INT. Border's Bookstore, 1997, Day.

15 YEAR-OLD MICHAEL "LAWLESS" ADAMS is skulking around the bookstore, checking out THE EROTICA SECTION. He is eagerly flipping through the pages-- hoping, PRAYING that no one sees him. There is a rustle of human activity in a corner of the store, and OUR HERO half looks up, before going back down to his pages. He heads toward the gathering, and beholds an old, white-haired gentleman in a dark-blue suit. He looks at the card of scheduled book signings, and it turns out to be BOB KEESHAN-- the man who played "CAPTAIN KANGAROO" on television. OUR HERO stares on as the narration comes on.

Captain Kangaroo? Personally, that was a little bit before my time but what I remembered him for was the show, "CBS Story-Break" back in the '80s.

[CUT TO CLIP of the opening theme-- a roller-coaster ride of high-octane electric guitars and lightning bolts and robotic dinosaurs falling away with a roar and about a million other things in the junior '80s zeitgeist]

Basically it took popular books for young adults and turned them into cut-rate cartoons spun out of a South Korean conglomerate and fed back to we boys and girls in a Reagan-era nutritionless swill. But of course, we lil' bastards scarcely knew the difference, as the advertisers had a bonanza of our undivided attention.

[CUT TO ARCHIVES of CHEESY, CUT-RATE FOOTAGE]

Or at least half of the time. . . . .

I mostly hung out for the theme music but found the content about as oppressive as PBS children's programming. IN FACT, I think the show was passed off as "EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMMING".

[CUT TO FOOTAGE of "Arthur the Aardvark]

Bob Kesshan would come out, looking very impeccable and detached from all of this high-stimulation overdrive, and would cheerfully announce that morning's story. Of course, it was given either the 10:30 or 11:00 A.M slot which is the equivalent of "Siberia" for kids' shows. But the old man was taking it fair & square; he needed the paycheck.

[CUT TO FOOTAGE of BOB KEESHAN announcing]

Part of me was actually convinced that he was "plugged in" to that super-electric world in the beginning, that he held the key to an existence somewhere that was "that intense", which promised something so much more glorious and exciting then my drab life sitting in front of my television like a pouting, misshapen Quasimodo.

[CUT TO SHOT of 5 YEAR-OLD MICHAEL "LAWLESS" ADAMS sitting in front of the T.V. like a dim-bulb]

I was also the sort of kid who believed that you could magically drop in on "Pee-Wee's Playhouse" and find "just another day in the life" going on just like the t.v. show, that it was some kind of valid statement "of how to be".

[CUT TO SHOT of PEE-WEE HERMAN FOOTAGE]

I saw a commercial for the "Super Koolaid Super Fun-House", a wild claymation world and asked my parents to buy "Koolaid" when the announcer said that you could enter the super sweepstakes to visit such a place, not understanding that they would usher you to a playpen, a table of coloring books, and a man in a "Mr. Koolaid" costume.

[CUT TO CLIP of SAID COMMERCIAL]

[CUT TO FOOTAGE of man in a tape-together MR. KOOLAID COSTUME]

I was going through a period when I was coming to terms with THE ABSOLUTE DEATH of this world, how anything of my magical childhood existence had been reduced to this running sore of life. It was very important for me to glance over and see that Bob Keeshan was standing there and talking like anyone else. He wasn't exalted, he wasn't god-like, he just happened to be some schmuck on T.V.

[CUT TO MTV FOOTAGE from 1998, "MEET YOUR HERO" when A SUPER-FAN is going bonkers in the presence of BRUCE WILLIS at an arranged meeting at "Planet Hollywood" set up by the producers. The more excitable THE SUPER-FAN gets, the more BRUCE WILLIS shrinks. The more BRUCE WILLIS shrinks, the louder THE SUPER-FAN gets, sensing that the clock is ticking and "that time is running out"]

No one really knows what to tell these overgrown kids wandering around like phantoms in a world the media machine has created.

[CUT TO PICTURE of EDDIE VEDDER looking like a young Jacobin]

What is so disconcerting is when certain posers moralize about how you shouldn't base your life on celebrities for some kind of answer, when they themselves are taking an authoritative stand like they themselves are some kind of answer that should be picked up the media "and broadcasted", becoming a part of the very attitude machine they disavow. If Eddie Vedder and the rest of Pearl Jam wanted to be "authentic" they would quit being rock stars and get straight jobs like anyone else instead of acting like a bunch of left-wing sages propped up by other people's ticket sales and belief. However, everyone likes "the bully pulpit". . . . .

Nowadays, it's all just niche marketing to a whole lot of sheep desperate for a magic pill to keep them bopping around in perpetual adolescence, and the longer that these little cliquish groups of close-minded "know-it-all's" hurl invective across each other and the "SPIN"'s and "MAXIM"'s of the world keep pandering to their audience than the longer the robber barons can go on feeding from the government pork barrel.

 

Tut, tut, tut, though. You had the carrot of rewards such as money and status for "playing the game" and "asking no questions"; then "the stick" of being tarred "an extremist" and left outside the gates of prestige with the rest of the milling, marginal hordes.

