The first tragedy on record was when intake and excretion parted ends. Cells mitotically engineered themselves an expiration date. Goliaths with furfuraceous hides ensued. Their scat took on dimensions and, following an extinction event, viviparism became the next scatological fad. Succeeding beasts had the will to defecate down their mothers’ backs while they swung on trees, avoiding predators. Mammals syndicated their cramps, accomplishing much furry butt-play in the forest. Millennia of agriculture later, whole troops of dudes could select “mom’s basement” over getting a life, and the shit of it was they were basically on point. Grown no bigger than the amenities encasing them, offered an option between wage slavery and marriage, many boys, satisfactorily in the throes of penile death grip, indentured themselves to an academic business model ensuring each of its customers that they could remain a fixture of the previous generation’s failure to achieve the human rights their squalid, prodromal lot were falsely promoted as originating – and these rotten sons, parasitical Hamlets one and all, became the new human ricochet breastfed into senility.
Despite buzzardly over-habituation, these kids, twenty to fifty years old, had, of late, taken to arming themselves with accessories far scarier than a video game controller. The leaky basements that exacerbated their infections were being converted into obstacle courses. The hundreds of dollars spent on consoles now went to an assortment of firearms. Their browser histories filled with tutorials on how to knife fight, how to self-apply first aid, bomb materials. Their existentially malfunctioning nervous systems and anxiety disorders wound down, trained into remission. Mass shootings, always trending, increased, less as a condition of this atmosphere, more as a test run for the looming infamy of skylines – the orchestral puppetry of a brain beneath its chemicals, reactionary yet methodical, a desultory confluence of hysteria codifying nationalist viewpoints. The status quo of theoretical gibberish drilled into students of a certain age, so they could accept the meaninglessness of their monthly loan repayments, which continued unabated, unless half a McDonald’s paycheck had been chipping away at their usurious expenses in vain, did, ironically, help combat the dread of what was to come. Push-button ideologues online ping-ponged left wing to right in their armchair militarizing propagandas. Foot soldiers of cultural offense, taking and giving, replaced television. Social media clickbait kept the mob chasing its tail in crossfire factions with an unprecedented tabloid overflowing every pocket, living out the hype of journalism’s misreported death. Worldwide discourse flushed like faulty plumbing, baying for universal rights, jiggling with abstractions. The people’s comments moved oftener than any normal set of bowels could bear. Having an opinion was now a monetized addiction. Dating was an auction at the speed of light, a scrapbook bordello. This pandemic neurological backfiring played with the multiplication table of its symptoms, embarrassing the self-helpists who dared correct it.
Such was the nature of the message arriving in Plug’s inbox. The sender’s email contained a series of underscores with a period stranded in the middle. Plug came of age just as the internet entered its domain, being a mainstream household nuisance – like him. Holder of a college degree or three, he was accustomed to nonsensical jargon, and felt aroused by the scattered whims of the email’s connotation. Now that he felt enlisted in the new lobbies of the clown, stellar bunglers one and all, well-armed jesters of the prepuce, Plug noticed that the ubiquitous sensation of meekness that surrounded him daily was starting to lift. The epiphany arrived in stages, finding fruition a year or two later, after Plug read and viewed thousands of hours of likeminded articles and videos about his generation’s conundrum. A single screed and JPG attachment, a deep web image likely glommed from some snuff site, instituted the mutinous seed that later abetted his Kleenex. Plug leaned back in his stained, ergonomic chair, receptive, but appalled, ultimately reverential, studying where the foam nose aligned, a nipple on a robust beanie, an ouroboros of marrow chasing its own insides.
Plug couldn’t tell if his past was an electronic assortment, a rented pixilation, or the actual memories of an event. He wasn’t sure if he could say his life included events in the plural usage of the word, and utility never seemed like an option. There was a reference error in the forfeiture of his birth. Mediocre screen name puns sounded better than anything certified IRL, and the outdated pieces of paper that proved he existed were always held in question. Plug neared passable weights, despite a life of fast food, but one girl let his mawkishness back into the brand of fishy space he forgot he’d left. Due to internet pornography, the act of flirting herniated most, but Plug tilted his dump truck head, collecting enough fun comments to be of use, and verified the same sad effort from both parties.
The girl had no idea why a yes had occurred between them and, preparing her end of a testimony that could revoke every previous consent, blamed her over-groomed sense of etiquette, and some vague societal obligation. Squalled into a kiss, his head struck against hers like experimental produce – hot dogs perspiring K-Y Jelly. His acne camouflaged adulthood, as did everything about him. Duffel bags of meat that stood for cheeks became increasingly loose. Each emanation bore his heft. He cooed cliché pet names, liver-lips puckering labial out of an untrimmed beard. The type of must she felt she had come to deserve was presently wafting. She readied herself for the boredom of his cunnilingual worship.
