SIX POUNDS OF FLESH

Everyone's a goddamn survivor, unless you're dead.

Bobby asked me to write a blog entry and I told him I wouldn't have a lot of nice things to say. But he insisted and said he appreciates my "honesty" and that he wants this to be "real."

It doesn't get more real than this. I cut off my left arm with a knife and watched my business partner and friend of seven years get his brains mashed up right in front of me.

I hacked off my arm and dropped it down a plastic chute. I saw it hit the scale and then I had three long seconds to think about my life before we ran out of time.

Yes, I spent years ripping people off, gaining their trust and contracting them into loan schemes that would ruin their lives. I made money by destroying families. No, I don't do it anymore. I regret hurting anyone. I regret Eddie had to die. I regret every day that I wake up with just one arm, with the trauma of that night burnt into my brain.

Yes, I'm a survivor. He didn't kill me. I still get out of bed and when I look in the mirror I feel all right about what I see. I've got six pounds less on my body and I know I can get through my life without hurting anyone else ever again.

Everyone should have a chance alone in a room with a meat cleaver. Maybe motherfuckers would get a lot nicer.

-Simone

WATCH BOBBY AND THE JIGSAW SURVIVOR GROUP

SURVIVAL MEANS PAIN

Survival means enduring incredible pain. meat hooks tear your flesh. battery acid blinds you. Electrical arcs burn your every nerve. All the mistakes of your life pin you to the cold cement floor and tear you limb from limb.

But none of these torments are as excruciating as the one single revelation that sings in your ear when you have reached the apex of your suffering. It is the revelation that detonates within the survivor, the dirty bomb of self-discovery.

When I awoke to my own excruciating torture, feeling the silver hooks in my body, my first thought was, "Who did this to me, and why?" My own blood soaked my body, my nerves screamed with every cell, and yet louder and clearer than any other signal was this one simple question: WHO?