Rise of EvilMammoth

Making John McCain the President is like giving Grandpa the remote control to the VCR. Brian Milsap

I think that’s a damn good quote. It’s catchy and true, and I’m friends with the man who said it. All good reasons that it’s been stuck in my head for a week or two.

There is a sad lining to these words, though, because the truth is that neither Obama nor McCain have the slightest idea how to fix this economy. They can debate about foreign policy all they want. Those decisions will be made by nameless white men behind a massive smokescreen that, as far as I can tell, has been hiding this country’s policy rats since the establishment of the FBI. And it will work the same way with the economy.

The president is and always has been an overstated role in the government. Anyone who’s taken a high school level government class knows that much, and all the empty promises rocketing out of both candidates” mouths will fall upon barren soil. Every. Single. One. The Commander in Chief is nothing more than a glorified notary public–an executive pen wielder and patsy for those who make the real decisions. Obama might not realize this now, still drunk on his rockstar status, though it has been significantly eroded since this crazy horseshit merry-go-round started almost two years ago, but he is going to be a shill when he takes office. The special interests, Democratic party heavies, and a host of bitter rivals on Capitol Hill will make sure of that. Hell. Tony Rezko might even make a few calls from his prison cell (READ: Caribeean resort) just to make sure all is going according to plan.

And it will be.

Sure. He doesn’t know the first thing about the economy. Neither does John McCain. But with all the pitfalls that stand in the way of his [Obama's] success, there isn’t a whole lot to worry about, especially not since the Dow’s staggering losses just before the markets closed today. The stock market has lost almost 40% of its value in one year, and most of us, I think, should feel that we’re closing in on the bottom. It can’t get much worse. The only things left to lose are our jobs.

Perhaps I’m overstating the severity of the situation, but I can’t help feeling that this is the necessary medicine for years of adherence to free market capitalism, which really means very simply that a lack of oversight and general ignorance on the part of everyday Americans will allow moneymen and executives on Wall Street to plunder the piggy bank on a noational scale and bring about a dangerous, destabilizing misappropriation of wealth. Trickle down economics has failed. Once and for all. Let us never consider it again.

What really and truly confuses me, though, is what people hear from Barack Obama that sounds much different from the rest of the politicians. His policies certainly weren’t much different from Hillary Clinton’s, and anyone who watched even one of those lame, free-for-all Democratic primary debates knows that Obama edged her out solely on the basis of likability. But seriously. I wouldn’t be railing on Obama if he hadn’t sold himself as the New Hope, the man with spare Change in his pocket. He could have either surprised me by following through on his word, or he could have spared me the letdown. Then again, I was foolish to have the small modicum of hope that I did when this whole thing started out.

In the last month, I’ve heard negative campaigning, political attack ads, and numerous vagaries meant to parry inconvenient lines of questioning. I’ve heard it from both candidates, and the election is now as mundane as any I’ve seen. Same. Old. Shit.

And it makes me wonder—yes, we’re coming upon my hidden jist here–why people are so reticent to support a third-party or independent candidate. There is the argument that you’re throwing a vote away, right into the river or Lake Michigan if you’re from Chicago. What if, though, people voted for the candidate they truly wanted—the one that hits all the right points and tickles all those fuzzy places inside, whatever they may be and whichever way they might lean. You’d have at least four major candidates, and truth is the only reason we don’t is that the whole “throwing your vote away” hogwash reinstills the impossibility.

It works just like our current economic crisis. People panic, and they’re afraid. They sell their stocks and make a bad situation worse. Except this time, we’re not selling our stocks. We’re selling off (cheaply) our free will and our power to make our own decisions. We’ve let ourselves be pigeonholed into the D’s and R’s that appear next to our politicians’ names, and we are paying for it every single day.

That’s why the Iraq War happened. It’s why the stock market crashed today. It’s why we feel helpless and complain that our voices are not heard in our state and national capitals. It’s because we don’t hold anyone accountable for what they do. We just bitch and moan while they do it, and the biggest change most of us ever think to make is switching from D to R or vice versa as if it would do any good.

 

This article first appeared on They Will Rise Again from the Tundra at SlothJockey.com.

Directed by: Alex Gibney
Narrated by: Johnny Depp
Interviewed: Sonny Barger, Angela Berliner, Douglas Brinkley, Pat Buchanan, Jimmy Buffet, Pat Caddell, Jimmy Carter, Tim Crouse, Gary Hart, George McGovern, Ralph Steadman, Anita Thompson, Juan Thompson, Jann Wenner, Tom Wolfe, Sondi Wright

 

All political power comes from the barrel of either guns, pussy, or opium pipes, and people seem to like it that way. Hunter S. Thompson

Let's get one thing straight. There will never be another Hunter S. Thompson.

The conditions that allowed a journalist like him to operate in the 1960s and '70s simply do not exist in our modern political and social climates. No Acid Wave. No Free Love. No unhinged generation of revolutionaries to frighten and terrorize the noble classes. A political intellect like Thompson's probably only comes around once in a century anyway, and the next felonious, drug-addled luminary with enough balls to march on the political process in any significant way will likely be silenced in the zygotic stages of his/her career or else be doomed to the polluted wastes of the blogosphere.

So have we fallen.

Alex Gibney's documentary Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (2008) concentrates mainly on Hunter's best and most active years when he was able to tap existing political resources as well as those of Jann Wenner, the Editor of Rolling Stone who made Hunter the head of the National Affairs Desk. From Hell's Angels to Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72, Gibney collects the testimonials of prominent figures in Thompson's life and delves into the political and social backdrops of an era marked by revolution, drugs, and the Vietnam Conflict.

For the obsessed fan—for those admirers writing regular correspondence to Anita Thompson to finally release and publish Prince Jellyfish, a long-shelved Hunter Thompson tome that remains to be seen (presumably) by anyone other than Thompson's personal biographer Douglas Brinkley—Gonzo provides an admirable of rare footage from Hunter's appearance on radio programs and talk shows, some discreet phone conversations between him and his mistresses, and a behind-the-scenes look at Thompson's nearly successful campaign for Sheriff of Aspen County in 1970. Though it parses some footage from a few other documentaries about Thompson (Breakfast with Hunter (2003) and Fear and Loathing in Gonzovision (1978)), most of the insights provided by Gonzo are pretty fresh even for aficionados.

There is a sense at the beginning of the film, however, that Alex Gibney was about to screw the pooch with this one. With Johnny Depp's droning recitations of selections from Hunter S. Thompson's early work playing over staged footage of a man riding a motorcycle and some scene transitions marred by especially shitty kaleidoscope shots, it momentarily appears that the documentary would be better suited for daytime airings on the History Channel, and it isn't until Gibney gets a few testimonials under his belt that the film corrects its course and takes the content head on.

What follows represents something the subject of Hunter S. Thompson rarely receives: an honest, in-depth look at his legacy as a massive literary character, but more importantly, as a person.

The most compelling interview comes from Thompson's first wife, Sondi Wright, who was present for the early rage-filled years when Hunter was cutting his teeth in the journalism world. Through her, we get a glimpse into his infidelity and his craziness, and she, perhaps, is the one person since his suicide to call him cowardly for biting the Big Bullet in an era where his voice and tenacity are once again needed. Of all the interviewed celebrities, personal friends , and politicians, she provides the most candid, personal, and realistic portrayal of her ex-husband as a flawed and somewhat fragile human being, only part the juggernaut portrayed in his own books as well as derivative films and documentaries produced following the apex of his career.

That being said, almost all the commentary provides valuable insight into the man, from Jimmy Carter to Jann Wenner to Juan Thompson, Hunter's son. Pat Buchanan gets his licks in as well, having been the brunt of much of Thompson's ire throughout the years, and fans with an esoteric knowledge of his work will appreciate the commentary from some of Thompson's recurring characters and Woody Creek friends like the Sheriff of Aspen County.

As has been the general rule since Terry Gilliam's masterful adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was released in 1998, Johnny Depp once again plays a prominent role in this documentary, providing the voice for selections from Hunter Thompson's written work and appearing in transitional shots holding a .357 Magnum and reading from the books. Rolling Stone gave Depp a column in their memorial issue shortly after Hunter's suicide, and he appears in numerous short subjects and documentaries reading from Hunter's personal letters. It seems as if we cannot have a conversation about Hunter S. Thompson without cashing in on Johnny Depp's star value, though I will give Gibney credit for not actually interviewing him about the time he spent living in Hunter's basement in preparation for Fear and Loathing. The point was to concentrate on Thompson's formative/prolific years, and Gibney manages to stick to the subject more or less as strictly as possible. Besides, if you really want to split hairs, Bill Murray's portrayal of Thompson in Where the Buffalo Roam (1980) is just as good as Depp's, if not better in many ways.

As a frothing, maniacal fan, I've read Thompson's entire body of work save for the end of Hell's Angels and much of The Proud Highway (a volume of his personal correspondence). I'll probably knock those out before long. However, I would have liked some information on the quieter years as well as some attention given to Generation of Swine and Better Than Sex, both enjoyable and intermittently brilliant works focusing on the Iran Contra scandal and aspects of Bill Clinton's presidency, respectively. After all, Thompson didn't really lose his edge completely until he began writing Hey Rube for ESPN.com. Even his last major work Kingdom of Fear, while primarily retrospective and a partial rehashing of previous stories, was worth a read, if a heart wrenching, depressing one.

Perhaps those are worth a follow-up.

All in all, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson is a satisfying documentary and a film to be added to the required reading list for any Hunter S. Thompson fan as well as for those who might not have found his writing all that accessible in the past but are nonetheless interested.

This article was first published on SlothJockey.com.

BOOKS BY HUNTER S. THOMPSON

Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (1966, non-fiction)

Sarah Palin is the new savior of the Republican Party. No one can say why or list any significant traits that set her apart from a thick roster of conservative heavies who most likely would have turned down John McCain's request to assume the Vice Presidential nomination if it were offered, and there's a very good reason. Her biggest and only attribute in this election is her vagina.

