I never thought of myself as a supervillain. It seems a little boastful, you know. Super? Really? It feels like a marketing ploy. Still, if both BuzzFeed and Gawker agree that's what to call you, I guess you are that thing. What is modern braggadocio but retweets and clicks anyhow? I'm also dubious on the former part of this portmanteau. I don't consider myself a villain. Sure, people have risked their lives trying to stop me, but people will make a crusade over just about anything these days. I mean, in college the white kids held a protest because there was an only POC student interest group. Then some other white people started attacking the protesting white people. Who's the villain there, huh? ... Okay, I guess all the white people, but you get my point. Just because people protest you, try to murder you, run a very tasteless smear campaign at every Chick-fil-A in America against you, or even if the nominal superheros of the day make it their business to stop you, it doesn't mean you're a villain.
All that said, I'm creating a giant machine. Some might call it a doomsday device, but those folks are hyperbolic, fear-mongering rubes. The function of this machine is not to destroy, but to dismantle. Specifically society. Now it may seem like I'm being pedantic or semantic, but hear me out. Life sucks, right? That's my basic premise. At least as presently constituted it does. You still with me? Cool. Now why does it suck? Well, lots of reasons: terrible dads, poverty, Tinder, etc. Now what do all those and other shitty things in life have in common? They're not xanax. And that's a problem. And the crux of my very machine. To put it technically would be tedious, so I will settle for a trite metaphor. Use your mind's eye, imagine the air, the substance we breath and live upon, is Troy and xanax is the Greeks. They gotta get in there, but how? My machine is the horse. The Trojan Horse that will permeate our atmosphere with alprazolam. In deference to this metaphor I've built my machine to look like a horse and, ironically, to be piloted by a horse, which was far and away the most difficult aspect of its creation. I'm terrible with design and I hired this engineering student as an intern...he said he knew PhotoShop...it all went to shit pretty fast...we lost alot of good horses...
The long and short of it all is that I built a monumental horse-shaped industrial desk fan that spews xanax. Enough xanax to fill the jet streams of our atmosphere and veil the world. I also have a jumpsuit to go along with it. It's...remarkably comfortable. Anyhow, once the fan is turned on it will not stop. Sort of. Someone has to keep shoveling loads of xanax into the machine. Furthermore, the horse pilot needs to be replaced once every however long horses live. But let's not get too mechanical yet.
As the world is enveloped in a giant sack of xanax dust (a.k.a. Operation Teabag Gaia) society will be reborn. The panic of modern life will give way to floppiness. The world shall know what it is to flop and the virtues of flopping. Think of it - no fear, no anger, no inhibitions! Everyone will describe themselves as "laid back" on their online dating profiles. Animals will be much more chill and you'll be able to pet even the most dangerous ones. Ferrets will suck less! Now I can't calculate what will start happening to society after prolonged exposure. My guess is, though, that whatever happens will be real smooth. I wouldn't be surprised if froyo becomes the global currency. Beyond that, who knows. Of course, everyone will become addicted to xanax fairly quickly. But that's the beauty of my horse ouroboros. Humanity and most life on the planet would die from withdrawal were the machine to stop.
So why am I telling you this? Why reveal my plot? I'm not going to lie, this is really just a Kickstarter pitch. The machine is good to go; I'm set to turn the dial of history to floppy, but I can't afford enough xanax to keep my machine going. That's where you come in. All I'm asking is a paltry 27 million USD to get enough xanax to kick (wink wink nudge nudge) this thing off. Pledges of at least $20 will receive a follow by me on twitter. Pledges of $20 - 100 will get a 2mg bar of xanax inscribed with their name. Pledges of $100 or more can some to my evil lair and take a selfie with the machine! And finally, if you pledge $1000 or more I'll let you jack off the horse pilot. So please, donate today. Thank you.
Regards,
The Xan Man
-Sent from an iPhone
Sunday, December 14, 2014
Sunday, December 7, 2014
Story of the Wry
It came into the mind of my father that he needed to do a thing. This was subconscious, but we all felt it. Hell you could see it. See it in his eyes, his lifeless, black eyes, like a doll's eyes. You could sense it in his listlessness. You could smell it in his bathroom. Not long before he had begun to engineer a grand personal bathroom for himself. A palatial WC lined with red velvet and filled with the electronic gadgets old men adore. There were multiple TVs and a pull-out Lazy Boy, just in case you wanted to have a cozy night in. Each time he added a new feature, he would take my sister and me on a tour of his magnum opus. This was by necessity, though, since his pride over his crapper was greater than it was in us, his children. Furthermore, he had designed a series of interlocking doors so no one could enter his bathroom without the correct sequence of passwords, keys, and retinal scans. I once joked that the only vulnerability of this shit safe house was the ventilation system. A small and determined person could slip in through the air vents to drop a clandestine deuce. My father starred at me blankly for a moment before bolting for the door. He was going to Home Depot. His butt bunker had to be impregnable.
Of course, my father's bathroom was merely symptomatic of his greater ennui. He took on many pet projects in those days, mostly home improvements that were questionably improvements and certainly not home. More troubling were his mental lapses, moments when he he would forget what he was doing and stand idly in some spot, sometimes for periods as long as golf. He seemed demented, his mind incapable or unwilling to follow through on the very impulses it created. Often we would find him trowel in hand standing in the garage and staring at his peg board, as if each hole contained some Vernian microverse about husbands enduring their wives' Netflix selections. Things were getting worse and we were worried. Our house became filled with half-finished projects started by my father. My sister had significant difficulty reaching her drafting table as dad had partially built a miniature recreation of the Battle of Antietam using Street Sharks action figures to denote troop deployment. Worse yet, these undertakings were eroding the very core of the man I had known for 27 years. Savagely frugal since time immemorial, my father had grown profligate in his search. Thousands were wasted on trifles, which distressed him further. His maxims of productivity and asceticism were corrupted to ceaseless toil and wanton snacking. He got fat and his impeccable bald spot sprouted the single longest stress devil's lock I had ever seen. His face bloated and divided by that single hair made him look like an angler fish that had lost it's Viagra prescription. A once proud Hank Hill was becoming a Bobby.
Luring us out of the house with the promise of a trip to Target, my mother confronted my sister and me. In typical dramatic fashion, she had applied extra mascara for effect. My father needed an intervention and if we didn't help her she was going to "CHANGE THE LOCKS!" (a favorite threat of my mother's). With no hope of talking her down from her self created ledge of histrionics, we agreed. The following day, we gathered in our living room and went about making preparations for the intervention. My sister sealed all the exits. My mother set up snack traps around the house and rehearsed her water works. I pretended to be helping. Sitting awkwardly on a couch together, we waited to spring the trap on my dad. However, he never came. We waited seven hours at the insistence of my mother before breaking apart like a self-loathing Pangaea. My sister ran off with a friend that ambitiously worked two jobs, a hostess at Hooters and a waitress at Tilted Kilt. My mother took one of her famed angry beauty naps and I merely watched TV. Late into the night my father returned. His dark silhouette stood in the door holding a dripping bag. Lightning illuminated the sopping wet sexagenarian. Without a word, he stepped into the house and wiped the moisture from his brow. He took off his bright yellow Spongebob hat, which he had received for free at a runner's convention, and flopped onto the couch next to me, still cradling the bag. "What's in the bag?"
By that point I had not seen or spoken to my father in twelve hours. He nodded at me knowingly and said, "You want to know what I've been doing?" He mashed his lips together in a strange way and tilted his large bulbous nose down at me. The glare from Criminal Minds shone off his bald head and it made him look like a poorly drawn Mr. Natural without the beard. He grabbed the bag and ripped it open. Golf balls. Hundreds of them. Covered in muck. Apparently he had spent the entire day fishing them out of a stream adjacent to a golf course near our house. "I spent all day fishing these puppies out from that stream." His hand dove into the sea of golf balls and swam through it as if it were some kind of precious treasure. "Can you believe these idiots down at the golf course let their perfectly good balls go to waste?!" I blinked at him. "Okay, I'm going to bed. Goodnight, Dad." I pulled myself up from the couch and walked past him and to the vestibule with a pullout that was my bedroom. My dad did not respond. He held a neon yellow ball in his hand and dangled it in front of his eyes. Blowing on the ball to cleanse the muck, he sprinkled mud everywhere.
When I awoke the next morning, my father was gone and so was the bag. My mother paced nervously around the kitchen, chugging decaf coffee mixed with metamucil and valium. "It's another woman. I just know it." "It's not one. It's hundreds." I said. My mother spit up her coffee like an owl regurgitating a pellet. "I KNEW something was up when your father told me about that all female focus group!" "No, not women. Golf balls." "You can't fuck or focus group a golf ball! Don't even try to cover up for your father!" I went and laid down face first on the couch as my mother accosted me with threats and theories. Thankfully, my sister arrived then, still drunk from her all night bender. She was the new kid in school, the school of maternal ire. I listened as they had their tête-à-tête, my mother throwing insult and my sister retorting with vomit. The puke seemed to be the glue of her defense, hardened by an imbrication of implausible excuses. Things were escalating quickly, when my father showed up again laden with a sack of golf balls. My mother rushed at him. "What is this?! A bunch of presents from your whores?!" She slapped his arm and the bag fell to ground, expelling its contents onto the floor much like my sister's vomit. Dad immediately dropped to his knees, scrambling to collect the balls. "My darlings!" He gathered them with such care, as if he were a male seahorse and they his children, sucking them into his grasp for protection. "Anal beads!?" My mother collapsed on the couch weeping, simultaneously splattering her brains on the jagged rocks of her own delusion. My sister puked sonorously. I got up from the couch, went out the door, into my dad's car, and drove off.
It would be a full 30 or so hours before I returned. I passed the time smoking weed in the car and wandering around the suburban streets of Orlando. It is quite surreal, especially in the summer. The heat is savage and the sun is so bright. The only humans that exist hurtle by you in their cars afraid lest they get stuck in the vegetation, which grows seemingly by the minute, threatening to swallow up suburbia. Around sunset I ventured back. On the way I saw a strange silhouette stooping in the stream. Like some mythological fool consigned to his eternal fate after challenging a god, he hunched over the waters and sifted through the muck with his hands. Every now and then he would rise up holding a small sphere in his fingers to examine it against the backdrop of the red sun. Upon arriving home, I noticed a note on the fridge. "Dear Children, I am leaving you to be with my lover Armand. I can no longer endure living in a loveless marriage. There is leftover pasta in the fridge. XOXO, Mom." I ate that pasta and it was sub par at best.
Of course, my father's bathroom was merely symptomatic of his greater ennui. He took on many pet projects in those days, mostly home improvements that were questionably improvements and certainly not home. More troubling were his mental lapses, moments when he he would forget what he was doing and stand idly in some spot, sometimes for periods as long as golf. He seemed demented, his mind incapable or unwilling to follow through on the very impulses it created. Often we would find him trowel in hand standing in the garage and staring at his peg board, as if each hole contained some Vernian microverse about husbands enduring their wives' Netflix selections. Things were getting worse and we were worried. Our house became filled with half-finished projects started by my father. My sister had significant difficulty reaching her drafting table as dad had partially built a miniature recreation of the Battle of Antietam using Street Sharks action figures to denote troop deployment. Worse yet, these undertakings were eroding the very core of the man I had known for 27 years. Savagely frugal since time immemorial, my father had grown profligate in his search. Thousands were wasted on trifles, which distressed him further. His maxims of productivity and asceticism were corrupted to ceaseless toil and wanton snacking. He got fat and his impeccable bald spot sprouted the single longest stress devil's lock I had ever seen. His face bloated and divided by that single hair made him look like an angler fish that had lost it's Viagra prescription. A once proud Hank Hill was becoming a Bobby.
Luring us out of the house with the promise of a trip to Target, my mother confronted my sister and me. In typical dramatic fashion, she had applied extra mascara for effect. My father needed an intervention and if we didn't help her she was going to "CHANGE THE LOCKS!" (a favorite threat of my mother's). With no hope of talking her down from her self created ledge of histrionics, we agreed. The following day, we gathered in our living room and went about making preparations for the intervention. My sister sealed all the exits. My mother set up snack traps around the house and rehearsed her water works. I pretended to be helping. Sitting awkwardly on a couch together, we waited to spring the trap on my dad. However, he never came. We waited seven hours at the insistence of my mother before breaking apart like a self-loathing Pangaea. My sister ran off with a friend that ambitiously worked two jobs, a hostess at Hooters and a waitress at Tilted Kilt. My mother took one of her famed angry beauty naps and I merely watched TV. Late into the night my father returned. His dark silhouette stood in the door holding a dripping bag. Lightning illuminated the sopping wet sexagenarian. Without a word, he stepped into the house and wiped the moisture from his brow. He took off his bright yellow Spongebob hat, which he had received for free at a runner's convention, and flopped onto the couch next to me, still cradling the bag. "What's in the bag?"
By that point I had not seen or spoken to my father in twelve hours. He nodded at me knowingly and said, "You want to know what I've been doing?" He mashed his lips together in a strange way and tilted his large bulbous nose down at me. The glare from Criminal Minds shone off his bald head and it made him look like a poorly drawn Mr. Natural without the beard. He grabbed the bag and ripped it open. Golf balls. Hundreds of them. Covered in muck. Apparently he had spent the entire day fishing them out of a stream adjacent to a golf course near our house. "I spent all day fishing these puppies out from that stream." His hand dove into the sea of golf balls and swam through it as if it were some kind of precious treasure. "Can you believe these idiots down at the golf course let their perfectly good balls go to waste?!" I blinked at him. "Okay, I'm going to bed. Goodnight, Dad." I pulled myself up from the couch and walked past him and to the vestibule with a pullout that was my bedroom. My dad did not respond. He held a neon yellow ball in his hand and dangled it in front of his eyes. Blowing on the ball to cleanse the muck, he sprinkled mud everywhere.
When I awoke the next morning, my father was gone and so was the bag. My mother paced nervously around the kitchen, chugging decaf coffee mixed with metamucil and valium. "It's another woman. I just know it." "It's not one. It's hundreds." I said. My mother spit up her coffee like an owl regurgitating a pellet. "I KNEW something was up when your father told me about that all female focus group!" "No, not women. Golf balls." "You can't fuck or focus group a golf ball! Don't even try to cover up for your father!" I went and laid down face first on the couch as my mother accosted me with threats and theories. Thankfully, my sister arrived then, still drunk from her all night bender. She was the new kid in school, the school of maternal ire. I listened as they had their tête-à-tête, my mother throwing insult and my sister retorting with vomit. The puke seemed to be the glue of her defense, hardened by an imbrication of implausible excuses. Things were escalating quickly, when my father showed up again laden with a sack of golf balls. My mother rushed at him. "What is this?! A bunch of presents from your whores?!" She slapped his arm and the bag fell to ground, expelling its contents onto the floor much like my sister's vomit. Dad immediately dropped to his knees, scrambling to collect the balls. "My darlings!" He gathered them with such care, as if he were a male seahorse and they his children, sucking them into his grasp for protection. "Anal beads!?" My mother collapsed on the couch weeping, simultaneously splattering her brains on the jagged rocks of her own delusion. My sister puked sonorously. I got up from the couch, went out the door, into my dad's car, and drove off.
It would be a full 30 or so hours before I returned. I passed the time smoking weed in the car and wandering around the suburban streets of Orlando. It is quite surreal, especially in the summer. The heat is savage and the sun is so bright. The only humans that exist hurtle by you in their cars afraid lest they get stuck in the vegetation, which grows seemingly by the minute, threatening to swallow up suburbia. Around sunset I ventured back. On the way I saw a strange silhouette stooping in the stream. Like some mythological fool consigned to his eternal fate after challenging a god, he hunched over the waters and sifted through the muck with his hands. Every now and then he would rise up holding a small sphere in his fingers to examine it against the backdrop of the red sun. Upon arriving home, I noticed a note on the fridge. "Dear Children, I am leaving you to be with my lover Armand. I can no longer endure living in a loveless marriage. There is leftover pasta in the fridge. XOXO, Mom." I ate that pasta and it was sub par at best.
Saturday, November 8, 2014
Neither Noir
"I always pictured you with an Oriental" my mother intoned while perfunctorily scraping the pimento cheese from under her finger nails. "I'm not sure why I bother telling you anything." She did not respond immediately, the pause impregnated with her self-righteous indignation. "Because I'm your mother!" Of all the tautological explanations foisted upon me in my life, this was without a doubt the worst. "Don't remind me." She huffed, less out of general offense and more out of the hypothetical hit her social status might take if her romance writers group caught wind of my irreverence. Backed into the shit-stained corner of her own making, she rose to the occasion. "Well, I'm very disappointed in you." She strutted away from our tiff. As stupid as it sounds, as much as I can overcome through force of logic how meaningless those words are, they always sting.
I returned to the couch, throne of my ennui. I hadn't been home for three days and already the expected rejuvenation of vacation was turning into stasis. My father napped on the other end of that gargantuan divan, his tray of cookies poised precariously on his gut. I watched them teeter there, the rising action of my day. Guide. Guide. Guide. Pressing the remote with greater urgency each time in the hopes of syndicated intervention. The Syfy channel was running a Star Trek movie marathon. For 2+ hours I watched as the supposedly omnipotent V'Ger probe came to the gloriously banal awareness of itself. I mused that my own life ran a trajectory counter to V'Ger, an impotent dissipation into whatever. With characteristic manic dedication to his own time table, my father woke up fifteen minutes before the end of the film and started rushing my mother and me to dinner. Yelling from every conceivable room in the house in his mad dash of preparation, we endured the elan of our familial chief of staff. Together we piled in the new brown Subaru of which my parents were so proud.
The Blue Ridge Mountains are both blue and hazy, but only in perspective. As a sort of meditation I tried to see the haze around me and through which I moved, our brown SUV rudely displacing the ancient miasma in an attempt to get to P.F. Chang's. "What do you think the F stands for?" My dad chuckled. We pulled up to some giant, faux-terracotta horses and my sister smoking on the steps, the respective guardians of the tomb of General Tso. We were greeted by her smoker's cough that sounded like it had come back from the future to warn us about something, but we weren't listening or didn't care. We trundled in and were attended to by an obviously depressed wait staff. With great consternation and no scruples whatsoever, my father demanded from our waiter the exact proportions of each dish he was interested in. Gesturing with his hands aloft as if praying to some budget deity "Like this much, or THIS much?" Not to be outdone in his own tactlessness, my father then jumped to a line of questioning about our server's ethnicity. On hearing he was Korean, my dad posed this to the man - "So, who do you like more Kim Jon Il or Kim Jong...uh the other one?" He waited on that answer as much as on his food.
