Preface by the Author

There is no worse pain than losing a close friend or loved one suddenly. One day you're saying goodbye for the evening, the next morning your friend's partner calls you; 'she died last night.' I have lost too many people to addiction. From close friends and to new acquaintances, the loss of both cuts deep. There is not enough time in the world nor pages ever printed to detail those lives in all the ways they deserved. I am slowly losing track of how many people I've known who have died from overdosing, drug and alcohol related accidents, or simply disappeared never to be heard from again due to their spiraling addiction. Each one ripped from the lives of those who loved them. We're all left hurt, standing in the ashes.

Over the years this has seeded in me great anger. I feel rage and want to scream thinking about each of those deaths. I only feel anger when I walk into the cafe my friend once worked at only to see a memorial to her in the corner. To attend a funeral hosted by vultures who exploited your friend in life only to feign grief at her death. Who go up to the podium and lie to everyone's face about how much they'll miss the woman they plan to proverbially grave rob. It's a deep rooted rage that festers and grows with each death. An endless parade of misery that marches on until my time comes to join my friends in whatever lies beyond, if anything.

Allen Ginsburg wrote “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked” in his seminal poem, Howl. I have seen recovering addicts turn to utter madness. So much so they might as well be dead. I have seen them loose touch with reality and simply vanish. I have seen them join cults and talk nonsense. An example is the cognitive dissonance I once heard in the words “I've been clean for four years now, so I'm fine, but I still need the group because I'm a junkie.” Those words were said without even the slightest bit of self awareness. If the drugs don't kill your body, chances are the vultures circling around your recovery path will attempt to kill your mind and soul. I should know better than most. I almost died from my own alcoholism and was indoctrinated in such a cult. I quickly broke free from the cult and still struggle with addiction, though am nowhere near as bad as I once was.

I first wrote HIT SOMEBODY as a means to deal with the awful and nightmarish world of Seattle. It is as terrible a place as I depict. Filled with deeply childish, cliquish, delusional, judgmental people. I saw an ad for a free room online that read, “Free to any apprenticing witches. We will teach you magic. You do have to sleep with me to pay rent.” This isn't uncommon in Seattle. You'll see a lot of creepy old men soliciting sex from young girls through the offer of a free room. From what I hear, most people in tech do that regardless of gender identity. So I started this stupid story as a way of taking the piss out of Seattle. I was inspired primarily by The Crow and Cowboy Bebop. Mostly just 90s action film bullshit and Gen X attitude. All that changed when a very close friend of mine died a senseless death. The story got darker. Then another friend died. They would never see justice in the real world, but I would try to avenge them in my silly, childish novella. Then another friend died. And then another.

I wrote the character of Claudia Kohler as an amalgamation of many things. A great deal of what I dislike about myself and others. As a way of exploring the awful mindsets that lead us to our darkest places. I write about how easy it is to simply spiral out of control if you have no one to ground you. When you are surrounded by awful people, the world becomes darker. Extreme responses become the only viable solutions. Before you know it, you're buried up to your neck in more mistakes than you can fix. Claudia is the worst part of us all, the devil on your shoulder urging you to punch that smug bastard who just pissed you off. Yet our pain and anger are tied directly to our grief and sadness.

I wrote this novella as a train of thought, just rambling incoherently, shouting at the darkness. With no pretense and no aim. It just was a thing I had to complete. I felt like if I could just complete this, part of my friends would live on in some small way. Even just writing this forward gives me tremendous anxiety. How can such a stupid, immature, silly novella possibly keep them in my heart? I do not know but I feel compelled to follow it through to the bitter end. To circle back to the inspiration that helped kick this off is the penultimate line from the 1994 movie adaptation of The Crow,

If the people we love are stolen from us,
the way to have them live on is to never stop loving them.