Thursday, May 14, 2009
the narrator
nobody likes abstract artsy films. not even me. they're terrible. it's usually some poor attention whore trying to be deep and assert himself in some sort of intellectual light to impress the
little piss-ants and sluts that he wishes were his peers. call me contemptuous, call me cynical, but it's a pretty pretentious endeavor, if you ask me. but then again, it gives me something to talk about. now all i need is a good reason to be heard, but it's lookin' slim.
maybe i'm just looking for excuses. i decided a couple years back that my true goal in life is to continuously search for a better excuse for being the way i am.
and so far it hasn't failed me.
but if i ever run out of excuses, and my money is on the chance that i will, at least i can look forward to bitterly growing old in my hometown and spending my saturday night chain-smoking outside the bingo hall.
it's good to have goals, they said. grey skies are gonna clear up. put on a happy face.
they told me i'd be over it by now. they told me a lot of things.
but, well, to quote matthew good, "i used to think i'd get over everything, but everything just got over me."
ain't it the truth.
but for now all i've got are my excuses. someday,if i'm lucky, maybe i could sit on a thrown made from my excuses.
if i was king of everything we know, i would make it so we wouldn't have to know more. if i was ruler over all this land, i would burn it, furiously dance around it in naked madness, i would sweep it clean, and build low-cost housing units to store your children and all the pretty things they make for me at school. if i was your master, id keep you scared. id keep you safe, that is, until i come in the night and filter out the weak.
if i was your man, you would be beautiful.
all i need is a reason.
*
I hope you had a wonderful stay.
I truly enjoyed our conversation.
Let's do this again some time.
*
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
i laugh until my head comes off
Here I am.
Here we are.
Here we go now.
There is nothing more important than eating right. I’ve got my sandwich. I’ve got my apple. I’ve got my juice. The sandwich is bologna. The juice is full of sugar and the apple skin gets stuck in my teeth, but I’m not one to complain. Especially after considering what everyone else in this mammoth cafeteria is eating.
I see the girls. I see the fat ones, the skinny ones, the pretty ones, and the ugly ones. I see the athletic ones with their letter jackets draped over their chairs as they eat what little they allow themselves to eat. A thousand girls, all of them with vending machine lunches. They eat their corn chips one by one, and sip their diet pop slowly. Occasionally, one will gracefully snag a pepperoni off of someone’s pizza, and then chew it with her mouth open, giving everyone a detailed example of exactly how food particles can get caught inside a girl’s braces. I look at her with veiled disgust. You do too.
A thousand boys in this cafeteria, and they’re all sucking down the grease, right before athletics class. It’s okay, it won’t come back to harm them until they reach college. Today, after lunch, they’ll just exfoliate the grease through their skin during their warm up laps around the football stadium. Of course, it all comes out as acne and terrible white heads on their backs, but this is Texas – everyone is gross here anyway.
And there are those kids like my friends and I, the kids who bring their own lunches out of contempt for the cafeteria food (plus it’s cheaper than even getting the discount lunch). We’ve all got our lunches wrapped up in plastic grocery bags. It’s our mothers’ way of recycling and being “green”, even though it technically does nothing to help the environment. But still, it’s recycling… and we’re too poor to afford reusable or paper bags anyway.
We’ve all got the same things: sandwich, apple, and juice. All off us except Tim Burgess, but that’s because his mom is crazy.
We knew his mom went crazy the day she sent him to school with a plate of filet mignon wrapped in a white grocery bag. There was a side of melon-balled potatoes and a sprig of parsley. The gravy was already poured on. The next day he had a red snapper fish with a slice of lemon. The day after that he had stuffed mushrooms with couscous.
At first she just gave him Perrier to drink with these swanky meals, but eventually starting packing a small bottle of Merlot with his lunch instead. No teachers have noticed, but Tim’s been tipsy every day in his fourth period class for weeks.
