American Paradise

Her voice always takes me to the same place
A place of open plains, and a long stretching road that never ends
It flows to the edge of the earth, and back again
She runs her hand on the back of my neck
It'll be okay baby, we'll get goin, we'll figure this place out 
Nothing but space, space to outstretch your arms as far as the horizon
Praying to the sun god, and the beautiful angels of the coast
Where the desert meets the ocean, and the deep blue flows
She looks at me; I can feel her gaze through those big sunglasses
She lights her last cigarette, and exhales slow
Damn it, what happens after perfect? What else is there? 
Modern love, I thought, what a ride
We'd drive till we could smell the Pacific
We'll run down the beach with the rhythms of the shore
The desert devil in the rear view only going till we can't go anymore
Wherever you may be, whatever you'll be doing, you'll remember these days 

DARK ROOMS

“Man look at the tits on this one though.”

“Lord have mercy, those ones are fake, no doubt about it.”

“Who gives a shit, they’re fantastic.” The bartender puts down a glass from shining it and leans over the bar to get a better look of what the two guys were looking at on their phones. “Let me look at that Bill . . . jesus! You were right! Unreal! Who is she?”

“It looks like her name is. . Penelope, whata dark Spanish dame.”

“You know her?”

“Nah, its this app, sets you up with these prostitutes, well, I guess on here they’re called ‘escorts’ .. it’s called findher.”

“Escorts?” the bartender asked

“Yeah, they’re high class hookers I suppose.”

“Hm, Los Angeles just keeps getting better and better”. I sat there listening to all of this at the end of the bar, what fucking slobs, probably don’t have the money or class to really see a woman more than what she is in a photo, they don’t have that kind of capability. I tipped the last bit of whiskey I had in my glass into the back of my throat, and slammed down the glass on the table. Joe, the bartender, comes walking over, “alright Colten, that’s enough for you, I’m cutting your ass off.”

“Yeah, yeah fuck you man I’m leaving!”

“That’s how you talk to your psychiatrist?”

“Till next time fellas! Have fun drooling on your phones.” I walked out and down the block to my building. My doorman Zach grabbed the door for me, and my arm, as I was about to fall over. “Howdy doody my main man?”

“Jesus Colten, again? It’s Tuesday!”

“Everyone is a fuckin critic, just get me to the elevator.” I got into the elevator, and punched the 15^th floor. The motion of the elevator mixed with the whiskey had my head spinning like a top so I ran down my hallway, into my place, and had to throw my face into the toilet -- I made it mostly. I crawled off the bathroom floor into the shower. I felt the warm water washing over me, and everything became clear. I had nothing, I mean maybe I did. I had my books, and my old Benz, I have this apartment, I have LA – for what it’s worth, and I have my writing. 5 books I thought, but for what.

            I woke the next morning, made some coffee, had a smoke on the balcony, and went back in to wrestle with the blank page. I was working on my 6^th book, about a guy meeting a women, falling in love and running down the stars and stripes escaping every bit of the world around them, at least that’s where I thought it was heading. Afternoon became night, and night into late night, and I cracked the seal of another wild turkey. I had banged out 15 pages, whether they were good or not, who knows. I pulled out my phone and searched for the app, findher, found it after a while and downloaded it. Fuck it, what the hell, here alone in this apartment, I bet these women are begging for a decent guy to give them a call. After swiping through numerous faces, and tit pics I came to her, Penelope. Alright, alright, alright, I gave it a call. A man with a dark voice answered, “hello?”

“hey, I’m trying to reach Penelope?”

“What’s your address?”

“Uh, it’s, wait man how do I know I’m not talking to a cop?”

“I’ll ask again, what’s your address?”

“1459 Washington Ave, Room 156.”

“Be there in a half hour.” Then he hung up. I jumped up from my chair and paced back and forth in the room, okay fuck alright, just did that, alright. CLEAN, I’ll clean up a little, maybe another shower? No I smell fine, maybe beat off? Okay yeah maybe, definitely have another drink. 30 minutes later on the dot there was a knock on my door. I opened it, and it was the pimp, same nice fella I talked to on the phone. “You again?” I asked

“Pay before.”

“All right big guy, what’s the going rate?”

