They called him "Alfonso".
Yes, granting anthropomorphic significance to this miserable shrunken bat preserved in a miniature formaldehyde jar that cast a greenish tint like a torture victim of the Spanish Inquisition, forever dead and spread-eagled to the world like a ghastly specimen of science.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
That bat. That fucking bat.
So it was in 9th grade biology, trying to find transcendence among slime, a sign from the heavens that there was more than this.
(NONE WAS FORTHCOMING)
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Mr. Drinkard, our biology teacher (-- whom we called "David" because this was a screwball institution of learning) talked about "the wondrousness of biology" with his pattering, hippie voice that offered no comfort for the instinctual fear & loathing of shriveled corpses and death juice. It had the same ring of "the wondrousness of birth" with its spraying fluids and human mothers howling how much they hated their husbands as the gripped the rails and popped out a mass of screaming, squalling, shitting flesh.
At the moment, Alfonso-- damn his hairy little soul-- was being picked apart with a pair of forceps.
I, in the meanwhile, was struggling diligently with a "virtual frog"-- a pile of laminated paper cards piled on top of each other in ordered sequence. The posters in this room of the neglected sciences proclaimed the mechanics of life with pathos, the inferior specimens of evolution caught in the net of human affairs and left to play out their life cycles in twisting agony-- much like how I felt among my goofball, rock-headed peers who carried on like evil, google-eyed doofuses from a mirror image across town "where not all was kindness on Sesame Street" as they hopped around with dildos and porno tapes and the social Darwinism of twisted muppetry.
"The flower that once blooms forever dies", as Ragnar Redbeard the Viking had once penned in "Might is Right" with hard cruelty. I had an image of frogs jumping towards freedom, leaping through the hallways with the categorical imperative of being unrestrained by quite-unnatural circumstances which according to the book, were grim, primordial law.
But that did no good for me, as I fingered a laminated anus with disgust. . . . . fantasizing about throwing these gremlins-- these little beasties that passed as my peers-- into a shrieking fire like something out of the Grimm's Faiery Tales where black gook oozed from the furnace like the melted-down essence of their evil beings returning to the steaming earth.
Flip a coin for preferability: dissecting dead animals or watching undersea nature videos with the celebrity narration of Michael Douglas telling us to kneel before Mother Nature, to plead for sustenance before the earth mother goddess Gaeia or whatever it was his flaky "New Age" Hollywood religion told him to worship. . . . . . counting our prayers before the wrathful earth deity deigned to destroy her children with typhoons, or even passing on the torch to our wise Dolphin brother who was the rightful heir to this planet with a bigger brain, but unfortunately never developed an opposable thumb to harness tools or fire or a preachy microphone.
One wondered what it took to make it in Hollywood, the city of sugar-spun dreams, if they'd ever have a life more glamorous and full than this one. . . . . listening to lectures about mitosis and meiosis and not really giving a shit either way.
"David" also sponsored the teen issues class
where we merely sat around and watched movies for our
"enlightenment".
One was "Higher Learning" (1995), a breathy, pompous Gen-X polemic shot MTV-style
directed against
racism, sexism, and homophobia on a college campus
utterly without nuance, like
a modern mental hygiene film that attempted "to be deep" but only demonized and
made a fool out of hapless white people "minding their own business"
with loaded
assumptions about "authenticity" and the inherent righteousness in someone just
because they were black or traditionally marginalized or were some self-serving
left-wing egoist even more putrid with his Eddie Vedder antics, hackey-sacking
his way into my radar "that not all was right with America" as told by Hollywood
and New York-- not only a problem with the story, but a problem with the
story-tellers who never got it right.
"RACISM IS WRONG!"
"ALWAYS WEAR A CONDOM!"
"HAVE AN OPEN MIND!"
And other stone-faced pronouncements that left no room for qualified discussion as they held up a hand of left-wing dismissal and said that "you were beyond even talking to" if you questioned the sacred, tribal, hoop-nosed silence of multiculturalism and postmodern ego. God help you, there was the "soul roots" authenticity of "The Red Hot Chili Peppers" to back up these P.C. Commandments of the quick-cut MTV generation: the Meso-American, Afro-Caribbean apolitical communal-Trotstykist-funk of four white guys giggling, whooping, and flapping around like chickens with socks on their dicks. . . . . .
