The Amazing Atheist

I won’t bother refuting it. It’s already longer than most of you will read, and I don’t need to go making it longer. It doesn’t tell my side of the story, but why would it? We so rarely cast ourselves as the villains in the sagas of our lives. I will only say that with a few exceptions, Cody’s stories are half-truths. Only a couple of them are outright lies. I repost it because I honestly find it kind of flattering. He views me and my brother as these Machiavellian agents of guile and subterfuge—which isn’t true, but would be sort of awesome if it were.

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For the over 500+ messages I’ve received about TAA over the last couple months, allow this to be my only comment and stop asking for fuck’s sake.  After reading this, you will have both sides to this situation and you can judge it as you will.  Honestly though, since it has nothing to do with you, I don’t really understand the judgment in the first place.  I also don’t care if you hate me after reading it.  You shouldn’t be affected one way or the other.  Our videos have never had anything to do with this shit, and they won’t.    I don’t think these questions are just going to stop on their own anymore, at least not without something said by me.  That’s why I am doing this.  So many people want the other side and I am honestly just so tired of my Tumblr inbox being the same every day.  Going to try to clear all of it right here.  Believe what you will but I will never mention this human again if at all possible.

I’m not pretending to be a perfect person.  I’m not interested in that shit anymore.  I’m not even close to being unbreakable and I’m even worse at acting like I am.  At the end of the day, I’m just a dude that enjoys making stuff and sharing that with the world.  If someone wants to ignore what I make in favor of paying attention to a set of faults created by someone else, then fuck them.  In my opinion, they are the ones missing out.  

The only thing I’ve learned as an adult so far is that I spent way too much of my childhood hating shit for no reason.  If there is anything in my life that I wish I could change, it’s that.  I would enjoy my teen years a lot more than I actually did.  People that waste their lives consumed by hate, instead of what they don’t, deserve nothing but pity.  That’s not a snide, underhanded remark toward TJ either, just the haters.  These trolls, faceless as they are, don’t deserve to beat you up…and trust me, trolls are a-plenty when over 200,000 people watched videos that you helped create for a year.  That’s kind of the entire mantra behind TAA, isn’t it?  To Passionately Not Give A Fuck!  That’s a really nice way of dignifying otherwise useless feelings.  The TAA channel taps into the emotional appeal of an angry young person that can’t figure out why they are so mad.  That’s one reason, among many, that the channel has reached such popularity in recent years.

Many people don’t realize the true value of love, how much better it feels to love something than it does to hate on it.  That is the single most important realization I’ve ever had and it seems so simple in retrospect, I don’t know how I never reached the conclusion before, honestly.  I know this all sounds like some new-age bullshit, but hear me out.  That was the disconnect from the very start.  It always kind of felt like I was trying to become somebody that I have already been before, something impossible and stupid of me to even attempt.  But I still did.  The truth is this: I’m not as angry as I used to be. The older I get and as life gets more and more fucked up, I somehow feel less and less vindictive about it.  I’m happy just to exist, getting the chance to exist, and to have some ability to create things on a regular basis while I am still alive and well.  Things piss me off, sure, but I don’t let those things define me anymore.

Neither does TJ…but TAA happens to be fed off the emotion alone.

That’s why I haven’t written any kind of false closure about TJ to camouflage how I’m really feeling about it.  Closure is bullshit and it just doesn’t exist.  Truth is, I’ll miss the fuck out of the guy that I knew and that almost none of you know.  TAA is the most important thing to TJ, for good reason I suppose, but it was certainly not the most important thing to me.  With TJ, I valued our friendship a hundred times more than I ever did that channel.   I had every ability that this dude lacked (and vice-versa).  Because we are both hyper self-aware, we used this to our advantage all the fucking time.  I never told TJ how to write and he never told me how to direct.  I don’t think we ever had a problem when it came to actually getting shit accomplished, and if nothing else, we were extremely productive.  Most important in my head, though — we had some great times just hanging out.  To date, I’d like to hear of just one other person that has done these things for him.   I doubt he exists.  It’s not every day that someone takes the time to try to be your friend, to use their abilities to make your life better.  No matter how you want to dissect me, I still helped define that channel for an entire year of my life.  I did more for TAA than 99.9% of his fans ever could.  At one time that’s all I was too, so remember that.  I was a fan of TAA who became a friend TJ’s.  In life, I’m not sure if I lost TJ as a friend or if I just gained TAA as an enemy.  As it is I can’t really figure out where the line even blurs.