“A G for an hour, 1500 for 2.”

“Here’s 1800, go get yourself something nice.”

“Okay boss.” Penelope walked in, she was a dark Spanish dame. Long dark brown hair, dark eyes, face absolutely designed for beauty, red lipstick, black heels, wrapped up in a long fur jacket. “Where?” she asked.

“Uh, living room I guess, just down there to the left.” I shut the door on the pimp.

“Quite the place you got here.”

“Ah, yeah thanks..”

“How much you pay for a spot like this?”

“I think 1.1, something like that.” She walked down the hallway slow and smooth, walking from some heaven that had brought her here, pious to the world from the bottom of her being to every tip of every strand of dark hair. She was made for love, sex, and this, she was this.

“What do you do mister?”

“I’m a writer.”

“A writer?” she sat down on the long couch, I walked over to the bar.

“Yeah, a writer.”

“What books have you written that I might know?”

“Uhm Devil in a New Dress, God Hates You, what do you drink?”

“Gin, gin and tonic.”

“Satan’s Paradise.”

“Oh! I know that one! I loved that thing .. wait.. you’re Colten Fox?!”

“Yep.” As I dropped a few cubes into the glass. I had her now.

“Wow I’m about to fuck a New York Times Bestseller!”

“Hahah that’s great.”

“What a girl can’t be excited? You’re one of my favorites!”

“Well.. thanks..”

“Hookers read books too Mr. Fox!”

“Okay, all right, here’s your GnT.” I sat down on the couch close to her.

“Have you been working on anything new?”

“Yeah, I guess. I’ve wanted to do more, something with a full punch of grit. Something that will grab you and hang you over the edge and when you turn the last page it’ll feel like you’ve lived twice. You know?”

“I’m not sure, sounds sexy though”

“All right, all right. I’m saying I don’t want something that people will be necessarily comfortable with, something that will bring a real story with it, something to widen eyes.”

“I like your classic love stories though. They took me to a place and world where I don’t ever really see.”

“You think love exists in everyone? You think every person can love?”

“I don’t know, Colten, that’s sad to think about.”

“Here we are.”

Penelope takes a long drink from her gin & tonic.

“Let me take your jacket.” I said.

“Thanks.”

“You called yourself a hooker earlier, didn’t you?” I asked over my shoulder going to the closet near the front door.

“Why yes, what else?”

“I just feel as if that’s what .. a derogatory term?” I yelled down the hallway while hanging up the jacket, turning around, and headed back down the hallway to the living room. She hadn’t responded. I rounded the corner to the living room and nearly dropped my glass full of bourbon. She had taken off the little black dress and had on the most ridiculous lingerie, ridiculous in the most fantastic form. This was Satan’s mistress, and certainly his paradise, where had she been when I wrote that damn thing. “I’ll do it for you if you really, really like it”, she said staring me dead in the eyes. “Oh Jesus.” I walked over and we did the deed right then and there on the couch.

            Midway thru I looked up from her and out the windows at the city of angels feeling more than ever before. Maybe this is true desperation, maybe this is what a man is, looking and searching for reality yet having to get it in it’s temporary forms, paying the man no matter what the circumstance. Just a blur, a dreamily crazed wakening of time, money, and loneliness. This is what I had come to Los Angeles for, to contact my most animalistic qualities in a place where everyone felt the same, no judgments in the morning, no reason to hide. A jungle of man made delusions, and manifest destiny, all funneling through The American Dream.

            She grabbed my neck, and ran her hand down my chest, “I don’t know who’s more lucky tonight.” And never for a moment in the blazing heat of it all did I think I was paying for what I was getting. She was more.

            The next morning I woke with a headache. I fumbled to the medicine cabinet, and put my face under the sink. I think it was Thursday by this point, maybe Friday. It really didn’t matter. I called up Emma, a good friend of mine with always a good ear for listening. That’s what’s wrong with people these days and why I stay away from them as much as possible, because nobody fucking listens, they just wait to speak again, not her though. She’ll take it all in. We met in college and have been friends since; she was my lawyer, and at times agent, but mostly like sister that you could talk to about the dirty stuff. She had an extended lunch because of meetings so she came over. I brewed some coffee, and put the pan on the stove for some eggs. “Scrambled okay with you?”