Why, it was sure enough to stop the
Oklahoma City
Bombing,
LITTLE DUDES
!!!
It came to a point when you're looking around, and you get the feeling of "fuck this shit" as you were slowly overcome with that "slipping feeling"-- when your expectation of reality meets how things really are and your paradigm get swished away, irretrievably, like a live goldfish getting flushed down the toilet, the twisting pipes emptying into the toxic sewers and your dead buddy floating off. Gone. Lost. But grasping after the wishful corpse of your idealism like a man in the dark with complete cognitive dissonance. I was taught to hate the conservatives, but now I found myself hating the liberals even more.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
That bat. That fucking bat.
Next it was that flea. . . . . that god-damned flea.
"David" somehow trapped a flea under a slide and blew it up on the screen in a giant transparency. There the parasite was, snorfling, heaving furiously in its entrapment as our "New Age" teacher lectured about "the beauty of life". I figured he must have had a vibrator up his ass, his voice was so soft and lilting. Gimme a sack of beef jerky, chewing tobacco, and a pint of booze to shore up my manhood, not this Californian "I'm O.K. . . . . you're O.K." vegetable mind.
Well, the flea was losing energy and was presumably dying as "David" kept up the magical tone in his voice and I wanted to punch him in the teeth. But that would have been singularly unwise, for he knew the Far Eastern secrets of the body's "pressure points".
There was once this scurrilous counterculture kid named Todd, whom I always remembered for the three sticks-- knocking one airborne between the other two gripped in his hands with a "toc, toc" sound like a sideshow performer at a "Grateful Dead" concert as a bunch of crusty, aged Cheech n' Chong dopers half-stared on with scurviness-- and the time he rushed "David" in the library. This teacher who reminded one of an albino rabbit, his voice was so soft, grabbed Todd's wrist and put him in a "Vulcan Death-Grip" or whatever and had him going "OOOOOHHH, OOOOOHHH!" for mercy with practically one finger, making him drop to his knees in lilt-voiced "negativity management" that put fuckers like me in their place.
I hated that man.
It was always the talk of such nebulous ideas such as "energy" and "feng sheui", but all I saw around here were a bunch of teenagers soaked in the negativity of malformed adolescence, like a rag soaking up shit. And shallow, pat answers from either MTV or Hollywood "New Age" flakes wasn't going to fix things.
Whatever one was going to do with their life, it was not to be found in biology rooms picking apart dead bats. I wanted life, spirited and free. I looked up at the human skeleton mounted up on the steel frame, and felt my brief stay on earth disappearing, much like that snorfling flea. I asked to go get a drink. . . . . and never came back.
I walked home from school-- an unexcused absence.
A flurry of anger, of panic from the school's authorities. I was a minor, "an insurance liability". That may have been true, but I was not akin to a piece of teenaged cargo to be warehoused like a pile of VCR's. And maybe I thought of the fate of ole' Alfonso stretched out like a victim of the Spanish Inquisition in a jar of formaldehyde.
That bat. That fucking bat.
Exactly.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
As punishment, "Ray" the soft-headed principal figured-- almost apologetically-- that I should be forced to clean up the twin vans. One a light blue, the other a dark cobalt. Each with the logo, "Crossroads School" written out with white paint, along with the five-spoked wheel that was meant to suggest the harmony, congruity, and balance of a school founded in 1974 out of the remains of a cleared-out grocery store bordering on "Crackville". The vans were musty with sweat, caked with dirt, and somehow "Ray" never got around to enforcing his decree.
Which was just as well, because I wasn't going to do a good job.
Apathy. Indifference. Sullenness.
Various teachers tried to poke us up, how good universities wouldn't accept students with a single "C" on their transcripts, and how that would impact our lives forever. Looking around in this slop, I figured that I had already "blown it" and didn't really care. Society seemed more about "trading in illusions" then about exchanging in meaningful ideas, and I could tell that even at the age of 14.
