Crawl

The gallery crawl happens downtown on the first Friday of each month. These galleries are all very hip and cultural, and I don’t bother applying to these ones. My work would never get in. I can only visit. Normally the work is bad anyway. Tonight, however, it’s awesome. They’ve got some intense African drumming going on, too. Seems like the real thing, as best I can tell. All black guys dressed in brightly colored clothes. They look like they’re probably adhering pretty closely to the traditional article. They’re all wearing matching garb, kind of like a uniform. Most have dreadlocks. There are some really big, beefy-looking guys pounding away, and a feeble little old guy who appears to be the leader. He can work a crowd of white suburbanites like nobody’s business. We’re hanging on his every word. The music is loud, furious, and throbbing. If Slayer were acoustic and African, this is what they would sound like. F u c k i n g a w e s o m e. There’s nobody under the roof who isn’t dancing. There’s beer too, and that always makes cool stuff cooler. Walking to the next gallery, I pass a porn store and a white tranny, walking with a really good-lookin’ black chick. I suppose she might be a tranny too. I can’t tell, and I don’t care. They’re radiant, glowing in the neon lights, heading into the bar across the street. They will take no shit from anybody on their way there. Part of me wants to follow them into the bar. I bet they’ve got more soul than any or all of the hip-looking college kids hanging their bullshit cartoons in these downtown galleries. It’s getting cold, and the heavy, drying taste of beer spit fills my mouth. I’ll likely need to piss soon. The next gallery has a bathroom, and more beer. I stop there. Hit the mens’ room. I can feel the heat of my piss radiating back from the urinal. No backspray, just heat. It was gross but reassuring. I’m hot, and therefore still alive. There’s a gay bar beside the gallery, and I’m pretty sure it’s the one the black chick and the tranny went into. I give it a long hard think, and determine that I’d look like an asshole if I went in there. I’m pretty sure I’d be an asshole if I went in there. In the next gallery there’s a confused Christian hippy girl with an acoustic guitar and enough sappy songs about Jesus to choke a whale. She looks like she needs to eat something. The plot-loss is devastating. Behind me, I catch a glimpse of the overflowing cleavage of a snobby-looking, pretentious, artsy bitch in her late 30s. She’s sporting a plunging neckline and giant bright red glasses. She’s laughing, and her tits are jiggling wonderfully. I’m sure she’s upper-middle class, enlightened, and lives on organic food. If she owned an art gallery, she wouldn’t even let me in the front door, but she’s got a great rack, and she’s showing it off really well. At the end of the night, I can’t complain.

Prestige

I want to go parties. I want to socialize with elite people, get drunk, and then say crass, inappropriate things to them. I want to be places that I don’t belong or deserve to be. I want to make people slightly dirtier with my presence. I want to buttfuck the daughter of a Bush voter while she’s doped up on prescription meds. I don’t want to be them. I don’t want to be one of them. I just want to be among them. I want to be the turd that cannot be flushed and continually floats back up to offend. I want prestige and a wall of pretense to wear like a flak jacket.

Laughing Asses

You’re the best, you laughing ass. The world might just be a quieter, more focused, intelligent place without you. It’s a fortunate thing that we’ve got you on the job to prevent that from happening, you laughing ass. It’s a good thing we’ve got you handy to mock and debase anybody with aspirations higher than being another laughing ass. It’s great that we’ve got you around to belittle anything more refined than slapstick comedy. Not enough people realize that the world really is just there for their amusement, that anything beyond their current intellectual grasp is stupid, and that other peoples’ pains and struggles are, in fact, hilarious. You’re the best, you laughing ass. You’re the anchor keeping human evolution safely tethered to where it sits, and where it will die, you laughing ass. Thanks.

Pseudo-Intellectuals

There was a table of pretentious, pseudo-intellectual, upper-middle class, white, liberal college professors seated behind us. They were talking about Brazil, South America in general, all of the wild and exotic places they’ve been, and how profoundly their travels had changed their lives. They segued from that into a critical analysis of the writing for popular television shows. I wanted them all dead and on fire. It must be nice to do that for a living. It must be nice to make your living that comfortably and be concerned with such ridiculous and trivial things. I must confess that a large part of my scorn was steeped in jealousy. I would love to have the luxury of accumulating degrees, spending my entire life inside a classroom, drunk on information and never having to get my hands dirty. It’s occurred to me that I will never teach anything. I’m too good at what I do to ever waste my time teaching it. I will never be so full of shit that I run from the real world into the pristine safety of academia. Only abstractions can exist in a vacuum, and I’m not an abstraction.

Contemporary Caveman

Nothing elevates the values of humanity higher than a contemporary caveman with a gun. You will be the pinnacle of human achievement, contemporary caveman, not by virtue of your irrepressible creative brilliance, crushing intellect, or social resilience, but with intimidation. You will shame all others with the constant threat of violence, you semi-literate, infantile, hot-tempered mongoloid with a sidearm. Keep buying into the thug shit, because that’s valuable. That will get you a lot of sincere respect. That’s an effective way to fight stereotypes, rise above, and defy social expectations. What can’t be intimidated into submission can be beaten, or even shot if necessary. That’s the most effective way of getting what you want. Know what you want, because you need to want it. It’s important to want things. It’s important to take. Just take. Don’t think. Don’t earn. Take. Thinking is for people less real than you, contemporary caveman. Keep it real. You’re a man. You’re the man, and a man shouldn’t have to think. A man should take.