Summer
Summer
I’m swimming through a world of thick oatmeal. I’m in oatmeal purgatory.
My deepest desire at the moment is a dim room and the feeling of bedsheets against my bare skin. I’ll take a whole week of that. In fact, get me three months or so of that. Just give me time and I’ll decide how to kill it. Mostly though, I just want to close my eyes and drift off. When I wake up, maybe I’ll feel like smiling. Maybe I’ll feel like life is okay.
I don’t think I ever quite adjusted to the lack of a summer vacation in adult life. It was a life saver. A soul saver. Was three months or so of nothing but damn did I need it.
I remember late nights. Staring at the ceiling. Chocolate milk on the nightstand. Art Bell’s voice on the AM radio gently interrogating a long haul trucker who has visions of how the apocalypse might go down. I remember the sound of the garage door opening. Dad home from the night shift.
I can remember my face illuminated by the pale glow of a computer monitor. Lights were off. Tapped gently on the keyboard so mom and dad had no idea I was awake. XXX lovin’ with strangers on IRC (Internet Relay Chat). Some of ‘em come to me more than once. Yeah, I had online “things” with people who I never really knew back in the dial-up era. Like friends with benefits type stuff but instead of real life sex, it was just writing dirty stories together. I never ended up on an episode of Catfish: The TV Show. I’m thankful for that. That could have been way weirder.
I can remember getting dismissed from the last day of school. High school some time. Evangelical Christian school. The books say diabolical shit. The Great Depression was socialist propaganda. British rule was good for India cuz it exposed Indians to Christianity and many of them cast aside their false religion for the only savior that laid it all down for them. Nelson Mandela was a dirty commie. Satan basically ran the Catholic church. Bible teacher was a nice guy. I think his heart was in the right place. I think that to this very day. I remember when it was all done. No more schooling left so we all chilled and watched a movie about getting left behind after the rapture. So, I walked out of the school a free man. The sun was shining. Women wore sundresses. My mind kept wandering to the appearance of the Anti-Christ and 7 years of tribulation. I can kinda laugh now but that shit fucks with a kid.
I can remember a suburban megachurch. I can remember a youth pastor with swagger. Shit, I think he hangs out with Justin Bieber. I’m serious about that. I’ve seen pictures on Instagram. He spoke with a drawl despite not coming from anywhere near the south. He was obsessed with talking about sexual purity. I used to go midweek. Jesus power ballads and righteous suburban honeys I never said a word to. One night, his words cut deep. I had mad guilt. Mad guilt over being a human being. Mad guilt over filthy thoughts. Come forward and re-dedicate your life to Jesus Christ. I did. I responded to an altar call. I cried. I got taken in a back room. I got told to accept the baptism of the holy spirit. The evidence of that was speaking in tongues. It was supposed to come down on me and I would speak in tongues that were not my own. Some bald dude had his hand on my chest as he declared that I should let the spirit speak. I did not speak in tongues that night. I didn’t feel it. I had at least one person years after the fact admit to me that they faked speaking in tongues.
I’m sitting here in the office on a Monday. I’m tired. I keep sipping water and having to go to the bathroom. Maybe I should stop before someone thinks there is something wrong with me. I also keep getting up and just taking laps around the office.
I need mercy today. I need the world to play as nice as it can today. I feel like I don’t have ‘it.’ I don’t know what ‘it’ is. The best way I can describe ‘it’ is whatever you need to be in the world and not totally fucking lose it. That sense is always more acute on a Monday. As the week goes on, I feel it less and less. That’s how it goes most of the time anyway.
I do feel some satisfaction. I did the work of attempting to communicate the realities of my internal world. Just trying to do that is fulfilling. It occurs to me that I’m not only trying to communicate my internal reality to whoever might be reading this, I’m also attempting to describe it to myself.
I better get to trying to look busy. I better get to trying to look like I know what I’m doing.
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The Grand Motherfuckin’ Conspiracy.
I’ve always kept one eye on the conspiracy theories that were en vogue. It’s just something that I’ve always done. I suppose you can learn a lot about reality by examining alternative interpretations of it. That’s basically what a conspiracy theory is. It’s an alternative explanation of reality that’s not endorsed by The Powers That Be.
I have a lot of feelings about conspiracy theories. Complex feelings. On the one hand, they can make people feel dis-empowered. If Queen Bey, Jay-Z and the rest of the Illuminati elite have everything locked up that tight, what kinda hope does the average Joe have? I do believe that there is a grand overarching conspiracy by powerful individuals to keep things pretty much the way they are. I believe that The Powers That Be only want you smart enough to fill out the forms and push the buttons. They don’t want you schooled in critical thinking. They don’t want you to have the time to think. They want you to come home all bleary-eyed and ready to turn on the TV. The last thing they really want you doing is thinking about your situation. If people really start thinking, the whole system will fucking fall apart at the seams and there offspring will have to take that job at McDonald’s.
