“Your workout is our warm-up”, the cultists chant.  A cacophony of clanking kettle bells and the exaggerated thumps of bumper weighted bar bells abandoned midair at the apex of their extension by mindless followers are the reinvented sounds of battle in a fitness war being waged against common sense.  Every day devotees consult the CultFit website like a Book of Common Prayer, receiving instructions for their workout rites and periods of rest.

The CultFit website forum is the foundation of the CultFit ministry.  On a typical day, some 200 people post responses to the workout in a feverish fitness ‘facebook’.  It’s an exercise phenomenon uniquely dependent upon modern connectivity.  That is to say, CultFit couldn’t exist without lots of viral video, social networking, and an expansive platform for international, demographically varied community interaction.  It’s not just an exercise routine, it’s a lifestyle.  Like Chairman Mao dictating the orders of the day to all his peoples, the main CultFit website dictates its daily WOD to all the affiliates who in turn merely parrot the parent command to their worshippers.  Want to simply go to the CultFit gym, use the equipment and do your own thing?  Well you’re in for a surprise, membership precludes individuation.  That’s right, group sessions only, the official WOD only.

I want to stuff a dollar in your waist strap!

Many of the official demo videos feature women, generally attractive women, conducting grueling workout routines.  And you know I have to hand it to them, the women are hot (if not somewhat mannish).  There are literally hundreds of pictures and videos swirling around the internet of ripped CultFit chicks working out.  There is nothing that fires me up quicker than a badass fitness chick getting after it in the gym, but I have to tell you that I’ve never been a fan of bitches that cake on make-up just to go work out.  More than anything I am irritated by watching chicks cry after finishing their routines.  They act like it was the emotional pinnacle of their existence, some bizarre epiphany caught magically on video.  What the fuck is wrong with you!?  You merely finished your workout – get over yourself!

"Mr. CrossFit" (oh my bad)

Now these CultFit girls are not your garden variety bored housewives trying to spark a gym fling or turn a few heads, it’s actually something much more selfish.  I suppose in their viral video they don’t want to look like a total sea-hag, but motivation by ego and not results is hardly an argument for the program regardless of physique.  Maybe there is an ego piece that all athletes and exercisers possess, and yes, there are mirrors in every gym.  I’m just not going to debase my sense of self and adulterate my personal gains by videotaping myself working out and posting it all over the internet.  This is truly modern fitness masturbation, tantamount to ‘girls gone wild’ in a gym.

There is another element at work here, albeit a subtle one.  CultFit flaunts intensity, as do many exercise programs.  CultFit also seems very focused on form and ‘proper movement’, but there is a difference between form and technique.  Proper form can be expressed in any venue of exercise, as a particular condition, character, or method in which something is done.  Correct form is objective, based upon science and physiology, concepts outside the individual and the program as well.  Technique is subjective, it is the manner and ability with which an artist, writer, dancer, athlete, or the like employs the technical skills of a particular art or field of endeavor.  Two athletes of equal fitness levels could both perform the “Fran” workout and get vastly different times simply because one is using a quicker technique.  A perfect example of this is the distinction between the pull-up and the “butterfly pull-up”.  How then can this be in any way a measure of fitness or performance?  What about intensity?  How can a subjective existential quality be measured?  In someone’s Fran time, I don’t think so.  Perhaps intensity is measured in devotion to CultFit.

Although this guy is a total toolbag with faggy shorts, the demo is a simple, yet effective, illustration of the muscles affected as well as the basic movements of the pull up.

Now observe the bizarre CultFit complexity that has adapted from the pull up.  No comment on the potential risks to joins and tendons inherent with this technique.  How is this “functional fitness”.

A CultFit routine including pull-ups would allow either type (butterfly or regular), although the two can hardly even be called the same exercise.

CultFit is the epitome of successful marketing on a foundation of dogshit philosophy.  How exactly they were able to convince people that everyone should be doing the exact same workouts regardless of age, abilities, specific needs, or goals is completely beyond the scope of reason. The foundation of the entire program flies in the face of everything that has been learned about human performance and stress physiology over the last 50 years.

Perhaps a testament to CultFit success is in the general malaise that has set upon the American people.  When everyone is desperately struggling for attention and acceptance it is not difficult to convince them that doing 5 minute exercise routines picked randomly out of a hat is a smart way to train.  Since the workouts are very short and following a WOD requires no thought process or planning from participants it becomes mindlessly easy for the braindead zombie followers of this backwards fitness religion.  If you train for any specific purpose at all I would highly recommend learning the basics of programming rather than just following some claptrap program that has no scientific basis behind it or rational planning involved in it whatsoever.  CultFit is the Scientology fast food of the exercise world.

Admittedly, CultFit is better than much of what I see going on in the gym.  The problem is this, weights plus momentum equals a potential for injury.  It’s just that simple.  Now add competition into the mix, in addition to the subjective nature of CultFitters technique and intensity.  Performing heavy explosive lifts and training completely randomly without being physically prepared to do these things is a recipe for disaster in the long run.  I know many CultFitters who have suffered injuries to joints and tendons as well as more serious and debilitating physical damage.  The amount of training injuries alone is expressive of the hazards of the CultFit ‘curriculum’.  There is no training progression, no periodization, or methodical approach whatsoever.  Maybe most people in a regular gym don’t get peak results, but at least most of them aren’t getting injured either.

It is fundamentally flawed to believe that having no structure in a program means it will produce general results and that this is somehow better than specific training.  There is no such thing as a jack of all trades physiologically speaking, a marathon runner will never be a powerlifter and vice versa.  Even somewhere in the middle specific adaptations will always apply.  Throwing a bunch of methods together at random doesn’t mean the body gets better at everything.  Additionally, there are much better ways of progressively developing “general” fitness that will improve health than CultFit’s haphazard approach.  Just watch the CultFit games and witness for yourself the total physical devastation of CultFitters simply attempting to run seven miles.  Seven miles!?  Some trainers, Gym Jones for example, even use what you might call the CultFit style of intensity in their daily routines but without claiming that they invented the push-up or demanding adherance to a cult ideology.  On top of that, Gym Jones actually identifies a tangible goal or endstate for the individual that they will then craft their routines towards accomplishing.

“We do your stuff almost as good as you, you can’t do our stuff at all and we do stuff neither of us does way better than you can,” the cultists will scream.  This is a very confrontational statement with no testable results to back it up.  To that I simply say that I have done your workouts better than even some of your most devoted followers.  I have walked into your gyms and crushed some of your best times.  You have a great Fran time (ostensibly the benchmark CultFit workout) well that’s great, but the truth is this; doing CultFit only makes you good at CultFit.  Getting faster times on your CultFit routines is a measure of skill at CultFit and not of fitness or performance.  With no goals there can be no plan, with no plan there can be no attack, and with no attack there can be no victory.

Throwing the potential for injury to the wind, abandoning reason in place of popularity, and embracing an unquestioning lifestyle of fitness communism must be liberating.  I truly enjoy working out with likeminded and motivated individuals.  Individuals being the operant word.  God knows I love exercise and constantly hunger for competition, but I am not so devoid as to physically and intellectually consign myself to martyrdom like the rank and file CultFit disciples.  This is exercise for vanity not for longevity; this is an ideological struggle for an imagined moment of heroism that will never come.

Bitch tits, a fat gut, and he knows the proper form of how to gently caress a nutsack!

With every cult there is a cult leader, and CultFit is no different.  Enter one of the biggest fuck-tards in the known universe Greg Glassman.  CultFit’s founder, Greg Glassman, is referred to by his disciples simply as “Coach”.  A former gymnast who put his program online in 2001, Glassman is known for his impatience with exercisers who fear injury: “There’s nothing about crashing that makes you drive faster, right? But you’re not going to learn to drive real fast unless you’ve wrecked once or twice.”  What the fuck is this inscrutable bullshit!?  In brazen, inventive, hortatory speeches and prose, he leans on the concept of “forging,” blacksmith style.  His Web site is “forging elite fitness,” and his message board is “forging elite community.”  CultFit represents a ministry for Glassman, who is intent on drafting and redrafting his program — so intent, in fact, that he has said he works out inconsistently.  Physically Glassman is nothing to speak of, fat and out of shape even, hardly what one would expect from the leader of a supposed fitness revolution.

Glassman fancies himself the grand vizier of his burgeoning fitness ministry.  With bellowing and dogmatic seminars and psych-up speeches that make you sit like a sheep and think that you finally understand the secret of existence.   “If you say, ‘I will not take my intensity past where the form goes bad,’ the intensity will never develop!” Coach cries into the vacuous crowd.  The CultFitters unquestioningly eating his shit like soft-serve ice cream without even realizing that this statement is a contradiction of the entire religion.

Of all the things I hate about exercise culture, the thing I hate most is pontificating about ethos.  Exercise should be kind of primitive and stupid and mostly physical; it should not require flourishes and perfect sneakers and 10 sessions of learning minutiae before you even break a sweat.  Demo videos for exercises should show you what the body can do, how strong a body can be.  It should not exist to worry you that you’ll never do anything right, sell fear, be a showcase for vanity, or foster derision.  Maybe that’s all just part of the marketing gimmick.  You are fundamentally flawed, but come to CultFit and we can fix you, almost like original sin for athletes.

Some would argue that CultFit has outgrown its creator, but not Glassman.  He equates his program to the Second Coming.  Well that is if the Second Coming cost $1000 for a level one certification and $150/month gym fees.  That’s right, CultFit is mega expensive.

It takes two days of training and a thousand dollars cold hard cash to receive your Level 1 Certification from CultFit.  You heard me correctly, $1000 and two days to learn 9 basic movements.  The Certifications are run at one of the many CultFit Affiliates over the weekend usually, and CultFit conducts 2-3 per weekend.  There are 60 people in each class.  Simple math, $60,000 for one weekend of CultFit Level 1 Certification at one location.  So after opening up their doors and permitting use of their facility and equipment, how much money does each Affiliate gym get out of each of these certifications?  Nothing.  Not one penny.  All the cash goes back to the company with not one penny ending up in the hands of the gym owners.  Well what about Affiliate fees you say?  Ok, shit, you got me – Affiliates have to pay $2000 to apply for Affiliation and $1000 a year after that.  Cha-ching!?

I can think of a lot of things I learned in two days, but mastery over physical fitness was not one of them.  I don’t think there’s a professional coach of any athletic program in the country that was merely certified in two days and then took charge of that program.  But these educated, intelligent, and experienced professionals are exactly the people that CultFit is in a theoretical dispute with.  CultFit ardently attacks these myopic “specialists”, or athletes who they say neglect versatility in order to refine one or two skills.  The CultFitters’ critique has chastened more than one specialist.  “Specialization is for insects,” the CultFitters chant, yet specialists from other arenas show up and perform highly, even outperforming most CultFitters.  Meanwhile, CultFitters don’t notice that they’re all busy ‘specializing’ in their little WODs and demanding everyone use their brand of measuring stick.

Additionally, there are a myriad other certifications out there to become a personal trainer.  Some are generally valued and others are pure crap, but none runs over roughly $500 bucks.  On the other hand, some personal trainers go to college for years to earn degrees and learn the nuances and intricacies of anatomy, kinesiology, and human performance.  CultFit will advertise that form is always adhered to because all the guided workouts are at the behest of one of their certified coaches.  Well aside from a giant wad of greenbacks and a spare weekend it doesn’t take a whole hell of a lot to receive that certification.  This is yet another arrow pointing towards the movement’s cultish aura, unfortunately this also has underpinnings of multi-level marketing and unscrupulous financial dealings if not outright dishonesty.  Don’t worry about merchandising either – you can get everything you need to fuel your cultish devotion at their online store from t-shirts to pregnancy tests.  “What about the next generation?” you desperately cry… Never fear, there’s CultFit for Kids too.

Uncle Rhabdo: I just farted blood ;-P lol!

Now it is widely known that some professional athletes have used illegal substances to enhance performance.  Some have been injured and even died because of it.  Professional athletics generally refrain from celebrating these actions.  CultFit on the other hand takes a different approach.  Not to illegal performance enhancing drugs, to my knowledge, but to personal safety.  Take a look at “Uncle Rhabdo” one of the network’s mascots.  Rhabdo is a clown-headed figure often shown vomiting; who suffers from rhabdomyolysis, a dangerous condition in which damaged muscle tissue enters the bloodstream.  Many a CultFitter has suffered from this condition.  The clown is worshiped only half in jest by the CultFit crowd, which see exercise-induced injury as ritual suicide for the cause.  In a 2005 interview, Glassman said of CultFit: “It can kill you… I’ve always been completely honest about that.”

Ok.  Relax.  Let’s take a minute to breathe here.  I want to make sure that this next point is made abundantly clear.  Studies of the psychological aspects of cults focus on the individual person, and factors relating to the choice to become involved as well as the subsequent effects on individuals. Under one view, an important factor is coercive persuasion which suppresses the ability of people to reason, think critically, and make choices in their own best interest.

Studies of religious, political, and other cults have identified a number of key steps in this type of coercive persuasion:

1. People are put in physically or emotionally distressing situations;
2. Their problems are reduced to one simple explanation, which is repeatedly emphasized;
3. They receive unconditional love, acceptance, and attention from a charismatic leader;
4. They get a new identity based on the group;
5. They are subject to entrapment (isolation from friends, relatives, and the mainstream culture) and their access to information is severely controlled.

CrossFit is a cult.

CultFitters are put in physically and emotionally distressing situations.

CultFitters fitness problems are reduced to one simple explanation… “Functional fitness”.

CultFit advertizes themselves as a tight-knit community with “Coach” as their charismatic leader.

CultFit itself creates a general identity.  CultFit gyms around the country, all with various names and monikers, create the localized group identity.  Handles, callsigns, and screen names posted on the online forums express the adherents’ new internet CultFit identity.  Even real names take on new meaning in the subculture as the cultists are reborn into their CultFit identity.

The CultFit philosophy is faith-based and exclusive.  Look on the CultFit message board itself.  Articles are created, deleted – criticisms posted, rebuked, then evaporate into thin air.  There is an ominous totalitarian element in the information control that is exercised by CultFit online.

CrossFit is a cult.

Ask yourself just a couple simple questions:

Which martial art is best?

Which ice cream is best?

Are sunrises or sunsets better?

Everything has strengths and weaknesses.  Everything is good and bad.  CrossFit does have its merits.  Believe it or not I have enjoyed doing some of the routines and I have incorporated some of the exercises into my own personal fitness regimen, but listen to me very carefully all you would-be CultFitters; Beware any person that says that they have the answer. The only answer is that there is no answer.  No single answer that is, there are many, and in a democracy sometimes the opinion you hate most and makes the least sense is screaming the loudest.  CultFit is entitled to their opinion, something that they do not permit of outsiders, but that opinion is only valid if it can be sustained and substantiated by the worth of its own merits, the value of its argument.  A philosophy of any kind must stand on its own and endure criticism regardless of how loudly its worshippers preach it or how fervently they believe in it.  Even a drug dealer will sell you crack while arguing that it is harmless.   You know I fully expect this very article to be misquoted, flamed, spammed, and generally denegrated by the CultFit crowd, and you know what – bring it, me no care.  But make up your own goddamn mind, that’s part of being a fucking human.  Just hear this;  beware an exclusive and dangerous ideology that is prone to injury and isolation.  CrossFit is not a fitness regimen, it is an unhealthy lifestyle.  CrossFit is not an exercise ideology, it is a cult.  Good luck.

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Bands themselves have record contracts, music videos, and clothing lines without the ability to even tune their goddamn guitars. They pick an image then let the music industry computers create their substance. A friend asked me the other day what music I like and I immediately got balls deep into a drawn out explanation of how all the music I liked came out during the decade between 1975 and 1985. I told him how even though through the ages people have probably been saying that ‘music nowadays sucks’ that I felt that there was a categorical difference between the types of changes that had occurred in the past and what transpired to push music from being art to product. Music is now all made by machines for machines. It’s the death of originality. The death of birth.  Music is no longer release or expression of the artists, but product – like shoes – that the consumer purchases to express the associated values embodied by the product (and it’s marketing campaign). I’ve never been a class warrior, and don’t generally give a shit what people like or don’t like unless they shove it in my face or try and convert me – force me to join. The genres I generally ascribe to; Punk and Metal. Music with edge, attitude, lack of ‘give a shit’. Underground music. Fringe music. The art of rebels and revolutionaries. Music with innovation, emotion, heart, and the brutal honesty of life in its stripped down degeneracy. I’m sure there are a million people out there that would completely agree with everything I am saying, and yet somehow I have become part of the musical minority. I use the same words, have the same defined values, but nobody is speaking my same language – I exist, alone with my ’77 punk bands, ‘fuck you’ sensabilities, and Hi-Fi stereo in a musical vacuum of isolation.

Example:

I hate Green Day.

I fucking hate EVERYTHING about this band. Their music, their look, their politics, even – fuck, especially – the braindead cutesy stereotypical pop-punk facial expressions they spent half of their youths perfecting in their bathroom mirrors.

Now why on earth would anyone hate a band. They are like inanimate objects. It’s tantamount to saying that you hate paperweights or coral or paperweights with coral in them. Who really fucking cares, right!? Well wrong motherfucker. Green Day is not only garbage but they are representative of this whole garbage paradigm shift taking place in America right now where badass is being replaced with faggotry (all in the name of badass).

Now I know that there is a fairly substantial bandwagon of people who already ‘hate’ Green Day. Some idiots simply don’t like the band because they are played too damn much on the radio. Well that is a good reason to hate the band, I’ll agree, but I think that is more symptomatic of the gayness taking over America where bullshit braindead overproduced music is being unwillingly pumped into culture like a giant syringe full of shit. I can’t hardly tell which is a legitimate song and what’s a goddamn commercial jingle these days. With the culture of self expression and identity started taking over it seems like both the song and the jingle are the same thing, both an excuse to define oneself an infinitesimal degree further – customize their avatar, which is who they play as in everyday life. Another sickly expression of the ‘everyone gets a trophy’ syndrome that is emasculating the US of A. Belonging to the group of people who like Green Day brings with it certain social assumptions and rewards that at one time were rooted in the core of punk culture, a culture that is long dead.

Other bandwagoneers say that Green Day sold out, and those people would also be correct. The band changed its music to be more accessible to the widest market, thereby selling more records. This is classic “sellout” activity. I can understand when over time a band’s music changes. If those changes are driven through life and experiences and an evolving ethos I will support them (as long as the music doesn’t suck) but if those changes are founded in making more money, or marketability, or business shit in any way – well you can now just go fuck off. The truest fact is that according to punk history the existence and prevalence of the band itself expresses the deepest and most insulting ‘selling out’ against the values of all that is punk. All the hard fought territory gained by nihilistic 70’s and 80’s degenerates in the name of social and political freedom being completely desecrated by the mere existence of a Green Day, the grave pissed on over and over again.
I suppose the least bandwagonesque people say that Green Day’s music is no good. These people I agree with most. The music being bleated out by Green Day is mediocre…

Uninteresting…

Political for the sake of being political – do I really think that world events or national politics affect these guys, fuck no. If they had a true sense of politics then their message wouldn’t be so goddamn simplistic. It’s like political rebellion for people with downs. Sorry, got sidetracked there…

Boring…

Formulaic…

Safe – and what worse could be said about any “punk” band.. but they are not a punk band and because of their safeness they get heavy rotation on every radio station trying express the ‘punkness’ of their avatar.

