DON BRASKELL'S OPEN LETTER TO TICK

From The Don Braskell Chronicles: His 2016 Open Letter to Seed Tick To my fellow dwellers of Seed Tick,

I, Don Braskell have sent this very letter to all citizens of Seed Tick because this is a time for action. I want to get this No Smoking Ordinance the mayor and the City Council have drawn up, thrown out of the City Laws. This has become my personal mission and ever since I challenged them on this thing, I feel like they’ve done nothing but spread lies, rumors, and innuendoes about yours truly. Me and my good buddy/ace cameraman Mr. Ted Sullivan have tried to track down all the rumors so I could dismiss/correct/justify them one by one in this State of the City address but we finally gave up listening to all the gossip. It was making me paranoid. The truth, it needs to be out there. Y’all need to know who I am, where I been, and what kind of man I am. Skeletons are crammed in my closet but there’s bones in other closets, too. I’m looking at you Alderman Gene McNamara, I remember catching your wife stealing little knickknacks from The Pig. She did it all the time and I never said a word about. I was being a bad citizen back then. I should have hollered, “Citizen’s arrest,” and ran her down. Shoulda, woulda, coulda. But I didn’t. And I’m man enough to admit that. Getting this No-Smoking Ordinance thing abolished has cost me a lot: My job at the Piggly Wiggly. I’d fought them so hard in the town meetings they had me fired. I gotta see this thing through to the end. I’m getting on up there in age and accomplished so much, I need something the last leg of my final world tour.

By the end of my time working at The Pig, I was having to stay after work for because the city council drew up a law that forced customers and employees to smoke 500 feet from a business establishment in town. I had to hack my way through 200 feet of bamboo and briars just to get my cigarette break. They hired an extra constable (I refuse to put that asshole’s name on such a beautiful piece of paper) to follow me on my smoke breaks and make sure I was the proper distance away from The Pig.

Smoking is a human right. America was built on tobacco and now they want to shame smokers by making them walk a shouting distance to spark one up. The City Council is anti-American. I just proved it. Hell, smoking is about the third reason I had the damn job at The Pig in the first place. I had to quit smoking after I lost the job but Mr. Ted come along, he shares his Benson and Hedges with me and I appreciate that.

I just turned around and his mustache was about to curl up. I can’t believe I got him smiling. He’s standing behind me videotaping me draft this important document. Mr. Ted just told me, “This isn’t a document, Thunder Chief. This is a declaration.”

I told Mr. Ted, “You’re damned Skippy, Dirty Pete. I’m Don Braskell the Thunder Chief and I approve that message.” You’ll see this video posted on my YouTube channel later tonight. Me and Mr. Ted have this thing where I call him Dirty Pete and he calls me Thunder Chief. I confused the title lyrics from the AC/DC song, “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap,” I thought they were saying Dirty Pete and the Thunder Chief. Me and Mr. Ted often used these as code names. I let him have first billing. Thunder Chief sounded like I was the one in charge.

Mr. Ted played the song when we rode around in Mr. Ted’s WKRG 5 news van from the 80s he bought and restored from a junkyard. We were snooping around, trying to dig up dirt on the mayor and the city council. We’ve got shit tons of footage we’ll be releasing on YouTube soon. Since I’m 20 years senior to Mr. Ted’s 52 years of age, I feel weird calling him Mr., but peoples been calling him that ever since the sixth grade. I know it’s batshit crazy for a elder statesman like myself to be all over the youTube, but hey, how else is an artist supposed to canvas his work.

Mr. Ted said, “I’ll snoop around for. As long as your Thunder Chief.”

I said, “Put me in Dirty Pete, I’m ready to play.” This whole nickname thing is one of the quirks Mr. Ted has because he is a genius. All geniuses have them. Me, I guess the boob hat is my quirk.

Y’all know me. I’m Don Braskell, the guy that used to check you out at the register at Piggly Wiggly. Ding! The one with long hair that told you jokes when I bagged up your grub. Ding! Ding! I’m the guy that wears the mesh hat with the foam boobs on it. Ding! Ding! Ding! Of course when I wear the hat anywhere in public with the exception of a bar—it’s time that y’all face it folks, this is the perfect hat to wear to a honky-tonk. That’s the whole purpose of a boob hat. I’m not fronting, putting on disguises. This is just who I am. When I do wear the hat in public, I put a little crochet bra over the boobs, my wife, Miss Nelda Tessmacher, made drew the patent and sews them for me. I wrote a song about it called, “Don Braskell Gets with the Times.” I started to put the lyrics to the song here but I knew my prowess as a songwriter would outshine my abilities as an author of letters. Maybe I’ll have my song book published after I’m dead.