Perhaps that is a crude statement to make the night after Palin delivered a high-volume speech lacking anything approaching substance, but it's certainly no more crude than McCain adding her to his ticket based on no other prerequisite than her reproductive anatomy. Don't get me wrong. The move makes good political sense as a legion of disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters wades through Barack Obama's ill-described fairy tales, and McCain has hit the nail on the head. His only hope of winning rests in more than corralling a decent number of independent voters. He absolutely must win over former Clinton supporters if he has even a fleeting chance at taking the November election away from Obama.

I'm not trying to say John McCain should have picked a man, nor am I implying that Sarah Palin won't adequately fulfill her role as Vice President because she's a woman. Quite the contrary, if nothing else about the last year and a half of political posturing pleases me, I remain pleasantly surprised that the people of this country were willing to consider both a woman and a black man as viable candidates for the highest office in the land (besides those offices we haven't heard about yet). It speaks to a level of progress I sincerely didn't believe had taken place since the 1960s, at least not to an extent that would allow one of those candidates to march all the way to a presidential nomination.

No. Palin simply doesn't seem to have any qualifications. Sure, she was the mayor of a small town of about 9,000 people, and yes, she is the governor of Alaska. But so what? If the depth of Palin's political prowess is limited to the skin deep swill she dished out last night, it might be safe to suggest we ship her off to a special school where she might be of more use spooning non-toxic glue into her mouth.

Even Joe Biden acknowledged her as a formidable opponent, someone who might be a threat to him in the upcoming debates, and if Biden is as smart as he may or may not be, he said this out of feigned respect for a politician with little ground to stand on. What was hailed as a rousing, powerful speech by Palin was really nothing more than a series of punchlines, my favorite being, "We tend to prefer candidates who don't talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco." That's good stuff, and whoever wrote her speech should get a raise for that line.

Palin's predictable hammering on the major Republican topics like high taxes, big government, and bringing old-world conservatism back to Washington can be readily enough dismissed as run-of-the-mill bullshit, brainless hogwash when one contemplates the brazenness it must take to pretend that Republican administrations don't notoriously act in direct contradiction with conservative values as they have been defined since the 1800s. Republican administrations have lowered taxes (yes, they're not lying about that) and created mountains of debt in doing so. They've actively increased restrictive laws and negated the old states' rights theories that were once the hallmark of true conservatism. Take the fight to illegalize abortion, the drug war, and a litany of laws meant to control the social whims of—for the most part—otherwise peaceful people who simply don't buy into the concept of morality as it is defined by the Christian religion. Make no mistake. The Republican Party of today is much more about control than they might let on.

I digress.

Palin said one thing that particularly irked me. She spouted some nonsense about having taken on the oil companies and being a trademark opponent of the Big Oil lobby, which is exactly why she stated her support of offshore drilling (as well as the opening of ANWR) to cries of "Drill, baby, drill!" Is there anything more to be said about such a blatant lie? About such an obvious attempt to whip poor, misguided voters into a frenzy? And all it took was a nobody governor from Alaska.

Make no mistake, folks. The time has come in this campaign where anything goes. Biden has the space to say Sarah Palin's pregnant teen daughter is off limits because he knows the media will do a swell job of prodding all the necessary soft spots, but other than that, we've hit the home stretch. McCain and Obama are already taking dumb jabs at one another while proclaiming to carry the frosted winds of Change beneath their wings. For being the election of change, things are looking pretty familiar at this point.

Barack Obama is going to tear the White House down by its foundation. Sarah Palin is going to memorize every country on the planet in alphabetical order. John McCain is going to take a napalm Q-tip to earmarks, and Joe Biden is going to shatter his insider connections now that he's latched onto Obama's teat.

Hell yes. Things are going to be different this year, goddammit.

 

This article originally appeared in I Don't Approve of You or Your Lifestyle on SlothJockey.com

Yes, it's true. Back from the void and lumbering like some mad nightmare from the darkness.

But it's only for a minute, my chums. I left this place ages ago because it had been run over by spammers, scientologists, and sociopaths. Forgive my bluntness as I will at least spare you my awkward testimonials.

That being said, I have started a website with a couple friends of mine. I oversee the writing department, for the most part, though the three of us founders post on a whim, and I refuse to enact my editorial will over my co-conspirators.

All others, though, shall feel the Paw or the Tusk if your offenses warrant such a thing.

Please come take a look if you'd fancy it. I may be found at www.slothjockey.com. My new contact information can be found on the site (I use the Evil Mammoth moniker here as well) if any of you might be interested in submitting.

You might notice some drawings published by TBlog's very own Jongleur.

And, of course, being the contemptible egomaniacal ass that I am, you are free to peruse my own missives penned for the sole purpose of poisoning the collective consciousness.

...back to the Darkness.

I'll be lurking.

Yes, it's true. Back from the void and lumbering like some mad nightmare from the darkness.

But it's only for a minute, my chums. I left this place ages ago because it had been run over by spammers, scientologists, and sociopaths. Forgive my bluntness as I will at least spare you my awkward testimonials.

That being said, I have started a website with a couple friends of mine. I oversee the writing department, for the most part, though the three of us founders post on a whim, and I refuse to enact my editorial will over my co-conspirators.

All others, though, shall feel the Paw or the Tusk if your offenses warrant such a thing.

Please come take a look if you'd fancy it. I may be found at www.slothjockey.com. My new contact information can be found on the site (I use the Evil Mammoth moniker here as well) if any of you might be interested in submitting.

You might notice some drawings published by TBlog's very own Jongleur.

And, of course, being the contemptible egomaniacal ass that I am, you are free to peruse my own missives penned for the sole purpose of poisoning the collective consciousness.

...back to the Darkness.

I'll be lurking.

Well...I'm in the business of memorializing the journey to Valhalla once again. The House of Strange Noises, my recently former place of residence, is down two animals.

The first, an Australian shepherd named Corky. A creaky old thing of 17 years with brilliant white cataracts and a propensity for getting stuck under the couch at nights. His helpless wails and arthritic shuffle finally brought to light an obvious yet painful answer that demanding my close friend's acceptance, and in the late hours of last week, Corky received a mercy injection and went on to meet his fathers in the Great Hall. He is most likely feeling much better after having been plied with ripe meat and as much mead as his now ulcerless stomach could accommodate. It is a long-awaited, long-dreaded fare-thee-well I must extend to him with best wishes attached and similar remembrances.

The second is for my cat, Desdemona, the cleverest little cunt to ever roam the Chicago suburbs. She was found last night lying dead in a nearby cemetery, not mangled by a sadistic predator but bluntly done in by the treads of a designer tire as the first nips of autumn crept into the air. How long she lay dying after collapsing in the graveyard, I can't say, but I hope she passed quickly and without a great deal of pain.

Walls had never kept her well, and it was only a matter of time until she met with the business end of the outside world. The one year she roamed this earth was one without the fardel of domestication weighing her spirit. Lord knows, we tried to talk sense into her, but she refused to remain anything but feral until the end and must be respected and loved for it.

She was the only animal I could ever call my own, and perhaps I erred in bestowing upon her a name that could not escape the fate attached to it. For this, I apologize.

Sleep well the both of you.

We are confronted primarily with a moral issue… whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.  John F. Kennedy

Well. It looks like my poll, ill-conceived and vague as it was, proved to be a spectacular flop. Only three people other than myself voted.

C'est la vie and good riddance. If polling has been confirmed as anything in recent years, it is as an ineffective means of gaging popular sentiment, which bodes ill for statistic junkies like me who get off on seeing row upon row of percentages and demographic tallies detailing anything from batting averages to health pandemics and constituent support for brainless political toadies. The results are usually depressing anyway, especially so for someone who is a firm believer that They will never tell the general public how bad it really is.

For instance, let's say Gallup released a poll indicating that 50% of people participating in a telephone survey said that gay marriage should remain illegal. One could conceivably imagine that the figure would approach 75% if the same cross-section of polled citizens were asked to put the pen to paper and actually draft a binding document in favor of legalizing the institution. Furthermore, a realist should probably assume that the same initial 50% opposed to same-sex unions also support ritual torture and execution of homosexuals as well as renewing the myriad anti-sodomy laws dating back to the 1700s that would effectively outlaw homosexual activity altogether. Don't kid yourself. The Supreme Court only just declared such laws unconstitutional with their decision regarding Lawrence v. Texas in 2003, and provided the opportunity, a good number of patriotic Americans would support Gerald Allen's proposed 2004 ban on gay arts .

Remember, folks. This is the same Land of the Free that had "colored" drinking fountains and bathrooms not so long ago. It is the same country that corralled every Japanese-American they could find and threw them into internment camps for the duration of World War II. There seems to be some inherent malfunction in the American brain unable to connect the very palpable definition of liberty with usage of the word itself. Our current civil rights crisis is no different. It too can be attributed to this faulty wiring and the strange, endemic notion in the United States that freedom is achieved only through its constant defense, a strategy that entails occupation, penetrative surveillance, social control, and constant war.

I can remember first coming into any sort of societal/political consciousness believing the bold lies about Free Press and preserved civil liberties--thinking these notions were more or less upheld in modern times--and suffering for a while under the pretense that America was a beacon for social change.  It seemed to me that our society maintained a fluidity in the latter part of the twentieth century as well as a sense of responsibility to those disaffected by institutional prejudices.  One needn't do so much as use a magnifying glass to identify the blatant cracks in such logic.  Conventional myths propagated by the government and major media outlets exist only to instill illusions of meaningful dissent and personal freedom when, as the matter stands, they are simply nuts and bolts in the political machine.  These institutions serve one primary purpose:  to maintain the status quo.

In reality, change is a long and painful process during which the marginalized suffer on spikes and hope for a fortuitous fluke, a glitch in the Great Design.

To say the continued discrimination of homosexuals in this country is primarily due to the infiltration of our political system by religious fanaticism would be short-sighted.  It might be true in large part, but the bias, while more prevalent among moralists, spreads across all social strata.  Southern Baptists and proclaimed agnostics alike will grow squeamish at the thought of two gay men or women setting up house in a quiet suburb and attempting to lead a normal life.  All the more saddening, perhaps, is that even people in favor of gay rights often fall back when it comes to nomenclature.  Civil Unions are in, but gay marriage is as out as it ever was.  No one likes to use the M-word, and if homosexual partnerships are established one day as legal and binding--in other words, as marriages--calling them Civil Unions would still be an act of discrimination, an inherent proclamation and utterance that something is less than full-fledged.

