Under the fluorescent vapor of the ER, as I filled out a clipboard, I started to feel, for once, like I had a purpose – to be comparable, to be benchmarked. I blinked, and everything changed, like I had taken too much modafinil, but really I was waking up to the twin ataraxic suns coming through the window, and everything in the dead ages, 200 years or 2 minutes ago, was a flatline in my collapsed eardrum.
Romeo and Juliet syndrome will often afflict a man in his twenties once the neoteric concept of adulthood begins its blunder. The most debilitating symptom: chemicals dupe him into believing that the ancient laws cruelly governing all relationships are in any way subservient to passion. With luck, he recovers into a manageable form of detachment before ending up imprisoned, a product of the state (more so than we all already are), or both: married. To the bungling charge of misogyny placed upon this book: while my client may be responsible for supporting twin habits with sentimental intent alongside a lady he blames none, indicted still (re: Roxane Gay on Goodreads – the more you attempt to console the inconsolable the more you resemble lunch to them) under the weighty complaint of some objurgatorily shifty implication against her (I’d rather rob a thousand banks than let the internet think I slighted one woman), I insist that in the country (note: which, let the record show, he served bravely) native to his upbringing, money is the sole arachnid purpose stitched to every hormone. To the cowardly (no other kind) journalist who pulled the trigger and posted a pictorial reminder (with typical click-button morality and ersatz indignation) of my client mid-heist, bandit-masked and aiming a pistol at a (we are weepily informed) pregnant bank teller (why this amazing image is not an author photo is lost on me, and how brave of this woman to function under such stress while girthed, how brave of her co-workers for enduring her cravings during lunch, how brave of us all for reading one book this century, lingual rusticisms notwithstanding): perhaps mister press pass twitterer, my client’s photo-posting vigilante, Batman in a wet-bottomed cowl, can glue a mullet where his genitals were so each heretical bit of testosterone might clod together and enjoy the gentlest casket. To the allegation of treasonous profit or misrepresentation of battle: no work of art serves its country (rarely is even its maker served); then it would not be art, but a memoir stooped somewhere between the laurels of its author and his nation, slanted toward impersonal justices or jingoism, not dissimilar to the corn-fed polemics of any online forum (because it has been written and not enacted: more juxtaposition is required) in its heartfeltry (as mentioned above, too much heart was already a separate issue here). I hereby submit for the court’s approval: time served and zero public apologies upon release, as long as Walker blocks himself from dope (love, same diff) and studies, with caution, Jack Henry Abbott, Miguel Piñero, and Eldridge Cleaver’s tale of the elder nihilist prisoner.
Whereas a writer once wolfed the news through a mask of their own tenuous citizenship, shaking hands with the catering (readerships either mostly gone or barely present), transposing their vague sense of revolt at being born over a byline or two so the page might be mistaken for something human (salt through a premature gill), muckrakers (meaning ninety-nine percent of journalists / propagandists swaddling the public since moveable type existed) have successfully reduced the language to a torporific quelling via whichever political dither inspires frowns. While the celestial debris above this planet sits heavier with our clickbait, anyone arty has had to marry their scraps (fair enough), yet, those with the savvy to pedal through the squall and into some just promotion, are now, it seems, using their leashes to masturbate too vociferously. One assumed a social crutch of left wing bric-a-brac-met-with-journalistic-knowhow had been fairly accountably stamped in place since, perhaps, the civil rights era, allowing a vague, ultimately unnecessary, quarter of a muse to back one’s reaction against the system (as the impetus to versify, long ago, involved any ratio of genitalia). Free speech can demand a lethal amount of alimony from her go-between exes (execs), and deploy it, right genital or left, to stomp out art. Those pundits who profit under the guise of literature are easier to diagnose than ever before. The only reason that responsibility has fallen to commenting trolls (and mentally ill poets, as bad as the truths we inadvertently correct) is because the internet is a real career-ender if any uncouth sentiment gets saddled with your name. Asocial libertinage is no longer a property of the left, if it ever was. The right has no use for niche kinks because money is not a factor. Politics cousins its light-hearted countercultures, swapping ass-cheeks twice a century: the old villain of the religious right went over to the new inverse of the same moralist hysteria (Jerry Springer’s audience stumbled through the hive to take charge of Twitter, a democracy on stilts) camouflaged as the (politically correct? buzzword offense takers) left, and the censorship became somehow worse, an amorphous void that can judo all your defenses into a populist bracket of privilege versus victimology so complicated it makes you miss the unintentional advertising of: “this godless book, this evil satanic filth!” My adult undergarments are curiously alight anticipating the body of Baudelaire’s work being condensed into an emoji (stand the pyramids on their point; may future archeologists spit on our hieroglyphics (how do you black pill someone who already used their prescription to overdose?) – no worries, any immoral or nefarious supposition will be considered as passé in a hundred years as the metered line is now). Good thing I squat all day in a subterraneous ectoplasm of my shortcomings on playback, because, concerning this soon (hopefully) forgotten generation (of which I almost partake): I aim to effectuate the meanest and most sublime revenge against the contemporary crossing guards of lit, figurehead whistleblowers to their own bloat, one and all, for reasons both psychotically personal, and intending to certainly not save my expired darling (the spectral and delicate Madame Artasia McAestheticia), but to provide a gnarled tunnel for the six or so of us who miss her dearly, a dumbwaiter to the casket we all envy and belong within.
Cliqued by proxy into Dodie Bellamy’s (born to sneer dismissively about the flank of her Buddhist sebum & riding some long expired mid-west working class cred) most fleeting and be-caped endowments (paper towel wipe of political-writer-arrogance-cum-mundane-new-narrative-diary-graph endemic to San Fran), iphgenia baal (the pronunciation of which is its own insufferable reparation / too patriarchal if capitalized / character white guilts yuppie pals into buying her drinks / prime to move copies with another super-ethical, f-the-corporation (ballsy maybe twenty years ago), slogan-wrought (SJW PP time) NPR chum trending its propagandistic new left media Iago ballyhoo (titling the hydra-dependent soapbox as it cousins her protests) inveigles readers (even one this mean and pasty) with the tale at hand, because attention, lost and gained (unto aforementioned death), is her book’s motif. Enchanting splotches tobogganed down daddy’s comforter (she’s not yet another victim in a half shell), the spanked array of politics and ass may be capable of rooting up an eye or two while a sophisticated talent endures below ideology (getting under the skin it aroused and bleeding the life out). It’s art, though, not a marriage, and for zero to five likes online, I’m willing to call baal an artist. Any click-count higher and I will correct my mistake and revert to the previous hatred. Her publisher (Jarett Kobek, to whom I apologize) wrote a brilliant book (Atta) that, to the shame of our anti-literate country, relatively few people bought. He then changed his approach and wrote a gimmicky (overtly) political conundrum (sneaking talent in) and profited, if any lit could provide the ink for a receipt (thumbs up and hearts from me, he awesomely Trojan horsed the culture).
Sometimes I pluck my castration stitches like a banjo. You get annoyed because I’m kind of silly and your disappointed expectations have turned you constantly quite serious. A man does not love outside whatever maximizes relaxation. I believe in free assisted suicide for everyone who shakes my hand. May my enemies bloat and be awesome. Who I ram strangers my skin. Every reek I skim. My surviving exes ignite in a dire shit of chemicals whenever I internet search them. We break as the earth turns.