The sick man of dinner was our own inability to relate to one another. Our conversation bound with inane questions, tortured with silence, and killed with under-cooked scallops. That is a bit misleading, though. It had been dead so long that we were used to the putrefied stench of the corpse. I had hunted for the killer before, but like any good crook he had long ago payed off the witnesses. Nobody would talk. "Why doesn't your generation care about the future?" Another benihana hot take from my mom. This drove my sister to the restroom for the third time that evening, leaving me to answer for the sins of my generation. Luckily, my mother was more concerned with throwing us under the bus one at a time rather than collectively. "You sister is very depressed." Who isn't? "She's talked about suicide...openly!" At least she's not thinking about it. "You should go out with her tonight." Fine.
One and a half Kirin Ichibans later I stumbled into my sister's white Lexus. The floor was covered in dog food and loose tobacco. The seats leaned back so far it felt like a trip to the dentist. Steering with her iPod wheel, my sister sped us to a bar of ill-repute. There we waited for her friend, Celeste, a "weird looking" Peruvian girl and one that just might be "my type." Between beers and smokes there were cryptic text messages from Celeste, each one placing her nearer or father from us. It felt like a ruse, which incidentally feels like getting drunk. As I built a monument to my own numbness, my sister seethed with anxiety. Where was her friend and would she have to drive her home? I thought about waxing delphic to her, but instead played the analyst. She was terse, but honest. She felt like she had no place, no hope, no future. She lived in the shadow of our parents and she hated the shade. She longed for the sun and when she couldn't find it or no longer believed it was there she got angry. I comforted her. Delusion and displacement were the currency of our generation. We were told that once we came back from college the world would have a place for us, a comfy two bedroom studio with Ikea furniture enough to barricade the doors against our parents. A utopia of solipsism rolled up in do-what-you-want fuckery. Instead, we were like that guy at far end of the bar, a forty year old acoustic guitarist prostrating himself for acknowledgement, living in his parent's basement, and hung up on an indifferent single mom who only fucked him for his average penis and his CD-WR mixtapes which she promptly rewrote with Steely Dan songs.
I hadn't been that eloquent or drunk since I was on probation college. Solemnly my sister acknowledged that she hadn't been listening to me at all. We hugged and ran out on our tab. Back in her white Lexus, I rummaged through the center console as my sister cased the town for Celeste. I found an old car phone, a gigantic black brick that could have just as easily been a kilo of heroine. My sister had unplugged the phone fearing the cops might track her moderate weed consumption. I told her I would buy her a bumper sticker that said "Proud 2 Be Paranoid" or "My conspiracy theorist is an honor student." Notwithstanding my teasing, I agreed with her logic. The text messages from Celeste started coming in rapid bursts like machine gun fire, she was nervous, lost, and refused to stay still. Blue to black as the night progressed, the mountains were screening our communications like a prison warden. We found ourselves always a step behind her friend: a broken heel on a street corner, some glitter on a park bench, the torn threads of leggings. The evidence suggested the restless soul of a hoochie mama bound to haunt the night forever in search of one last partially smoked cigarette. Still we cruised through the city, attachés to an apparition that would not forget us.
I returned to the couch, throne of my ennui. I hadn't been home for three days and already the expected rejuvenation of vacation was turning into stasis. My father napped on the other end of that gargantuan divan, his tray of cookies poised precariously on his gut. I watched them teeter there, the rising action of my day. Guide. Guide. Guide. Pressing the remote with greater urgency each time in the hopes of syndicated intervention. The Syfy channel was running a Star Trek movie marathon. For 2+ hours I watched as the supposedly omnipotent V'Ger probe came to the gloriously banal awareness of itself. I mused that my own life ran a trajectory counter to V'Ger, an impotent dissipation into whatever. With characteristic manic dedication to his own time table, my father woke up fifteen minutes before the end of the film and started rushing my mother and me to dinner. Yelling from every conceivable room in the house in his mad dash of preparation, we endured the elan of our familial chief of staff. Together we piled in the new brown Subaru of which my parents were so proud.
The Blue Ridge Mountains are both blue and hazy, but only in perspective. As a sort of meditation I tried to see the haze around me and through which I moved, our brown SUV rudely displacing the ancient miasma in an attempt to get to P.F. Chang's. "What do you think the F stands for?" My dad chuckled. We pulled up to some giant, faux-terracotta horses and my sister smoking on the steps, the respective guardians of the tomb of General Tso. We were greeted by her smoker's cough that sounded like it had come back from the future to warn us about something, but we weren't listening or didn't care. We trundled in and were attended to by an obviously depressed wait staff. With great consternation and no scruples whatsoever, my father demanded from our waiter the exact proportions of each dish he was interested in. Gesturing with his hands aloft as if praying to some budget deity "Like this much, or THIS much?" Not to be outdone in his own tactlessness, my father then jumped to a line of questioning about our server's ethnicity. On hearing he was Korean, my dad posed this to the man - "So, who do you like more Kim Jon Il or Kim Jong...uh the other one?" He waited on that answer as much as on his food.
The sick man of dinner was our own inability to relate to one another. Our conversation bound with inane questions, tortured with silence, and killed with under-cooked scallops. That is a bit misleading, though. It had been dead so long that we were used to the putrefied stench of the corpse. I had hunted for the killer before, but like any good crook he had long ago payed off the witnesses. Nobody would talk. "Why doesn't your generation care about the future?" Another benihana hot take from my mom. This drove my sister to the restroom for the third time that evening, leaving me to answer for the sins of my generation. Luckily, my mother was more concerned with throwing us under the bus one at a time rather than collectively. "You sister is very depressed." Who isn't? "She's talked about suicide...openly!" At least she's not thinking about it. "You should go out with her tonight." Fine.
One and a half Kirin Ichibans later I stumbled into my sister's white Lexus. The floor was covered in dog food and loose tobacco. The seats leaned back so far it felt like a trip to the dentist. Steering with her iPod wheel, my sister sped us to a bar of ill-repute. There we waited for her friend, Celeste, a "weird looking" Peruvian girl and one that just might be "my type." Between beers and smokes there were cryptic text messages from Celeste, each one placing her nearer or father from us. It felt like a ruse, which incidentally feels like getting drunk. As I built a monument to my own numbness, my sister seethed with anxiety. Where was her friend and would she have to drive her home? I thought about waxing delphic to her, but instead played the analyst. She was terse, but honest. She felt like she had no place, no hope, no future. She lived in the shadow of our parents and she hated the shade. She longed for the sun and when she couldn't find it or no longer believed it was there she got angry. I comforted her. Delusion and displacement were the currency of our generation. We were told that once we came back from college the world would have a place for us, a comfy two bedroom studio with Ikea furniture enough to barricade the doors against our parents. A utopia of solipsism rolled up in do-what-you-want fuckery. Instead, we were like that guy at far end of the bar, a forty year old acoustic guitarist prostrating himself for acknowledgement, living in his parent's basement, and hung up on an indifferent single mom who only fucked him for his average penis and his CD-WR mixtapes which she promptly rewrote with Steely Dan songs.
I hadn't been that eloquent or drunk since I was on probation college. Solemnly my sister acknowledged that she hadn't been listening to me at all. We hugged and ran out on our tab. Back in her white Lexus, I rummaged through the center console as my sister cased the town for Celeste. I found an old car phone, a gigantic black brick that could have just as easily been a kilo of heroine. My sister had unplugged the phone fearing the cops might track her moderate weed consumption. I told her I would buy her a bumper sticker that said "Proud 2 Be Paranoid" or "My conspiracy theorist is an honor student." Notwithstanding my teasing, I agreed with her logic. The text messages from Celeste started coming in rapid bursts like machine gun fire, she was nervous, lost, and refused to stay still. Blue to black as the night progressed, the mountains were screening our communications like a prison warden. We found ourselves always a step behind her friend: a broken heel on a street corner, some glitter on a park bench, the torn threads of leggings. The evidence suggested the restless soul of a hoochie mama bound to haunt the night forever in search of one last partially smoked cigarette. Still we cruised through the city, attachés to an apparition that would not forget us.
Monday, October 27, 2014
Family Tree...Now with Gallows!
My entire family is suicidal. Even the dogs. Maybe them most of all because my suicidal sister named them in an apoplectic fit of terrible taste: Agony and Ekphrasis. You got to hand it to her, though. She is pretentious even when tormented. Half of white Brooklyn would kill to be able to posture like her. The other half would kill, but insist that the murder was ironic. It is without a doubt one of the greater affectations passed down to my sister from our mother, who always seems to find a well to throw her expectations of others down. Give her an inch and she'll mourn by that well for the rest of her damned life, all because the mailman didn't look her in the eye. Before you know it you'll be consoling her while the mailman is consumed by guilt. He won't set a foot down on the mail route again without seeing visions of the husky, bleary-eyed, self-proclaimed early adopter of widowhood crouching by that accursed well in the very same squalid wedding dress she's worn everyday for the last twenty seven years.
Father, of course, knew exactly what he was getting into when he took my mother out to Olive Garden on what must, in retrospect, be considered the most ill-fated first date since China and opium. It must have been a supernatural event. The breadsticks acting like crystals of sorrow channeling the collective melancholy of the universe into the nexus of insipid, faux-Italian chain dining. In the anecdote that serves as the foundational myth of their love, my parents cored their breadsticks, wept into them, and, arms entwined, toasted to misery. The more unfortunate will hear the humorous twist of how my mother then stole the Andes Mint right off the plate of my hypoglycemic grandfather who was chaperoning the date and consequently died from the sugar deprivation.
Thus was signed the strategic copulation pact between a cerebral idiot and a demented ingenue. Their axis forged less out of love and more out of mutual self-assured sexy desperate destruction. Tales of my conception are greatly exaggerated, but in parental parlance I came to be out of an "ill-conceived thought experiment turned sex". My folks presumed they could disprove the Schrödinger's Cat Theory by placing semen in my mother's vagina in a tantric, irradiated sensory deprivation tank. In every conceivable metric they failed, except in conception itself.
Eighteen months later I was born, a marvel in delayed gestation. During the pregnancy my mother insisted on micro-dosing herself with mescalin in the hopes of creating a "amniotic Burning Man" for me. Paraded around talk shows by an hallucinating mother and labeled the "Burner at Birth" I was imbued in the womb with an uncanny connection to canned laughter. The doctors said I came out of the womb with the umbilical cord tied in a hangman's knot around my neck. Mistaking the lights in the operating room for an audience cue light, I laughed and applauded at my suicidal birth.
The next fours years went by with increasing levels of misery. My first word was ennui, my first pun was INTJ-ed off, and my first meme largely forgettable. As my language skills developed, so did my penchant for brooding. I found that life-threatening situations were the most conducive to thought so I would routinely lock myself in the trunk of a stranger's car in the middle of summer in Florida. Unfortunately, I was always found before I became a desiccated corpse. The next most dangerous scenario which I afforded myself was simply my father's company whose neglect and idiocy flirted with death harder than a campaign intern canvassing a zombie suburb. Quality time with my father was a phantasmagoria of irresponsible power tool use, wildly inappropriate aphorisms, and neglect. It was as if viewing some surrealist play with the fourth wall occasionally broken by errant circular saw blades and asides about hard work and/or sexual intercourse. "Don't force it!" he yelled as he pushed me onto the highway for my first bike ride.
Where periods spent with my father bristled with a certain sanguine fatality of the body, time with my mother ensured ego death. An afternoon with my mother is like hanging out with a omniscient third person narrator / drone operator who is constantly making tactical strikes on your self-esteem. The drones are an allegory for her delusions and are armed with histrionic soliloquies about the burdens of motherhood. Forced to escort this one woman war machine on every imaginable errand, I fantasized about my own death. I contrived to lace my Sunday clothes with poison, so that I might die in church convulsing. My soul exulted as the congregation feverishly surrounds me and praises this manifestation of the holy spirit, only to see my divine mania cut short by the excremental deluge of death. My antediluvian dingle berries sprinkled over the flock like holy water. Alas, unable to obtain the proper toxins, I consigned myself to predicting how many of the faithful might be crushed to death by the collapse of a support beam.
Just when our sorrow really seemed to be clicking, my parents adopted my sister. Neophyte to woe, but one hell of a quick study. My sister rode in the wake of our wretched clan like she was water skiing ...which was coincidentally how her biological family was murdered. Her presence amplified each of our respective and collective agonies, turning our woebegone band camp of a family into a crestfallen philharmonic. Life with her was an onslaught, your patience and sanity besieged, circumvallated, and starved into raving madness. She was the Cerberus to our filial Tartarus, appeased only by sugar and blood sacrifice. To keep the beast at bay, we offered her babysitters, those poor souls too oft included in porn video titles. The lucky ones escaped with a mild case of PTSD and a crippling fear of children. We don't talk about the unlucky ones.
Fate had ordained this assemblage, a super group of sad sacks. The Al Bundy Signal shimmered in the night sky and called us to our mutual dysfunction. Unite and suit up! Mother chugging her crying juice (a mix of water, gin, vinegar, and WD40) and layering her mascara like Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son. Father wrapping himself so tight in a layer of his own aloofness that it gives his ego a hernia. Sister rolling out the manic red carpet of her insanity. And me looking for a cave with some golden needles to stab my eyes out with. We were the Voltron of self-pity.
The strength of our family unit lie somewhere between fear and spite. Despite near constant emotional deterioration we stood firm knowing that, no matter what, we could always come home to someone to berate or ignore us. Mandatory family dinners, where we gambled food for suffering, were another element of our blight bond. On more than one occasion my mother was caught with suffering up her sleeve. Perhaps the most pivotal gear of the entire forlorn machine was the family vacation, specifically the road trip. Nothing lifts the spirits like a doomed voyage, so we celebrated our communal enthusiasm with prolonged silence and slapping. Across hideous hinterlands towards a destination we were all indifferent or opposed to, my family shared a transcendent hatred. Thus we lived for 19 years before I left for college, the ultimate experiment in extra-familial sorrow.
Much like water, piss seeks its own level...even if it takes 30 years. So it was that on my little sister's 30th birthday I returned home. I had been out of the house since I left for school, and out of school since I left for Dollywood. There I had stayed for 14 years, hiding in a theme park underworld ruled by a ruthless council of oligarchic lost children. The food was terrible, the governance corrupt, and the living conditions more squalid than a solitary bathroom in a refuge camp rave. I was too sad to move, but was forcibly evicted for not scavenging my monthly quota of temporary tattoos. So I trekked home, my ego severely wounded by the rejection from a society that's ideology was based solely around cotton candy. At my homecoming my parents regaled me with tales of their own vile travails, the constant misfortunes that beset them, and their still growing hatred for one another. It is a testament to their marriage that after 35 years their disgust was still blooming.
As a family, we sat down together to harass my sister about her burgeoning decrepitude. She looked as if in the span of 14 years she had lived the life of two coal miners and one very self-destructive child star. Sitting around the dinner table we screamed and cried and silently and simultaneously stumbled into a shared moment of taint wrenching clarity, as if we each realized that dinner was merely a ruse for an intervention. Frozen in our respective seats lest the other's begin their spiels, we individually plotted our escapes. My father stood up and announced he had left "a very important business document" in the YMCA. They found him the next morning asphyxiated by the noxious fumes of kickboards melted on the sauna hot rocks. Always class conscious, my mother clambered into our industrial dryer, filled it with pearls, and turned it on. The coroner said she looked like she had been through trench warfare at Loft. Pulling no punches, my sister climbed into the gorilla cage at the zoo and tried to put a pair of Hulk Hands on a silver back. As for me, I just took a shot of Drano and smoked a Black & Mild. Like my father always said, "Smoke em if you got em!" Which, in retrospect, seems like a metaphor about something because this cigar sucks.
Father, of course, knew exactly what he was getting into when he took my mother out to Olive Garden on what must, in retrospect, be considered the most ill-fated first date since China and opium. It must have been a supernatural event. The breadsticks acting like crystals of sorrow channeling the collective melancholy of the universe into the nexus of insipid, faux-Italian chain dining. In the anecdote that serves as the foundational myth of their love, my parents cored their breadsticks, wept into them, and, arms entwined, toasted to misery. The more unfortunate will hear the humorous twist of how my mother then stole the Andes Mint right off the plate of my hypoglycemic grandfather who was chaperoning the date and consequently died from the sugar deprivation.
Thus was signed the strategic copulation pact between a cerebral idiot and a demented ingenue. Their axis forged less out of love and more out of mutual self-assured sexy desperate destruction. Tales of my conception are greatly exaggerated, but in parental parlance I came to be out of an "ill-conceived thought experiment turned sex". My folks presumed they could disprove the Schrödinger's Cat Theory by placing semen in my mother's vagina in a tantric, irradiated sensory deprivation tank. In every conceivable metric they failed, except in conception itself.
Eighteen months later I was born, a marvel in delayed gestation. During the pregnancy my mother insisted on micro-dosing herself with mescalin in the hopes of creating a "amniotic Burning Man" for me. Paraded around talk shows by an hallucinating mother and labeled the "Burner at Birth" I was imbued in the womb with an uncanny connection to canned laughter. The doctors said I came out of the womb with the umbilical cord tied in a hangman's knot around my neck. Mistaking the lights in the operating room for an audience cue light, I laughed and applauded at my suicidal birth.
The next fours years went by with increasing levels of misery. My first word was ennui, my first pun was INTJ-ed off, and my first meme largely forgettable. As my language skills developed, so did my penchant for brooding. I found that life-threatening situations were the most conducive to thought so I would routinely lock myself in the trunk of a stranger's car in the middle of summer in Florida. Unfortunately, I was always found before I became a desiccated corpse. The next most dangerous scenario which I afforded myself was simply my father's company whose neglect and idiocy flirted with death harder than a campaign intern canvassing a zombie suburb. Quality time with my father was a phantasmagoria of irresponsible power tool use, wildly inappropriate aphorisms, and neglect. It was as if viewing some surrealist play with the fourth wall occasionally broken by errant circular saw blades and asides about hard work and/or sexual intercourse. "Don't force it!" he yelled as he pushed me onto the highway for my first bike ride.
Where periods spent with my father bristled with a certain sanguine fatality of the body, time with my mother ensured ego death. An afternoon with my mother is like hanging out with a omniscient third person narrator / drone operator who is constantly making tactical strikes on your self-esteem. The drones are an allegory for her delusions and are armed with histrionic soliloquies about the burdens of motherhood. Forced to escort this one woman war machine on every imaginable errand, I fantasized about my own death. I contrived to lace my Sunday clothes with poison, so that I might die in church convulsing. My soul exulted as the congregation feverishly surrounds me and praises this manifestation of the holy spirit, only to see my divine mania cut short by the excremental deluge of death. My antediluvian dingle berries sprinkled over the flock like holy water. Alas, unable to obtain the proper toxins, I consigned myself to predicting how many of the faithful might be crushed to death by the collapse of a support beam.
Just when our sorrow really seemed to be clicking, my parents adopted my sister. Neophyte to woe, but one hell of a quick study. My sister rode in the wake of our wretched clan like she was water skiing ...which was coincidentally how her biological family was murdered. Her presence amplified each of our respective and collective agonies, turning our woebegone band camp of a family into a crestfallen philharmonic. Life with her was an onslaught, your patience and sanity besieged, circumvallated, and starved into raving madness. She was the Cerberus to our filial Tartarus, appeased only by sugar and blood sacrifice. To keep the beast at bay, we offered her babysitters, those poor souls too oft included in porn video titles. The lucky ones escaped with a mild case of PTSD and a crippling fear of children. We don't talk about the unlucky ones.