Since I’m not living double lives anymore, me and Nelda openly take the kids out in public. So yeah if you ever heard a rumor spread by that bunch in the council about me having multiple families, it’s true. But I wasn’t one of them nut jobs like out in Utah. My two wives knew nothing about each other. The whole point of a secret family is keeping it a secret. It would have went against the whole idea if we would have announced to everybody in the street that we were a secret family. I had to lie on that one. And for that I’m sorry, folks, but at least I’m man enough to admit that I’m a liar, a cheat, a drunk, a poet, a songwriter and playwright. You’ll never get any kind of admissions out of the mayor and his council. All they’ll give you is empty promises. Anybody remember the Bingo Hall they talked about last fall?
You may also know me from my videos on Youtube.com. If you don’t, search the user name donbraskelltherascal. I have Vintage Tin Can Show, This Country Boy Can Survive Vlog and my main thing, Adventures of The Singing Clogger. I’ve got over 1000 subscribers already. I couldn’t do it without my ace cameraman, Mr. Ted. And I ain’t too proud to beg. There’s a PayPal thing you can click and donate money. That’s how I’ve been making it these past few months since losing my job at The Pig. On weekends, I been going to the flea market in Mobile, getting rid of all those boob hats I invested in in the early 80s. I overbought. I thought they were going to catch-on like the yo-yo or the hula hoop. I started to bury them in the backyard but kept them instead. I rented a storage building to house the 75,000 units. I make alright at it. Usually sell 30-40 units a weekend at $6.98 a pop. For a extra buck, I throw in a bra. My good buddy Mr. Ted advised me, “You’ve got to cash in on that kitsch market with the kids. They’re all about the kitsch these days. Flea markets always have the next hip thing."

Mr. Ted knows about kids, he films them all the time. He used to be a cameraman for all the sports teams at the Seed Tick High School. When he started palling around with me, the Seed Tick City Council seen to it that he got shit-canned from his gig as cameraman. Who’s ever heard of somebody getting fired from a volunteer job? Me neither. Let’s face it, when it comes to a camera, Mr. Ted is a genius. If he wasn’t a genius, I wouldn’t be hanging around him.

I said to him, “I’ve heard of people finding The Force or their Chi but I ain’t never heard nothing about any kitsch before. What the hell is it? Some kind of gay thing.” Mr Ted’s mustache quivered as if he wanted to speak but I kept on talking. “A bunch of men that want to be women but can’t, so they wear boob hats instead. I ain’t one of those kinds of cats, Mr. Ted.”
Mr. Ted explained it all to me about how it had to do with irony and said that he’d learned all about it on 60 Minutes. I still don’t really understand what he was getting at, I never claimed to be much of a learner because what little bit of learning I ever did learn was learned slowly. There comes some of that songwriting ability gleaming through my prose. All my talent is god given. Books can’t teach what I got. Teachers always labeled me as unteachable.

When the Seed Tick Quarterback Club kicked Mr. Ted to the curb, they stomped his teeth out by taking away his Honorary Alumni status. Mr. Ted is originally from Texas. He graduated from Odessa Permian, class of ’81. He was cameraman for the football team.

This letter I’m writing y’all, it’s the plain truth. I’m not much different than the great man that’s fixing to be out next president, Donald Trump, when it comes to the truth: I like to tell it. I want to help Trump make America great again. My contribution may be a small step but I’d say it’s in the right direction. But before I can deal with that bunch of yahoo’s, I’m going to run through any scandals I’ve ever been in where there might have been a witness. If nobody was around, I’d like to keep that between me and God and the Lord, Jesus Christ.

I got some more plain truths for you. I was once in prison but it was just for DUI’s not murder or sodomy or drug manufacturing like the rumors are saying. I was one of those three-strikes-and-you’re-out-guys. I used to own my own trucking business. The startup cash for my business was earned from a song I wrote that nearly made it onto the B side of Dolly Parton’s Bargain Store album. I had a fleet of three trucks that I ran Panamanian red marijuana and semi-automatic rifles on for the Banditos. I owed them a big favor and they had a Hong Kong connection that fronted as a fake rubber dog shit company. That’s where I hijacked the boob hats from. But I lost all of that to my real family after that third DUI. I’m not the only person in the world who’s got a drinking problem. I’m talking to you Alderman Haight. I drink to drown out the song lyrics in my head, I bet you can’t top that reason.

