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 .   .   .   .  .   .  .   .  .   .             "GIMME THAT NEEDLE"  
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  . . .  .   .   . . .  . . .  . . .                by Infernal


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        Fellow scribes rant and kick at the stupefied, hoping to shake a few
 of them loose from their barnacled grip on their TV’s, on their sports
 teams, on their SUV’s, on their churches.  Homo suckerus, the human tick.
 Give ‘em something to bury their head in and enough satiation for their
 bellies and crotches, and they’ll purr till they die.  And we of the
 Underground Intelligentsia want to stop them, to expose their pincers to the
 cold, bracing wind of reality, refreshing and brisk as the air in winter.
 Right?

        Fuck that and fuck you.  I’m jealous as hell of those shlubs and
 their stupid diversions.  Do you think I want to sit here in the middle of
 the night, brimming with five-dollar words and four-dollar wine?  If I could
 possibly slap on an Abercrombie hat, hop in my Tracker, crank up the
 Cristina Aguilera, cruise to the local sports bar, pick up some brain-dead
 bit of fluff with surgically enhanced tits and have selfish, pointless sex
 before my equally faithless girlfriend got home from her nail technician job
 – I’d do it!  I can’t, and chances are you can’t, and are we mad at those
 dipshits because they’re so pathetic, or because they look so much happier
 than us?

        If I could blindly, blithely go to church, believe in God, and feel
 the absolute swaddling comfort of unswerving faith in utter bullshit, I’d
 go.  If I could truly have big fun sitting around a big-screen TV with some
 like-minded mulletheads, watching race cars drive in circles and getting
 drunk, I’d do it.  If it could fulfill me to go to the mall, buy Kid Rock
 CD’s and count down the hours till the next date-rape-fest at the local
 college bar – hey, count me in!

        If only happiness was that easy!

        One of my mentors, a wrinkled English teacher with a heart as bitter
 as her coffee breath, said to me once that she’d wished her children had
 been born stupid.  That seemed cruel to me ten years ago (as did many of the
 things I heard her say, I believe I even called her callous once!) – makes a
 helluva lot of sense now, though.  Why NOT be a happy asshole?  Why NOT be
 as shallow as a puddle?  It seems to be working for a lot of people.
 Caring, thinking, hacking out your own identity in a life made up of bogus
 choices and dazzling, vapid distractions – what does it do?  It doesn’t make
 YOU happier, and it convinces all those other people around you that you’re
 a snobby prick.  And is that wrong?  Do we get anything but a grim, nobly
 doomed self-satisfaction by being different?  We spend our lives crucifying
 ourselves, martyrs to our egos, slaves to the desire to be slaves to
 nothing.

        And the worst part it, we can’t fake it.  If I could convince myself
 I really wanted the pasteboard and rags, the charlatan’s smile and the
 shitty music, I’d leave you all in a second and mainline myself on the
 mediocrity everyone else seems addicted to.  Smack me up – get me out of
 this angry head and into some Tommy Gear, pronto!  But it won’t stick.  We
 can’t bullshit ourselves – we don’t know what’s right, but we know it ain’t
 that.  So we sit in our foxholes, in our e-zines and song lyrics, in our
 coffee shops and bedrooms, and we throw rocks at the squares, because it’s
 all we ever learned how to do.

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 .           anada 106                   by Infernal  (c)2000 anada e'zine .
      
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