Fate had ordained this assemblage, a super group of sad sacks. The Al Bundy Signal shimmered in the night sky and called us to our mutual dysfunction. Unite and suit up! Mother chugging her crying juice (a mix of water, gin, vinegar, and WD40) and layering her mascara like Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son. Father wrapping himself so tight in a layer of his own aloofness that it gives his ego a hernia. Sister rolling out the manic red carpet of her insanity. And me looking for a cave with some golden needles to stab my eyes out with. We were the Voltron of self-pity.
The strength of our family unit lie somewhere between fear and spite. Despite near constant emotional deterioration we stood firm knowing that, no matter what, we could always come home to someone to berate or ignore us. Mandatory family dinners, where we gambled food for suffering, were another element of our blight bond. On more than one occasion my mother was caught with suffering up her sleeve. Perhaps the most pivotal gear of the entire forlorn machine was the family vacation, specifically the road trip. Nothing lifts the spirits like a doomed voyage, so we celebrated our communal enthusiasm with prolonged silence and slapping. Across hideous hinterlands towards a destination we were all indifferent or opposed to, my family shared a transcendent hatred. Thus we lived for 19 years before I left for college, the ultimate experiment in extra-familial sorrow.
Much like water, piss seeks its own level...even if it takes 30 years. So it was that on my little sister's 30th birthday I returned home. I had been out of the house since I left for school, and out of school since I left for Dollywood. There I had stayed for 14 years, hiding in a theme park underworld ruled by a ruthless council of oligarchic lost children. The food was terrible, the governance corrupt, and the living conditions more squalid than a solitary bathroom in a refuge camp rave. I was too sad to move, but was forcibly evicted for not scavenging my monthly quota of temporary tattoos. So I trekked home, my ego severely wounded by the rejection from a society that's ideology was based solely around cotton candy. At my homecoming my parents regaled me with tales of their own vile travails, the constant misfortunes that beset them, and their still growing hatred for one another. It is a testament to their marriage that after 35 years their disgust was still blooming.
As a family, we sat down together to harass my sister about her burgeoning decrepitude. She looked as if in the span of 14 years she had lived the life of two coal miners and one very self-destructive child star. Sitting around the dinner table we screamed and cried and silently and simultaneously stumbled into a shared moment of taint wrenching clarity, as if we each realized that dinner was merely a ruse for an intervention. Frozen in our respective seats lest the other's begin their spiels, we individually plotted our escapes. My father stood up and announced he had left "a very important business document" in the YMCA. They found him the next morning asphyxiated by the noxious fumes of kickboards melted on the sauna hot rocks. Always class conscious, my mother clambered into our industrial dryer, filled it with pearls, and turned it on. The coroner said she looked like she had been through trench warfare at Loft. Pulling no punches, my sister climbed into the gorilla cage at the zoo and tried to put a pair of Hulk Hands on a silver back. As for me, I just took a shot of Drano and smoked a Black & Mild. Like my father always said, "Smoke em if you got em!" Which, in retrospect, seems like a metaphor about something because this cigar sucks.
Friday, August 29, 2014
5 Insanely Simple Steps to Crafting a Thought Catalog Piece
Okay, so you want to write for Thought Catalog. Great! Wanting to write is half the battle! Of course, lots of things are half the battle. Not wanting to write is also half the battle. Let's not win the battle and lose the war here.
1. What's your relationship with lists? You're going to have to get over any childhood trauma involving cataloging. It doesn't matter if your mom forced you to list your favorite toys just so she could burn numbers one through five, and leave you only with number 38 that fucked up doll you inherited from you sister. Start making some goddamned lists. Ideally, make them in the 3-100 range. Shoot for some key numbers 3,5,10,15, 20, 50, 69, or 100. If you want to be edgy you can do an odd number like 57 or 33, but don't get too cute with it.
2. Choosing a topic. Look deep within yourself or the internet for some inspiration. Pick something that is personal to you or something inventive. Nothing, huh? How about something topical or controversial instead? Race! Now that's a hot button issue. But why limit yourself? Best to paint with broad strokes. Gender! That's the stuff. Now you can be assured that your writing will reach the hearts, minds, egos, and tumblrs of at least 50% of the population. Maybe more if you do your job right.
3. Filling out your list. You have your topic, now get ready to stretch it far beyond it's scope. A good rule of thumb is that only 1/3 of the list really needs to respond to your theme. The longer the list the more leeway you have. Reach for marginal points or things that are tangentially related. Split a single item into two similar ones to to beef up your catalog (see: 1). Add a funny but unrelated point to distract people, a picture of a cat or an inappropriate Vine. Don't think too hard about how to order your list. It doesn't matter. If worse comes to worst, don't sweat it. You can always become a staff writer for Jezebel.
4. Giving your work a title. This one is more important than it might seem. Most of the people who are going to want to read your piece won't even bother. You shouldn't mind, though. You're in it for the clicks. All you have to do is lead them their or better yet drag them screaming. Think of your piece as a radiator, the reader as someone you kidnapped, and your title as the chains to bind them. Use simple, visceral, and gripping words to grab peoples attention like sex, drugs, farts, turnt, EDM, fails, hentai, John Mayer, etc. Employ adjectives that heighten the sense of expectation and add some mystery to your list like wild, unbelievable, _______-blowing, unfortunate, uncommon, reprehensible, millenial, tripadelic, sucky. If all goes according to plan you'll have a title people will be too horrified to look away from, for example "13 Insane Ways the Birth Orgasm is Better Than Any Human Penis" or "50 Helpful Suggestions My Dad Gave Me About Suicide".
5. Coming to terms with people hating you. You've really done it this time. You got your work published. Congratulations. Now brace yourself for the ignominy. In all likelihood your work was so offensive, disgusting, and/or stupid that you're reputation and dignity are going to take a significant hit. Be prepared to lose some friends, perhaps even a family member or a household pet. Expect complete strangers to avoid your gaze and hiss at you. Don't be surprised if you find a subreddit dedicated to deriding and harassing you. Settle in for the long haul because this could haunt you for the rest of your life. You should be okay, though. I mean, they're just haters, right?
1. What's your relationship with lists? You're going to have to get over any childhood trauma involving cataloging. It doesn't matter if your mom forced you to list your favorite toys just so she could burn numbers one through five, and leave you only with number 38 that fucked up doll you inherited from you sister. Start making some goddamned lists. Ideally, make them in the 3-100 range. Shoot for some key numbers 3,5,10,15, 20, 50, 69, or 100. If you want to be edgy you can do an odd number like 57 or 33, but don't get too cute with it.
2. Choosing a topic. Look deep within yourself or the internet for some inspiration. Pick something that is personal to you or something inventive. Nothing, huh? How about something topical or controversial instead? Race! Now that's a hot button issue. But why limit yourself? Best to paint with broad strokes. Gender! That's the stuff. Now you can be assured that your writing will reach the hearts, minds, egos, and tumblrs of at least 50% of the population. Maybe more if you do your job right.
3. Filling out your list. You have your topic, now get ready to stretch it far beyond it's scope. A good rule of thumb is that only 1/3 of the list really needs to respond to your theme. The longer the list the more leeway you have. Reach for marginal points or things that are tangentially related. Split a single item into two similar ones to to beef up your catalog (see: 1). Add a funny but unrelated point to distract people, a picture of a cat or an inappropriate Vine. Don't think too hard about how to order your list. It doesn't matter. If worse comes to worst, don't sweat it. You can always become a staff writer for Jezebel.
4. Giving your work a title. This one is more important than it might seem. Most of the people who are going to want to read your piece won't even bother. You shouldn't mind, though. You're in it for the clicks. All you have to do is lead them their or better yet drag them screaming. Think of your piece as a radiator, the reader as someone you kidnapped, and your title as the chains to bind them. Use simple, visceral, and gripping words to grab peoples attention like sex, drugs, farts, turnt, EDM, fails, hentai, John Mayer, etc. Employ adjectives that heighten the sense of expectation and add some mystery to your list like wild, unbelievable, _______-blowing, unfortunate, uncommon, reprehensible, millenial, tripadelic, sucky. If all goes according to plan you'll have a title people will be too horrified to look away from, for example "13 Insane Ways the Birth Orgasm is Better Than Any Human Penis" or "50 Helpful Suggestions My Dad Gave Me About Suicide".
5. Coming to terms with people hating you. You've really done it this time. You got your work published. Congratulations. Now brace yourself for the ignominy. In all likelihood your work was so offensive, disgusting, and/or stupid that you're reputation and dignity are going to take a significant hit. Be prepared to lose some friends, perhaps even a family member or a household pet. Expect complete strangers to avoid your gaze and hiss at you. Don't be surprised if you find a subreddit dedicated to deriding and harassing you. Settle in for the long haul because this could haunt you for the rest of your life. You should be okay, though. I mean, they're just haters, right?
Thursday, August 21, 2014
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Monday, August 18, 2014
War & Peace & Other Things Too
Friday nights are largely the same for us. Stumbling through the same clubs and piss niches, using tired, formulas to calibrate the near ideal, near identical high with the same drugs. Same expectations of music, strange experiences, beautiful women. Same dude who pulls a blunt from his sock and offers you a hit. The night leaving you warm, but knowing the same journey home will make you cold. Same realization you were cold to start with. Same. So when we left that night in search of another cooler, more happening, less throwing-my-friend-out-for-being-too-drunk club I felt the same as I always did.
Mark had met some girl that night. Met is a strong word. He had fallen into her unlocked bathroom stall and then they started making out on the checkered floor. That is an unbreakable bond and tonight they were proving that the power of love could topple mountains, specifically the mountains of utter incoherence and lack of motor skills. They have some beautiful vistas, by the way. The girl, Mona, complained of a raging drunk hunger and Mark championed her cause. He rallied us all, Cutler, Tobias, Jill, Mona, and myself, to an intersection with three bodegas, one on each corner. After much debate, It was decided that the bodega on the South East corner was the best for its better chip selection and rumors of having Orangina.
We pilfered the store for our respective snack fantasies. Tobias seethed at the owner for not having Nerds Rope. He tried to suggest other rope like candy options to my friend to no avail. "Cowtails?! You fucking animal!" Loaded with several bags of chips I stared into the drink freezer. An Orangina shaped silhouette waited in its depths. I opened the door and reached into the blackness, only to have it snatched away. A dark figure had been waiting and bolted with my bottle. Were I in anyway sober, I might have been more disturbed by this, but instead I felt the all too familiar drunk rage of a toddler. I threw my money on the counter and stormed outside to wait for my friends.
Alternating fistfuls of different chips, I noticed something new and strange. Outside the bodega was one of those quarter rides for children, a sort of miniature mechanical bull but without the whale tails and puke stained safety cushions that accompany it in a bar setting. Upon closer inspection, it was not a bull at all but a duck. A white feathered, yellow billed duck wearing a colonial three cornered hat. I mused at this choice. Why such a blatant and peculiar anachronism? Perhaps it was a cast-off from a Crucible themed amusement park? I did not know and was further overcome by a sense that I had been unPC. What if the hat was part of the duck's cultural heritage? No doubt he had been oppressed in his life. I would never be able to understand his hardships. Ohh god, I was assuming the duck was a man. Better just to apologize and shut the fuck up.
My friends poured out of the bodega and interrupted me saying "please don't post this on tumblr." Perplexed at my contrition to this mechanical beast, they stood around me blinking. Artfully I played it off like I was mad at the ride for stealing my money. Mark, ever the champion of people's whims, insisted he would make the duck pay. "Either you're getting a ride out of this thing or I'm going to bore a hole into it so you can fuck it." I told him to leave the duck alone, that it had had enough mistreatment for one night, but Mark was not one to be dissuaded. Tobias, Jill, Mona, and Cutler applauded as Matt mounted the machine and kicked it's flanks as if it were a horse. The duck resisted his advances. Then he resorted to pecuniary lubrication, dropping a quarter into the change slot. The duck acknowledged the transaction with a piercing jingle, a tune somewhere between obnoxious door bell and a child's shriek or laugh (it's really impossible to tell between the two).
Either baby crazy from the sound or jealous that the duck was taking her man's attention, Mona bounded over to the machine and jumped on clutching Mark's barrel chest for balance. In turn, the machine began to rock slowly back and forth. "This is worse than fucking a fat guy" Mona blurted. "Hey!" an obviously body conscious Mark responded. The pace of the duck's swaying quickened and a strange color emanated from the ride. A brownish almost areola like aura billowed out from the head of the duck and quickly encapsulated the lovers. Before the rest of us could react the aura morphed from transparent to opaque, in effect creating a spherical nipple around our friends and the ride. We rushed over to the pyramid and pounded it's dense, yet fleshy exterior. Cutler recoiled from the tactile sensation. Jill, barred the fuck out from enough Xanax to quell a Walmart shopping riot, hugged the pyramid and pressed her face into it. The equivocating effete that I am alternated between throwing ineffectual punches and hurling lame jokes at it. "You call yourself a pyramid?!" I had no idea where I was going with that one. The pyramid began to quiver violently and then collapsed in upon itself, shrinking to a tiny dot and vanishing all together. My friends were gone. The machine remained. Duckus ex machina.
Aghast by the disappearance, we encircled the machine and prodded it as if it were a dead body. Nothing happened. It starred back at us with it's black, bread-lusting eyes. Tobias enjoined us to panic and wild speculation. Was it some kind of sentient entity with charnel machinations for its riders? Perhaps it was a gateway to another world? Mark had always been a bit off, what if he were some kind of magician? What if we were all just THAT fucked up and they had slipped away unnoticed to bone? There was only one way to know. Someone had to ride that dastardly duck and hard. I volunteered. I had always had a thing for ducks from Daffy to Donald and Darkwing. I also had the least to live for. I gave a eulogy for myself and parceled out my belongings to the attending host. Cutler would get my cat. Jill my prized Emperor VHS, a rare black metal relic. Tobias would get my books and Steam account. Burn everything else. Doing my best John Wayne impersonation I saddled up the duck and moseyed on to a near certain death, my chips still in hand.
Pocket. Quarter. Slot. Slide. Clink. The duck swayed forward and back. The tune played. I laughed. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe I wasn't about to be obliterated. Also, how could anyone enjoy this ride? "Kids suck!" I affirmed to my friends before being swallowed up by the large brown triangle. The interior was filled with a sour fluid and I big gulped a lung full trying to breath. I reached out to my friends, but the shape turned fully opaque. Floating up to the middle of the pyramid off the saddle of the duck, I thought about the Orangina and the girl who I had tried to dance with that night. I thought I was polite, but she was obviously very creeped out. It was probably for the best that I was drowning in this brown sauce. Flush the pain away. The pyramid began to shrink and the pressure was unbearable. I blacked out.
I awoke in a field tilled by war. Robotic and organic limbs rose up from the soil intertwined like grape vines. Enough to supply every sorority house in America with a years worth of Franzia. Probably a red vintage, but what do I know. I sat and surveyed the slaughter noshing on my chips. The horizon flashed with strange neon colors and the earth shook. I marched among the dead, following the waning light of the horizon. Out of the carnage rang a husky death rattle and I paused to find its source. There heaped among the bodies was Mona, though much older, more robotic, and gored up than I remembered. "You look better without all that blush on your lower intestine" I said. She laughed. "Where the fuck am I, by the way?". Blood dribbled from the side of her mouth. "Of course. How rude of me." I offered her my chips, but she declined with a shake of her hand. "We're on Trewegttie. A planet in another dimension that has been ravaged by war since time immemorial." I gasped. I had eaten all my chips.
"Where's Mark?" I asked foolishly. Mona chocked back a tear. "Those bastards, they killed him. We've been fighting against them for years. He was the love of my life." I knelt down and held her hand. She smiled back at me. "You must avenge us!" I cringed. "Uhhh, I hardly know you and Mark's more of an acquaintance than a friend. I would feel a bit uncomfortable avenging y'all. I could give a solid eulogy, though. Also, do you know a way out of here?" Mona laughed like I was complete fool. "Don't you see! They brought us here. They won't just let you go back." Now I was the one doing the laughing. "Listen," I said "I can entertain your whole we're on a different planet theory simply because I'm standing on what appears to be cyberpunk Gettysburg. I mean, there's a gigantic robotic arm crawling across the battlefield and strangling anyone left alive. It's plausible. I'll bite. But what fucking purpose could they have for me?" She looked at me like an old girlfriend who thought my idiocy was cute. "The Orangina. That's how they lure people. They want us to end this forever war."
I started laughing hysterically, loud enough that a dying woman asked me to keep it the fuck down. I gazed at Mona. "Okay so they need a 130 lbs. white dude with a bald spot and several moles he really needs to get checked out to end this conflict for them? Maybe there's a reason why these people have been at war for so long. I mean, if their solution to the problem is importing turds (me) not much is going to change." "Regardless, you are here now. There's no going back." I kicked at the dirt like a grumpy toddler. "Well, what the fuck should I do now?" Mona reached into a satchel by her side. She groaned from the pain and picked out a small cube. With flat palm she offered it to me. "Take this. It will tell you about the land. Find a woman named Ftupled. She is a leader here. Tell her you are from our dimension and that you know me." I took the cube. "Cool. Thanks. I guess I'll get out of your hair now." Mona howled in pain. "Wait! Do this one last thing for me." She pointed to her bag. "There is a small disc within. Give it to me." I hesitated. "You just like a second ago reached into that very same bag yourself." "Fuck you! I'm dying!"
"Alright fine." I walked over and pulled the disc from the bag. I handed it to her. "Now go. End this senseless violence." Mona aligned the disc with a small slot on her cybernetic leg. It slid in. She convulsed, almost resonated, for several seconds before collapsing into death.
Armed with a small geometric shape and a total ignorance of everything around me, I continued my journey across the gory moors. After sometime I noticed a man walking in the distance. He seemed to be scavenging the battle fields, stopping every now and then to bend down. Without knowing where I was supposed to go and having lived a year among the freegans, I decided to approach. The man did not stop his search, even though I stood within fifty feet of him. He wore long blue robes and large metallic backpack he sported with only one strap on, the cool kid way. I watched as he stooped down and attached a cable to a robotic head lying on the ground. The head moaned in a creepy way and then powered down. I was disconcerted to say the least. "Did you just make that robot cum?" I asked. "If by cumming you mean transferring his intelligence into a hard drive, then yes?" Good lord, for all intents and purposes this man was a pretentious, LARPing, peripatetic hooker with a robot fetish and a savior complex. This world deserved to burn. I waved goodbye and spun on my heel to leave, but he ran after me. "Excuse me. I can't help but notice that you seem to be a little lost." I admitted that I probably couldn't be more disoriented even if I were butt chugging LSD. He laughed and told me I reminded him of a certain journalist in his world's history who was known for taking copious amounts of drugs. Flattered by these visions of Hunter S. Thompson, I agreed to follow this man wherever he may go.