“Whatever you’re serving chef” she said from the bar seat

“All right, I’ll put some feta and spinach in there, I know that’s your favorite.”

“Why’d you call me over here, we never meet here, we’re never sober either.”

“Oh.. I don’t know.”

“You have any work for me? Anything I can sell?”

“Maybe eventually, I’m doing field work at the moment.”

“Christ Colten, what have you gotten your self into?” I turned around from the eggs to face her, “I met someone, quite the number too.”

“YOU, you met someone?”

“Why yes I did.”

“A name?”

“Penelope.”

“What does she do?” I turned around back to the eggs to throw some more spinach in.

“She’s a uhm a stress reliever, a spiritual pleasurer.”

“Like physically, like a masseuse?”

“She massages, yes.”

“And what was that second part?”

“Spiritual pleasurer.”

            There was about a minute and a half pause. “Turn around and look at me Colten”. She used that tone that I’ve heard her speak in before we went into meetings, and when she had to bail me out a time or two – so I turned around. “Is this Penelope a .. hooker?”

“Oh Jesus Christ, that’s such a derogatory term!” I turned back to the now cooked eggs, and pulled two plates out of the top cabinet. “Wow, I’ve seen you, and heard of you doing some shit in the time we’ve known each other, but this takes the cake.”

“Think about it though Emma, a lonely man up in a glass house in the other city of sin, finding the morality in the people that aren’t supposed to have any?”

“You write it, I’ll sell it.”

“Deal.”

“Just don’t think you can save her, don’t think that she can be saved.”

I pushed her lunch in front of her, “don’t worry, material gathering only.”

“how much is this assignment running you?”

“Ooooh about 1500 a pop.”

“Shit, well, okay, this next ones on me, get a fucking punch card or something.”

            Emma left shortly after. I went back to writing, then getting up and staring out the windows every 10 minutes or so, recalling the night before. I haven’t had one like that for a long time, someone who you play moments back and forth with in your mind for the days after until you get another hit. It’s an addiction for a desire, and a plague of lust. Not only the things she’d do, but her, just her, she was fearless because I obviously wasn’t the first, and there wasn’t anything to be insecure about, it was us at our most humanistic elements, stripped of any doubt, or suspicion that could permeate in a “regular relationship”. We had an obligation, an informal contract to do what we were there to do.

            Afternoon turned to night, and eventually night into acceptable drinking night. I pulled out my phone, and called the number again. My dark voiced pimp friend picked up, “yes?”

“It’s Colten, from last night, I want a round 2.”

“She’s booked for the night, john, I can put you down for tomorrow at the same time.”

“But . .”

“Tomorrow or no?”

“Sure man, tomorrow, I just know she’d rather have me!” the line was dead. I guess tomorrow it was. I looked deeply at my Wild Turkey from across the table, and grabbed my keys instead and headed down the local watering hole. The same place where I had initially found out about this mess. I always walked; it was only a few blocks. There were some younger guys standing out on the corner swaying back and forth talking. I thought fuck it, and walked up to them, “hey you guys have any blow to sell?”

“Fuck outta heer old man.” The tall one said.

“I may be old, but come on, do you or do you not.”

“How much you got?”

“50 bucks, how about that?”

“Aight, old man, aight.”

“Hey you guys always round here?”

“Why the fuck you wanna know, youz a cop?” asked a different one

“Uh no, I just live around here, so if you gyp me, I’ll go somewhere else or I can be a repeating customer, just saying.”

“Nah man, I got you bro.” Said the tall one.

“Aiiiight.” I said.

“But just don’t do that.” The tall one said. They all laughed. The tall one handed me a bag, and I threw my key into it, my key up to the bottom of my nose, and breathed deep. I closed my eyes, and shook my head. ALL RIGHT!

            About an hour later around 12:30 or so the two guys from the other night came in. I waited for them to order drinks, then from a few bar stools down said, “hey.. fellas.”

“Yeah?” one of them said. They were sloppy old degenerates, just oozing out from every crevice and into the bar stool through their rum and cokes. “I checked out that app that you both were talking about the other night..”

“You fuck one of them?”

“Oh yeah.”

“You sick fuck you, those skanks are trash.”

