Nighttime. I turn on my laptop and log in and start to read the new news and blues and see what screws have come loose now. Instantly I start to get a dull headache as the room starts to fill up slow and bittersweet and steady and unstoppable with exhaust fumes of destruction, exhausting fumes of pure corruption, the brainkilling carbon monoxide poisoning symptoms of a country in dangerous and serious mental and emotional and physical decline; empire of the slum. The news is always bad. A deranged pornographic kaleidoscope of ever-more-insane hysteria and pain and madness and stupidity dances crippled before my disbelieving wide analytic eyes: abortion killers, fun-damn-mentalist Bible-bashing blowhard bastards, fuck-the-country wannabe-secessionists, uncompromising progress-blockers in every legal and artistic and sociological arena, nigger-haters, gun-lovers, government disbelievers, hatefueled true believers, gaybashers, invisible everywhere-lurking terrorists, crosswaving self-loathing ugly female senators throwing out impotent legal bills of gynecologic fury from the unfucked cunts of their religious insanity, and always the never-amended-or-mended Second Amendment bullet ballet argument, militant militia mania, they can have my gun when they pry it from my cold dead ideology, and everywhere the rank dogpiss ammonia smell of corporate madness and hatred seeping from every clogged societal pore, madmen at the country wheel steering it over the financial cliff of evil and psychopathology, herding us into the deathcamps of global warming and absolute final solution consumerist stupidity, and yes we see the tempers and temperatures in the country are escalating, too late to scale back, we know you, we own you, we know how to control you, and long as we keep you overfed and braindead and preoccupied with fads and gadgets and new apps 24/7 365/365 you won’t even look up as you bump into people on the streets as our inaction-encouraging distractions gain traction in your dopamined brains, reward chemicals for another Facebook message, a last lost look at your ever-receding hairline and humanity and ever-increasing gut and hatred and confusion, we are your new and last and weary gods, we are the new emperors who wear no clothes but the ones we design and sell to you, we are the new insane kings and fuhrers of all inherent evil, the hierarchical stupidity of the human race never went away, it just disguised itself in the sheep’s clothing of a young wolf country born ready to be betrayed by all within and its own unbending arrogance and incomprehension, a dying country with no pride, no principles, no societal cohesion, no neighbors anybody knows or cares about so let’s just line ‘em up like sitting ducks in some new weekly ever-occurring school shooting and have the NRA talk about the DOA as if they were AOK and say well, we need to sell you more guns to kill more people because we’re all in one big open-air insane asylum shooting gallery now, automatic rejection of semi-automatic gun control, of course the blood and bones and brains of dead kindergartners don’t concern us, we have a war to sell here, the war on Americans versus Americans as the maniacs at the top laugh and yelp in mad dog glee from behind gated communities of infinite stasis and decay and death, pounding their fists on sturdy mahogany antique tables at the hilarious sights of a country lost at sea and drowning steadily, from sea to shining seizure, but no seizure of guns, can’t ruin the fun, got to keep them killing each other brother and mother and father and sister and cousin and missus and mister, north versus south versus east versus west versus good versus bad versus ugly versus right versus wrong, and it never ever stops even for a second, throw some more coal on the ire, a bit more racism, a bit more religion, a bit more homophobia, a bit more abject stupidity, we need a vagrant vapid bill or two to attack that uppity nigrah in the White House, yes the White House for white men, historically, we don’t want to see the changing population demographic numbers, the election flagged our flaccid erection, our country club is shrinking and being powerless is calling, we’re fighting tooth and nail for all the shit we don’t even care about anyway, no miserable person like a rich person, as a nation of vapid teenage narcissists masturbates on cam for bored hiding middle aged men and every bloody body just tries to stick their head in the sandcastles that will effectively be ejected from the historical record by time and tides that wait for no man, kill an illegal immigrant for Christ or sport or fun, it’s all the same to us, just another underground video for the sick kids to jerk off to before it goes viral, their parents watching sexy pathologists easily solving crimes and righting all wrongs in the unreal world, restoring justice and sanity to a meaningless existence, the bad guys are always caught, but there are funeral pyres of the death of dignity and human decency and privacy burning ever-brighter in the clammy consumerist night far as the tired pain-reflecting eye can see, the slipscream of the Bush legacy, Bush, the man who toppled the twin towers of reason and sanity in America and turned the place into Jesus-loves-guns-and-madness-and-droneland, they say ignorance is bliss, but really, ignorance is a blister bursting the bubble of every citizen of America in its own painful way, free dumb of speechless with nothing to say, as our already-old kids educate us as to how to use some new stupid app on some new stupid gadget, and it takes too much effort to get angry and rebel, but why would we rebel against comfort anyway, and what would a revolution bring, meet the new boss same as the old busted flush, flush that shit down the toilet of history, no time for retro utopias anymore, just stick our snouts in the televisual and internet trough as the sky fills with holes and carbon gases and we don’t know what to do but at least we have an excuse for our nameless faceless fear, we don’t know our friends our neighbors our history or anything about the ultimate mystery or beauty of life, we have nothing to live or die for, and the levels of carbon monoxide are building in my room, my lips are blue cyanosis my prognosis and mass hypnosis and mass psychosis are my diagnosis, who the fuck are these people and how did they get so fucked up and why am I here, why am I reading about this still filling myself up with their alien madness, I can’t do this anymore, I can’t do this anymore, I CAN’T FUCKING DO THIS ANYMORE I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE, I don’t know why they let themselves be led, not with a whimper but with a big bang of psychic electricity and had-enough-bullshit sanity and grace and humanity, so before my brain can get any more beaten and battered and bloody and bruised and used and abused and confused I switch off the laptop with one last somehow burst of energy and go to see what time it is and it’s morning I have been lost in cyberspace or someplace wearing someface somehow somewhere and I go for a brisk stiff early morning walk down by Lake Michigan and stroll along the pier by the Loyola dorms and stand looking out onto choppy waters on a wet rainy morning and spit words of swept-away nothing out into the mocking natural void and look to the event horizon and a beautyfuel red ball of sun starts to rise to illuminate the new natural day slow and sweet and steady and unstoppable and therapeutic.