I did all four years at Parchman. That’s up in the Delta part of Mississippi, where all the land is flat and there ain’t a tree in sight. I knew all about the landscape, I grew up in Ruleville which is right down the road from Parchman. Growing up, me and my buddies got piss drunk on Slit’s (that’s malt liquor, at Parchman they call it Ghetto Whiskey) and swerve around on the highway that ran through the Parchman farm. Somehow we knew this was our destiny. I was the last of us to get locked up. I never seen Billy, Earl or Bob on The Farm because I spent my entire sentence in lockdown. Certain people may call me a coward, but I’m out of that place and alive. Like Kenny Rogers sang, “Sometimes you got to know when to fold them.” I met Kenny Rogers one time at the casinos in Biloxi. Great man and he put on one hell of a show. Two words: Consummate professional.

Got locked up in 2008 but I hadn’t killed a man since 1975. That was back in my rascal days before I got married to the bitch wife that took Braskell Trucking Co. and sold it to one of the goons from the Banditos after she married the bastard. Before I married her, I earned my money bare-fist boxing in honky-tonk bars across the US of A. It was a good way for me to travel and see the world for my songwriting. I can’t talk that much about that part of my life, I sold the rights to Hollywood and they made them Any Which Way movies with Clint Eastwood. Per Clint’s request, they added all that bullshit about the monkey. When asked what I’d do with the monkey, I told them I would try to get him laid. They threw that into the movie.

I didn’t want to kill again and I knew I’d have to if I was a free range chicken out there in the Gen Pop. I had to stay in lockdown. In order to do so, I slipped guards twenty dollar bills and they’d write me up for bogus infractions. These BS charges kept me in the hole and just for their delight and entertainment, they’d write me up for masturbating. I was sent to the shrink for my perversions and labeled, “A Chronic Masturbator,” which I assure you, I never really was. Usually, when I did do that, I’d hang a sheet where nobody could see me. Now there were other guys in there that would sling the old meat pistol out for anything that walked down The Zone. Damn savages is what they were but even though they were of sicker minds than me, it was I that gained the nickname Master Blaster.

All that stuff I just told you about the masturbation, it sounds like the truth, don’t it. Well, it is. That’s more than we’ll ever get out of the mayor about that incident his niece had when she “accidentally” left the curling iron on while she was making love to it. Just out of simple curiosity, all of us are wondering the same question: Why was the girl making love to a curling iron? We shouldn’t have to ask questions like that. We need the facts of the case. It’s a question in need of answer. Don’t blame me. Blame human curiosity. I’m just telling my version of the truth here. And since they’re so interested in my past digressions, I think I got every right to ask.

Back to my days at Parchman. The bigbull on B block went by Bruce. Bruce was such a badass motherfucker that there wasn’t any reasons for him to need a nickname. His eye was on me and he bargained with the guards to arrange us showering together. After we got to be friends, I learned that he was willing to pay the mid-shift guards $1000 for such an arrangement. It made me blush. Here I was in my old age, god’s gift to women and men. Bruce was serving a couple of life sentences for killing a couple of cops on The Coast. Those double-life sentences turned him into a gay man. That’s prison for you. I didn’t want to give Bruce a country boy ass-whipping and end up sending him to the infirmary or the morgue. I wasn’t an Any Which Way man anymore. Once that light comes on, I can’t help what my fists do, badass motherfucker or not.

The ex-lawyer in the cell beside me went by the name of Bob Reno—obviously an alias. I never learned his real name but me and him got to be tight. Bobby Reno was one of the best jailhouse lawyers in America. In jail, you can’t send text messages through a phone, you have to pass them around on actual folding paper and retrieve them the best you can. Easiest way was tying your sheets to your trousers and dragging the note on into your cell. The guards called this flying kites. And me and Bob Reno flew a many a kite to each other. He advised me to slip the guards five one-hundred dollar bills and give the guards a note asking to make it sound like I’m in the joint for some heinous crime. He said everybody on the cellblock thought he was involved in the Watergate Murders back when Nixon was in office. Of course I knew there wasn’t any murders at Watergate but none of those other numbskulls knew any better. Bob Reno took showers by himself. I wanted that too. Problem was, I didn’t have 500 bucks laying around. Now out in the world (anywhere but prison), I always kept 500 bucks on me for walking around money but in the joint, having that kind of dough on hand was as crazy as catfish pussy.