The fact that there is debate at all is shameful, in my book.  Here we are, a preachy juggernaut constantly yammering on about progress and world leadership without a clue as to what either of those terms mean, unable to grasp the concept of tolerance even in the infancy of a new century that should have been ushered in with bolstered overtones of acceptance.  Even now, the United States has made regrettably few strides toward evening the field, and such stubbornness has led to American Citizens, members of We The People like anybody else, being treated as something outside of legitimate.  Many have been forced into the closet, sent to behavioral camps, and all in all, psychologically tortured because of something as innocuous as sexual orientation.

Maybe we've gotten one step past Selma, but if it weren't for a modicum of good luck, we'd be seeing another cross-section of the public plastered to the pavement by water from fire hoses paid for by their own tax dollars.

I was born for this; I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead.  Charles Bukowski

People seldom do what they believe in.  They do what is convenient, then repent.  Bob Dylan

Fucking maintain, goddammit.  Stop this confounded shuddering.  These panic attacks.  The realization hits with full force in the morning like an ocean crashing down upon you.

Don't let the nervous breakdown win, no matter how many times you glance out the window and see your own blood-spattered corpse lying prostrate on the asphalt.  It's best not to look anyway lest the sight becomes too much for your little, diseased heart to bear.  Identity crises are a bitch, young man.  They strike without warning, but the incubation period is actually quite long.  The seeds were planted a long time ago, and soon enough, you retreat into your head and trace over the slow mutations that led up to this point--this horrible transformation into something you had always considered not only an enemy but a malignant tumor.

Shouldn't you have noticed it years ago?  A little money goes a long way toward compromising a grounded sense of perspective and sacrificing it to the Gods of Convenience as well as that accursed Scavenger Bird, who is probably laughing his ass off right now in one of his many cliff-side palaces and being attended by a harem of fertile demi-goddesses with unquenchable avian fetishes.  He's had this life for eons, and now you are coming into a frightening approximation of it.

Is it greed or stupidity?  Is it disassociation?  Questions.  An idiot's questions, posed only to distract from the inalienable truth:  that you have unwittingly and almost spontaneously buried a part of yourself.  You felt it in the morning, choking back the welling sadness.  No.  Not sadness.  Crippling woe, the feeling of dissolution and a numbness to those passions that still fueled you a few days ago.  What to do when the fire goes out and the hearth grows cold?  When your limbs quiver with a new gravity that will inevitably mutilate you, mold you, twist you into something you wanted to avoid at all costs?  What to do when you look in the mirror and see the Enemy?  You wonder if you'll ever get it back, screaming, "Yes, goddammit!!" with another answer nestled in your brain, whispering. 

The very powerful, after all, speak softly.  Always have.

Fuck.  You feel as if you've aged twenty years in a day, and if nothing else, your inability to use anything but tired clichés must hint at the severed connections.  The slow and ugly death that once gave you purpose has turned into a stinking rot.  Terminal.  Spiritually fatal.  You are groping now for an anchor point.  Some sliver to hold on to even though all the things you once possessed you vowed never to abandon.  And now this.  You fall quickly into Limbo and Waking Death.  Where will you stand when humble earth falls away from beneath your feet and is replaced by a vast marble vanity polished against the teeth and bones of unfortunates?

The gig is up, son.  You burnt out, and now you think you can play the Game.  But the game plays you.  It has already won the critical victory, broken the perimeter.  Slit the throats of your faithful sentries and night watchmen you trained yourself all those years ago to preserve the dirt under your fingernails and allow the organic wasting of your body to continued unabated.  And now, there is nothing more left to do but try to stand as this new foe festers within or just end it all by obliterating the mainframe.  It's your choice.

Or you can keep your wits and attempt to repel delusion and dilution at every turn in the minuscule hope that you might be able to retain some of your old spiritual skeleton.  Not impossible.  Not out of the question.  No.

There is always some hope, and perhaps parts of this fog will lift and level...balance your polarized reactions from last night with those of this morning.  Must be a chance.  Anything.  At all.

Jesus Fucking H. Christ.  Take your Fire back. 

It's been a good long while since I've written something new and even longer since I've said anything of relevance. The past couple of weeks have been confusing to say the least, and I feel the sinister vibrations of an impending crash. Indeed. My boss god, the Scavenger Bird, is screeching somewhere in the distance. He feels the swell too, but I can't seem to gauge how far off he is. His ethereal shrieks echo off the canyon walls with increasing ferocity, compounding one another in a great cacophony of malicious hunger. The din has become unbearable, and there is no telling how soon I will be thrust unwillingly into fallout. The tides are marked with uncertainty and peril, despair.

But what brought all this on?

Monticello Gelatini, my old friend, was married on Saturday, a ceremony to which I bore witness with an odd contentment and a marked lack of the cynicism that normally taints my enjoyment of such ceremonies. Funerals and weddings have, for the most part, struck me as predominantly dishonest events, but I suppose that, every now and then, confluence rules the day. It is rare but certainly not non-existent. I am thankful, at least, to have been afforded the momentary respite of the past weekend before the Scavenger Bird finally arrives, for I will need fortitude to combat the fears of mine that will become realized, I think, before very long. The recent spiritual erosion has been unmistakable, and divergence might just prove unavoidable barring some evil arrangement with the cosmos I cannot promise to make.

All the warning signs are here, though. These bedraggled horsemen of a lesser apocalypse. On a personal level, if only slightly more. Hell. Dick Cheney assumed the duties of the President for two hours during this past week, a fact to which I was blissfully ignorant during the matrimonial festivities. If I had been aware, the weekend might not have represented the sanctuary that it did. Hearing the priest give the Benediction might have sent me into a frothing, mad tailspin. I would have been prompted by powers greater than my own to desecrate the Eucharist and drive a sword into the Christ's wooden heart, cupping his blood in my hands and gulping it down with the fervor of spiritual greed. Of course, none of that is true, but when the ground under my feet feels unstable, I am prone to flights of violent, irresponsible fantasy for no other reason than that it provides an effective counterpoint to anticipated sadness. The loudest men are also the softest, in a way. The most unsure of their certain future.

Damn it to hell. The words aren't flowing. I've spent too much time this weekend sucking on booze and nostalgia to be of any use to myself at the moment. Ha! You heard me, you filthy bastards. Myself.

Did you really think I was doing this for you?

These screeches from the Bird are getting louder, and I've spent too much of my life being a pushover not to stroke my ego a bit before the end. If karma has anything to say about it, I'll be sent back as a retarded platypus for bowing to hubris during the final moments of my former life. Then again, the gods have studied me well enough to know that I would be perfectly happy as a retarded platypus, so they'll have to come up with something truly heinous if they want their petty revenge. I don't know. Maybe a Deaf-Mute-Paraplegic Genius or the President of the United States of America.

This Scavenger Bird of mine is fucking scumbag.

For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.  Hunter S. Thompson

I remember screaming, "Follow the Pink Elephants!" Normally, such an outburst would have been the product of old-school tomfoolery or severe dementia on my part, but this time, there were, in fact, Pink Elephants promenading down the street harassing people - mostly tourists. And yes, who in their right mind wouldn't follow these things? They were clearly superior beings to ourselves. We would have been idiots to resist.

So we tagged along.

Amsterdam is a confusing city, to say the least, and very little of it has to do with being stoned for most of the time. The layout of the town is based on its many canals, which are arranged as a series of concentric circles. It remains the only major European city besides Venice that is almost entirely navigable by boat. Oddly enough, the only people on the water are sucker tourists with rented paddleboats (like the one we had). The streets wind, and people piss in public. All in all, travel presents no small challenge, and this time, we were on foot. Good god.

But there was no turning back. We were sufficiently lost, and eventually, the Pink Elephants led us all the way from Liedseplein and the Hotel de Paris to the Red Light District. I should have known those elephants. They rang a bell when I saw them, which might be why I was so keen on following them into this diseased pit of legal prostitution and Live Sex Shows - the latter being the primary form of entertainment for which our elephants were representatives. Those bastards from Theatre Casa Rosso almost dragged my counterparts and me in there. If we hadn't have been on the last leg of our European Excursion and woefully out of money, we probably would have spent the night watching young, enslaved Asian girls performing fellatio on prominent Dutch businessmen. I cannot imagine the horror.

But let me tell you, folks. I had heard about Amsterdam's Red Light District many times before, and no account of lechery had ever surprised or startled me. It seemed natural that the Dutch would act in such a way, and rightfully so. Holland is, after all, a Land of Jabbering Maniacs. It is where I coined the phrase.

I was wrong to be so nonchalant. Not two minutes into our exploration of the city's seedy overbelly, we saw two thirteen-year-old kids bartering with a prostitute. It was clear they were getting nowhere with her, and we stopped to laugh and take bets from passers-by. Money plays, but none played that night. Not one person took us up on the offer, and the kids were sent home to deal with their budding sexualities alone - or possibly together. I turned around and looked at the window where I'd seen a hooker oblige one of her customers, having led him slowly behind her curtain while yammering on about Rough Sex in her harsh Viking tongue. This had happened five, maybe ten minutes before, and already she was back in the window fixing up her makeup and waiting for the next Johnnie to come along.

She saw me looking at her from across the way and beckoned. Hookers are not shy in Amsterdam. They will offer you FFFM action for half-price (they did). Of course, the catch is that you will never really know the full price in the first place, and by the time the blood gets back into your brain, you've been swindled into contracting god-knows-how-much expensive Cockrot from women named Olga. (They are all named Olga, by the way.) Chlamydia Jane, indeed.

I never had the balls to barter with a hooker, though, and neither did my associates. I didn't have any intention of partaking myself, but it seemed a necessary novelty - a mental souvenir to hold onto for when I had grandkids or something. At the very least, it would have made an amusing story, but I don't have such a tale to spin. For now, we're going to the Dollar Menu Aisle.

The hookers are arranged curiously. Along the main drag are most of the attractive prostitutes, windows lined in purple and blue*. They are of all nationalities and descents but are predominantly fair-haired with a good number of Asian beauties that send money back to their families in the homeland. In fact, cameras are not allowed anywhere in the area. The last person who snapped a picture of an Asian hooker was run down by the manager and beaten in the streets. Word has it she was a rival prostitute looking to shame the competition by sending Mommy and Daddy some lewd shots of their daughter rubbing her pussy for pedophilic textile entrepreneurs from Brussels. Amsterdam is a rough town, and the hookers are near the top of the food chain - all things considered.

