"Captain Stoner"
There was a time when your author was tempted by the scuzzier jewels of the cultural zeitgeist, circa 1993 or so in a time where everything seemed to bloat out and stink like a beached squid. Our buffet of media presentation was becoming a bit more slick, though it did not completely surrender itself to digital excess, and colorful veils whirled around as things that should perhaps not be given such prominence, were made blown up and huge like putrescent rot as the unhip seagulls "cawed" and swooped and hen-pecked like "shut-the-fuck-up" moralists. An existential gulf presented itself there, between what was seen as "authentic" and our humdrum lives, whose tentacles you were a bit afraid to pick up and play with.
Take a band like GWAR, weird Cromagnon dudes bounding around the stage in grotesque Styrofoam costumes shaped like evil, leering insects and aliens, if not glorping parasites with fangs. To a 12 year-old, if there is no one to pat him on the shoulder and point at the performers with a squint, "putting it in some kind of perspective", the boy might take the show as far more of "an answer" than he should, not understanding that the point of this show is to present "rank entertainment" and that generally speaking, you would not want to follow these musicians' path unless you wanted a lifetime of cross-eyed misery.
Yet one would at that age would lay back in their bedroom, self-consciously striking the pose of a long-haired southern Californian skateboarder lazing in his "den of slack", perhaps "trying too hard" to capture the pose "just right". It's the same kind of feeling when you feel the occasion rising beneath you-- that day, happening to wear a black t-shirt that reads "Sri Lanka" on it with an exotic sun of Buddhist meditation-- that you take your bike and cycle on down to "The Loop", an alternative shopping district. A boulevard of goths, gypsies, hippies-- random, flighty, blue-state/style detritus-- "the street of dreams".
We reap what we sow. . . . . and throwing your seeds in the wind will not take root as the world sits at restaurant tables, or at the smoking wall, indifferently. There are those "who give" and those "who take", like a panhandler acting exceedingly nice to the boy as he looked around a bit "clueless", caught on the spot. Be wary, because that is "the law of the world".
A fist-full of zines at the copy center, and a whole lot of smudged ink with half-assed production values. Now you're talkin'. And may a gangling stick of a carny hold a Russian wolf-hound on a chain at the back of the Gypsy folk-rock punk show. . . . . looking about "three doors down" from skittering October leaves being blown across his chicken-necked grave.
Vampire. . . . . loser of the night. Do you want ketchup on those fries? Flip the tape over, and moonlight at home. For that is the state of the social misfit.
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"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!'
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(Rheeee of Crickets)
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("I heard that, Missy!")
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