Coincidentally, this was the right choice. Dch, the man who was leading me, was a robo healer traveling around this war torn land and helping sentient machines fix themselves. He told me an anecdote about a woebegone android to whom he suggested the philosopher Klaaat (apparently this world's equivalent of Kierkegaard). Turns out ceaseless war is bad for morale and almost everyone on this world is depressed about it. He spoke of this world's history. How there were two major schools of thought about how the war began. One side proposed that a lusty cam boy pitted two world leaders against one another in a game of one-upmanship that eventually turned violent. The other stated that it was a candy pop music video shoot gone wrong behind all of this. I didn't know what to think, nor did I really care, but the preponderance of discarded lollipop sticks made me think those candy pop folks were on to something. Following several days of hiking we made it to the border of a bombed out metropolis.
Dch brought me to the headquarters of Ftupled within the city. I was led through by a minor procession befitting of a popular local radio talk show host. Ftupled held her court in a large pool which I prostrated before. I told her my story, about the duck, Mona, Dch, and I gave her the cube. The room erupted in hushed yet feverish speculation. Ftupled raised her arm and her court went silent. "So, stranger, can you help us? Have you a way to end this war?" I stroked my chin vigorously. "Well, I've got a couple of ideas." I pulled out a notepad I had been keeping and opened it up. "Would it be possible to kill all of them? I mean win." The room hissed and booed. Ftupled shook her head. "It is a stalemate. No side has enjoyed a meaningful advantage in hundreds of years." I crossed off "win the war" from my list. "Okay, well how about peace?" Everyone in the room looked around quizzically at one another. "You know, not fighting." Ftupled stood up from the pool and approached me with a solemn saunter. Taking my head in her hands she pulled my face into her breasts and kissed the top of my forehead. Her court began crying and cheering. I wrested my self from the motor boating/water boarding and gasped for breath. I gazed at my notebook and put a check mark next to "peace". Sirens and exclamations of joy could be heard resounding through the city. "Fucking idiots" I whispered under my breath.
Mark had met some girl that night. Met is a strong word. He had fallen into her unlocked bathroom stall and then they started making out on the checkered floor. That is an unbreakable bond and tonight they were proving that the power of love could topple mountains, specifically the mountains of utter incoherence and lack of motor skills. They have some beautiful vistas, by the way. The girl, Mona, complained of a raging drunk hunger and Mark championed her cause. He rallied us all, Cutler, Tobias, Jill, Mona, and myself, to an intersection with three bodegas, one on each corner. After much debate, It was decided that the bodega on the South East corner was the best for its better chip selection and rumors of having Orangina.
We pilfered the store for our respective snack fantasies. Tobias seethed at the owner for not having Nerds Rope. He tried to suggest other rope like candy options to my friend to no avail. "Cowtails?! You fucking animal!" Loaded with several bags of chips I stared into the drink freezer. An Orangina shaped silhouette waited in its depths. I opened the door and reached into the blackness, only to have it snatched away. A dark figure had been waiting and bolted with my bottle. Were I in anyway sober, I might have been more disturbed by this, but instead I felt the all too familiar drunk rage of a toddler. I threw my money on the counter and stormed outside to wait for my friends.
Alternating fistfuls of different chips, I noticed something new and strange. Outside the bodega was one of those quarter rides for children, a sort of miniature mechanical bull but without the whale tails and puke stained safety cushions that accompany it in a bar setting. Upon closer inspection, it was not a bull at all but a duck. A white feathered, yellow billed duck wearing a colonial three cornered hat. I mused at this choice. Why such a blatant and peculiar anachronism? Perhaps it was a cast-off from a Crucible themed amusement park? I did not know and was further overcome by a sense that I had been unPC. What if the hat was part of the duck's cultural heritage? No doubt he had been oppressed in his life. I would never be able to understand his hardships. Ohh god, I was assuming the duck was a man. Better just to apologize and shut the fuck up.
My friends poured out of the bodega and interrupted me saying "please don't post this on tumblr." Perplexed at my contrition to this mechanical beast, they stood around me blinking. Artfully I played it off like I was mad at the ride for stealing my money. Mark, ever the champion of people's whims, insisted he would make the duck pay. "Either you're getting a ride out of this thing or I'm going to bore a hole into it so you can fuck it." I told him to leave the duck alone, that it had had enough mistreatment for one night, but Mark was not one to be dissuaded. Tobias, Jill, Mona, and Cutler applauded as Matt mounted the machine and kicked it's flanks as if it were a horse. The duck resisted his advances. Then he resorted to pecuniary lubrication, dropping a quarter into the change slot. The duck acknowledged the transaction with a piercing jingle, a tune somewhere between obnoxious door bell and a child's shriek or laugh (it's really impossible to tell between the two).
Either baby crazy from the sound or jealous that the duck was taking her man's attention, Mona bounded over to the machine and jumped on clutching Mark's barrel chest for balance. In turn, the machine began to rock slowly back and forth. "This is worse than fucking a fat guy" Mona blurted. "Hey!" an obviously body conscious Mark responded. The pace of the duck's swaying quickened and a strange color emanated from the ride. A brownish almost areola like aura billowed out from the head of the duck and quickly encapsulated the lovers. Before the rest of us could react the aura morphed from transparent to opaque, in effect creating a spherical nipple around our friends and the ride. We rushed over to the pyramid and pounded it's dense, yet fleshy exterior. Cutler recoiled from the tactile sensation. Jill, barred the fuck out from enough Xanax to quell a Walmart shopping riot, hugged the pyramid and pressed her face into it. The equivocating effete that I am alternated between throwing ineffectual punches and hurling lame jokes at it. "You call yourself a pyramid?!" I had no idea where I was going with that one. The pyramid began to quiver violently and then collapsed in upon itself, shrinking to a tiny dot and vanishing all together. My friends were gone. The machine remained. Duckus ex machina.
Aghast by the disappearance, we encircled the machine and prodded it as if it were a dead body. Nothing happened. It starred back at us with it's black, bread-lusting eyes. Tobias enjoined us to panic and wild speculation. Was it some kind of sentient entity with charnel machinations for its riders? Perhaps it was a gateway to another world? Mark had always been a bit off, what if he were some kind of magician? What if we were all just THAT fucked up and they had slipped away unnoticed to bone? There was only one way to know. Someone had to ride that dastardly duck and hard. I volunteered. I had always had a thing for ducks from Daffy to Donald and Darkwing. I also had the least to live for. I gave a eulogy for myself and parceled out my belongings to the attending host. Cutler would get my cat. Jill my prized Emperor VHS, a rare black metal relic. Tobias would get my books and Steam account. Burn everything else. Doing my best John Wayne impersonation I saddled up the duck and moseyed on to a near certain death, my chips still in hand.
Pocket. Quarter. Slot. Slide. Clink. The duck swayed forward and back. The tune played. I laughed. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe I wasn't about to be obliterated. Also, how could anyone enjoy this ride? "Kids suck!" I affirmed to my friends before being swallowed up by the large brown triangle. The interior was filled with a sour fluid and I big gulped a lung full trying to breath. I reached out to my friends, but the shape turned fully opaque. Floating up to the middle of the pyramid off the saddle of the duck, I thought about the Orangina and the girl who I had tried to dance with that night. I thought I was polite, but she was obviously very creeped out. It was probably for the best that I was drowning in this brown sauce. Flush the pain away. The pyramid began to shrink and the pressure was unbearable. I blacked out.
I awoke in a field tilled by war. Robotic and organic limbs rose up from the soil intertwined like grape vines. Enough to supply every sorority house in America with a years worth of Franzia. Probably a red vintage, but what do I know. I sat and surveyed the slaughter noshing on my chips. The horizon flashed with strange neon colors and the earth shook. I marched among the dead, following the waning light of the horizon. Out of the carnage rang a husky death rattle and I paused to find its source. There heaped among the bodies was Mona, though much older, more robotic, and gored up than I remembered. "You look better without all that blush on your lower intestine" I said. She laughed. "Where the fuck am I, by the way?". Blood dribbled from the side of her mouth. "Of course. How rude of me." I offered her my chips, but she declined with a shake of her hand. "We're on Trewegttie. A planet in another dimension that has been ravaged by war since time immemorial." I gasped. I had eaten all my chips.
"Where's Mark?" I asked foolishly. Mona chocked back a tear. "Those bastards, they killed him. We've been fighting against them for years. He was the love of my life." I knelt down and held her hand. She smiled back at me. "You must avenge us!" I cringed. "Uhhh, I hardly know you and Mark's more of an acquaintance than a friend. I would feel a bit uncomfortable avenging y'all. I could give a solid eulogy, though. Also, do you know a way out of here?" Mona laughed like I was complete fool. "Don't you see! They brought us here. They won't just let you go back." Now I was the one doing the laughing. "Listen," I said "I can entertain your whole we're on a different planet theory simply because I'm standing on what appears to be cyberpunk Gettysburg. I mean, there's a gigantic robotic arm crawling across the battlefield and strangling anyone left alive. It's plausible. I'll bite. But what fucking purpose could they have for me?" She looked at me like an old girlfriend who thought my idiocy was cute. "The Orangina. That's how they lure people. They want us to end this forever war."
I started laughing hysterically, loud enough that a dying woman asked me to keep it the fuck down. I gazed at Mona. "Okay so they need a 130 lbs. white dude with a bald spot and several moles he really needs to get checked out to end this conflict for them? Maybe there's a reason why these people have been at war for so long. I mean, if their solution to the problem is importing turds (me) not much is going to change." "Regardless, you are here now. There's no going back." I kicked at the dirt like a grumpy toddler. "Well, what the fuck should I do now?" Mona reached into a satchel by her side. She groaned from the pain and picked out a small cube. With flat palm she offered it to me. "Take this. It will tell you about the land. Find a woman named Ftupled. She is a leader here. Tell her you are from our dimension and that you know me." I took the cube. "Cool. Thanks. I guess I'll get out of your hair now." Mona howled in pain. "Wait! Do this one last thing for me." She pointed to her bag. "There is a small disc within. Give it to me." I hesitated. "You just like a second ago reached into that very same bag yourself." "Fuck you! I'm dying!"
"Alright fine." I walked over and pulled the disc from the bag. I handed it to her. "Now go. End this senseless violence." Mona aligned the disc with a small slot on her cybernetic leg. It slid in. She convulsed, almost resonated, for several seconds before collapsing into death.
Armed with a small geometric shape and a total ignorance of everything around me, I continued my journey across the gory moors. After sometime I noticed a man walking in the distance. He seemed to be scavenging the battle fields, stopping every now and then to bend down. Without knowing where I was supposed to go and having lived a year among the freegans, I decided to approach. The man did not stop his search, even though I stood within fifty feet of him. He wore long blue robes and large metallic backpack he sported with only one strap on, the cool kid way. I watched as he stooped down and attached a cable to a robotic head lying on the ground. The head moaned in a creepy way and then powered down. I was disconcerted to say the least. "Did you just make that robot cum?" I asked. "If by cumming you mean transferring his intelligence into a hard drive, then yes?" Good lord, for all intents and purposes this man was a pretentious, LARPing, peripatetic hooker with a robot fetish and a savior complex. This world deserved to burn. I waved goodbye and spun on my heel to leave, but he ran after me. "Excuse me. I can't help but notice that you seem to be a little lost." I admitted that I probably couldn't be more disoriented even if I were butt chugging LSD. He laughed and told me I reminded him of a certain journalist in his world's history who was known for taking copious amounts of drugs. Flattered by these visions of Hunter S. Thompson, I agreed to follow this man wherever he may go.
Coincidentally, this was the right choice. Dch, the man who was leading me, was a robo healer traveling around this war torn land and helping sentient machines fix themselves. He told me an anecdote about a woebegone android to whom he suggested the philosopher Klaaat (apparently this world's equivalent of Kierkegaard). Turns out ceaseless war is bad for morale and almost everyone on this world is depressed about it. He spoke of this world's history. How there were two major schools of thought about how the war began. One side proposed that a lusty cam boy pitted two world leaders against one another in a game of one-upmanship that eventually turned violent. The other stated that it was a candy pop music video shoot gone wrong behind all of this. I didn't know what to think, nor did I really care, but the preponderance of discarded lollipop sticks made me think those candy pop folks were on to something. Following several days of hiking we made it to the border of a bombed out metropolis.
Dch brought me to the headquarters of Ftupled within the city. I was led through by a minor procession befitting of a popular local radio talk show host. Ftupled held her court in a large pool which I prostrated before. I told her my story, about the duck, Mona, Dch, and I gave her the cube. The room erupted in hushed yet feverish speculation. Ftupled raised her arm and her court went silent. "So, stranger, can you help us? Have you a way to end this war?" I stroked my chin vigorously. "Well, I've got a couple of ideas." I pulled out a notepad I had been keeping and opened it up. "Would it be possible to kill all of them? I mean win." The room hissed and booed. Ftupled shook her head. "It is a stalemate. No side has enjoyed a meaningful advantage in hundreds of years." I crossed off "win the war" from my list. "Okay, well how about peace?" Everyone in the room looked around quizzically at one another. "You know, not fighting." Ftupled stood up from the pool and approached me with a solemn saunter. Taking my head in her hands she pulled my face into her breasts and kissed the top of my forehead. Her court began crying and cheering. I wrested my self from the motor boating/water boarding and gasped for breath. I gazed at my notebook and put a check mark next to "peace". Sirens and exclamations of joy could be heard resounding through the city. "Fucking idiots" I whispered under my breath.
Sunday, August 3, 2014
Clogs from the Underground
I've been cobbling it all together since the beginning. Filling the gaps with whatever I could. Flipping and flopping in loss. Booted to despair. Pumped to near the climax of agony. I'm not trying to be existential, by the way. I'm a cobbler. A cobbler of high fashion women's shoes for the internet. That is to say, the shoes I make are utterly unwearable. At best they induce a stress position that slowly subjugates the will and the body of the wearer to the shoe. At worst they are fatal. I have seen my shoes used as implements of torture, weapons of war, even as scenery in snuff films. Slobodan Milošević once sent a very thoughtful missive thanking me for a particular pair of loafers about which he said (and I quote) "If these puppies had been around in Roman times, you could bet your keister they wouldn't have bothered crucifying anybody!" The thought of my footwear being used as the predominant method of capital punishment in any time period is enough to make me blush. But Roman times?! It would have made the Passion of Christ look like a glamorous runway show! Say what you will about old Slobodan, but he sure knows how to pay a girl a compliment.
Now cobbling treacherous fashion isn't all fun and games. My clientele (mostly psychotic, drug-addled fashionistas and murderous warlords) can, on occasion, make terrible board game partners. Just try telling the partly mutated, fanatic religious leader of a platform wearing paramilitary group that she has to pay for her second child's college fund in The Game of Life. I can't say for certain that things would turn out the same way they did for me, but in all likelihood she's going crash her 2003 leased station wagon right into the crotch of a nearby Canadian drug kingpin. Despite the clear and present danger I face everyday with clients, I still seem to eek out a good time. It's my employees that give me a real headache! No matter what it is, from testing my explosive, high couture landmine wingtips to guiding customers through my 10,000 strobe light flagship store, they always seem to find a way to complain. Human rights violations this, war crimes that. It's like a broken record, but that record is a spoken word version of Mein Kampf. In a fit of rage I once fired all of my employees and replaced them with a troupe of pulchritudinous pool boys. My business suffered immensely, but the erotic haze created by the smell of chlorine and the sight of the first ever Cabana Boy Con was well worth the monetary misstep.
When people ask me about how I come up with my perilous vogue, I laugh. As if inspiration were some routine like masturbating when your parents go take the dog for a walk. It comes to me in spurts. Sometimes I'm watching a movie and I think "Hey, this alien would look way more menacing in stilettos, but how on earth could I find a way to fit all fourteen of its toes in a pair?" Other times it's an overheard conversation. Why just the other day I was on a bus and heard this redneck couple being effusive toward their seven year old for trying to incite a race war at school. It occurred to me that they would look far more chic if they bound, perhaps even imprisoned. So I came up with a little straight jacket meets Teva sandals ensemble for them. Corsets have always been a muse to me and it is my firm belief that fashion is overly fixated on binding the gut and not so much other, eminently shackle-able parts of the body. What about the face, I always say. If I have one fashion prediction it is that in the next twenty years face corsets will replace white as our post labor day prohibition.
Footwear is more than just a career for me it's a philosophy. The funny thing is, though, I hate feet! In my design, I do as much as I can to punish them. And not like "slave" punish, more like righteous-vengeance-on-a-corrupt-cop punish. For me the gate to hell is a steaming, gaping Croc filled with the an eternity of lost soles. With all this more or less articulated in my mind I decided "this is going to be my life!" and I haven't looked back or down since.
Now cobbling treacherous fashion isn't all fun and games. My clientele (mostly psychotic, drug-addled fashionistas and murderous warlords) can, on occasion, make terrible board game partners. Just try telling the partly mutated, fanatic religious leader of a platform wearing paramilitary group that she has to pay for her second child's college fund in The Game of Life. I can't say for certain that things would turn out the same way they did for me, but in all likelihood she's going crash her 2003 leased station wagon right into the crotch of a nearby Canadian drug kingpin. Despite the clear and present danger I face everyday with clients, I still seem to eek out a good time. It's my employees that give me a real headache! No matter what it is, from testing my explosive, high couture landmine wingtips to guiding customers through my 10,000 strobe light flagship store, they always seem to find a way to complain. Human rights violations this, war crimes that. It's like a broken record, but that record is a spoken word version of Mein Kampf. In a fit of rage I once fired all of my employees and replaced them with a troupe of pulchritudinous pool boys. My business suffered immensely, but the erotic haze created by the smell of chlorine and the sight of the first ever Cabana Boy Con was well worth the monetary misstep.
When people ask me about how I come up with my perilous vogue, I laugh. As if inspiration were some routine like masturbating when your parents go take the dog for a walk. It comes to me in spurts. Sometimes I'm watching a movie and I think "Hey, this alien would look way more menacing in stilettos, but how on earth could I find a way to fit all fourteen of its toes in a pair?" Other times it's an overheard conversation. Why just the other day I was on a bus and heard this redneck couple being effusive toward their seven year old for trying to incite a race war at school. It occurred to me that they would look far more chic if they bound, perhaps even imprisoned. So I came up with a little straight jacket meets Teva sandals ensemble for them. Corsets have always been a muse to me and it is my firm belief that fashion is overly fixated on binding the gut and not so much other, eminently shackle-able parts of the body. What about the face, I always say. If I have one fashion prediction it is that in the next twenty years face corsets will replace white as our post labor day prohibition.
