Workin'

Another day is come
like yesterday and yesterday and yesterday
last week, last month
year upon slow year.
Long seamless days
constant peristalsis with no release.

I used to hope for a better future.
Now I just hope to get done early.

This slow dying isn't killing me fast enough.
Thirty more years of this
and I can shuffle
meekly off to the grave
my bastard life done
the fruits of my labors
safely tucked away
in another man's bank account.

a short rant

I don't know much about much, but I know about working for a living. I know that if you visit any blue-collar grind, you'll find hollow-eyed exhausted people who believe work is necessary and important... even noble. They have to believe that. Otherwise they start counting up the years spent breaking themselves on the wage-slave rack, ruining their knees and their backs, trading their best years for a paltry paycheck, a few mean crumbs from their overlord's groaning table. Too much of that kind of reflection and one day the headlines scream of yet another workplace rampage, well-coiffed television personalities gushing breathlessly over the body count in between commercial breaks. Disgruntled employees are always filed under "deranged" or "psychopathic." The clarity that leads one to stalk his boss with a high-powered rifle is deliberately misunderstood. To do otherwise would be to invite carnage to retail outlets, offices, and what few manufacturing facilities remain. So the "deranged psychopath" meme is carefully fed to the toiling masses in easy to digest soundbites. They nod soberly before resuming their scutwork, but if you look carefully into their eyes, you can see a troubled doubt, just a glimmer that's soon gone, but it was there. They know something is dreadfully wrong with their lives, but they blame themselves. If only they'd tried harder in school. If only they'd chosen a different military specialty. If only they'd taken night classes. Their corporate masters keep the screws turned tight so that doubt is never directed at them, its rightful target. The real tragedy is that we don't have more corporate massacres.

Do you hate me now? No? How about now?

Oh, I wish I could transcend this fleshy prison. I’m trapped by my perceptions, by the limitations of my senses. I’m an American living in the second decade of the 21st century and I’m probably as sentient as a trained rat. Stimulus, response. Stimulus, response. That’s me. Zap my neurons with a television commercial and suddenly I crave a Big Mac. Tickle my balls with the image of an emaciated supermodel and I have a strange urge to fuck a 12-year-old boy.

Who convinced us these skinny women are sexy? The way their bones stick through their skin makes me think of box kites. I think making love to a supermodel would be like poking my dick into a baggie full of chicken bones. They’re so thin. I’d be afraid my dick would kill her, smash her internal organs into soup. I’d be pounding away at it, trying not to think of prepubescent boys, and her viscera would start streaming out her nose like sausage from a meat grinder.

I’ve been trained, all right. I’ve learned my function well. I’m a consumer, just like you. Patriotism means getting a credit card and maxing the fucker out on cheap electronics made in China. It’s good for America. It’s good for the country to gut the manufacturing base we used to have and ship it overseas where, coincidentally, there are no environmental regulations, no minimum wage laws, and no worker protections. It’s all profit! Isn’t that beautiful? Our factories are empty, leaking toxic waste into the water supply, while American factories in China are stuffed to the rafters with 8-year-old girls making a nickel an hour. They’re running shifts 24 hours a day and the money rains from the sky.

So don’t think about that avalanche of debt roaring toward you. Just watch the latest Rob Schneider movie on your 60-inch flat screen TV. This is the best of all possible worlds and you’re living right in the middle of it.

Yeah, I want to transcend my monkey limitations. My third eye is gummed shut from a lifetime of commercial conditioning. If I could think clearly, if my mind wasn’t a constant clamor of marketing jingles I’d be free to fulfill my potential. I could become Super American. What does Super American do? He builds Wal*Marts in Mecca! Shove over the Dome of the Rock with an M-1 tank and build a super Wal*Mart. A hundred aisles of cheap consumer crap. All of it made in Indonesia by 8-year-old girls. They work a hundred hours a week for a nickel an hour, but they love capitalism. They have to love it or they’ll starve to death. There are no Cadillac driving welfare queens in Indonesia. It’s either work until you drop dead at twenty, or be sold into the sex slavery market. These 8-year-olds think, “I can live my life chained to this injection molding machine, or I can have Rush Limbaugh fuck me in the ass. Hmm, what a choice. I guess corporate slavery ain’t so bad.”

No, corporate slavery ain’t so bad. Neither is dying in a fire. Not when the only alternative is to be gang raped by Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and Michelle Malkin. Don’t laugh. Michelle Malkin has a veiny, warty, suppurating cock that hangs to her knees. Every year she uses it to club baby harp seals to death. Then she licks the blood from the weeping tip of her pulsating cock. It’s how she stays so fresh and young.

