They didn’t have it easy either.
None of them made any money playing their music.
They had to work shitty jobs to pay the bills.
They didn’t have much of nothing but random compliments they would get on how their music cheered some poor bastard up.
They understood what music and art was created for and why people enjoy it.
People come home from work or are listening to the radio at work and the song takes them away, a human goes into the song and escapes but at the same time, the escape is that they don’t feel so alienated and alone.
They are escaping their alienation by realizing that there are other people out there, with the same problems as them, the same hardships.
It gives one a sense of unity.
*
Reality television show idea: Take a billionaire. Stick him in the projects with no money and have him live there for a year.
Contests:
Crack smoking.
How many forties can he drink in one night.
His brother gets shot and his boss won’t let him take a day off work the next day.
He gets shot in the leg and has to crawl to the hospital.
And 5 °Cent hosts.
Another show idea: The Ultimate Survivor.
Take an American liberal who is getting their masters at a private school. And drop him off in Porte Prince, Haiti.
Contests:
He gets $100 bills stapled to him and then placed in the middle of a busy street.
He has to kill a cat and eat it.
He gets sold to a rich Haitian as a boy toy for two weeks.
Then he has to make a raft and sail to America.
And hosted by Wyclef Jean.
*
Were you ever drinking one night and thought, I would like to kill myself, but I just don’t have a good reason. I wish my daughter would get hit by a car or I was a ground troop in Iraq so people would say after I did it, “He had his reasons.”
*
Make it all go away!
Please!
Make it all go away!
*
The other night I was delivering a pizza to a hospital.
I had to deliver two pizzas while I was there.
I went into the building.
A nurse came over and paid for her pizza and gave me a four-dollar tip.
A doctor came over next and paid for his pizza and gave me a three-dollar tip.
America.
*
The only difference between children and adults is that adults pay bills.
*
What terrifies me.
The majority is, has, and will be mediocre.
They do what the others say is good.
Which implies most human lives are pointless.
The terror lies in how they deal with their pointlessness.
*
I want to have some kids.
So I can beat the shit out of them.
*
There are a lot of long nights here in Youngstown.
When the sun doesn’t wanna come up.
You just sit on your couch, staring at your living room.
Looking at what little you have.
Your fourteen-inch television without cable.
Most of the time only NBC works.
Your used couches.
Your used coffee table.
Trying to think of something to do.
Some activity that will make you happy.
That will make it worth living.
Most of the time there is no activity affordable.
So you sit there.
Staring.
Trying not to think.
Trying not to notice how there you are.
Just there, surrounded by your junk.
Junky objects and junky people.
You go to a bar and get drunk sometimes.
Come home and sleep.
Sometimes you’re lying there on a day off wishing you had to go to work, because work will give you something to think about that isn’t you.
The night goes on.
And you eventually fall asleep.
And have strange dreams about how you can move things with your mind.
You call someone on the phone sometimes, trying to have a little conversation.
And they tell you about how they just got a DUI.
Or they are pregnant and don’t want the baby.
Basically always something horrible.
Sometimes you don’t call.
You surf the internet looking for a porn picture to jerk off to.
Or write a five-page letter to your dude in the pen.
Sometimes you put in a movie.
And watch it.
But the people in it are always more attractive and richer than you, so it just makes you depressed.
And other times you decide to break things.
But if you break something you have to clean it up.
Most of the time you do nothing.
You just wait to be so tired you fall asleep.
*
I try to make friends.
But I never can.
I can’t handle people.
They never stop lying.
I can’t think anymore.
Burning Babies
DEATH OF AN OUTLAW
“I’m going to kill myself,” said Josey into a cell phone in Kentucky.
“Oh, don’t do that. You’ll go to hell,” said his mother from her house in Youngstown.
“I’m serious you fucking assholes!”
Josey was in a poorly painted gray van that was once red.
He had to paint the van gray because THEY were coming, he said.
Josey was convinced people were coming for him.
Josey was right.
Two days earlier THEY found him.
Beat the fuck out of him, busted up his genitals, and left him for dead.
He crawled to the hospital and stayed there for two days.
That was somewhere in Georgia.
Now he was driving his van down the Kentucky highway to Ohio, to Youngstown, his home, where he’d matured into an unhealthy fucked-up adult.
The conversation continued.
“Josey, you can’t kill yourself, I love you.”
“I can’t take it anymore! I’m serious, I can’t fucking take it.”
They randomly spoke like this as he drove home.
Josey screamed in the van, pounded his fists on the steeling wheel, punched himself in the face, wringing his hands, growling, making fists, crying, bawling, screaming, wailing!
He screamed, “Fuck you all, who am I! Fuck fuck fuck! WHY! WHY! WHY! How did this happen! Can’t someone make this stop! Can’t someone help me! Fuck fuck fuck!”
He drove for hours and hours like that.
Going home to where he grew up, to parents who never cared about him.
Going home to a place where no one cares about anyone.
There is no time to care, work must be done.
And when the time-clock is punched, errands like going to the bank, writing out bills, sending boxes, buying toothpaste, eating ice cream, checking your credit report, going to the dentist, back doctor, psychic, and Asian Spa must be done.
Shit must be done; there is no time for friendship, no time for sex, romance, conversations, swimming, relaxation, no time for happiness. Work must be done!
Josey had done his work.
It gave no rewards.
Josey graduated high school with good grades. No scholarship, no money, no sex for that.
Josey graduated from a state university with a business degree because his parents said he should go.
No rewards for that.
What does the world of free-market Information Age business want with a kid who has a business degree from a state university, nothing, jack shit, no rewards there, no sex, no big house in Burbank, no 1970 mint-condition Camero, nothing but wasted time and money.
So there was Josey: a thirty-year-old man wearing dirty underwear, jeans with holes in them, a mullet, and shirt with beer and coffee stains on it driving a shitty fucked-up van down a shitty highway to his shitty home where no one cared he existed.