On top of all this shit I have to say that I fucking hate Green Day fans. Again you may decry my hatred as unreasonable. You don’t hate dogshit for being dogshit, even when you step in it, right!? Wrong again bitch! Green Day fans are the musical equivalent of Creationists. They have a ridiculous and fundamentally flawed point of view regarding their band and under no circumstances will they give even an inch for fear that their whole bullshit avatar ‘punk rock’ image will crumble.

Green Day Fan, “Dude, Green Day are so rebellious that they say ‘americans are idiots’!”

Me, “Get over yourself you fuck-tard. This is just a blatent pandering toward the mindless Bush-hating youth of America.”

Oh yeah, by the fucking way, who is the extra mystery member that was surreptitiously added to the band!? Green Day is Mike Dirnt, Billie Joe Armstrong and Tre Cool. Next time you want to make your brain hurt a little bit go ahead and watch the video to ‘Wake me up when September Ends’ and you too will notice something – there is a fourth goddamn dude out there with the band. Who the fuck is this!? The funny thing is that this mystery guitarist apparently materialized out of the void just to rock out in ‘Wake me up when September Ends’. No one in the video seems to take any notice of this guy. Where the hell did he come from?

The logical explanation is that Green Day (like many bands) required an extra guitarist for this particular song, so they just had someone play an extra guitar. For example Mars Volta use Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers to play on some of their songs because they don’t have enough guitarists. However Mars Volta don’t reflect this in their videos. Neither do countless other bands. So why Green Day?

The only possibility is that Billie Joe wanted to act more as front man and less as band member. The band, in its continual evolution towards becoming the most hungered for pop-music candy in modern history, needed “BJ” to be more in the cameras with the facial expressions and the mindless political rallying and less on his instrument as an actual musician.

These tactics have been used before, in Societ Russia, except in reverse. After Lenin died there was a sort of power struggle. Stalin on one side, Trotsky on the other. Stalin was in charge, but Trotsky was troublesome. Stalin needed to institute himself as Lenin’s former best friend and Trotsky as nothing. As time went on he doctored countless photos. Trotsky would move further away from Lenin, whereas Stalin would move closer. Eventually Trotsky ended up disappearing completely whereas Stalin would end up standing next to Lenin. Trotsky would later become a figure of hate in the USSR, and Stalin, always a pleasant fellow, had him exiled and then killed by having an assassin drive an ice pick through Trotsky’s eye in Mexico City.

Green Day is doing something similar. Except without all the evil. Well, not as much evil. And in reverse. Instead of getting rid of a guy, they’re bringing one in. Soon you’ll find that listings have this mysterious fellow as being in all Green Day’s albums and songs. He’ll appear on Green Day’s official website, he’ll be rocking in all the concerts, and when Green Day’s asked about it the answer will be as that he’s always been there.

See, the core of this issue for me isn’t really Green Day so much, even though it’s like drinking formaldehyde every time I hear some asshole call them ‘punk’, it’s something much bigger. Somehow in modern times we have subtly taken the same words and replaced the meanings with their diametric opposites. The same words, but opposite meanings. It’s not so blatant and tyrannical as 1984 where words are being systematically destroyed, but it’s something just as sinister and a million times more subtle.
“PUNK” could be a metaphor for American culture. I’m not so braindead to not see it when it’s happening, but every time I ignore it or am forced to adapt its like the world is taking another wafer thin slice of my soul.

Maybe I’m not being completely clear – a quick lesson in the history of punk.

Punk rock is a rock music genre that developed between 1974 and 1976 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Rooted in garage rock and other forms of what is now known as protopunk music, punk rock bands eschewed the perceived excesses of mainstream 1970s rock. They created fast, hard-edged music, typically with short songs, stripped-down instrumentation, and often political, anti-establishment lyrics. Punk embraces a DIY (do it yourself) ethic, with many bands self-producing their recordings and distributing them through informal channels.
By late 1976, bands such as the Ramones, in New York City, and the Sex Pistols and The Clash, in London, were recognized as the vanguard of a new musical movement. The following year saw punk rock spreading around the world. Punk quickly, though briefly, became a major cultural phenomenon in the United Kingdom. For the most part, punk took root in local scenes that tended to reject association with the mainstream. An associated punk subculture emerged, expressing youthful rebellion and characterized by distinctive clothing styles and a variety of anti-authoritarian ideologies.

By the beginning of the 1980s, faster, more aggressive styles such as hardcore and Oi! had become the predominant mode of punk rock. Musicians identifying with or inspired by punk also pursued a broad range of other variations, giving rise to post-punk and the alternative rock movement.

The first wave of punk rock aimed to be aggressively modern, distancing itself from the bombast and sentimentality of early 1970s rock. According to Ramones drummer Tommy Ramone, “In its initial form, a lot of [1960s] stuff was innovative and exciting. Unfortunately, what happens is that people who could not hold a candle to the likes of Hendrix started noodling away. Soon you had endless solos that went nowhere. By 1973, I knew that what was needed was some pure, stripped down, no bullshit rock ‘n’ roll.” John Holmstrom, founding editor of Punk magazine, recalls feeling “punk rock had to come along because the rock scene had become so tame that [acts] like Billy Joel and Simon and Garfunkel were being called rock and roll, when to me and other fans, rock and roll meant this wild and rebellious music.” In critic Robert Christgau’s description, “It was also a subculture that scornfully rejected the political idealism and Californian flower-power silliness of hippie myth.”

Throughout punk rock history, technical accessibility and a DIY spirit have been prized. In the early days of punk rock, this ethic stood in marked contrast to what those in the scene regarded as the ostentatious musical effects and technological demands of many mainstream rock bands. Musical virtuosity was often looked on with suspicion. According to Holmstrom, punk rock was “rock and roll by people who didn’t have very much skills as musicians but still felt the need to express themselves through music.

Some of British punk rock’s leading figures made a show of rejecting not only contemporary mainstream rock and the broader culture it was associated with, but their own most celebrated predecessors: “No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones in 1977″, declared The Clash song “1977″. The previous year, when the punk rock revolution began in Great Britain, was to be both a musical and a cultural “Year Zero”. Even as nostalgia was discarded, many in the scene adopted a nihilistic attitude summed up by the Sex Pistols slogan “No Future”; in the later words of one observer, amid the unemployment and social unrest in 1977, “punk’s nihilistic swagger was the most thrilling thing in England.” While “self-imposed alienation” was common among “drunk punks” and “gutter punks”, there was always a tension between their nihilistic outlook and the “radical leftist utopianism” of bands such as Crass, who found positive, liberating meaning in the movement. As a Clash associate describes singer Joe Strummer’s outlook, “Punk rock is meant to be our freedom. We’re meant to be able to do what we want to do.”

By the turn of the century, pop punk had been adopted by the mainstream, with bands such as Green Day, The Offspring, and Blink 182 bringing the genre widespread popularity.

Modern ‘punk’ bands are just a pandering bunch of post-punk, pop, “please love me”,  pussies. It’s like the biggest problem with music now is how desperate they are to be liked, to be loved, to find an audience, to be on the newest fucking car commercial. It’s all pose and fashion and style. It’s all manufactured. These fags probably have a team of fucking stylists working for them . It’s all so cynically put together to evoke 70’s, New York, danger. It’s all ‘la-de-dah’, happy-go-lucky, spoiled little brats from the suburbs, coming together to start a band because they’re bored and not getting enough attention. And they tell you absolutely nothing, show you nothing new, it is not visionary, and by it’s very nature and attitude redundant. It’s very fucking sad that these bands are referencing something that happened 30 fucking years ago. It’s not as if there is a revival of the intellectual concepts, or the values, or the diversity, or the extremity of that music. It’s a homogenization, it’s a gentrification, and it’s a softening. It feels soft and mushy and weak. There is no substance, no spine, no teeth. There is nothing important that these new bands are doing. It’s a commodification and sterilization of the three same fucking instruments – bass, guitar, and drums. And don’t try and sell my memories back to me. Fuck nostalgia. Show me something new, sell me something new, scare me, shock me, rape my fucking mind. There is no time for old shit, don’t repackage my first love as commerce, it’s time to move forward and that’s fucking it. Adopting nostalgia as the base from which to create from is intellectual bankruptcy. I want something that blows me away and I’m not sure whether it’s “cool” or not. It’s time for a new nihilism. It’s time for the whole post-modern deconstruction of everything to strip it of meaning to end. Is the control that pervasive? Is the industry so powerful that peoples’ views and desires are implanted by corporate capitalism and people are just so fucking confused that they don’t even know what to rebel against any more? Maybe it’s simply that a new and different mode of control requires a new and different mode of rebellion. Maybe that’s just my own pathetic romantic prayer for the death of the things that I hate.

Regardless and in conclusion; punk does is not equal to punk. So fuck you!

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2. The Grande Ballroom – by Brad I.
3. He Was One of Us

The evidence is clear. I haven’t shot a gun in months, let alone at other people (or hajis). I spend more time on hold than I do having sex. I wait in traffic for endless expanses of time with nothing to show for it except frequent brake jobs and a hundred horrible radio pop songs being hopelessly stuck in my head. Its like a bad fucking dream, like a goddamn hangover. I was drunk on the ecstasy of modern life that promised everything. and I eagerly offered my drunken complicity. Every sexy promise that a grounded life flashed before my eyes, like a flirting dirty-mouthed whore at the bar, and I jumped on it only to wake up, roll over, and find that it has turned to a foul and revolting shit-beast. So here I am with my despotic job, tyrannical mortgage, dictatorial hair cut, and my autocratic frustration with endless visions of an empire in decline trying to chew my arm of and get out the door before the shit-beast wakes up and tells me she’s in love.

I’m so fucked.

You know, I think my whole filthy life has been put on hold. I mean it is the modern confessional, an emotional rollercoaster, and in the end completely futile. I mean what’s the fucking deal!? I know this only because HP has raped me over and over and over again with their ‘customer service’. Everyone knows they don’t give a shit about you. They construct as complicated and frustrating a labyrinth of menus and ‘unusually high volume of calls’ so that you will inevitably fuck off long before you ever reach an actual human fucking being.

I try and console myself, take fleeting comfort in my bullshit self-imposed justifications like a penitent man too smart for christianity. “The longer you wait, the more your call is valued.” Type horse-shit. Sometimes god’s voice even tells me how long I have to keep praying before he himself will actually answer, but he’s never right, not even close. The fucked up thing is that a minute of hold time is worth like ten minutes of actual time because you can’t do anything, not even move for fear that already tenuous cell reception will shift, and your prayer will be dropped and you will be forced to start praying all over again from scratch.

Sometimes god’s voice tells me that he is going to record my prayers. He does this for my own protection of course, as well as to learn better how to answer my prayers in the future. Sometimes he’s a man, sometimes a woman, but god’s voice is always the same. Cool, irritatingly calm, totally detached, and generally boring. He talks like this so that I will not become further enraged by the act of praying, and in this way allow me to really focus on the real reason I started praying in the first place. Most of the time the only answers to my prayers are the sound of shallow breathing interrupted by god’s voice regularly telling me how valued my prayer is. Sometimes, to handle my prayer more efficiently, god gave his only living options to all of mankind. God’s voice then takes the next fifteen anytime minutes to explain, as excruciatingly slowly as possible, all the different types of reasons that people pray (with the fifth option being a prayer to ask god to repeat the first four types of prayers). Sometimes god’s voice tells me to use his website to answer my prayers, even though with his infinite wisdom he knows that the reason I’m praying is because my computer blew up. He does this to test me.

The funny thing about praying is that the longer you are on hold, the less likely your prayers are going to be answered. During marathon prayer sessions, you develop a deep loathing for god and you contemplate blaspheming him by holding at his expense for the rest of your life. You also develop a deep loathing for the person who is currently boring god to tears with a load of completely unnecessary problems while you sit there in abject misery.

The moment when you’re finally connected to god is one of the most awkward in modern life. It’s like the moment your roommate finally comes home after you’ve locked yourself out of the house all day. It’s not their fault that you had to wait around like an idiot, but it’s almost impossible to be nice to them, especially if they attempt to show you how much you’re valued. The strangest thing is that god has an Indian accent a lot of the time. I know that his product and organization are all based in America, but for some reason god himself has this strange foreign accent. I can only attribute this to the fact that god is mysterious.

Recently god told me that the reason for my prayers was out of warranty and there was nothing He could do without charging me a modest fee. God informed me that even though he did answer my prayers just five months ago for this same problem, that he would only support the answering of that last prayer for three months. Without my previous purchase of the extended warranty there was nothing he could do at this time. I told god that his creation was flawed and that its downfall was not in the expected performance of such a creation. God simply told me that even though he was vast and all powerful, essentially able to fix my computer with just a simple wave of his hand, he would not.

I wept.

Related posts:

1. Temptation
2. Exodus 9:23
3. The Black Beast Strikes Back

I continue north, following for fifty miles an idiot driving a minivan who is oblivious to the fact that his left turn signal is blinking.  Fifty fucking miles behind a complete moron.  As if I didn’t already have enough reason to hate him.  Fifty goddamn miles.  From Solana Beach to El Toro. Blink blink blink.  Wake up you fucking LOSER!  The blinking is driving me insane but I resist the urge to pass or run him off the road.  I force myself, almost a test of will, to remain behind the vehicle for as long as is possible.  I keep telling myself that it will all end soon, he will pull right or realize that his blinker is on and my brain can finally relax.  But relief never comes.  The small blinking light burns into my eyes like a welder’s torch.  My hands grip the wheel with increasing tightness.   My teeth clench and grind.  My mind wills cancer and smallpox onto the driver.  But I stay the course and eventually he flicks the blinker to the right side and gets off the freeway.  I had overcome the challenge, but it left me worn.  I had an overwhelming desire to pull right, follow the minivan to its final destination, get out of my truck and beat the man to senseless.   Not quickly, but slowly, the punches coming after long luxuriating pauses where I soak in the warm satisfaction of his pain and eventual death.  One punch for every blink of his turn signal.  Payback for his stupidity.  I imagine pounding away on his broken face as a freakish smile plastered on my own is slowly sprayed to dripping with his blood.

I decide I needed to chill the fuck out.  Can’t have a drink yet so I settle for some Mexican food.  In case you were wondering, everything I consume is in burrito-form.  Carmels.  I used to eat at the Carmels in L.A. every fucking night.  They would have my order ready for me when I walked in like clockwork.  No ordering required, just throw some money on the counter and grab my shit.  I used to always have 50 cents left over and I would play two games of Ms. Pacman before heading back to the dorms.  I hit the drive through then swerve another 300 meters to the best thrift store on planet earth.  Right there off El Toro Road hides the last bastion of good thrifting that I am aware of.  Its right in the heart of a extraordinarily rich area and every solitary tax-evader pays off their heaping debt of white guilt with massive donations of crap to the local thrift store.  It’s an out of style dumping ground for every designer fashion from ten years past.  I imagine these richies all going through their vast closets in these vast houses and throwing into a pile the latest fashions from the 70’s and 80’s.  With no more knowledge of what to wear than what the television tells them is cool.  No identity, no souls, just a bottomless pocketbook and all the time in the world.  Well fuck ‘em.  Their loss is my gain, and so a thrifting I will go.

Things I hate right now:

I purchase nothing.  The store is rife with Mexicans.  They have adulterated the last bastion of my individuality.  Mexicans swarm to thrift stores like flies to shit.  Go home you fuckers, and I mean back to your primate mud-huts back in Mexico.  Quit turning my country into a shanty-town.  Quit taking all the good shit from garage sales and thrift stores and leave that to us Americans you fucking fucks!
North again, into the smog pile.  I heart smog.  I heart bums too.  That’s why I’m even doing this job.  Joel called me the day before, I’m supposed to pull a thug detail at a halfway house.  As it was later described to me it was the entry point for the lowest common denominator.  This is not a halfway house for rich Hollywood celebs or even middle-class housewives, this was for the bums – the homeless, the utterly abandoned souls barely scratching out a subsistence living out of trash cans and handouts.  Most with some form of mental instability, most with some kind of criminal record, all utterly derelict.

Their desperation is palpable.  Like a morbidly obese person overcome with hunger, fat greasy fingers scrambling wildly as if all the answers to life were at the bottom of a KFC bucket.  Their sanity was a dirty thing, like the disparate sloppy chunks of a hundred rushed meals inside an old microwave.  Many have replaced alcohol and drugs for cigarettes and coffee.  This is considered success.  There is no god here, just an enigmatic ‘higher power’.  Paying tribute to this mysterious force is tantamount to putting change in a parking meter.  It’s the new urban metanarrative – self-help.  This one tick forward, the one moment we are loved and embraced by god and society.   Admitting that you are flawed and incapable of being fixed.  The city itself has rejected the old Christian ideals of redemption after the fall.  There is no universal rule, no telos for humankind.  There is no heaven or hell but what life you make within the city.  Abandoned also are the Enlightenment theories of rational thought, allied to scientific reasoning, which inexorably would lead toward moral, social and ethical progress.  The city defies progress, defies logic.  Its mere existence is a crime against nature.  Fundamentally, a man-made organism, unsustainable in every aspect.  A hundred square miles of concrete.  The only nature left within its sprawl is the street names.  They have turned long strips of concrete into trees, bushes, birds, and unspoiled vistas.  It’s a crime against the mind.  The city lives as those within its borders live, to cosume everything and produce nothing save their own existence.  Like a comatose patient in a hospital bed, fed through tubes.  The city itself is like a junkie, a subliminal buzz, always present, always jonesing for the next hit, just there in the back of your mind.  The street sounds become a mellifluous symphony and the city exhales its lustful smoggy breath between the tall sexy legs of dirty skyscrapers.  Honking horns, sirens, internal combustion engines, the rattle of bums rooting through garbage cans.  Pigeons roost above every storefront foretelling of disease and pestilence.  Their droppings mix with grey-brown globs of human saliva, lipstick kissed cigarette butts, and small circles of chewing gum blackened by the soles of a thousand dirty shoes.  Pairs of old sneakers hang from powerlines.  Trash and graffiti have pushed well beyond the tipping point, the entire city is a dumpster.  The earth has no language here except earthquakes, violent outbursts, sins against the city, sins against the system.  It’s a contradiction to logic, to god, to nature for the city to even continue, yet here it stands.  And amidst the contradiction more contradictions are borne.

In our country, and in all classes, there are, and always will be, strange social ‘failures’.  People whose destiny it is to remain always beggars. They are poor bastards all their lives; mostly broken down, they remain under the dominion or guardianship of someone or something.  All personal initiative is for them an insupportable burden. They only exist on condition of undertaking nothing for the betterment of themselves, and by serving, always live under the will of another be it a master or an addiction or the consequence of their misguided decisions. They are destined to act by and through others. Under no circumstances, even of the most unexpected kind, can they get rich; they are always beggars. Always derelict of success, always homeless of glory.  I have met these persons in all classes of society, in all associations, even at the SEAL teams.   The people I was to guard and protect this weekend were just such people, and yet, of the lowest possibly segment in society.  They were in the most obvious way bums.  In this time and place only those with no possessions, no “worth” can act with impunity.  The only freedom is vice.  And there the paradox exists.  So here I stand, an obscenely paid mercenary, a samurai of the best training, hired to protect the very lowest form of life in our society by one of their own, a bum who had become rich.