What concerned me were the culture magazines, and their fixations-- how they represented the thermostat of our mutating society that was overheating with irony as they pandered to a dumber, cruder audience and pulled my country down. It all came down to "what you could get away with" instead of what was right as our people carpet-bagged from what remained of our virtuous institutions even as people found themselves more and more trapped into powerless, artificial lives as pigs packed in a pen started gnawing on each other, particularly on me-- who was not aloud to point out the race, ethnicity, social class, disability, or overall brutishness of who these pigs were and why we could not all just get along with this status-quo. White kids, black kids, L.D'd kids. . . . . freaks, misfits, outcasts, losers, vomit-looking alt-rockers whom you weren't allow to decry for the scum-froth they were lest you be "intolerant" and not a happy member of the collectivist failure known as "Sesame Street".
. . . . . . . . . .
Welcome to "The Central West End". . . . . San Francisco on the
Mississippi. Caught between the rotting vise of north and south St. Louis, this
location is the prime gentrified area of the city where all the money sits like honey in
a jar, sickly sweet with buzzing cultural events and other frippery.
Rather like that old cartoon show, "The Smurfs" where you had a bunch of happy, equalitarian sky-blue little men who live in a socialist village off in the forest with white, sack-cloth little hats. They dwell in little mushroom houses by a purling brook under the guidance of "Papa Smurf", a bearded Swiss elder who offers wise guidance as they farm and play and sip honey and ride snails in namby-pamby fraternal bliss. And when someone trendy like Barack Obama comes along, there they are happily leap-frogging and whistling on the flute and painting and skipping and composing love poetry and not getting any work done and not growing out of their infantile lovesick habits. And at night, they sleep-- tightly nestled, metaphorically speaking-- two to a bed and snore softly with their little white sack-cloth hats on as always. ZZZZZZZZZ. What I'm trying to tell you through this allegory, is that these liberals have no dicks. Just like the Smurfs.
-- "Streetside at Euclid & Pershing"
Or behind closed doors, they're on the internet message boards hopping up and down on their thumbs while squawking how much they love Winona Ryder in a big ring behind their computers, the communal "personality fuck" of the modern simulacrum era where the Christian god has no home. If only that actress could get them to proselytize in a multi-level marketing scheme, she could become a savvy trillionaire from these twitch-nosed, rabbit-looking online community of finger-fucked subterranean dweebs.
-- So long as she doesn't have to shake hands. . . . .
To
whatever god, gods, or goddesses which we choose to kneel upon the face
of this
mysterious earth-ball as we wander around like
thralls to our own delusions, vast human and economic
forces thrum under your feet whether you're fully aware of them,
Why, you could even liken corporate headquarters to "The Deathstar" and its overworked employees to "Micro-serfs" who slave like peasants on the manor! Yes, as we weigh unlike essences in the public square like amateur pop culture philosophers who think themselves clever and profound despite the pressing silence of the cosmos that has no answer, just the shrieking of pestiferous starlings who mess the sidewalks. That is, if we even go outside anymore. Many of us will figuratively amble along while never guessing the true extent of our fragmentary knowledge as we lecture on like "little professors". . . . . even as the lectern of our speechifying is being shook and jostled by underground tremors, spilling the water glass as we go on obliviously just like the stodgy Western tradition some of us aim to replace like perhaps a more principled looter & desecrator who can fool his stork-like self "that he's doing the principled thing".
Though somewhat "a latecomer" I always found myself marginally ensconced with the interface of Microsoft-DOS computing.
Whole worlds were represented in that operating system, built on the moldy "hack/slash" bones of the early 1980's-- the scratched out lines of text from 100 million plugged into an online grid and devoted to game cheats, jokes, and poetic doggerel. The evidence of human concerns, lordly and base-- of loneliness, awkwardness, and obsessive-compulsion-- gathered out there in the anonymous electronic ether like gunk collected beneath the fingernails when you scraped an index finger beneath the windowsill of a church rectory, the inhabitants of the electronic cathedral either looking at pornography or gazing up at the stars.What existed out there was one big cry for "meaning", for some kind of "answer", but could not be given in a cut-and-dried revelation at the passive, chair-bound, ass-end of the 20th century where tax protesting was "big talk", good taste was questionable, and lock-picking was best left to those with nerve. Like some kind of "poor man's James Bond", a gawky little creep holding up a hand of $100 bills with a sly, secret smile as a daydreamin' figment of someone "who beat the system" before gliding off arm-in-arm with Vanna White like swans.