“2 G’s a go is trash? Can’t be worse than either of your old ladies.”

“The fuck you say?”

“haha oh come on, those pasty old girls waiting for you at home.”

“Keep talking, please give us a reason.” Just then my phone rang. I winked at them and took the call. “Yes?”

“Hey, it’s me.”

“Penelope?”

“Yeah, wanna come over? I want to see you”

“Off the books?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, I can’t figure it out, maybe it was something you said. One of those unexplainable things I guess.”

“Okay. Where do you live?”

“1279 Cleveland Way SE, almost into Santa Monica.”

“Jesus, I’ll go get the Benz.”

“Are you good to drive?”

“I’m good enough to see you, yes, I’ll see you in a bit.”

“Okay.” And I hung up, and turned my head to my buds.

“Really wish I could stay and look through those photos in your wallets of your pathetic lives, but I have to go have some fun.”

“You fucking do that, you fuckin go have a grand old time yah piece of shit.” I gave them the peace sign and then flipped it to the middle finger while I walked through the door. Maybe I was looking for something, maybe I wanted to get in someone’s face, and them to get into mine, to keep living, keep towing the line till I figure who is tending the light at the end of the tunnel. Fuck them, those old sick beasts, too weak to live, too laughable to die. 

            I went down to the garage and slumped into the Benz, an old 82 black convertible with a coke white top. I stuck my keys in my bag one more time, and then threw them into the ignition. I’ve always liked older cars; they have more truth to them, built tough, with more conviction. You could feel it in the way it rode on the hills, and down into the valley. My favorite place to just drive in the old set of wheels is the road into Malibu, right along the beaten path of the Pacific Coast Highway. Just rolling up through the hills with the top down, the smell of the Pacific, not seeing it yet, but just smelling the salt in the air, and when it’s about the time that day falls into evening, and it’s the moon’s time to clock on, you can see the sun sinking into the ocean coming down from the hills, and the giant orange orb on the edge of earth, and creation. It’s true, real, and that’s what I’ll think about when I’m moments away from leaving this earth. 

            I rolled into Santa Monica about a half hour later. I pulled up to her place. A 3-story brick building. I called her, and she came down. I walked up trying to hide a smile and she wrapped her arms around my neck and put her face into my chest. I could smell her hair and her perfume. She was wearing torn up jeans, and a pull over sweatshirt. She was clearly off the clock. “It’s good to see you, sorry I live so far away.”

“No worries P, I had nothing better to do..”

“Come on up.” She lived on the 3^rd floor.  A nice sized studio with everything you really need. I sat down on the edge of her bed. “Want to listen to some records?” Penelope asked.

“You have vinyl?”

“Only way to do it, how about some blues, maybe, Davis?”

“Yes.” I laid down on the bed and shut my eyes and listened the horns, and the piano, and everything. It was all there in that room, nothing else but time, and her and me, and the music. No reason to think or fear. She lit a few big candles, and turned out the lights. “Wanna get high?” she asked

“Of course I would love to get high.” She reached into her bedside table and pulled out a pipe and a bag. We smoked a bowl and listened to jazz. She put her head on my chest, and I ran my hands through her dark hair. “Don’t ask me about my work, it’s just us right here, and now, I don’t believe in God either.”

“Okay.. that’s okay, what did you want to be when you were little?”

“A veterinarian, and you?”

“A rock star, I wanted to be Kurt Cobain”

“And cut your hand on angel hair??”

“Aha yeah, yeah, you know your shit!”

“Oh come on baby, you don’t know a damn thing about me..”

“You’re right, but I think I want to”. She looked up at me and put her chin on my chest, I looked down at her. “No you don’t.. you really don’t.” She said. I broke eye contact and looked at the ceiling. “You wouldn’t want me anymore, I’d make you sick to hear these stories I keep up in here, what I have locked away, sometimes I feel like swan-diving off of the roof, but I don’t, I just keep going, why, I don’t know.” Penelope said.

“See, that’s why I want to, that’s real, you’re a real person, you don’t meet many of those in this city, fuck, anywhere.”

“Where are you from Colten?” She moved up and laid on her side, and I turned over on mine, both looking at each other again. “I’m from Seattle, I moved down here after college to chase dreams, and meet beautiful women, and drive to their apartments at 1 in the morning.”