But we were talking about the Dollar Menu Aisle, weren't we? It is a curious facet of the District, to be sure. Like I said, the beautiful girls are on the main drag, but adjacent to the major thoroughfare are a set of small alleyways. These are more secluded and are bathed in neon purple just like the strip. They act as tributaries to the Good Stuff, but the road to the Good Stuff is lined with Discount Items. Alleyway girls are either heinously overweight or look like they've been mauled by a drunken hippo, and they are oddly arrange according to their race. Any tourist looking for exotic cuisine can find it in a very categorical and organized fashion, and, in these alleyway Flesh Boutiques, some of the girls flash their unapologetically lopsided tits, an action that has been outlawed in public but is overlooked as long as it doesn't occur on the family friendly Main Drag.

Absolute madness, and, in an otherwise curiously silent city, the Red Light District is one giant din. It is the melting pot of town where people from all races, creeds, and nations commingle to browse for Hot Sex. The Irish seem particularly fond of the area.

Truth be told, I was horrified - not on a moral or principle level, but on a purely hygienic one. I am a mild-to-moderate hypochondriac, after all. Moreso than that, though, the entire scene might have been the most foreign, unexplainable thing I've ever seen in all my travels. It was like a raging carnival for the Sordid and Lonely, and when these two things are let loose, there is nowhere for them to go but toward the Insane. It is easy to find your way there as well. The dirtier the streets, the closer you are to the Main Attraction.

I didn't recover from the shock of it all until the next evening when we smoked the last of our hash, which finally stilled my shuddering nervous system and entrenched in me the nagging feeling that I mustn't ever trust strangely-colored pachyderms again.
 

*   I have heard rumors that blue windows identified hermaphroditic prostitutes, and although I am reluctant to believe such a thing, I was willing to admit to ogling some of the "women" in blue. My associates are, to this day, predisposed to denying such potential hazards to their reputations as Men.

I said I would never work in an office, and I've been working in one for just over two years.

I said I would never take a job offered by one of my family members, and I did.

I said I would never become a father, and at approximately eleven o'clock in the morning I received a phone call informing me that my beloved cat, Desdemona, gave birth to three healthy kittens in a cardboard box and was hunkered down in my housemate's bedroom cleaning them with her tongue.

I have received no status reports since that time, but the entire ordeal has led me to question my plans of providing unlicensed medical diagnoses since I had deliberately palpated Desdemona's abdomen one week earlier and confidently proclaimed that she was, in fact, not with child. Last night, when one of my housemates barged into my room complaining of having had menstrual blood dribbled down his arm, I reinforced my earlier diagnosis by providing him with a deferential wave of my GameCube controller and saying, "Well. At least we know for sure that she's not pregnant. Now watch me open up a cut on this fucker's eyebrow."

In effect, I became one of those doctors I bitched about in my Case Report a few months ago. I exhibited total lack of regard for my patient, and had I taken the time to properly evaluate the situation, I most likely would have recognized the material on my friend's arm for what it was: amniotic fluid. Personally, it sounds like a good enough litmus test to satisfy my needs. If the myriad misdiagnoses in this country prove anything, they must point to inefficacy in the primary care system that employs underqualified/unconcerne d physicians to make critical initial assessments of a patient's health. Failures at this level can cause serious illness, if not death, and just as I hope justice will be served against me in order to provide Desdemona with some manner of retribution, so should primary care physicians pay for negligent mishandling of their faithful patient-base.

But that's not what I'm on about here. There is plenty of time to discuss fundamental malformations in our healthcare system and, verily, more qualified people than I to provide you with such services. On the contrary, I have 6-8 weeks to mull over these kittens and ensure that they are properly nursed, weened, and given away to caring people who will refrain from pithing them with needles and running them through defrost mode in Cold War-era microwaves. Being the absent-minded caretaker of a feline strumpet prowler, it is my responsibility to monitor the safety of her offspring. In the immediate future, this means keeping Thomas, my roommate's bruiser of a cat, away from the litter lest his territorial pride gets the better of him and we all come home one day to find Dez tied to a chair mewing in distress over the mutilated carcasses of her three murdered kittens.

It would be an ugly scene to behold, and the bastard would certainly have to pay for such cold-hearted treachery. He has lived long enough in our civilized household to understand the rules. I have certainly informed him of the restrictions outlined by the No Homicide Clause contained in his signed-and-dated lease papers. Any behavioral derivation resulting in a breach of the agreed upon stipulations will be dealt with accordingly. If he does succumb to the murderous glint in his eye, he can rest assured that I will strangle him, carve the Code of Hammurabi into his skull, and devour his eyeballs on the spot. No Funeral for the Heathen Warrior. No flaming pyre. I will put the remainder of his corpse through the garbage disposal and be done with it.

I have been accused quite frequently of cruelty to animals, and perhaps outlining a vendetta fantasy against an "innocent" cat isn't the best way to dispel these suspicions. Mind you, these accusations stem from similar musings of mine involving carnivorous fish-fighting rings, wrestling bear cubs, and the occasional ill-advised statement that I would--if provided the opportunity--eat a dog.

But these things are simply daydreams akin to Albert Einstein's thought experiments. In truth, I would never hurt an animal. I would sooner batter a human than lay a malicious hand upon a creature--domestic or feral--unless it was in self-defense. Insects and arachnids are notable exceptions to this rule, though I do and will continue to maintain that dispatching of such villainous refuse is an inherent act of preservation and cannot, in the context of modern parlance, be considered equatable to cruelty.

I do, after all, consider myself a reasonable man.

Here we go. A nice little prelude to potential lapses of judgment or downright defiance of previously stated positions and desires. How I deal with this litter of kittens might be a good indication of how I will fare in the future as a father (Lord help me). Maybe not, though. From what I've read, it is best to leave the mother alone and allow her to rear the kittens without interference. Still, there is some odd, creeping feeling in the back of my head. The voices from the Place of Human Mess are telling me that I don't quite understand--that I am misinterpreting my own analogies.

Something about cats and humans being...different, is it? Yes. That's it. Different.

I wonder what they mean.

 

SUBJECT: Great American Heroes
DATE: June 28, 2007

No. I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God. George H.W. Bush

Dear Ralph,

I'm sitting here at a staff meeting pretending to take notes on issues that everyone knows don't concern me. Indeed. I am hardly even involved tangentially in this boorish conversation, and thank god for that.

I originally began this letter with some comments about New York-some lame and egotistical thing about tendrils invading your brain, severing the corpus callosum. Who knows what I was talking about, really? I would hate to waste your time with impotent ramblings or rehashed fantasies about fighting Humboldt squid armed only with a diver's knife. Not to mention the fact that my first three-sentence draft was typed on a computer. I recall our conversation a few months ago regarding postal correspondence, however, and in lieu of pounding this thing out on my 1928 Smith-Corona, I will do the next best thing and handwrite the fucker, perhaps only to satiate both of our thirsts for purity. Whatever that is. In many ways, you and I are stuck in a past that only partially existed. Our mutual affinity for the days of the Pony Express is mixed with similar longings to have been born in the 1960s or the Roaring Twenties when mirth and booze were the operative spiritual currencies. Today we deal in swill, and the spiritual economy is primed for a crash that will likely leave most of us gasping for air in the vacuum that is sure to follow.

Shit. A staff meeting is no time to be scribbling about human drought unless the individual in question is a true masochist, which I am not. I am a sadomasochist-an infinite believer in give-and-take as well as the theory that you can't appreciate pain without inflicting it. For more thoughts on this, I recommend a Japanese film called Ichi the Killer. Be careful with it, though. And make sure you are of sound mind when you watch. The five gallons of semen shown during the opening credits came from the production crew. It is 100% authentic. It is also the least disturbing part of the film.

Anyway. There are probably more than enough hipster doofuses in New York who could get their hands on a copy for you. They get off on pop culture evangelism. It is their masturbatory creed to spread retro hats and rabid love for Icelandic industrial music, especially if it means outfitting an army of city punks with fishnet stocking for the women and black bowler hats for the men. Who am I to talk, though? I recently removed my porkpie from the backseat of my car only to find its brim mangled and its crest irreparably wrinkled. The ensuing heartbreak I experienced effectively ruined the rest of my day, even moreso than when those sorority sluts ran off with the cobbler hat I bought in Dublin. So I suppose I will reserve my criticism of hat whores for now. It is one of my many vanities.

I really do apologize for getting off track here (or not having any sort of track at all). This meeting is now one hour and twenty minutes old. The palms of my hands are dry and burning, and I am forced to look up every few seconds to fend off any suspicions of non-involvement. Quite honestly, I suspect I have done a remarkably bad job of maintaining airs, and my expression of feigned interest probably looks so tepid as to be almost universally offensive. But I don't care. As of June 13, I have been in this office for two long and confusing years, and the only thing I have to show for it is a fat helping of brain calcification or necrosis. I'm not quite sure which, but it doesn't really matter. Are you prejudiced?

GODDAMN FILCHING RAPIST BASTARD!! I should be past this by now-stealing potent little nuggets from the Good Doctor. I'm a victim of the simulacra like everyone else, I suppose. Why am I surprised? My thoughts are fractured and stilted. I am starting to misspell (sp?) words, and the coffee is wearing off but quick. Just keep plugging away. Ride this meeting out without swallowing your tongue, and then it's smooth sailing for the rest of the day, away from the leery stares of co-workers who long ago wrote me off as a slacker and a Communist. Serves me right for submitting Marx and Lenin quotes to be printed on the weekly office calendar. I can't imagine that rubs the missionaries and nationalists too nicely. Thank Christ we live in a country where it is illegal to fire me for being an arrogant, snide asshole. God Bless America. Long live King George IV, who has just rejected a subpoena from the Senate Judiciary Committee for the release of documents pertaining to the U.S. Attorney firings. That fuckbrain has shit on the Constitution repeatedly and has somehow managed to make the least respectable office in government even more so. He added broccoli to a tofu salad. (I HATE broccoli, and tofu tastes like Jezebel's uterine lining.)