A hundred aisles of cheap consumer crack. Introduce the Moslems to consumer hog heaven. Wal*Marts with minarets. A McDonald’s next to every mosque. Just because I’m an American and just because I know my lifestyle is superior to every other human possibility, I’ll introduce the Moslems to ham and bacon. It’s my foreign policy. Ham and bacon are tasty. If the Moslems would just enjoy a tasty breakfast every morning, maybe they won’t be so cranky. Maybe they won’t want to blow up any more of my buildings. Maybe they won’t crash any more of my airplanes. Maybe I can slip back into my coma. I can stop being afraid there’s a Moslem underneath every park bench. I can resume exporting democracy, dropping 500-lb bombs from the stratosphere onto Third World civilians all across the globe. I can go back to my old life, go back to what I do best—harassing the queers.

Did you think I forgot about the queers? I haven’t. The queers want to be recognized. They want to be accepted. The queers want special privileges. They want some assurance they can live among us without being beaten to death and left hung dripping blood on a barbed wire fence. What’s wrong with that? I’ll tell you what’s wrong with that. The thought of two guys having sex makes my stomach roll. It’s sick. It’s disgusting. It flouts every law of God and man.

Can you imagine a bedroom full of 14-year-old girls fucking each other silly with 8-inch black dildoes? Oh my god, that’s so hot. It would make the highest grossing porno of all time. Of course, we’d have to use 18-year-old models to record the actual video. It’s illegal to use minors in porno shoots. I guess the First Amendment doesn’t mean much any more. But oh god! Fourteen-year-old girls! Their first sexual experiences with each other! Oh, the thrusting! The moaning! Their slender, glistening bodies writhing with each other! Their pink pudenda opening like blossoms! And they flit from pube to pube sipping the nectar there like lithe little honeybees.

But guys sucking dicks? That’s just perverted.

So as you can plainly see here, I do want to transcend my mortal limitations, but it seems I’ll never be able to transcend being American.

Bloomington is where it all started going so terribly wrong, but the seeds of my failure were planted in high school. I wasn't prepared for life after high school. How do you prepare for that? No one told me the things I needed to know, or if they did, I certainly didn't listen. How do you make a kid partake of your wisdom? Especially a know it all smartass like I was. Anything anyone said to me was likely rejected without consideration. I was caught in my own hippie trip. Sure, it was 1985, but in my mind it was 1968. I wanted to protest againsst the war in Vietnam. We didn't have any handy wars in 1985, none that we knew of anyway. Ronald Reagan, Cap Weinberger, John Poindexter, and Ollie North were waging their own little cocaine cowboy shootem-up in Central America, but we didn't find out about that until later. So I had no war against which to hurl my earnest epithets.

So I did the next best thing. I started using drugs. Tune in, turn on, drop out, right? Kick open those doors of perception. I started with beer and then graduated to that great gateway drug marywanna. I found I loved me some marywanna. The more the better. Too much was never enough. And soon enough marijuana didn't have enough bang. I wanted to try the granddaddy of them all, Hoffman's troublesome stepchild, LSD. Man oh man, the feelings those three letters bring up even now, almost twenty years after my last tab. If I had a long weekend coming up and if it wouldn't scare my wife to death, why I'd.... It's best not to think about it.That stuff will rock you right back on your heels and no mistake about it, son. You'll think down is up and up is over there and the Grateful Dead taste like orange Kool Aid. And did you see the phone ringing? You could find yourself wandering in your back yard, your mind a psychedelic riot, staring at the lamplight in your bedroom window, panicking because you're lost. Nope, not for me, thanks. That shit's for young people who don't have jobs yet.

Whenever I think back on that time, I always end up remembering Russell. He was my pot and acid connection. He was an angry tough guy, happy for the opportunity to rap some wiseguy in the teeth. I had a gray felt fedora I'd bought at the Odon Clothing Co. for seventeen bucks. I wrapped a red bandana around it and wore it with my dad's Vietnam era Army blouse. I was so proud of my look. I met Russell one day at the dorm. I still remember his slow appraisal and dawning disgust when he considered my get-up. I'd just gotten my ear pierced, which was quite daring in this area in 1986. I was growing my hair out to here and I felt so smug, so rebellious. There wasn't any rebellion in town, but I was ready to be on its vanguard.

The first time I dropped acid was in Russell's dorm room. He was tripping balls at the time and he bade me to kneel on the floor while he placed the tab on my tongue. I thought that was wonderful. I felt like I was being initiated into an exclusive secret society -- the Golden Esoteric Order of Intrepid Psychenauts, perhaps, daring to go where so many had gone before.

Are you on the bus? Yes sir, captain. Indeedy-do I am, and let's get on with it, mmmkay? There are miles to go before I sleep and miles to go before I sleep and I'll barely even leave this musty concrete block dorm room. Whee-hoo! Further!

It was quite banal, actually, but to me it was fresh and new and so, so strange.

Later Russell was disgusted with me. He kept telling me I shouldn't have let him humiliate me like that. "Never get on our knees for another man!" But I thought my first acid trip should be accompanied by some sort of formal ritual. I didn't feel humiliated.