“Oh shush, you didn’t have to come!” She said with a smile.

“How about you bella, where are you from?”

“New Orleans.”

“That explains the music.”

“Everyone should love jazz, fuck the squares that don’t.” I reached into my shirt pocket, and pulled out 2 Marlboros, lit both in my mouth, and passed one to her.

“How’d you know I smoked?” she asked

“I didn’t.”

“Tell me something.” She asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Tell me a story, something that will show me the man I’m actually laying across from.”

“Okay well.. you’re the first one to hear this..”

“All right.”

“Recently I’ve been seeing women from a far, or even some times in my dreams and they look sort of like my English teacher from high school.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“About 2 years ago, while I was visiting home for Christmas, only a month before she committed suicide.”

“Oh Christ Colten.”

“Yeah, I don’t get it, she went out brutal too, I just miss the fuck out of her, she taught me so much, and never asked for a fucking thing, I don’t want to understand her reasons, I just have never had any body even remotely close to me die. It just has loomed over me, and fuck I mean I ran into her a month before, I just wish we could’ve talked for longer, you know I’m not gonna say, ‘I wish I could’ve saved her!’ that bullshit, I just wish we could’ve talked for longer, maybe that would’ve or could’ve done something.”

“My God, yeah you can’t plan those sorts of things, everyone’s got it figured out in reflection.”

“Yeah, and I was back up there in Seattle this year, and, one night I was writing at this café, and I decided to drive past my high school before going back home, this is about 3 weeks after she offed herself, my parents live in a different part of town so I honestly never got up to that area after I graduated. It was windy, and a bit rainy. I parked my car out on the street, and walked up the back way to where I had her class, this is at like fucking 1 in the morning, by the way. I walked up to the window and lit a cigarette, fucking wind blowing like crazy, but I just stood there in front of the window, and looked in, trying to feel something, you know? Like I wanted to bawl my fucking eyes out right then and there, but nothing. It started to just pour after 10 minutes so I threw out my smoke and walked back to the car. I lit another when I got into my car and I think I got like 4 blocks down the road before I started dropping ashes on myself from trembling so much. I mean I was just crying like a fucking baby, just wailing there in the car alone, I truly honestly can’t even remember a time where I had cried before then, it had been so long. Just fucking terrible the whole goddamn thing, she was so alone yet, not, everyone fucking loved her at that school.” She leaned in without saying a word and held my face, I leaned into hers. We just laid there together in the dark room, but we didn’t fuck, we just held each other till sleep took control, and night turned to morning. I woke up and outstretched my arms without opening my eyes, and I didn’t feel her. I looked over and there was a note, “coffee in pot.”

            I rolled back into downtown. Thought about giving Emma a call, but instead slept the rest of the day away. I had a dream about Penelope, and we were somewhere, I’m not sure where, but it was clear and the whole dream was calm, and it felt okay. We drifted in space and I heard her voice, as if we were going down a long road next to the ocean front, and we kept running and driving, and never stopping, just kept with the motion of time until there was no time, no place, just us, and the sun, and the moon, every wall broken, every reality seen. Then the dream shifted, and swirled and the whole thing just felt like I was falling, and trying to reach out and grab something, but it was there wasn’t anything. There was no God there, I only heard Penelope’s voice in distant echoes, but there was no divine intervention to help, I just kept falling, and that’s when the weird music began to play drowning out her voice.

            I woke up with a sense of longing, but not exactly knowing what for. I paced around my room, and felt as if I wanted to shut everything off. The static, and the noise of it all. Los Angeles, the lifestyle I had chose, the writing, and the not writing, and the same depraved bullshit of living. I grabbed the bottle of Wild Turkey, and a glass from the cabinet.

            She was scheduled to come to my place at 12, she got there at 1. I heard a knock at the door, and I paid the pimp, and Penelope walked in down the hallway and into the living room without saying a word. She just looked at me as she walked by. Those dark eyes. I shut the door, and went down into the living room. She was sitting there on the couch still in her fur coat. “So?” I asked.

“Hey.”

“How’s it?”

“I don’t know, Colten, I don’t want you to pay.”

“Mm all right.”

