Pirate University

This is a story that begins at a low point. All the fun ones usually do.

Eli Kimbell

This is a story that begins at a low point. All the fun ones usually do.

Greetings, my name is Eli Kimbell and I am 25 years old, a native of New York, a city-slicking, Ivy League-educated, athletic Jew who was recently relieved to leave a corporate job. I am a writer, not a salesman. My cousin, Alex, is also a writer. It’s in the blood whether anybody likes it or not. He tried his hand at sales for a while too before coming back to his roots. But that’s a story for a different day or for him to tell, or both. Same shit, different pot.

            We’re family, so it was only a matter of time before we found each other once again. Or for the first time, depending on your perspective. All it took was a near-death experience, a heavy hand from Aunt Stacey, a shared adulthood, one winding backroad and a straight-n’-narrow highway that converged in a wood. So here we are.

            My writing style is often flowery, verbose, metaphor-ridden and… you get it. Alex’s is direct, hilarious, sometimes dark and as reflective as it possibly could be of his speaking voice. The guy should really start taking voice notes anytime he talks about his writing, because most of it is gold and should probably be immortalized on paper.

            Okay, I’ll stop beating around the bush. Earlier this year, Alex was shot in the face and although the road to recovery has not been easy for anyone, particularly him, you might be surprised to learn that little tidbit if you met him today. You probably wouldn’t bat an eye if you saw him roaming the streets of this incredible city. The only real giveaway is his dope as fuck Dior eyepatch that covers the place where his right eye used to be, and which he will not bat at you either.

            And for the love of God, this better be a turning point for the both of us. Our relationship post-op has only resulted in good things, namely the drafting of a short story on my end, the beginning of a memoir on his, and the beginning of a blog for the pair of us. There are a number of ways these initial steps can make us whole again (minus one eye, of course), but the foundation for clarity, direction and impact rests in the fact that we are both consistently writing, and writing together. It makes us better people in different ways. And the fact that it is the solution for us both is incredible, considering our paths have almost never crossed like this before. Yes, we’re family, but I challenge any reader to show me a tighter relationship than the one that must exist between writing partners deliberately leaning into the honesty and rawness necessary to bear the weight of an entire extended family’s healing process.

            And that’s where we begin. A fucked up, melodramatic, mutually beneficial, uncertain, juxtaposed work in progress. One note on the juxtaposed part: our plan is to pick a topic each week to write about and publish one piece from each of us. In the past, this has yielded varying results, oftentimes ones that if taken individually would not necessarily provoke a reader to make the connection that yes, these thoughts emerged from the same prompt and the same bloodline. Hopefully there’s some humor in that.

            One lasting impression of who we are: currently, Alex and I are both drafting our posts in a really chill café that I have liked to visit in the past to do things of this nature and where I think I fit in pretty damn well. I like to muse on what it all means and what really matters. He just posted a sarcastic story to his Instagram about how he’s decided to drop everything and truly live the quintessential hipster lifestyle, wearing a thrifted monocle and a second-rate ZZ Top beard, bouncing from one café to the next and telling the world he’s a “creative.” I think Alex knows what it all means and what really matters. He just needs to write it. I’m figuring it out. And I’ll let you know if I make any progress. Welcome!

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Alex DeOrio

After years of procrastination, resistance and misplaced defiance, I have officially decided to start my own blog (feel free to applaud, folks). If I’m being honest, it wasn’t the love of story-telling that inspired me. It was the love of money. Techies in the know and millennials with entrepreneurial-instincts had informed me of the accumulation of cash flow that can be gained from readers clicking advertisements. Yet as irony would have it, I’ve discovered this to be a newfound passion of mine. A loophole to capitalize on my love of literature and my way with words.

From the time I was old enough to spell, it was obvious that my true calling was being a writer. Contrarily, for reasons not even my shrink has been able to decipher, I spent the first 37 years of my life doing everything in my power to run from my destiny. When they wanted to put me on the honor roll after I wrote a piece on a Cuban refugee that was featured in the local newspaper, I scoffed at the idea of success and achievement and chose to cut school instead. When I was away at college, I aced every class without trying. And as soon as my professor reached out to me to discuss the idea of publishing my work, I stopped showing up and instead hung out with all the fraternities, partying my brains out, fucking my loins out, and selling drugs to the trustfund-babies. I didn’t want to conform. I was afraid of being average. I didn’t want to do what I was good at. I wanted to branch out and prove my renaissance. For instance: training to be a stockbroker. But I had no passion for cold calling, so it ended up being a bust. Customer service at Home Depot. The employees loved me. I felt it was all beneath me. Framing houses and building doorways. Physically it was a cakewalk. But I lacked the mechanics of a blue-collar guru. 

These easter eggs and failures I’ve mentioned from my past hold no real relevance as to why I’m starting this blog. However to understand what it was that got me here, to finally give in and give my gift back to the world, a constructed timeline is all but mandatory. 

You see, when the unthinkable inevitably happens, when you come face-to-face with Judgment Day and live to tell the tale, it would not only be a disservice but a full-blown sin not to write about it. Case in point, on March 10th I was shot in the head execution style while sitting in my car. In a simultaneous display of ungodly horror, my right eye was shredded to pieces while pieces of my brains spattered across my dashboard and windshield. 5 months later, I’m still here, recovering as if it were just a common injury. To question how I survived and why I’m still here would be a waste of time. God doesn’t owe me any answers. Instead, it is I who owes a debt, who needs to pay it forward, who needs to fulfill a purpose. There’s no more time left to waste. 

With that, I present to you: PIRATE UNIVERSITY. An unlikely duo formed from family ties. On the left, a Princeton graduate who put baseball on the shelf in exchange for a taste of poetry and journalism. On the right, is his cousin. A college dropout-turned-maniac who survived a gunshot wound to the head, ultimately as a result of being corrupted by the insidious misfortunes of drug addiction, the hypnotic obsession of chasing money, and the emotional substitute of filling the void of validation with beautiful women. Two polar opposites bonded by blood, here to share our trials and tribulations we experience on a daily basis. I welcome you, the reader, to join us.