Later Russell gave me his approval. He said that's how he took his first hit. He wouldn't have done it if he hadn't been tripping so hard at the time. "I just thought your first trip needed some kind of formal initiation," he said. The zap and zing of my neurons responding to that frisson of coincidence, that validation was audible in my ringing ears. Russell approved! I was in!

Some weeks later when my friend Hippie Steve** tripped with me for the first time, I tried to make him kneel as I did so I could properly induct him, but he refused.

************************************************************************************

**Note: I was calling my friend "Hippie Steve" long before I had heard of our mutual friend Hip.

As always,

the cocky little prick

I had my yearly checkup today with my doctor. As I waited on the examination table, clad only in my boxers, the nurse stepped in. Oh, but she was a pretty young thing, no more than twenty-four, with a cute little upturned nose, a bright gleaming smile, and everything pert in its right place.

"Lie back on the table for me, please," she commanded, and this is when I sensed trouble. My boxers are slit in the front to allow easy access. It just makes it easier to take a piss at work or to duck behind a door for a quick scratch. It also allows for easy exit when lying on your back on a doctor's examining table in front of a hot young nurse. She turned to consult my chart and I hastily arranged all my manly bits as best I could to hide properly behind the gaping flap of my shorts.

So then this pretty young nurse turned back to me wielding one of those digital thermometers they shove into your ear. When she inserted the probe into my ear, she also thrust her pudenda into my left arm. I was lying there waiting for her to be done checking my ear, feeling her up with my left forearm. There was nowhere for me to go. She had my arm pinned to the table. Her hips fit neatly from my elbow to my knuckles, and I could clearly feel the dip in the middle and a small mound right in the center of that dip. That's when I felt a stirring down below.

"No, no, no, not now," I groaned silently. Immediately a graphic image popped into my mind in full, living color. It was the nurse grinding her hips into mine, moaning with the pleasure of taking all of me as far as it would go, grinding and grinding, groaning and working. Sweating with the effort of slowly riding all the way up and then settling slowly back down so as to feel the full raw power of the pleasure wracking her from the tips of her toes to the crown of her head.

The harder I tried not to think about it, the more intense and real it became. Soon my dick was peeking out of the flap, as if to say, "Hey, what's going on out there? Anything you need me for?"

"No, no," I willed. "Back inside! Get back inside!"

The nurse turned to jot something on my chart and I slapped at my pecker, knocking it down a notch but not halting its fervor. She returned with a stethoscope and spent the next eternity and a half checking my heart and my lungs. Her firm young mons pubis pressed into my forearm again. I gritted my teeth.

This time the treacherous little prick bounced out of my shorts like a child playing in his bedclothes. It stood halfway out of the flap of my boxers and had itself a good look around. It spoke to me, silently but clearly. "You're up to something," it said, "and I'm not leaving until I know what it is."

"There's nothing going on!" I screamed in my mind. "Lie back down!"

"Huh uh," it said. "Nothing doing. No how, no way." It stretched its head as far as it could and opened its one good eye wide. "I wouldn't miss this for anything."

"But there's nothing going on," I pleaded, knowing I had lost the struggle. I felt the fullness down below that announces a throbbing blue-veiner. There was nothing I could do now.

The nurse was done with her stethoscope and pulled the ear pieces down to her shoulders. "Well, you have a good..." Her eyes widened when her elbow bumped my penis in the head. I hoped it knocked some sense into the little bastard. Her face reddened and she turned back to my chart. As she scribbled, her tight little butt twitched in a most lovely manner.

My treacherous little dickhead stood at its full height now, with its hands on its hips admiring the view. "Oh, she's cute, isn't she?" it said, grinning a wide careless grin. "What a peach!"

I reached down and gripped it by the neck. "Shut the fuck up!" I hissed as quietly as I could.

The nurse stopped scribbling. "What was that?" she asked, half turning to me.

"Oh," I stammered. "Uh, what was my blood pressure?"

"I haven't taken it yet," she said. Nice. What else could I do to expose myself as nothing more than a hormone-crazed lout? I tucked my prick back into my shorts to no avail. It sprang immediately back to full attention.

The nurse turned around with a blood pressure cuff and stared directly at my discomfort. Her full lips parted. Her pink little tongue bobbed slightly against her gleaming white teeth. Again, she was just as lovely as a fuzzy dew-dropped peach. She tossed the cuff on the counter and edged toward the door.

"The doctor will be with you shortly," she announced as she fled the room.

I turned to my dick. "Okay, bastard," I said, "now you'll get yours!" I punched it solidly in the head. I hope it saw stars because the pain doubled me over. At least the cheerful little beast started to recede.

The punishment for treason is death, but I think death is too good for the little prick. I have sentenced it to life at hard labor. Every day from now until the end of its natural span I shall work it until it pukes.

It will give me great pleasure.