Satire and Cynicism

The Abortion Meeting

by Guy Walker

They wait in the knee-deep red sludge that’s quietly humming like a muffled symphony. Justice Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Amy Coney Barrett, John Roberts, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, Brett Kavanaugh, Elena Kagan, and Neil Gorsuch all huddle inside the crowded and pregnant womb of a young woman. The claustrophobic air is pumped with a fog machine, choo-chooing red steam until it’s hard to see. The crimson, translucent glow casts a moody artificial sunset tone across their faces, as they stand around in a circle, looking solemn. Its slimy, nutrient-soaked walls dripping in the gelatinous muck. It reminds one of the same gurgling fortune that created life out of nothing, when all there was was space dust that is somehow kept glued together with gravitational pull, and life arose seemingly out of nowhere, from the gaseous vents at the bottom of the ocean, and somehow dominoed into complex self-aware lifeforms.

The nine Supreme Court Justices are hot. They’re tugging at the collars of their ridiculous gowns, wiping the sweat from their temples and brows. They’re waiting for the meeting to begin, rendering the same formal orchestration as the masked ball ritual scene in the movie Eyes Wide Shut. In fact, they’ve modeled every meeting based on that scene…or was it the other way around? Their dull and spiteful jitters in preparation to enact some demonic carnival for millions of women they’ll never know personally. A sexually repressed Clarence Thomas, whose face and overall posture has collapsed into an amoeba-like, formless glob, takes up what little light there is. His decades of cynicism was enough to kill the last of the pollinating bees during his earlier years as a lawyer for Monsanto.

Outside, there’s only horizons of asphalt and condominium complexes. Drones whiz by overhead, dropping off Amazon parcels of cat food and cordless headphones and purple curtains this time because you returned the green ones. Joe Rogan blares on the city-wide emergency loud speakers: “Look, I’m just keeping an open mind! I was on DMT once, and saw this baby crawl out of the soil and sat in my lap, and it was me!! It didn’t really look like me, but I knew it was me, you know what I mean? So when the woke mob says [he does his weak, girly liberal voice] ‘Oh, I’m pro-choice,’ what are they saying about the soil baby that’s a reflection of their own, you know? Besides, I have a sensory deprivation tank and a cold plunge!!!!” His testosterone booster injections trigger a delayed response with the gorilla coffee he drinks, and his neck veins burst, sending a spray of blood across his studio like a Jackson Pollock painting.

A jack-lifted truck drives down the empty street with an American flag waving behind. The conservatives won, and now flags are mandatory. The “Don’t Tread On Me” flags are mandated by every Republican governor. Every single house and car (which is all just tract housing and trucks with those fake bull testicles known as “truck nuts” dangling freely from the toe hitch) are issued at least one flag each, turning the low sky into a flittering arena of yellowed flotsam, the collective and intersecting butterfly-effect of their waving flags cause storms spanning from Norway to Thailand, the smoldering skies churning like cauldrons, as a tornado bursts onto the Siberian tundra with a baleful wrath, pulling up weeds and trees in huge clumps, lifting barns into a confetti of splinters. Roadkill fatalities caused from the swinging truck nuts skyrocket, hitting squirrels and raccoons and opossums square in the forehead—their evolutionary progression had started to adapt to dodge cars by freezing right under the middle of a car, but not yet realizing the fatal mistake of those huge brass nuts.

The Democrats protest all of this. To stop the storms, they march in their pink pussy hats; while some of their own self-immolating attendees protest the pink-pussy people because they say their hats are strictly pink and it implies only a white woman’s pussy is at risk, and therefore the grandmother pastime of knitting is inherently racist. College-age Republicans counter-protest in their hats, which are simply gargantuan felt testicles bobbing from side to side as they march. A buck-toothed man in oversized cargo shorts and a bulletproof vest, who walks with his feet pointed out like a ballerina’s, begins a chant: “I don’t eat pussy! And my dorm room is messy!” He pushes his bicycle helmet up above his eyebrows, so he can continue to avoid every crack in the sidewalk, in order not to break his mother’s back. Everyone in the group does this, hopping to-and-fro from one unbroken section of sidewalk to the next, creating a sort of embryonic form of goose-stepping. It’s hideous to watch. There’s even a conspiratorial faction of the right that believes the deterioration of our streets, the splintering of spiderweb cracked roads and sidewalks is an attempt from the elite to break more mother’s backs. The pro-life position, they claim, is having the full health of the mothers in their best interest. Can a mother with a broken back give birth to more babies? they ask in their meetings. The buck-toothed man’s mates continue the chant as before. Clearly, they have rehearsed this bit, as everyone knows the words without missing a beat. “A cute baby is pretty adorable! If I break my mom’s back, it would be real horrible!” They then all pull out framed photos of their mothers from their back pockets. “This is my mum! There are many like it, but this one is mine!” The featureless landscape of office buildings and condos and tract housing cul-de-sacs fills with more than the usual banal lurking contempt of its own, and the hatred becomes real. Battalions collect more forces. Everyone has their flags and their bumper stickers and their hats, as the sprawling hideous void of society materializes into a billowing storm cloud, the clattering fiefdoms beyond the city erupt in flames.

Back in the poor young woman’s womb, are the justices, shifting from side to side with impatience for the formal deliberation to begin. Amy Coney Barrett tries to force a smile while working through the maze of a rather complex Cat’s Cradle that she made for herself, but she breaks down in tears. She attempts to show Neil Gorsuch her creation, but he scowls, and then accomplishes hacking up a marble of mercurial-colored phlegm, telling the others with casual confidence that his rock hard little morsel of barf is the postmodern pearl, and they should all invest in his industrious hobby. The four-month-old developing fetus bobs over them like an illuminated orb, its gigantic size in comparison causes Roberts to faint. Under a Freudian understanding of psychosexual development of the id, Kavanaugh never developed beyond the oral stage, and so he simply sucks and licks and chews everything around him. He grabs one of Alito’s earlobes which sags like an empty canvas, and begins sucking on it like a pacifier, to which Alito admonishes: “You idiot! We’re here to look presentable. Even the Taliban have victoriously ruled that all women wear full gowns with a face covering, and all you can do is make us look like fools! Now get up, and straighten your own goddamn gown.” Alito then clears his throat as to get everyone’s attention and begin the meeting, but then this descends into a coughing fit. He gags, then wipes his eyes. “Ahem. Anyways, so happy you were all able to make it. We thought it’d be a fun treat for the viewers at home if we had this deliberation in-person. In person.” There’s a long silence, as the other justices look around aimlessly, not understanding another one of Alito’s strangely garish attempts at humor. Then, Kavanaugh finally gets it, and shrieks more than laughs, with a gaping lipless mouth. “That’s enough, Kavanuagh, quiet down,” to which Kavanaugh abruptly stops, and does the Charades game motion of zipping his lips shut. “We’re here to discuss the already infamous case, Chicks vs. The Harness of Serfdom,” Alito continues, “in which we’ll discuss such topics as When walking a woman on a leash, it’s better to have a harness around their chest than one tight collar around their neck; When ‘trimming the hedges’ or ‘mowing the lawn’, or any other libidinally suggestive garden duties, it’s your responsibility—not the State’s—to keep your mind clean. Umm, let’s see here…” he flips through some pages, squinting. “Oh right, right. Disney princesses won’t show midriff; Bellybuttons are simply that, buttons. They are not scars leftover from being in the womb, because there really is no womb; Ummmm, Now that condoms are illegal, the black market is popularizing criminals pulling them over their head like they used to with pantyhose…what should we do about that?; and lastly, and this is really my favorite, Mary Magdalene was a whore, so, do you think Jesus scored or what? Kavanaugh now presses his bellybutton with the palm of his hand over and over as if it was a buzzer in a game show, and makes the accompanying buzzer sound with his mouth. “It’s not that kind of button, you idiot!” Alito exclaims. “Why do you think it’s in the same vertical line as the buttons on a shirt? You think that’s just a coincidence? Think for once in your pathetic life.” Kavanaugh proceeds to wipe his nose with the length of his forearm. Amy Coney Barrett, being one of the few members of the ecumenical covenant, People of Praise, a parachurch community of about 1,700 members, most of whom are Catholic, and whose two founders were involved in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal and advocate for the practice of speaking in tongues, begins screaming in gibberish. Her eyes roll to the back of her head, and her hands raise to the ceiling, shivering, groping the sordid red air. “HAIL!!!! Shabada-diddy-slim-shady…TITS ON RATTLESNAKES!!!” Her glossolalia collapsing in on itself, and she gasps for air before beginning this routine again. Breyer finally looks up from the murky sludge that makes up the ground, and asks, “My God, the poor woman’s a schizophrenic.” Alito’s eyes widen in disbelief. “Are you nuts? This is a religious experience, she’s speaking to God.” “Oh, I see,” Breyer replies. “I’ll shut up then.”

A rumbling is felt under their feet. The dark red nutrient bath curdles into a thick foam. There used to be a fountain that gurgled like a fabulous spring, and the womb would hum in its coquettish mass, pulsing around the fetus as an invisible slow-moving lightning storm. These multitudinous involuntary forces aren’t like that of a clattering machine, but rather as a unified and benign world that manifests all of life’s forms from a subterranean infinity. But suddenly, there’s a rupture in the system, and the warm liquid cocoon turns into a huge fondu sculpture splashing violently from underground tremors. The nine Justices clamor for something to hold onto, something solid, but the viscous knee-deep ground slips out from under them, and they summersault backwards, dunked head-to-toe in the coruscating muck. Their meeting is ruined, sending Alito into a psychotic diatribe, his spit-soaked exclamations about how it’s not over ’til it’s over. The developing baby rolls over them, crushing Kavanaugh mid-scream, as Thomas easily drowns under his heavy black robes. There’s a struggle afoot, but only inside, as the young woman whom they are inside of casually gets ready for bed. She dropped her toothbrush, and had bent down to pick it up. She holds her tummy, feeling it rumble gently, the baby kicking the inner wall. She smiles, and takes a deep breath as she stands back up, sending the Justices again into a huge tidal forced baptism of blood and embryonic tissues.

Finally, in bed, her husband puts his ear up to her taut and glossy stomach, mistaking the Justices’ faint whimpers for the cute rumblings of their baby. His eyes widen in excitement, as he leans his ear in closer, obsessively trying to listen, as if he were listening for morse code inside a seashell. “Baby, I can hear the baby,” the husband says. Alito croaks his last feeble cry. “America is the violent extroversion of a people in exile. I was only trying to wrangle you back to a time and place of good behavior.” And his voice fades under the gurgling in the womb.

Jeff Bezos Goes to Space

by Guy Walker

Jeff Bezos never came back to Earth. He can still be seen up there, if you look closely on a night with no moon—the Amazon logo like the fading stain left behind a shooting star.