I walked around the parking lot of the halfway house.  Hands covered in gloves, jacket zipped tight, a small Styrofoam cup of bland coffee in one hand – the butt of the knife tucked away in my pocket in the other.  I bounced between conversations, sometimes breaking in, sometimes just pressing up against.  I am here only as a ghost, to observe and interfere but only with the rattling of chains or the moving of furniture, not as an actual participant.  Les yeux sans visage. The only way people observe me is in the same manner that scientists discover black holes in outer space.  Simple look where all the light has been swallowed up, even though you can’t see it – it is there.  The people of the house were as full of color as any who have walked the earth.  I grind the heel of my boot against a pile of small blue-green cubes of glass on the edge of the street.  A car was broken into here.  Across the street a cell tower rises against the city lights.  An obtrusive structure, expressing violence, like a caltrop for the eyes.  I watch the steam rise from my cup, turn back towards the house, and like the cast of a play the house’s residents introduce themselves to me each in their own way.

A 16 year old girl.  Two kids, one abortion (by her dad’s best friend), and a 40 year old boyfriend locked up in county.  In her injured soul, fucking equals love, and getting boys’ attention is how she defines her self-worth.  She was instantly enamored with Joel (and for fuck’s sake who isn’t!?), who jokingly at first but sternly very soon after, rejected the flood of “do you like me? __ Yes __ No” notes passed via third party, from every recovering alcoholic and drug-addict in the place.  Her confidence was as stable as a house of cards.  I only spoke with her briefly, kindly, and very carefully.  I was of no consequence in her mind, her own inner gears churning more powerfully than all the kind comments and thoughtful remarks.  I believe she was molested as a young girl, possibly by her father.  I also believe that she was to some degree a prostitute.  Its one thing to hear about these things on tv or read it in a magazine, its quite something different to meet them head on in person.  I was really nothing in her world – a decoration, a toy.  She only questioned me about things that she thought would provoke a deeper interest by me in her, but nothing did.  She tried to use her pubescent whimsy to glean information about Joel, but her ploys were poorly constructed and obvious.

A hideously deformed woman named Carol.  God only knows the horrors that her yellowed eyes have glimpsed.  Sickly yellow bags, like smelly old motel pillows, filled with questions that only tears could answer.  Her gums, little pink mounds where teeth used to be.  Chewing itself, a long forgotten concept.  Her belly peeks out from beneath her matted shirt, as wide and round as a prize winning pumpkin.  Her belly button sticking out, protruding distended, like a purple half of an orange.  She said her name was Carol and asked me my name 5 or 6 times every night, my answer never lodging in her brain for longer than a few moments.  She walks oddly, one leg like that of a marionette – the other a zombie.  For all the times I reached out to her, I was instantly forgotten.  I forced myself to draw close.  I penetrating into the miasma of her musty words and musty smells to be kind, but was forgotten.

A strange wispy woman.  Long thin blonde hair that caught the wind like barn hay in a fire.  A giant puffy faux-fur jacket, giant puffy Ugg boots.  A pair of undersized tights connecting the puffs.  She looked like a giant poodle.  Her voice was always far off, even if she was standing right next to you.  Her mind, although gentle and compassionate, was is another dimension – another world altogether.  She existed in a place that was unlike anything I have ever imagined, soft, beautiful, intoxicating, and at the same time completely disturbing.  I don’t know if she was at the meetings for drugs or alcohol, god only knows what furtive needs people from completely different dimensions have, but she was there – albeit aloofly – nonetheless.  She seemed to know everyone there, except me of course, but she still seemed completely distant.  I remember back when I was in Kurdistan about a year ago.  I was so sick I thought I would die.  My Kurdish liason brought me some “Kurdish cough medicine”.  He and I had become friends, and part of my Kurdification was to experience the glory of this time honored tradition of a thousand feverish Kurdish boys.  It must have been pure opium and licorice, knocked me out for three days straight in a drug induced fog.  I hallucinated wildly, I was in pain but it didn’t matter, I was feverish and found it entertaining, I was enchanted by the dim orange sunlight as it crept through my brown curtains, I lay mesmerized by the dust particles floating in my room, I was halfway between dream and reality – and yet somewhere altogether different.  I was in a world that I imagine her life must be like.  Sadly though, soft gentile creatures like her are often taken advantage of in our world.  I shudder to think the depravity she has been party to.

A scaly biker dude who would endlessly complain about a spider bite on his leg.  His handshake was like a bundle of dry leaves.  His eyes dirty and weathered, like two piss-holes in the snow.  He was later identified in a long paranoid rant as being a spy or plant in some sinister master plan to take over the halfway house.  This is the place of spider bites.  Spider bites and flea bites and paranoid rants.  Down the street a dog is hit by a car, its piercing whelps shatter the fragile calm.  Everyone gathers to berate the driver of the car, spider bite told the driver to just drive away, earning him the admonishment of the entire place.  Everyone except me that is.  A bull-dyke with short cropped hair and denim from head to toe got an inch from his face and told him that she would rather kill him than have that dog be hurt.  He told her “fuck you”, and she responded in kind.  I walked over and looked at them both, they cautiously and surreptitiously acknowledged my presence and moved apart.  They weren’t really going to throw blows.  This is just rehab posturing.  In this un-drunk world the defining of values is a sketchy business.  The bull-dyke simply wanted to advertize that she loves animals and hates men.  She also wanted to put it on the table that she is willing to fight to defend these beliefs.  The love of animals makes her more affable to everyone else, at least in her mind, while the threat of violence makes her tough.  The perfect position from which to stand on a soap box and cry about your weaknesses.  The scaly biker dude just wanted the drama to go away.  He only afterwards made overly obvious gestures of compassion towards the wounded dog as an effort to repair the perceived damage to his reputation done by the confrontation with the bull-dyke.  I would have to listen to both of them converse with everyone that would arrive later in misguided efforts to sell their own actions through back-alley politics and shady one sided depictions of the event.  They sold it to everyone but me.  I don’t really exist here.  My beliefs don’t matter.  My words are hollow promises.  My actions are invalidated before they are performed.  Why?  Because I am not ‘in recovery’.  I still drink.  I still use drugs.  I still live and fight and fuck and destroy.  I have not surrendered myself to a ‘higher power’.  Until you have surrendered yourself nothing you do matters at all to these people.  You could be slaying dragons and winning wars but it is all bullshit until you surrender.  Only then will you be accepted at the table to bicker endlessly about whose actions BEFORE they surrendered were the most significant, the most depraved, the most self-destructive, the most painful, the most drunk or addicted.  Only then can you bet your experiences at the table in an endless game of one-upsmanship.  The funniest thing is that the biker and the bull-dyke were probably more alike than anyone else in the place, and yet they struggle against each other – despite each other.

Marxists believe that in order to be emancipated, society must undergo a revolution. Just as the bourgeoise (whose living depends on the control of capital or technology) took power from the noble class (whose wealth was based on control over land), they believe that the present system of capitalism will fall and the proletariat (who live by selling their labor) will take over. This change will be driven by the unstable and cyclical nature of capitalism, and by the alienation felt by the laborers who keep the system working.   Well Marx was right about everything but the conclusion.  The observations about a capitalist society were balls accurate.  Alienation and instability.  The endless marching of steamrollers forcing people to live as prisoners in their own homes, isolated, marginalized, consumers of goods.  No voice, no representation in the forces that affect them, no freedom.  Impotent.  Emasculated.  Sterile.

The problem is that there will be no universal change to the very foundations of the flawed system.  That kind of change has been made extinct by the system itself.  Instead the revolt expresses itself in the individual.  One singular person, the very smallest and least significant part of the whole great machine, thereby becomes the engine of self-destruction, revolution, and self-repair.  The people, not the system, are ground to dust.  The system is safe, the people themselves burdened with the brunt of the system’s flaws in their own lives.  It forces them to abandon everything in pursuit of their desires, freeing themselves of all other encumbrances, only to hit bottom and struggle from nothingness towards their own impossible redemption.  It is this struggle against the world that drives men to drink, this struggle against the world that drives them to madness.  The world, like a giant hand squeezing a ball of worms, destroys everything within its grasp and alienates everything that escapes.  In this impossible situation it is only through drugged perception or madness that there exists only for the briefest moment the realization of one’s dreams.  In the city, in the system, if you follow the rules and walk the line, there is no realization of dreams – just an endless shopping list jus to break even, your identity defined through your most recent possession.  Dreams are dangerous things, and maybe the system has a way of engineering solutions evolutionally.  For all those who dare, for all those who try, for all those whose fortitude and guts and effort might just create the slightest hint of change, or maybe for those crazy enough not to give a shit, there has grown a solution.  Like an orchid in a poisonous swamp, the rarest and most tenuous form of perpetuation, its unique shape and color evolved over a multitude of generations to attract just one single insect out of the swarm.  Drugs, alcohol, sex, madness, crime – these are the release valves in this city that’s just a mere tangle of pipes all leading nowhere.  For the people at this halfway house just talking about their favorite vice is like coming close to their dreams once again.  They talk about addiction dreams where they get high or drunk, they call these “freebies”.  Their addiction, their most intimate and personal relationship, their most treasured and valuable possession, has become just a stranger in a crowd brushed against for an instant and then it’s gone.

Drugs are freedom, madness is freedom, and this halfway house is the church where these things are backwardsly worshipped.  If the individual is the engine of Marx’s revolution, then the violent raging of a druggie alcoholic can only be seen as a new existential communist revolution.   One drunken night of rebellion, where one destroys all his relationships along with all his furniture in a fit of primal frenzy.  All things being made equal at zero point.  These things happen every day, most are simply corrected by the machinery of society itself.  Small and inconsequential rebellions, a traffic signal ignored, a fashion not followed, a gossip not shared.  Other times they take out entire high schools, colleges, or shopping malls in a bloody rampage.

Everyone is astounded at the cause of this unexpected explosion on the part of a person thought incapable of such a thing. It is the convulsive manifestation of their personality, an instinctive melancholia, an uncontrollable desire for self-assertion, all of which obscures his reason. It is a sort of epileptic attack, a spasm. A man buried alive who suddenly wakes up must strike in a similar manner against the lid of his coffin. He tries to rise up, to push it from him, although his reason must convince him of the uselessness of his efforts. Reason, however, has nothing to do with this convulsion. It must not be forgotten that almost every voluntary manifestation on the part of the convict is looked upon as a crime. Accordingly, it is a perfect matter of indifference to them whether this manifestation is important or insignificant, debauch for debauch, danger for danger. It is just as well to go to the end, even as far as murder. The only difficulty is the first step.

The criminal who has revolted against society, hates it, and considers himself in the right; society was wrong, not he. Has he not, moreover, undergone his punishment? Accordingly he is absolved, acquitted in his own eyes. The addict is the same way.  They have abandoned everything and are thereby absolved by their emptiness.  Finally to be filled up again with the fulfillment of their beliefs, their desires, their addictions.

For those within that society to understand is impossible.  The rebellious man’s actions must be that of lunacy, must be that of a natural born criminal, because to understand even on the most basic level is tantamount to suicide.  Spiritual suicide.  To see the reasoning of these wild thrashings is to for oneself view the painful, prison spectacle of the system itself.  Of the city itself.  Of their own lives.  To understand the rationale is to view oneself within the cage of our society, trapped, the only escape is to abandon everything like the madman, or the junkie.  The only true act of freedom is their self-destructive act of madness.  Maybe even nature is revolting in this way, the earthquakes a mournful cry for freedom from a under smothering concrete mask.

I myself am a ridiculous man. They call me a madman at times. Sometimes just funny or obtuse.  That would be a distinct rise in my social position were it not that they still regard me as being as ridiculous as ever.   Essentially it is through absurdity, through madness, that I have preserved my sanity – my clarity.  In the face of an impossible situation, in the face of utter existential abandonment by god and by nature it is only through absurdity that some semblance of sanity can be maintained.  This madness causes me to suffer, but in a world of suffering can’t we only truly love with suffering and through suffering? It is the suffering that creates the capacity for love, and it is this ideal that explains why I can only be happy when I’m miserable.

I wonder sometimes if my moods aren’t more a side effect of my surroundings.  L.A. is a miserable city, but it relishes in its misery.  Trees are planted in the pavement, their flesh marred and slashed viciously.  Every vertical surface is buried in squiggly lines, names, ink, and blood.  Every bus window and plastic fast food table is carved with the city’s own Braille.  A million names all written on top of each other, a million people all clamoring on top of each other.  Maggots on a rotting corpse.  Everything is in some degree of disarray or degradation.  The only pristine images are that of celebrities and advertisements.  Meticulously manicured bodies and faces each selling something different and yet all saying the same thing.  They are impossible faces, airbrushed, photoshop’ed, every aspect of their world painstakingly controlled. Every shadow, every ray of light, every angle, every mood.  Their surgically modified, chemically enhanced, mouths speak out one singular message “you are inadequate”, “you are not beautiful”, “you are horrible”, “life is horrible”, “everything is horrible”, “buy more detergent”.  It is no wonder that the squalorous masses aspire to the figures they see on the glowing box.  Its also no wonder that they want to see them destroyed.  This is the revised edition of the laborers resentment foretold by Marx and Engels, alienation from potential.  Alienation from “humanity”.

The days turn into nights.  I only work the halfway house from 5pm to 9pm.  Four short hours.  And after being locked in the presence of so many drunks and druggies I felt compelled to turn every night into a inebriated fiasco.  It was all a blur really, only a few memories strike from the shadows.

Every morning feels like being plunged into shit.  The taste of puke seeps out with every breath.  My mind is beleaguered by disturbing memories that it can’t push away.  Like a swarm of mosquitoes around my face, there is no relief.  As I stumble to brush my teeth I wonder if I even still have a soul.  I look down my hangover hole in the mirror but I can’t seem to find it.  I am saddened necroticly.   I feel like I’m going to die.  Most people want nice painless quiet deaths.  Not me.  I want horror.  Most people are fearful of the future.  You can see this at every sudden view of freeway.  You are driving along, traffic is normal, then there is a long stretch of road where you can see cars for miles into the distance and everyone slams on their brakes.  Infuriating, but human.  It is the knowledge of their own doom that causes them to brake.  Like cattle wandering through the maze leading to the slaughterhouse, they are happier with their illusions, with their misconceptions, with their lies.  I embrace the spectacle, I can’t force myself to believe the lies – don’t want to, and thereby I embrace my own demise.  Embrace the horror.  Not the horror of drowning or being burned alive.  Not crucified – too symbolic.  I want to be tortured to death.  Taken apart brutally a piece at a time and then shown each dead portion of myself before its discarded on the floor.  I want to know I’m dying.  I want to see it.  I want to watch my futile little life end.  Guillotined face up.  My severed head lifted and forced to gaze upon my lifeless body as I fade into eternity while a crowd of my closest friends and family laugh.

I don’t even know what I want any more.  There was a time when the future seemed so clear and simple, my beliefs seemed to make so much sense.  Those times are gone.  Everything is much too complicated now.  Its understandable I suppose, for  after all you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments.  And if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him.

I head home, but find myself still lingering on the thoughts of the places and people I saw over the weekend.  I go back to my routine in San Diego.  Working on my condo, waiting to hear back from several other real jobs, working out at the gym.  Days drop away and I find that the weekend has affected me, and affected me strangely.  I’ve taken on a form of malaise.  The kind where my world shrinks down to the size of my apartment and everything that happens there takes on new significance.  The way when you are in love that trinkets and baubles become meaningful and rich in memories.  I sit around drinking tea, the hot bitter liquid draining through my unbrushed teeth.  Time slows down, like when you’re listening to the Moonlight Sonata.  I sit in front of the clothes dryer and play my acoustic guitar with the rhythm of warm dry air.  I explore the window sill for dead bugs and mysterious pieces of things.  I get angry shuffling through my old CD’s and DVD’s and eventually fall asleep in a pile of them.  When I awake my back is creased with strange curved indentations that I run my fingers over endlessly.  I take long hot showers at awkward times of the day, spending most of the time either listening to the sound of the shampoo bottle pop open and closed or watching water drip away from my eyes.  A thousand tiny clear droplets falling out of focus.  I try to set tasks but in decreasing levels of motivation they all fail to be completed.  I discover strange phrases that have no meaning at all and they become my daily mantra, echoing through my brain until late that night.  And then I lie there in bed, gears churning out of control.  I question whether I should get up and just make some more tea and watch a movie.  Sometimes I’ve gotten up and gone for long meandering walks through the darkened city.  Sometimes long drives.  Its at these times that my camera replaces my mouth, and all my meaning is expressed in the images I capture.  I’m always dissatisfied though, the pictures never come out the way I see them in my mind, the way I’m willing them to be.  People stare at me in puzzlement and judgement.  I feel more alone sitting at a freezing bus stop in the middle of the night than I do back in my malaise cave.  Holding my camera steady so as to not blur the shot.  Slowly a strange sense of alienation and failure creeps into my bones and I walk back home.  Start to peel off my clothes, usually leaving myself halfway undressed asymmetrically until I wrestle the rest off in my sleep.   I am lonely, sleazy, and lost.

I wake up but the questions are still right in my face.  And so I confront them.  Where is meaning?  Where is God?  If God is dead then man is god.  Life is pain, life is fear, and man is unhappy. Now all is pain and fear. Now man loves life because he loves pain and fear. That’s how they’ve made it. Life now is given in exchange for pain and fear, and that is the whole deceit. Man now is not yet the right man. There will be a new man, happy and proud. He for whom it will make no difference whether he lives or does not live, he will be the new man. He who overcomes pain and fear will himself be God. And this current God will not be.  Hopefully this new man can be me.  But do you understand?  Do you understand that along with happiness, in the exact same way and in perfectly equal proportion, man also needs unhappiness.  And so I embrace unhappiness, ugliness, evilness, and pain.  I embrace these things because they embody the essence of why my soul is endlessly screaming into the void.

My god, I am a bum.

Related posts:

1. Death Bums
2. Stop, Drop, and Roll
3. Back to the Future – by Brad I.

I remember thinking that I should eat something, you always leave at least one critical detail unfulfilled, today it was food.  Fortunately we both wore long pants and shoes.  It would have been a rookie mistake, although not an uncommon one, to have ventured out with nothing more than shorts and flip-flops.  We took the 15 North after a short crawl through the ghettoes of North Park where fat disheveled Mexicans lurched up and down the sidewalks with white masks and bandanas over their faces.  It was like a fat zombie army of banditos hulking in small groups towards liquor stores and carnecerias.  On the freeway the traffic was strange and disproportionate.  The weight of vehicles hung much heavier in the steady flow of southbound motorists, as they, with bleary eyes, feared for their homes and lives while staring at the few solitary cars heading north.

There was a roadblock ahead.  The police had closed off an entire section of the 15 freeway where the fire was raging.  We pulled off the road at the last exit before the turnaround and headed east, straight into the mouth of the dragon.  Without gathering any info off the internet and my maps being a prisoner to an ex-girlfriend we had only the signs of devastation to guide us, and there was no shortage.  Heading directly for the largest, thickest, and darkest section of smoke that rose like a giant b-movie monster over the town we soon were passing burnt fences and blackened earth.  There were numerous police roadblocks but because of the enormity of the disaster they were only able to secure the major intersections thereby leaving the side roads and residential areas open for circumventing their meager efforts.   There were fire trucks everywhere and utility workers in full respirators turning wrenches on grey power boxes and control panels.  There was an eerie sense of the place.  Nobody on the streets, nobody in the businesses.  It was a ghost town.  The wind whirling recklessly around us, and nobody to be seen for mile after mile.  It would have been no effort at all to simply walk into somebody’s house and steal everything they owned.  Igor and I vowed to beat the shit out of anyone we caught doing that.  There are scumbag moves on this earth but that is one that we would not tolerate, especially in our own fucking town.