When I was bothered by all this, I admit that I said some shit that wasn’t true.  Like when I said the only reason I worked with TJ was for the prospect of financial stability, that it was just a job to me and nothing else.  The initial appeal to working with TJ was money, I concede to that, but I had honest intentions.  A week before he approached me about producing AMAZING, the documentary I did about him, I was talking to military recruiters.  I knew I failed in a fundamental aspect of growing up and I was ready to make money by any means necessary.  It was a disgustingly dark time in my life that TJ helped me climb out of, and I trusted him as much as I’ve ever trusted anyone in my life. That enough is worth feeling like shit when someone turns their back on you.  Right?

Those intentions evolved when we were all renting this shitty house together in the worst winter I’ve experienced in years.  I really cared about the content we put online every day and I busted my fucking ass trying to make the best looking content on YouTube.  I wasn’t comfortable with edits that were just okay.  I wanted every shot to be the fucking best that it could possibly be.  You know those hour-long Q&A’s on the TAA channel that have multiple shot cuts and audio throughout, the ones that I am also in?  Yeah, that was the result of me staying up all night, editing until I couldn’t keep my eyelids open anymore. I did this knowing, in full, that most people minimize those kinds of videos and hardly pay attention to the visuals.  I didn’t care.  I took the extra time for the small group of people that did watch it. The big picture was always about quality content and we both knew that.  I did these things because, in my head, I really did believe we were a creative team and I absolutely believed TJ when he told me a third of the business actually belonged to me.  

What TJ ended up using as ammunition against me were the very things that I confided in him about most, in private, as a friend above all else.  

He attacked my mechanism for dealing with my semi-frequent panic attacks.  That’s fine, honestly it is, because I don’t care how people perceive that at all.  It’s a total non-issue created just to fill up space and make a list longer than it already was.  I know what helps me and what doesn’t help me and it’s up to me to decide that for myself.  I will say one thing though:  For someone that talks so often about doing things your own way, he sure snapped on me for doing just that faster than any conservative or religious person I’ve ever met.

TJ slandered me and made me look way less efficient than I actually was.  Fine. Untrue, but fine, because I know he knows how hard I worked.  It’d be impossible to not know that. So what did bother me then?  

Well for one thing, the fact that he took very personal conversations we’d had, things that he knows the real stories behind, and he used them to craft some ugly narrative about me.  TJ wrote these little articles knowing full well how it would affect me and that fucking stung.  He knew my frame of thought better than anyone else at the time and he just didn’t give a fuck about what it would end up doing to me.  At all.  It wasn’t that he’d insulted me, I could care less about that shit, it was that he was consciously trying to make me feel like shit.  He took the very reason I initially went on vacation and used it against me the exact same way a teenage girl does with the other girls she calls her friends.  That’s honestly what the whole exchange felt like to me.  It seemed as if TJ had been cataloging different things in his head that, if need be, he could use and shell out a verbal equivalent of an atomic bomb all over my internet life.  The same way young girls do in school when their social position is threatened or they are offended by something totally valueless — it felt just like that.   This all sucks harder than I’d ever be able to describe to you.  I still don’t know if that’s what he was actually doing, I’d like to assume not, but my perception of people in general is all kinds of warped anymore.  I’d like to believe that TJ is just a really good writer, that this situation was the dying breath of anyone that collaborates with him for any period of time.  That’s way easier to swallow because I’ve seen that person on several occasions.

Speaking of destroying things, many people have said I tried to get his videos taken off of YouTube and his account suspended.   First of all, how big of an asshole do you people think I am?  That’s the only thing TJ has in this entire world.  If his YouTube channel was removed tomorrow, he would be completely fucked in his real life.  Do you think I’m unaware of this or what? YouTube is TJ’s bread and butter.  It would never, not in a million years, bring me any kind of satisfaction to destroy his existence and everything he’s achieved in the process.  I wouldn’t do that to my worst enemy, let alone someone I considered my friend for a very long time.  That’s not just his time on that channel anymore either.  You guys realize that, right?  A lot of that content is the physical manifestation of my own time.  I am stained within it as well, for as long as my work stays there. 