Bob Reno gave me the 5 Franklins. Told me all I owed him was a hand-written heterosexual dirty story at six o’clock. He said, “I’ve read every one of them known to man that’s been published. I think I’m ready for some fan fiction. Don’t be afraid to mix movies, music, TV, and history into the genre of the tale you tell. I want characters. I want real conflicts. Dammit I want to learn something. All I ask for is the same exact conclusion each and every time I get to the last word on the first read.”

I told him, “I was always a fan/participant of stories like this too but it always takes me a couple of...ah...reads to get to that point of...ah—‘same exact conclusion.’” I got right to work and Bob Reno gave the 500 to the guards and they convinced the other inmates I was the real-life fellow they based that Hannibal Lecter on. It was all Bob Reno’s plan. He was like Murdoch on A-Team when it came to plans and pornography, he loved them when they came together.

Bob Reno said something to me but I was already brainstorming ideas for my first story. I wanted to use Donald and Daffy Duck but ended up writing about Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton making a baby. Take in mind, the story was set in 1973. Bob Reno came to a conclusion at the bottom of page one. He flew me a kite that said, “Just the period details alone, man.”
2 days later, he asked if I could read them aloud. Everybody on Cell Block B called 6 o’clock, “The Don Braskell Circle Jerk Hour.” He’d assigned my other stories without my permission and the other literate inmates were fans of my work. I charged them each a pack of Ramen noodles a night for me to read at six o’clock. One of the inmates, I think it might have been Dat Nigga Reggie—well, that was his name folks. I could be like the folks at the city council and just use a name that’s not real like they did back during those land development deals back five years ago. Dat Nigga Reggie paid me with State Issued Shit Paper (Bob Reno called it, SISP) and I’d read him stories into the night. Hell, sometimes, the right guards on-duty, they'd cuff me to somebody’s cell so I could read to them. All I had to do was share a Ramen Noodle with the guard in return. Anything for a Ramen Noodle. A pack of Ramen Noodles in the pen is worth about a buck on the street. Whoever has the most noodles has all the power and I got to be pretty damn powerful.

They banned smoking at Parchman a few years before I got there and going cold turkey wasn’t easy, but I did it. Wasn’t like I had any other choice. Gotta be addicted to something. Then Bob Reno showed me peyote. Bobby Reno had an Arizona connection. Another associate in Cali sent him LSD—they hid the gel tabs behind the stamp. Me and Bob Reno may have physically stayed in those cells for years but our minds took many a trip.

Before too long, I was reading entire history books searching for material to use for my dirty stories. Flying on peyote and LSD inspired some crazy “meldings.” “Meldings” was a word Bob Reno liked to say a lot. I did George and Martha Washington getting it on in a series of erotic letters he wrote her while snowbound in Pigeon Forge. JFK and Marilyn Monroe having a quickie during the Cuban Missile Crisis—the story is told through Jackie O’s point of view as she watches a surveillance video. Of course Jackie’s both turned on and disgusted in her tone. Bob Reno helped me a lot with this one. It was one of the first ones I did, and he wrote notes on the side of the page that told me how to make it better and I did just that. Got so good, I even did a homoerotic Lee Harvey Oswald story for Bruce. My Immaculate Conception story was published in Penthouse Forums. Soon after, they started printing all of my stories. Hugh Hefner wrote me a letter begging me to come to Playboy. I sent Hugh back the rejection letter he personally signed for my story and added this note in response: “Missed opportunities.”

After a year or so of my stories, Bob Reno had spent his days teaching the illiterate how to read. My stories made them want to learn to read. Can the mayor or any of the council people say they’ve ever been part of a project that helped adult literacy? I don’t think so. But they’d argue that I’m a pornographer but what else was I suppose to write about in prison? Not only did I help literacy, I also did a dirty story that inspired Bob Reno and we wrote a hit play, KenNixon.