Footwear is more than just a career for me it's a philosophy. The funny thing is, though, I hate feet! In my design, I do as much as I can to punish them. And not like "slave" punish, more like righteous-vengeance-on-a-corrupt-cop punish. For me the gate to hell is a steaming, gaping Croc filled with the an eternity of lost soles. With all this more or less articulated in my mind I decided "this is going to be my life!" and I haven't looked back or down since.
Monday, July 28, 2014
The Jar
"How foolish!" He thought, "this pink-faced prawn believes she really has come up with something. I can't believe I turned down a host spot on Shark Tank for this." He turned over the bell jar in his hands and stared into its depths. She smiled with dead eyes as he inspected the object, that horrible child smile that belies their utter inhumanity. He gasped, seeing her distorted face through the glass. "What's the matter, mister?" Alicia cooed. "Your face...I mean...er...nothing. What does it do?" He handed the jar back to the girl. "Well, it's kind of hard to put into words." Alicia began gesturing and Don zoned out, his mind focused on how her fat fingers reminded him of an Italian deli. "A quarter pound of Mortadella!" Don screamed. The girl blinked repeatedly at him. "Please continue." "Maybe you should just try it yourself."
Alicia took the jar from his hands and tapped the edge several times. "Now put it over your hand just like Mommy does to Daddy." The girl enacted a severe thrusting motion and Don knew not to question the idyllic childhood of that impressionable youngster. Taking the jar, he slipped it over his hand and twisted it around his wrist. "Now, take this rubber band and slide it onto your left ankle." "Awww, it's just like a tiny garter." Don accomplished the task. "Okay, so the last step is you have to drink this." Alicia forked over a shot glass filled with a white glistening liquid. Don cringed at the fetid fluid. "Just pinch your nose like when you're eating broccoli" she said. "That's a genius! A nose clamp for eating terrible home-cooked meals so you won't offend the host! You kids are marketing wizards! Have you ever done any consulting?" The girl frowned. "Oh yeah, that's right. Your kind is too damn lazy to get a job!" Don threw back the shimmering swill.
It was like his taste buds were being curb stomped by penis that had recently been used to stir a large cauldron of habanero shit chili. He collapsed to the floor scraping his tongue and writhing in olfactory agony. Like some parasite the pain purposefully clawed through him and settled in his lower neck. Alicia stood idly by and was not the least bit disconcerted when Don jumped up seemingly unaware of the past few moments. His eyes now coated with a crimson film like the inner eyelid of an alligator. "I've heard of seeing red, but this is ridiculous!" exclaimed the Don. "I knew you we're going to say that." Alicia droned. Don threw himself upon the girl like a child into a well in a 1950s TV script. "What in the name of Fortune 500 have you done to me?!" He lifted up the girl by her exaggerated lapels and only know realized how strange it was for a girl of her age to be wearing a suit. He shook her violently. However, a sudden bilateral pain weaving it's way down both sides of his spine froze him. Alicia solemnly grabbed his finger and bent it at an acute angle causing Don to drop her. In turn, Don collapsed to the ground, face down and arms scratching his own back.
Alicia tapped a packet of cigarettes against Don's head. Staid and cool she slid a cigarette from her pack and hung it from her lip. "See you in a minute." Alicia walked away smoking. "I'm going to tell your fucking mom, you goddamn loser! I'll have you black balled from all the Bank of America's in south West Virginia!" Don eked out through his suffering. His slowly building torment suddenly spiked...literally. Spines emerged from his backbone, two for each vertebrae, symmetrical down the spine but with each with decreasing length from the neck down. Don reached back and felt his mutation. "Jesus, I look like a fucking harp!" The agony subsided and Don stood upright. His back now rigid with excess bone and his vision deeply red. "Alicia, you cunt, get back here!" Don mused about whether she was the youngest person he had ever called a cunt. He then recalled that particular incidence of mistaken paternity in which he sauntered down the aisles of a large nursery and asked his ex whether this or that cunt was their cunt. So basically this was just a drop in the old cunt bucket for Don.
His rosebud colored glasses proved to be more than just a tint, however. Creatures slowly filtered into his field of vision. Hideous beasts of an unknown provenance. All quadrupedal, yet all afloat in some mesmeric effluvium. Perfunctorily, Don called for an intern to clean up the mess. None came and Don was faced with an existential crisis that business men of his station spend their whole lives insulating themselves against. Delusion, however, was strong with this one. "It must be some kind of metaphor for free market economics!" Don thought. "Yeah! The starfish-faced hippos are an allegory for supply and the squirrel mantis shrimps, well, they're tiny Alan Greenspans!" Pleased with his hermeneutical gymnastics Don began pitching the creatures his "can't miss" business opportunities. "Listen, all I need from you is 68 million dollars and a minor act of terrorism in the Balkans." The creature which had seemed to be listening spewed a caustic sludge in Don's face and swam away. "I'll have you know spittle amounts to a contractual obligation in some countries!"
With Don berating his new found business associates, Alicia returned. She stopped in front of the mutated corporate goon. "You're coming along nicely" she said. "I don't understand. Your lack of corporate jargon is, well, jarring." He gestured with his jar hand. "The mutation has taken a shine to you. Soon I will install you as the resonator, the link between this dimension and that of the creatures you see about you! You shall live in eternal torment as these beings filter through you on their voyage to our plane!" Don looked askance at her. "That is a terrible business model. Where is the planned obsolescence? The thinly veiled insult to the consumer?" Alicia took Don by the hand and led him into a large crystalline chamber. She closed the door behind him and slid a stack of business cards under the door. "Please hand them out as our guests begin to arrive." Don carefully took up the pile of business cards. "Ooohhhhh, Junior Associate Inter-Dimensional Meat Gate! Does this mean I get PTO?" A bloody beak gnashed through his through his sternum and the air sang with his screams.
Alicia took the jar from his hands and tapped the edge several times. "Now put it over your hand just like Mommy does to Daddy." The girl enacted a severe thrusting motion and Don knew not to question the idyllic childhood of that impressionable youngster. Taking the jar, he slipped it over his hand and twisted it around his wrist. "Now, take this rubber band and slide it onto your left ankle." "Awww, it's just like a tiny garter." Don accomplished the task. "Okay, so the last step is you have to drink this." Alicia forked over a shot glass filled with a white glistening liquid. Don cringed at the fetid fluid. "Just pinch your nose like when you're eating broccoli" she said. "That's a genius! A nose clamp for eating terrible home-cooked meals so you won't offend the host! You kids are marketing wizards! Have you ever done any consulting?" The girl frowned. "Oh yeah, that's right. Your kind is too damn lazy to get a job!" Don threw back the shimmering swill.
It was like his taste buds were being curb stomped by penis that had recently been used to stir a large cauldron of habanero shit chili. He collapsed to the floor scraping his tongue and writhing in olfactory agony. Like some parasite the pain purposefully clawed through him and settled in his lower neck. Alicia stood idly by and was not the least bit disconcerted when Don jumped up seemingly unaware of the past few moments. His eyes now coated with a crimson film like the inner eyelid of an alligator. "I've heard of seeing red, but this is ridiculous!" exclaimed the Don. "I knew you we're going to say that." Alicia droned. Don threw himself upon the girl like a child into a well in a 1950s TV script. "What in the name of Fortune 500 have you done to me?!" He lifted up the girl by her exaggerated lapels and only know realized how strange it was for a girl of her age to be wearing a suit. He shook her violently. However, a sudden bilateral pain weaving it's way down both sides of his spine froze him. Alicia solemnly grabbed his finger and bent it at an acute angle causing Don to drop her. In turn, Don collapsed to the ground, face down and arms scratching his own back.
Alicia tapped a packet of cigarettes against Don's head. Staid and cool she slid a cigarette from her pack and hung it from her lip. "See you in a minute." Alicia walked away smoking. "I'm going to tell your fucking mom, you goddamn loser! I'll have you black balled from all the Bank of America's in south West Virginia!" Don eked out through his suffering. His slowly building torment suddenly spiked...literally. Spines emerged from his backbone, two for each vertebrae, symmetrical down the spine but with each with decreasing length from the neck down. Don reached back and felt his mutation. "Jesus, I look like a fucking harp!" The agony subsided and Don stood upright. His back now rigid with excess bone and his vision deeply red. "Alicia, you cunt, get back here!" Don mused about whether she was the youngest person he had ever called a cunt. He then recalled that particular incidence of mistaken paternity in which he sauntered down the aisles of a large nursery and asked his ex whether this or that cunt was their cunt. So basically this was just a drop in the old cunt bucket for Don.
His rosebud colored glasses proved to be more than just a tint, however. Creatures slowly filtered into his field of vision. Hideous beasts of an unknown provenance. All quadrupedal, yet all afloat in some mesmeric effluvium. Perfunctorily, Don called for an intern to clean up the mess. None came and Don was faced with an existential crisis that business men of his station spend their whole lives insulating themselves against. Delusion, however, was strong with this one. "It must be some kind of metaphor for free market economics!" Don thought. "Yeah! The starfish-faced hippos are an allegory for supply and the squirrel mantis shrimps, well, they're tiny Alan Greenspans!" Pleased with his hermeneutical gymnastics Don began pitching the creatures his "can't miss" business opportunities. "Listen, all I need from you is 68 million dollars and a minor act of terrorism in the Balkans." The creature which had seemed to be listening spewed a caustic sludge in Don's face and swam away. "I'll have you know spittle amounts to a contractual obligation in some countries!"
With Don berating his new found business associates, Alicia returned. She stopped in front of the mutated corporate goon. "You're coming along nicely" she said. "I don't understand. Your lack of corporate jargon is, well, jarring." He gestured with his jar hand. "The mutation has taken a shine to you. Soon I will install you as the resonator, the link between this dimension and that of the creatures you see about you! You shall live in eternal torment as these beings filter through you on their voyage to our plane!" Don looked askance at her. "That is a terrible business model. Where is the planned obsolescence? The thinly veiled insult to the consumer?" Alicia took Don by the hand and led him into a large crystalline chamber. She closed the door behind him and slid a stack of business cards under the door. "Please hand them out as our guests begin to arrive." Don carefully took up the pile of business cards. "Ooohhhhh, Junior Associate Inter-Dimensional Meat Gate! Does this mean I get PTO?" A bloody beak gnashed through his through his sternum and the air sang with his screams.
Monday, June 30, 2014
Hell Zoo
"Hither a shade shrieking out of the darkness at us. They can strike three times the length of their own shadow!" Bumbled the tour guide. He tossed a square of Captain Crunch to the grasping wraith. My son gasped, my daughter leaned in as if to watch the phantom digest the cereal. Her hand shot up with all the eagerness of a meth head playing Bingo. "Where the fuck do these things live?!" She had taken to cursing early. She threw back a shot of tequila from her pink Limited Too pocket flask. Drinking too. "Well, these dudes are endemic to the Cocytus Valley in the 6th Circle." She looked longingly at me. "Why haven't you taken us on vacation there yet, you lazy shitlord?" Fuck. Time for another speech about how being a single demon dad was hard enough on her bummer of a father? No, can't show weakness. Engage dad mode! "Go for it!" I tossed her the keys to my matte purple soccer demon dad van. "Hop on the Fields of Punishment Beltway and get off right after the third Dixie Stampede in the Suicide Forrest. Just don't mess with my stations." She turned the keys over in her grubby, infernal hands.
"Maybe after I see the live human taint threshing." She chucked the keys back at me, hurling them over my head and into the wraith cage. An ethereal claw grabbed them and retreated into the blackness. My son covered his eyes and began shaking. "Don't worry. I've got a spare set under the wheel well." I don't. Peaking out from behind his hands he squeaked, "Can we go home now?" Dagona slapped him so hard it knocked his baby third eye out. Valac began to weep. I picked up the disembodied eye and put my arm around his shoulder. "You're becoming a man" I said. He cried harder. "Can I have my eye back?!" "Hell no! This is a keepsake." The eye blinked at me."It's also an insurance policy. If you ever get it in your shitty little head to turn on me, I can use this eye to destroy you!" I took several minutes then to admire my own parenting with my son weeping at my knees and my daughter wreaking untold havoc. I put the eye in my back pocket and ushered my demon spawn along behind the trundling tour guide.
Next stop was always a favorite of mine, the succubus pit. There's nothing quite like watching a gaggle of large breasted harpies frying cocks on the stove. "These demonesses are part of the subgenus Foodie" the guide chortled. Somewhere between his smug delivery and cocked eyebrow I was beginning to like this guide. I nudged my kids with the get-a-load-of-this-guy force all demon dads instinctively know. "Somebody blew their nudge load again!" Dagona cackled. The whole group, even the succubi, laughed at me. To take some of the heat off me I launched into a speech about my plan to give the succubi their own cooking challenge show. Spitballing I came up with name Gnawed and the subtitle "Penis Al Dente for Vagina Dentata". As hard a sell as it was to those fat, greasy tourists, my children proved even harder to impress. Dagona was never fond of word play, but I figured these ultra violent femmes might pique her interest. She, however, took far more pleasure in the neighboring Face Hugger enclosure. She described them as "forced Halloween" which I thought was a pretty cute way to talk about those murderous face spiders. Valac, well, he was wailing like a banshee in the throws of the saddest orgasm of her life. The succubi were disturbed and I tried to take some pride that my son was creepy enough to unsettle those broads. I like to tell myself he's basically a social terrorist, his suicide bomb being equal parts disdainful histrionics, pathetic sycophancy, and a pinch of perv to be.
There comes a time when every dad realizes he might as well stop shoeing away the vagrants of vice from his facade of fatherhood. Just let 'em set up shop, piss on the walls, and solicit hobo sex from the strangely interested passerby. That moment is known by most as birth, and so I, not interested in bucking the trend, have treated fatherhood like an all-inclusive booze cruise. When the opportunity arose, somewhere between the bone horror installation and the fire penguin tank, I slunk away to smoke what was arguably the fattest doob of my entire fatherhood. The heady buds left me nearly incapacitated, so when that over-eager teenage security guard bum rushed me all I could do was curse the nearby chupacabras for not alerting me to his presence sooner. Escorted by the pimply punk, I found myself in the zoo detention center along with a gallimaufry of hooligans, most notably my daughter. Dagona was howling and demanding that other people shit so she could toss their excrement at the guards. However, upon seeing me, she let a smiley turd drop from her hand and entwined me in a big hug. "They tossed me in this joint after I threw Valac into the goblin compound. They ripped his face off!" I smiled warmly at her and knew we could at least form a reasonably well-respected prison gang together.
"Maybe after I see the live human taint threshing." She chucked the keys back at me, hurling them over my head and into the wraith cage. An ethereal claw grabbed them and retreated into the blackness. My son covered his eyes and began shaking. "Don't worry. I've got a spare set under the wheel well." I don't. Peaking out from behind his hands he squeaked, "Can we go home now?" Dagona slapped him so hard it knocked his baby third eye out. Valac began to weep. I picked up the disembodied eye and put my arm around his shoulder. "You're becoming a man" I said. He cried harder. "Can I have my eye back?!" "Hell no! This is a keepsake." The eye blinked at me."It's also an insurance policy. If you ever get it in your shitty little head to turn on me, I can use this eye to destroy you!" I took several minutes then to admire my own parenting with my son weeping at my knees and my daughter wreaking untold havoc. I put the eye in my back pocket and ushered my demon spawn along behind the trundling tour guide.
Next stop was always a favorite of mine, the succubus pit. There's nothing quite like watching a gaggle of large breasted harpies frying cocks on the stove. "These demonesses are part of the subgenus Foodie" the guide chortled. Somewhere between his smug delivery and cocked eyebrow I was beginning to like this guide. I nudged my kids with the get-a-load-of-this-guy force all demon dads instinctively know. "Somebody blew their nudge load again!" Dagona cackled. The whole group, even the succubi, laughed at me. To take some of the heat off me I launched into a speech about my plan to give the succubi their own cooking challenge show. Spitballing I came up with name Gnawed and the subtitle "Penis Al Dente for Vagina Dentata". As hard a sell as it was to those fat, greasy tourists, my children proved even harder to impress. Dagona was never fond of word play, but I figured these ultra violent femmes might pique her interest. She, however, took far more pleasure in the neighboring Face Hugger enclosure. She described them as "forced Halloween" which I thought was a pretty cute way to talk about those murderous face spiders. Valac, well, he was wailing like a banshee in the throws of the saddest orgasm of her life. The succubi were disturbed and I tried to take some pride that my son was creepy enough to unsettle those broads. I like to tell myself he's basically a social terrorist, his suicide bomb being equal parts disdainful histrionics, pathetic sycophancy, and a pinch of perv to be.
There comes a time when every dad realizes he might as well stop shoeing away the vagrants of vice from his facade of fatherhood. Just let 'em set up shop, piss on the walls, and solicit hobo sex from the strangely interested passerby. That moment is known by most as birth, and so I, not interested in bucking the trend, have treated fatherhood like an all-inclusive booze cruise. When the opportunity arose, somewhere between the bone horror installation and the fire penguin tank, I slunk away to smoke what was arguably the fattest doob of my entire fatherhood. The heady buds left me nearly incapacitated, so when that over-eager teenage security guard bum rushed me all I could do was curse the nearby chupacabras for not alerting me to his presence sooner. Escorted by the pimply punk, I found myself in the zoo detention center along with a gallimaufry of hooligans, most notably my daughter. Dagona was howling and demanding that other people shit so she could toss their excrement at the guards. However, upon seeing me, she let a smiley turd drop from her hand and entwined me in a big hug. "They tossed me in this joint after I threw Valac into the goblin compound. They ripped his face off!" I smiled warmly at her and knew we could at least form a reasonably well-respected prison gang together.
Friday, May 9, 2014
A Dad's Tale
A long ass time ago, some Greek idiot posited that there were five types of governments. Significantly later, the gestalt cretin that is the internet theorized Rule 34, the so-called "there's a fetish for that" principal. Now tons of stuff happened in between those moments, but what concerns us falls afterwards. Before I begin, though, let me throw you a curve ball. CAPITALISM! Wooosh! Hurt's, don't it?
And here we are! The vile present. This future may be unfamiliar to you. That's just fine, though. I'll walk you through it. I'll go with you all the way until we reach the shit river. Then, I'll hold your head under the putrefied effluvium for 30 seconds or so and when you coming up crying and gasping for air you'll call me Dad and I'll pat you on the back. You've learned how to swim! If the office printer was working I would print you a certificate of achievement. Of course, that printer hasn't work in well-nigh 15 years. You don't know it, but that's funny. Funny because I say so and funny because that's when all the trouble done began.
Before you were born shit was weird but stable. HORSE PUN! The world had fucked and panic attacked its way to a stilted equ(us)ilibrium. Guilt was assuaged and ignorance was feigned with uncommon industry. The perhaps brilliant, perhaps imbecilic performance artist of history had tricked us. We actually believed that the penis pills we were taking were increasing our girth, our length, our gift-wrapped big-dicked future. Feed yourself enough lies, read enough of those "______ hate him" internet ads, and you'll think they hate you too. Truth is, though, they always hated you, and you started hating yourself long before that. They actually probably started hating you when they saw the ad on the internet, and thought "Fuck, this guy thinks I hate him. Well, fuck him and his goddamn hate mongering! He can read, he's on the internet, and he thinks he's some kind of big shot pariah that deserves my hate!"