Tim is the last person to sit down at our table today. He’s carefully balancing the plate that’s inside that plastic bag so as to not make today’s feast spill inside the bag. He unravels today’s lunch. I give a little drum roll. It’s fettuccine chicken alfredo, with a light salad and a small bell pepper on the side. Fantastic. Mrs. Burgess is an artist, even if she did become a nut bar after her husband disappeared.
I’ve got to hand it to Tim as well. It would be hard carrying around a plate of food all day in your backpack. It’s hard enough being a ninth-grade nothing without opening up your backpack in class and finding that your schoolbooks are covered in beef au jour dipping sauce. It once happened to me, except it was a can of Coke that had exploded all over the stuff in my backpack. It was kind of my fault, though. I guess that’s what I get for being the kind of guy who throws his backpack hard against a wall as soon as he enters a classroom.
Maybe that’s why I’m eating a grocery bag lunch. Maybe it’s because of my assertive complexities. Maybe we all have that same excuse at this table. All except Tim. His mom is just crazy.
Every five minutes or so I stand up just to survey the people in this cafeteria. It lets me stretch and gives me a respite from the mundanity that is the usual conversation at our table. I can see everyone, everyone in little cliques. Everyone in their own proclaimed territories. You’ve got the jocks, the douchebags, the burnouts, the trash, the punks, the thugs, the dangerous intellectuals (us), the bangers, the kickers, the band geeks, the game freaks, the skaters, the preps, etcetera, etcetera.
The game freaks are whom I’m scoping out today. Today is Wednesday. On Wednesdays, my friends and I usually like to cause some sort of scene here in the cafeteria. We always get away with it, too.
I sit back down, take a swig of Tim’s wine, and give my friends Todd and Brown a nod. “Go for it,” I tell them.
Todd and Brown get up from their seats and make their way to the long table at which the game freaks are seated. The game freak table is actually numerous rectangular tables put together consecutively to make one long table. This is where these kids escape to their magical world where they aren’t fat and lazy, they aren’t ridiculed, they aren’t utterly useless, and their parents aren’t ignorant and spoiling. At this table, the game freaks obsess over the card game Magic: The Gathering. At this table, these kids are gods. And Todd and Brown are about to ruin their shit.
Todd stands at one end of the table, while Brown goes to the other. Brown takes several long steps backward, and then runs forward and lunges head first across the table, ruining the numerous Magic games that were taking place. Todd grabs several stacks of cards from the table and tosses them in the air. Cards are scattered all over the place. Creepy little kids with stained clothes are panicking, frantically trying to gather their own cards out of a fear that the cards will be stolen or ruined.
Some of the kids throw weak punches at Todd and Brown for ruining their decks, but the kids are too wimpy and worried about their cards to do anything serious about it. A kid named Oliver Teems grabs Todd by the collar and punches him in the shoulder, furious. Todd laughs in his face and Oliver puts him down. We actually call Oliver “Teemster”.
Teemster is the only one at that table that knows our names, but won’t tell on us because he knows how badly we can ruin him. He knows how low we’ll go to tear your world apart, and he knows not to tempt us.
Teemster knows this because he used to hang out with us, back in the day. He was like the little pet friend that we pitied and made fun of. We had his back. I like to think that we still do.
His family is really poor, poorer than any of ours. His mom is too fat to work and his dad broke his back on the job when a gigantic rack full of huge carpets fell on top of him. His family is currently sitting in lawsuit limbo – the case still stands, but the only money they’re collecting is from welfare. They don’t have running water. They use an outhouse.
But eventually Teemster found his little card game and a whole group of people like him who just wanted to escape from their dreary lives and everyone’s condescending, shit-eating grins.
Todd and Brown come back from the game freak table laughing. We’re all laughing. The whole cafeteria is laughing. And nobody is going to turn us in, because we will fuck shit up.
I’ve got to go to the bathroom, so I do.