Even with all the bullshit, I am damn proud of what I helped create with TJ.  I wouldn’t want to see it disappear at all.  I didn’t try to take anything down.  Ever.  I don’t think I’ve ever even flagged a video in my life.  I haven’t flagged a video that has me edited out of context to look like I’m a proud racist.  That video actually gets me in trouble sometimes.  Why would I go out of my way to try to shut down something I put so much work into, and at the same exact time, be so indifferent toward videos that fuck my actual day up?  Lastly, how exactly did this rumor even get started?  Probably from the same people that said I was streaming AMAZING in a BlogTV room when I wasn’t.  Oh well.  Fuck them.

But I know how TJ deals with loss because I sat witness to it.  In his world and writings, nobody ever gets paid for their work and they’re still the bad guy to his fans somehow. I’ve never seen so many sycophantic people in one setting before.  It’s insane.  Anyway, what I am trying to say is this: when TJ burns a bridge, he really burns the fucking thing down to ash. When I left and kept producing content, at least artistically unaffected and even avoiding conversation about TJ, I think that burned him a little on the inside.  He is so used to being this big internet personality, so used to people wanting his attention for their own delusions of success and I’m just not like that at all.  I liked TJ because of who he was, or at least what I thought he was, and I’d have been his friend with no subscribers just as easily as I was when he was resting pretty at 200k.  I hope that, at some juncture, he realizes how unlikely this is to happen to him in life.  That’s the only way I can rationalize how this went from the way it was to the way it is today.  TJ told me on several occasions that he views this trait as a flaw in his personality, something he cannot contain or control.  That’s why I don’t really care about any of the bullshit he has to say about me online.  It’s fruitless before it becomes anything else.

TJ was literally the only dude I hung out with by choice for almost an entire year.  I liked working with him so much that I didn’t even mind having his brother there, someone that I did not like or identify with at all, in any capacity.  I worked as well as I could beside his brother because I gave a shit about that channel and because I gave a shit about TJ.  

I’m not going to pretend that I won’t miss shooting TAA videos sometimes, because I have and I will.  I won’t miss roasting my ass off in that dead, Louisiana summer heat or shooting rants outside in the middle of a Midwestern winter.  I will definitely miss the process, though.  I’ll miss getting a TAA video ready and wondering if that was going to be the one, the video that gets hundreds of thousands of views out of nowhere.  “It’s Only Sexist When Men Do It” is a perfect example of that feeling.  It blew up so fucking fast, I even saw it on one of my favorite band’s Facebook feeds.  That shit was exciting to me every time.  I’m also not going to pretend that I didn’t care about this dude as a human or that I didn’t try my best to be a genuine friend toward him.  If this long and rambling post should show you anything at all, it’s that I very obviously did, at least a little bit, care.  I know I did, and that’s why the transition back to not caring was so simple.  It’s not hard to remove a friend from your life when they suddenly change the moment it’s convenient to, you know?  We went from being good friends and business partners to not even being able to reach them about a deal we’d already made. (At that time, we were all trying to wrap up a side-business we’d started with my dad.  I’d told them a billion times that it was most important to me to never fuck my dad over.  That was the very first conversation we had about the business, when the idea first took shape.  When it all ended, our deal was simple: we would release a Trans-Am that we had in our possession and they would, in return, put my stuff on a freight and ship it back to me.  We lived up to our end of the deal, even helping a bunch of dickheads from Chicago load it into a giant trailer as it snowed outside.  Needless to say the story went as it did and I ended up taking a thirty-two hour trip that wasn’t necessary at all to get stuff back that was already promised to me and give stuff back that was already given to me.  It was literally as if they’d bought a college-ruled notebook and tirelessly developed the scenario that could screw me the worst. When it was perfect, it was as if the whole thing just had to come into play.  I know how presumptuous and paranoid that comment sounds, but I seriously don’t think I (or anybody involved with me) could have been fucked any worse.  Maximum fuckage.)