When he and his younger brother boarded the New Shepard—the rocket ship made by Bezos’s space company Blue Horizon—he had no intention of coming back. This is already not a habitable enough rock to come back to; we ruined it, turned it into one of the other planets with opaque clouds of sulphuric acid. No, he ruined it. He made us buy towering monuments of plastic toys, all shipped and suffocated in that trademark rectangular bubble wrap. He made us buy those 4-in-1 inflatable pool floats that are shaped like a crocodile. He made us buy a Dyson ball vacuum; and then a miniature-sized fake one for our kids. He made us buy those hipster-chic security cameras. He made us buy the virtual assistant AI with the sexually enticing name of libidinal paralysis, Alexa. Earth used to actually be a nice place in the universe. It had swirling turquoise oceans filled with the bioluminescent octopus and sea turtles, the Glaucus Atlanticus blue sea slug, the narwhal, the ribbon eel, the frilled shark and goblin shark, and predatory whales as old as the dinosaurs. The sprawling orgiastic terrariums of moss and lichens and mushrooms that grew amongst the old growth forests all helped fill this terraqueous orb, and somehow levitated in empty space, spinning around in the benevolent circumstellar habitable zone, known as the Goldilocks zone.

When Jeff Bezos looked out from his portal window, he had no intention of coming back. The ship lifted out of the thick mass of smog like a shimmering erection slowing rising out of a witch’s stew. He cackled maniacally, still wearing his aviators, his bald head slippery with a thin coat of Vaseline. He looked down as the last armies met in the ashen rubble of an old city, its skyscrapers of bursted windows and the stained steel armory that couldn’t last long enough for a real empire. Shopping malls had been left abandoned, their plain stucco coating crumbling into a slurry of sand and kindergarten paste; their food courts invaded with king-sized rodents dragging entire pizzas into their locked away dens under the ten story parking structure that has already deteriorated into the groaning skeletons of rebar and concrete that falls apart like bread crumbs. What were once painfully dull neighborhoods of track houses that wandered through labyrinths of cul-de-sacs, where every grass lawn had at most one dainty tree supported by two wooden posts larger than the tree itself, were now barricaded training grounds for opposing armies, preparing for widespread civil war. Free two day shipping was canceled, and the militias assembled. 

As Jeff Bezos lifted off, he looked down on them all—all those humans running around desperately amongst their bombed-out cities, like crazed ants whose hill was smothered and ruined by a lonely schoolyard bully. The New Shepard left the mesosphere and almost immediately into the exosphere, as the flight commander flipped some switches, turning on the magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters and their unique plasma propulsion specially designed for exoplanet exploration, sending them hurling through the soundless arena of eternity, the distant flurries of other worlds whispering in some absurd fantasy.

Jeff Bezos left because he couldn’t stand being the richest person on the planet any longer. On this planet any longer. Even after the divorce, and giving up half of his wealth, he’s projected to be a trillionaire in his lifetime. He had to eject himself into the vast nothingness of space, into the infinity of other galaxies and stars, to find out if there’s someone wealthier. Or something wealthier. Because everyone knows that in space is where true wealth lives. Every last scrap of gold ever discovered on Earth came from a supernova explosion or from when neutron stars collide. It can’t be synthesized in chemistry. All the original gold was pulled to the center of our planet upon its formation, and so all the existing gold has come from astroid impacts. The simple truth is: Jeff Bezos is not nearly rich enough. He got rich selling books to a people that don’t read anymore. Imagine the cosmic wealth he could attain if he reached the stars—the stelliferous plumes of priceless empyrean glitter spreading a full lightyear across, as he basks in the violet enthusiasms of their clouds.

On Earth, we are boorish hicks, a singular aggregate of inbred distant cousins smashing rocks together in the sandbox of time. From the ionosphere, he realized us as a mass of ants that could be swept away and easily forgotten. But from space, he came to the final and full realization that we are the microscopic virus maggots chewing through the rotting carcass that we made the Earth to be. Jeff Bezos has said before that ever since he was five years old, he has dreamt of traveling space. He’s known since before he became Jeff Bezos. This space journey is his return home to where the gods live, amongst the astral throes of infinity. When Walt Whitman wrote about his own mortality, he wrote “If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.” Bezos wants the opposite: to be found still glimmering in that ephemeral milk stain behind a shooting star. 

Once the New Shepard fully left the gravitational pull of the Earth, Jeff Bezos unbuckled his harness, floating out from his seat and summersaulting forward out past the main cabin. The ship commander spoke into their synchronized headsets that it was against protocol doing this so early. Jeff’s brother reached out with a helpless hand. Jeff bounced around aimlessly against the ship’s walls like the digitized ball in those old pong games, the laws of physics still dictating bodies of mass in these weightless skies. His glossy circumcised head stuck out eagerly from the hugely floppy astronaut suit—it ached and pulsed with a sullen heartbeat for the coruscating grandeur of something better than himself. It wasn’t on Earth—a preposterously small pebble of dew and bacterial peasantry. And it surely wasn’t on this ship. This ship was already a claustrophobic hell of authority and the simple machinations of mankind. Bezos was destined for castles of spiraling hallucinations, the primordial gases made up of shades of crimson and vermillion we’ve never seen before. He reached the back-bottom of the ship, rumbling above the rocket boosters attached securely beneath it. He flipped open the simple plastic shield, and tightened his grip around the large red lever, hesitating for less than a moment before he made that singularly fateful twist-pull motion.

A child with an unkempt bowl cut stood on a pile of soot covered bricks that were once stacked in an order that made up his home. He looked up at the enormous night sky filled with the conflagrant disorder slowly swirling around overhead. Gunfire whizzed by his head, as the militias closed in. And all at once, the large familiar stroke of a shooting star poured from the top of the sky—a friendly logo appeared, a smiling arrow, connecting a to z, making the boy smile one last smile.

Trump’s Final Farewell

DUSTY: What does that mean, “in-famous”?

NED: Ohh Dusty. “In-famous” is when you’re more than famous. This man, El Guapo, is not just famous, he’s in-famous.

-Three Amigos!

What would it be like to be rich and famous, you wonder. Or rather, what does it mean? If in their final fleeting moments of life, what if the richest amongst us thought soberly and somberly for the first time about all the vacuous horrors they committed? If during those last short and punctured breaths through their dry gaping anus of a mouth, and that dormant tongue of perverse fortune, if they saw the light, as it were, even for the shortest of moments. When David Koch died in the summer of 2019, he had successfully corralled unnumbered billions of dollars for himself and his brother, and funded so much deliberate junk science and misinformation around environmental and climate science. He did his damndest to singularly kill the planet for the rest of us. And I wonder if he died confidently, convinced that his cause was righteous, or in quiet unacknowledged despair. Or when the casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson slowly rotted down that final stretch of his miserable life, was there any deeper reflection into what it was all actually for in the end? I would like to imagine some well-dressed ushers of the Utilitarian Theatre greet you moments before you die, and ask you bluntly how well you achieved the task of delivering the greatest good for the greatest quantity. They greet you politely, and reach out with one of their white cotton gloves, and you take each of their hands, and see the fortune of your meandering decisions that constituted your life. And then you step forward, and then you die.

There is Donald Trump. It’s the first days after his presidency, and he is laying down slouched on a kingsize bed, the ironed and neatly folded white sheets tucked under his ass and arms. He breathes heavily, and looks out the window of his residential suite at Mar-a-Lago, the long lace curtains blowing softly in the Palm Beach breeze. A storm front is coming. The neatly scattered palm trees gently sway like slender poems, and a seagull screams, shitting a little shit as it flies by. He stares indifferently at the few golf carts that roam the low hills of the course. There’s some shredded iceberg lettuce caught in his chest hair like seaweed, and a half-eaten BigMac discarded on the hardwood floor. His toes are long and pale, like two bundles of micro penises sprouting from his flat rectangles of feet. He’s never had a drink in his life, but this hangover is excruciating. He can’t move. He can’t imagine speaking another word.

There are six bulky box televisions stacked three across and two levels high on the mantle of other assorted accruements. One is tuned predictably to CNN—Don Lemon is anchoring, in the middle of his show, but something is wrong. He has unbuttoned his shirt, and is sticking his tummy out so it looks like he’s pregnant, then sucks it back in again. He repeats this over and over, and is laughing enthusiastically at the success of this trick. Another television is turned to Fox and Friends—Brian Kilmeade is drunk, staggering aimlessly on the sound stage with a Louisiana Slugger thrown over one shoulder. He starts swinging in every direction, and hits one of the cameras, smashing it to pieces, and screams more menacingly than when Howard Dean did in 2004. Another television is turned to a late night infomercial of hands wearing jewelry, the man and woman enthusiastically conversing about the diamonds. Another to an 80’s porno of a man with a dark mustache and a woman with frizzy bleach blonde hair and plastic tits fucking to disco. Another television is turned to the movie Top Gun, in the middle of a dog fight scene. And the last television is just the blizzard static. They are all turned up to full volume, a deafening chorus of incoherence. The CIA used to use that Meow Mix song from the commercials to break terrorists at black sites—this geometric aberration would have been far more effective, as the line between the real and the dismally chimeric is truly at a crossroads these days. But Trump watches them all at the same time, including the television static, taking it all in as one screen, one grand narrative of the current condition of the world beaming itself through invisible space. He could fall asleep at any moment and the sound wouldn’t bother him.

For a second, his hand moves impulsively to get his phone, but remembers he is forever locked out of his Twitter. And so his hand just hangs off the edge of the bed, its limp slumber without any further autonomous desire to move. There’s no point anyways, he thinks to himself, they’re all imbeciles on there anyways, dueling it out in the imaginary squalor of that online arena. Parlor is even worse—the only residents of its platform were shivering loners, seething at the worst of reactionary politics. Good riddance, he assures himself.

Twitter is, by definition, a massive middle-school chorus of mental illness. And Trump was the conductor, waving his arms frantically with no musical direction. There’s already an obvious void of the usually gleeful madness on Twitter, as everyone tries to carry on as before, but their central magnifying force has abandoned them; the most convenient and amusing villain has left the stage, and very soon his most outspoken opponents and critics will be lost at sea, illiterate destitutes unsure of what to say about anything. If your political identity is summarily being for or against the dementia gameshow host, and he suddenly disappears, where do you wander now? They are like scattered fans hanging around the sprawling parking lot after a concert, the tumbleweeds of red beer cups and other trash slowly blows by, as they’re all left standing there in speechless stupor, their brains so clogged with bong resin that they’re still laughing mutedly at their own farts.

So Trump just drops his head back into his pillow. Don Junior and Eric Trump come stumbling in. Eric looks somehow even more inbred and grotesque than usual. His gum-to-teeth ratio is further out of balance. In fact, his gums have almost entirely enveloped his teeth, so they are just mustard-stained pearls gleaming at the tips of his glossy baboon mouth. He tries to speak, but saliva drips down from the corners of his mouth like a newly tapped spring. He smiles nervously at his father for no apparent reason. Don Junior is wearing one of those Statue of Liberty crowns from a gift shop. He’s pissed himself again. His face is shaped like a melted globe—he has no jawline, but has carved himself one through his bearded stubble with a nine-inch hunting knife that he keeps tied under his trousers. “Daddy,” he blurts out, “daddy, what are we going to do?” “….Yahhh,” Eric somehow manages to say through his complication of lips and boney gums. Trump stares at them both with heavy eyelids, and tries to say something but it just emits as a wordless exhale. “Daddy?” Don Junior says again, “It’s okay, what are you trying to say?” Trump wets his lips with his tongue the way very old people do when about to eat pie, and closes his eyes for a moment to collect himself. “You’re disgusting,” he whispers, barely audibly, with eyes still closed. “You’re filth.”