When I come back, the cafeteria is in a frenzy. People are running from their seats, some hiding under tables. Food is flying through the air. My friend Robert is covered in ketchup. The campus police tackle a couple of throwers. A good quick food fight just went down, and it didn’t start from our table. I know this because all my friends are still in here. If it had been one of us, we’d have all escaped before anybody could point a finger.
The bell rings. We all make our way out of the cafeteria. And I think to myself, damn, today was a bad day to bring my gun. Didn’t expect that food fight.
Oh, well, I think. There’s always tomorrow.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
dare i offend your delicate sensibilities?
bury me
build me a thrown of blood and bricks
so i can watch how the empty turn their tricks
and when it's made it'll all come back
the memory of how we lost track
so let's do it altogether or i'll whip you with the leather
and i'll tie you to a tether so you can knit me a little sweater
and then i'll make you worried 'cause you're certain to be buried
where Adam & Eve had hurried to produce their evil son
i've said it once, i've said it before,
i'll say it again, and then once more
no one's really sure just where he went
i'm made of fire, i'm made of ice
i've disappeared at least once or twice
you can forget me but i'll come back again
through the sandstorms and through the rain
the people still walk for endless days
we've forgotten now but it'll all come back again
it's time that you be shown the door
my prodigal son, there's nothing more
nothing left when you come back again
i dragged myself out of the bog
my figure stood out in the fog
you can bury me but i'll come back again
Monday, July 28, 2008
let's go down to the river to pray
All The Children Will Clap And Sing As They Bring Me Breakfast
i wish i wasn't real
i wish i was your dream
i wish i could peel away myself
so i never could be seen
Remember me for the burning soul
and hollow shell that I am.
i want to have control
i want to make you cry
i want to lose control
and disappear, then die
I hope you had a wonderful stay.
I truly enjoyed our conversation.
Let's do this again some time.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Someday
I will wake up
and all of this will be gone.
Sunday, March 09, 2008
you're a poem of mystery. you're the prayer inside me.
These are the lyrics to a song I wrote a couple years back about meth-amphetamine addiction. I have completely forgotten how to play it. All I know is that it was in a crazy tuning.
manimal
creep across the windshield
come pooring rain
no stop signs
i can quit when i want
i've been alive for days
here i come
white cells in veins
i came, i came across
desert of sand and grain
now i've kept this question
since my baptismal
am i man or am i animal?
am i man or am i animal?
light a fire
under the stones
barefoot and pregnant
with blood so stagnant
she walks all alone
now i've got this problem
do i sink or do i swim to the bottom?
yeah i've kept this question
since my baptismal
am i man or am i animal?
am i man or am i animal?
Friday, February 15, 2008
Worms in his hair and a hand so sturdy
Dear Landon,
You are one lazy fucker. Do you realize that? Lazy piece of shit. Took you long enough to fucking write back.
It's good to hear that your Christmas and holidays were pleasant. Mine was decent. My concubines arrived a bit late. Not to worry, though. I had the delivery guy's hands pierced with arrows. I do not tolerate tardiness, unless it is my own. You know I hate getting to places early. We both do. Anyway, the concubines got here via airmail, duct taped inside cardboard boxes just like I asked. One didn't make it, but that's okay. "Filtering of the weak" is what I call it. If you can't survive being trapped in a box for a week and sent through the postal service, then you won't survive as my concubine. In fact, I even set up an American Gladiators style gauntlet outside for their forced recreation. To be honest, I'm really just prepping them for next month. For my birthday, that is. I'm going to build an exact replica of Thunderdome and make them battle in it. I have even hired a huge retard and a midget to impersonate Master Blaster. It's gonna be fucking rad.
What was I talking about before? Oh right. Christmas. I think somebody mentioned to me in December that I should set up some fully lit Christmas trees around the slave quarters to boost morale (not that it really matters, I mean, they're fucking slaves). I figured "what the hell", so I surrounded their homes with tall pine trees and set them all on fire on Christmas Eve. Long story short: they didn't sleep well that night.