Whatever you want to call it-- "The Council of Foreign Relations", "The Bilderberg Group", or even "The Bohemian Grove-- sort of a Roman frat party where the elite "boy's club" cook wienies, sing songs, sip champagne, and as a joke, worship a giant stone owl of all things--by invitation only.

[CUT TO CLIP OF A MAN in a blue cape and rubber skeleton mask and a sword kicking down a door at a business round-table meeting. They ask "who in blazes are you?" and he yells, "I'm the PHANTOM PATRIOT! And you're THE NEW WORLD ORDER! I'm here to protect THE CONSTITUTION!" Next he's tackled by security guards and is down thrashing on the floor before they handcuff him and haul him off spitting and growling]

[SOUND EFFECT of tweeting and buzzing, and hearts forming and dissolving with "oozy" chemical process]

[CUT TO CLIP of a mawkish animation clip of "the birds and bees" in love  This takes such an unhip, obvious, and tasteless approach to a subject that makes a lot of people very self-conscious]

[SOUND EFFECT of gagging]

[EXASPERATED. . . . .] Sickening, isn't it? Whatever you want to say about our ideals of romantic love in a mass society of individuals squirming like worms in shit, you know what it really comes down to. . . . .

[CUT TO FOOTAGE of '70s PORNO set of "funkadelic" music]

"Oh, come now. . . . . let's not be that cynical. Surely we're more than just shivering protoplasm 'glorping' around under a microscope on the cosmic scale of things, though there are some among us who would maintain that we're little more than exalted cockroaches.

[Cut to shot of cars and SUV's caught in gridlock out on the freeway in the height of summer, people yelling and honking their horns as vehicles give off farting exhaust alongside noisy construction, which only congests things further]

[As horns honk and men holler and jack-hammers crunch into the pavement, CUT TO PICTURE of Marilyn Manson album: "Portrait of an American Family"]

[CUT TO FOOTAGE of TRACTORS shoveling through a LANDFILL]

"It can be said that man exists either as a mouth or an anus, or possibly both"

[CUT TO FOOTAGE of squealing pigs, and a pig-shit lagoon off at a pig farm]

[FOLLOWED BY: A video of a port-a-John being knocked over by a crane as a practical joke and the hated boss sliding out with the sewage like a fish]

MOTIF ABRUPTLY CHANGES

[CUT TO PICTURE of OSWALD SPENGLER, a very serious man who wrote "The Decline of the West", a grim post World War I tome that predicted that we were all doomed and living in the winter of our demise]

For me, romance was always the tantalizing "escape hatch" from the more sober, unpleasant facts of existence. And to the extent that people would toy with my sullen crustiness was pure torture!

[CUT TO SHOT of GIRLS sitting around in CLAYTON, flitting around and acting like sluts. 15 YEAR-OLD MICHAEL "LAWLESS" ADAMS is sitting alone and drinking chocolate milk with a comically serious expression, like a young Republican all but wearing a Barry Goldwater t-shirt. They half look in my direction and laugh with mischief]

The great thinkers. . . .  Oswald Spengler, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, foretelling the doom of society like great rusting architecture that knew not of rock n' roll and "jigginess".

"Here were stiff intellectuals who never went out, but would retire alone to their study and drink laudnaum-- their sole conceit-- whirling around with his monocle to see if they were being watched, and slowly sip. Incidentally, they never had sex. Some people are born twisted. Other people GET TWISTED"

[CUT TO SHOT of Oswald Spengler-type sneaking off a quick drink]

SCENE CHANGES ABRUPTLY

 

MICHAEL "LAWLESS" ADAMS (V.O.)

I wondered why no one would take me seriously. . . . .

Yes, an ultra-conservative. . . . . the hammer of the state. . . . . as sure and inevitable and undeniable as the spring of a trap-door dealing squarely with those who would threaten the stern status-quo. Infallible as "the Divine Right of Kings". Iconic as "The 7th Seal" when the protagonist plays chess with "The Grim Reaper" by the fjords to determine his destiny. Instinctually "right" as the Metallica "Monsters of Rock" concert footage from Russia as stolid Soviet military looked on and swung clubs at concert-goers in a flurry of state suppression while the band played "Harvester of Sorrow", a grim dance of stark 20th century social conscience-- akin to the reaper of authoritarianism that cuts down the masses like stalks of wheat across the frozen Eurasian plain and the young man who turns his face to the pale lemon of a sun, pondering fate.

[CUT TO CLIP of the old HARVESTER OF SORROW VIDEO from several sections ago]

One of my most obnoxious things I dreamed up was "The Hangman of Prague"-- ripped off from a stray line in a Slayer song about a Nazi war criminal. I had the image of a big wrestler type-- George "The Animal" Steele, maybe-- a ghastly gargoyle of a man with an excess of body hair and a black hood manning the gallows and swinging law-breaking peasants off into eternity with the spring of the trap-door in front of a sallow-faced crowd of simple townsfolk under the gray skies of Eastern Europe. Why, I wanted to take on the attributes of this dreaded executioner at my high school, a feared and mysterious character who people avoid when he strutted down the hall, holding up a noose to make the teenagers scatter like children.

[CUT TO SHOT of HOODED EXECUTIONER holding up a noose, and making the teenagers scatter]

I might as well have looped the noose around my hard-on and jacked off with it, because I wasn't getting anywhere fast!