A songbird smacks into the double-pane window, and drops dead like a fly. “Wh-Wh-Wha do you mean?” Don Junior splutters through quivering lips. Trump ignores his whimpers. “Have I ever had a pet?” he says now with eyes open. “Like a doggy.” “Do you have a doggy?” Don Junior repeats. “What do you mean? You’ve never had a dog.” Trump exhales, annoyed. He moves now, trying to shimmy his legs off the bed so they can fall to the floor—the first step of many as he gets up from bed. The movements of his body make the viscous glugging sound of warm jelly being stirred on the stovetop. His legs hang off the edge. “Get your daddy a doggy,” Trump says menacingly. “I’m going for a walk.” He puts on his robe, and slips on his slippers, and manages to stand up. Going out the back way, he wouldn’t have to interact with any of the guests or supporters who painfully stalked him.

Trump has always hated his supporters. At least the ones who always showed up to his rallies, maniacal and wild-eyed, dressed in burlaps of American flags and Trump-branded costumes, raving lunatics chanting “U-S-A-!!! I’m not gay!!” at pigeons sitting peacefully on telephone wires. A manatee was discovered swimming with TRUMP carved into its back. Henry Thoreau was sadly naive when he declared, “Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.” Because Trump would paint his name permanently across the sky if he could. He would smear all myriad constellations of stars with his turds if he could, and his most frenzied fans would carry each other on their shoulders, trying desperately to touch the Trump-turd stars. Where back in mainstream politics, ten thousand op-eds were written about how fashionable and chic Biden’s inauguration was. Everyone posted a meme about Bernie and his mittens. I guess we’re back to normal. Nothing changed.

Trump pulls open a sliding glass door that opens straight out to the golf course, a delirium of oblong deserts under a patchwork of heavy clouds. This weather system has smothered the entire country, and everyone has stepped out into their front or back yards to watch it. The brooding thunderclouds across the American plains, a faint lightning bolt off in the distance as the tall prairie grasses sway in unison to one side, and then stammer, sending them all into opposing directions. The red rock arches of Utah are cast in deep shadow, as a peregrine folds back its wings for the evening under the branches of a dead tree, and a ground squirrel stands watch on its back two legs. The first heavy snowflakes begin to fall in the high desert of California. The skies are full, like an unadulterated aura of calm and storm all at once. And back in Palm Beach, circling above Trump and his expensive sprawl of grass lawn like it was beard stubble, seagulls roam, looking down in search of a discarded bag of potato chips, or a French fry, some debris in this pristine and custodial wasteland. Trump is staggering across the seventeenth green now, in his underwear and a long untied robe. A gust billows under his gown like a parachute, and sends his long neon-tubed hair twirling like a wild predator’s frill in the wind, he could almost be mistaken for a monstrous Marilyn Monroe. The gusts turn to gales. He staggers forward now, leaning forward with all his might, headed straight for the white sand beach as umbrellas toss like tumbleweeds across the dimpled plateau, and clumps of sea foam burst along the edges of the sea. He’s been without social media for some weeks now, and while we proudly scoff at his dismay, we deny in wonder if we could do the same. The waves crash in every direction, breaking like the white manes of stampeding horses, the boundary between sea and sky is a blur with mist and storm.

Eric and Don Junior can be seen squinting through the sliding glass doors. Mexican maids and landscapers stand with feathered dusters and lawn clippers in hand, and mouths agape, watching the ex-President fight the storm with his entombed fantasy of replete squalor. A child stands in the hotel lobby, holding his mother’s hand with one hand, and a melting ice cream cone with another, with a frozen stare ahead. Donald Trump has unleashed his robe, and it flies like a tattered flag, soon indecipherable from all the white seagulls clamoring for a hold in the storm. Winds are only visible when there’s an object that shows their currents and direction and strength. Without an object—even a single leaf—they are unprojectable holograms. Trump’s cheeks and bovine tits were just that object, rippling under the commands from invisible gods. He leans full steam into the glaring fangs of the storm, scaling the last green dune of the golf course, and steps onto the soggy white sand like it were a doormat before entering the next frontier of vast ocean.

At this, the winds erupt with their angriest force yet, sending shock waves inland, shattering car windows. Dogs that were once barking madly at the sky are now huddled, whimpering under bedsheets. The frothing edges where sea meets lands sinks lower into the depths of the ocean, pulling everything into one violently colossal wave moving in slow motion at the helpless outcropping of marbled grandiosity cowering in its shadow. Whatever great empires man has built, they last like an erection in the cold and drunk winds of winter. Nature will devour us, is the motto of all our lives. The wave peaks at over a hundred stories high, making Trump and his castle of grass lawns nearly invisible. Trump throws his arms up one last time, screaming one last scream. Probably the most famous word in film history is Charles Kane whispering “Rosebud” on his deathbed. Not Trump. His face contorts to his usual menacing way as he speaks. “Vic-tory!!!” he screams, stabbing his pointing finger forward like he enjoys doing. And the ocean hurls over him. And just like that, he is gone.

New Year, New You

by Guy Walker

It’s a new year, you remind yourself. New beginnings, not just for you, but for the country, the world, the hapless gentry of mediocrity that weighs down on you every second of the day. A Democrat is going to be president again, you tell yourself, and although he’s not perfect, and his brain may be rotting like a cauldron of ferment, and he’s maniacally supported every war and measure of incarceration imaginable, he and his historic pick for Vice President are going to get us back to the sweeping indifference of normalcy. There were historic fires last year, as there were the year before that, and the year before that; but we’ll be rejoining the Paris Agreement, so all will soon be well again. And Covid happened, sending us all scurrying back into our dwellings, like meerkats who just saw a hawk pass overhead, huddling behind rotting drywall and crumbling brick, letting the Netflix’s autoplay feature run its numbing course as we simultaneously scroll through this eternal pixelated flip book of tweets and memes and tiktoks and snaps, our necks slouched into these sickly double chins. But the vaccine is on its way.

Let the wet markets continue, as long as we have a vaccine. A 2012 New York Times article, entitled The Ecology of Disease disposed that everything from AIDS, Ebola, West Nile, SARS, and Lyme disease haven’t happened on their own accord—they happen as a result of our tampering with nature. What will come in the following years will be left to the sanguinary gore of our imaginations. There’ll be another vaccine for that. Then the George Floyd killing happened, amongst countless others that have since been swept away from our memories. But we protested for those following days and weeks, and posted black squares on Instagram. There’s mass unemployment. Countless small businesses are closing their doors for good. And we’ve only delayed the inevitable looming tragedy of the economic fallout from the pandemic. And Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are in a race to rocket themselves to the stars, like an ejaculatory falling star of impossible wealth. Soon we’ll all be living in tents, under the freeway overpass, selling baggies of brake dust to drunken foreign tourists to get high. None of it is going to get better. But still, the general consensus is that 2020 was an awful year.

Everywhere you look you’re reminded that 2020 was the worst year in recent history, as if a year were a real thing, a measurable unit of a calendar’s inventory. It seems obligatory to mention in conversation that 2020 was dreadful, as if this mention were part of the usual ailing phlegm of smalltalk, filling the beautiful emptiness with our saliva and noise, blaring through the chorus of trees and tall grasses with our cruel and coarse stanzas about how everything sucked. Can we take a year, like a ball of useless clay, and make something of it? Can we take our events of the year, and improve that, through resolutions and commitments to good habits? Can we be good again, and bathe with frank decency under the quiet stars? I went for a long run on Christmas Day through these remote mountain trails near where my parents live, and sat for awhile somewhere amongst the wild sage covered in frozen dew as it thawed with the eager bits of sun that passed through the soft green pastels of its thicket, and watched the chickadees and towhees flutter purposefully amongst its copses of old growth. This will always be here in a million corners, I assured myself, the unfathomable beneficence of nature in bloom wherever it is. Don’t complicate the serene, because it’s already there. Because once we’re all gone, they will just carry on as normal, in bigger and better numbers, tilting their heads back as they drink single droplets, dragging each side of their miniature beaks across the thin and heavy branches. Commit more time to this sort of thing, I told myself. Spend all our time purposefully, because we’ll be dead soon. Make love on the thick beds of moss, and feel something familiar in each other. But then on New Years Eve night, I was at a repulsively overwrought resort in Mexico, without the woman I should have been with, drinking a bottle of $400 lukewarm and flat champagne alone in the bathtub, jacking off into the squalid froth of a contaminated bubblebath, my own ego-dystonicity at the crossroads of some vague and formless heartache. This was the beginning of a new year, a new me—at least, that’s how it’s supposed to be, that’s the common sentiment anyways. What is the triumph of the stars, that this is what we’ve made? Jacking off alone to an image on a glowing screen. 

Look at your own resolutions: drink less, read more, learn how to say no, exercise dutifully and joyfully, write longhand, spend less time on social media, finally get your career started now that you’re in your mid-thirties, find love and don’t fuck it up as you have all the others. Because the older you get, the more a dizzying fury it becomes, as the weight of gravity and disappointment and the mulish insensibility of yourself becomes as obvious as the enormous tits of an old lady who never wore a bra in her life. At this point, if you’re old enough to still be reading a blog on the internet, you’re already rotting with the suddenness of each passing day, trying to hold it together a little longer, moisturizing your glaring shortcomings with whatever feckless new ritual you hear about. Our habits are now engrained as the permanent highways we now travel. I never fully ridded myself of my childhood stutter, and now say ‘uh’ and ‘fuck’ between difficult words to try to mask an embarrassing stumble. I’m likely never going to fix this, because it’s too much work after thirty-three years of hammering this habit into its callow perfection. Lacan’s insistence that there was a jouissance beyond the pleasure principle is the hallmark of why we’ll go nowhere—we’re seeking miniature degrees of orgasm everywhere we go—whether it’s the bright colors on our phones, music and televisions series in the background in order to drown out the hauntingly true thoughts that arise in silence, or the tyranny of our cocks and cunts wiggling between our legs. We’re all alcoholics in some or other way, passively stumbling in and out of AA meetings, dumping several heaping spoonfuls of sugar into your coffee, wiping the reeking perspiration from your forehead with the same old handkerchief you’ve been using during Covid. A couple tumbles off the wagon and you walk off the road for good. A few inevitable mishaps, and your list of resolutions is discarded into the heap of others from every previous year, your notions of self-betterment now just swept up in the gutters of wet confetti from last week’s New Years party, your own soggy nightmare is now a hallmark of masticated glee you wear with enthusiasm. Are we so fortunate to play chess with death?

What will this year bring? And the next. And every year after that until you give up and lay down to die, perhaps thinking your last pointless thoughts about how you spent all that precious time. Most of us try to get through the day so we can just go to bed again, letting a movie or tv show rock us back to sleep. And so collectively, most of us just spend our lives getting by so we can die without much consequence. What do the days’ wordless screams really mean? We are unavoidably and wisely solipsistic beings, and so we think in ways of our year, and how to improve our routines of attention and immersion. The gratifying mirth of spectacle is sometimes all we give ourselves—a few grunts of self-improvement perhaps, a deluded crawl up some nondescript Everest of career and achievement. But mostly just binging and gorging our way through the ephemeral jubilance of youth and old age. This was a bad year for everyone, even if it wasn’t. But it is the best year compared to every year ahead of us. This is a real life tragedy of the absurd—no writer, not even Beckett, could write such a sadly absurd tale as the one we are all living.

Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht—they all saw enough worth in the absurd that perhaps a Theodore Adorno or a Nietzsche would not have. Congenitally, by the works they committed themselves to, they glorified the sometimes awful and mundane, transcending the nihilistic tendency that catapults us to the callous phlegm of apathy. So there is worth in that. Bob Dylan said something about life not being a mission to find yourself, but rather one of creating yourself. So amidst the glamorous torture of last year, and what this year and every following year will bring, we’ll have to create ourselves into each one, the collective years compiling into an archival book of our private selves that will fill the library of our united madness. We are stammering at the brink of collapse; we are somewhere between the midnight rave of unbridled joy and the reality show of our undiagnosed rabies.

I am tired and hungry. We all are. I’m hungover, and my heart still aches from nothing in particular. But the chimera of gardens shining in their morning dew is like the lost archipelagos I read about when I was young. If last year is any indicator whatsoever, we are all losing this race together. And there’s no end in sight. I flew on a loaded plane last evening back to Los Angeles, and as I returned to my seat from the bathroom in the very back, I saw every single person’s screen was turned on to some forgettable dithering thing, some movie that made no sense, some actor in a costume saving the world. At the same time, Trump supporters were storming the Capitol building; a man dressed as Conan the Barbarian and red, white, and blue face paint was trying to take over the capitol of our nation. Because we are a Miltonian tragedy, an epic failure that is somehow still surviving in our torrential wake of waste. 

We have always been a mad species, devoted to self-immolation and torment. Beckett said, “That’s the mistake I made…to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.” Maybe that’s the mistake all of us are making—because it’s part of our programming—in that, we’re trying to create some legacy or monument of ourselves that doesn’t need to be built. Maybe we’ve been worthy all along, and just lost sight of it for awhile. Maybe it’s just so hard to be human in an increasingly inhuman world. I don’t know. 

I don’t know what I want to achieve this year. I don’t know why that even matters. I can make things up for answers: I want to be in more high end art galleries this year. For reasons that are purely vain. I want to finish and publish all these incomplete stories and plays and poems I’ve only begun and never completed. I want to buy some land, and start building myself a house. I want to drink less, and study more, work on achieving these things now. But it’s ten in the morning now and I’m already working on my third White Russian, so who am I kidding. My fingers are so cold as I write out here in the garden. There are finches and woodpeckers hanging upside down from slender and bowed branches, eating seeds from bursted pomegranates. There is an old retired Indian chief who walks with a cane up the hundred stairs to his house above mine. We talk, and smile, and he tells me stories of Charlie Manson and those equally strange old days. There’s a cluster of huge coastal redwoods in front of his house that he planted from a small pot so many years ago. Is life not enough for them? Or did they all have to write their own story? Or are these trees and these birds and this old Indian chief already enough for themselves? I don’t know.

I’ll make myself some coffee, and hopefully turn things around, start moving in the right direction again. Maybe tidy up the garden, and plant some new things, even though it’s winter. It’ll be easy because things will be silent more. Yes. I’ll make sure there is more silence, and therefore more purposeful thought and action. I see honeybees land ceremoniously on the edges of lily pads in my miniature pond. They drink, and fly away, and others come again. And I sit up from my chair, take a sip from my water glass for the first time all morning, and water the garden for the first time in ten days. After all, it’s a new year.

Journey to WAP: A Love Story With Ben Shapiro

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Something terrible happened to Ben Shapiro last night. It was a dream, a vivid mirage puppeteering against his eyelids, a nightmare so realistic and awful that it jolted him awake. He was trapped in Cardi B’s new hit single, WAP (Wet Ass Pussy), trapped in the music video version that he watched too many times in preparation for his show of conservative male punditry, until it crept into his fluttering subconscious. Like Freddy Kreuger dressed as an unindividuated series of black women unfurling their curves in glossy leather lingerie. “Yeah, you fuckin’ with some wet-ass pussy, Bring a bucket and a mop for this wet-ass pussy…” Shapiro clambers through random doors along an eery and brightly hued hallway, opening and slamming them closed again. Cheetahs licking their upper lips clean; cartoonish renderings of bedizened door knockers unwrapping themselves as serpents opening their jaws; the floor rushing with a clear pungent fluid that’s clearly not water. Ben runs, stumbling over himself as he splashes his way down the hall, but he trips and falls, skidding to a halt. Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion stand over him, blocking the exit, singing in their hypnotic gaze. The walls seem to close in. “…In the food chain, I’m the one that eat ya, If he ate my ass, he’s a bottom-feeder.” Shapiro screams. “Macaroni in a pot, that’s some wet-ass pussy.” The pornographic and predatory grotesquerie sends a sleeping Shapiro into wide-eyed convulsions. He’s awake, trembling, whimpering like a beaten dog. It’s okay. It was just a nightmare.

But what’s this? He looks down and sees that his penis is erect, warm with blood, like a chihuahua that perks his head up because he has heard a creak in the walls. But it’s not erect with arousal—certainly not sexual arousal at least—he is absolutely certain of this. He does not get aroused, and has devoted his entire life to a sexless devotion of political monogamy. Yes, surely it’s just an anatomical glitch of cellular walls filling with blood because he was sleeping. And the woman sleeping next to him (his “doctor wife” as he refers to her) is laying there peacefully like a frozen plank, arms locked at her sides, breathing heavily, as she always does. He slips out of bed, and steps onto the cold marble floor, sending a shivering rush up his legs. His legs of course are just pale tree trunks stripped of their bark—knobby sun-deficient rods of hairless death. His toes resemble more a deck of miniature penises, sprouting mangled weeds atop. He stares down at them, wiggling them, giggling in his iconoclastic squeaky way. In fact, his toes are not miniature penises at all—he has dressed them up to look exactly like those talking bullets in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, each one unique from the others, with a cowboy hat and a fake mustache different from the next. He murmurs something to his toes under his breath, and checks to make sure his doctor wife hasn’t stirred. He looks back to his toes, and smirks. Then frowns. This is unusual—this whole “erect penis” thing—unusual and unwanted.

The cold floor hasn’t subsided his erection, and it still prods awkwardly from his silken pajamas with patterns of Spongebob and cartoon bananas littered across them. “Hmm,” he thinks softly, staring at this strange edifying protuberance in his pants. “This doesn’t seem right. No. No, not right at all,” he whispers. He walks across the floor and into the hallway and then into the kitchen, where he dips his genitals into a cereal bowl of yoghurt and ice cubes, his penis cresting out of the surface like a submarine breaking through the Antarctic ice sheets. It’s no use. His erection is sturdy and everlasting. He begins spiraling into panic, his lips quivering, bubbles of snot glugging with volcanic slurry. “Wha-wha-what is this?” he asks nobody. “Wh-why is my pee-pee hard? I don’t want a hard pee-pee!” He scurries back to the bedroom in short, rapid steps, yoghurt splattered on the bullseye of his crotch like the residual fog of a huge firework. He reaches his doctor wife still sleeping like she was in a cryogenic chamber, and violently shakes her awake. “Wife! Hey wife!! Wake up woman, I have an erection!!!” Her eyes open with a thud—immediate and callous, her pupils instantly sharpening into pinpricks against hazel circular tapestries.

“What did you say?” she declares coldly, not moving an inch.

“You know, a boner. Why do I have a boner? These things are for sin. ‘The skin of sin’ as I like to call it.”

“It’s not a boner, you idiot. As a doctor, conventional wisdom tells us this is a penile tumescence, or being the early morning, happening in your sleep, nocturnal penile tumescence, something that occasionally happens in young men, as yourself.” She begins to close her eyes again, but is interrupted.

“So it just fills with blood, and there’s nothing I can do except wait it out?!” He’s sobbing now. His eyebrows are making violent undulations, his lips curling and uncurling themselves.

“It doesn’t just become engorged with blood. It’s not a balloon animal. When nitric oxide is increased in the trabecular arteries, causing them to dilate and then fill the corpora cavernous to fill with blood. But you also want the blood to stay there, so at the same time of dilation—”

“—No! No!!! I don’t want it to stay filled with blood, you psycho.”

“Well it’s quite interesting, because both the ischiocavernosus and bulbospongiosus muscles constrict the veins, which permits only the blood to only stay in the vicinity of the penis. Like beavers building a dam, if you will…Speaking of beavers…”

“What the f word is wrong with you? Have you gone completely mad? Next you’re going to tell me vaginas get wet when aroused.”

“Well, in simple terms, yes, yes they do.”

His voice squeaks. “That joint where a woman’s legs meet, you know, that indiscernible mold like on a Barbie doll. It allegedly gets…what’s the word? Ugh. The M word. You know, it rhymes with foist [he shudders with revulsion], but it starts with an M, hence the M word. Is that what you’re telling me?”

 

What makes Ben Shapiro truly horrific, is you know his prudeness is real. You know confidently that he has never even thought about the writhing ecstasy you can give a woman by going down on her. He has children, but you know there’s at least a notable chance that his wife’s eggs were fertilized in vitro—that there was no sexual intercourse whatsoever. I grew up very religious, and my father was something equivalent to a church pastor; but when I found my parents’ Kama sutra booklet in their dresser when I was six or seven years old, I remember feeling some indiscernible relief. Maybe some muted respect, or understanding, as much as a runny-nosed six year old is able to feel. Even in my childish naiveté, it humanized my own parents, doing their acrobatic 69’s or whatever they did back then. Other republican lunatics who get caught getting blowjobs through public bathroom glory holes, or Jerry Falwell Junior who watches his wife get plowed by the pool boy—there’s a redemptive quality in these stories. We mock them for their religious hypocrisy, but at least we find a glimmer of humanity in their perversions. Because the sweaty blood-choked limbs of our libidinal fatigue always wins in the end. The religious folk are at war with the flesh, and when the armies of nipples and scrotums and oddly shaped cocks and pussies come marching over the the grassy knoll, singing their war songs with trumpets and drums, you know they will always win. The scrawny trembling lines of Bibles and holy books and discarded cassette tapes of church hymns gets mauled by bludgeoning cocks and big hairy pussies with studs around their cartoon wrists.

And although Shapiro has undoubtedly never seen his wife’s own asshole, and probably takes pride in not being able to locate the clitoris—he is a one man show, a quivering and banal theater of prudeness—his outrage is obvious and performative. He was never actually angry about Cardi B’s WAP single. It’s a gleeful performative anger, like a parent who gets mad at their child for drawing a dick in their schoolbook, but then laughs about it with their spouse in private. Shapiro is snickering through all of this, because he gets to read dirty poems and pretend he is losing his mind over it all. It’s great entertainment. You want to send in requests: have Ben read James Joyce’s love letters to his wife, the ones about how much he loves her spluttering farts. (If you haven’t read these yourself, do it at once.) Have Ben read the dirtier scenes from Tropic of Cancer. Have Ben read Couples by Updike, someone who David Foster Wallace once described as a “penis with a thesaurus.” Even after all these, you come away thinking that Cardi B is better at writing about the erotic. Updike’s description of sex goes as follows: “Her slick firm body was shameless yet did not reveal, as her more virginal intercourse once had done, the inner petals once drenched in helpless nectar.” This is awful writing, and is laboriously painful to get through.

