All Is Fair In Love & War: Happy 37th Birthday, Joey!!!

He’s someone that I don’t speak about all that often, but after all he is a sibling of mine; the baby of the family, the brat, the spoiler and the dirty rotten scoundrel who cheated me out of a chance at a better life…

When Joey was born on August 9, 1968, Chicago was being burned alive by the Yippies and the cops; the music world as far as rock and roll went was in a drug coma and people passed around love like a cocktail weenie tray at a formal dinner party.

I only wish I had nice words for Joey, but alas I don’t, so today I’m going to make some full confessions about the only brother in my family that I cannot stand.

It’s no fun being teased and taunted and ganged up on my brothers and sister; let me tell you it happened constantly and consistently with little parental intervention, but there it was and it happened. And the teasing got rougher and rougher and rougher until it went out of control.

Shortly thereafter, the name-calling came into play. Yep, we all did it and enough of it, so that it hurt and hurt hard. It would end up hurting for years until later when I was finally able to release the hurt into the wind and watch the ashes fly into a beautiful black snow.

Fast forward a decade and a half later when Joey was in high school and helped himself to my clothes closet, my personal effects and anything else he could get his grubby little hands on.

Even later, when I graduated from college in 1990 and lived at home for a while longer, Joey withheld all of my telephone messages from me regarding job offers of places I applied to and never quite fully understanding why personnel never called me back when they said they would.

Only did I find out a few weeks later when I called a lot of these companies back did they tell me that they called me several times and then of course when they didn’t hear from me they offered the position to someone else! This is what I began to understand and realize what Joey was doing I knew he was out for blood and sweet revenge.

Not only was he not giving my job prospect telephone calls, but my personal messages as well. A lot of the time Joey used my job prospect calls to his advantage; in other words I helped him land a job when the job lead was mine to start with! Then once he landed the job, he went out of his way to play-act as if he were angry and surprised when I decided to pursue the position at the company he now worked at!

I never got that job either and the several hundred I applied for, all due to his not giving me my telephone messages. I ended up with crap, yet that was Joey’s intention; his payback to me after all those years of teasing and name-calling that he repeatedly denied doing to me.

But I won’t tell you about his long and weaving drug and drinking habits; nor will I tell you about the time he pissed away $2,500 my parents gave to him as intended for college at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona in Las Vegas, Nevada in one night; nor the time when we were driving back from somewhere with my parents and I was reading a gay/lesbian newspaper and he suddenly shouted obscenities and angrily tore the newspaper to shreds once he saw what I was reading; nor the time during a thunderstorm when he got extremely angry and threw a fork at my left eye, that missed it by half an inch; nor the time he complained to my mother about myself that I lived too close to him, even though I lived in the apartment I was dwelling in two years prior before he even moved within range of me!!!

So it’s Joey’s birthday today and I’m going to be extra generous and nice to him by letting everyone who reads this journal his phone number (773-267-9340) to call and wish him a happy, prosperous birthday; he’s 37. While you’re on the phone with him be sure and ask him about all those incidences that I can’t tell you about.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot; be sure and tell him that Sidney AKA The Mishegas Master sent you!!!