We were taken aback for a short time pointing at different images as they flashed before our eyes.  Like two children on a funhouse ride we observed in amazement as the horrors pressed against the windshield one by one, each more horrifying last.  And then we were in it.  Swallowed up by the gaping mouth of destruction.  The burning jaws that led into hell itself.  It looked like the apocalypse.  It was beautiful.

The earth was black.  Trees stripped of their leaves and standing painfully like black skeletons.  Smoke hung heavy in the sky.  It was hard to breathe, hard to see, your face and lips stung, your tongue tasted the curious and sour ash as it fell like massive snowflakes.  It was like being trapped in a noxious snow globe.  The winds increased in their violence and everywhere stood testament to their fury.  Downed trees and branches, signs and fences pulled down, a howling cry as everything turned sideways and bowed away from the gale.

We took a side road and ended up at Poway Lake.  The fires were consuming everything in sight.  There, a hillside stood in flames.  There a building lay in fire.  The wind was stronger than ever.  Reports were coming in that they had topped 100 miles an hour.  White caps crowned the million waves, driven by the moaning wind, as a desperate helicopter attempted to fill its water tanks with a long flaccid hose.

We drove on, deeper into the menagerie of masks and destruction. After swerving around several lines of cones and a small army of unmotivated cops we found the very brink of the devastation.  The front lines.  It was a standoff between the fire and the firefighters.  On a hill overly-punctuated by expensive houses we parked and walked up to a small group of firefighters in full regalia wielding hoses against the red-orange beast.  The fire, like a ravenous monster, was threatening to swallow a million dollar house whole when in between stood the firemen.  We took a chance and walked up a narrow path to another house, mere inches from 30 foot flames, only to look back just seconds later and find that the fire had consumed the path from which we came.  Fear rose up inside of us.  When we started this journey we didn’t really know what we expected to find or even how close we would even get, but when a 50 foot tall conflagration with an endless appetite hungered for the grassy food at our feet we knew we had found it.  We hurried to a concrete drainage ditch and escaped down the backside of the hill.

Me – “hey dude.. look there, a swimming pool.  If we get trapped we should could jump in that thing.”

Igor – “yeah! Haha.. and be boiled alive instead!”

We both laughed.  We could feel the heat of the flames, smell the stinking burning in our noses. Constantly wiping dust and ash from our tearing eyes, we cried black.  Natures forced empathy.

Hell surrounds us.  Bits of burning ash and embers rain down in all directions.  The sky is pure black.  The sun is a pale red circle hanging evilly overhead like an angry blood-filled eye… watching.

Eventually we found our way back to my truck and headed back home.  The stink of the experience hung heavy in my upholstery for a week but the memories would last much longer.  I found myself questioning my attraction to the fire.  Wondering why I head towards that which others flee.

I had a jumble of hours between seeking destruction and causing it so I spent my time thinking, watching, processing.  Although the motives are cloudy, the hunger is clear.  I seek fire.  That night I got increasingly more drunk until it all went black.  The next morning I wake up feeling estranged from planet earth so I take to the streets.  I try and spark my soul with the things that bring me pleasure.

I see people every day.  I am a watcher of things.  I am outside their world looking in.  Like a scientist writing observations in a log book I scratch down these thoughts into my notepad.  Take my pitiable photographs and tell myself that I’m different… better.  I sit down at the bus stop after a cup of coffee, not to get on the bus, but merely to gain vantage in my observations.  By chance to hear a strange phrase or see an alien act.  I feel like I am constantly waiting for these dirty little events, seeking them out like a despondent and poverty stricken bum grappling after loose change.

There a woman sits unconsciously rubbing a spot on her dress, there is a stain there, she has worn the fabric thin.  Here a man walks slowly, hunched over, bowed and crooked, gnashing his teeth against invisible food while frothy white foam is slowly squeezed from the corners of his leathery mouth.  Over there a man wearing a cheap suit brushes ash from his coat, his stubby fingers moving strangely across the grey.

A group of tired eyes staring down the road, expectantly, waiting for the bus. A glimmer washes over the crowd, a quick breath, a flash of recognition.  In this one tiny instant there is life, but it is fleeting, almost non-existent in its brevity.  A simple joy mixed with tired relief.  An ecstasy of fumbling.  Fingers too fat for tight pockets.  Quickly counting and re-counting a muddle of greasy coins.  “Correct change”.  A modern contrivance.  A monetary shackle, forcing attention to detail, forcing prioritizing of values, forcing subservience.  The coins drop from the dirty claw into a clear plastic machine almost completely covered in small white dents and cracks.  The machine has collected countless handfuls of “correct change” from the countless masses.  A million handfuls of bacteria from not washing after fondling excrement.  A million handfuls of grime from under fingernails.  A million handfuls of lint from sweaty pockets.  The machine clicks and churns as it withholds judgement.  A bell chimes, the person is deemed worthy, “correct change” has been achieved, they may now get on the bus.

Its no wonder that so many are sold on the idea of St. Peter and the pearly gates.  We have created a world where our very value is determined by such devices.  “Correct change”, be it coins or acts, seems to be the price paid not only to get on the bus every day but to get into heaven as well.

And the people sit there, waiting, like zombies.  Like tired disgusting cadavers.  A million dirty scars and cracks, wrinkles and lines and marks cover their discount clad bodies.

Everything is horrible.

The people, their bodies, their clothes, the bus, the road, their jobs, their homes, their lives… the whole fucking city.

Everything is horrible.

And here I sit.  Wondering whether all this smoke I’m breathing in is going to give me lung cancer.  Counting carbs, trying to justify my bar tabs, trying to justify my choices and actions in my mind.  Hangovers make me suicidal, hangovers make me schizophrenic, hangovers make me misanthropic.  There is no cure for hangovers.  There is no cure for living.  I start to hate everything.  Everything pisses me off, makes me get violent, triggers my fight or flight response.

Fight or flight.

I like to pick fight.  I trained to pick fight.  From being a soldier, being a man, a million years of evolution in a savage world.  If you pick fight then they will own you.  Make you the “bad guy”.  It justifies all their actions, excuses all their sins.  At the moment you choose to fight back, to take something back, to stand up, to not give up, to not bow down, at that very moment you are defeated.  It is an impossible situation.  If you choose flight then you are a quitter, a loser, a victim, and they own you even more.

No win.

It’s a downward spiral, a violent downward spiral, smashing into shit all the way down.  A violent destructive toilet flush.

Like the wildfires, I destroy everything I touch.

Even though everything was broken already I adulterate it.  Everything ages in my presence, everything rots. my existence makes things rust.  My thoughts make things decay.  My life… all life… is illusory.

What else is there? Where does one go from here? The answer – Las Vegas.

The end of the week was to be culminated with a trip out to Las Vegas.  My buddy Bobby was getting married soon and we all were to congregate in the city of sin for his bachelor party.  It was a good excuse to escape the smell of smoke if only to replace it with the stink of greed and desperation.  A long drive east.  I emerge from the smoke, confusion, and turgid rumblings of a city in despair intoa  vast lifeless desert at the center of which lies a necropolis of vice and gluttony.

We launched ourselves full power into all the Vegas highlights.  Gambling, alcohol, women.  Money was thrown around like confetti and a town where no action is considered criminal imposes its own special values over you.

I was drunk, I was sober.  I was down on craps, I came back – eyes so inebriated they couldn’t even read the numbers on the dice.   The only determination of what I was doing was the inward and outward flow of chips as I threw them willy-nilly over the unreadable numbers and colors.  I finally pull away, hit a dance club, slur at sluts camouflaged as women in slutty costumes, still somehow able to shoot my mojo all over them – at least long enough to get some free drinks and a girl’s room key.  None of it really mattered though.  The whirling typhoon of drunken activities was all to give my buddy a good send-off.  Every offer to peel away from the group was declined, no matter how beautiful the woman, no matter how strong the drink, no matter how great the winnings.

Two straight nights of debauchery and by Sunday morning I didn’t know if I was coming or going.  I had made some critical mistakes along the way.  Like a just-released convict I made out with a girl who crawled right out of a dumpster before joining the group.  Our wills were entangled like two fighting snakes, intertwined in a death grapple.  Why is there never mouthwash around when you need it… or bleach… or hemlock.  We now refer to her as “Poor-man’s Amy Winehouse”.  I had eaten food, thereby tricking my body into thinking that I actually wanted to live.  At one point we took a shot of whiskey so large that it took 3 full swallows to get it down.  It was the most whiskey I had ever consumed in one moment of time.  It sat there at the top of my neck right on top of 3 full plates of super-buffet that I forced down my hole like it was the last food I would ever eat.  I almost had the biggest barf session known to any human ever until I made out some more with “Amy Winehouse” and my body just gave up on trying to save me.  We lovingly refer to that drink as “triple-shot” and we drunkenly made a song about it.  We finally capped the trip off with a visit to the Spearmint Rhino.  I fucking HATE strip clubs.  HATE THEM!  They are disgusting and pointless.  I don’t want or need whores.  The place is all that is evil about women.  They play on your deepest and most primal instincts in order to steal money from you.  Fuck ‘steal’, give willingly, for the momentary fantasy that some perfect -10 beautiful chick actually wants to fuck you.  FUCK OFF!  The Rhino pissed me off so bad that I took a cab back to the hotel and crashed out.

The next morning we all met up for breakfast and regaled over the exploits of our weekend.  I jump back on the road home and my brain goes back into hangover-suicide mode.  I think back over the past week and weekend with a sense of confusion and wonderment.  Leaving Vegas is a strange experience.  Into the harsh, forbidding desert.  Nothingness for miles.  It’s a lonely planet.

I think back to the dumpster slut “Amy Winehouse”.  How amazingly horrible she was, but in the vacuum of existence, in this one spark of electricity place, this lightning rod town in the middle of a vast lifeless existential desert… Maybe she is doing exactly what we all should be doing.  She is the metaphor for all that I hold sacred – and yet I draw away from her poisonous embrace just as much as I hunger for it.

The devil’s plaything.

Roads and powerlines all spiderweb out from Vegas like the cracks in a broken window.  I think back over the few highlights…  My bro ‘Villain’ hooking up with a Columbian chick who wouldn’t let him wear a condom.  We all jokingly said he got “da nang” from her, a fictional std created from the Vietnam Magnum P.I. hat that bobby wore as part of his costume.  Dan getting the moniker “Dirty Dan” for making statements of willingness to have sex with a girl who (pardon my French) had the smelliest pussy on planet earth.  I was in the front of the limo-bus occupied by other equally dubious activities while in the back, apparently, it was so bad that it almost made Bobby barf up his triple-shot.  After that Leif and I had to sleep in shifts to keep constant vigil over “crab-watch ’07″ from Dan and Villain’s bed for fear that crotch creatures would try and migrate over to us. Bobby telling me that his “shit was like french fries. Not the little crappy ones, but the big thick Ore-Ida fries”. My other bro Adam twisted the shit out of his ankle in a drunken dance-off at club Tryst where the girls were literally throwing themselves at us for no other reason than we were there.  Our presence alone was the only pre-requisite for a meaningless sexual encounter.

For me the weekend was a bitter reaffirmation.  It feels good to be wanted, to be lusted after, but for me I am always questioning it.  Wondering why.  And if not finding ample valued explanation then I have no interest.  It’s a pointless kind of confidence, believing in the sloguns written on the banners that these girls waved at us.  Their mouths just a pointless parrot-holes, spouting the same five phrases like a Chatty Cathy doll.  Pull their string and hear the pre-recorded message.  Utterly devoid of life.  Merely the appearance of life.

The dumpster whore was not like that.  Everything that came out of her mouth, while trumping each conversation with increasingly disturbing garbage, was unique and original.  Frogs and snakes and spiders pouring from her horror-glazed lips with every word and yet unpredictable, vibrant, alive.  Her words landed like the first drop of blood in my suicide bathtub.  And then I question myself again, and come to the same conclusions as days before.  I seek fire.

Is this the way of free living and actual experiences?  Freedom at an unacceptable price.  Sitting in a bathtub filled with ice minus one kidney but laughing like mad?  Each experience more taxing than the previous, each more self-destructive, each more masochistic, more dismal and depraved?  And at the same time liberating?  The greater the depravity, the more liberating?

But even this false life, this death spasm, like an animal twitching with its head cut off, even this ‘life’ is illusory and fleeting.

All these temples of steel and glass will crumble.  These vibrant memories will bleach and fade, these hands that cling desperately onto fistfuls of hundred dollar chips are only holding dust.  Dust that inexorably slips through your fingers, an unstoppable hourglass of decline, decay, and death.

“memento mori”.

They used to tell the Roman generals when they returned to Rome triumphant.  Their glorious parade, wreathed in gold and glory, all the while a slave quietly whispered these words into the generals ear.  All glory is fleeting, remember that you are going to die.

Like Charles Manson, strangely, prison is the only thing I’ve known.  Locked behind the bars of my consciousness, unable to see the world past them but for in these few moments.  Passing quickly and leaving me feeling sickened.

The Panther – Rilke

His vision from the passing of the bars
is grown so weary that it holds no more.
To him it seems there are a thousand bars
and behind a thousand bars no world.

The padding gait of flexibly strong strides,
that in the very smallest circle turns,
is like a dance of strength around a center
in which stupefied a great will stands.

Only sometimes the curtain of the pupil
soundlessly parts –. Then an image enters,
goes through the tensioned stillness of the limbs –
and in the heart ceases to be.

So this becomes my conjugal visit with the human race.  Where Joshua trees grow randomly like the burning pieces of the space shuttle Challenger as it blew apart.  These are the confessions of a desert lizard.  These are the lost words of a cactus eater.  Breath heavy and full of fermented cactus fruit.  Squeezed through the body of a snake.  Spilled out their pungent bile onto the dry cracked earth.  The only testament to life is these cracks from ancient waters.  And in these cracks is the last refuge of spiders and crickets and centipedes.  I am the outlaw, sleeping alone, a heap of dry bones, in the trunk of a rusted car with no tires.  Spiders spin webs in my ribcage, crickets chirp from inside a grand auditorium, the hollow cavity of my dried skull, and centipedes now dance in the place where my heart used to be.

Wildfires ’07 Super-self-destructo Song List:

Danzig – Soul on Fire

Dead Boys – Down in Flames

Iggy and the Stooges – Gimme Danger

Social Distortion – Lost & Found

Ladytron – Destroy Everything You Touch

Danzig – Devil’s Plaything

The Sounds – Fire

Subhumans – Dying World

Related posts:

1. Other Shoe to Drop
2. “He [neighbor's "possessed" dog] won’t let me stop killing until he gets his fill of blood.” – David Berkowitz
3. Back to the Future – by Brad I.

Our dear friend and bassist extraordinaire Dave decided to show us west coast people how they do weddings in the original rock city by taking the party back to his hometown of Detroit.
A swirl of different concepts rushed into my head at the prospect of this. Along with Detroit’s iconic Woodward Blvd, where late 60s big block monsters tore up the pavement back when gas was 30 cents a gallon, I also remembered that this was the home of the Grande Ballroom on Grand River Blvd. Built in the 20s as, well, a ballroom for dancing, it was later resurrected in the late 60s as a rock venue, and became the home for many local acts, including proto-punk Satanists the Mc5 and, of course, The Stooges.
This is what the Grande Ballroom looked like in 1928:

Into the 1940s, in became an institution for swingin’ big bands and boasted “one of the largest polished hardwood dance floors in the country.” (Detroit News)
Then in the 1960s, things changed a bit. I’ll let Wikipedia explain:
“In 1966 the Grande was acquired by Dearborn, Michigan high school teacher and local radio DJ Russ Gibb. Gibb was inspired by visiting the San Francisco Fillmore Theater, and envisioned a similar venue in Detroit for the new psychedelic music and a resource for local teenagers. Gibb worked closely with Detroit counterculture figure John Sinclair in bringing in bands, both from San Francisco and harder-edged psychedelic rock bands gathering around Detroit’s Plum Street community. National and international acts of this period included Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Alice Cooper, Cream and The Who. The MC5 and The Stooges served as house bands, assuring weekly performances. The Grande also featured the avant garde jazz of John Coltrane and Sun Ra.
Performances of this period were frequently advertised by the distinctive psychedelic handbills of Gary Grimshaw. The Grande’s rock’n'roll counter cultural experience was extensively documented by Detroit photographer Leni Sinclair.”

The legendary Mc5 record, Kick Out The Jams was recorded during a live performance at the Grande Ballroom in 1968.

Grande re-opening in 1966.

Cream @ The Grande circa 1967

Ron Asheton of the Stooges @ The Grande Ballroom, 1969

However, by the early 70s, due to competition and financial problems, the Grande Ballroom closed its doors to the public and fell into disrepair. This is how it stands today:

Bottom floor of the Grande Ballroom as it stands in 2007.

2nd Floor, Main Stage.

One last gasp. Along with CBGBs, punk rock’s heritage fades into history at the mercy of commerce.

And now, next to my SG sits a 12 inch chunk of stage molding from an era where loud amps, tire smoke, and depravity were staples in the diet of angry young men across the country.  So long Grande Ballroom.

(Incidentally, I’d like to thank the fine men and women of the Detroit Police Department for choosing not to haul my trespassing ass to jail an hour before my flight home. Haha!)

Related posts:

1. Private Dick
2. The Big Disconnect – by Brad I.
3. Back to the Future – by Brad I.

The place is, at its most elementary level, a good idea.  Unfortunately in execution it is a judgmental left wing hippie hell hole.  I don’t like being judged for not filling my cart with all organic foods.  I don’t like being judged because my fucking clothes aren’t made out of hemp rope.  I don’t like being told about stupid homeopathic cures for shit that only takes a pill to solve.  If organic food was so fucking healthy then why do they have a whole section of vitamins and shit?  If eating pig droppings from a South American rain forest makes you a mega-man then why does everyone shopping in the place look like a homeless cancer patient.  You know, I hate branding as much as the next guy but when not one single package appears to even resemble the products that I know and love it gets me a little frustrated.  You can’t even buy a fucking Coke there.  I mean, all I want is a goddamn protein bar – not a wheat grass and raisin nasty tasting monkey-shit bar.

Is this all just a scheme to get me to pay more and more for shit I don’t want or need by ratty useless wanna-be’s acting superior by trying to make me feel less alternative than them.  Less in tune with the earth goddess.  Less ‘part of the solution’.  So you charge me twice as much for the recycled packaging and then force me to by two times the groceries just to keep up.

BULLSHIT!

If the place is about health then why does everyone who works there look like a concentration camp survivor with more piercings than I can even comprehend?  And why do they all stink of B.O. ?  This ain’t no hippie commune out in the desert.  This ain’t some motorcycle road trip with Peter Fonda… TAKE A FUCKING SHOWER YOU SMELLY FUCKS!  Since when does smelling bad and chicks having armpit hair mean you are saving the environment?   Maybe if you would stop taking baths in brown algae and afterbirth you could get the stink out of your pores you nasty weirdos!

Look, I’m not against alternative lifestyles of any kind, but I thought people who apparently identify with others in being ostracized would conduct themselves less critically of people who just want to get some fucking groceries.  So take your Che Guevara t-shirt and VW bug and drive off a fucking cliff.