Shapiro behaves as if WAP is the first of its kind to sing poems about sex. He tweeted that his doctor wife diagnosed a wet ass pussy as either “bacterial vaginosis, yeast infection, or trichomonis.” His wife surely knows this, and he made the whole thing up. He later tweeted that he doesn’t mind being mocked for never making his wife wet because him and his wife know there’s more to a happy marriage than sexual satisfaction.

I often leave my phone on black and white so I don’t look at it so much, and my speaker on it is broken. So the other day I was watching muted black-and-white porn with subtitles, jacking off in silence to things like “[moaning] Oh yeah, baby, lick that pussy. Ugh.” It was pretty awful, but the thought of Ben Shapiro reading the transcripts of porn for the deaf could be a whole subgenera on Pornhub. Many would finally pay premium. A woman started following me on Instagram who reads classic literature in her lingerie for money. Ben Shapiro basically does the same. But he doesn’t really know the affluent luster of what’s possible. What if he familiarized himself with George Bataille’s Eroticism, reading the philosopher’s lyrically mad rejection of the orgy as an agrarian ritual, he might realize what he’s doing. Bataille committed himself to the dialectic of denial and embrace of the orgy as any semblance of the sacred.

Bataille compares these libidinal torrents of climaxes and orgies under the contextual framework of Christianity specifically. But all religion works the same—Ben’s orthodox Judaism banishes the orgy as part of the profane, and the quotidian piety of the religious experience as key features of the sacred. Rather than a sordid commitment to the non-erotic love of agápē, orthodox religion is an attempted banishment of all unmediated materiality. Women mustn’t only present themselves as sexless beasts, their physical modesty not simply encouraged by the barbarized progeny—but they will actually become these things through and through. When Shapiro refers to a woman’s pussy as her “p word,” it is in reference to Bataille’s nod to a more Nietzschean critical materiality of Christianity, in that sex and the orgy ritual are one step away from violence and war. “A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism,” Bataille famously stated. If Ben says “pussy” he risks a domino blunder of profanity and perversions. He will collapse into a puddle of self-flagellation, crying and trembling as he did in his nightmare.

As Dostoyevsky writes at the beginning of Notes from the Underground, “I am a sick man. …I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased.” It’s almost as though it’s a ventriloquist’s dictation of Shapiro himself. If he get’s his wife’s pussy wet, he risks even the momentary elimination of the suffering and pain that he and the Underground Man in Dostoyevsky’s book crave so much.


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The Bloomberg and Trump Debate

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by Guy Walker

[MICHAEL BLOOMBERG and DONALD TRUMP lumber onto a sprawl of twenty asphalt basketball courts all packed neatly together, the summer sun rotting into its lava crest until black tumors split open and hiss like miniature volcanoes. Hundreds of folding chairs tossed haphazardly on the ground. The supporters of DONALD TRUMP are only furries without their costumes; they stand around in their underwear, the festering scars of their deep belly-buttons throb in the heat. MICHAEL BLOOMBERG’s supporters consist of a few rodents rummaging through a garbage heap of fast food to-go bags. A opossum waddles by with a slice of pickle still on its forehead. BLOOMBERG has wrapped his face in Saran Wrap in an attempted facelift, and wears a hammer in his trousers, displaying an uncomfortable outline to all who look at his crotch. TRUMP is wearing his long trademark red tie that hangs like a dog’s tongue dead from exhaustion. But no shirt, and no blazer. His meaty, porcine tits and face are painted in some indecipherable team colors like he was a drunken fan at a football game. They are both sweating profusely.]

MODERATOR: Thank you. Yes, thank you, please take your seats everyone, this isn’t a casual gathering. I’m very pleased to announce this debate between two distinguished professionals. On my right is Donald Trump, famed celebrity host of the game shows How Many Turds Is Too Many, Do These Pants Make Me Look Like A Man, and of course, The All-You-Can-Eat Mac ’n Cheese Eating Contest. And Michael Bloomberg, who narrowly won the Democratic nomination after Bernie Sanders was stopped and frisked, and discovered to not have marbles in his coat pocket, thus proving that the old geezer really lost his marbles this time. Congratulations Mr. Bloomberg.

[BLOOMBERG flashes some gang signs with his hands, and forces a smile.]

MODERATOR: We’ll begin with you, Mr. Trump. This election has been criticized as being too absurd, as a kind of malevolent degeneration of American politics. How do you respond?

TRUMP: I simply don’t agree.

[At this, one of the human furries has started humping a raccoon, rubbing the length of its prickly unconditioned fur across his genitals.}

BLOOMBERG: [pointing to the profane bestiality] This is what I’m talking about. My opponent just attacks, attacks, attacks. We need to unite the American people as these two magnificent beings have. Because we are all Americans, in need of the same thing.

TRUMP: Sir, my supporters are literally fucking yours to death. You are roadkill. This is what Adorno meant in Minima Moralia, when he wrote, “Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.” You should no longer resist this obvious truth.

BLOOMBERG: Now look, let’s not get carried away with this who’s-fucking-who business. I’m a business man, and this is no business for us to get tangled up in. I started the practice young, raised by my father, taught me how to write my first check. And so forth. You see, my very first business, I sold cheese balls. I rolled up these little balls, and you would have about fifteen or twenty of these white cheese balls floating around in a bag of water, you see, and the water gets almost a milky hue to it, from the balls. It’s just amazing the things a kid learns. My opponent here, has he ever made cheese balls? I bet you he couldn’t tell you the first thing about cheese balls. I do. You roll them around between the palms of your hands, very gently like this, you see.

TRUMP: What Mr. Bloomberg is trying to insinuate, is that he’s a pervert. Now, as we all know, Kierkegaard wrote a great deal about the Absurd, especially in his journals. You have asked about the absurdity of a game show host being your president. This is not at all the point, and completely robs the Danish philosopher and his successors of their original intent. But this is of course a truly sisyphian nightmare, is it not? To explain the point of something in a meaningless world? Kierkegaard, as you all know, believed the interpretable pre-Socratic paganism was as correct as Jewish idolatry, in that, we are all indistinguishable beings brought into form by the eternal truth. We act in accordance to the absurd, meaning we act upon faith. When Kierkegaard correctly noted the example in the Old Testament, when Abraham is told by God to kill his son Isaac, and he did not because an angel interfered, this action of inaction was by virtue of the absurd. Now I ask you, when the Son of Sam was told by his neighbor’s dog to kill all those people in New York in that scalding hot summer, where the heck was his angel? I’ll tell you where: there was no angel, because it was hotter than hell! Ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! Oh boy, I really crack myself up. Excuse me, really. But no, seriously folks, this is exactly why, when you get to the voting booth, and have to decide between that monstrous scoundrel and I, you could very well choose one or the other, it doesn’t at all matter. But you will be at a standstill if you reflect upon it too much. We are the same. But it is in this godly bestowed faith, by virtue of the absurd, that you will vote for me. It’s not the reasonable choice because this is a completely unreasonable world, and therein lies the beauty.

BLOOMBERG: Now wait just a minute. We are not the same, and that is completely unfair to assert we are. He only had two phone numbers in Jeffery Epstein’s black book. You know how many I had? Four. When he hires a prostitute, he invites them over to watch Shark Week in his bathrobe. Like a fucking eight-year-old. When I hire a prosty, I tie a chain around her neck and toss it over the rafters. I have eaten the corpses of children. When he watches porn, he only watches the initial build-up storyline—plumber-coming-over-to-fix-the-pipes type of thing. And then he closes his laptop before their clothes come off, and cums into a dirty sock. Don’t believe his dithering crap about Kierkegaard and the absurd. I have eaten hot dogs from street vendors in order to look relatable, goddamnit! You want some fucking philosophy? R.L. Stine, in his esteemed classic Say Cheese and Die!, wrote, “The next day, Greg is so large that he cannot even ride the car to school because he can’t fit in the car.” Close quote. I would drop the mic if there was one. But there’s just these bendable antenna ones. But you get the idea.

[TRUMP has started eating a taco bowl. Strands of shredded iceberg lettuce are getting caught in his blonde chest hairs. A few granules of burger meat sprinkle the melting crust of asphalt, and the naked furries and rodents scramble on all fours, snarling for their share. Trump smiles, and gives the deserted tarmac a thumbs up.]

TRUMP: Look at them. They love me, I can’t help it. This is exactly what Beckett had intentioned when writing Endgame and Waiting For Godot. His servant characters, Clov and Lucky, in their respective plays, symbolize the inevitable and irrational devotion we have for others. These are, of course, absurdist plays. But now we are speaking of a different kind of absurd. When Lucky is writhing in the tangle of an imaginary net, it is of course a nod at Vladimir and Estragon who are trapped in their own imaginations of the Godot character. Godot is not coming. He’s not going to save them of their own boredom. We know that, but it wouldn’t be a play if they suddenly realized it on the first page of dialogue. Is this not analogous to our own situation here? Between Bloomberg and I saving this present hellscape? Are you not all writhing in invisible mania, hoping some fictional savior will lift you from your daily peasantry.

BLOOMBERG: Oh fuck off. I’ve seen you play tennis in shorts.

TRUMP: Look, in Godot, Lucky cannot think or speak without his bowler hat. Estragon keeps taking on and off his shoes, and Vladimir his hat. The point is, we are condemned to our meaningless props. It’s why people smoke cigarettes outside of bars—they don’t know what to do with their hands. You have turned Mr. Bloomberg and I into props, like dirty siphons for your chronic turrets, because you’re all animals, you don’t know what to do with yourselves. You’ve committed yourselves to this delirium where you simply cannot speak about anything unless you’re speaking about us.

BLOOMBERG: Let me be frank. Well, let me be Michael, but as the expression goes, let me be frank. I’m still a pretty hip guy. I still put potato chips in my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, because as I like to say, “it provides a little crunch in my lunch.” Ha ha! You should try it. In fact, within my first one hundred days in office, I will pass a mandate that all sandwiches will have potato chips in them. It will be fun, and we are fun goddamnit! I will get all you fucking bloodsuckers—I mean, excuse me, my apologies, I mean, I will bestow the good fortune of crunchier Wednesdays for everyone.

MODERATOR: We have just a couple minutes for closing remarks.

TRUMP: What do you think my red tie is all about? It’s not a sexual noose, I promise you. I swear to god, it’s not. I use props just like all of you imbeciles. You disgust me. Vote for me, Donald Trump, and your problems will dry out like a scab in this heat.

MODERATOR: Thank you Mr. Trump. Mr. Bloomberg, any closing remarks?

BLOOMBERG: Look, I would never brag. But I have a Coachella sticker on my Jeep Wrangler. I started an Instagram account for my cat, Mr. Fickle Feet. Because sometimes they run, but sometimes they sleep. My opponent on the other hand, is a coward. You can see it, it’s written all over his loose baggy face. Ned Beatty has more of a jawline than him. His face looks like the fried chicken he eats straight from the bucket. How can you trust a man who eats fried chicken? I’ve always said we should lock up anyone and everyone who eats fried chicken. And watermelon of course. Is that too much? Nevermind. But a man who has turned into a fried chicken, my god, what do we do? We elect him as our Commander in Chief? I make the promise to you today, if you elect me as your president, I’ll lock all of you up and brush my teeth with your blood. Bloomberg: fight for me and die!