One of the big names in American conspiracy theory has been Alex Jones. He’s a Texan with leather lungs who has been preaching on the radio since at least some time in the 90s. He warned about government overreach. He ranted hysterically about RFID tags paving the way for the Mark of the Beast. He’d be nearly in tears talking about CPS (Child Protective Services) being some kind of stealth pedophile ring. He was the prophet Ezekiel for American paleoconservatives who waged their own “infowar” on the Internet.
I remember that old milieu. It wasn’t that long ago. I can remember these YouTube channels run by upstarts that were inspired by Alex Jones. They shared dispatches from the rising police state from their own neck of the woods. Maybe their local police department bought up a bunch of military surplus equipment. Maybe they noticed listings on an Internet job board for military detention specialists and they connected the dots to a possible internment of American dissidents that was just around the corner. I remember sitting up at late at night, sipping on orange soda like Kel and watching these grainy YouTube videos of possible camp locations. Imposing, empty structures behind razor wire. Huge train cars. It was speculated that the train cars were fitted with shackles for the transport of prisoners. Yep. The FEMA camps was comin’. They would be filled with patriotic American citizens who would not go along with the Luciferian, globalist New World Order death machine that was run by bankers who wanted to merge with machines and become immortal beings of light or some shit like that.
What became of Alex Jones? Well, that’s a funny story. You see, at some point, he came to the conclusion that the only hope for America against a bloodthirsty, pedophilic, globalist conspiracy was Donald J. Trump. Trump was America’s last best hope. Jones-y always had a problem with torture yet Trump declared on stage that he loved water boarding. Jones-y railed against power hungry cops that beat the shit outta citizens. Trump joked about police brutality on stage in front of an audience of pigs who fucking loved it and yes, they are pigs. If you have a problem with that, you can go fuck yourself.
The FEMA camps never came. That shit got especially intense under President Obama. Of course, we are now seeing people get rounded up and Trump presides over it. The Infowarriors and their YouTube channels are silent however. Many of their channels sit abandoned and those that do not have taken up the banner of Donald J. Trump, the golden-haired warrior who is making America Great Again. See, it doesn’t much matter that people are being rounded up because the people being rounded up have dark skin, they don’t speak English and they are not American citizens.
It’s only an outrage if it happens to white folks. White pain is the only pain that matters to motherfuckers like Alex Jones.
You’ve got no idea how surreal it is for me to see Alex Jones carrying water for a sitting American President. It’s incredibly difficult to appreciate if you’ve not followed the man’s career. In his mind, pretty much every President that came before Trump was working for them. They were in on the plot but somehow this fat, loud-mouthed septuagenarian ex-game show host who got his kicks walking in on naked teenage pageant contestants isn’t. Somehow he has been sent by God or some shit.
The reality we live in is truly strange. As I go about the drudgery of my day, I sometimes pinch myself and wonder if the Almighty dropped acid at some point and this just happens to be his bad trip.
This track always goes right to my heart for some reason.
“The borders should be illegal instead of the people / That were here before the Bible and all of its sequels.”
Was a good day. It was a day I could half-way breathe. I handled what needed to be handled and then I went home.
The air is hot. I’m just in here with me.
For some reason, I talk a lot at work today. I talk way more than usual. I make people laugh. I get told I’m funny. I get told that I should do stand-up. I confess that in my 20s, I sorta tried that. I told him it didn’t go so well because I half-assed it and I didn’t have a god damn thing to say. He asked me if I think I do now. I said, yeah but I didn’t have anything unique to say.
I didn’t try so hard at stand-up. Maybe it wasn’t for me. I don’t know.
Thing is though, I took some risks in the way that I perform me and someone liked it.
I like that.
That was cool.
You’re Already Vastly More Valuable to Society Than a Capitalist Could Ever be.
It’s hard to fake it when you can see the hallucinations of others who have far too much money and can identify said hallucinations as hallucinations. That is an awkward sentence and would make a terrible bumper sticker.
People say, let’s run the government like a business and that’s basically the beginning of The Book of Revelation.
Of course, I’ve got no idea what to say. Not a god damn thing. This is just another Monday survived. I knew I was coming into a shit show. I knew all weekend that a potential horror show was waiting for me. I handled it. I held on. That’s all. Tomorrow is another day and there will be another day after that and another day after that and so on until I die.
Yeah. That’s all.
Some days just are. No sugar. No flowers. They just are there to age you.
Fucked o’clock
and time to get up.
Nude
Tired
Still slightly stoned
but not stoned enough
for America
when she on that cocaine
and she talkin’ all crazy
and her nails are demonic claws
tearin’ us all to ribbons
but you don’t talk about that
cuz if you do talk about it
you don’t really love her
but she loves you
She really fucking loves you
You know that, right?
You do.
Sometimes the sun shines
and somehow I’m okay with that
The wind tickles me like it does
and I really can’t protest
even if I got no clue
what the sweat and the tears
were for.