You know the workers are only half the problem.  The shoppers almost make me go postal every time I’m in there.  I get cut in line by yuppie’s and homo’s all speaking the same foreign “health” language.  If your lifestyle was so fucking healthy then I wouldn’t be able to kick your ass up and down the street in front of your mama without you being able to do a single thing about it except whimper out “I’m sorry”.  I swear to god people do more reading in a Whole Foods than in a goddamn library.  I mean, I read labels too but these assholes are acting like there’s gonna be a test at checkout.  Just in case there is one, I am certain that Kashi cereal is made exclusively out of cardboard.

Another thing is that because I am at Whole Foods does not in any way identify my political leanings.  No I don’t love Hillary or Obama.  No I don’t think that blah blah blah.  Keep your smelly monkey ideas between you and your monkey mate.  I don’t want to know about anything that is going on inside your primitive healthy conscious environmental monkey head.  If you are a vegan then we have really nothing to talk about.  I eat meat, I wear meat, I am meat.  I am a million animal parts all smashed together lovingly.  I like the thought of slaughterhouses, I like the sound, and I like the smell.  I like leather jackets – If they were good enough for the Ramones then they are good enough for me.  I like animal testing because I don’t want a shampoo that will burn holes in my eyes or a cancer drug that will make my balls shrivel.  I like all kinds of things that would make you shit all over your wicker furniture.  All you dowdy, sullen, over-sized glasses wearing, cable knit sweater and turtle neck wearing, frizzy unkempt hair, foot shuffling type people that are likely college drop-outs or part-time bums just stay the fuck out of my way.

The cereal aisle is like walking through bizarro world.  Nutty puffed millet meal and fruity leather globs is not my idea for a healthy breakfast.  I want bacon and eggs.  Hot coffee harvested off the slave labor of third world workers paid a penny a day for their toils.  I mean all this praline and granola yogurt slop is never gonna cure a fucking hangover in a million years.  All that cran-tomato juice just sounds like indigestion leading to a painful nutty shit.  No wonder they have whole sections devoted to making good dumps, because the food itself is the antithesis of healthy bowels.  I mean, it’s sooo healthy that I got whole-grain diarrhea shooting out of my eye sockets.

The fucked up thing is that some milf’y orange county lady will drive up in her SUV and then fill it to the brim with ‘save the environment’ bullshit.  Not only are you a hypochondriac but a hypocrite as well.  Maybe its just for the image.  Whole Foods IS the most expensive groceries you can get.  Leading the pack over other specialty stores like Trader Joes and Henry’s by a long mile.  I call the whole foods down in La Jolla “Whole Paycheck” because it costs so much to shop there.  The WP in Hillcrest gets the name of “Whole Dudes” because all the gay boys are all on the prowl for a lover with a healthy colon.

Here’s a true story for you.  So there I was, buying almond butter. I like almond butter. I don’t necessarily prefer it peanut butter, but the shit is damn tasty and I read somewhere that almonds have good shit in them.  I’m there, scouting out the almond butters and another customer says “You know they make that in the same factory as they make the peanut butter.”

“Oh. Ok. Thanks” I said, still reading the label.

“No, really” she insists, “That’s not a good one. They make it in the same place they have peanuts.”

“Yes, you said that. Peanuts. Thanks.” And I place the jar gingerly into my basket as if it were butter not made of sunny organic California almonds but cloudy inorganic Nevada TNT.

Oh, but she insists, “Look, do what you want, but you’re going to be very very sick if you eat that one.”

Me – “Why?”

Health Hag – “Because of the peanuts!” in the same way you tell a 2-year old the hot water is HOT.

Me – “Last I checked, peanuts weren’t cyanide, so I think I’ll be just fine. But thanks for the concern!”

Health Hag – “Well, they are if you’re allergic to them!” Like in “Duh!” Like in “How dumb are you, Mr Almond Butter Dude?”

Finally, an organic wholegrain lightbulb goes off over her head. “Oh, you’re not allergic are you? I am.. even the smell of a peanut makes me swell up for a week. I can’t fly because of that.”

Me – “Ah. And no, I’m not allergic. Peanuts are great.”

Health Hag – “So why don’t you buy peanut butter?”

Me – “Because I like almond butter too, so what?”

And then, the kicker. The punchline. The slap in the balls.

Health Hag – “So can’t you buy the peanut butter and save the almond butter for people who can’t eat peanut butter? Why don’t you put that back and buy the peanut butter instead?”

Me – “I thought this shit makes you sick anyway?  Leave me the fuck alone lady.”

So I guess to be fair I gotta say that the salad buffet and the sandwich deli are pretty fucking kickass.  The Jamba Juice right inside the store is kickass as well.  Other than that, all I can really say is..

WHOLE FOODS GO FUCK YOURSELF!!!

Related posts:

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2. Health Junk
3. War Wacky

OUTRAGE.

and more RAGE.

Ok, I am TOTALLY sick of it.

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

GO FUCK YOURSELF!

The whole concept needs to FUCK OFF!

So for all the idiots lucky enough to have never heard of this shit (or maybe not have it all spelled out for you), heres the deal.

Political correctness (PC or politically correct) is a term used to describe language, ideas, policies, or behavior seen as seeking to minimize offense to racial, cultural, or other identity groups. The term is also used in a broader sense to describe adherence to any political or cultural orthodoxy. Conversely, the term politically incorrect is used to refer to language or ideas that may cause offense; or that are unconstrained by orthodoxy.

Now some motherfuckers (usually on the political left) have argued that the term “political correctness” is a straw man invented by the New Right to discredit progressive social change, especially around issues of race and gender.

This is just a modern version of fascism. Do not tell me what to say. Do not tell me what to do. Do not tell me what to think.

I agree, there is a socially constructed reality. I agree that children can be detrimentally altered by negative stereotypes. But I do NOT agree that the controlling of etnic images or the supervision of manufactured images is an answer to the perceived negative effects.

Some members of identity groups embrace terms that others may seek to change. Some American Indians take pride in the representation of their images as sports mascots. Many deaf people in fact find the PC term “hearing impaired” to be derogatory while at the same time taking pride and identity in the politically IN-correct term “deaf”. These days I don’t even know what to call a black person. Are you an ‘african-american’ or a ‘black’ or a ‘nigger’? All three terms are used almost interchangably within the identity group both as a point of pride and as insult. In this case terms selected by an identity group as more acceptable descriptors will then pass into common use, including use by people whose attitudes are those formerly associated with words which the new terms were designed to supersede. The new terms thus become devalued, and a further set of expressions must be coined. This can give rise to lengthy progressions that derail the intention of ‘political correctness’ by creating confusion and animosity in the absence of an ‘acceptable’ categorization.

At its foundation political correctness implies censorship and endangers free speech by limiting what is in the public discourse, especially in universities and political forums. University of Pennsylvania professor Alan Charles Kors and lawyer Harvey A. Silverglate, connect political correctness to the ideas of Marxist Herbert Marcuse, in particular his claim that liberal ideas of free speech were in fact repressive. They see this “Marcusean logic” as being at the basis of the hundreds of college speech codes formulated on American university campuses.

Others contend that politically correct terms are awkward, euphemistic substitutes for the original stark language. They also draw comparisons to George Orwell’s invented language Newspeak.

Several political figures claim that political correctness is a serious movement aiming to change the nature of Western society. Thus, Peter Hitchens has written in his book The Abolition of Britain, “What Americans describe with the casual phrase …. political correctness is the most intolerant system of thought to dominate the British Isles since the Reformation”.

An example of the PC argument is self referential and irrational, here is an example.

• Different cultures are compatible.
• People who contradict this claim are blinded by prejudice against other cultures.
• People who contradict this claim are trouble-making bigots, which makes them enemies of the community, if not humanity, and deserving persecution.

Lind and Buchanan have characterized PC as a technique originated by the Frankfurt School. According to Lind and Buchanan, the work of the Frankfurt School aimed at undermining Western values by influencing popular culture through Cultural Marxism. Many commentators, along with Buchanan, describe university campuses as breeding grounds for political correctness. Patrick Buchanan, says, in his book The Death of the West: “Political Correctness is Cultural Marxism, a regime to punish dissent and to stigmatise social heresy as the Inquisition punished religious heresy.”

Political correctness is virtually communist propaganda writ small. The purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of integrity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.

Opponents of mainstream scientific views on evolution and other issues have claimed that political correctness is responsible for the failure of their views to get a fair hearing. Thus Ted Steele, an associate university professor of biology, says, in his book, Lamarck’s Signature: “We now stand on the threshold of what could be an exciting new era of genetic research. … However, the ‘politically correct’ thought agendas of the neo-Darwininists of the 1990′s are ideologically opposed to the idea of ‘Lamarckian feedback’ just as the church was opposed to the idea of evolution based on natural selection in the 1850′s!” Camille Paglia, a self-described “libertarian Democrat,” argues that political correctness gives more power to the Left’s enemies and alienates the masses against feminism.

Political correctness creates a list of acceptable and unacceptable words and phrases that can be manipulated depending on circumstance. It also creates an environment where people are made to feel that they are being prejudicial for simply questioning ideologies.

Political correctness marginalizes certain words, phrases, actions or attitudes through the instrumentation of public disesteem. Political correntness is a form of coercion rooted in the assumption that in a political context, power refers to the dominion of some men over others, or the human control of human life. Ultimately, it means force or compulsion. “Correctness” in this context is subjective, and corresponds to the sponsored view of the government, minority, or special interest group. By silencing contradiction, political correctness entrenches the view as orthodox. Eventually, it is accepted as true, as freedom of thought requires the ability to choose between more than one viewpoint. Some conservatives refer to Political Correctness as “The Scourge of Our Times.”

Political correctness has infected even our foreign policy. So concerned with everybody’s opinion, so overcome by the need not to offend, so paralyzed by the lack of non-PC options in both speech and action we have become an impotent nation. The conflict in Iraq is a perfect example of how fighting a war with flowers, a PC war, is a failing proposition.

And so in conclusion… FUCK YOU POLITICAL CORRECTNESS! People not only should not be protected from being offended but the complete opposite. Political correctness is the death of liberty. Political correctness is irrational. Political correctness is tyranny.

Check out these web sites to more educate yourself against the oppressive regime of political correctness:

racial slur database = http://www.rsdb.org/

wikipedia list of ethnic slurs = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_slurs

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Conversation finally drew to a close and I hit the road.  I drove hard north.  I was gonna try and make Chicago that first day so I could go out at some of the old bars and clubs and shit I used to frequent in another life but it wasn’t in the cards.  The Pennsylvania turnpikes fucked me all up and by the time I pulled my head out of my ass I had murdered too much time to make it.  I pulled off the road at truckstop hell somewhere in the pinetree maze.

While the Uhaul is slowly filled with liquefied dinosaur bones I wander over to a crusty old man standing behind a large pickle barrel.  Wearing an old pale blue mesh trucker hat so old it was probably bought back when those things were first in fashion and it looks like he hasn’t taken it off since.  His face looks like one giant scar.  Tan, weathered, didn’t move like flesh.  More an animated collection of cracks.  I stood there for a moment staring into the murky depths of the barrel.

Leatherface “Thems’ th’goodn’s they’s”

I look into the barrel at the pungent green liquid suspending what look like bright red pickles.

Me “What the hell is that?”

His flat brown wrinkled hand reaches into the barrel.  I watch as the thin blue veins slowly dip into the green stuff until they emerge clutching their prize.  The man holds the bright red thing like a cigar, raises it to his face, then bites the end off with the side of his mouth.

“Pickled sausage” he says as bits of pickled red meat are mashed between his teeth.

I take a deep breath, look into the barrel one more time.

“I’ll take three!”

… and they were delicious.

With the pickled sausages in my guts and the gas in the car I was ready to rock on.  Snaking my way through the Appalachians I pushed hard into the night until finally burning out in Toledo, Ohio.  I pull into a nowhere motel and rent a room for 25 bucks from a creepy dark haired girl that smells like mothballs and has deep black rings under her eyes.  I back the Uhaul against a wall so that it wont get broken into while I catch a few winks.  Feeling jittery from the long drive I wander the hotel grounds in a daze.  The place was a trainwreck.  A small swimming pool lay partially drained in a half-hearted attempt to keeping the long hauls from drowning trucker whores in it.  Three mattresses were stacked neatly nearby.  Moldy, smelly, half soaked in rainwater and piss and god knows what else.  I lumber over to a liquor store to get some cash and some new batts for my GPS.  As I step into the ass-rape mini-mart the smell of incense and sulfur hangs heavy in the air.  I hit up the ATM and grab some supplies.  The skinny bald white dude behind the counter looks like he’s been living off diet pills and satanism for the past 10 years.  The guy has no upper lip, 25 silver hoops in his right ear, and tiny grey teeth that defy the existence of modern dentistry.  The neon signs outside buzz in the cold air.  The man looks like he’s snarling as his bottom lip does all the work.  The total comes to $6.66 and I wonder if I’m not about to be Punk’d or something, but nothing happens.  Its just another shithole liquor store in another shithole town.  I make my way back to the hotel and slam my door shut only too late to realize that the thing is only being held in place by grime and luck.  The hinges and deadbolt have all been kicked in and repaired a hundred times in what is probably a long history of drug busts and jealous confrontations.

I wanted to get up early but the constant rhythm of trucks driving by on the interstate sing me into a deep sleep.  I wake up late the next morning to a freezing rainy day.  I drive over to “Brandy’s Diner” after promising myself a real meal before I charge into another day of gas station food.  The place was a box.  As soon as I walk in a fat man warmly tells me that I can sit wherever I want.  He doesn’t look like he really works here but I say “thanks” all the same and find a seat near the large front window facing the street.  ‘Rick’ is the name on his gas station nametag.  The guy looks completely at home in this diner.  His face was like a pink throw pillow.  Fat, yellow teeth, talking non-stop from the minute I enter the restaurant to the minute I leave.  The place is tiny so its impossible for me to not overhear everything that he says.  He babbles on about industrial chemicals, employment trends, he even seems to know a hell of a lot about a psychic pig that lives somewhere nearby, but what he is an absolute expert on is pie.  I had no idea that there was so much to talk about when it comes to pie.  The size of the pie, the size of the slice, the taste, the amount of fruit, the amount of crust, the amount of glaze, the price, the freshness, how long it was cooked for.  I swear that this dude must be the all time master of pie knowledge.  He knew all the best places in town, confidently compared the prices of different restaurants various flavors as well as qualities.  He had a fancy statement to conclude each of his points.  The only one that really stands out in my mind is when Rick stated with absolute authority “Now THAT was a tasty pie!”  I had this sense on a spiritual level that that pie must have really been something special.  Unfortunately, Rick was about the only thing in the diner that wasn’t creepy.  The place was painted lime green.  The walls were covered with paper mache pumpkins and ceramic figurines of angels.  Everyone in the diner was wearing American flag shirts, or ballcaps, or jackets, or pants.  One woman had a blue denim floppy hat with no less than 50 pins.  Each one a little flag, or an eagle, or POW/MIA.  Everyone in the there was missing at least one tooth, so I didn’t feel so bad as I popped my tired retainer out and set it on the table.  One pale skinny girl was meticulously spreading jam on ½ inch squares of her toast then carefully biting them off.  Another man was taking these little mini-sips of his coffee then sticking his tongue out repeatedly in what looked like disgust.  The mini sips couldn’t have been more than a few drops.  It must have taken him a month to drink just one cup, disgusting from start to finish.  One large window was the main source of light.  As I sat there with my back to the window watching the people, every five minutes a big rig would drive past.  For a few seconds the place goes dark and conversations stop.  Everyone looks out the window to see the truck pass by but then they would all look at me.  I felt like an insect on a pin.  Then the truck passes, light returns, and the people continue their conversations.

I ordered the ‘country breakfast’:

3 eggs
3 pieces of bacon
toast
home fries
and coffee

grand total = $3.50

As it turns out there was nothing on the menu over five bucks.  Today’s specials included baked pork chop, fried chicken, hot roast beef sandwich and potatoes, shrimp and steak.  As soon as the last crumb of food was slurped off my plate I threw down some cash and booked it.

With the coffee running its course I motivate to stop at an antique mall.  Remarkably I find a few treasures that will grace my possession until the end of time.

Original newspaper from the day after JFK was assassinated – 5$

6 inch thick leather bound scrap book that someone kept from 1930 through 1970 – 20$

August 1988 LIFE magazine featuring Pee Wee Herman ‘How to throw the coolest party ever’ – 2$

I load my treasures into the cab of the Uhaul and get back on the interstate.  I burn through the rain.  It’s time to put some more miles on this trip.  The solitude of the car starts to turn my gears.  I feel homeless, rootless, without direction.  I can’t drive towards one relationship without driving away from another.  I’ve been a hunter gatherer all my life and now for the first time I’m starting to suffer for it.  I burn through a whole tank of gas and pull off to refuel and grab some maps.  The fat dude at the counter is almost a body double for fat Rick back in Toledo.

Fat clone, mockingly “You don’t even know where your goin’!?”
Me “Well if it was to the buffet I’m sure you could give me directions.”

I press on down the interstate until I come across what’s being advertised as the 8th wonder of the world; FIREWORKS!  I keep telling myself that experience is more important than wealth, well its time to prove it.  I drop 165 bucks on the box labeled “Black Avenger”.  I instantly befriend the people in the store who with absolute confidence agree with me that ‘fireworks are the fucking coolest thing EVER’.  The people were so satisfied that they had just had a completely masturbatory transaction with a fellow fire-starter that they went deep into the store and came back with a gift for me.  The blue rocket.  Basically a gigantic fucking rocket that explodes blue flame all over the sky. It was time for me to rekindle my pyromaniac youth.  What better way to express my disapproval of meaningless material gain than to blow a bunch of cash on shit that just blows up.  The fireworks store is a symbol.  It is a metaphor for life, man’s plight.  This is it, right now.  This is life and its not gonna happen if you just stay on the interstate.  The whole point is not the destination but it’s the journey.  The grail is not what is important whether it’s a cup or a woman, but the quest is what is relevant.  The quest.  And its how you act while on the quest, the decisions you make, that define your true character.  I am a knight on a holy quest.  This roadtrip is my quest, this Uhaul is my trusty steed, and the prize is my soul (or maybe just to blow some shit up along the way).  I pull over to throw the fireworks in the back of the truck.  As I pull open the door I see that the load has shifted.  Some things have broken back there, some things are upside down, but it has found its own natural order, its own equilibrium.  With the addition of the fireworks that equilibrium has again shifted.  The future is again unclear.  This is what the roadtrip is supposed to be about.  I’m finding things out.  I’m discovering things and I’m changing because of it.  Time to get back on the interstate.

You gain proficiency in a whole new skill set when driving for extended periods of time.  You could even call them ‘road trip skills’ because they are unique to people who live in their cars.  Alternately they are totally present in everyday life in Los Angeles, but I think that may be the exception that proves the rule or whatever.  Knee on wheel, redbull in one hand, jerkey in mouth, typing a text message in the other hand, taking a picture out the window, writing down a few notes, and changing the playlist on your iPod all at once.  These are the road trip skills and with enough practice you can truly become a master.