[BLOOMBERG’s face is melting under the wrapped plastic. TRUMP’s face and body paint drip from his nipples. His neck sags like a blood-packed gizzard. Visible steam rises from the garbage heap, where the entire audience is now spreading it about with their snouts, looking for the last edible crumbs. TRUMP and BLOOMBERG join in, snarling on all fours, the sun burning their skin to a boiling crisp. At last in unison, under the same sky, after the same dream.]


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The Words We Utter Beneath This New Flesh

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by Guy Walker

Tumbling through black space, naked and shivering, I grope awkwardly at the aimless hologramic fog. Something is terribly wrong here. The sky is littered with digitized two-dimensional sparkles; bouncing hearts and doggy noses and ears gone astray, they scatter across the empty void like tumbleweeds; erratic and gruesome gifs bob and float like plumes of glitter. I soon realize these are only the mockings of stars—not light from millions of years away through their boiling tumors of nuclear fusion, but immediate and shallow, outlined with a crude magic marker. The doggy noses are fat and not cute, and mimicking a huge ass with a ribbon of warts on top. This is awful. I look up—or wherever up seems to be from my dispassioned and boorish summersault—and see two thick thumbs the size of skyscrapers tap and swipe randomly, smearing grease like a slug across some invisible barrier. Then, a jolt. And suddenly my formless arena is engulfed with an incomprehensible horror of Youtube makeup tutorials and high definition porn and presidential campaign ads and tsunamis of indecipherable Reddit posts. The entirety of the internet floods over me in the flash of a few minutes, a DMT-like cascade of an entire species’ desperation pleading to be heard.

To feel the gravitational weight of anything, my entire conception is ravaged by a global pandemic. I wake, but the clear distinction between the hallucination of dream and this fleshy terrain here and now is unclear. A cold wind howls outside, rattling my weighted single-pane window, a stale feverish condensation dripping on the inside glass from behind the curtains. Finally, I emerge from my room for the first time in months, perhaps years, realizing that this solitary confinement has been self-imposed all this time. I open my phone. Nothing. A dreary haze waits ahead outside, as two English robins bathe themselves in the birdbath. But all of a sudden one of the birds flickers with television static and vanishes. But static comes from electromagnetic waves from supernova explosions, or the sun, which makes this hallucination all the more confusing. Oh god, I remember that all my exes hate me, and I deserve most of it. Probably all of it. What the hell. I’ll go back to bed. A new season of Earth Planet is out, advertised as extremely bingeworthy.

This is much better. Our sense of nature’s operative machinery is perplexed by another outlandish documentary blockbuster, narrated by a crumbling erudite Englishman.You watch a tiger clamp into the neck of a gazelle at the bank of a river. The HD pictures sold to us as being sharper than real life—the thirty-thousand frames per second capturing every single water droplet mirroring the scenic barbarism on its glossy spheres. Don’t go outside—this is better than real life. Don’t let your children turn over stones and prod curiously at grubs and earwigs—teach them Pokémon Go, where they can chase illusory toy monsters into oncoming traffic or changing rooms at the mall, the hopping neon fragments titillating the masses the way a porch light does for all the country moths. How could we have possibly strayed this far? The coastal redwoods drenched in moss and chandeliers of a dew-soaked spider’s web, and the underground mycelial circuitry that entangles young vulnerable saplings in with the many-century-old torso of healthy forest—this is meant to serve our self-hating narcissism in some way, surely.

I’ve never had a difficult time of tending to the punctuated throes of social responsibility. Most of us are hallmarks of highly educated insouciance, witnessing our major natural habitats burn to a few last smoldering remnants, or the oceans churn and bake into reservoirs of plastic debris. There’s a spray-tanned gameshow host with severe brain damage running my country, tossing bundles of dynamite into the gears of international diplomacy. I’ll watch this all happen through my phone, my neck propped up by three pillows and molding itself into a permanent swollen nodule and double chin. I’ll wake up with all the lights on, an expensive cocktail glass spilled across the goose feather duvet, my willowy legs naturally awkward as they stick out of my Christmas underwear like two pointless roots. My eyes are starting to hold a permanent festering squint, unattractive and more serious by the day as they register the bohemian death drive of our species. I switch on my camera’s selfie mode, and study the slow rot passing across my face. Magnified enough, our skin is an abandoned agricultural field, spoiled of its terraqueous innocence with poisons and perfumes like they were crop-dusters.

There’s no use in trying to deny the neon spectacle just waiting there in its quiet rectangular blackness. It’s there, in your hand now, but when it’s not, it’s waiting, whispering from its depths for you to pick it up again and stuff yourself with the mildest intoxication yet again, your bloated edges spilling out onto the floor. You’ll do this, on average, one hundred and fifty times today. That’s about once every six minutes, if you’re awake for sixteen hours a day. I remember reading Guns, Germs, and Steel many years ago, where Jared Diamond quoted research that stated the average American household watches seven hours of television a day. Published in 1997, we’ve come a long way.

David Foster Wallace wrote endlessly about being raised by television. He would lead his own tv watching marathons, getting drunk and high as he obsessed over his own hypnosis of the thing, the shampoo commercials and applause-track sitcoms and real-crime dramas all blurring together into a mass rotating circus act. The marijuana binges in Infinite Jest are clearly autobiographical; the years that Hal Incandenza wades through have been replaced by sponsored advertisements—Year of the Whopper, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. You can imagine Wallace, stoned out of his mind, slouched in an antique loveseat torn along the seams, watching hours of grainy television, suddenly jolted by the epiphany that this orgiastic circus of commercials will eventually manifest into a dystopic branding of everything, even the Gregorian calendar. His short story, “My Apprentice” is about the swirling anxieties of a fictional female celebrity entering David Letterman’s formidable arena. “Little Expressionless Animals”, a short story in his 1989 collection Girl With Curious Hair, uses Jeopardy! as the platform to write a tale of lesbian romance. For Wallace, television was the new and compulsory chamber around which our dramas are told. Tolstoy used the ballroom or the battlefield; Melville, the sea; Hemingway, the African plains; Beckett, indeterminate locales in Ireland, or perhaps just the rambling mind; where virtually every other writer used the obvious landmarks of this miserable sodden frontier, Wallace knew there was no more frontier to be had. The illuminated screen is where we are born now. It’s where we copulate, argue, fall in love, and apparently now where we declare war.

In a 1996 interview with Charlie Rose, Wallace said he was “raised to view television as, more or less, my main artistic snorkel.” It’s what bonds us as humans, like a monotheistic tribe of bland rituals, our coruscating angst impressed beneath the fuzzy glow. At the time of the interview, the television set had long taken the position of the fireplace as the centerpiece of a home—the fireplace, of which, was always intended less as a device to heat the home, and more to mimic our ancestral storytelling origins—to gather the family around, in their holiday-themed onesies, sipping hot cocoa with both hands, dissembling their semi-glossed happiness into feigned resistance.

Chomsky said something about the television show being the filler that stations jammed within the real programming—the advertisements. Whatever real meat is in a hotdog. Television, Netflix, Instagram, Twitter, fucking TikTok—this is what we do. It’s the interface in which the flowering stink of spring is fully realized. We still have to occasionally make our brief little forays into the shallows of the outside world—afraid and vulnerable, glancing at others from behind our sunglasses, with the same obvious terror advertised across our face that a dog has when taking a shit on a crowded sidewalk, knowing full well we are now prey. Or when we go get drunk with friends, the conversation is often about what we watch when back in our curtain-drawn dens, with the insufferable veneer of any of it being artistically beneficial. This isn’t a cynical move. We just don’t have conversations to the maintained stature as in My Dinner With Andre. Our enviable dramas are on the other side of the screen. And today, we have the means to puppeteer ourselves as some clumsily drawn hero—we’ve become our own miniaturized Lawrence of Arabia’s on wherever our localized online universe exists.

The great French literary titan, Louise Ferdinand Céline, understood well that of all our drooling spluttering orifices, the mouth was the most unredeemable and profane. “When you stop to examine the way in which words are formed and uttered,” he wrote, “our sentences are hard put to survive the disaster of their slobbery origins. The mechanical effort of conversation is nastier and more complicated than defecation.” Everybody knows this, whether they realize it or not; it’s why most people prefer to send text messages than listen to each other speak on the phone. It’s why the laughing-crying emoji was awarded Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year a few years back. The belching profundity of the mouth suffers more through its chronic aching and throbbing, through the discolored leakage of so much exclaimed barbarism. We are perspiring with libidinal fatigue—better to lay in bed with our head supported by a gallery of pillows, with an episode of Golden Girls playing on the telly, and hammer something barely coherent with our thumbs. Better to sit hunched over on the toilet until your legs fall asleep, the pigment from your turds long ago leaking into the toilet water like a rotten teabag. (I receive a text from my boss: “lmk if da shit gatorade , coo? Honey pot too chill.” Fo sho. I got you, boo.) You sit at a series of missed traffic light on the Sunset strip with forty cars behind you, every one of them staring down at their phones—these pulsating factories of imprisoned aurora—doing that selfie-wheel-of-fortune thing, looking cute or ironically disappointed when they find out what Disney princess they are, or what squiggle they are, or what insect they are, or what hole they are. Whatever. Plato’s cave got a renovation. We throw pebbles at jetliners thirty-thousand feet high. We sell pictures of our feet on the internet to pay off student loans.

Two other writers joined Wallace in his interview with Charlie Rose: Jonathan Franzen and Mark Leyner, both of whom are sad Cimmerian men, but not in any desirable way, not in the way Wallace was. They are awful writers. And solemn men who write about trite things are openly denying their grotesque and balmy impotence. That’s what makes suicide so heartbreaking: those who should, never do, and those who do, never should. They complained together that the ubiquity of television has eaten away at the role of their timid fortune. They are writers, you see, painfully straining to articulate the psychic mess of being awake in a world of romance and betrayal and loss—and they have taken up the noble task of peppering their stories with relatable women and men, where allegorical lessons can be learned along the way. And it’s not fair, you see, that the screen has robbed them of their prophecy.

It’s not difficult to see where this is headed. This isn’t a cynical move that judges the degradation of the mind into illuminated bits of data, the maze of pneumatic tubes whizzing in and out of the atomic hard drive. Quite the opposite. We are being unified into a complete whole, gradually being sucked back into the other side of the screen, where the lyricism of our conversational prose spills from our mouths like expensive fondue. And glossy men in capes and suits conquer smoke-filled arenas like it was an expensive game of laser tag. The conspired fortitude of our heroes overcoming conflict—we will finally be together.