Anyway, we were trundling along shitting glitter and congratulating ourselves for all sorts of things we hadn't really accomplished yet. Full of intentions (so, so many intentions), it felt as if John Wayne himself had saddled us up, and spanked our horse off into the coruscated hinterland of possibility. By the time we got there, however, we were fucked. Turns out, we were fucked before we even left. John had filled our saddles with dog shampoo and the condescension of patriarchy. Poor building materials to be sure, though you could make a damn fine goo girl out of 'em. It's a poor craftsman that blames his tools, unless they're racist. So we consigned those bigoted implements to trial by tumblr. It was a mock trial presided over by teenage furries dressed as kangaroos. They didn't stand a chance and we gave ourselves a pat on the back for sound judgement, a job well done, and product placement.
Somewhere from here to there, things really went to shit. If memory serves (and it doesn't! It's not your fucking butler!) some meager and maligned white child got it in his head that no one wanted to listen to him. So, instead of doing the sensible thing and making like Fox sitcom and offending everyone so terribly right off the bat that it has absolutely no chance of success, this little fucker decided to purchase oppression. A fool and his money are soon parted, and thus the diminutive shit-kicker found himself destitute and down trodden. The object of prejudice both personal and institutional, Craig (let's call him) could no longer hang with the big dogs of privilege, so to speak. He lost everything: his family, his girlfriend, his job, his house, even his Pink Berry rewards card. Reduced to a poverty that his white guilt could only have dreamed of, Craig was beginning to think maybe that shit was a bad call. It was then in his darkest whitest hour that Craig was saved. During a routine nap on the memory foam mattress of throw-out Subway bread, Craig was spotted by a Fox news crew doing an expose on small business owner themed porn. The scene was hot and exploitative as usual but with no where near the frothy elan of the dejected Craig. Right then and there is when we licked the shit envelope, sealed it with cum, and mailed the suppurating dick of our destiny to ourselves in the future with no return address.
Craig was a hit. A televangelized martyr sniffed out and raised by the bloodhounds of consumerism. There he was suckling dog milk on national television and we all wanted a taste. Smoke 'em if you got 'em, unless you don't got 'em, in which case buy 'em. Thus it was that white men, so long excluded from bitchin' high rise of oppression, finally bought their way in. My dad always used say, "A man can't remunerate what he don't appropriate" and it's only now that I realize that he had absolutely no understanding of anything. Diligently white dudes the world over bought persecution; from the bargain bin "off color comment by distant acquaintance" to the designer "lifetime of institutional prejudice" oppression was all the rage. It was a status symbol, a designation of class mobility that casually gabbed "You see these boat shoes? If a cop sees me wearing them I'll be incarcerated! And not in the good way either. It's not so bad, though. I can say whatever I want now without repercussions. So why don't you shut the hell up while I explain phrenology to you."
Now we're getting closer to the bone, but it's going to take a lot more aggressive ignorance and willful delusion to endure this sack tap race. You better be up for it because no nameless child of mine is going to be losing to that fucking neighbor I've never mentioned! Anyway, humanity was humming along this timeline that not even JJ Abrams could contrive a more half-assed ending for. The social order remained as it always had been, except now those at the top claimed the oppression of those at the bottom, all the while spewing their privilege down upon their oppressors. As the expression goes, "An injustice anywhere is at least $10.99 before tax, but you can probably find a better deal if you go to the outlet mall." So that's where we went. Millions were trampled in the ensuing frenzy. Black Friday bled into Ecru Saturday and before we knew it it was Red Tape Wednesday. What happened next is a bit tricky, though I'm sure Run-DMC could explain it to you. Somewhere in that pecuniary passion pit, we got bored stiff. I mean literally...we had boners. All of us. Even the ladies? Especially them.
So, there we were all milling about the outlet mall of our doom, dicks in hands and dignities in god knows where. The fetishistic frenzy was so intense that all anyone could hear anymore was the fap, fap, fap of masturbation. It must have occurred to some depraved specimen that the oppression was ancillary at this point. What we really wanted was the rush, a bacchanalian speed ball main-veined right into our fucking eyes. Even the thought of buying oppression was enough for some folks. As any goddamned junkie will tell you, it's not all the withered veins that get you in the end, but your overwrought junkie buddy who extemporizes an epic poem about that first high. That's what pushes you over the edge. This is especially true when you're blind and we might as well have been a colony of geriatric bats. Fap bats even. So, when that big-tittied demagogue Amelia came, with Craig leashed up and humping her leg, whispering oppressive little slurs in our ears, well, our goose was cooked.
That's where you come in. Literally, I jizzed in that goose and you popped out 9-14 months later. You were a healthy eight pounds six ounces, but also a demon spawn birthed from the fetid remains of a fowl. Some people are calling you the Chosen One. They say you'll lead us out from the tyranny of our slutty suzerain, Amelia. Me? I don't buy it. You're half goose, don't have vocal cords, and really mean to children. Not to mention you're a drunk and you're not even ten yet. Yep, it doesn't look good. Amelia's got a grip so tight around our balls we can't even place a Scabble tile without wincing. Worse still, we like it. Hell, this is probably the best governance the world has ever seen. Enlightened despotism at its sexiest. Fetish is the only currency we know and the old hoi polloi just love getting their rocks off. Poverty is unknown and nobody but the biggest dingus still uses twitter. It's the proverbial gravy train on biscuit wheels driven by Casey Jones and Ozzy themselves. Ha ha yeah, we're Cruis'n USA! I'm sorry...that was before your time.
Craig was a hit. A televangelized martyr sniffed out and raised by the bloodhounds of consumerism. There he was suckling dog milk on national television and we all wanted a taste. Smoke 'em if you got 'em, unless you don't got 'em, in which case buy 'em. Thus it was that white men, so long excluded from bitchin' high rise of oppression, finally bought their way in. My dad always used say, "A man can't remunerate what he don't appropriate" and it's only now that I realize that he had absolutely no understanding of anything. Diligently white dudes the world over bought persecution; from the bargain bin "off color comment by distant acquaintance" to the designer "lifetime of institutional prejudice" oppression was all the rage. It was a status symbol, a designation of class mobility that casually gabbed "You see these boat shoes? If a cop sees me wearing them I'll be incarcerated! And not in the good way either. It's not so bad, though. I can say whatever I want now without repercussions. So why don't you shut the hell up while I explain phrenology to you."
Now we're getting closer to the bone, but it's going to take a lot more aggressive ignorance and willful delusion to endure this sack tap race. You better be up for it because no nameless child of mine is going to be losing to that fucking neighbor I've never mentioned! Anyway, humanity was humming along this timeline that not even JJ Abrams could contrive a more half-assed ending for. The social order remained as it always had been, except now those at the top claimed the oppression of those at the bottom, all the while spewing their privilege down upon their oppressors. As the expression goes, "An injustice anywhere is at least $10.99 before tax, but you can probably find a better deal if you go to the outlet mall." So that's where we went. Millions were trampled in the ensuing frenzy. Black Friday bled into Ecru Saturday and before we knew it it was Red Tape Wednesday. What happened next is a bit tricky, though I'm sure Run-DMC could explain it to you. Somewhere in that pecuniary passion pit, we got bored stiff. I mean literally...we had boners. All of us. Even the ladies? Especially them.
So, there we were all milling about the outlet mall of our doom, dicks in hands and dignities in god knows where. The fetishistic frenzy was so intense that all anyone could hear anymore was the fap, fap, fap of masturbation. It must have occurred to some depraved specimen that the oppression was ancillary at this point. What we really wanted was the rush, a bacchanalian speed ball main-veined right into our fucking eyes. Even the thought of buying oppression was enough for some folks. As any goddamned junkie will tell you, it's not all the withered veins that get you in the end, but your overwrought junkie buddy who extemporizes an epic poem about that first high. That's what pushes you over the edge. This is especially true when you're blind and we might as well have been a colony of geriatric bats. Fap bats even. So, when that big-tittied demagogue Amelia came, with Craig leashed up and humping her leg, whispering oppressive little slurs in our ears, well, our goose was cooked.
That's where you come in. Literally, I jizzed in that goose and you popped out 9-14 months later. You were a healthy eight pounds six ounces, but also a demon spawn birthed from the fetid remains of a fowl. Some people are calling you the Chosen One. They say you'll lead us out from the tyranny of our slutty suzerain, Amelia. Me? I don't buy it. You're half goose, don't have vocal cords, and really mean to children. Not to mention you're a drunk and you're not even ten yet. Yep, it doesn't look good. Amelia's got a grip so tight around our balls we can't even place a Scabble tile without wincing. Worse still, we like it. Hell, this is probably the best governance the world has ever seen. Enlightened despotism at its sexiest. Fetish is the only currency we know and the old hoi polloi just love getting their rocks off. Poverty is unknown and nobody but the biggest dingus still uses twitter. It's the proverbial gravy train on biscuit wheels driven by Casey Jones and Ozzy themselves. Ha ha yeah, we're Cruis'n USA! I'm sorry...that was before your time.
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Traumzeit
In the scientific community Germans are regarded with a disquieting distinction. This accolade is not one of accomplishment, however. German scientists are notorious for being the first to identify new horrific maladies and the last to tell anyone about them. Whether they simply don't want to be the bearers of bad news, or they derive some sick pleasure from discrete diagnosis is anyone's guess. Regardless, they always step forward and take credit after someone else has broken the news. Thus it was for Frau Doktor Professor Doktor Sauerbrun who in 1923 accidentally stumbled upon the cause of Pink Eye. Instead of informing people, though, she giggled at her crusty-eyed Austrian cousins. So too Herr Doktor Schultz when he defined the debilitating psychological disorder known as Gawker Speak and neglected to tell anyone. For years innocent people suffered the incensed bloviations of these deranged idiots without recourse. Even so, this most recent German remission is by far the most grave and attacks humanity at its most vulnerable point...and I'm not talking about the balls.
"Traumzeit" that's what she called it. Dream time. I chortled when she told me. Was she fucking with me? I had fucked Lara's boyfriend back in med school and I always got the sense that she wanted to vivisect me for that. You know, cut off my vagina, wear it as a hat, and then diagnose me with irritable bowel syndrome and a case of hysteria. Still, she said it with chilling clarity, like Nietzsche after a syphilitic paroxysm claiming he could see humanity's extinction, but with tits and a lab coat. In deference to the gravity of her professionalism I played along, slipping into the orbit of her seeming insanity. I told her about Steve, my patient, who had first begun to have the symptoms. She confirmed them, even cutting me off to elaborate in precise detail the nature of specific traits. Her research matched my own but for the label of Traumzeit. When I inquired for her notes she became erratic, confessing to me that she herself was having difficulty sleeping. She said that she had bought a carrel at the Berghain and did her research among fiends and perverts. A significant portion was lost after her desk was mistaken for a fisting booth. Alarmed by her increasingly agitated and voluble speech, I begged to come see her. Thursday would be sufficient, she said. She walked away from the receiver and I heard a bang then a thud.
Lara's colleague contacted me the following day to tell me of her suicide and designate me as heir to her research. This surprised me as she and I were not at all close. He explained, however, that German primogeniture is determined by whoever spoke with the deceased last. A policy too peculiar and moribund not to be German. Though grieved by the loss, I forced myself to return to work and my patients, repeating to myself that grief, terror, uncertainty, and toil are all important players in the gangbang of inspiration. That day Steve came to my office. Steve was a preeminent shlub, a forty something with monster truck sized thyroid and debilitating fear of exchanging money. He always joked that he would have been a hit in communist Russia. He looked as if he had skipped puberty and went straight to menopause. This was my patient zero.
Steve had been coming to me for around eight months after having been abandoned by his last three therapists. I had sized him up and after several months it was my professional opinion that I would rather die than see his jowly face again. However, by such time as I was about to drop-kick him out of my cute ass office, Steve threw me a psychological curve ball. Showing up uncharacteristically bewildered, Steve gushed that he had met someone. Upon further inquiry, it seemed that a young woman had appeared to him in his dreams. I tried to explain through a series of gifs of Jung and Freud crossing swords that this woman was merely a projection of his subconscious desire for his own mother. Steve begged to fucking differ. According to him, this woman (Natasha was her name) acted not at all like any other person in one of his dreams. She was reactionary, confused, and seemingly sentient. Probing further about the nature of their interaction, I learned that Natasha had cut off Steve's dick when he tried to graze her nipple. I laughed but Steve insisted that this was not an ordinary behavior for a dream vixen. Over the course of the following weeks, Steve detailed to me these strange visions. Every time he would dream he would see Natasha and she was not happy about it. Sometimes she would conjure a weapon and force Steve to sit in a horribly stinky port-a-potty (also manifested by her) for the duration of the dream. Other times they would chat and Steve would tell me anecdotes about Natasha the next day. She told him that she was real, that she found great displeasure in twitter narcissism, and that whenever Steve dreamed she would fall asleep in her real life, only to awaken once his dream had ended. The persistence of his experience and the nuanced psychological profile of Natasha led me to believe and that Steve was indeed the victim of some strange phenomenon; it was this oneiric convergence of unknown origin that led me back to Lara.
Hoping to avoid the academic sloppy seconds of an over-researched topic, I assembled my notes on Steve and awaited Lara's posthumous analysis. I was certain that, if published, my research on "Traumzeit" would make me famous. Finally, I could hold the face of the puppy of my dismissive colleagues over the pile of the hot, stinking shit of my genius! Also, I could hire a harem of sexy, banana-hammock-wearing interns to do my bidding. That night I went to sleep with the confidence of Kanye, but, much to my dismay, my psychopomp was not to be of Kardashian stock. As a trained psychologist, I take some pride in my own dream awareness. It's not uncommon for me to turn the bestial terrors of my psyche into laughable, micro-penis-ed Tea Partyers. Thus, when my Traumzeit began I was not at all disturbed. The first symptom is a rift, some tear or delineation in the horizon of your dream. So, when I saw a sun-sized sphincter floated through the air, I thought, "Goddammit, my subconscious wants to talk about butts again." However, instead of a bootylicious metaphor about anal fixation, I got Dylan. The celestial sphincter dilated and grew to eclipse half of my dream. There I was standing a midst the non-euclidean architecture of my dream town and staring into a black disc with a pinkish border. It was abyssal and I dared not enter. Then a towheaded doofus sauntered through. Dylan somehow combined the idiotic zen of an early 90's surf jock with the pedantic smugness of a dubstep DJ. Sporting oversized, pooka shell headphones and more facial piercings than the Gathering of the Juggalos I thought this tool could only be the twisted machination of my subconscious. This idea was quickly dispelled when he told me that my tits inspired P.L.U.R. Not even a think tank of misogynists could come up with something so lame, let alone myself. Even more unsettling, though, was the sphincter which had gone from black to transparent. Through this dubstep looking glass I saw Dylan's dream and it was horrifying.
His dreamscape extended interminably and was tessellated by images of breasts, bongs, and dogs wearing sun glasses. It looked like an infinite tumblr and was awful to behold. Unable to endure the gaze of this other realm, I ran deeper into my own dream. Terribly, the portal remained and Dylan followed me. Eventually, we spoke and through our conversation (he told me a story about surfing with Sublime's tour nanny) I came to the nightmarish conclusion that Traumzeit was happening to me. I awoke that morning and poured over my notes while anxiously awaiting Lara's data. It did not come and it would not for several more weeks. In that time I had the harrowing privilege of getting to know Dylan. Needless to say, he was a fucking idiot. As if watching Dylan attempt to take selfies in his dream were not bad enough, I was coming to a realization that was far more dreadful. The portal, the liminal space between our dreams was begging to erode. Images, structures, and even persons from his dream were bleeding into my own. This fetid hemorrhage brought to my dream legions of vape heads and scores of bimbos mutilated by Dylan's imagination to be nothing more than giant breasts with legs. Neither was his dream immune, though, and before long Dylan approached me and asked that I "unfollow" his dream. Apparently, my increasing agitation was warping his dream into a nightmare too brutal for his fragile psyche. I took some pride in that, but I knew that Dylan was right.
Lara's research arrived in the mail precisely two and a half weeks after I was stricken with Traumzeit. Her findings were less the light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel and more accidental-discovery-of-ex-boyband-member-mass-grave. They outlined the pathology of Traumzeit. Though uncertain of it's etiology, she confirmed the dream fault, the blending of dreams, and (most disturbing) their ultimate fusion. Was I really going to have to spend the remainder of my sleeping life shackled to this turd jockey and his lame ass imagination? I strongly debated murdering Dylan in an attempt to free my dreams from his vapid oppression. The researched indicated, however, that there was some connection between the two dreamers and that any disruption to that could be fatal. I was devastated. I didn't know whether to kill Dylan anyways or masturbate on my divan and laugh as my patients confessed on a bed of pussy juice. An old psychology professor of mine used to say that the shame of masturbation is great perspective. So I followed his advice...hard.
After a marathon of clit clobbering, I fell into an almost catatonic sleep. Of course, Dylan arrived and he was rather miffed. Supposedly, I had taken him away from a particularly productive meeting where he was trying to pitch a time traveling Surf Ninjas prequel with a dubstep soundtrack. As he berated me, another surreal sphincter appeared or rather collided with our dream. It produced a seismic event, effectively prostrating Dylan and me before this quivering orifice. Out of the blackness stepped two persons, a svelte twenty something hipster girl and a paunchy euro trash slum lord, Katy and Jens respectively. Dylan was amazed, but the newcomers were both rather blase about the whole experience. This perception was reinforced when Jens began conjuring slutty, male capris and Katy told me in condescending fashion about dream gentrification. Apparently, Dylan and I were "like at least 20th wave dream gentrifiers" and therefore very lame. Resisting the urge to impale this pale imp, I questioned her further. With rolling eyes, Katy explained that her and Jens' dream had been fused for months and that several other dreams had begun to merge with their dream as well. In time I met these baby dog dicked shit kickers. There was Ralph, Naoko, Jenny, Afua, and of course Trevin. All had come to the dream at different times and were in varying stages of fusion with the original Jens/Katy dream.
Since the time of the merging between my/Dylan's dream and that of Jens/Katy and the others I have spent at most two hours awake per day. I often awake covered in my own shit and piss, my pajamas looking like a Rorschach of feces. I spend my waking hours gorging on food and organizing what research I have. It seems that the sleep of any one dreamer forcibly draws the rest into the collective dream, thus explaining my impromptu narcolepsy. Worse still, the dream is accruing more and more dreamers. So it is that I have gotten to know trash from all walks of life. There is even a fucking baby in the dream now. I fear that this oneiric convergence is approaching a singularity. By my estimation, humanity will share one collective dream within two months. We all will be sitting on the same hypnagogic, furry-tailed butt plug. This will no doubt spell the end of humanity, as everyone will be ensconced in a communal siesta unable to stir or live a waking life at all. Perhaps once the majority of humans have died those with the greatest endurance may awaken to a mostly dead world. It is not end of humanity that scares me, however. Rather, I am terrified by the prospect of this collective Borgesian nightmare to which we are all running. The thought of spending a relative eternity haunted by the maudlin machinations of teenagers is anathema to me. Furthermore, I cannot be sure what the geography of this dream will be. A psychomanteum of malformed tweets and half-assed fetishes? Were I a younger psychoanalyst, I might revel in this opportunity. I am old, though, and much too afraid of sharing a sex dream with my mom.