“But I also can’t do this again.”

I walked over to the bar, and made a gin and tonic, as well as a bourbon. “I can pay more?”

“NO, you’re not listening! I can’t see you anymore!” I walked over, and handed her the glass.

“What, Penelope?”

“I’m trying to say, I have feelings for you, and I had feelings once before, and I can’t go back, I can’t do that again Colten..”

“We can leave! We can go up the coast till we find somewhere, we can go to Big Sur, or Redwoods, fuck, lets go to Seattle, lets leave, and go!”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying fuck this! Lets run with it!”

“I can’t do that.”

“You’re confused, and you’re afraid of anything real!”

“You just want someone that will nod their head, and listen to you talk, you wouldn’t care if it was me, or some other whore.”

“What are you even saying? I like you, I really do Penelope! You’re reaching for things that aren’t there, you’re putting up walls!”

“STOP, fucking STOP!” She screamed through tears, makeup running.

“Lets go, right now, lets leave.”

“I have a life here, this is all I know now! I’m a fucking whore, I fuck for money, I can’t love, I can’t see you!”

“PENELOPE! PLEASE!”

“Stop it Colten, you’re making this more difficult! Please, just fucking let GO!”

The door opened, and in came the pimp. “What the fuck is going on?”

“I want to leave, I need to go.” Penelope said crying, and getting up from the couch towards the door.

“THIS is YOU! THIS is all YOU!” I yelled at the pimp. He started walking towards me, I grabbed a bottle from the bar, and ran at him, bottle of aged whiskey high above, he grabbed it in mid swing with his left arm, and got me with a hook from his right, the bottle flew, and crashed on the hardwood.

“Christ’s sake, stop, please!” Penelope screamed.

“You’re fucking killing her!” I pointed at the pimp, “and you brought her in and wont let her go, where the fuck is freewill? Huh motherfucker?!” I charged at him again and he hit me again square, I fell back, and hit the floor, blood pouring from my nose. I looked up through the blur of it all and saw Penelope one last time, makeup smeared and still trembling, she looked at me in the eyes with pure fear, fear of not knowing, and never taking that leap, and with the idea that she never would again.

            It was that feeling again, that pulling sensation of going somewhere that is too reflective of reality, all within split seconds, cut, and displaced images. Falling into a white space with the weird music, and trembling with one hand letting go of the wheel, and the other reaching to the cosmos. I saw it all there lying on the hardwood, I felt it, my teachers face and her smile once again shifting to her in a bathtub with red water pouring over the edges. I saw Penelope’s dark eyes, felt her smell, and the touch of her hands on my face. Then a God-like figure, and every fallen angel in linked arms walking down skid row, uprooting plastic Palm Trees with each whisking step. Those sloppy old beasts of bar flies, and the glass windows of my glass house, floating bottles of whiskey, and long lines of Columbian, all in a loud cacophony of some false hope of my delusions. I was trying to swim to the surface but there wasn’t any surface, just more crashing waves. I’ll just keep running, and keep escaping to the next whim, to that light and whoever is tending it. Fuck hope, and this place, its all a façade of the dream that never existed.

“You can’t write your way to me, this isn’t real love”, and then Penelope turned away slowly. I shut my eyes till the sun came through the windows.

            I got up and washed my face, tended my wounds. I grabbed my keys, and my sunglasses, and went down to the garage, opened the door of the Benz and took down the white top. I drove up Pacific Coast Highway, towards the water, to hear the ocean’s choir, thinking of a different time of a place that is true, with the shapeless dreams, and tepid air flowing around. Bombing through those hills, looking at the road ahead, it all felt real.

FORGETTING & LOSING: THE STARS AND STRIPES

May 25^th, 2015. I am looking through news articles, and images of white tombstones, and widows lying down next to them with babies in their arms, and crying family members embracing because of the fallen. Through all of that, one thing in particular grabbed me, “every day is memorial day”. Okay, I thought, maybe it is. See I go to a public university that is funded and subsidized through tax dollars of the generous souls of Seattle, and the greater state of Washington. Washington is in the upper left corner, which resides in the United States of America. The University of Washington itself does not formally recognize Memorial Day. They have a gathering and recognition of sorts for Veterans Day, but not Memorial Day, up until this year, (yet was put on by the Veteran's Group, and received donated mini flags from the student Republicans). Sure, I didn’t have to go to class, which was appreciated, but that’s only because it’s a nationally appointed holiday. But as an objective bystander how can I not acknowledge this blunder? Why isn’t there a fucking parade, why aren’t large gatherings people weeping at the bottom of flagpoles? Instead we go to beaches, or a 3-day vacation and raise our hotdogs, and lite American crafted beers towards Jesus, and the heavens and bugle, “GOD BLESS AMERICA!”