….Long live the new flesh. David Cronenberg’s 1983 classic Videodrome delivered it best. “The television screen,” a mysterious television operator, played by Brian O’Blivion, tells us through another television framed within our own television, “is the retina of the mind’s eye. Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain.” He was right, and I guess still is, but the artful horror of today is far more advanced than a simple television screen. And yet, at over three-and-a-half decades old, the film hits the important marks of technological morphology that we’re dealing with today. By the visual consumption of a plotless television show featuring torture porn and eventual murder, our hero, played by James Woods, gradually transforms into the pulsating machines behind the screen. His hand holding a gun transfigures into a grotesque mass of flesh and gun, unified together into a viscous mess of veins and entrails. His stomach opens up as a vaginal wound, gripping onto video cassettes, guns, and hands, like a cannibalizing anemone. And finally, he gets sucked back into the television screen where he belonged all this time. Where we have all belonged all this time. “You’re reality is already half hallucination.” This is indeed the new flesh, an embryonic culmination of ones and zeroes colliding into a red-stained chamber of gore and ecstasy.

I was infected by the transcendental optimism of Thoreau and Emerson and Whitman at a young age. And I still want to follow their direction. But take the naiveté of Henry Thoreau, for example. He was forever enamored with the soft hymns of the country, and wrote about how we are all born with the same impulses of exploring the outdoors, observable by whatever unwavering spur of children to explore caves and climb trees; and adulthood is merely the ruinous hangover we suffer through, wandering around stupidly, gorging ourselves on expensive dinners, shooing away an ever-expanding list of annoying disturbances, like a cow using its tail to bat away the flies from her eyes. But look at any child today. They are hunched over and commanding the screen like a master conductor. They know home is inside there, somewhere, and they’re trying to figure it out, the secret exchange of passwords to get back in. We were never meant to climb trees and explore caves. Thoreau naively anticipated a Rousseauian-branded return to the unique barbarism of walking on all fours. We are manifesting Voltaire’s Enlightenment. We’ll find a door to the other side.

This is it. We are Nature’s victorious ejaculation, the fermented glob on the crest of a sulphuric pit that has somehow crawled its way into these molds of human flesh. We have committed ourselves to lives that are the equivalent of accosting strangers on the street, shoving our walnut and goat cheese salad directly under their face, asking them for comment. Maybe Wallace and Cronenberg saw it coming, that we would all be self-quarantined in our studio apartments, hunched over our own miniaturized television screens, our eyes bloodshot and eventually rotting. But maybe they were too shrouded by the swirling delirium of the present day to see where it was all headed. Thirty or forty years from now, we won’t be reading Walden from a moss-covered boulder in the evening sun. We won’t be scouring the footnotes in Infinite Jest next to our naked lover. Whatever it is, it’ll be far more fragmented and cloistered than this doggy-eared frenzy here.


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Why Stephen Miller Hates the World

by Guy Walker

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Stephen Miller has an obsession he knows he’ll never be able to satisfy. It’s not his contorting hatred of immigrants—leading him to send around nine hundred emails to a Breitbart editor containing stories from the white-supremacist publication American Renaissance and the anti-immigrant website VDARE, promoting the narrative of a white genocide. It’s not his cinematic gloating of villainry, casting himself as some sort of advocate of cruelty. It’s not gaining the political power he has worked tirelessly to achieve.

No. Stephen Miller’s obsession is his own self-hatred. People like him come around every now and then—spluttering fuckless teenagers who are breastfed on slurries of American cheese and Froot Loops, who despise their localized worlds for reasons indiscernible to ordinary people. It’s not difficult to spot. You meet these people all the time. They’re usually just mildly grotesque against the humdrum of other forgettable personalities. Their contrarian evocations are contrived, as you can predict exactly what they’re going to say under each topic of discussion. But Stephen Miller has to campaign for others to hate him. His lifelong mission is to get mobs of people so terrified and enraged that he’ll finally be taken seriously.

Before being Trump’s primary speech writer and senior policy advisor—where he helped design the child-separation policy, as well as pressed to shut down the government in order to force Congress to pay for southern border wall—before he worked for Jeff Sessions when still a Senator, before being a spokesman for Michele Bachmann, before fundraising alongside Richard Spencer at Duke University (or, according to Spencer, being mentored by him), before flailing in a high school speech that janitors should pick up his garbage, there was the pale paralyzed slime of Stephen Miller. Wheezing like the thing in Eraserhead, he drags his tail netted with exterior veins across the cold concrete floor. Bubbling out of the sulphuric pits where the first microbes of life formed, he was there, with contempt for that first form of life. Because, similarly to the Bret Easton Ellis character of cultish lore, there is an idea of a Stephen Miller, some kind of abstraction that behaves willfully on its own. You can shake his hand, and stare into his cold gaze, but he doesn’t really exist in the way you think.

He knows he doesn’t have the countenance to be in front of the public. His leaden scowl is not patronizing enough to hold our attention. So he fashions himself as the hemorrhaging brains of the operation—writing the speeches, designing the policy—the champion ideologue who will set the agenda. But he’s not smart enough to be even notably controversial. His speeches for the President read like an alcoholic paranoid’s Letter to the Editor of some remote Town Crier newspaper. He wants to be viewed, more than anything, as a serious ideologue.

There’s a general public fear around Miller’s nobbled ideology—of kicking all the brown people out, of separating their families, of leaving infants in soiled diapers in frigid chainlinked paddocks, of banning Muslims—in that, he’s often viewed as being serious about what he purports to believe. In what reads like a congratulatory think piece on political villainry, The Atlantic described it a difficult task to outsmart “a provocateur as skilled as Miller.” The consensus seems to be that he’s not just some ordinary troll, that he is elevated from the squabbling carnies inside the White House, and severely focused on spreading his vitriol like it was the diseased gravy poured from a punctured tumor. The New Yorker reported officials describing him as a “savvy operator” who was cunning enough to manipulate a broken system to his advantage. Perhaps. But this determined ‘seriousness’ is wrong. Whatever ulcers of psychopathy slowly ooze from his various holes, he doesn’t believe any of it.

When the story emerged that Stephen Miller’s girlfriend is Mike Pence’s press secretary, and that they are in fact engaged, there was a momentary flurry of callow gossip at how gross it must be that Miller participates in any sort of act that could be called sexual, however balmy and profane it must be. And I guess there’s point there. It seems more likely he greases himself up in a full-body mask of Crisco, and watches hours of grainy 1970’s porn reels in the dark without doing anything himself—just sitting stone still and staring straight ahead until his eyes bleed. But none of it is right.

It’s not that it’s unfair to want to pry into the private life of someone so cretinous; rather, Stephen Miller conducts his fetishes and kinks out in the open for everyone to see. His normal self-flagellation as a teenager curdled like spoiled milk into what makes him a man today, getting off at the sight of mothers crying over their kidnapped children, climaxing to the horror stories of families fleeing gang violence in Honduras, punching the air with victory at the prospect of some poor kid stumbling up to an impenetrable thirty foot wall after crossing the desert. But most of all, his fetish is being hated by anybody. At least he’s something. Some men get off by going to a dungeon to get whipped by a dominatrix; Stephen Miller entered politics.

Then there is the issue of looking presentable. A year ago on Face the Nation, he didn’t even attempt to get a decent hairpiece. His hairline returned one day, sprayed on from an aerosol canister. Whatever the method—polluting his glistening bald head with a crop duster, crude oil thrown at his it through a window screen—it doesn’t matter. You can imagine in the beaming despair of Stephen Miller’s subjectivity as he performed this task himself, in the bathroom mirror, the way a five-year old cuts their own bangs with the kitchen scissors, or a teenager bleaches their hair in the middle of the night, realizing after it’s too late that they seriously fucked it up. So Miller revoked the stenciled blotch of graffiti on his head, and returned to being bald. But it’s in this strangely unskilled attempt to look normal that Miller’s paralyzing insecurity is exposed.

Through his smirks and half-attempts at looking relatably human, he can’t lift his eyelids above the threshold of indifference. He adds hair from a spray can; he gets engaged; he writes speeches; he performs the ordinary tasks of normal politicians and their chronic banality. But he’s so bad at trying to come across as a wicked mastermind. The whole act is a poorly groomed deflection of one’s self-hating idiocy, keenly aware that this routine won’t work much longer, trying desperately to appoint himself the patron saint of an intellectual famine before he’s thrown to the gallows.

Because there is something even more miserable ahead, and he knows it: in a couple years’ time when his tenure of wretchedness is over, and he disappears into the void of history like a background movie extra, he’ll do his anticipated episode of Dancing With the Stars. He’ll pirouette in a permed neon predator’s frill, sweating under the spotlights, smiling with feigned cinematic desperation, and twirl and twirl until the crescendo hits and his act is finally over. After the obligatory smattering applause, he will crawl away to join the other discarded Trump officials, left only to gloat about how serious people used to take him.


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Anti-Abortion Laws Discussed in a Bath House

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The following is the unannotated transcript of a discussion in a high-end bath house about the recent anti-abortion laws sweeping through several states of the country. SHARIA KENDOLL is an almost entirely hairless man, with a cavern of a dimple in the bullseye of his chin. He’s a pastor at a nondescript megachurch in Oklahoma not destroyed by surrounding floods, and has been struggling with depression and a test of faith after recently walking in on his only son watching Top Gun—a film of notorious gay propaganda—with another boy. JAY WALKIN’ DRACULA is a part-time sorcerer, and a big fan of spoiled meat and expired produce, who spends his free time shouting obscenities at stray cats and children walking to school. He has a pigeon named HOBBLES. MITCH MCCONNELL is also there, his face and neck sagging like plastered vomit passed his tits; his lips are entirely gone, so all that remains is a black hole, gasping like the violent and muted tremors of an asshole immediately after a gangbang. No one knows why he is here. He mostly just stares at the floor, and thinks about when he would tie worms in complicated knots as a child. JORDAN PETERSON, although Canadian, forced himself in the room for reasons unknown. He’s been on a strict meat-only diet for years, but now just throws a couple of dead pheasants on the table in the middle of the room, and sinks his teeth into them, feathers and all. CLARENCE THOMAS has a beard now, and scratches it furiously, and wipes his runny nose with the back of his hand. This has become a habitual tic. We begin.

SHARIA KENDOLL: So, um, yeah. Thank you all for coming. Thank you for gathering here, I mean. We’re here to discuss the recent abortion bills passing through such states as Alabama, Georgia, Ohio—can I get an “Oh, HEYOOOO!”?

This obligatory introductory attempt at humor falls to complete silence. The others are staring at the feet of MITCH MCCONNELL, where a pool of flesh-colored slime has formed around his ankles. He tries to speak, but his incoherent Southern drawl just splurts out animal sounds, like a cow giving birth in the hottest day of summer.

JAY WALKIN’ DRACULA: What the hell are we looking at? The man is melting. And he just moaning shrieks of death. Would someone put this poor bastard out of his misery?

SHARIA KENDOLL: No, no. He’s by no means melting. And don’t you hear what he’s saying? He’s mapping out a superbly fascinating strategy on how to win back the House. How can the Evangelical community—how can America—expect to win back the House, if we can’t get the houses of America to live by the law of God? We need babies now more than ever. We need babies to crawl out of their mommies already waving American flags. Gosh darnit! If I ever had an idea, by golly that’s it. Clarence, you’re a lawyer. What if you propose mandatory miniature American flags transplanted in with the babies in their little cubbies—what do you call those things?—those liquid jello-sacks they bob around in. Inside the mother…Anyways, we staked the American flag in the virgin soil of the New World, didn’t we? Well, maybe these mothers don’t want their babies because the babies don’t know they gonna be born in the United States of Awesome! Huh guys? Ammirite?