"Traumzeit" that's what she called it. Dream time. I chortled when she told me. Was she fucking with me? I had fucked Lara's boyfriend back in med school and I always got the sense that she wanted to vivisect me for that. You know, cut off my vagina, wear it as a hat, and then diagnose me with irritable bowel syndrome and a case of hysteria. Still, she said it with chilling clarity, like Nietzsche after a syphilitic paroxysm claiming he could see humanity's extinction, but with tits and a lab coat. In deference to the gravity of her professionalism I played along, slipping into the orbit of her seeming insanity. I told her about Steve, my patient, who had first begun to have the symptoms. She confirmed them, even cutting me off to elaborate in precise detail the nature of specific traits. Her research matched my own but for the label of Traumzeit. When I inquired for her notes she became erratic, confessing to me that she herself was having difficulty sleeping. She said that she had bought a carrel at the Berghain and did her research among fiends and perverts. A significant portion was lost after her desk was mistaken for a fisting booth. Alarmed by her increasingly agitated and voluble speech, I begged to come see her. Thursday would be sufficient, she said. She walked away from the receiver and I heard a bang then a thud.
Lara's colleague contacted me the following day to tell me of her suicide and designate me as heir to her research. This surprised me as she and I were not at all close. He explained, however, that German primogeniture is determined by whoever spoke with the deceased last. A policy too peculiar and moribund not to be German. Though grieved by the loss, I forced myself to return to work and my patients, repeating to myself that grief, terror, uncertainty, and toil are all important players in the gangbang of inspiration. That day Steve came to my office. Steve was a preeminent shlub, a forty something with monster truck sized thyroid and debilitating fear of exchanging money. He always joked that he would have been a hit in communist Russia. He looked as if he had skipped puberty and went straight to menopause. This was my patient zero.
Steve had been coming to me for around eight months after having been abandoned by his last three therapists. I had sized him up and after several months it was my professional opinion that I would rather die than see his jowly face again. However, by such time as I was about to drop-kick him out of my cute ass office, Steve threw me a psychological curve ball. Showing up uncharacteristically bewildered, Steve gushed that he had met someone. Upon further inquiry, it seemed that a young woman had appeared to him in his dreams. I tried to explain through a series of gifs of Jung and Freud crossing swords that this woman was merely a projection of his subconscious desire for his own mother. Steve begged to fucking differ. According to him, this woman (Natasha was her name) acted not at all like any other person in one of his dreams. She was reactionary, confused, and seemingly sentient. Probing further about the nature of their interaction, I learned that Natasha had cut off Steve's dick when he tried to graze her nipple. I laughed but Steve insisted that this was not an ordinary behavior for a dream vixen. Over the course of the following weeks, Steve detailed to me these strange visions. Every time he would dream he would see Natasha and she was not happy about it. Sometimes she would conjure a weapon and force Steve to sit in a horribly stinky port-a-potty (also manifested by her) for the duration of the dream. Other times they would chat and Steve would tell me anecdotes about Natasha the next day. She told him that she was real, that she found great displeasure in twitter narcissism, and that whenever Steve dreamed she would fall asleep in her real life, only to awaken once his dream had ended. The persistence of his experience and the nuanced psychological profile of Natasha led me to believe and that Steve was indeed the victim of some strange phenomenon; it was this oneiric convergence of unknown origin that led me back to Lara.
Hoping to avoid the academic sloppy seconds of an over-researched topic, I assembled my notes on Steve and awaited Lara's posthumous analysis. I was certain that, if published, my research on "Traumzeit" would make me famous. Finally, I could hold the face of the puppy of my dismissive colleagues over the pile of the hot, stinking shit of my genius! Also, I could hire a harem of sexy, banana-hammock-wearing interns to do my bidding. That night I went to sleep with the confidence of Kanye, but, much to my dismay, my psychopomp was not to be of Kardashian stock. As a trained psychologist, I take some pride in my own dream awareness. It's not uncommon for me to turn the bestial terrors of my psyche into laughable, micro-penis-ed Tea Partyers. Thus, when my Traumzeit began I was not at all disturbed. The first symptom is a rift, some tear or delineation in the horizon of your dream. So, when I saw a sun-sized sphincter floated through the air, I thought, "Goddammit, my subconscious wants to talk about butts again." However, instead of a bootylicious metaphor about anal fixation, I got Dylan. The celestial sphincter dilated and grew to eclipse half of my dream. There I was standing a midst the non-euclidean architecture of my dream town and staring into a black disc with a pinkish border. It was abyssal and I dared not enter. Then a towheaded doofus sauntered through. Dylan somehow combined the idiotic zen of an early 90's surf jock with the pedantic smugness of a dubstep DJ. Sporting oversized, pooka shell headphones and more facial piercings than the Gathering of the Juggalos I thought this tool could only be the twisted machination of my subconscious. This idea was quickly dispelled when he told me that my tits inspired P.L.U.R. Not even a think tank of misogynists could come up with something so lame, let alone myself. Even more unsettling, though, was the sphincter which had gone from black to transparent. Through this dubstep looking glass I saw Dylan's dream and it was horrifying.
His dreamscape extended interminably and was tessellated by images of breasts, bongs, and dogs wearing sun glasses. It looked like an infinite tumblr and was awful to behold. Unable to endure the gaze of this other realm, I ran deeper into my own dream. Terribly, the portal remained and Dylan followed me. Eventually, we spoke and through our conversation (he told me a story about surfing with Sublime's tour nanny) I came to the nightmarish conclusion that Traumzeit was happening to me. I awoke that morning and poured over my notes while anxiously awaiting Lara's data. It did not come and it would not for several more weeks. In that time I had the harrowing privilege of getting to know Dylan. Needless to say, he was a fucking idiot. As if watching Dylan attempt to take selfies in his dream were not bad enough, I was coming to a realization that was far more dreadful. The portal, the liminal space between our dreams was begging to erode. Images, structures, and even persons from his dream were bleeding into my own. This fetid hemorrhage brought to my dream legions of vape heads and scores of bimbos mutilated by Dylan's imagination to be nothing more than giant breasts with legs. Neither was his dream immune, though, and before long Dylan approached me and asked that I "unfollow" his dream. Apparently, my increasing agitation was warping his dream into a nightmare too brutal for his fragile psyche. I took some pride in that, but I knew that Dylan was right.
Lara's research arrived in the mail precisely two and a half weeks after I was stricken with Traumzeit. Her findings were less the light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel and more accidental-discovery-of-ex-boyband-member-mass-grave. They outlined the pathology of Traumzeit. Though uncertain of it's etiology, she confirmed the dream fault, the blending of dreams, and (most disturbing) their ultimate fusion. Was I really going to have to spend the remainder of my sleeping life shackled to this turd jockey and his lame ass imagination? I strongly debated murdering Dylan in an attempt to free my dreams from his vapid oppression. The researched indicated, however, that there was some connection between the two dreamers and that any disruption to that could be fatal. I was devastated. I didn't know whether to kill Dylan anyways or masturbate on my divan and laugh as my patients confessed on a bed of pussy juice. An old psychology professor of mine used to say that the shame of masturbation is great perspective. So I followed his advice...hard.
After a marathon of clit clobbering, I fell into an almost catatonic sleep. Of course, Dylan arrived and he was rather miffed. Supposedly, I had taken him away from a particularly productive meeting where he was trying to pitch a time traveling Surf Ninjas prequel with a dubstep soundtrack. As he berated me, another surreal sphincter appeared or rather collided with our dream. It produced a seismic event, effectively prostrating Dylan and me before this quivering orifice. Out of the blackness stepped two persons, a svelte twenty something hipster girl and a paunchy euro trash slum lord, Katy and Jens respectively. Dylan was amazed, but the newcomers were both rather blase about the whole experience. This perception was reinforced when Jens began conjuring slutty, male capris and Katy told me in condescending fashion about dream gentrification. Apparently, Dylan and I were "like at least 20th wave dream gentrifiers" and therefore very lame. Resisting the urge to impale this pale imp, I questioned her further. With rolling eyes, Katy explained that her and Jens' dream had been fused for months and that several other dreams had begun to merge with their dream as well. In time I met these baby dog dicked shit kickers. There was Ralph, Naoko, Jenny, Afua, and of course Trevin. All had come to the dream at different times and were in varying stages of fusion with the original Jens/Katy dream.
Since the time of the merging between my/Dylan's dream and that of Jens/Katy and the others I have spent at most two hours awake per day. I often awake covered in my own shit and piss, my pajamas looking like a Rorschach of feces. I spend my waking hours gorging on food and organizing what research I have. It seems that the sleep of any one dreamer forcibly draws the rest into the collective dream, thus explaining my impromptu narcolepsy. Worse still, the dream is accruing more and more dreamers. So it is that I have gotten to know trash from all walks of life. There is even a fucking baby in the dream now. I fear that this oneiric convergence is approaching a singularity. By my estimation, humanity will share one collective dream within two months. We all will be sitting on the same hypnagogic, furry-tailed butt plug. This will no doubt spell the end of humanity, as everyone will be ensconced in a communal siesta unable to stir or live a waking life at all. Perhaps once the majority of humans have died those with the greatest endurance may awaken to a mostly dead world. It is not end of humanity that scares me, however. Rather, I am terrified by the prospect of this collective Borgesian nightmare to which we are all running. The thought of spending a relative eternity haunted by the maudlin machinations of teenagers is anathema to me. Furthermore, I cannot be sure what the geography of this dream will be. A psychomanteum of malformed tweets and half-assed fetishes? Were I a younger psychoanalyst, I might revel in this opportunity. I am old, though, and much too afraid of sharing a sex dream with my mom.
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
Friday, March 21, 2014
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
In Search of Lost Kibble
When they found the corpse it was not as expected. That is not to say it was a surprise. I had known Josh for a long time, since the third grade when he attached himself to my friend group and became a member through osmosis. He was a set-piece almost, an object without apparent function, but one who's absence was rarely noted yet always felt. I admired this ability as it set him against the scores of other social chameleons who through contrived style and persistent sycophancy insinuated themselves into their desired clique. Like a kitschy coffee table art book that no ones ever reads, Josh lived a charmed, hassle-free life. There were no real opinions about him and certainly no consensus, except for one thing. Josh was eminently murder-able.
It was not that Josh incited the latent bloodlust festering in our hearts. Rather, he was imbued with a profound aloofness like some clumsy species that evolved without fear of predation. He screamed extinction and we found ourselves the forlorn conservationists to his ungainly existence. So when news arrived that Josh's body had been found, our friends were proud that he had lasted as long as he did. However, we were deeply unsettled by the nature of his demise.
His blanched bones were found perched immaculately upon the toilet that he died, as if he sat in severe constipation more determined to pass a turd than foil his murderer. There was no flesh upon his body whatsoever and his skeleton retained the pose of his death despite the absence of any ligature. Without any blood or signs of an apparent struggle in the squalid hotel room, police initially thought Josh was a science classroom skeleton placed there by some high school goths. The dental records would eventually confirm that this skeleton was indeed Josh, but not before the investigators had posed with the body in lewd and unflattering ways. One detective even received a reprimand for posting a compromising photograph of the deceased on her Instagram in which Josh appeared to be doing a line of blow off her ass. His parents complained that cocaine does not look good in sepia.
Soon thereafter the detectives came to question my friends and me. They interrogated us bereaved with all the tact of a horny teenager first discovering a neighbor's porn stash. Grief was overcome by anger as the bumbling detectives groped their way to a number of possible conclusions, all of which were inconclusive and unsatisfying. One theory assumed our friend Lydia as the main suspect, citing a prior incident in which she had fucked her dead boyfriend. To this day she extols the virtues of rigamortis dick. Another hypothesis placed Josh at the center of a vast conspiracy involving the love child of Drake and Bette Midler. The official story, however, was that the incident was some sort of ritualistic murder carried out with fiendish exactitude by newly wed meth heads. Dissatisfied with both the process and conclusion of the investigation, several friends and I took it upon ourselves to find the truth.
Returning to the fatal locale, we happened upon a number of peculiar things. First, the room had an odoriferous miasma to it. The air was uncommonly thin and penetrating, as if the valence of the molecules held tiny penises instead of electrons and all those micro dicks were fucking our pores. Though rarefied, the atmosphere preserved a stench, some sweaty, suburban necrosis faint enough to pass as run of the mill motel stank. Second, Noah, our regular dungeon master who once created a Paris is Burning D&D campaign, discovered a sprig of pale fur. Identified by cops as belonging to the motel owner's cat, the hair seemed not at all feline, bearing an ethereal hoariness and almost abrasive coarseness. Confused, we sat upon the bed and made Lifetime style re-enactments of Josh's death. What could have kept him so still? Terror? Was he posing for a tasteless Vice article? Perhaps he had wanted to die all along?
As we brooded over his porcelain tomb, our theories began to grow more outlandish. Perhaps a dominatrix yeti was face-sitting on Josh and her caustic pussy had eroded him? Maybe he had been eviscerated by some futuristic ray gun? What if it was killer bees?! We were all terrified by killer bees. All this conjecturing unnerved us and the lack of a significant thesis darkened our hearts. Noah began to smoke and talk as if he were some grizzled detective ruined by an unsolved case. He mumbled about his ex-wife and his daughter who wouldn't return his calls. Noah was 17 and a virgin. Lydia seemed to be in a trance and droned that she saw the entire history of the motel room laid out before her. Laughing she described in lurid detail an aborted three way between Michelle Branch, Vanessa Carlton, and Macaulay Culkin's sentient pinkie ring. Feeling woozy and overwhelmed myself, I ushered my friends out of the hotel room and back to our respective homes.
That night I dreamed of Josh or rather many Joshes. He visited me as each female cast member of Twin Peaks. Laura Palmer Josh swung from a chandelier, Audrey Horn Josh prostrated before me with an empty roll of toilet paper, and Shelly Johnson Josh asked me to interpret text messages from a boy she met last night at a bar. I awoke to the flatulent unity of my mouth and asshole gasping for air. Immediately, I got dressed and went to Josh's house to look for more clues. Scouring his room, I found much to disturb me. There were some photos of the Spice Girls in which he photoshoped himself as the sixth member (alternately Institutional Racism Spice or Soda Stream Spice). The stand out creepiest, however, was a collection of hand-made clay figurines all shaped like tiny dogs. They were poorly crafted, but for their buttholes which had meticulous detail. A regular canine anal menagerie. Along with his journal, I took one of the figurines for evidence.
Together Noah, Lydia, Eric, and I poured over Josh's journal. A terse and laborious read edited as if it were meant to be submitted to Thought Catalog, Josh's journal conveyed a manic obsession with small dogs. Shifting from panegyric to twitter promotion, Josh heralded these tiny hounds as savior and humbled himself before them. We were disgusted to read and reread his fantasy of being carted around in a purse by a giant, bitchy chihuahua in pink heels. Despite the fetishistic revelry of the majority of its entries, Josh's journal occasionally belied a sense of bewilderment and dread. The entries became more and more chaotic toward the end, especially when referencing a hirsute "white man" with "ivory hair and black eyes". For Eric this confirmed the yeti dominatrix thesis. For the rest of us, however, it was another disconcerting element to a man we were only now finding out we hardly knew.
His journal made oblique mention of a place in the woods where "the dogs would dance" and it was there we directed our search. Outfitted with excessive quantities of trail mix and not an overabundance of Xanax, we waded into the slash pine forest with Josh's journal as our guide. We moved quickly like roadies fleeing a Taylor Swift mega tour. Around dusk we seemingly found the area indicated by the journal. It was not much. A shack even by hobo standards but ensconced within a series of concentric circles. Warily we approached and entered the shack. Within was a ring of couches all facing inward to a tiny dog bed at the center. Disarmed by the comfy setting, my companions and I began to loaf on the couches and munch on trail mix. We guessed as to the nature of this oddly ritualistic place. Lydia assumed it was a stoner hideout, noting that the couches were arranged in such a way as to facilitate bong passing. Ever incredulous, Eric developed the yeti dominatrix thesis further, positing that "dominatrices gotta chill too, bro." Noah withdrew into himself.
Finding no answers, we agreed to leave the place where "the dogs would dance." As we packed the remainder of our things, Noah exhorted us to listen. A soft yipping crept through the forest and into the shack. We sat and waited as the barking grew louder. Then, as if driven by the barking, the smell at the hotel began to fill the shack, though this time far more acrid. Noah, who was by far the most uneasy among us, began to insist that we leave. When we refused he stormed out. I pleaded with him and watched him fumble away like a recently awakened coma victim on a obstacle course. Returning to the couch, Lydia dolled out some Xanax to calm our nerves. Within minutes, however, Noah returned bleary eyed and gushing with more snot than all the preschoolers in Texas. He was raving. He claimed to have heard post 2000 No Doubt jams in the forest. He swore he saw the white man. Adding to the tension, Eric noted that it would be just like a hirsute white dude to listen to No Doubt.
As Eric rifled through the journal in the hopes of finding more information, I stared out the dingy window of the shack. In the distance I saw him, the white man. His pallid fur covered every inch of his face and hands. He wore a white suit, white pants, and a white belt to the side. Leaning up against a tree one might have mistaken him for a geriatric metal-core scenester. Terrified, I locked the shack door and demanded everyone pick up a blunt object. Huddled together on a couch facing the door and holding giant bags of trail mix, we awaited Josh's murderer. The barking had reached its peak along with the reek of putrefaction; the shack door began to shake. Then, all of the sudden, it stopped. The quiet rattle of a swinging door filled the room and in trotted a tiny white dog. The dog sauntered to the middle of the room and plopped down on the dog bed.
We sighed collectively and put down our weapons, all relieved near to the point of orgasm, beside Eric who made a comment about disliking tiny dogs. I walked over to the little pup which titled its head at me and licked the air. Its breath smelled vaguely of the miasma in the hotel but far less acute. Strangely assured I sat down on the nearest couch as my friends crowded around the fluffy intruder. I leaned back and breathed deeply, but with each breath I felt a mounting pain in my chest and deep ringing in my ear. I shook my head violently and awoke at the scene of Josh's murder. The air was asphyxiating in its rarity and choked with its stench. I felt weak and delirious. We were all sitting on the that same foul motel bed that would surely have looked like a Jackson Pollock of bodily fluid under black light. The scene was similar to how we had left it, except the dog was there. A wan and scruffy Eric petted the beast with a skeletal hand. He smiled and cooed as the dog slowly consumed him. I screamed, but my friends did not hear me.