Collective underground fantasy aside, the solution to the world's problems was evidently the rational answer found in democratic liberalism and FDR-style "big government"-- young, overly thoughtful children of NPR-families mulling on "The Rights of Man" and all but lacking the powdered wigs and buckled shoes at the 18th century Constitutional Convention and nodding at the righteous necessity of internationalism to fight Hitler as we played strategy games on the P.C. that broke down warfare into digital units, boxed history into a gung-ho CGI cartoon swooping around with unnatural movements, and ignored the infinite primacy and calculus of the human soul that defies a programmer's orderly algorithms like so much unforeseen.
Pathetically enough, as the average purview of the internet citizens (--
or "netziens"!) kept getting cruder and more degraded, trading in bestiality jpegs and offering up praises to the so-called profundity of Kevin Smith movies like slime and mold and filth breaking out on the Lincoln Memorial. The quality of a democracy will always depend on the moral quality and sense of high purpose found inside the hearts of its people. My friend would respond by logic-chopping away the idea of morality and any kind of upward-coursing purpose in the universe until standards became meaningless, asides from the pure Marxist tinker-toy conception of logic. I had to resist telling him that not only is man not particularly logical, but that history recks nothing of human logic and the state of the world is "fallen". So fallen in fact, that the system of checks n' balances is eventually pulled down by the cracks in its very foundations. Watch and learn. . . . .
The
clanking collar of punishment is placed around your neck in middle school, and
there you scamper around with your fellow little porno-hungry gremlins. You find your imagination "reined in" by the drab, restless
environment of zero resourcefulness and a whole lot of unrequited sex drive as
you shove against "your logical confines" as dictated by adults "who
allegedly know better".
This, as the corporate media blares its message of hyper-stimulation "up-front" and "in-your-face" as you blink with a smile on your mug. Skateboarders, MTV, sports drinks slammed down on the counter with an angry fist. And there we are, the over-stimulated expected to sit still and "learn our logical lessons" in an atmosphere catered to "instant gratification" and the unruly side effect "of fucking shit up" like rioters at Woodstock 1999. . . . . 10,000 shirtless young men skipping counterclockwise around a bonfire and raping young women in a flurry of repressed suburbanoid testosterone as security, vendors, and the bands, even-- hid out like scared raccoons about to be beaten to death with stray chunks of metal.
And you couldn't shoot them, because their families would sue. . . . . in a land where the criminal, the barbarian, has more right to shirk his responsibility then you have to hold him to the law. So much for logic. So much for the courts. So much for simple, manly justice.
And not helping
matters was SHE. . . . . every 9th grade boy's worst nightmare;
But the more I listened to her speak, the more I loathed this rotten universe. . . . .
She was a liberal, the kind of insufferable progressive utterly in love with the sound of her own mellifluous voice, if not the romance of her adopted pet causes. Genocide in Rwanda. Feminine genital mutilation in sub-Saharan Africa. Oppression of the colored peoples around the world, especially here in the white, patriarchal United States which she aimed to tear down like a spear-wielding Amazon with her hand on her hip as she directed her junior minions.
Just what this bright, well-haunched woman in her late 20's found romantic about fraternizing with a bunch of mumbling black folk shuffling around in overalls and shaking their heads in earthy reproof, whom might as well have been masturbating with a watermelon for all the good they could ever do for themselves, and for some of the seedy, hangdog, low-down expressions I've seen on their faces down at the local MetroLink light-rail station, if not lazing in their seats with the alcoholic stink of jaundice, I could not say. But isn't it said that a pert, young liberal leaping into the "underprivileged breach" is just a conservative who hasn't been mugged, beaten, dragged into an abandoned building and gang-raped?
For her, if it wasn't "facing the beast head-on", it was pestering the fat, easy, toothless targets waddling around like beach balls-- i.e. US as she instructed with solemn purpose, a smile working around her full, red lips as she cut down men in class.