CLARENCE THOMAS: Eat shit.

JORDAN PETERSON: Uh, yes, well, you see, to have American flags planted, Mr. Kendoll—I would like to extoll you the importance of uttering such unsavory mishaps as “trans” anything, as the young postmodern neo-marxists in America are trying to subliminally indoctrinate our minds with these bloody…these bloody words. And I’m not being rhetorical when I say that. Words do have blood, and I have sucked their throats…Anyways, transplanted is not accurate, as it suggests to the subconscious of the deep recesses of the mind that a man can make me call him a her. Well I’m not bloody doing it! Because next a baby is going to tell me it’s not a baby. It’s going to say it’s a booby, one of those blue-footed birds in the Galapagos. And on and on, until nothing means anything anymore. And we may as well not speak because these radical leftists have hijacked language, and then all of a sudden we’re trapped in a jetliner headed straight for the building of meaninglessness. [He starts crying uncontrollably. Then slaps himself across the face, falling to the floor, before eventually collecting himself, continuing as if nothing happened.] But anyways, these are complicated matters that just can’t be succinctly summarized in just a few phrases. As you were saying, put it in the woman’s, um, in her, stomach lining. Whatever it’s called.

JAY WALKIN’ DRACULA: Tummy!

CLARENCE THOMAS: No, not her tummy, you idiot.

JAY WALKIN’ DRACULA: Her midriff! The whores have midriff! That’s where the babies are.

JORDAN PETERSON: Thank you, in her midriff. To get an American flag planted in her midriff is no simple matter, Mr. Kendoll. And for starters, let’s be reasonable. America was never loved for being miniature. A big American flag represents big ideas, big freedoms, big trucks, slaughtered pigs the size of sumo wrestlers, and so on. The bigger it is, the freer we are. A dead cow, with her guts spilled across the floor—it’s a beautiful thing. It’s what I love most about your country—all the dead animals. What are we doing here talking about saving dead babies when we can be talking about the virtues of overflowing hog lagoons. They contain vital nutrients that the environmentalists conveniently ignore…[to JAY WALKIN’ DRACULA, pointing at HOBBLES] Are you going to eat that?

JAY WALKIN’ DRACULA: Hobbles? He’s my best friend!?

CLARENCE THOMAS: Plebeians! The last half of “friend” is “end.” It’s the bird’s fate to be eaten!!

[MITCH MCCONNELL’S neck is now just a flesh-waterfall that has finally reached the floor. His bellicose gargling suffocates him, and what’s structurally left of him falls to the floor, mimicking something like Gumby getting hit with a baseball bat. He’s probably dead, but no one seems to notice except for JAY WALKIN’ DRACULA, who looks around nervously at the others.]

SHARIA KENDOLL: This has been an extremely productive conversation. Justice Thomas, you always seem to declare such enlightening truths. We are all indebted to your lifelong commitment to the law.

CLARENCE THOMAS: Fuck off.

SHARIA KENDOLL: Exactly. So, to conclude, Impossible Burgers and Beyond Meat are made from aborted bambinos. Little sprouts, I like to call them. Little buggers, for fun, when I’m feeling cheeky. You get the point. No, no: teenagers, with bad breath, actually. Ha! Ha! I crack myself up. Heck, may as well be graduates of West Point, fighting for the freedoms of the malnourished. Which is why all vegans are the infernal children of Satan.

JAY WALKIN’ DRACULA: This is awful.

SHARIA KENDOLL: I want to thank our sponsors, the protein smoothie startup Loaded Phlegm, and the nightclub The Pulse of God, found in your hometown—actually, in every living room—for making this conversation possible. Thank you all, and I look forward to sweating with you all next week.


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Self-Help and the Cult of Banality

(originally published in 2015)

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night. -Dylan Thomas

The operation runs smoothly. Hundreds of Chinese child laborers sit hunched over on the cold concrete basement floor, the florescent lights flickering, each of the children scribbling hundreds of inspirational quotes per day. The skittering of a cockroach is heard, and the sudden heartless thud of a stiletto stabs the thing in the center, a white paste oozing out onto the shivering floor. Tony Robbins—motivational speaker extraordinaire—stands over the children, pacing the aisles in his stripper heels, his whip dragging on the floor beside him. Only the sound of frantic scribbling can be heard, along with Tony Robbins’ heels clicking on the impenetrable callousness beneath him. His thin porno mustache twitches. He opens his mouth, white saliva pooling at the corners of his lips, making a smutty moist sound as it smacks open, and he booms, “MAKE MEEEE MONAYYYYYY!!!”  And the little children scribble furiously. “It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped,” one bucktoothed boy writes. “We can change our lives. We can do, have, and be exactly what we wish,” a five year old with a bowl cut and a runny nose, writes.

This place was a fortune cookie factory for years, with the same child laborers previously scribbling good common sense and lotto numbers, but Tony Robbins highjacked the place years ago, and uses the kids to write his books. He’s worth $480 million, and suffers from illiteracy and adulthood ugliness. But over the years, he’s inspired millions to buy his books and pay for his courses and motivational lectures on how to become rich. It’s something the Cult of Scientology excels at, convincing throngs of boorishly inept humans to give the institution all their money to become free from all their problems.

There have been countless others before Robbins, promising you heaven, health, love, money, tits, happiness. There was Robert Tilton, the famous televangelist, who’s demographic was predominately old women in the American South and Midwest with only a high school education and an average income of between $15,000 and $25,000. Tilton raked in $80 million a year from contributions, one hundred percent tax free. Discovered in a Primetime special in 1990, donations and pleas for prayer didn’t go to Tilton at all, but rather straight to his bank, depositing the money directly and tossing the personal letters into the dumpster behind the bank. There’s Creflo Dollar, another MegaChurch pastor, who started a fundraising campaign to buy a $65 million private jet. There’s Kenneth Copeland, who used his private jet not to preach, but to ski and hunt and kill endangered animals. But Tilton, Dollar, and Copeland used and use religion as their face, pandering to the incorrigible stolid masses in order to lift themselves from their flaccid arrangements of manhood. What Tony Robbins has accomplished is a mastery over the vulnerable without using religion. The philosophia perennis generalized for any woman or man.

You don’t need to listen that closely to realize they are selling you dog shit wrapped in Reynolds wrap. But then again, men like Robbins are attracting tens of millions of people to their bro-ish fallow theater. You have to wonder why he keeps coming out with books promising you these are the steps to your financial freedom, as opposed to his previous ones. Tony Robbins is the high priest of all the others. There is Tai Lopez, a pubic-bearded general of sexless adulthood, showing you his Lambourghuini (which turned out to be a rental) in his garage, next to his “seven new book shelves” of two thousand new books appropriately also in his garage. Because I always go to my garage when I need a new book. He reads a book a day, because  .  .  .  because he reads good. He quotes Conrad Hilton, the founder of Hilton Hotels, (who was also a charged rapist), and tells you to remain an optimist, that optimism will eventually get you your new Lambo.

Then there is Lewis Howes, a regular guy who still dreams of being a high school jock, who played two games of arena football before breaking his wrist, thus ending his career. He starred on my college’s football team, a Division III Christian Science school who lost to the worst college football team in the country. He called up a girl I know very well, and asked her to buy him a plane ticket to fly him out to see her so he could fuck her. And he recently made the New York Times Bestseller list with his book about how to be great. It’s called the School of Greatness. In his highlighted Facebook video, he teaches you the ten best ways to make money on the internet: 1) teaching and training. 2) providing a service. 3) creating and selling a product. These are his top three, in his words. The androgynous auto-objectification of such a vaguely non-comedic skit, along with the brittle hysteria of telling someone the best way to make money is to make something and sell it, is so horridly adolescent, so mockingly stupid and obvious, you ought to punch a male stripper in the dick. You can purchase an hour conference call with Lewis for $497. I have $14 to my name and a pack of condoms I got for free at Planned Parenthood. A kid from my college bought thirty copies of his book, like a lost evangelical, passing out copies to homeless people at the airport. I just don’t know anymore. Here at Paradise of Storm headquarters, we know the importance of intellectual bravery. Last week, someone found my blog by searching for “throbbing dick.” Another found it by searching for “rob palm oil with penis before fucking besides a dead man in my home town.” Another was “iggy azalea yoga pants fit a little too well naked.” I pride my readers in asking about the big issues, and together we try to nudge ourselves closer to the answers.

On the other hand, I am as much a follower as anyone. We idolize women and men of sun. Over the years, I’ve passed through phases of literary idolatry, pretending to shadow the brazen obsessions for beauty that was lived by the likes of Rimbaud and Celine and Baudelaire and Thompson. I’ve mimicked all their writing styles, drunk and drugged away endless nights, slept with as many women as I could, in some sort of vague pedantic discipleship of the great men who also put pretty words together. I began sailing strictly because of Hemingway. At one point I began writing standing up, slamming away on my typewriter, allowing the breeze to blow through the curtains and across my chest, certain that if this is how Hemingway did it, then so could I. But there is a justified egotism in our ubiquitous want for recognition. A ballet dancer could never merely dance in her bedroom. A singer could never sing to himself. And a writer strains to earn his or her laurels. The ephemeral orgasms in the daily struggle. As a young writer, Hunter S. Thompson would type out the entirety of The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises over and over, just to feel what it was like to write masterpieces. When we realize we’re not becoming the sports stars and the rock stars that we first imagined we’d become, we turn to more achievable men. Bankers. Writers. Politicians. Alcoholics.

But then there are Lifestyle Entrepreneurs. Motivational speakers. Social Media experts. The smarmy inbred tanning salon men who sell snake oil on the internet. They write self-help books and host podcasts, with hundreds of thousands of listeners paying for subscriptions, writing notes on how to make it rich. They use phrases like, “Your life is your message to the world. Make sure it’s inspiring,” with a picture of a footpath winding through a sodden morning forest. Or “Your greatness is not what you have, it’s what you give,” scribbled casually over the sepia stained silhouettes of girls twirling their hair. The magniloquence of their egodystonicity is something from the bowels of poetry  .  .  .  a vague enough catch-phrase stolen from a bunch of fortune cookies. They are the actual vampirish cult leaders of the modern age. Their horoscopic forgery is basic enough to inspire misandry. They steal the insanity from the beautiful. Until there is nothing but a bow tie and a forced smile. We need the gorgeous and the awful, the theater of wilderness and rage. Woman and man will always have a bowl of porridge in the drought, a last glimmering maxim that shines beyond the distance.

In Kant’s What Is Enlightenment? he describes man’s inability to free himself from the herd, from his timid nonage that prevents him from maturing into his hypothetically innate state as Übermensch. Man’s craving for instruction. Craving for “laziness and cowardice.” Kant quotes the Roman poet, Horace: Sapere aude! Dare to know! Dare to be wise! It’s a challenge for bravery, to walk into the unknown night without Tony Robbins holding your hand. Enlightenment, freedom, wisdom, knowledge itself, is the courage to find the beautiful alone, to shiver in the silver strands, to rage and rage until the sky burns spectacle.