I tried to stand up to escape the motel. My legs gave way and I fell. I awoke back in the hut, my friends still gathered around the dog. "This..." I said, "this...". I had forgotten what I meant to say. Lydia told me I looked tired and should lie down on one of the many couches. I agreed. We had been walking all day to get here. I lied down and felt a cool, wet breeze slither across my forehead.
It was not that Josh incited the latent bloodlust festering in our hearts. Rather, he was imbued with a profound aloofness like some clumsy species that evolved without fear of predation. He screamed extinction and we found ourselves the forlorn conservationists to his ungainly existence. So when news arrived that Josh's body had been found, our friends were proud that he had lasted as long as he did. However, we were deeply unsettled by the nature of his demise.
His blanched bones were found perched immaculately upon the toilet that he died, as if he sat in severe constipation more determined to pass a turd than foil his murderer. There was no flesh upon his body whatsoever and his skeleton retained the pose of his death despite the absence of any ligature. Without any blood or signs of an apparent struggle in the squalid hotel room, police initially thought Josh was a science classroom skeleton placed there by some high school goths. The dental records would eventually confirm that this skeleton was indeed Josh, but not before the investigators had posed with the body in lewd and unflattering ways. One detective even received a reprimand for posting a compromising photograph of the deceased on her Instagram in which Josh appeared to be doing a line of blow off her ass. His parents complained that cocaine does not look good in sepia.
Soon thereafter the detectives came to question my friends and me. They interrogated us bereaved with all the tact of a horny teenager first discovering a neighbor's porn stash. Grief was overcome by anger as the bumbling detectives groped their way to a number of possible conclusions, all of which were inconclusive and unsatisfying. One theory assumed our friend Lydia as the main suspect, citing a prior incident in which she had fucked her dead boyfriend. To this day she extols the virtues of rigamortis dick. Another hypothesis placed Josh at the center of a vast conspiracy involving the love child of Drake and Bette Midler. The official story, however, was that the incident was some sort of ritualistic murder carried out with fiendish exactitude by newly wed meth heads. Dissatisfied with both the process and conclusion of the investigation, several friends and I took it upon ourselves to find the truth.
Returning to the fatal locale, we happened upon a number of peculiar things. First, the room had an odoriferous miasma to it. The air was uncommonly thin and penetrating, as if the valence of the molecules held tiny penises instead of electrons and all those micro dicks were fucking our pores. Though rarefied, the atmosphere preserved a stench, some sweaty, suburban necrosis faint enough to pass as run of the mill motel stank. Second, Noah, our regular dungeon master who once created a Paris is Burning D&D campaign, discovered a sprig of pale fur. Identified by cops as belonging to the motel owner's cat, the hair seemed not at all feline, bearing an ethereal hoariness and almost abrasive coarseness. Confused, we sat upon the bed and made Lifetime style re-enactments of Josh's death. What could have kept him so still? Terror? Was he posing for a tasteless Vice article? Perhaps he had wanted to die all along?
As we brooded over his porcelain tomb, our theories began to grow more outlandish. Perhaps a dominatrix yeti was face-sitting on Josh and her caustic pussy had eroded him? Maybe he had been eviscerated by some futuristic ray gun? What if it was killer bees?! We were all terrified by killer bees. All this conjecturing unnerved us and the lack of a significant thesis darkened our hearts. Noah began to smoke and talk as if he were some grizzled detective ruined by an unsolved case. He mumbled about his ex-wife and his daughter who wouldn't return his calls. Noah was 17 and a virgin. Lydia seemed to be in a trance and droned that she saw the entire history of the motel room laid out before her. Laughing she described in lurid detail an aborted three way between Michelle Branch, Vanessa Carlton, and Macaulay Culkin's sentient pinkie ring. Feeling woozy and overwhelmed myself, I ushered my friends out of the hotel room and back to our respective homes.
That night I dreamed of Josh or rather many Joshes. He visited me as each female cast member of Twin Peaks. Laura Palmer Josh swung from a chandelier, Audrey Horn Josh prostrated before me with an empty roll of toilet paper, and Shelly Johnson Josh asked me to interpret text messages from a boy she met last night at a bar. I awoke to the flatulent unity of my mouth and asshole gasping for air. Immediately, I got dressed and went to Josh's house to look for more clues. Scouring his room, I found much to disturb me. There were some photos of the Spice Girls in which he photoshoped himself as the sixth member (alternately Institutional Racism Spice or Soda Stream Spice). The stand out creepiest, however, was a collection of hand-made clay figurines all shaped like tiny dogs. They were poorly crafted, but for their buttholes which had meticulous detail. A regular canine anal menagerie. Along with his journal, I took one of the figurines for evidence.
Together Noah, Lydia, Eric, and I poured over Josh's journal. A terse and laborious read edited as if it were meant to be submitted to Thought Catalog, Josh's journal conveyed a manic obsession with small dogs. Shifting from panegyric to twitter promotion, Josh heralded these tiny hounds as savior and humbled himself before them. We were disgusted to read and reread his fantasy of being carted around in a purse by a giant, bitchy chihuahua in pink heels. Despite the fetishistic revelry of the majority of its entries, Josh's journal occasionally belied a sense of bewilderment and dread. The entries became more and more chaotic toward the end, especially when referencing a hirsute "white man" with "ivory hair and black eyes". For Eric this confirmed the yeti dominatrix thesis. For the rest of us, however, it was another disconcerting element to a man we were only now finding out we hardly knew.
His journal made oblique mention of a place in the woods where "the dogs would dance" and it was there we directed our search. Outfitted with excessive quantities of trail mix and not an overabundance of Xanax, we waded into the slash pine forest with Josh's journal as our guide. We moved quickly like roadies fleeing a Taylor Swift mega tour. Around dusk we seemingly found the area indicated by the journal. It was not much. A shack even by hobo standards but ensconced within a series of concentric circles. Warily we approached and entered the shack. Within was a ring of couches all facing inward to a tiny dog bed at the center. Disarmed by the comfy setting, my companions and I began to loaf on the couches and munch on trail mix. We guessed as to the nature of this oddly ritualistic place. Lydia assumed it was a stoner hideout, noting that the couches were arranged in such a way as to facilitate bong passing. Ever incredulous, Eric developed the yeti dominatrix thesis further, positing that "dominatrices gotta chill too, bro." Noah withdrew into himself.
Finding no answers, we agreed to leave the place where "the dogs would dance." As we packed the remainder of our things, Noah exhorted us to listen. A soft yipping crept through the forest and into the shack. We sat and waited as the barking grew louder. Then, as if driven by the barking, the smell at the hotel began to fill the shack, though this time far more acrid. Noah, who was by far the most uneasy among us, began to insist that we leave. When we refused he stormed out. I pleaded with him and watched him fumble away like a recently awakened coma victim on a obstacle course. Returning to the couch, Lydia dolled out some Xanax to calm our nerves. Within minutes, however, Noah returned bleary eyed and gushing with more snot than all the preschoolers in Texas. He was raving. He claimed to have heard post 2000 No Doubt jams in the forest. He swore he saw the white man. Adding to the tension, Eric noted that it would be just like a hirsute white dude to listen to No Doubt.
As Eric rifled through the journal in the hopes of finding more information, I stared out the dingy window of the shack. In the distance I saw him, the white man. His pallid fur covered every inch of his face and hands. He wore a white suit, white pants, and a white belt to the side. Leaning up against a tree one might have mistaken him for a geriatric metal-core scenester. Terrified, I locked the shack door and demanded everyone pick up a blunt object. Huddled together on a couch facing the door and holding giant bags of trail mix, we awaited Josh's murderer. The barking had reached its peak along with the reek of putrefaction; the shack door began to shake. Then, all of the sudden, it stopped. The quiet rattle of a swinging door filled the room and in trotted a tiny white dog. The dog sauntered to the middle of the room and plopped down on the dog bed.
We sighed collectively and put down our weapons, all relieved near to the point of orgasm, beside Eric who made a comment about disliking tiny dogs. I walked over to the little pup which titled its head at me and licked the air. Its breath smelled vaguely of the miasma in the hotel but far less acute. Strangely assured I sat down on the nearest couch as my friends crowded around the fluffy intruder. I leaned back and breathed deeply, but with each breath I felt a mounting pain in my chest and deep ringing in my ear. I shook my head violently and awoke at the scene of Josh's murder. The air was asphyxiating in its rarity and choked with its stench. I felt weak and delirious. We were all sitting on the that same foul motel bed that would surely have looked like a Jackson Pollock of bodily fluid under black light. The scene was similar to how we had left it, except the dog was there. A wan and scruffy Eric petted the beast with a skeletal hand. He smiled and cooed as the dog slowly consumed him. I screamed, but my friends did not hear me.
I tried to stand up to escape the motel. My legs gave way and I fell. I awoke back in the hut, my friends still gathered around the dog. "This..." I said, "this...". I had forgotten what I meant to say. Lydia told me I looked tired and should lie down on one of the many couches. I agreed. We had been walking all day to get here. I lied down and felt a cool, wet breeze slither across my forehead.
Wednesday, January 29, 2014
The Florida Renaissance: Part 1 - Pull My Florida Finger
"In what fucked up universe would Florida assume supremacy over the entire earth?!" Was one of the more frequent questions running through the minds of those who by impudence or insolence were put to the alligator guillotine. There were other questions to be sure, such as "Am I living in a teen's spiteful LiveJournal post right now?" or "Didn't I move into a gated community to avoid this sort of thing?", but none so poignant as the first. The answers to the question of the soon-to-be-beheaded and the many more cranially privileged who came under the yolk of Florida arise from the land itself. Not from its geography, natural resources, or any other such rhetorical contrivance of the historian, but from a strange happenstance, a confluence of the mystical and the chemical, a fate bound to the swamp.
Florida's reputation during the opening decades of the 21st century was one of cultural isolation and endemic fucked-up-ness. An autobahn of auto-tuned cannibals, criminals, cranks, geriatrics and mock Civil War generals all bracketed by a fleet of mobile meth labs on the ground and a Camusian sun above. Its population was disparate and combative, a patchwork of Walgreen's parking lot refugees plagued by poor governance and a steady importation of madness. From North Korea to South Jersey, Florida bore an infamy as endless as the Ever Glades. One woman even joked that Florida was Australia's Australia. However, much like Carrie, Florida was about to turn the prom of 21st century life into a blazing inferno of plastic flamingos.
The year 2023 began just as any other with corporations colluding and butt fucking their way through our political institutions and into our hearts. Of greatest significance to the Florida Renaissance was the creation of the world's largest Xanax factory on the shores of lake Okeechobee. Tax payer funded and granted diplomatic immunity by Richelle Scott, the then governor of Florida and deranged offspring of former governor and Putin wannabe Rick Scott, the Xanax factory opened amid a series of mysterious deaths and a surfeit of Maroon 5 cover bands. Despite these ill omens and the presence of an impenetrable miasma surrounding the factory, few cared to investigate. If you've got leprosy, you probably don't care if you have scabies. Then, as if the land itself just got a prescription from a corrupt doctor, Florida swallowed the Xanax factory.
Sinkholes are a common occurrence in America's choad, but this one was all together startling. The Xanax factory (which was said to contain enough Alprazolam to sedate both Robin Williams and the Sun) sank instantaneously to an uncharted abyssal depth, drawing down with it the entire Okeechobee watershed and creating an interminable whirlpool at it's center. This redneck Charybdis abided no exploration being both too turbulent and too toxic. Concerns about it's growing girth and the contamination of the water supply were diverted by Richelle Scott's state-wide, cross-promotional music fest, Dubstep Stairway to 7-11, that sought to unite classic rock, dubstep, and jam bands for the dual purpose of snacking and amending the state constitution to allow corporations to adopt the adult population. With the populace of Florida awaiting the "drop", the land of Florida braced itself for the up-welling.
Changes were subtle at first. Native species began to grow larger than their normal size. The water turned a pharmaceutical blue. And the disposition of Floridians began to shift from dissociation and violence to uncommon, Dude-like chillness. The fabled institutions of old Florida, namely pill mills and bath salts mines, were slowly abandoned and converted to community recreation centers frequented by a zealous populace willing both to break dance and kill for their beloved institutions. Unnoticed by the rest of the nation, Florida underwent a metamorphosis that not even the hirsute love child of Ovid and Kafka could have imagined.
Of course, all would have been for nothing were it not for the indefatigable will of a woman. Cassandra Krusaphos was an alligator wrestler and a poet scrapping by in Tampa whilst buffeted by the injunctions to ambition all persons mired in their mid-twenties must endure. Bonded to Florida by love and history, she had long lamented it's self castration and envisioned an empire forged in the latent madness of the swamp. A cunning observer of the changes brought about by the Xanax whirlpool, Cassandra was perhaps the only one capable of wrestling the gator of history and prying open it's jaws...or butthole.
Cassandra began small by organizing disaffected people into creative collectives and promulgating poems proclaiming a new age...but this time without Enya. Her drive for demagoguery was matched by her insight for industry through which she realized the potential of her savage surroundings. Harnessing the mutations of natural species, Cassandra domesticated the now Bruce Vilanch sized Green Anole turning it into both work horse and cattle. Lizard meat became so popular that she spawned a chain of family-oriented restaurants called "Reptards" modeled after Ted Turner's buffalo grill (incidentally, Cassandra would later feed Ted Turner to her lizards). With a fleet of giant reptiles and cult of uninhibited artists, Cassandra founded her imperial city, Xanoplis, upon the banks of the benzo abyss. Cassandra, the poet queen and Marxist dino-rider, then set her sights upon Tallahassee.
Mounted upon a lizard and armed with the totally marketable skills of a Lit degree from a liberal arts college, Cassandra and her cohorts besieged the Wet 'n Wild water-park turned governor's palace in Tallahassee slaughtering politicians, lobbyists, and Richelle Scott. The coup was met with adulation by the public as Cassandra stood atop the pee and band aid filled rubble holding the head of the former governess. In a speech that would later be called "a 69th wave rad fem revision of the Gettysburg Address on shabu" Cassandra extolled the virtues of Florida and asserted its independence from the United States. Though West Virginia and New Jersey protested claiming that they would become the de facto laughing stocks of the US, the majority were in support of the defection. Thus Florida became a free nation and so embarked upon an era of political and cultural dominance that would change the world forever....
Florida's reputation during the opening decades of the 21st century was one of cultural isolation and endemic fucked-up-ness. An autobahn of auto-tuned cannibals, criminals, cranks, geriatrics and mock Civil War generals all bracketed by a fleet of mobile meth labs on the ground and a Camusian sun above. Its population was disparate and combative, a patchwork of Walgreen's parking lot refugees plagued by poor governance and a steady importation of madness. From North Korea to South Jersey, Florida bore an infamy as endless as the Ever Glades. One woman even joked that Florida was Australia's Australia. However, much like Carrie, Florida was about to turn the prom of 21st century life into a blazing inferno of plastic flamingos.
The year 2023 began just as any other with corporations colluding and butt fucking their way through our political institutions and into our hearts. Of greatest significance to the Florida Renaissance was the creation of the world's largest Xanax factory on the shores of lake Okeechobee. Tax payer funded and granted diplomatic immunity by Richelle Scott, the then governor of Florida and deranged offspring of former governor and Putin wannabe Rick Scott, the Xanax factory opened amid a series of mysterious deaths and a surfeit of Maroon 5 cover bands. Despite these ill omens and the presence of an impenetrable miasma surrounding the factory, few cared to investigate. If you've got leprosy, you probably don't care if you have scabies. Then, as if the land itself just got a prescription from a corrupt doctor, Florida swallowed the Xanax factory.
Sinkholes are a common occurrence in America's choad, but this one was all together startling. The Xanax factory (which was said to contain enough Alprazolam to sedate both Robin Williams and the Sun) sank instantaneously to an uncharted abyssal depth, drawing down with it the entire Okeechobee watershed and creating an interminable whirlpool at it's center. This redneck Charybdis abided no exploration being both too turbulent and too toxic. Concerns about it's growing girth and the contamination of the water supply were diverted by Richelle Scott's state-wide, cross-promotional music fest, Dubstep Stairway to 7-11, that sought to unite classic rock, dubstep, and jam bands for the dual purpose of snacking and amending the state constitution to allow corporations to adopt the adult population. With the populace of Florida awaiting the "drop", the land of Florida braced itself for the up-welling.
Changes were subtle at first. Native species began to grow larger than their normal size. The water turned a pharmaceutical blue. And the disposition of Floridians began to shift from dissociation and violence to uncommon, Dude-like chillness. The fabled institutions of old Florida, namely pill mills and bath salts mines, were slowly abandoned and converted to community recreation centers frequented by a zealous populace willing both to break dance and kill for their beloved institutions. Unnoticed by the rest of the nation, Florida underwent a metamorphosis that not even the hirsute love child of Ovid and Kafka could have imagined.
Of course, all would have been for nothing were it not for the indefatigable will of a woman. Cassandra Krusaphos was an alligator wrestler and a poet scrapping by in Tampa whilst buffeted by the injunctions to ambition all persons mired in their mid-twenties must endure. Bonded to Florida by love and history, she had long lamented it's self castration and envisioned an empire forged in the latent madness of the swamp. A cunning observer of the changes brought about by the Xanax whirlpool, Cassandra was perhaps the only one capable of wrestling the gator of history and prying open it's jaws...or butthole.
Cassandra began small by organizing disaffected people into creative collectives and promulgating poems proclaiming a new age...but this time without Enya. Her drive for demagoguery was matched by her insight for industry through which she realized the potential of her savage surroundings. Harnessing the mutations of natural species, Cassandra domesticated the now Bruce Vilanch sized Green Anole turning it into both work horse and cattle. Lizard meat became so popular that she spawned a chain of family-oriented restaurants called "Reptards" modeled after Ted Turner's buffalo grill (incidentally, Cassandra would later feed Ted Turner to her lizards). With a fleet of giant reptiles and cult of uninhibited artists, Cassandra founded her imperial city, Xanoplis, upon the banks of the benzo abyss. Cassandra, the poet queen and Marxist dino-rider, then set her sights upon Tallahassee.
Mounted upon a lizard and armed with the totally marketable skills of a Lit degree from a liberal arts college, Cassandra and her cohorts besieged the Wet 'n Wild water-park turned governor's palace in Tallahassee slaughtering politicians, lobbyists, and Richelle Scott. The coup was met with adulation by the public as Cassandra stood atop the pee and band aid filled rubble holding the head of the former governess. In a speech that would later be called "a 69th wave rad fem revision of the Gettysburg Address on shabu" Cassandra extolled the virtues of Florida and asserted its independence from the United States. Though West Virginia and New Jersey protested claiming that they would become the de facto laughing stocks of the US, the majority were in support of the defection. Thus Florida became a free nation and so embarked upon an era of political and cultural dominance that would change the world forever....
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