...

Alright. It's a couple of hours later now, and hopefully, I've recovered a bit of focus. That meeting ended up clocking in at nearly two hours after being scheduled for one. The wave of fatigue that hit me was crippling and served only to further entrench [in me] the sense of vocational ennui I have been trying to cast into the fire.

But by all rights, this is starting to sound like one of my bitchy blog posts-further testament to the gravity of my self-involvement and perhaps a circuitous admission of observations made by my mother as to my emotional configuration. I will, under no circumstances, comment any further in that regard since the information is sensitive enough to warrant a level of secrecy on my part by avoiding its documentation in any form and at all costs.

Enough about me. I have neglected all this time to ask of New York. The Big Town. How is it treating you at this early stage in the game? Have you been admonished yet for being a Midwesterner or publicly flogged for not have a family member under investigation for mob-related crimes? I hope so. It's just the sort of excitement you need after languishing for so long along the quiet avenues of Chicago's western suburbs-those affluent streets lined with shadows and skeletons disguised as garden gnomes. We all need a kick in the pants every now and then, and perhaps the madding din of Gotham is yours. One can only hope. Indeed. Bend your will into the wind and defy those external forces that would see you broken down in the gutter and sucking the free-whiskey teat for crimes against False Democracy and Blind Patriotism. These are dangerous times for dissidents, my friend, but that simple fact should not precipitate mental erosion. No. It is time to cut your teeth and hone the killer instinct lodged deep within your reptilian core. You have no other choice, and besides, you will need it soon enough when the American Gestapo comes to confiscate any and all materials unrelated to the preservation of our superiority.

Some would call the anticipation of the American Police State foolish or irresponsible. Perhaps even naïve. You know as well as I what will go down in this country once the general public reaches the critical point of saturation. We both have had the same nightmares pressing at the backs of our eyes.

I regret that I haven't the time to discuss real news with you. It is marked, naturally, by the destructive stagnancy we have come to expect from our governing bodies, typified recently by the Senate's blockage of the immigration bill. Give them amnesty, I say. We've acted like a gang of toddler thugs crouched down in a tree house with waterguns and buckets of hot oil, waiting for little Sally Sweet-tits to ride by on her bike.

...son of a bitch. No energy again. The typewriter bruises my fingertips, but this pen has effectively worn away the ligaments in my knuckles. I'm afraid I'll have to cut this short right here and right now, continuing only to provide you with a little food for thought and maybe even a creeping feeling of nausea.

Hope you are as well as can be expected.

Best,

Paul
[em]

Paul Stanley
Pine Magazine

P.S. I have enclosed my only notes from three hours of meetings at my society's annual convention...well, actually they are notes from the prep meeting. It's all the same bullshit anyway. Selah!

 

NOTES

• Bad age jokes. Already bleeding. I'm looking down the barrel at two hours of this insufferable shit. The office. Some terrible nightmare even Fritz Lang couldn't have imagined.
• Two years here as of June 13, and when that day comes, my head will implode taking everything with it. The Earth will be lost in the supermassive black hole that was once my cranial supernova. Good fucking riddance to me and mine. Once you step foot in the tar, you're stuck...and not because you want to be or meant to be.
• Customer service is key, a dish best served with lye and armor-piercing bullets. Get straight to their hearts even if it means stopping them.

SUBJECT: Trust no one, but do not be suspicious.
DATE: June 19, 2007

Howdy Bones,

Technically, there should be a comma between the words "howdy" and "Bones," but quite frankly, I thought it looked a little cramped. So we'll just forego grammatical propriety for now because it has been largely ostracized as a Public Menace and a threat to the stability of capitalism in the 21^st century, which is enough justification not to ruffle the feathers of postal censors who will, no doubt, thumb through this letter before it reaches you out in the land between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains.

It is foolish, I know, but we live in nonsensical times, Bones, and reason does not appear to be in style these days. We are, rather, obsessed with manufactured threats like Random Terrorism. The spiritual economy is being saturated with all sorts of bad rubbish I don't have the heart to write about at the moment, and if I did (supposing the aforementioned censors got their hands on this), there is a decent chance that I would be put in stocks for the day and marched around the streets of Naperville while young children threw rotten lettuce and mangled Korans at me. In these yuppie suburbs, the two are very nearly considered one and the same--useful only to insult and further degrade citizens who refuse to bow to the conventional wisdom of the generation, which includes among other things, the willingness to be perfectly mundane.

We have always been afraid of The Other, old friend, and I see little evidence of an impending paradigm shift in this regard.

But let's not weigh this letter down with half-assed admonitions or regurgitated political slogans from the Far Left, where I have set up ideological base camp. That sort of thing would be boring, and indeed, might bring to light past disagreements that highlight certain impasses in our respective characters. Mind you, I am loath to count your personal philosophies against you. It would mean harboring the same intolerance for which I have rebuked organized religion as well as the manager of a popular piano bar in Wicker Park. According to him, a flannel shirt and Vans are not formal attire. I remember screaming some lewd condemnation at him in a fit of drunken rage and then growing exceedingly nervous that I was dumb enough to display such high-decibel candor on a crowded street in the United States of America. I ducked into the nearest alley, dug up a rusty razor from a dumpster, and proceeded to shave the beard off my face in an attempt to disguise myself at least modestly before venturing out into the open again. With my luck, they had probably already run my biometrics via satellite and beamed the information to every CPD squad car in a ten-block radius.

Then again, you and I see eye-to-eye on most of the important things, and I have always enjoyed our random phone conversations. There is a tendency to lose touch, some inherent entropic[1] inclination that drives friends apart when the miles between them are too many and the winds are whirling. Or perhaps I am simply a contemptible ass. As Monty pointed out at the wedding shower, he must always be the one to contact me, which means I bear the blame in this case. I reneged on our agreement to remain in touch.

Curses! A thousand bloody plagues! If there is one thing I despise, it is being proven the villain, even in the mildest of situations.

Well, shit.

I initially interrupted my work to tap out this letter with a great deal of inertia, but it seems my reserves are running low at the moment. I haven't eaten all day, and this morning, I wrenched my back hauling a large wooden table into my house. I did it by myself, much to the surprise of Fräulein and my roommates, but I have gained ten pounds and probably some muscle to go along with it as well as a great deal of ferocity. But I am not invincible and must avoid falling to hubris as I have done in the past lest such delusions lead me into waiting jaws--enemies unforeseen due to self-love and foggy vision.

And yes, if the crick in me back is an indication of anything, I should be cautious when it comes to physical exertion. A few fleeting moments of virility and optimism will not immediately counteract the effects of nearly two decades of pessimism, depression, and self-defeat. Baby steps, right? I will take baby steps before I muster enough strength to accept the world's submission.

It's worse than I thought. Think no less of me or my waning sensibilities. We will be swallowed much as anything else and feel the same demonic teeth tear us asunder that have torn all of our faithless predecessors.

Tread lightly, my good man, and shield yourself from prying eyes.

Your Friend,

Evil Mammoth

---

[1] Microsoft Word does not recognize "entropic" as a legitimate word, which only solidifies, in my mind, its endless capacity for electronic retardation. We humans must never put unending faith in the machines we create or in the programs we write for those machines.

 

My buddy is getting married and had the audacity to request that we submit essays as to why we should be considered as groomsman. This is mine:

The friendship between Monticello Gelatini and myself dates back to the fall of 1999—seven years ago—which was, by all rights, a very foul and damnable autumn plagued with scholastic annoyances and a general sense of pubescent ennui. If I remember correctly, our relationship was forged in French II, and it was an odd sort of pairing to be sure. He a cocky, self-assured braggart and me a reserved, introverted sociopath, I found our mutual respect for one another unexplainable. In retrospect, we exist as compatriots for no other reason than that high school is an invariably confusing forum in which to operate and one that begs an individual’s avoidances and prejudices to be balanced with unlikely admissions and acceptances where neither would normally exist.

Nonetheless, we “hit it off,” as the kids say and became quick partners in crime, terrorizing the other French students with a barrage of wit, insincerity, and broken pencils. Some students wept at our cruelty. Some dismissed us as petty rabble-rousers or hopeless dickheads. We simply laughed at their consternation and attempted to associate only with those few individuals who respected our particular brand of humor. Needless to say, we were forced to operate under the radar of our good teacher, Madame Femmeforte, and CIA operatives and Marines alike will attest to the following: once you go into battle with someone, the bond is never broken. Indeed. If Monty and I were never to speak again, if he were to move to Beirut and I to Okinawa, we would always share a connection comparable to those harbored by infantrymen across the globe. Our friendship itself began as a mutant zygote—a truly contemptible alliance between two individuals hellbent on destroying anyone whose constitution did not agree with their own.

The preceding paragraph is not meant to connote in any way that we were heartless in our castigation, nor were we unduly cruel in our methods, but it stood to reason that if we were to suffer the halls of St. Francis High School, we were going to have at least little Fun doing it. The French Trip in the summer of 2000 provided a more than ample forum for these sorts of activities. The memories are well-documented enough, however, that I will not go into detail about that trip to the Land Across the Pond suffice to say we had ourselves a high-voltage frolic, a balls out rampage that impregnated our budding sense of adventure with the Will to Act. France taught us both invaluable lessons, and if I had been allowed to accompany him on the second trip, I have little doubt that Paris would have been left a pile of rubble, and at least one or two newspapers would have run pictures of Monticello and I pissing on the smoldering remains of a city suffering too many cancers to list in one short essay.

And so the years progressed. Junior year led into Senior year. The seasons changed, and we were all subjected to the sort of clichéd high school experience we had been trying to avoid…for the most part, anyway. Trips to the Warren Dunes were coupled with vicious attacks on Bones Malarkey’s penile extremity. We all flung Gatorade bottles, rocks, baseballs, anything we could find at the poor kid’s genitals, and perhaps that is where his own appeal for groomsmanship actually lies, for many of his sustained injuries were caused by my good, marriage-bound comrade. I doubt Mr. Malarkey will mention any of it, and the full force of our reasonless teenage vendetta against him will not be recognized until he fosters a child with four legs, three faces, and a lemon-flavored blood stream.

But the adventures Monty and I had are not the point. They serve, of course, to add context and nostalgic reverie to the mix, which is both essential and appreciated. I certainly do not intend to undermine the sanctity of those things with what I am about to say.