My original story, “Robert E. Lee’s Fountain of Youth” had The General winning the Civil War, becoming King of the Confederacy and becoming super paranoid that his family will be heir to his thrown, he discovers the fountain of youth. The fountain of youth makes him a horny old devil, he banishes his family because they have a sense of entitlement. The erotica kicks in when he disguises himself as a hobo named Nebuchadnezzar and conceives five bastard children. Well, Bob was flying on peyote one night and he come up with an idea for a play that would define what America is and make everybody forget about Shakespeare. He planned to meld the lives of Kennedy and Nixon. This is why I hang around other geniuses.

I never left my cell but one time during my stint at Parchman, and that was when I performed in KenNixon. I’ve been shopping the script out to Hollywood for the past four years now and I’m waiting to hear back from an agent.

One night late June 2012, me and Bob hit the wall in the Third Act of KenNixon. We’d created so many damn characters, we didn’t know what to do with all of them. Bob floated the idea out there about cutting down on this cast of characters. I told Bob, “That seems too damn easy. Why don’t we have Alexander the Haig and Lee Harvey the Oswald hire out Albert the Einstein to make a nuke.” Bob Reno flew me a kite back that said, “Far out, man. But why don’t we just cut out all the science and call it an ‘apocalyptic weapon.’”

We each wrote a draft of Act III and I flew it to him the next day. He kept it for a week and a half. He didn’t say a word to me during that whole time. He’d mentored me with my dirty story’s, we got to be quite a dynamic team and it just about broke my heart when he gave me the old cold-shoulder. He was comparing our manuscripts. I thought what I’d written was so damn bad, he’d decided to ignore me. Bob Reno hummed this beautiful song that I could have sworn I’d heard in a movie. I asked Bob over and over, “What movie was that song from? Is it a romantic movie or a prison movie?” He never told me but he told everybody else. A couple of the guys that were real good singers starting singing it all the time. They sang on all the songs in KenNixon, as well.

I woke up one morning and both our drafts were in my tray hole. Bob wrote this on the front of my draft: “I’ve studied these things for a week. Analyzed them any which way you can. They’re almost word for word, the same exact thing and its brilliant, man. Love, Bob…”
P.S “The song. You were right about the genres. It’s a romantic prison movie. Midnight Express. I know you “scene” it, we’ve talked it about before, when we writing the scene where Nebuchadnezzar stays at Watergate Motel in downtown Atlanta. Songs called, “Love’s Theme.” Don’t act like you don’t remember that aerobic/shower scene where Billy and the Swede consummate their relationship.”

Mr. Ted almost swallowed his Benson and Hedges. Yes, folks. Bob Reno had done fooled around and fell in love with me. And truth is, all them nights when he wouldn’t talk to me, I don’t know how many times I wanted to be the first to say, “I love you” but I didn’t. I didn’t see Bob as a man or a woman. He was just Bob and I was in love with him. I really didn’t know what he looked like even though we lived by each other for four years. Sure, we caught glances of each other by bouncing our reflections from one of the small shaving mirrors to the other.

Mr. Ted just said, ‘I didn’t know you swung that way, Thunder Chief.”

I’ll tell you what I just told Mr. Ted, “I ain’t gay. More “bi-curious” I guess.” I seen somebody on The Facebook use that word. Yes, folks, me and Bob Reno. But we weren’t like Billy and the Swedish dude. We never “consummated our relationship.” We wrote each other secret dirty stories in place of it. I just stopped writing this letter and let Mr. Ted read a couple of our stories. Mr. Ted was moved to tears. He said, “That’s real love right there. Wish I had that."

I wrote, “I love you, too” on a piece of shit paper and tossed it into the hall. A minute later he flew me another kite that said, “I really mean it man.” I screamed, "Me too!"
I know for a fact the mayor wouldn’t admit to gay love in a State of the City Address. Spoiler warning for tonight’s youTube video! You've been warned. Me and Mr. Ted got footage of that mayor of ours in the Bamboo Inn in Saraland kissing a young male gigolo on the mouth. Talking about secret families.

Bob Reno sent the KenNixon to his lawyer who played golf with the warden and the lawyer arranged for a production of KenNixon at the gym in the prison. Bob put me in charge of casting and the powers-that-be let inmates come to our cells and we’d watch them audition. Bob played the Paula Abdul role, I went all Simon Cowell on their ass. Of course Bob Reno was playing the titular role. The hardest part to cast was the part of young and ambitious villain, Alexander the Haig. Bob gave me the honor of playing the role of Lee/Nebuchadnezzar.