She
was maddening! She was infuriating! Especially when she led all the young women
off into "the cult of the feminist" for further instruction
of how to break away from
the bonds of modern male-dominated society. Writing poetry in the woods, hoeing
beans, eating pussy, sharing menstrual pains, and carving dildos so they
wouldn't have to be dependent on a man anymore.
Yes, this fat, farting woman and her crew of shithouse feminists fit for the
insane asylum, their alternative order rising up like a putrescent "citadel of evil". If it wasn't that, it was the
droning drumbeat of "the cult of suffering" around those sisters in the
"women's
rights movement" who had fallen before. A hundred million stifled cries, wails
coming from insane asylums, the martyr who threw herself in front of the king's
trampling horses at the English derby to bring attention to the cause.
In a word, all manner of curdled deprivation, rib-exposed starvation, and stone-faced moping that "didn't know how to party" as they sat down with an egg-plant up their ass like some kind of retentive, mothering neurosis.
"Yes, it was only through that woman selflessly giving her life and shocking the King in 1913 that women won the right to vote in England", that teacher uttered to great effect."Nyyah. Why don't you just throw her bruised & broken body to the dogs, sun bonnet & all?", I say from the table like a "Bowery Boy" with a derby cocked over one eye, sick of all this sanctimonious blather. I even supply the growling sounds as the starving beasts drag her grim, stick-like corpse back and forth and the egg-plant goes rolling down the street. In my own weird way, that was "flirting", trying to get a rise out of her leopard-skin draped form.
"Are you serious?",
she asks, open-mouthed."No".
"Good. I'm glad you're not. Because it is only through this noble sacrifice that. . . . .".
And
then there was the applause of the crowd that stayed, the langour and slack and
implied futility of physical exertion as far abstracted from sterner
considerations as a
philosopher in a green jester's hat with jingling bells pondering
on the irony
and agony and tragedy of an outstretched hangnail, as if it was as consequential
as the skull of Shakespeare's "Yorick" as the arts offered no hope and America
sunk deeper into it's '90s malaise
like so many slick, pukey-looking covers of
"Rolling Stone".
This was in the reigning days of the corporate alterna-empire with it's pantheon of vacant, glass-eyed personalities from "the so-called counterculture" that were like Big Mac grease dripping down Slick Willie's chin as the nation repressed a fiery belch of indigestion. This was the flat-out "state of the world" that didn't even bother "to dare you to do better" because it would have been "too much work" as you settled for this corporate gruel that made it a point to take a false stand "against the corporate", and fool the sheep "who didn't know the difference".
But even "the revolutionary underground" was paltry.
Once
, the school gathered everyone together on the floor during Tuesday announcements-- everyone from clueless dweebs to flitting black girls to lisping goths carrying on remarkably like snakes with all the appearance of the Marc Jacobs of the world-- and put this low quality of human swill through a mental exercise. They divided the school up into theoretical "continents" representing populations and comparative distributions of energy consumption by handing out candy. Lo and behold, was not enough measly little pieces of hard candy to go around the world as the suspense built, until they came to North America and the adults started handing out sacks and sacks of chocolate in plastic shopping bags to illustrate our flawed, greedy, SUV-driving American ways with a "Big Mac" sitting on the seat in a grease-soaked sack.Everyone laughed heartily at this broad, generalized, "socialistic lesson" and this rich bounty was passed around in an equitable manner like a clearing in Sherwood Forest and Robin Hood's "Merry Men" tapping their quarterstaffs to the ground.
For all our romantic populist notions, here we were like a bunch of gobbling turkeys staring at the manor of whoever "those evil, rich white men" were supposed to be and plotting a coup, thinking that if there was just enough government programs out there through socialist legislation, then everything could be fixed. It was an article of faith that the system was perfectible if only enough voters got involved, if there was just enough enlightenment.
But turkey shit collects, and ain't washed away if folks keep pecking around the barnyard like self-indulgent idiots who don't clean the cage. And there was "Turkey Revolutionary Command", hammered out of such politically-correct materials as adobe mud, tin foil, and balsa wood as naive grotesques shrieked "humanity is good!" and the underlings carried on like bird-brains sashshaying around and growing soft with $5 Mocha espressos. . . . . with sprinkles.