That last situation with them proved two things to me for sure and positively: These dudes weren’t the right people to work beside, and my life today is at least more genuine than my time there ever was.  When you can lie to my dad’s face and intentionally fuck him over, a guy that selflessly made the company thousands of dollars on multiple occasions….wow.  That just takes a special kind of apathy, something almost nonhuman.  It’s one thing to fuck me over but it’s another beast entirely when you take advantage of the nicest guy you’ll ever meet in your life.  Do you want to to know how much my dad charged those two for finding that Trans-Am in the first place?  Not a penny.  How about when the guy originally wanted two grand more for it and how my dad haggled him down and still got extra shit with it?  How about all the cars besides the Trans-Am that he found for the company, all the cars he stored in his garage for free?  Do you want to know how much my dad charged them to professionally paint the front-end of that Trans-Am and build a custom fender from scratch, taking out an entire work day to finish?  Not a fucking penny!  You get my point.  My dad did these things in good conscious to help me and to help the business I was suddenly part of grow.  After the Trans-Am was loaded in the trailer, TJ’s brother changed his number and refused to even talk to my dad.  It seemed as if the very second that car was no longer in our possession, the tone shifted.  Peachy. “Tough shit.” One particular e-mail to me pretty much stated.  “If you want your stuff you can come get it.  Any further messages from you or your dad will be regarded as harrassment and settled in a court room.”  Wow…really?  You mean I have to come up with another $700 and waste even more time on this shit?  All of this done because they decided it was simply too expensive to ship once we had no leverage to use against them?  I kept asking myself, “Is money really this fucking important to these people?”

But I knew the answer so I kept quiet and I did what I had to do.

On top of all this, when I actually and finally did arrive in Louisiana, I had to give back the only two things I really ever acquired there: MY lens and MY microphone. It wasn’t enough to take my time away from me, no, they wanted my work utensils too.   Fine, whatever, fuck it.  That’s all I thought the entire ride.

Friendships are really important to me because they aren’t easily gained and shit like this is exactly why.  I let TJ into my world because I thought we could help one another and he really gained my trust a million times over in that year alone.  Fool me once, shame on you. 

To suggest I was paid in drugs, as he did and has suggested now on multiple occasions, is just another insult to show how little he actually valued what I did there.  I can count on one hand how many times we dipped into the company money for anything fun or that didn’t come with salt and a soda.   Looking back, I can’t believe I was actually duped into having my checks direct-deposited into their account and never actually getting the chance to see them.  All this did was make two people think that they spent money that they simply did not spend.  I didn’t even have access to it, not a penny in any account.  I had to fucking ask if I wanted to get a pack of cigarettes.  Do you know how demeaning that shit feels, to be part of a site making thousands of dollars every month and still not being able to buy your own smokes?  And for fuck’s sake, I didn’t even have an expensive habit when I was there. Half the time, since I knew nobody, I would just get loaded on $5 whiskey from the gas station.  $5.00 whiskey tastes way worse than regular whiskey by the way.  If I have to get personal here, I’ll go ahead and let you know that I did smoke down there any time I got the chance.  I take no shame in that because it happened so rarely.  If I spend sixteen hours a day working on something, I believe I can do whatever the fuck I want when I’m done or by myself.  That’s all there is to it. If I was pawning off the TV to buy pills or some heavy ass drug, then there would be some merit to this accusation.  Hell, if I even lagged behind on my work a little, I could understand it.  There’s no such thing as a weed junkie.  They don’t exist.  I did nothing but get better at our shooting schedule the entire time I was there.  I was almost always the last one to bed and usually still the first one up the following day.  What I actually did and what was written about me in reality’s place are two very, very different things.  Fool me twice…well…fuck, now that just sucks.

You know how many nights the two of us planned videos at some shitty diner in a town neither of us wanted to be in?  How, despite the fact that we were making good money, we were often told to only get coffee or cheap breakfast food simply because it was the will of his brother.  That’s my entire point here: we made good money every month and I still had to live like a poor person.  You know how many days I went without rest because our shooting schedule was so hectic and the edits were too complicated to do otherwise?  That was my entire life for a while, sparse moments of food or sleep, and the rest was finishing TAA stuff.  To say that I cost him too much is a fucking insult to the truth and to me.  Did you think that this money magically floated in from some dead relative of his or something, from some job that he worked alone in the evenings?  Fuck no.  We earned every penny of that money together.  Emphasis on the word we. Just from the business we were doing with my dad alone, not including my personal effort in the TAA collaboration,  I earned that company way more money than I’d ever spent when involved with it.

