Voice of the Democratic Party: “Don’t smoke, drink, go to strip joints, and don’t ever fucking eat candy. We are pointless.”
Voice of the Moderates: “We are pussies who wait to see who is gonna win.”
Voice of the Green Party: “We are a bunch of upper-middle-class assholes who listen to Bob Dylan, stopped maturing the day of the Kent State shootings, and don’t know shit about Middle America.”
The Voice of the Communist Party: “We are correct, we are correct, we are correct, but we kill our own people, not others.”
*
Humans aren’t hard to figure out. The problem is, you have to admit you are one of them to do so.
*
This book is my asshole.
My books are not my babies.
They are my assholes.
After this book gets published.
I will have three assholes.
*
I’m sitting in a crappy house that hasn’t been remodeled since the sixties.
There are holes in the walls.
I’m sitting on a thrift store couch.
Naked.
Smoking cheap cigarettes.
My girlfriend whose name is Fuck Supreme told me today why see-through thongs have cotton over the pussy.
I asked her, “Why is there cotton there?”
She responded, “Because the soft fabric makes the female aroused all day, she is wet for so long that she gets a yeast infection.”
“Wow,” I said.
*
Things you should know before you die.
There is a worldwide gay organist subculture.
Women started the French and Russian revolutions.
Your mother doesn’t love you.
Violence helps.
The meaning of life is that each human is striving to one-up one of his or her parents and at the same time trying to piss off the other one. People usually choose which one matters most to them and strive harder for that one.
*
There is a man.
Sitting in a white trash bar.
He is by himself.
It is Friday night.
There are a lot of people there.
Stevie Ray is playing on the jukebox.
The man speaks to no one.
He has no friends there.
He doesn’t want any friends there.
If he knew people there.
He would have to talk.
And what he wants least is to talk.
He likes to hear people talk.
He listens to the other people’s conversations.
About football, drugs, strip joints, work, etc.
He likes to hear people talk.
But he doesn’t want to have the responsibility of responding back.
He doesn’t want to think of funny shit to say.
Of opinions on anything.
He is tired of opinions.
They go nowhere and do nothing.
Like most Americans, he prefers action.
He has read philosophy and much literature.
He knows the phrases, the big words, the names, and ideas to have to give opinions.
But it doesn’t interest him.
Nothing much interests him anymore.
He just drinks.
And waits.
For what, he doesn’t know.
But he waits.
Sometimes he doesn’t wait.
Sometimes he just kind of exists like the ashtray or the shot glass.
Those moments are his favorite.
When he isn’t thinking.
When he just exists.
The man doesn’t have much.
He has no job, which means he has no money.
His girlfriend buys his smokes and food.
And that is all he gets.
She doesn’t have much to spare.
She’s gotta pay the bills.
He understands that.
The man wants a job.
But he’s got no education.
No skills, nothing.
He and his girlfriend only have one car.
So that makes it tough because she has to be at work and school at certain times.
He knows any job he gets won’t pay much.
Maybe six dollars an hour.
But he’ll take what he can get.
The gun is to his head.
Inflation has raised the price of gas, food, water, heat, and cigarettes.
The man keeps drinking, and listening to people talk.
The man doesn’t have many options.
His credit is ruined and he’s got no skills.
He would like to start over.
Go back to the age of nineteen and try it all over again.
But he’s twenty-four and too many years have passed.
Only five.
But five is enough to destroy a man’s possibilities and hope in the world.
Now the man drinks alone.
Sipping his drink, waiting for this era of stupidity to end.
But the man sees no end in sight.
So he keeps ordering drinks.
Getting drunker.
Trying to make himself as stupid as the era he lives in.
The other people in the bar are like him.
Hopeless, forsaken, without a reason.
They keep going, so he keeps going too.
The gun is at the man’s head.
The gun is always there.
The son of a butcher and a factory worker.
In a country that lives by the gun.
In a lawless city.
The gun, he thinks.
The gun.
I have to take six dollars an hour, maybe just minimum wage.
Because of the gun.
He sees the gun at that moment pointed at everyone’s heads.
They all know the guns are there.
Telling silly lies about the gun.
The gun is written in the stars.
The saddest thing, thinks the man, is that the gun is held by all of us. By the people who love me. And at the moment of my birth, a man came and pointed the gun right at my head.
So the man drinks to forget about the gun.
*
Ever think about killing yourself?
I mean just to get it over with.
Like how people say, “I got a cavity. I have to go to the dentist. I might as well go tomorrow to get it over with.”
Like that.
Are you ever sitting there alone in your home eating dinner by yourself and think thoughts similar to these:
I should kill myself.
Death sounds fucking horrible.
I really want it to be over and done with.
First, nothing happens after.
Second, everyone is going to judge you after you’re dead.
And third, you have to die in a certain way, car wreck, gunshot, cancer, something horrible.
And for sure if you live long enough you will die toothless, shitting yourself.
*
My mother said, “Goo goo gaa gaa.”
The pundit said, “Goo goo gaa gaa.”
Then the hammer came down saying, “Diddle diddle, eat your sandwich, scum fucker!”
And I knew the truth then — metaphysical and dumb.
Today I applied for a job.
Perhaps they will hire me.
Then I work for the goo goo and the gaa gaa.
Drink the pussy juice.
Licking sweat off a stripper’s tit in July.
Cost me ten dollars.
Now the guns fire.
The band plays. They get mowed down by long-range missiles and blogs.
“More drugs,” she yelled.
“My father is a metallurgist,” she said while sniffing a line.
Poor heroin addicts aren’t interesting. The news will not run a story on a trailer park girl shooting up in a whore house in downtown Youngstown.
Mother of three, suburbia, sniffing crystal meth, give her a reality television show.
Are you engaged yet?
Have I raped you!
School teachers in chorus: “Goo goo gaa gaa, goo goo gaa gaa!”
The crackhead: “I put my guitar in F sharp, then they shall know my awesome power.”