It is the reason why we were caught so off-guard on 9/11 and all but curled into a whimpering, fetal ball when some of us got beheaded in a sudden spasm of violence carried out by those with a stronger will. In "A Few Good Men" from 1992 everyone in the audience laughs-- somewhat uncomfortably, always uproariously-- at Jack Nicholson's big speech when he snarls. . . . . "The TRUTH? You can't handle THE TRUTH. . . ." without seeming to understand that police and soldiers and fire fighters and medical personnel with that mentality are the only ones that allow us to live free in our worlds of sheltered sub-reality which can come crashing down at any moment when matters go awry and the lions pounce.
. . . . . . . . . .
Turkey faggot scum.
Eventually you're tossed out with the scuffle of feathers because you don't "toe the line" like a dust-kicking rooster crowing in resentment and lashing out at 'em with your spurs.
Where had the strong white male gone in this "neck of the woods"?
You wouldn't find him down here, always adjusting to others and apologizing for himself, getting out of the way of some hoodlum with a chirped "oh, my" like the CP30 robot from "Star Wars" in a faggy British accent and denying the obvious. This kind of degradation could go on forever unless you took a bellicose stand against "pig-people", no matter what color. I did-- when some runt decided to use my back for a punching bag, thinking that there were no consequences when you tried to bully around someone three times your size.
The new headmaster was the kind of short, intense man who listened to you, staring upwards like the little bully on the playground, but only half-heard you because he was piecing together his own oblique designs that had no reflection on "the ground situation". It was a blooming future of tech stocks, Starbucks franchises, and a politically-correct Clinton/Gore Imperium that spread outward inexorably like "Manifest Destiny". He expelled me to show that he was in charge like a bristling lapdog left in charge of the backyard, the school shivering with "the coup" but doing nothing because they were confused and stupid and weak, the ultimate example of social democracy in action when you see the fullest blooming flower of putrid implication when the trap springs down at the gallows and the body is quietly disposed of. . . . . namely when I was "kicked off into eternity" out the door with my weeping mother.
With my friend, it simply didn't register in his "logic banks". He didn't know what to say and said nothing. We hardly ever spoke again. It only goes to show the principle that if a power vacuum exists, someone or something will rush in to fill it-- usually for the worse. You can bemoan the law of the universe endlessly, but it doesn't do any good. You may as well be raging at the laws of themodynamics, or even the law of the jungle.
It really stung-- the fact that I had been utterly snookered by a flowery belief system and then disemboweled by what, looking back, was the feeblest of carnivores our de-clawed society could spawn. The biggest wound was not necessarily the act itself, but the psychological affliction of ennui that rots the blood and leads to deep internal infection that threatens to eat the soul, as you wander around like Nietzsche in his final days spitting curses at gibing apparitions and glugging down rotgut beer, if not swiping his boot at the cat and reliving the incident with the blood-roar of cavalry instead of recollecting the true, minor importance of our "fallen Promethesus".
To find THE REAL PARTY raging somewhere in the night where all the hip, happening, beautiful people congregated (-- the ones who weren't sociopaths) and to crush that final bit of uncertainty that seemed to lay at the heart of things always, at least the size of an mustard seed that itched & irritated because no one truly knew what it was like down here. Adults forgot, or were so far removed that whatever they said was simply irrelevant to the realities of "the field". To know what it was like swimming through a sea of illusions, and trying to find "what was real". . . . . yet shrinking from what reality actually turned out to be. How life was not glamorous, how life was not star-spangled, how life was pathetically ordinary and lonely. Your comfort was a collection of CD's, some old books, and a dream about better days to come. . . . . but would they ever come in this fallen, demented world of dead bats and human insectivores and cracks running along the blasted quasi-ghetto pavement like ruined topological geography and crack-pot causes?
Only time would tell. . . . . and remember that rusted sign with bolted letters above the Nazi concentration camp gates that read "Work will make you free", if not the adage of those who survived the ordeal: "what does not kill me will make me stronger".
Spoken like a true half-Jewish neo-Nazi "bullshit" artist (-- with a soft heart for Jewish girls "who talk back")
*******************
"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
(Rheeee of Crickets)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
("I heard that, Missy!")
© 2010 by Insufferable Industries
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