Speaking of sleep, I've got to tell you about this dream I had the other night. I was hosting some crazy party on a huge boat in international waters. The guests were all unhealthy aristocrats and hard-heeled snobs with blood on their hands. I fed everyone seafood. Apparently some of the food had gone bad, so I fed it to the slaves who were catering the party. If I remember correctly, it was the putrescent shellfish that drove the slaves mad and caused them to throw everyone overboard and take off with the ship. There was only one lifeboat, which I quickly acquired as soon as I saw the deadening glare from the the first slave coming up from the lower levels. I'm no fool. I know a crazy person when I see one. We can sense our own. So then I'm floating adrift in this lifeboat with a massive collection of bourgeois pigs clawing at my hull for salvation. Lucky for me, I was carrying a machete. I started hacking at any fingers that came even close to my boat. I spent the better part of a day just cutting off long, slender fingers with too much gold and diamonds on them. I collected them. I spent the night listening to the tortured screams of the mutilated as they doggy paddled in pain and the salt water entered their wounds. Eventually the sharks showed up and carried off the lot of them. So I started rowing. Got bored of that. Cut off a few of my own fingers with the machete. The pain kept me occupied for another day. I wrapped the wounds up in a piece of cloth I had torn off my shirt. Whenever I would get bored, I would swiftly karate-chop the wound. Like I said, the pain kept me occupied. Eventually I was picked up by what seemed to be George-Michael Bluth from Arrested Development riding around in the Bluth Company yacht. [I just finished watching all three seasons. That show is fucking great.] Of course, I had also already stabbed out an eye by then. So a piece of cloth was wrapped around my head as well. George-Michael seemed pretty shocked to find me floating along with terrible wounds and a pile of severed fingers in my boat. I made up a story about how I was a pirate and the only hidden treasure left in the world was carried upon the fingers of the rich. Such bullshit. I don't know what's wrong me. I'm not too sure of how the dream ended, but I think it had something to do with me knocking out George-Michael with chloroform and speeding back to California to bone his cousin Maeby. But that was just a dream. THAT WAS JUST A DREAM. THAT'S ME IN THE CORNER. THAT'S ME IN THE SPOT LIGHT, LOSING MY RELIGION. <---- that's a good song.
I woke up underneath my bed with all my fingers still attached. I've been sleeping under my own bed lately. I don't know why.
But yeah, the reason I tell you about the dream is because of how ridiculous it is. For one thing, why the fuck would I throw a party for a bunch of rich prick bastards and bitches? And if I ever did, it would only be so that I could toss those fuckers overboard. Or I'd sink the boat while the slaves and I scurried off in a submarine.
I like that word. "Scurry". Reminds me of small dogs and fluffy rodents.
And why the fuck would I serve seafood? Fuck being on the ocean. I HATE SEAFOOD.
But I've written enough. Time for my midnight peanut butter and jam session. Fuck you. I know you do it as well. And I know you call it that too.
Write back soon.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
barely living but we're living large
Eating honeydew on a Sunday
Destroy myself
Whether good or bad
What comes or doesn't come
Destroy yourself
It's been said that the world will end in 2012
But the world is relative
Myself, I'm aiming for 2015
Aim to fail, baby
Aim to fail
Push and push and push and push and push
and pull it
I am exasperated by myself
and the reflection of myself in other people
I could really go for a fajita burrito right about now (with cheese, please).
The bug's in my head
and it's slowing me down
Society likes me more now, though
Yes it does
Mom always wanted me to be a pilot.
Told her I would grow up to be an aging rock star.
I only came for the free microwave.
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Well I can see it as time and a sight through smell
Dear Landon,
I've been finding it harder. I've been finding it stronger. I've been finding myself alone.