Here it is the, though, the Meat of this thing, if you will. In the tenure of our friendship, in the seven long years since Mr. Gelatini and I first romped together, I have been forced to endure more arrogant blathering, pseudo-nationalistic rhetoric, and personal castigations than I am prepared to fully admit. Furthermore (and perhaps this is another reason I should be a groomsman in and of itself), I have always had a very public hatred for Italian-Americans and Italianism in general. I regard both characteristics as diseases that are incurable until the host decides, once and for all, that any genetic presence of the motherland is overruled by place of birth. Monticello Gelatini, despite what he might tell you, is not Italian.

That’s correct. He is an American through and through.

He is a Yank. I cannot tell you fully how many times I have had to remind him of this fact, yet I did so specifically because I did not want one of my best friends growing up with delusions of international flavor. I am not one to butter his balls. Such things would not serve him well in the future, and besides, he butters them well enough himself. There is only so much I can do for him nowadays, proximity (or lack thereof) being what it is. However, in the olden days, there was never an action of my own related to Monticello that did not in some way attempt to act in favor of his best interests. According to my recollection, this is entirely true, and might I simply reiterate that I did so in spite of his heritage. If you look through my history of friendships and companions, you will find that Mr. Gelatini is the only predominantly “Italian” person with which I have kept company.

I would also like to state briefly that Monticello Gelatini sexually harassed me numerous times, and the scars that bled then continue to bleed to this very day.

So really, I am owed this honor, if not for the mental anguish in question then because of my sincerity as a friend. I believe Monty has faith enough in this sincerity to let his interpretation of it go unmarred despite what good-natured insults I might throw his way, and besides, gentle ribbing has always been a practice we held in high regard. It keeps a man on his toes and thickens the skin. We will have much need of it as we tear our respective paths into adulthood.

When all is said and done, despite our general aloofness and regardless of the mutual neglect of a promise we made to one another during a basketball scrimmage at God's House, I have never called Monty anything but “friend.” Believe me when I say this is a courtesy I have extended to very few individuals from days past, but it is one I will not hesitate to apply to our soon-to-be groom now or ever. O, how I would like to be involved in his union as the groomsman. At the very least, perhaps it will provide me with the chance to warn Ms. Miller who, when I saw her last, appeared to be under the influence of one of Monticello’s hypnotic spells and, quite possibly, a mild dose of sedative.

The cicadas are croaking, singing a swan song that marks their return to seventeen years of relative silence.  They will not go quietly, though.  Afternoons are beaten with the constant tattoo of the Swarm, buzzing incessantly in the trees as if to remind us that, yes, they were here.  They came, and they thoroughly annoyed the living hell out of us for a little over a month.

I have waged various entomological wars in my day.  I've had epic battles with giant subterranean spiders.  I swept a Dark Hand over a teeming earwig metropolis, and I led an all-out assault on the neighborhood hornets' nest as a child having equipped a veritable mob of snotty youngsters with pillow armor, cans of Raid, and various blunt objects for when the time came to obliterate their headquarters.  And naturally, I have an ongoing battle with the centipedes, which I am losing due to their uncanny ability to forge cohesive multinational networks as well as recruit impressionable younglings to take up the cause.

Indeed.  My personal military history is not marked by tremendous success in any way.  I have returned a defeated man my fair share of times while having vanquished a modest handful of my enemies in times of particular strife.

Cicadas, however, are a relatively easy foe to combat.  They are slow and clumsy and have poor eyesight.  What's more is that they are an insect of some substance.  Thick-bodied.  Lacking the intelligence of spiders or centipedes.  All it takes is one swing from a book or tennis racket to cause massive internal bleeding in one of those little buggers, and he will fall to the pavement convulsing like a bumble bee soaked in nerve toxins.  (I had to bash one with a UPS box today during a cigarette-run to Walgreens.  I would have left him alone, but he kept pestering me and spewing weird gibberish in that grating tongue common among Swarm members.)

Cleanup is relatively painless as well, since we need do nothing more than to wait a short while until the worker ants take the poor bastard piece by piece back home to their underground city.  Cicadas appear to be a particular favorite for ants.  I have noticed on a few occasions a band of worker ants passing up the chance to haul away much smaller, lighter insects in favor of systematically tearing asunder the body of an expired cicada, which makes sense.  The flesh of a larger insect takes longer to fester not to mention the fact that cicadas must be revered among ant populations as a particular delicacy.  I would imagine the Queen heaps fantastic rewards upon the band of workers responsible for bringing such a royal feast into her house, plying them full of honey alcohol and granting private audience to the band leader in her central chamber.

Well, it must go something like that, right?

But enough talk of insects.  My mind has been crawling with them for several days, and quite frankly, this whole thing is beginning to wear on me.
 

Vibrations are turning sinister.  First, a bad run-in over bad music and then a disproportionate outburst from the Boss at work.  It could only be some disturbance in the force, and I refuse to chalk all this vile nonsense up to the storms that are making their way toward the suburbs.  Hell no.  It's true that people begin to act strangely when there is a sudden drop in barometric pressure accompanied by thickening of the electromagnetic field--a combination of their homeostasis being thrown out of whack and a rigid anticipation like that which overtakes a person standing on the very edge of the Grand Canyon.  By all rights, the view from the Eastern Rim is more apt to fill a person with convulsive fear, but when you're talking about falling thousands of feet into the Colorado River, location and the corresponding sensations become almost meaningless.  Semantic.

So yes.  We can't simply pass these emotional lava flows off as byproducts of natural conditions.  Something must be playing at the tender underbelly of human interactions, which are already guarded and half-assed as it is.  There are evil wiles to be dealt with here, and it remains the wisest thing to tread cautiously where unnecessary accusations could quite possibly turn building pressures into a firestorm of immense proportions.  Casualties would be unbearable.  The fallout, crippling.  The spiritual economy would crash, and the only solution would be to start up another round of ill-conceived Ideology Wars to buffer our collapse.

But let's not get bogged down in issues that might see me placed in front of a firing line.  Those goddamn death squads things are more painful than they most likely seem to the majority of people.  One would conceivably rather be pumped full of lead from every gun on the line, thus maximizing the chances of a bullet obliterating the brain and making the whole thing seem very painless and humane.  At very least, a body with seven holes in it will probably die a helluva lot quicker than a body with one hole in it.

That's not the way it works, though.  In order to protect the fragile psyches of the gunmen, only one firearm is loaded with a bullet and the rest with dummies.  Each member is, presumably, a highly-trained marksman--unlikely to miss by more than an inch from fifty paces away with a military-issue rifle.  Thus, when the prisoner is offed, no member of the firing squad is quite sure who fired the fatal shot.  No doubt, forensics could easily determine the source of the live round, but why would anyone sacrifice the luxury of anonymity?

Silly question.

Plenty of things to grapple with as I fight my way through this thunderstorm that appears to be sneaking up on us quicker than the meteorologists predicted, and that barrel of diesel gas is still sitting outside the building.  It's been two weeks now, and I hate--as I always do--to consider the metaphorical implications of such a thing.  The fucker is a mistake waiting to happen.  A stray cigarette butt.  The ricochet of a bullet off the brick.  Who knows?  But something is going to blow the thing up, and my suspicions are that this conflagration will be cosmically coupled by another unfortunate incendiary accident.

Whom any of this involves, I know not.  I've just been stricken with an odd desire to self-preserve, though, and I am obligated to think this unfamiliar sensation must be a dark omen from the Scavenger Bird.

Or perhaps I'm just being ridiculous. 

On September 11, 2001, we thought we were going to be attacked many, many times between then and now. We haven't been. I believe we had a president who made the right decision at the right time... to put us on offense against terrorists.  Rudy Giuliani 

Rudolph Giuliani wants to be President of the United States.  But why?

You will find plenty of political wizards and former New York officials more than willing to answer that question, all the while touting Rudy's credentials as a tough-on-crime pest control specialist and a stalwart leader during trying times, but the truth is that no one--least of all Giuliani--really knows why.  The closest answer, though, is probably "because."  Because he can, or thinks he can.

The wave of popularity he experienced after the September 11 attacks was nigh unprecedented.  One might even need to go back to FDR in order to find a man so universally beloved by Americans of all demographics.  And rightfully so.  In his own way, Rudy Giuliani managed to instill hope in a city that played victim to the single largest attack on U.S. soil since the Civil War, and he seemed to do it with unnatural ease.  He became America's Mayor in a country that thinks only passingly about mayors unless the name Richard Daley pops up, in which case, you will find any number of people soliciting condemnations of the Chicago politician who just might be the closest thing to an emperor this nation has ever seen. 

But Giuliani is another best entirely. 

He fucked over and around on his wives, dressed in drag, and had a penchant for the type of sordid behavior that could only be accepted and aired publicly in a placed like New York City.  Imagine that.  A U.S. politician dresses up like a woman and still has his praises sung by millions of racist, regressive homophobes from south of the Mason-Dixie Line, and all for rebuilding a city most of them never liked in the first place.

Forget Giuliani's relative social liberalism, which has been highly publicized since he decided to fight with the big dogs.  His views back then were overshadowed by the gravity of grief and intense national strife.  Most people don't give a shit what he thought just as long as he was only running a Yankee city already bought and sold by the Devil himself--overrun with queers and illegal minorities--which really makes the national outpouring of support darkly humorous considering the heat he is taking now from evangelist factions who consistently refuse to make political decisions rather than religious ones.

Where have all the flowers gone?  Indeed.

Rudy probably figured on waltzing through the Republican primaries pushing the only thing he knows how to:  his leadership during the Aftermath.  For the most part, he has tried to do just that, despite being frank when asked sensitive questions about abortion and gay rights.  In that way, he is a one-trick pony, and his recently released 12 platforms don't do much to dissuade that theory, most notably his health plan.  An African witchdoctor could have come up with something better--something involving virgins and red bush poultices--that would have more easily soothed the health care crisis.

Ha!  No, no.  Rudy is the Enforcer and plans to eradicate Islamic terrorism in much the same way that he shoved countless junkies and other dangerous folk off the streets of New York, and to hell with everything else.  That's what Cabinet secretaries are for.