I pull over a few hours later and accidentally find myself in front of another roadside anomaly.  “The Pickle Factory”, an entire store dedicated to pickles.  I have a brutal flashback to the red pickled sausages back in Pennsylvania and start to wonder if this is some kind of bizarre unconscious theme in my brain that is only now, out here on the road, being revealed.  Regardless, I roll into the Pickle Factory to check the place out.  Pickles assault my every sense. The woman running the store turns out to be the nicest lady on planet earth.  Big awkward glasses, salt and pepper hair, thick puffy sweater.  Answers all my stupid questions about the store, the company, the pickles and about a hundred other things.  I tell her about just coming back from Iraq and taking a cross country road trip to clear my head.  She tells me that her son was killed in Iraq about a year ago.  I watch her face very carefully.  Her delicate smile crumbles before my eyes and she has a far off look.  The color recedes from her cheeks and her eyelids sag slightly.  Her head hangs down if but only an inch and yet having the effect of her posture like she had been hauling 200 pounds of rocks all day.  I feel like an invisible hand reached into my chest and squeezed my heart as hard as it can and wont let go.  His name was Ryan, she asks me if I, by chance, knew him.  Obviously the answer was no.

I load up on 20 dollars worth of pickles and stuff before heading back to the interstate.  Its misty, drizzling.  Farms and churches are everywhere, the spirit of many hands working together.  I wanted to take as many pictures as possible, I remember Brad’s statement “Pictures, pictures, pictures” but I’m caught up in more than just the picture.  I’m caught up in the message.  And right now the message is more important than the picture.

long metal watering booms stretched across fields
blue/gray metal grain silos with orange rust spilling down out of every seam
an American flag painted onto a barn door
trailor parks
semi trucks
prefab homes
truckstops
rusty barbed wire fences whose legacy stretches back in history to when the west was won
flannel jackets
rotting cars
dead wooden barns, sagging, being swallowed up by the earth
billboard signs advertising sporting goods stores and motor homes
tan, tightly cropped stubble out of a dark brown earth
smooth streams that reflect barren branches
burned out homes with caved in roofs slowly imploding under the weight of moss.  This is the chaos theory of the American dream.

I try and let go of what’s holding back my emotions.  I want to feel everything.  I’m teaching myself how to be human again, maybe for the first time.

cops on the side of the road focused on their radar guns
sagging powerlines that cut through trees and across fields into the horizon
every 30 miles a little white cross on the side of the road sometimes with a little bow or some plastic flowers tied to it
the smell of wood fires

Every time a rock flies off the back of a semi truck or the Uhaul’s engine cuts because the governor detects 90mph my heart stops.  For a split second my blood runs cold and then instantly I recover.  The car is not blown up.  A rocket did not hit the car and neither did an IED or EFP or any other damn thing.  I won the war.  I won the war because I survived.  I won the war and I’m never going back to Iraq.

I pull over in Gary Indiana.  This is what I’ve been looking for.  This is a post-industrial town in utter shambles.  A titanic steel works is the main attraction.  Initially I wanted to get photos of the works, its huge plume of white smoke groping high into the sky, but the town was so utterly abandoned, so completely downtrodden, so totally derelict that I was instantly enamored with everything except the works.  This is a broken glass town where shattered windows are boarded up only if they’re lucky.  Row after row of abandoned storefronts, each one completely smashed in.  The only operational businesses are fried chicken fast-food and payday advance loans, wig stores and video rentals.  The people here move slowly, everyone looks tired.  People waiting for busses, crossing the street against the signal.  Expressions are deliberate, gestures methodical and deep in meaning.  Freight trains rumble by constantly, the sky is yellowish gray and the ground is black, the soil has been smothered completely with coal dust.  I am the only white person, but the fact that I’m carrying a camera, my clothes aren’t ripped and worn, and I’m not wearing any gold jewelry would be enough by themselves to make me stand out.  I make my way past the deterioration and detritus until I find a giant burned out rail station.  Must have been built about a hundred years ago, the huge stone and brick structure looking like the skeleton of a dinosaur there by the train tracks.  A once powerful thing, massive, intimidating, but now absolutely in ruins.  It was beautiful.  I spent thirty minutes snapping away on my camera.  I even dug an old brick out of the coal dirt and took it back to the Uhaul with me.  Took a piss on it before I left to mark my territory.

Check out the pictures I snapped off right here.

Back on the interstate, next stop Chicago.  The town brings back a lot of old memories. My drunken street fighter days.  Pre-seal teams.  People are impatient here, intentionally chic, street savvy in their mid-west metropolis.  I could live here if I had to.  I quickly snake my way through traffic until I hitch up the Uhaul a block away from what used to be one of the best punk stores in the world.  The decentralization of product sourcing through the internet has made places like this somewhat obsolete.  Culture no longer flows from one physical geographic locale any more but is sprinkled homogeneously everywhere at once.  This waters down the message, waters down the effect, and means that ideas have to appeal to the lowest common denominator.  The city moves at its own pace, get up to speed or get out of the way.  This is not the idea of this trip, I can’t be told what to do, where to go, and how fast to get there.  Fuck the oppression of this modern life.  This trip is about reversing the flow of the river, if only for a little while.  I grab a couple t-shirts and escape to the south.  I have begun my sojourn along Route 66.  Already tired and dirty I have no idea where this trip may take me, but I am ready.

I drive hard south.  Joliet is my next stop, hoping to find more of the post-industrial leprosy that has left barren neighborhood and abandoned factory in its wake.  The place is nothing like what I was hoping for.  All the grime and ghetto glory that was so apparent in Gary is nowhere to be found here.  Joliet is a total bust.  If I wanted to hang out in strip malls and burger shacks then I’d just have gone to fucking Anaheim.  I loop around town for a while until completely disappointed I get back on the interstate.  Night has fallen like a severed head.  Fog drapes the road and for the next fifty miles I press through it with near-zero visibility.  The numbing gray vapors slowly coat the car in moisture until the small droplets join together and run down the windshield.  In the few random moments when I emerge into a gap in the misty prison and the fog is clear for a few moments I take in the dramatic sight of…. Nothing.  I am truly in the middle of fucking nowhere.  There are no other cars on the road, the fog is keeping everything pressed right up against my face, and when it clears I realize that there is nothing around me except a vast barren expanse of cold dead earth.

The fuel light blinks on and I pull off in Normal to fuel up.  I roll into the gas station, start the pump, and go inside the mini-mart to piss and load up on supplies.  I grab a couple Sprite Zero’s hoping that they will fill me up enough to not eat another 50 fucking hot pockets and beef jerky tonight.  I can already feel my body transforming into something fat and useless.  A cop comes in as I’m getting rung-up.  The checkout dude looks at him and says “Good evening officer Barney” then turns to me with a smirk as the cop passes by.  I sit there waiting for the green plastic bottles to pass under the red laserbeam.  The glowing red eye blinks on the bar code and the machine’s brain beeps with recognition.

“I hate pigs” I say.  I don’t even know where that comes from.  I mean, I know where it comes from because I hate pigs, but it was something else.  It was me playing the part of the sideburns tattoo guy at the gas station who hates cops and wants to act cool by saying so to the pimply faced loser checkout clerk.  God I am such a fucking faggot sometimes.

I look up at the clerk as his pale white and red speckled face drops and I just know that I’m fucked.  I turn around and the little buzz-cutted pig is puffing up one foot behind me.  I smile “hey man” I say.  His face is starting to turn pig red and his beady little pig eyes are falling deeper and deeper into pig rage.  I grab my Sprite Zero’s and walk out.  I stand there by my Uhaul pretending to pump gas until he leaves so he can’t follow me and fuck me on some driving violation shit.  I finally pull out and do a few loops through town to check the place out.  It is as advertised, normal.  I hate towns like this.  Places like this make the scars on my knuckles itch.  I roll through a supermarket to scoop up some stuff the gas station didn’t have and every eye in the place tracks on me the entire time like a dozen fleshy security cameras.  Even the college kids don’t know what to make of me.  I can feel the rage building up.  Like that pig back at the gas station.  My rage stems from the fact that I am an outcast everywhere I go.  I never fit in, especially not here in Normal.  I am anything but normal and somehow my presence here has disturbed some cosmic balance.  I am that little spot of black in the white swirl in the yin-yang.  I have to get out of this shithole before someone offers me bong rips or a bible and I have to murder every last one of these fucking sheep.

I wake up the next morning not knowing exactly where I am.  I popped some sleeping pills the night before to take the edge off the long hours on the road and it had splashed bleach on my memories.  I stumble out of the hotel into the restaurant next door.  The Hen House.  Nine booths all single occupied with wayward travelers such as myself.  I take the last empty booth in the back to the left.  An overweight ruddy faced woman in the opposite booth is continually hacking and coughing through advanced lung disease.  I order the ‘harvester’.

2 eggs
2 sausages
home fries
pancakes – I request peanut butter for these.

Antique farm tools cover the walls and the furniture is all thick and wooden.  The caffeine and sleeping pill combo when piled on top of many hours of driving have left me groggy and unmotivated.  I sit there watching a mini swirling galaxy of cream in my steaming black coffee.  I am in a trance.  My mind wanders out of my body and looks down on my current state in tired disgust.  I am starting to come apart, starting to show the worn through parts of my soul.  Too many trips to Iraq, too many hours on the road, too many beers and too many pills.  The hacking woman’s phlegmy call jerks me from my meditation.

My meal is served, kechup, Tabasco, and peanut butter applied to their respective foods.  One quick slurp chased by a large gulp and it was all gone.  Four women come in and sit in one of the middle tables.  They are clucking about election results, air conditioners, the grooming and training of dogs, as well as a number of other equally life changing topics.  One woman continually says “especially these days” to add final emphasis to her specific argument on the previously listed topics.  Now I see why they call this place the hen house.  All the regulars file in as the travelers file out.  Pretty soon the place is full of 40-60 year old women wearing sleeveless fleeces and sweaters over turtlenecks and long sleeve denim shirts.  All overweight and in varying degrees of graying hair.  All just clucking away.

“especially these days” cluck cluck cluck

“oh well, you know” cluck cluck cluck

“that’s too bad, that’s just too bad” cluck cluck cluck

“well I really feel sorry for her, really I do” cluck cluck cluck

“that’s what you get when you don’t do what’s proper” cluck cluck cluck

“oooh, that is sooo nice” cluck cluck cluck

I find myself running to my Uhaul to get away.  The fucking banality almost made my soul throw up on itself.  This place should be hit with a neutron bomb.  I’m back on the interstate before I even know what’s happening.  Peddle pressed to the steel, barely awake, stomach full of hot food and coffee causing my forehead to start to sweat.  My eyes are covered in dead bugs and my mouth tastes like road salt and in my hair dead strips of long haul truck tires lay abandoned like alligator skins.  Middle America, this is Bush country, these are the red colored states in the election.  I’m driving through the red.

About an hour down the road I snap out of my road trance as my guts start to revolt all at once.  I’m 2 seconds away from shitting my life and there isn’t a pull-off for another 10 miles.  Sweat beads up and starts to run down my face.  I lean forward, groan, turn the radio off, roll the windows down.  “Shhh.. ooh..  SHIT!!?!” I feel a single cold drop of sweat roll excruciatingly slowly all the way from the back of my neck down my spine.  The gas pedal slams home, the vehicle lurches forward in a panic.  I pull into the Pilot gas station and truck stop like a meteorite, the transmission clicking fearfully as ‘D’ becomes ‘P’ while still doing 30mph.  I stumble anxiously past a small army of realtree ballcaps bobbing around on top of dirty angry heads.  Something gurgles up inside of me like an office water cooler that randomly takes a large gasp of air.  I shuffle past the coin-op showers where a fat greasy trucker is dragging a gangly worn out hooker with a bad case of acne behind the dented steel door.  She looks at me as I trundle past, our eyes meet for a moment and there is some kind of strange connection.  Past the thick circle of black smudged eye make-up, through the ring of pale blue wreathed in white and red, into the black and bottomless hole in the middle.  She is asking and telling all at once and for just a split second I forget about the toxic waste burning a hole through my ass.  Then a cramping pain seizes up my bowels just as the trucker figures out the latch and she is yanked into the small white cell.  The moment is broken.

I barely have my pants down before my guts explode out of me into the porcelain bowl.  Technically I had shit my pants.  Don’t get me wrong here, no shit in any way shape or form was crapped into my jeans, but at the moment when I did crap it was in no way my choice or under any form of control.  I shit my pants but luckily I had just pulled them out of the way in time and was squatting over the toilet.  I sit down with relief as a hundred curly trucker pubes and errant half-dried piss drops stuck to my sweating ass.  There was no time to put the seat down and I sat there beyond caring against the cool white rim.

After cleaning up I walk back out of the stall.  A massive man with a white beard standing in front of a urinal is hauling his huge gut up.  Kneading it with his forearms so that his hands are left free to zip his pants up and fasten his belt.  The tattooed names of lost loves and his poor departed mother pressed tightly against parts of his abdomen that he hasn’t seen in years.  When he is finished he releases his belly in an avalanche of flesh and lets out a tired sigh.  I hear a horrible thumping and muffled whimpers coming from the now locked coin-op shower stall as I walk back into the gas station.  I spy a stack of ‘radioactive’ stickers used on the sides of semi’s on my way out the door and decide to scoop a few up.  As I pay, the cashier starts complaining to nobody in particular. “Fuck I hate today!  Everyone is being a fucking idiot!”  She looks at me and reaches over the counter with a leathery freckle-covered arm.  Grabbing my wrist with a kind of grotesquely acute strength she continues “Oh, everyone but you, you’ve been sweet.”  She smiles as row after row of blackened teeth testify to a long hard life filled with $20 blowjobs and freebase methamphetamine.  I try and snatch my arm away from her but her grip is too tight.  I don’t want to be impolite but I can’t break her grip and I am starting to tumble between those scarred and glistening lips into that horrible rotting mouth. At that moment, feeling very lightheaded, my mind wanders out of my body.  I pick it up a few minutes later behind the dumpsters out back.  Cowering there in the shadow of a dusty semi truck I carefully peel the backing off one of the stickers.  I look over my shoulder at the message scrawled with a fingertip in the dusty side of the trailer “Jesus loves you!” right next to the message “Show me your hooters, I dare you!”  I throw the backing to one of the stickers into the rusty steel dumpster that’s already half filled with bloody clotheshanger abortions and broken Coors longnecks.  I slap the sticker on the once green box, scribble ‘abandon all hope ye who ender here’ across the front of it, then jump back into my Uhaul.

The interstate gives sanctuary for the next whole tank of gas.  I pull over again in Collinsville to snap a few shots of a giant ketchup bottle.  Just outside of St. Louis I spend about 45 minutes trying to get into a massive rusting factory with no success.  I drive in circles past burned out neighborhoods and small groups of black people just sitting on front lawns watching life ooze slowly out of their bodies.  There is trash everywhere, the place looks like law and government have been discarded remorselessly years ago.  I swerve through St. Louis on the ‘actual’ Route 66.  Traffic is frustrating, its hot, everyone has a disappointed look on their face.  When you spend more time and effort finding and photographing a giant 80 foot high ketchup bottle than the St. Louis arch  you realize that you’ve turned a corner in your life.  The heat starts to overwhelm me so I stop at ‘Dirt Cheap’ to grab a couple cool daddy’s.  The woman ahead of me in line seems excited.  Half white, half mexican, half black.  Her purchase consists of a 6-pack, lotto tickets, and cigarettes.  The frayed old football jersey she wears shimmies left and right over soiled gray sweat pants as she animates to the more important details of the story she’s telling to the visibly disgusted checkout clerk.  “…he was workin’ me up so good…” It was all I needed to hear, the rest was pulp fiction predictable.  I pay for my beer and walk back outside, cracking the first one immediately.  As I take that first delicious swig I hear traffic droning around me, bees buzzing in my ears, and a dead hot wind rubs past my face.  A cop looks at me from across the parking lot and I stare him in the eyes fearlessly.  He knows I am in violation, his computer readout is blinking red bold letters inside his head, but he does nothing.

HEY

HO

LETS

GO!

By the time I chuck the first empty into the growing collection of garbage in the cab of my Uhaul I hit Merrimac Caverns and decide to take a detour.  The memory of my recent subway mission in Los Angeles rattles around in my head as I probe through the depths of Jessie James’ old hideout.  Ducking low ceilings and cheesy pedantic tourguide humor my tour group makes its way through the darkness.  The group consists of 8 other people, all of them old, like retirement old, probably all taking that trip across America that they’ve been telling their kids about for the past 30 years.  They have fancy new cameras but no knowledge on how to operate them.  They wear old style clothes on their old bodies and make old style jokes out of their old mouths.  They huddle together and repeat the same statement 4 times into deaf old ears, wasting away the last precious moments of their lives on some trip across the country that will probably end in the grave.  I can’t imagine what America must look like to them.  A world that they neither created nor have any stake left in, a country that has forgotten them and in which their contributions are lost, desperately trying to pretend that everything is alright here in this leftover wet dream from the cold war.  The tour concludes with the spectacle of playing a recording of “God Bless America” while the tourguide flips switches controlling red white and blue lights that are projected onto a massive stalagtite.  Many of the old people stand up and sing with their old voices along with the recording, some even salute as they sing.  This is bomb shelter patriotism.  This is what we would all be doing every day if the nukes fell.  Here, 300 feet beneath the earth, these people can embrace their fantasy one last time, their failing eyes welling with tears and their failing hearts with pride.  Their hands trembling with love of a place that no longer exists… a place that has been blown to smithereens.  The song reaches its conclusion as a giant American flag is projected onto the rock structure.  Everyone claps triumphantly with old hands and we shuffle back out into the daylight.  My mind feels ravaged, its time for the other cool daddy.

[This is the video of the gruesome patriotic spectacle under the earth.]

I get back on the interstate trying to process everything that has just happened.  That cave is where Jesse James swam through the pitch darkness in a freezing underground river to escape the law.  He left his horses, his equipment, and all his loot.  The lesson is that freedom is worth any price.  Never surrender.  And so on this trip I vow that I never shall.

The black silhouettes of fast food signs, hotels, and gas stations rise and fall against the setting sun.  My feet feel vulgar, I haven’t changed my socks in days and now my toes are wrapped in a swamp of melted cheese.  Squeezing my toes hard against the suffocating filth I start to zone out.  My mind wandering off into an unfamiliar place.  My consciousness and the road align, my thoughts whirling in synchronous revolution like the spokes on a spinning wheel that seem to slow down and reverse rotation.  Somewhere far off I hear the sound of children screaming.  Somewhere in this haze, somewhere in the last beams of the setting sun something changes in me.  I hit the point where I just don’t care any more.  Fuck hotels, fuck sleep, fuck showers and brushed teeth.  Fuck exercise, fuck a healthy diet, fuck everything… just drive… just drive on.  I’m down to a quarter tank and a rage starts to rise up in me.  I pull off and fuel up as I wipe up spilt beer with a used dirty t-shirt.  I purchase 3 large energy drinks and then hit the Taco Bell for some nutrition.  The truck is too tall to clear a drive through so I challenge the locals on foot for my spot in line.  The two teens ahead of me are lost in their own programming.

teen 1 – “Oh snap!!!”
teen 2 – “What’s up?”
teen 1 – “Dude, I got an extra soft taco in my bag!”
teen 2 – “Extreme!  You’re so lucky dude!”