I've set the slaves out to play for the evening. Sometimes they need a little recreation after a hard day's work. Besides, it gives them time to write new songs to sing while they work. I sure do love the songs that they sing. Simple songs of pain and woe. I eat that shit up for breakfast. It goes good with a nice tall glass of apathy. If it gets quiet I just tell the foremen to whip them harder. Really give them something to cry about. I feed them pretty well so they can't complain about being hungry. Although, I've been suspicious as of late that I've been feeding them too well. You know how I feel about fat people. Gross piggy fuckers.
Sometimes, if I'm bored and think that the slaves are getting a little pudgy, I randomly make them stop work and do laps around the property. Haha! Oh man, do they ever hate that.
Otherwise all is well. Sometimes I set up a screen outside and play movies for them. I went out to watch a movie with them the other day. I doubt I'll be doing that again. Sure, the simple minded fuckers enjoyed the movie, but they didn't get it. They laughed at stupid shit. That's when I came up with my new philosophy -- set fire to the simple minded. I put this philosophy to practice the next night. I grabbed this really big fucker, a very dim bulb, and took him out to one of the fields where it was pitch black. Then I doused him in gasoline and lit a match. It was more enjoyable than I had anticipated. Seeing him run around ablaze, screaming at the top of his lungs and begging for mercy. It was fucking hilarious! Every time he tried to roll on the ground I would just spray him with more gasoline. I chased him around for a while with the red jerrycan. That was so much fun. You've got to try it sometime. Then I just sat on the ground, popped open a can of apple soda, and watched the poor son of a bitch burn like a big flaming marshmallow. It was cloudy so he was the only light in the night.
Often there are arguments among the slaves over whatever movie they're watching so I have to separate the men and the women. The men are easy. Usually I just throw in some porn and they're good to go. Sometimes a shoot 'em up flick to get the testosterone going (it pumps them up and makes them work harder). The women are a little more complicated, it seems. I tried showing them porn but all they did was judge and compare themselves to the women on the screen. That didn't work out. So I started showing them Audrey Hepburn movies. Most of them like it, but some of the fatter ones started bitching about how she was too skinny. At first I said "fuck them", but there is nothing more ultimately irritating than hearing a bunch of fat fucking hens constantly bitch about how some other chick is pretty than them. Bitter bitches, the lot of them. I thought about setting them on fire but I didn't have enough excess gasoline. Besides, if I did that I'd be killing most of my laundry staff. Eventually I gave them that terrible movie with Demi Moore and Rosie O'Donnell called Now And Then. That seemed to shut them up.
I know you don't keep slaves, Landon... or even like slavery. But if you ever get the chance, you should totally torch some simpleton and watch him burn. There's nothing like it. Once is enough, but I'll probably end up doing it again. You know me.
Anyway, how are things in Toronto? Any good crop for concubines and slaves? I've been thinking about assembling a whole team of concubines. Not to marry, 'cause, well, FUCK THAT! Right?! I was just thinking about it the other day. About how I've got all this fucked up shit, but no sex slaves. I don't want to turn any of the slaves I've already got into sex slaves. They're already ruined and hardened by the labor. Some crazy fucking sheik once told me that the best sex slaves are brought up to be sex slaves. I ask you because I figure that the city breeds this type of women, but in a free-range environment.
Well, there's not much else to say right now. Oh, by the way, when you write me back don't remind me about how fucked up I am and that I'm fucking evil and shit. Blah blah blah. It's getting old. But anyway, on that note, I'm going to end this letter.
Love, peace, and chicken grease (without the "love" and "peace" parts)
Sunday, December 16, 2007
the world's still turning? the world's still turning...
turn, turn, turn, turn, turn, turn, turn, turn, turn, turn, turn
turn, turn, turn, turn, turn, turn, turn, turn, turn, turn
turn, turn, turn, turn, turn, turn, turn, turn, turn
turn, turn, turn, turn, turn, turn, turn, turn
turn, turn, turn, turn, turn, turn, turn
turn, turn, turn, turn, turn, turn
turn, turn, turn, turn, turn
turn, turn, turn, turn
turn