It's not difficult to imagine America under the reign of King Rudy.  More war.  More reports of useless deaths on the frontlines, but he doesn't seem to grasp the weariness for this war that is coursing through the national veins, which is precisely why he will not win the election.  The nomination, maybe.  Especially if Mitt Romney starts talking cryptically about participating in privately-funded torture sessions--captured on video and for sale only to Freemasons--showing Romney hooking up a car batter to an enemy combatant's nut and whittling sacred runes of sinister device into the man's skin.

If such a tape existed, it would no doubt become instant masturbatory fodder for the more sadistic members of Romney's constituency, but that sort of image is too shocking for most people to handle.  Hell.  It might even push a wave into McCain's sinking ship, who has gained little sympathy for his stint in Vietnam where he himself was subjected to nasty shit nobody wants or cares to hear about.  Except for Mitt Romney.  You can see him grow a big rubbery one every time someone mentions the word "torture."

But none of that will really happen because the truth is that people are probably more prepared to vote for either a black man or a woman than they are a Mormon.  The former two are not choices one makes, and the tenets/mad devotion of Mormonism are too radical and irresponsible even for people like the late Jerry Falwell.  Mitt Romney will be out of the running before such a video has the chance to surface.

Actually, Rudy might have a better chance than I thought before I spat out all this gibberish.  The previous two paragraphs sound more plausible than I'd like to admit, but it doesn't change the fact that Giuliani is running a tougher road that he initially thought.  The political climate is very different than it was in his glory days, and he will have to at least pretend to care about more than the war, even if it requires his downright lying to us.  It's not as if we expect anything different.  As it is, only one candidate is speaking the truth from either side during this long, awful vortex of bad bullshit and one-liners tailor-made for attentionles evening news spots.

But that is another story.  The nut of this thing is about America's Mayor, and not some left-wing crabass from Alaska who happens to be the only alternative truly worth an enthusiastic vote.

That being said, no one will doubt Giuliani's America would be a great deal better than Bush's, which is only a minimal compliment to Rudy for reasons we don't need to hear about anymore.  The immense and mean-hearted failure of the Bush Administration is so well-documented by now that his reign will be looked upon in the same light as Richard Nixon's, with one exception:  Bush's handlers were smart enough to beat their opponents with a hickory switch, while Nixon slinked off into obscurity and Eternal Shame.  So too will Bush, eventually, but if current tides are any indication of the future, he will do so without the millstone of impeachment or forced resignation slung about his neck.

So Election 2008 is a more optimistic one than most.  After all, it can't get much worse, and with people like Rudy Giuliani running on the Republican ticket, the Democrats have a chance to stop pussyfooting around, as they have been of late.  Of course, let's hope Hillary Clinton is exposed for the egg-sucking bulldog that she is and loses the Democratic nomination.  Otherwise, things could be looking up for Mr. September 11.  It could be very dangerous for us as we have not yet experienced a moderately intelligent, sincere warmonger whose decisions are based on biased reflexes and a demented concept of patriotism rather than simply just filling his pockets.

Rudy Giuliani is when shit gets real serious, and the scars get deeper.

The Sun will rise soon on the False and the Fair. Townes Van Zandt

I writhed and grunted. Sweat began pouring out of my forehead. It must have sounded heinous to the folks in the next room, but I had no choice. I could either wrestle the bastards up front or spend the rest of the day letting them take little chunks of me back to Hell.

So there I was, sitting on the crapper with my pants around my ankles and performing the daily exorcism of some truly vicious excretory demons. My bowels were in a knot, and there was little hope at all of doing this thing quickly when I heard that familiar scuttle--like bottle caps scraping against a hardwood floor.

Sure enough, a centipede shot underneath the door and lit upon the white wall directly across from my face, close enough that I could see the sadistic smile curled over his little fangs.

"Out!" I screamed. "I don't have time for this shit right now!"

I took a half-hearted swing at him, but he ducked it easily and began laughing in the gravelly voice I have come to forever associate with his kind.

"Tsk. Tsk. You'd better not get too riled up, Mammoth. You wouldn't want to be tried for murdering someone with diplomatic immunity, would you?"

"What the fuck are you talking about? You're not in uniform."

The smile left his face momentarily, and he knew his cover was blown.

"Ha! You're not even an ambassador. You're nothing but a moss-sucking emissary. What's to stop me from smearing you all over the wall, huh? I wouldn't be breaking any treaties."

I cringed as he shuffled backwards a few steps. The very sight of the bugger was putting me off, and it was difficult to concentrate on anything but those yellow-black striped legs ticking against the tile. He didn't have to say anything. It was clear that he could see how afraid I was, and as I shifted uneasily on the toilet, he laughed again.

"Whatever you say. Just know that I could call down a strike right now, and you'd be swimming in us. We'd pick the skin right off your bones and feed it to the younglings."

"Bullshit. You're not in season until mid-July. Most of your soon-to-be recruits haven't even hatched yet, and it's only a matter of time before I find your nest and torch it along with your larval army."

"We have a truce until August!" he snarled. "Do not fuck with laws you weren't around to write!"

I could feel my face turning red, and a stabbing pain shot through my abdomen, but I didn't care.

"FUCK LAWS!! You assholes sent a bomber in April, you cretin, not to mention the fact that I took a shower this morning only to find one of your trainees scampering around on my bath towel! I thought you were nocturnal, anyway.

"And that's right. The best part is that nifty alliance you've made with the hornets, you twisted sot! I drowned two of them in bleach, and the other one got away!

"So do not utter another word about laws or treaties or agreements, or I'll soak the whole fucking basement in gasoline and see to it that we all go up together!"

Silence. The mention of alliances had sent an ecstatic shiver through his exoskeleton, and I could tell right away that I was doomed. Whatever petty transgressions had transpired within the house were now null and void. Something in my gut told me the game was different now. Something had changed for the worse. D-Day. Kaison. Fredericksburg. These days, heretofore momentous for their carnage and massive scale, were soon to become footnotes of footnotes in the Anthology of American Footnotes.

I hung my head, not wanting to hear what I knew the little punk was going to spit at me.

"It's funny you mention alliances...," he looked amused.

"Don't tell me. You've tapped PNAC."

He smiled.

I shook my head and bashed it against the wall. My voice became shrill and quivered with anger, "You've tapped them, and you've got Interpol, the World Bank, the Freemasons, Bohemian Grove, Exxon-Mobil, Richard Nixon's preserved brain, and the entire military-industrial complex under your thumb. Their resources. Their personnel. Everybody.

"Not only that, you've probably got Al-Qaeda and Iran too. You've got every rogue terrorist organization and cell operating in the continental U.S. as well as most of the ones in Europe, except they don't know you've got the West on the other side."

I sighed, and the "Jesus Christ" that escaped my lips was almost silent.

His laugh shattered the mirror. "Proud of us? It took a lot of elbow grease, but we're all quite pleased with the results around the nest."

"You're either planning to save the world or destroy it."

He flashed his fangs at me--a wide, sadistic grin--and turned to leave, but I managed to choke out two more words: But how?

"That's not any of your concern, old friend. But while we're at it, would you like to know who the next president is going to be?"

I nodded, eyes bulging in terror.

"Robert Kagan," he said. "With Paul Wolfowitz as his VP."

The emissary scuttled to the other side of the door as I began to weep. This was impossible. A global coup of this magnitude, and I allowed its perpetration. They did under my own nose, in my own house, and I had done nothing but pick off a couple of scouts.

They were too connected by now. Eradicating the nest in my house would represent an imperceptible hiccup in a centipedal network that was probably already teeming with operatives on all seven continents, and there was no telling how soon they would be able to manipulate, cajole, and kill their way to full support from the Chinese as well as Russia.

It was my last shot. I had to book the Red Eye to Beijing, and hope to hell I wasn't too late...

...and I still wasn't even ready to get off the John.

 

 

The boy's weird, Channon. You should trade him in. Or sell him for salvage. Spider Jerusalem

I awoke in a pissy mood today, and that sentiment has only been augmented since I rambled by WritingUp to pull down something like 250-pages worth of my blogs before the site went on a permanent fritz. Well, looks like I missed the boat and those lurid, depressive ramblings will be lost forever, or at least until I am able to recover what I can from the bowels of Google's HTML cache, which is a task I am not overly anxious to undertake, nor am I expecting it to yield much in the way of positive returns. If I can salvage some of the more pertinent inanities I spewed forth in those tumultuous and confused times, the whole thing might be worth the effort. Barely.

I am getting what I deserved, though. Faith in the Electronic Wilderness is usually misplaced and will, more often than not, bring about serious disappointment.

But here I am, hunkered down in this tasteless office with a film of dampness clinging desperately to my skin and the constant hum of Interstate 88 just outside my window. I can smell death as I often can on days like today, and I am usually right. About twenty minutes ago, I felt compelled to take a stroll into the mud around the side of my building despite the rain and my ambivalence at tackling mortality head-on when vibrations are sinister enough. There it was. A dead bird being picked at by a lonely ant.

I muttered words of rest and good will. Few things sadden me like the sight of a bird rendered flightless by injury or death with those large, lidless marbles that have faded into eternal blindness. It would seem to me that even the sky turns to dust.

I could list the reasons that I am in this funk, but what good would it do? My electronic ravings have gotten me in trouble before, and I have no doubt that things will turn out much the same if I am not careful. Besides, my nerves are jangled, and my thoughts are coming out stilted and in fragments. My mind is not in any condition to undergo serious soul searching at the moment, and pumping out yet another topographical analysis of my psyche would prove not only fruitless but ill-conceived in a way that might eventually necessitate a few days spent off the map somewhere, dressed in a loin cloth, sucking down booze, and filling my synapses with psilocybin.

Ah, yes.  Wrestling grizzly bears. Skinning wolverines. Getting in touch with those primal instincts we have been bred and conditioned to deny for civility's sake. Everyone needs to hit the reset button every once in a while to stay healthy.

But what the fuck am I talking about? Really?

It is easy to chalk this thing up to petty chronic whining, and yes, perhaps in memory of those old blogs that have been devoured by the Internet, I am shooting up one last Meandering Bitchfest in the style of old. And so be it. There is little reason to avoid doing so if it helps kill a little time and get these rusted-out gears of mine to start grinding again. The fucking bastards have refused to move for a few days now, and I'm getting sick of the bad reflexes and inability to defend myself against spiritual fascists.