Just because I am still kind of insulted by the suggestion, here is a small list of the bigger things I did in the course of that year.  All of this was done in less than 365 days. This doesn’t include the very mundane shit I always had to do, like travel to Peoria to deposit checks I’d never see or the numerous times we traveled without him from New Orleans all the way to Iowa just to make the business a little more cash.  If I didn’t pull my weight, nobody on this fucking planet ever will.

• AMAZING — 90 minute documentary.  Shot and edited entirely by me.  There were three different edits of this documentary, two nobody has really seen, and had three different underlying narratives.  Each of them were over 85 minutes.  I also put together four or five separate commercials promoting them.  I don’t know how much this project actually made because I never saw a penny from it.
• 2-5 YouTube videos a week, every single week, ranging in length from three to about thirty minutes on average.  Sometimes more and sometimes less.  I color-corrected (by hand and shot for shot) nearly every frame that was ever uploaded. 
• I did nearly every bit of TAA graphic design the whole time I was there.  This includes channel and book design, artwork for his videos, and two complete vectors of TAA to use as a logo on YouTube and his website.  His annual send-off of the year, a poem about the year in retrospect, was illustrated by several pieces I’d done in a single night.  This was not uncommon.  Many of his videos are sprinkled with little effects of my own that took a long time to create. 
• I shot and edited several videos for his time on TGWTG.  Many of his top-ten lists were even made with my help.  I co-starred and edited several episodes of his TGWTG show, “Sour Note.”  I also shot and edited his short-lived ASK SKELETOR series.
• The Straight-Eff’s would have never happened in a million years if not for me.  I wrote all the music and produced the entire damn record by myself.  TJ’s contribution was the lyrics, most of which he’d already had for years.  I even did the album art and both commercials.  This project bombed but I put a lot of effort and energy in it none the less.
• I helped in almost every BlogTV donation event / shot commercials for the bigger ones.
• 427-page photobook featuring hundreds of photographs by me and excerpts from the both of us about particular videos.  Not released as of now.  This is what sparked all the bullshit on the surface.  They released the book after they fired me without so much as even asking me.  I wasn’t cool with that and you wouldn’t have been either.  Funny thing is, had I just been asked, I probably wouldn’t have had any objections.
• Shorts like “Fred’s New Dad” and ”8 Years in Prison For Harmless Prank?!” had cinematic aspects that were a direct result of my help.  Watch TJ’s first attempt at BRICKS and then watch BRICKS II, the sequel that I produced, edited, and helped direct.  That’s the only way I can explain this when people ask me how I could have been so busy shooting video of a dude screaming at a camera for a living.  Most of our stuff was so much more than that.  

Needless to say, if you are just a casual watcher that suddenly hates me for no reason…you’re kind of a dick.

I also didn’t demand the master bedroom and I don’t know where that is even coming from.  I don’t think I demanded anything the entire time I was there to be honest.  When we first arrived to our house (that I hadn’t yet seen) in Louisiana, that room was decided mine because I had the most shit and that room had the most space.  There was just no way that all my, as well as Brittany’s, stuff was going to fit in the other two rooms.  There honestly was never a single discussion about this the entire time I was there.  That’s another revision of history that only seemed to become an issue after the fact.  TJ and I didn’t talk about that fucking bedroom one time. 

