An Inhuman Condition

“I can see the future, and the future holds nothing for me
I can see the future, and it makes me wish that I was blind
All the hype that intoxicates us tonight
All the crap out of which we manufacture our lives”
-Snog The Future

Here in the States people seem to be watching the news, eyeing the financial section of the newspaper and praying to their gods that the dollar doesn’t collapse like the WTC. Folks are without jobs, Wall Street is riddled with pot-holes, and the government is spending China’s money trying to patch our leaky roof. Ben Bernanke at the FED ready to slash interest rates down to a single percent as if somehow cheaper borrowing costs will drive debt-laden Americans deeper down the rabbit hole. OPEC has decided to produce one-and-a-half million less barrels of oil each day so they can continue lining the pockets of Shell and Exxon-Mobile. Everywhere I look the people with the money, the people with the power, are looking for bandages to patch up the Titanic global economy, but the water keeps flowing in.

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“There is no need for the president of the United States to be smart. He can be hovering on the grim cusp of brain death and still be the most powerful man in the world.”
–Hunter S. Thompson

There is no justice, equity, rhyme, reason nor value left in the American political system. All is fair in airport-bathroom love and preventative war. The most obvious clue that our system of governance will not soon reflect any of the aforementioned attributes is the latest turn in our presidential debates. McCain, in a primal display of ape-like feces flinging, turned an opportunity to address any issue at all in favor of his favorite new fatigued catch-phrase: Joe Six-Pack. Between McCain’s desperate attempts to dress himself as a Clint-Eastwoodesque underdog, and his feeble pleas for votes from the pious poor in this country, one gets the feeling that this man is comprised entirely of crap. It is then fitting that political discourse is reduced to fawning over the comments of some plumber on the campaign trail, and one can see in a crisp, sober manner that our country is floating clockwise on a path deep into the shitter.

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She woke me up. The loud synthetic beeps invading my dreams plucked me quickly from my sleep. I’m fogged, disillusioned and unable to adequately interpret or communicate. The voice is soft, jovial, alive with a playful tone. Mine is harsh, dusty and hibernating still. Slowly the speech changes, transforms from a subtle cipher into the unencrypted input my mind can manage. In line my conscious, cognitive, creative all perk up. I am capable of full duplex conversation and awake, finally.

The pile sits in ash: silent, waiting. The souls have run bone-dry and call out solely in extinguished death rattles. They mourn like a still bay after a pouring of rain. They lay there, through the sepia genocide, without regret. They are cast, one by one, into the dismally dry pit. Each victim resonates its death onto the burdened backs of the executioners. Even still, more are burned down and pitched into the void. Every breath is short, stifled and quiet as they pay their toll and take the last travel to Dante’s over-crowded waiting room. Each has a story to tell, an interesting individual life to sell: trying to make the dimes to buy its way from hell.

He walked to the truck – the rusting, sharp and bitter, beaten thing. It looked like it was decaying on four wheels the way a fox would fall apart lying dead against a tree stump, the way tanks hit by LAWs looked lying in the Gaza strip mid-day, torn apart, battered and forgotten; it was waiting for its page in a history book or the obituary section. He wiggled the key in the lock, twisting the dagger in its already fading frame – a euthanasia of a sort. The door crept open with creaking imprecision and a terrified, death-rattle of a cry. Its hinges were bleeding rust, and everywhere one looked it was falling apart.

The interior – muddy, stained and aging bitter from an unfulfilled life that left a slight coat of ash and cigarette burns in the seat – wafted the sour scent of the sun piercing into the buried fiber and uncovering a noxious odor from deep within its crevasse. A few decades of now unfamiliar faces and alien places were recorded in olfactory precision along the bench. Saddam’s fabled mustard gas was still seeping from its canister years after the gulf, years after anyone could still care; it was rising in undeath from the worn seats. Slow, gentle, deadly as belladonna, it seductively lurched through the air.

Guns can make very convincing arguments. Few people will say no to a gun, and when they speak, anyone who they’ve made eye contact with is actively listening. I tell myself I’d rather be a motivational shooter and save my throat a few hours work. This girl: this fucking girl is the driving force behind my current dilemma. Picture the nicest girl you can think of, the type of person middle class moms once were. Picture her with enough disorders to make Freud’s unconscious tremble in the grave. I can’t decide how I feel because everything about her says land mine. If I like her or hate her, I feel bad. So I’m confused, and I’m starting to wonder why I bother with some people, and really all people for that matter. Days spent in isolation seldom end with disgust. Is it sad that a picture definition of schizoid could be a motivational speaker? I think it is too. What can you do though? I have this cult-leader personality that, while absolutely fake, hangs people on my every word. So instead of drinking some bitter Kool-Aide, I get them to pay money for absolutely nothing. It’s not as if people who need motivational speakers actually follow through with anything. You can bring a horse a map, but you can’t make him navigate.

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