I shotgun the first energy drink and slurp down some low-grade carne.  The rage starts to rise up in me again, and I start to get mad at the road.  The road is the enemy.  The road needs to be punished and I’m gonna punish it by driving it as hard as I can.  My cycle has been established and now I rage against the rut.  Beer at day, redbull at night.  The cab of the Uhaul is a disaster.  I’ve been just dumping all my trash in it like a time capsule filled with empty beer cans and fast food wrappers.  It looks like AC/DC threw a concert in it.  Strange smells arise randomly and I have no idea if its form inside the vehicle or out.  The caffeine starts to run its course.  I pop my retainer in and out for hours until my gums bleed.  My tongue is swollen and dead, burned and blistered white from trying to eat hot pizza while doing 90 down the turnpike.  Food scraps in the cab are in varying levels of decomposition.  My fingers like prehensile snakes that swim through a foot of garbage before finding the taco bell bag and snatch a cold taco.  I stare trancelike at the road.  The colors of the road invert when I close my eyes.  White on black, black on white.  If you live in darkness for 6 months you go color blind… 1 year and you go completely blind.  Living without consciousness or free will works the same way.  My caffeine amplified foot drives the gas pedal into the floor wrathfully.  Like childish dreams of omnipotence where by touching a globe you think that you can actually crush cities with your fingertip.  My hateful mind recedes inward until driving becomes completely subconscious.  I find myself totally looking off to the right or left, programming a playlist into my iPod, writing in my notebook and suddenly become aware that I haven’t looked at the road in 20 minutes.  My heart freezes momentarily, I look up, make sure I’m not crashing, then go back to what I was doing.  I even have developed my own method to sleep and drive.  I turn the interior lights completely off, lean back, head against the headrest, iPod in my ears playing something mellow, squint my eyes until they are almost closed and just zone out.  Its exhilarating and relaxing all at once.  The cab melts away, the outside world melts away, only what is directly in front of me there in the 15 foot reach of the headlights exists.  It feels like flying.

I drove through all three energy drinks, I don’t even know where I am, the sun is starting to light up the sky behind me.  I pull into a dogshit motel in a dogshit part of town.  Walk up to the night office, “Just put new carpet in that room” says the mask of wrinkles and melanoma.  I barely have the strength to wonder what happened in the room that required new carpeting before I latch the door and go comatose.

The beeping sound of a school bus reversing woke me up.  It was picking up kids from the motel I called home that night.  I pull my shit together and make my way towards the continental breakfast.  Waiting for my english muffins to toast while listening to the trucks drive by outside.  The room is quiet, I meditate to the sounds of the toaster quietly clicking as it heats up, the coffeemaker making little gurgles, the t.v. buzzing silently on mute as images of bloody soldiers being dragged away from a blown up trucks in Iraq flicker through the room.  The morning manager comes in and takes my key.  “Were there any problems with the room”, this is motel talk for ‘did you break anything’.  “No” I cough up with a mouthful of mucus, “everything was fine.”

I pull out of the motel into the town of El Reno.  I circle around for a little while just getting my bearings.  I wasn’t feeling all together in any way.  I don’t know how much sleep I got but it wasn’t much.  The caffeine had made the few moments of unconsciousness I did glean edgy and uncertain.  I had made some excellent progress in the night but at what cost.  I was about to grab a bite at the local diner until it happened.  I saw it.  I saw him.   He didn’t even have a face but I saw him staring at me and I knew I had to save him.  I pull over, subtly parking my Uhaul truck next to the house.  I left the motor running.  Get out.  Pretend to be sending a text message on my cell phone as if these inbreds even know what a text message is, or a cell phone, or a toothbrush.  I check my corners, looks clear, I go for it.  Running up to the pumpkin I quickly throw my cell phone in my pocket and unzip my jacket.  Shit, zippers stuck, ok got it.  I pick him up, just when I hear somebody yell “HEY!!”  I come to grips with the fact that stuffing a 30lb pumpkin in your jacket is harder than it looks.  Two crusty looking rednecks come running from across the street.  “SHIT!!” I scream in my head as I run full speed in flip flops back to my truck.  I open the door and the pumpkin and I jump in.  Clutter and trash are everywhere, I try to close the door but I’m hung up on the seatbelt and can’t quite get all the way in.  The rednecks are getting closer.  Finally, just before the door closes in the nick of time my atlas and maps and printouts of roadside stuff to check out falls out of the car.  “SHIT!!” I cry out, this time not caging the words in my brain.  There’s no way to go back and recover that stuff.  I see it blowing away in the wind as the two rednecks point and yell at me angrily as I speed away.

“Well that could have gone better.” I say and turn to look at the pumpkin riding shotgun.  A friend was now made.  I pulled behind some abandoned buildings and gave him a name and a face.  I had stolen him from a front lawn.  His life was different now, changed, metamorphosed.  Because of this I named him “Gregor”.  Gregor’s mantra was then written on the back of his head;

MY NAME IS
GREGOR
I HAVE A FLAWED
CREATOR
I KNOW I AM GOING
TO DIE

Gregor was now my travel companion, but the price of his freedom was high.  All my maps and directions were lost.  We are directionless.  Fuck it, Jesse James right, no price is too high!

Me “Gregor, sometimes I feel like I’m losing my mind.”
Gregor “…”
Me “Yeah, you’re probably right.”

Gregor and I stop to celebrate.  I get us each an energy drink to celebrate our small victory.  As we sat there drinking our caffeine in the rest stop parking lot two boney hookers slither up to us.  They ask me what’s the deal with my pumpkin and I tell them that he is my travel companion on a cross country road trip.  They instantly love him.  All the girls like Gregor but they aren’t showing any interest in me.  I’m better looking but he’s got a great personality.  I wanted to get the two prosties, you know, one for each of us, but Gregor hogged them both.  You would think that he would show me a little gratitude for his rescue but no.  I feel hurt but I think I understand.

Oklahoma is beautiful country but it smells like buffalo piss.  Gregor’s stomach was gurgling so loud that it was starting to piss me off so I conceded to pulling over and getting something to eat.  I guess he really worked up an appetite with those Oklahoma skanks.  I carry Gregor inside and the waitress leads us to our booth.  I tell her that he’s going to need a booster seat.  She looks confused, but my face never betrays the request for an instant.  I ordered the pigs in a blanket while Gregor just stuck to a bowl of oatmeal.

scared waitress “Would you like something for dessert?”
me “Yes, do you have pumpkin pie?”
scared waitress “Yes we do.”
me “Oh great, I’ll have a slice.”

She disappears momentary and then brings me the pie.

Me “Man, now THAT is tasty pie!”
Gregor “…”
Me “What?  No.”
Gregor “…”
Me “Cannibal!”

We pay our bill and get back on the route.

We derail off the interstate all the way through Oklahoma so that we can drive the original Route 66 through all the ghetto little towns.  I pull off in Clinton to check things out.  A tall lean radio tower stretches into the pale blue sky.  An American flag flaps in the wind.  Endless barren miles of light brown grass reach off into the horizon in every direction punctuated only by a few patches of trees and spots where the red soil is visible.  The trees are amazing, bright yellow leaves covering black bark, branches sticking out in every direction like a primitive dance.  A dog riding in the back of a flatbed truck filled with rusting dirty shovels stares me in the eyes as I sit at a stoplight.  The sun is warm through the windshield, the rhythm of the wind beating the outside of my Uhaul is soothing.  The comforting redundant strobing of the white dotted line and the calm vibration of the wheels on the road.  The mellow yellows of the grass and the pale blue of the sky, I zone out for what feels like weeks.  When I wake up I am mindlessly staring at the flashing orange light above a yellow and black “WIDE LOAD” sign on a dirty black truck that is hauling large grease covered pieces of farm equipment.  Jumping and sparking like a chain being dragged behind a large truck my conscious mind flashes back to life.

A quick look left and I come face to face with a place advertising ‘fried onion burgers’, of course I get totally sucked in.  Dairy Fresh is seemingly an endless collection of small town images.  Bald tires, Styrofoam cups, calloused hands, red dirt under every fingernail.  It sits across the street from where sleeping freight trains are rusting on the tracks.  The people in the Dairy Fresh look like the cast from a failed horror movie.  Two completely obese women work behind the counter.  The less fat one takes my order while the grotesquely fat one waddles around behind the scenes cooking up the burgers and shit.  They both have American flag t-shirts on.  The grotesquely fat woman is wearing a neck brace that is pushing all the thick pink ruffles of her neck fat up around her face.  She looks like an uncircumcised cock.  There is a lit cigarette stuck in the middle of her face.  Her movements are stiff, lumbering, like a drunken penguin.  Stubby varicose legs drop straight down from under her jean-shorts.  She senses that I’m staring at her and she turns her whole upper body around like a tank turret, aiming that cig directly at me like a cannon about to fire.  I can feel my stomach turn as her brain tries to figure me out before giving up and guiding her bloated bulk back into the kitchen.

The customers are no better than the employees.  A bald dirty biker in leather sticks his tongue all the way out of his body before biting into his burger.  When he swallows the motion causes a ripple in the several shallow chins that cascade down his neck.  A surly native American woman with dark close set eyes and loose pock marked jowls that hang down limply on the sides of her face talks angrily with the little girl sitting across from her.  There are numerous small bluing tattoos all over the sagging gray flesh on her arms that come to life when she shakes her finger at the little girl every two minutes.  In the far corner sits a man with an extreme widows peak in his reddish brown hair and very bad purple acne scars all over his face.  His dark sunken eyes flash around the room quickly as his body moves with insect like precision.  The rest of the customers are a collection of dusty ballcaps and striped long sleeve cowboy shirts.  Brown leather belts and one man with a long pink scar down the entire side of his face.  My food comes and I feel at home as I take my retainer out.

A twisted green pickle slice falls out of my burger as I eat.  I pick it up between the tips of my thumb and pointer finger.  I hold it up momentarily – staring at it as the restaurant scene plays unfocussed in the background.  Then I carefully drag it through a small light brown and white puddle of grease and burger juice on the paper lining the inside of my red plastic mesh bowl.  I lift it up again and place it on my tongue.  It is gone.

I look over at widows peak as the waitress brings him his food.  He begins a meticulous process of completely deconstructing his burger and examining every layer.  It seems so deliberate that it makes me wonder if I should have done the same.  Only now do I realize that he is missing the tips of two fingers at the first knuckle.  The waitress asks him if he’s found work yet.  He says something inaudible through the food in his mouth.  Yellow teeth in the middle of a scarred purple face gnashing through grease and meat.  For my dollar the fried onion burger was pretty damn good.  Seems like everyone else in town thinks the same thing.

This is the truly good thing about Route 66.  If you follow it true then you have to get off the interstate.  Because of the interstate the route has become obsolete, too slow, too out of the way, outdated.  In this way it is more relevant because of the interstate than the interstate is itself.  This is the heart of this journey, get off the main road.  If you just go from point A to point B then nothing is ever going to happen and that is not living.  If nothing happens, you are not affected, and you have no potential to change, then you are not alive.

I burn out of town and don’t take a breath until I’ve broken through the Texas border.  A semi truck going the opposite direction flashes his lights.  I kill speed and get right just in time.  Speed trap.  Set up right there in the median just over the rise.  I would have been nailed for sure.  “Thanks trucker, I owe you one” I say to myself.  By “one” I mean a blowjob.  That’s the law of the road.  Trucker saves you from getting a ticket, you owe him a blowjob.  It’s a well documented fact.  I speed past Shamrock.  I get it, everything is green right?… Next town.  Texas… absolute nothingness as far as the eye can see.  The silhouettes of cowboy hats through the back windows of puckup trucks.  A man hosing down the flaking boards covering the windows of his dilapidated house.  What’s the deal with cowboy hats anyway?!?  Texans are like Muslims in that way, prisoners to the past.  I hit McLean and pull off to roll the ‘actual’ 66.  Holy fucking hellhole!  The place is like a ghost town, you can clearly hear the Texas flag flapping in the breeze outside the “Devil’s Rope” barbed wire museum.  This is a no-shit one-horse town.  Fuck, it’s a fucking one-intersection town with just a flashing yellow stoplight blinking at nobody in the middle of the road.  I would have snapped a photo of the beautiful Texas landscape but I only had 138 more pictures left on my digital and I didn’t want to waste one.  Just imagine a canvas painted on the top half in blue and the bottom half in brown.  That’s fucking Texas for you.

I wore a barbed wire cowboy hat.

I saw the leaning tower of texas.

I threw devil horns at the biggest cross on planet earth.

Joke I overheard in Texas:

Q: Why don’t niggers take aspirin?

A: Because they gotta pick cotton to get to it.

Mexican radio stations join the dial now in a major way.  I’m getting closer to California, thank god.  I get hungry again and what the fuck do you do when you are hungry in Texas?  Eat a gigantic fucking steak.  I pull off in Amarillo at the Big Texas Steakhouse and attempt to do myself proper.  A half dozen fat homely waitresses in Daisy Duke’s and cowboy hats and boots whirl around the weary looking truckdrivers.  Deer and steer heads cover the wooden walls.  It looks like a place of worship for a cult.  I sit there waiting for my feast and the only question that is burning up my brain is simply “Can an entire city of 175,000 people smell like cow shit?”  Unfortunately the answer is yes.  Yes, the whole city can, yes the whole county can, yes the whole fucking state can.  Texas smells like shit.  As I soak up the blood with my dinner rolls I ponder the millions of empty calories I’ve consumed on this journey.  Fuck it, it’s a road trip, you’re gonna eat like shit, its fucking inevitable.  With the steak and beers up in me I roll out to snap off a few of the good old “Cadillac Ranch”.  Yep, 10 caddies half buried in the middle of nowhere.  This is a turning point on my adventure.  I depart Route 66 here to take a detour to somewhere I’ve always wanted to see.  Roswell New Mexico.

[Check out the pix of the caddie ranch here.]

Road trips change you in a way, change the way you look at things.  1000 miles, shit, I could make that today.  A full tank of gas is something magical, mythical, full of almost unlimited potential.  Who knows what will happen and where you will end up, but that’s half the fun of it.  I drive straight into the setting sun and Texas is trying to stop me with every dirty trick in the book.  The reek is so profound that I can’t even think.  As I drive through the stench, the silhouettes of barren trees, powerlines, and massive farm equipment press their forms against the sky after sunset.  It would be almost beautiful if it didn’t stink SO FUCKING BAD!

Me – “I fucking HATE Texas!”
Gregor – “…”
Me – “Fuck man, you’re right.  They should just let them have it.”
Gregor – “…”
Me – “Well as long as it doesn’t affect me, fuck it!”
Gregor – “…”

I lean over to change the radio station and my beer spills all over my lap.  The truck jumps over a rock, its out of control in the dusty wastes.  I snap back into the moment, an icicle stabs through my heart, one hand on the wheel the other reaching to protect Gregor.

Me – “Hold on!! Fuck!!”

My foot stabs murderously at the brake pedal.  The Uhaul comes to rest in a large dust cloud 20 feet off the side of the road.

Me – “You ok man?”
Gregor – “…”
Me – “Thank god, dude.  What the fuck happened?”
Gregor – “…”
Me – “Well god damn.”

I hop out and inspect the damages, a few scratches, some plants stuck in the bumper, but nothing that is going to cause any problems.  I piss in the dirt and get back on the road.

I follow the speed limits like an old man at this point.  I don’t want to draw any more attention or get delayed here in any way.  I’m in the middle of fucking nowhere Texas and they don’t give tickets to outsiders here.  They just make them squeal like a pig.  This is truly BF Texas.  I pull over in Clovis and top the tank off, I don’t want to take any chances.  They spell a lot of words with boots and horse shoes around here.  You’d think people would get sick of it but its fucking everywhere.  A tall dirty Texan filling up his completely shit-canned chevy station wagon comes up to me at the gas station as I dump petroleum into my ride.

Dirty Texan pointing to my shirt – “Hey duuude, what are the ‘Ramon-ies’?”
Me – “Ramones, a punk back from New York City.  Basically the first punk band ever.”
Dirty Texan – “Punk huh… Well we like country western around here.”
Me – “The Ramones are like the Hank Williams of punk, or maybe the Johnny Cash.”
Dirty Texan – “I guess some people like Chevys and some people like Fords..  What do you like?”
Me – “Huh, oh.. I guess I like Chevy cars and Ford trucks, man.”
Dirty Texan – “Hah!  Well you’re alright duuude.”

I press on.  The road can be a lonely place at night.  Darkness surrounds you for hours.  Nothing to look at, nothing to do.  I talk to Gregor about everything under the sun but even that gets old.  I want to be home but I don’t at the same time.  I’m still a little nervous about it, don’t ask me why.  At least I’m in New Mexico now, progress has been slow but inevitable.  50 miles from Roswell and I’m the only car on the road.  I tried holding my breath between cars going the opposite direction but it was impossible.  I almost blacked out.  Somehow I’m hungry again, sober now, and I just want more.  Booze and food.  I want to get fucked up really bad and smash this night into a thousand pieces.  The Uhaul is pegged at 90.  Its so dark its scary.  I wait for a long straight stretch of road, line the truck up in the middle of the highway, and turn all the lights off.  My heart feels like its going to explode through my chest.  I hold it as long as I can or until I hear the vibro warning on one side of the road.

Me – “What the fuck am I doing, I must be suicidal..?”
Gregor – “…”
Me – “No, that’s not it.  God, Imagine if we really did crash.”
Gregor – “…”
Me – “Yeah, maybe you’re right, but the wreck would be ungodly.”

Roswell, I finally made it, fucking Roswell.  There are rednecks everywhere.  Hunger and alcoholism kick in like a motherfucker.  I pull over to fuel up again and get some supplies.  I dig through the trash in the cab until I find an uneaten Taco Bell soft taco.  As I walk into the circle K a fat troll sitting on a stool with her arms folded and resting on her large gut speaks to me.

Troll – “Looks like your hamburger’s wilted.”
Me – “It’s a soft taco.”
Troll – “Y’onna heat it up in the microwave over’n there?”
Me – “No thanks, it’s gonna taste like shit anyway and I just don’t care.”
Troll – “A’ight thenn, have a nice night.”

I found the fucking aliens.  Its rednecks.  Rednecks and white trash.  They’re everywhere.  They’re taking over.  It is definitely an invasion.  Weapons are not photon torpedoes or death rays – its poor hygene and tackiness, bleeding gums and acne.  The story of the crash was just a way to get tourists to come here.  I wouldn’t trust anything anybody here told me even if I already thought it was true.  Hell, it would make me question whether I had been right to begin with.

I got a room in town, dumped off my basic survival gear, and headed back out to the truck.  It was time for me to complete an important mission.  I took my bottle of tequila and 40oz of Hurricane HG (Heavy Gravity Lager) “brewed for a distinct bold taste” 8.1% alcohol/volume and headed out into the desert.  I was going to take those 150 bucks worth of fireworks and signal the fucking alien mothership.  I was going to set the sky on fire and if the fireworks wouldn’t do it then the tequila would.  I drove outside of town and found a road that dead-ended into the desert.  I pulled Gregor out of his seat and set him up on a large rock.  This is where we would make our stand.  Taking powerful large and sultry swigs of the tequila and then washing it down with a swallow of 40 we began to set shit off.  I don’t know how many people have ever bought a giant 150 $ box of fireworks but let me tell you that it’s a fucking LOT of fireworks.  We were using the 40 bottle to launch the rockets after Gregor polished it off.  Now it was just the two of us, a half bottle of tequila, and the rest of the pyro and this is when it happened.  Out of nowhere I fucking heard it.  It was unmistakable.

Bwoop.  Bwoow.

