Some people insist on making a case for their own chosen mediocrity (it's always a choice), and Austin is their Mecca.  The poem I wrote today is true, but it leaves out the good stuff.  Perhaps because the bad outweighs the good at a ratio of 100:1.  But last Sunday night was fun, and seeing Bill again was great, and his friends at the Section 8 house, even though I am not down with drinking.  They were kind enough to keep that spirit away from me, and drink somewhere else after it was clear it made me tired.  Drinking doesn't tempt me, but it's taxing.

But Austin is a nightmare, in spite of those people.  3 times I was presumed upon to be stupid and weak enough to accept moral improvement from rainbow-colored strangers in the mist.  3 times in a week.  Once at a hotel, once at a hamburger joint, and once, passively, at an open mic, at which the host took a jab at me by declaring that I was "getting some aggression out."  That's how much Austin doesn't rock.  It refuses to rock.  It is religiously devoted to arrogance and weakness.  It's a limp piece of lettuce floating down a river of rainbow-colored sewage.  It is a shot of estrogen mimickers with a soymilk queso chaser.  It's sad.  Austin is a beautiful town.  But it's what happens when you outsource your culture to artless, arrogant control freaks.  Support your independent artists today.  I am not kidding you.  We need it.

My reaction to the presumptuous, patronizing lesson in social and cultural enlightenment was decidedly un-Christian, and I don't think the high priests of the lower spiritual plane were expecting it.  But after 4 years of living in a culture full of mostly friendly, grateful people, it genuinely took me off guard and filled me with loathing I was unprepared to contain.  I confess that my contempt for them was expressed in terms both eloquent and clear.  Colorful language was employed in the most disdainful manner possible, I admit.

I hate to break it to you, but there are some people who are incapable of a golden age.  Some people are resistant to such things, and are a bellwether of something decidedly less cool.  People who will never take the hint, even after they get to hell.  Unfortunately, in lieu of repenting, they will be peeled off the earth by a rapid series of violent, extenuating circumstances.  Austin is their Mecca.  If you live there, buy a bulletproof umbrella.  It's a hellhole.

Oakwood Cemetery 2007

I wrote "Austin is a Special Ed Class" to purge myself of the toxic vibe imposed on me by a week spent in the artistic and intellectual No Man's Land of the Texas East Berlin, but it made me want to re-visit some of my older writing, back when the place to me was new.  I found a folder full of Austin poems, and dusted off the cobwebs before I realized that the cobwebs were part of the writing, and couldn't be removed.  There were several contenders for re-posting, from "Mad Flowers" to "Vampire Cats," but I finally settled on "Loaded On Valium Everyday," even though I like those other titles better.

The terminal medical condition known as being "Loaded On Valium Everyday" was compressed into the shorter English word "Love" by doctors who got tired of writing the condition out on their prescription pads every time some poor sap broke into ecstatic weeping while being consumed by a fleeting-yet-eternal, codependent inner flame.  In time, the meaning of the word "Love" evolved from "a dangerous chemical addiction," to a dangerous emotional one.  By the end of the 19th century, the epidemic of codependent saps had run its course, and the unstable groundwork for Emotional Socialism had already been friend-zoned by society at large.  The more aggressive, independent "Emotional Capitalists" began to untangle the faulty wiring in the beheaded, empty puppet known as "Love," and the EMOSOCS retaliated by opening a gay bar and starting several world wars, most of which are raging like an unchecked Viagra fire to this day.

Pablo Smog was an early 20th-century EMOCAP philosopher who played aggressive, angry love songs with an ink pen dipped in hellfire.  The flames of rage and desire leaped off the pages of his writing and singed the hearts of hirsute, EMOSOC hippies like Karl Marx, Walt Whitman, and numerous other jealous, talentless idlers.  A contemporary of Dmitri Shostakovich, Pablo Smog was a part-time "ghost reader" for the Russian genius, providing thematic and spiritual guidance through the tumultuous inner and political landscape of the time.  Ever the intellectual parasite, Marx even co-opted Pablo Smog's famous statement about the "religion of the muses," adapting it to his lazy EMOSOC purposes.

"Emotional opiates are the religion of the muses."
Pablo Smog

Shostakovich once visited Pablo Smog in his shotgun shack in East Austin, where the duo composed the very first anachronistic love song in advance, months before the protagonists would meet.  Pablo had written "Loaded On Valium Everyday" about The Darker of Two Evils only 2 days prior, and Shostakovich helped him write "The Blonder of Two Evils" about the girl who snapped the photo in the cemetery up above, way off in the future.

"The Blonder of Two Evils" became a massive hit at some point in the near future, while the sentiments expressed in "Loaded On Valium Everyday" were eventually displaced by super-gay flamboyant minimalism, militant feminalism, and an entire generation of Sigma males and MGTOW monks.

Here's the poem.  The '07 in the date at the end refers to the year 1907, not 2007 as most scholars unanimously disagree.  The poem is an interesting artifact from a time before emotional antibiotics had been invented, when people still believed in love.  Most people now understand "Love" to be a dangerous medical condition.  For better or worse, the epidemic has been successfully repressed.

The Austin poems, including "L.O.V.E.," are featured in Dancing on the Ceiling of My Existential Kitchen, a collection of random poetry and writings by yours truly.  The ghost readers of the silly, weightless tome are Dmitri Shostakovich and Pablo Smog, sworn enemies of the narcotic religion of the muse.

Thank you in advance for glistening,
N

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Loaded On Valium Everyday

I'm sitting by the river
looking up at the sky
with the chemtrail
screensaver,
while a Mexican baby
howls obscenities
at overweight
joggers
and a brown bird is hopping
on invisible
eggshells

all my ravens these days,
I see picking through
garbage
like psychotic
artists
with purple berets
and shiny blue
bruises

nobody chooses,
and no one
refuses
a beautiful woman

they go where they please

they boil & freeze

they drive a man crazy

for angel-eye valium;

they turn up the volume

they beat up the ballroom

they say she never blinks

or thinks twice about calling

her found-object

lovers,

and God bless her for it,

but the record has to end

somewhere

4/26/07