            God bless the place where a few pathetic pansy ass men sit in air conditioned rooms with staff to the end of time, and anything anybody would ever want, and push buttons to send young men to die in jungles, sand shit holes, or wherever the next “enemy” lies, all for the few beast’s delusional escapades. Sending drones of lives to the front of hell to die for their name, and the nation of the free. And for-fucking-get even the idea of Bush, or Obama out there in the sand dunes of Iraq or Afghanistan in a flak jacket gripping the trigger of a 50 cal. screaming at the circling bald eagles above, “FOR LIFE, AND FOR LIBERTY!”

            But, hey, you either fight them there, or fight them here. Yes, maybe, perhaps. But would anyone want to fight us before we try and eliminate them? Maybe, but how can we even start to figure that out when we bring the initial fire almost every damn time? Burning full villages with the simple drop of napalm ripping the flesh of disintegrating babies, or a miscalculated drone strike taking out a family and plowing them down into the jihad hell they woke from.

            If you look at the numbers, and accounts, the great nation of truth, and liberty has been killing the unfortunate for majority of its reign. Nation of peace? No. Nation of justice, perhaps, depending on the self titled patriot you ask.

            Take it as you may, but I love this country. I have attempted to reap every benefit that sits in front of me. I come from Veteran parents that signed their lives away for 4 years, which is more than I can say as I sit behind these keys. I just am afraid of us red, white, and bluers getting away from what actually matters, and falling into the generational façade that seems to be encroaching on the horizon. Caring more about a double tap, and a simple-minded click than what’s actually happening around us.

            I went to dinner the other night, and sat around a table with a few family members, and friends, totaling to 5. I looked up from my empty plate, and they were all either looking at their digital handheld robots, or looking over the shoulders of another. It made me sick, and sad, but I never mentioned a word, and then forgot about it till just now. I am just as guilty as them of this sinful act yet there seems to be nothing at all we can do about it. It’ll just be a life long addiction like any unruly pleasure.

            Sure, I do, and we as a people of the USA have it a lot better, relatively, than most around the world. Either by the hands of Uncle Sam, or some other external force. But because we live in a nation like this it should give us, or at least lend us a hand to freely bitch when we want to, for right or wrong, because nothing is ever perfect, no matter how many times you go back to the previous draft, no matter how many times you go to a museum and stare at the hand crafted painting -- there will always be a fuck up with the man made. Never will there be a right and wrong in the world, relativity is far too relative, but fuck it, if it’ll ever stop me from trying to find the balance.

            Perhaps Memorial Day, shouldn’t just be seen as a recognition of the proud individuals that either signed their lives away, or got their hands held to the fire until they did so accordingly, but also to be a recognition of what they actually did, so more don’t have to do the same, for similar reasons.

            Always question the fat cats of DC, and never if given the opportunity blow rainbows, and butterflies up their asses rather than spit on their shoes with no shine. Because they all went to their Ivy Leagues, and private schools, and it’ll be the first time they ever met anyone that is outside their realm. Never forget that they live within a world that us individuals are just numbers, and are disposable given the circumstantial moment. 

            AND, to summarize this shit storm most simply, last, but certainly not least, let’s seal the borders from any more brown people of the south, we can’t have them take more lazy white jobs. Then lets round up and exterminate the fags (because The Good Lord would want us to). Let in the drugs that the DEA wants, and keep funding our allies of the cartels, and nab any black street corner dealer that even breathes in the direction of a police cruiser. Pave over the satanic anti-abiding Middle East, aside from the manufactured Israel, and make a mega Wal-Mart that’ll only sell false hope, and fabricated doctrine, because, of course, we are the nation of the free, and the United States of The Righteous.