...and that is the signal to end this thing off. No need to spout out irresponsible accusations and be labeled an intolerant goon.

I wouldn't be able to deny it, and I have a hard enough time pretending to be compassionate as it is.

Lock into the mainframe. Download the necessary software, and hope to hell that it gets you where you need to go.

In a senseless world, oftentimes the only thing you need to stay grounded is a sufficient illusion--an insanity so depraved and irresponsible that you would be a fool not to dive head first into the damned thing without so much as a fleeting look back--which is a concept many people I've met, including myself, have managed to grasp. And who can blame them, really? For some, this illusion is laced with delusions of transcendence, the ability to rise above the Human Condition and touch the face of God, whatever it is.

It's never done the trick for me, though. I have too little faith in our crude machinery to believe in something as foolish as Answers, and it might be the very reason I am known among my peers as a hopeless and annoyingly concerted Absurdist. In the absence of answers, what sense does sense make?

Indeed.

Aren't you going to sing Happy Birthday to me? Professor Hess in THE AMERICAN ASTRONAUT

Things are getting haphazard and unorganized as I barrel my way into the evening, and I am overcome by a certain urgency. My nerves are quivering relentlessly, sending mixed-up signals to my extremities. What to do?

At 10:38pm, I officially turn twenty-three, and by some account, I am now well into a plight that will most likely end as a failed experiment for me: adulthood. Whether or not I put much stock in the concept to begin with is debatable and would probably yield a colorful array of responses if you were to ask my friends and confidants what they thought of my behavior. Their opinions, however, are worthless in this regard, as are mine. Interpretations and perceptions are, by natural law, respective to the individual, and the objective reality of any given situation tends to lay low until its revelation stands to do Maximum Damage.

Things have worked this way since the dawn of consciousness, and there is no reason to believe the Fates are going to change their tune any time soon. So naturally, it feels as if I am on the brink of either something or nothing at all. The anticipation manifests itself similarly in both instances, marked by tensity in one's joints and a frightening inability to perform certain basic functions that have been huddled in the outer limits of instinct since one's first steps. It is a temporary regression into childhood brought about by uncertainty. And why not?

Twenty-three is nebulous enough without combing through memories of the past two decades only to regurgitate all the silliness that eventually created whomever I am at this moment. Realizing the absurdity of my life and life in general, however, is easy enough to handle, and there is little indication that tonight will see me reeling from some sort of ill-wrought Crisis of Aging.

I am still young, after all. I have time.

If these words are mild rationalizations today, their foolishness will be tenfold when I likely utter them in ten years' time after having squandered every opportunity in favor of a sedentary lifestyle free of pesky burdens like accountability.

Perhaps I am simply coming down with a case of cabin fever as these dark clouds move into position over the western suburbs, dragging their swollen bellies from whence they will release a veritable hellstorm of nightmares. It is a shame that the Full Moon will remain shielded by these bastards. No howling for me. The werewolf will sleep yet another month...

...unless, of course, I am plied with whiskey tonight by people who have never seen me on the drunk nor been on the receiving end of one of my liquor-fueled tantrums.

But I will keep casualties to a minimum, if I can. I will maintain some of that self-control my parents talked about back when I was prone to creating handyman projects for my dad. I'd hate the see the bill for all the plaster, Spackle, and paint he used in erasing the evidence of my temper.

And as I think about the scars of my youth disappearing, almost gone now, it is easy to feel that I am growing old already. This feeling is countered by looking at the scars I've acquired more recently--those that have not yet glazed over into a solid white--and realizing that I am, more probably, still just growing up.

Oh, I have hair on my chest as well as in all the places where my old health textbook told me to expect it. My voice has deepened. My hands have become rough. According to most textbooks, I have achieved manhood.

Still, something seems to be missing, and I refuse to believe that it has anything to do with slaying dragons.

Richard Nixon looks like a flaming liberal today, compared to a golem like George Bush. Indeed. Where is Richard Nixon now that we finally need him?  Hunter S. Thompson

All political power comes from the barrel of either guns, pussy, or opium pipes, and people seem to like it that way.  Hunter S. Thompson

Well, the Democrats backed down with regard to withdrawal timelines further proving that they are a rabble of gutless whiners who don't have the balls to fire the trigger when it counts.  Why this is news to anybody, I'm not sure.  The Dems have been playing Little League for years against a GOP that is as ruthless as it is organized, and even so much as George W. Bush has managed to chisel cracks into his party's foundation, he was just quick enough to realize that being pigheaded is not a bad way to force Democrats into a hole.

For once, George Bush had his head on the chopping block.  He stood to lose all the juicy military contracts and have his PNAC-conceived foreign policy initiatives sacrificed to the Gods of Human Decency.  Robert Kagan would have ordered Oval Office oysters for dinner, sautéed in Condi's tears and garnished with Dick Cheney's old and failing heart.  (For the record, Kagan is probably more dangerous than any of them.)  It could have been the end of Bush's stranglehold on the national government.

But no. 

Obama and Clinton opposed the legislation knowing full well that a vote of "Yay" on the measure would quickly result in catastrophic losses in the polls, perhaps even enough to force either one of them out of the race within two weeks.  Times are such that the American People, to varying degrees, are finally beginning to show signs of palpable disgust, and support of an unconscionable bill like the War Funding Bill that passed on Thursday could justifiably be viewed as mass murder by large swaths of the liberal constituency.  Whether or not either Senator truly agreed with what came out of their mouths during the vote, it stands to reason they both considered the political consequences of their decisions.  They are, after all, running two very high-profile campaigns and are subject to more scrutiny than the rest of the candidates put together, Republicans included.

If there is one sign of hope in this dismal affair, though, it is that the vote in the House showed well over half the Democratic caucus voting against the bill, which is not altogether too surprising considering that the first two drafts of it basically waltzed nonchalantly through the House and Senate while riding a wave of Total Support from the Democrats.  At least the removal of withdrawal timelines spurred a good number of these career politicians--even those with very little to risk--to stand up and oppose what should be regarded as the largest legislative failure since Congress approved the war in the first place.

So it went down 280-142 in the House and 80-14 in the Senate.  The second outcome of the two is, by far, the more depressing one considering the public mandate issued via the interim elections in November.  Some people say it is overly simplistic to believe the overwhelming Democratic victories in the House and Senate constituted a direct order from the people to their leaders to end the war and concentrate on our domestic future. 

It is an argument I refuse to buy. 

If anything, the political landscape of this country has become progressively less complicated with every dead body and bombing.  People are being pushed to either end of the spectrum with very few attempting to pitch their tents on the middle ground.  The clear message George Bush refuses to yield to is that we no longer want this war.  The consensus over this statement is nearly as complete and resolute as our belief in the Holocaust, which is a nice way of saying our President King is either a total ponce or a totalitarian.  By all rights, he has acted like one by extending his presidential privileges farther than anyone since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  A true cynic might even say Abraham Lincoln, but I have been chastised for being too radical in the past as well as recently for my support of Mike Gravel, whose plan for a National Initiative would have effectively prevented the passage of this disastrous legislative mutation.

Even in light of nearly universal opposition from the American People, the Democratic Party backed down, and the minimum wage increase cleverly sandwiched into the bill does not rightfully provide those that voted in favor any excuse for throwing over $100 billion into a floundering military abomination like the Iraq War. 

As to the precise reasons for their legislative impotence, we can only guess knowing full well that we're probably right and that the Truth might be even worse than we care to admit. 

 

SUBJECT: It's Evil Mammoth From Years Ago
DATE: January 17, 2007

Hi Magdelene,

Hope you are dandy and that the halls of the High School are treating you well enough in this foul Year of Our Lord 2007 (that's 3 x 669, in case you were wondering).

I am writing to you at a moment of great consternation, both for myself and for an old compatriot of mine named Mathball. You might remember us. We were two ungrateful bastards who liked to fling irresponsible accusations and savage the class with our own brand of peculiar quasi-intellectualism. Needless to say, he has made more of himself by now than I have.

Regardless of our respective positions on the societal ladder, we continue to keep contact. Our most recent conversation fell upon the glories of the olden days, as our conversations often do. What glory, after all, is there to be found during the existential crises of one's early twenties? None, I tell you. It is a damnable time and subject to a great deal of retrospective reverie, but let's not get off the subject here.

I called him in an attempt to get my hands on some old documents, one The Devil's Repentance, and the other Small Talk. They were two plays we wrote for you hoping to receive a modest amount of extra credit, but instead, we both garnered a healthy chunk of masturbatory self-satisfaction by creating what we heralded as two masterworks the likes of which this world has never seen. The critics, however, furnished us with regrettably mixed reviews.

Sadly, neither I nor Mathball possesses a copy of these brave, epochal monuments to the literary tradition, and we were wondering, quite frankly, if you might have them. After this long, I'm sure the request seems absurd, but I know how teachers work, which is to say that I've observed my fair share of them over the years. I know how documents are thrown into one pile of scholastic inanities or another. Perhaps you might have a faint recollection of where you placed ours.

If not, please don't feel too sour. Mathball and I are planning a return to playwriting seeing as how the field seems to have been diluted with dullards, dolts, ditzes, and dingbats. We take it upon ourselves to give the theatre 500 cubic centimers of Pure Genius straight to the heart. The fuckers will never know what hit them, and with a bit of luck, Mr. Ball and myself will finally become household names among respected scholarly circles.

Great bronze statues of us will be erected on every college campus in America. Our names alone will be enough to titillate the desires of impressionable and prudish young women enrolled in Rennaissance Studies programs across the globe (which will be a feat in itself). Genetic perpetuation of our greatness will no longer be in question. In fact, we will have to be careful not to go hog wild and undermine the exactness or rarity of our brilliance by producing gross numbers of offspring.

Naturally, we would appreciate any help you might be able to throw our way in procuring these documents, and to alleviate any confusion, I would like to point out now that Mathball had nothing to do with this overlong blowhardian rant. He has not gone psychotic, and I have never been very good at begging favors.

Please let us know, and best wishes,

Evil Mammoth

P.S. Bones Malarkey was right. The tone of Prospero's speech from The Tempest is vanilla.