And by now it’s common knowledge that the room was a mess when I left it.  Yeah, it was messy.  There’s really no excuse for that so I won’t even bother making one.  I will tell you the state of my head that last week in Louisiana, though, and the sudden burst of emotion rolling through me when bad news finally sent it all over the edge.  I didn’t care about that fucking room anymore and I was at the point where I didn’t really care about the dudes in the house either.  The room got messy in that week’s span.  A few people have noted how clean that very room looked in a drum cover video I’d posted just a week or so before I left.  Most of the time, that room just got a little messy and I didn’t let it get out of hand that much.  That last week, I admit that I didn’t give a fuck about how it looked.  I couldn’t care about it less than I actually did.  When my apathy is left to its own devices, as it was the moment my ex left me there alone, it becomes truly limitless.  Yeah, I can definitely be a slob sometimes.  Hi pot, I’m kettle.  Try to put yourself in my position for a moment, if you wouldn’t mind.  If you were to put all of your effort into something successful but you didn’t get to experience any of that success yourself, would you really give a shit if the people around you didn’t want you smoking in the house?  I doubt it.  I had less money and enjoyed my life way less in Louisiana than I ever did in Iowa.  I had a beautiful girlfriend that I couldn’t even take out on a date ONCE.  I toughed that shit out until I just couldn’t anymore.  It was also made to look as if I left New Orleans for good with a messy room, another thing that is just false from the gate.  I had every intention on just going on a small vacation.  I expected to come back to my messy room and I would have cleaned it eventually.

I really didn’t think TJ was going to write shit about me after I actually took my belongings, though.  That came from the far left-field. TJ was very cordial in person, friendly even, and everybody with me did their best to stay respectful and civil in return.  Even when my brother discovered that his amp was handled terribly and had a four inch tear down the back panel, we still remained nice.  It was never in our heads to start a bunch of shit.  What would that have achieved?  We wanted to get on the road so we wasted no time bullshitting with them.  Why would we?  As far as I was concerned, there was nothing to be said at all.  As soon as the truck was packed, we left.  Easy at that.  Canyon even made note of their civility, how they helped load the truck to a small extent.  

Everybody got along and I thought that was the final nail in the coffin.  I was done feeling anything about it in that moment.  Our work had come to a close and I was way more than content with that.  In fact, I was even going to write TJ when I finally got home to let him know that I appreciated him putting my drum parts in a zip-lock bag and not just letting them get lost.  The fact that some of my shit was damaged went unnoticed because I saw a little bit of humanity in that plastic bag.  By the time I got home, though, there was already some half-assed blog about me on his Tumblr and it removed all doubt.

I wondered, “What does this serve?”  ”What is the purpose of this bullshit?”  But in the end, I know it’s all about sating the inflated ego of TheAmazingAtheist.  Above all else, that’s what it is and it takes precedence over all things.  The line between TJ and TAA blurs more and more by the day and I can explain this very simply.  TJ was my friend but TAA doesn’t care about anything.  TJ gave me a lens and a microphone as a way of saying, “Thank You For Helping Me For A Year!”.  TAA took the lens back as a way of saying, “Nevermind, fuck you!”

I know the difference between the two because I know both of them very well.

People want a big spectacle because they like when things fail and they can actually sit witness to it as it plays out like a sad movie does.  It doesn’t happen all the time, so when it does and it’s organic, people eat the shit up like they were literally starving for drama.  If the internet had a floor I swear to fucking god that it would be covered in popcorn kernals all the time.  People fucking love drama.  

Thing is I didn’t want a spectacle and I never wanted drama.  I wanted TJ and I to remain friends.  I really did.  I wanted some fucking respect for all the shit I missed out on to help him, a little bit of respect for all the work I’d done in the last year.  I really did want this shit to end amicably.  I did everything in my power to make it that way.  At this point, to me, it ‘s funny how a couple months can go by and there’s suddenly no price tag that would ever persuade me to work with that dude again.

So there you go.  The few fringe, TAA-exclusive fans that are still on the fence about me, just do yourself a favor and unsubscribe.  I’m never going to do anything close to the productions I did with TAA again.  That part of my life is done.  You can either accept it or you can hate me for it with every fiber of your being, I just don’t care anymore.  

Now quit asking me questions about this.  It’s so fucking old and I’ve officially said everything I have to say about it, honestly and with no bullshit attached.  Seriously.  I went out of my way to address every single message I’ve received about this.  For further questions, just reread this and then shut the fuck up.  Take it as you will, but fucking take it already…and leave me alone.

* * * 

So, there you have it. I am an egomaniacal monster, drunk on my own internet fame and sheer vindictiveness. I took every opportunity possible to fuck Cody over. Why? Because I’m just pure evil.