Bob Reno was forced to make a last minute script change and said that Nebuchadnezzar was in an iron lung because when the night of the play came, those two prison guards—it was that spic bastard Chavez and that big nosed, beady-eyed sonofabitch Coaker—they handcuffed my arms and legs to a dolly, put a catcher’s mask on my face, and the whole prison yard was looking at me as they rolled me to the gym like I was hell on plastic molded wheels. They
thought it was necessary to keep up the appearances of me being the inspiration for Hannibal Lecter. Warden Ernest Scissum came to the play and wanted my autograph. He winked at me, he knew I wasn’t the real Hannibal when he said, “I’d get your autograph but that’s how you escaped in the movie. With a pen. Big fan of your work, sir.”

Bob Reno’s lawyer cooked up a deal that led to our parole. The warden was "uber" impressed with KenNixon. He used us as an example of criminals rehabilitation. He’d hired a team of 15 psychologists and they analyzed the themes to see if me and Bob was cured of our nasty ways and the psychologists told him to tell the press that “KenNixon is a feat of genius. A true human achievement that proves the criminal element of the human condition can be treated through the penal institution.” The only negative critique they had was that we treated the abolishment of slavery like some kind of heroic conquest.

The next day me and Bob Reno were waiting in front of the prison for a moving van to come pick us up. Me and Bob had wrote so much stuff and collected so many noodles, we could have never convinced a bus driver to let us have it on the bus and the prison would not hold it for us. The warden arranged for a moving van to pick us up. He’d got Bob a house in Yazoo City. I was going back to Seed Tick to be with Miss Tessmacher, he didn’t know that yet. The whole gay love thing was new to me and I still had way too many reservations. But I had agreed to do an interview with former Entertainment Tonight sex kitten Leeza Gibbons.

One of Bob Reno’s shoeboxes housing his in-progress manuscript fell from the dolly and scattered. Wind sent the pages every which way. I was about to help but stopped when his body exploded like a water balloon filled with Hawaiian punch after the moving van hit him. Divorced #4.

By the time I got out of Parchman, my real wife from Ruleville, Mississippi, divorced me. There wasn’t any other choice but to move in with the secret family I had here in Seed Tick. They had taken care of me and sent me care packages. My secret old lady Miss Tessmacher sent me some nude Polaroids and I can’t say that I was always using those when I had the bedsheet up. I’ve lived in Seed Tick on and off for twenty years living with Nelda and the three little ones ever chance I could get. Shoot the youngest one was made on a conjugal visit in my cell.

I’ve got my life story coming out in a few months and you’ll be able to pick up the book at a gas station somewhere around town for $19.99 . Take in mind its only volume one and it covers my ancestry, my birth and first 5 years. I’ve split my bio into 12 volumes. Shit, I’m sure this letter will be in Volume 12, The Last World Tour Years. I planning on signing each and every copy. I went the self-publishing route and decided to have the 1st Edition produced in hard back. Mr. Ted took out a loan to help me with costs.

Now what I want to do here is tell you my plan. Mr. Ted’s convinced me that I should be mayor of Seed Tick. Well, that’s what this petition is. It’s to kick out the city council and the mayor and let me and Mr. Ted run the show. It’s like Alexander the Haig in KenNixon except I ain’t evil like him. We got some big ideas and plans about what we are going to do once y’all put us in office. First thing we’ll do is get this damned no-smoking ordinance kicked to the curb. So get your damn names on this sheet of paper and remember to subscribe to my YouTube channel. We'll turn the comment section into a city meeting.

Sincerely from Don Braskell,

Internet personality/playwright/songwriter/truck driver/ex-con

TOM COAKER lives somewhere on the Alabama/Mississippi state line. When he's not working on his novel, "Days Work," he's listening to David Bowie with Camden; reading "The Road" (or something like it) with Cassidy on Kindle app, with a million cords running from the iPad to the TV, just like his mom Roxanne used to fuss at his father Eddie's technological wasp nests; or watching Breaking Bad (same as "The Road) with Dora and Chloe. Sometimes he just watches old college football games from his 80s-90s childhood on YouTube. He especially likes it when the commercials aren't edited out of the old broadcasts.