It was a fucking alien space ship.  The aliens in this space ship were disguised as police officers and their ship was disguised as a police car.  I knew they were aliens because they were rednecks and because they flashed their red and blue laserbeams at me.  I was in a panic.  I never expected this to actually work, but it did and now I was totally unprepared.  We had succeeded in signaling the aliens and now they were here and wanted to fucking abduct us.  Oh hell no!  Jesse James, right?  Freedom is worth any price.  I threw the rest of the fireworks and the half bottle of tequila into the cab nearly leaving Gregor behind until I made one last trip to round him up.  I started her up and then slowly pulled off the road.

Me – “Hang on buddy, this is gonna be a bumpy ride!”
Gregor – “…”

If I used my headlights or brakes then the police aliens would see me and triangulate my location using their radar guns.  So here I was.  Bouncing through the desert unable to see or stop.  I could hear all my stuff in the back slamming home as the back of the truck created a virtual zero-g environment as I careened over ditches and mounds.  I could see the police aliens shining their white beams around where I had just been but I was already too far into the desert for them to see me now.  A few miles through the sagebrush and we were back on the main road.  We had made it.  We had escaped the aliens.  We were free.

We pull back into the hotel and drag ourselves inside.  We start drinking harder and harder, celebrating the victory that we had achieved.  Celebrating our freedom.  The last thing I remember was Gregor finishing off the bottle of tequila and eyeing me crazily.  I black out.

The next morning I woke up feeling like absolute shit.  I was still drunk, my face hurts, feels like spiders are crawling over it.  Stomach is overwhelmed with pungent sour queasiness.  The room is fucking devastated.  All my shit was everywhere.  The beds were overturned, the tv was facedown on the floor, and it smelled like death.  Gregor was sitting in the corner just eyeballing me.  He had gotten way to drunk last night and gone completely berserk.  The room was destroyed, he had kicked my ass, my knuckles were swollen and bleeding, there was god knows what all over the walls, and on top of all of that he had gotten into one of my jars of pickles from Toledo then puked it all up on my Ramones t-shirt.

Me – “YOU SON OF A BITCH!”
Gregor – “…”
Me – “IS THAT ALL YOU HAVE TO SAY FOR YOURSELF!?!”
Gregor – “…”
Me – “Well, alright, FUCK! we gotta get the fuck out of here right fucking now, but this is not over.”

That day we ditched the Uhaul behind an old brick building and spent the morning just acting like tourists.  We knew the aliens had us on their hit list and we needed to conceal our true natures behind a mask of slack-jawed photo snapping.  After what felt like an eternity it was time to leave, time to move on.  We had found the aliens, and the aliens are us.  As we drive through the desert wastelands the cab stinks of tequila so bad that I have to keep rolling down the windows to flush the airlock with clean air.  My eyes watering, taste of shit on my tongue, and I’m still drunk.  Gregor forgot to charge my iPod even though I reminded him a million times and it was completely dead in like 2 minutes.  The radio does three laps before settling on the same staticy Mexican station.  My consciousness had been abducted last night, and now we were like undead creatures wandering through the desert in search of our souls.

We drove hard west until we reached the disheveled town of Alamogordo.  It has long been my intention to investigate one of the best urban legends ever circulated regarding the lost treasure trove of buried Atari cartridges in the desert outside Alamogordo.

Read the whole story here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T._the_Extra-Terrestrial_%28Atari_2600%29#The_Atari_landfill

I often question why I seek out these lost relics.  Why I explore these burned out buildings and abandoned subway tunnels.  The fact is that you find things there.  No not money or treasure, but truth.  Rust is real.  People don’t create rust, it happens from neglect.  Rust is the death of caring.  The death of progress.  Slime is real, decay is real, trash is real, garbage doesn’t lie, it just is.  These things do not exist in plain sight on purpose.  Deformities are hidden, abnormalities destroyed.  You have to look to find them.  Look between the lines, off the main road, in the cracks.  The interstitial spaces.  That’s what getting off the interstate is all about.  That is the horror and grotesque spectacle that is the truth.  We are the fucking aliens.  We are horrible, nasty, disgusting little creatures and that is our legacy.  So that which is disgusting I find beautiful.  That which is abandoned I will seek out.  That which is shunned I will welcome.  That which is turned away from I will turn towards.  So in those places where nobody wants to go and most have forgotten, that’s where you’ll find me.  Sifting through the dirt just outside Alamogordo where a dozen conflicting rumors have led me.  Here on my knees fondling the sand in search of something that may have never existed in the first place.  This is postmodern archaeology.  This is the maddening quest that may produce what?  A small black square of plastic.  God, the carts and circuit boards are probably biodegraded away by now anyway.  I had searched all day and even visited the grave of the first space monkey at the Aerospace Museum but it was all for nothing.  Again, my search had left me dirty, tired, and totally lacking tangible success.

I get back on the interstate.  A minivan passes me at white sands.  Three screaming kids, mom riding shotgun, dad driving.  They fly past me at 100 mph.  As they scream by I notice the California license plates.  Joy fills my heart, they are going where I am going.  I feel a connection.  Maybe I can follow them all the way to San Diego?  But as soon as our paths meet they diverge.  I decide to pull off and explore the dunes before pressing hard west.

Gregor and I enjoy a good half hour of running up and down the white dunes.  It really is pretty cool but time is moving us forward and we needed to be moving with it.  I get back on the interstate and hit the road harder than ever.  We drive for hours.  No music is playing, nothing can be heard except the sounds of the road.  We have both been changed by this journey, but Gregor has started down a road that I can not follow.  I am the hands of change in his life, the motive of revolution.  This is it, this is the place.  The continental divide.  As I pull off the interstate he asks me where we are going but he already knew.  The spot.  The sun is a blinding yellow ball.  Its rays shooting deep into my squinting eyes even through my sunglasses.  The pale blue sky masked behind the criss crossing vapor trails of jets.  A sparse and thin wispy layer of clouds glows in the near sunset.  A soft quiet wind is rustling in the tall brown grass that crunches under my bare feet.  The expression on your face.  Knowing, intelligent, fearful, yet ready.  I walk towards you quickly.  You sit there unmoving, unflinching, looking me directly in the eyes.  I raise the shotgun.  It is cool and weightless in my hands.  The action is smooth, perfect.  I aim at your face effortlessly, instinctually.  Things are moving in slow motion but the violence is completely shocking.  I see your eyes at that last moment.  Those eyes staring right into mine, right through me.

BLAM!!

chk chk

BLAM!!

chk chk

BLAM!!

Your head explodes into a million soggy pieces.  Tiny orange and white bits of your brain stick to my face.  I stand there for a moment frozen.  Trancelike.  The wind rustles quietly through the grass.  Caressing the fresh moisture on my face. I stare at what is left of your head.  Unrecognizable.  Blown completely apart.  Hollow, empty, and utterly lifeless.  Gregor, my friend, is dead.

At the moment of the kill there was a direct line.  Me to Gregor to the sun.  That means something.  Out here in the badlands, out here in the wastelands.  A million miles from the interstate, a million miles from everything.  Here at the continental divide.

Nothing will remain here to mark the spot of your death.  The only tombstone, the only epitaph is burned into my mind.  Those eyes.  Staring right through me at the moment I snatched your life.  Those hollow knowing eyes, haunting me forever.  I got back on the interstate and drove straight into the sun.  As the sun set the sky was writhing, and convulsing with oranges, greens, pinks, and reds.  The clouds caught fire and seared my eyes with their brilliance.  The sun was also setting on Gregor’s blown apart corpse, still laying mangled in that barbed wire.  I killed him there on the devil’s rope.  And so I drove on into the night.

[gregor's snuff film]

The hundreds of dead bugs on the windshield glow red, green, and white as the lights hit them.  They glow in intricate geometric formations, express mathematical formulas like the movement of distant stars and galaxies.  Converse, commune, interact, intertwine into the constellations of ancient gods and heroes.  I pray to them with my eyes as I drive.  I meditate on them.  Their changing colors and patterns reflect the exact situation of the road at night.  They throb to life with the flashing lights ahead.  I hit the first traffic in five days.  Two long rows of dual red lights extend before me.  I stay hard left all the way to the wreck – it’s the minivan.  The one that passed me back in White Sands.  Its overturned at the center of a ring of burning flares.  Cops are shining flashlights around and there are three white sheets covering small piles on the ground (one of which is soaked through with blood).  The smell of burning engine fluids and plastic assaults my nostrils.  I muddle through, traffic releases like an orgasm.  I drive on.  I ponder the situation momentarily.  Fuck ‘em.  At least I’m not dead.  I look over at the empty passenger seat and a smirk creeps over my face like scum over stagnant water.

It was finally time for the last hard drive.  I keep the peddle bottomed out for hours as the Uhaul screams through the night.  I think about all the people I’d met and all the things I’d seen along the way.  I imagine Gregor, now finally transformed into spirit form, watching over my journey.  At the California border I get pulled off to the side.  The two pigs try to good cop/bad cop me as their dog sniffs and re-sniffs my truck.  The condescending little dog handler seems irate that I am so calm and just laughing at him as he says in hateful triumph that the dog indicated the presence of drugs or illegal aliens in my Uhaul.  He nearly reaches for his gun when I tell him jovially that it’s not my fault his dog is fucking wrong.  I open the back for them as they stand obliquely hands on their holsters.  When the open bay door reveals only kit bags and cruise boxes I send the dog-cop off with one parting shot before getting back on the interstate.  I fucking hate pigs.  There were two more checks along the way and I guess the border pigs radio’d ahead because I got the living shit sniffed out of my Uhaul at both of them.  They too came up negative.  They don’t have a dog yet that can sniff out free will, so fuck off you robots.

I get back into San Diego and it almost feels like I’ve got more questions than answers.  The next day I empty out the Uhaul, clean up my apartment, hang the art and put the newfound trinkets around the place.  Brad comes down from L.A. and we get wasted, jam guitars, talk about life, and finally cap off the road trip with one final act.

We fire the blue rocket.

Unlike shopping mall promises and infomercial lies, the blue rocket delivers.  Nearly as big as a can of quaker oats and bearing warnings to “light and get away” because it ” shoots flaming balls”.  Even Gregor let out a zenlike moan from the spirit realm as the blue stars exploded into the night.  The next day I finally threw my jeans into the wash.  I felt like the washing machine was somehow stealing the soul of the things.  Soap and warm water flowing through the fabric replacing the collected memories from a great journey with mindless April freshness.  And so with my jeans washed free of two weeks worth of travel grime I got back in line at the supermarket and switched my brain into autopilot with the rest of the nation.  New goals; another dollar, another woman, another set at the gym, five pounds heavier, five pounds lighter, move from point A to point B more quickly, more painlessly, dissociate farther from reality, run for office, get angry at traffic, save the whales, eat less carbs, get whiter teeth, get a longer erection, smoke less cigarettes, drink more blueberry juice, floss more, start drinking decaf, read more, flip somebody off and really mean it, register to vote, help the homeless, watch more tv.

[check out the video of the blue rocket here]

Related posts:

1. Necropolis
2. The White Plank
3. War Wacky

Our chief of base over here has been constantly complaining.  Bitter, crabby, says the contractors like myself are always joking around, lowering morale.  He says all we do is “work out, sleep, and eat”.  I swear he is a fucking vampire.  He looks like nosferatu.  A bald, withered, grey skinned old man.  Most of his faculties are starting to fade and sanity was completely abandoned years ago.  Every time we get a rocket attack half the team has to bang on his door with rifle butts to get him to wake up and get into the shelter.  We’ve nearly smashed his door in on two separate occasions just trying to make sure the creepy little fucker doesn’t get blown to bits when the next mortar or rocket comes blasting in.  We joke that he can’t get the lid off his coffin quickly and wonder why he doesn’t just have a ballistic coffin made.  The funny thing is that his life is basically run by fear.  He is easily excited and goes running off for his Kevlar helmet every time any kind of loud noise is heard.  He loves that fucking helmet like that thing can somehow magically protect him just by touching it.  I was throwing darts at the dartboard he has attached to the side of his hooch just after dinner the other day and he came running out in a complete panic.  He was wearing his ballistic helmet and white boxer shorts and nothing else.

vampire “Wha…!?… What was that, whats going on?!?”

I almost lose my shit laughing about the way his beady little bug eyes keep blinking in fear and confusion as his creepy little vampire head looks around erratically.

Me, “Nothing man, I’m just throwing darts.”

vampire “Well stop that immediately!  That is not for throwing darts at!  Go throw them somewhere else.  Some people actually have to work in the morning!”

Me, “Uh, ok… Sure thing dude.”

He’ll sleep through a rocket attack but wake up for a fucking dart?  And what the fuck, it was only 7:00 pm!?!

He actually volunteered to have the dart board installed on his hooch.  Everyone though it was crazy until we looked deeper into his fearful little world.  The only reason he had the dart board put up was as an excuse to have the 1” thick plywood board put up on the side of his wall that is used to hang the dartboard.  Its real purpose was to give a scared little vampire peace of mind and a little extra protection.  He is so aftraid of being killed in one of these rocket attacks that he goes running around with his ballistic helmet on for hours making these quick turns over his shoulder like just behind his back a fucking rocket is sneaking up on him.  It’s pretty funny to watch, but scary at the same time because everybody knows that he is in charge of the camp.  Keep in mind, this is the same little vampire that I caught picking weeds around camp.  Utterly insane.

The fucked up thing is that not only is he completely immersed in fear but he is a total sociopath as well.  We found out after starving for 2 weeks waiting for a resupply bird that he had a giant freezer filled with steaks and lobster tails and chicken breasts and all kinds of bbq goodness stashed away.  I had to have my sister send out a goddamn can opener because I was reduced to opening tin cans with a wrench like some kind of a demented street person.  Apparently the vampire sociopath saw the steaks merely as a tool to schmooze generals and ranking state department assholes and stuff like that, basically a way to win friends and influence people, but not for us to eat even if we’re starving.

We finally had enough of his shit and broke into the freezer and stole all the meat.  We cooked it up right, invited the whole camp, and everyone had a great time, except the vampire.  The crabby fuck just stayed in his hooch and never came out.  Maybe we should have gone to medical for some bags of blood.  It was the most fun we had in a long time, the best laughs (of course) coming from everyone on the site making fun of the vampire.  Unity was forged, and the team strengthened.  The next day is when he started complaining about the contractors lowering morale and making everybody miserable.

Napoleon – Grandma just called and said you’re supposed to go home.

Uncle Rico – She didn’t tell me anything.

Napoleon – Too bad. She says she doesn’t want you here when she gets back because you’ve been ruining everybody’s lives and eatin’ all our steak.

A couple days after the bbq, to the vampire’s great dismay, we had another rocket attack.  This time the rocket turned out to be a dud, but the problem was that nobody could figure out where it landed.  The army swept the camp three times without success until one of the local nationals came forward with the information the next day.  The rocket somehow had landed in the ‘most secure’ part of the entire base, the officers smoking area.  Specially constructed next to the headquarters tent it was surrounded by hesco barriers and t-walls in every direction.  Regular troops were not permitted to go smoke there because the officers feared that they would hear their conversations through the thin tent walls.  Since none of the troops were cleared to enter that section the rocket went undiscovered.  Even though the headquarters smoking area was specially planned and constructed it was totally useless.  None of the officers smoked, only the troops did.  Since the regular troops can’t use the smoking area they just smoke wherever and throw their butts on the ground.  The butts started adding up so headquarters hired a bunch of local hajis to go around camp and pick up the butts.  Since nobody was using it, and it was their job to pick up butts anyway, and the little fuckers don’t really know where they aren’t supposed to go, the hajis were using the headquarters smoking area to take their smoke breaks.  That’s how they found the rocket.  The army tracked the serial number on the rocket to Iran.  Another perfectly executed US military operation.  I’m sure somebody was put in for a medal on this one.

The next rocket attack missed the base completely but ended up causing more problems than if it had.  It overshot the entire compound and blew a giant hole in a mosque about 1000 meters behind the base.  The people at the mosque were understandably angry, especially when they found out from the insurgents that the rocket had been fired at them by our base.  Well they lined up the hole in the mosque with the base and believed every word of it.  After some vehement protesting and complaining about the Americans shooting rockets at their mosques, headquarters decided to pay to repair the damages to try and ease tensions.  Good old US Army, the grand appeasers.  Lets go fight a war but only if we don’t piss anybody off.  Later it was discovered that the repairs were paid for out of the fund used to finance the ‘home guard’ – basically an Iraqi anti-insurgency police force.  I’m sure somebody got a medal for this one too.

So the madness fills you up.  Everybody can see it but nothing is said or done.  The army guys can’t question it.  They’re not programmed to think but they want to.  Sometimes they even think that they can think, but that’s just the programming talking.  You can see it in their eyes.  They are begging to complain about shit, to call people out on stupid actions, to actually have an opinion of their own.  They look at you begging, pleading, praying that you walk over and say “hey dude, what’s the deal with this?” so that they can confess their sins.  Confess their deepest feelings, their fears, their resentments.  They all know, somewhere deep down, that they are totally fucked up.  Every aspect of their lives a farce.  Their mission here a pathetic joke.  Their youth and patriotism squandered, thrown away, utterly destroyed for nothing at all – all the while watching tax payers money rebuilding mosques that were blown up by insurgents and we took the blame for.  And still they say nothing.  Wake up you assholes…  But its no use.  “I am awake.  I am aware.  I am conscious.  I am self determined.”  It’s all just programming.  Go buy another Hard Rock Café Baghdad t-shirt you robot, these are not the droids you’re looking for.

So I am embalmed in this madness.  My guts are removed and the madness is used to pickle the empty space where they used to be.  Your brain can’t exist in a situation like this for an extended period of time without making certain concessions.  Making certain compromises that allow you to carry on, do your job, and not go completely insane.  The compromise is that you just turn everything off.  Flick it off like a switch.  Turn the lights out so that you can’t see the horrors that are inches from your face.  It’s the psychological equivalent to hiding under your covers.  But if you don’t do it then the madness will swallow you up.  But when I get short the covers come down and I revel in the wretched madness until I finally escape.

You can think about it, talk about it, dream about it, and joke about it, but not until you wake up between Ambiens at 30,000 feet are you really on it.  The freedom bird.  I lurched around BIAP for two days like a zombie.  Stomach queasy from lack of sleep and too much coffee.  I was walking around totally numb-faced trying to just keep myself together long enough to get on the flight.  Once you’re on the flight you can finally turn it off, turn off the alertness, turn off the give a shit, turn it all off for 20 hours until you hit DC and you’re free.  I hang around my room but the bed starts looking too inviting, tiredly strip each piece of clothing and leave it in a pile on the floor.  I’ve been wearing the same clothes for 2 days now and they are starting to become a part of me.  I get into the narrow plastic box they call a shower.  I turn on the hot water and the steam starts to fill the room.  I press my palms on my temples and prop my head up with my elbows wedged against the white plastic walls.  The hot water sprays directly onto my thinning crown.  My breathing is labored and rumbles as the steam starts to break up the months of dust, dirt, and ash collected in my lungs.  I cough some more, eyes water, I gag, and spit a long thick cord of saliva into the steam and hot water.  I dry off, feeling tired all the way through my body.  Put my dirty clothes back on and shuffle back to the kitchen for some more coffee.  The plan being that if I can just stay awake until the flight then I’ll sleep unassisted for a few hours before I start popping pills.  Its worked before but these flights are unpredictable and I always seem to get fucked by delays and fuck-ups along the way.  I guess that’s just part of the fun.  Fucking sucks.

mantra of a travel zombie:

20 hours in the air
20 hours here to there
20 hours and I don’t care
because I’m going home

Related posts:

1. The White Plank
2. Metamorphosis
3. Dukes of BIAP