Most men were uncommunicative below the visor they wore to scarf her. You had to be a girl to eat pussy right. Plug, certainly no man, was even worse at localizing muliebrity. Sequentially fricative slurping embarrassed her about bodies. She was having a lesbian experience with an obese mask. Her future baby had performed a jump scare and appeared grown, mistaking her provisionally arid, hide-and-go-seek clit for a container of milk, popping slick on the faux-rhythmic juncture between her dignity and his plebian appetite. She completed a suspenseful and epic reach toward the phone in her purse, because she preferred faking her grandmother’s death over faking an orgasm. A version of these events earned her a million dollars from a major magazine after she finally provoked Plug – dropping clumsy hints about the ineptitudes he was well aware of – into calling her a whore via text message.
from Shock Test: Bill Hicks & Timothy McVeigh Meet at Waco w/ Guest Lecturers Bill Cooper & Ted Kaczynski
BILL COOPER: Alright. Intermissions are for pussies. Perhaps any number of you fine people – a diminished sum – have noticed the globe caving inward, off its axis, one bloody nudge – room to rim, in fact, testes akimbo – a manageable amount of food poisoning hid in the bubbles of your burp. Here’s a still life painted in reflux, the interior blister mankind made trying to replace God’s image with his stinking own. Yes, there’s a tapeworm decorating your entrails, ladies and gentlemen, scrolling round sans consequence, loitering in the litter of your meals. Cute, huh? Well, something turned us into puppets on the business end of a Roto-Rooter, and I wanna know who or what, so anyone willing can yank it from its ulcerated hidey-hole! Please consult your pop-up book PTSDs, and be warned, because I got true-blue theories by the boatload – not butt-load – and your feelings, or way worse, may get dinged during their import. Whose hand’s up your backsides, folks? How many knuckles deep can a government reach? Trust me, they’ll ride so high in your heinie the halitosis could raise crops – ample harvests! Oh, but what difference does it make, Bill, if you claim sentience beneath a dung heap? Don’t know about you, sports fans, but I can recite all my colonoscopies verbatim. Sheep are never too fuzzy for a leash, even if the ropey content to follow is of the self-same manures we’re stranded in. If what I say feels as if the doctor just sneezed on your child’s circumcision, this is because I am a rogue marionette sawing at his strings, and the sound is deafening. Wag your bottoms at the rapture they have manufactured for you, with their serpent illuminations echoed back across the news. We are fine print on a tax rebate – Darwinists deferred – declaring pushbutton epiphanies against Christ. Yes, grovel at the altar of the asshole, like permed apes in the pointlessness of a work week, fearful of the corny notion in your loins to raise kin – start a family? how discriminatory! what an environmental lambaste! – sharing one egalitarian dollop of hooey for a brain, just an alibi of burnt lard smeared into a signal, farmed free of introspection. I know my gut contains multitudes, but no surplus parts stir within it, ready to be tossed upon the socialist farrago, this neo-Marxist, early-bird-buffet capitalism calls itself now. Buncha ninnies both universally, or university, bound – supposedly unbound – bereft of bread. Is it an onanistic futility to salute whoever dares assume the mantle of patriot: that oft abused verbiage?…Ten-hut, you coma victims. I say mayday for a living. Either limp alongside me or take cover, because I am far more solid than the earth they put me under, a breed of stubborn bastard who’ll lift the reaper’s gown and expose his maggot-dicked truth for all to point at and giggle. Wanna study the nature of a hernia? Steel your balls for a cupping and cough. Enough rhetoric. Let me prove my piece. May such stilted jargon turn tall in all our hankies. The perpetrators of a major farce are playing fifty-two pickup with church and nation and…ain’t no parental warning sticker on the skidmark! There’s vulgar and then there’s justified cause for alarm. My corpse sure has been stuffed with a dire amount of metaphors. Don’t rile a ghost, sir! Question is: who’s convoluted us so, and to which twin-horned principles do they adhere? Think of me as a not-so-friendly surgeon, never rude, but outright autistic in my efficiency…Shakespeare just hung himself on the catwalk. Who else could bowdlerize a monologue ad infinitum?
Cooper slaps himself twice. Hard.
BILL COOPER: Might you fear-struck simps wring the piss out of your pockets and find there a dry enough pen, you could then take ink to tablet and heed my shaky dictation, because the truth acts like a venereal disease when we want it to, when a little pus will do, information that’ll chasten, nigh hinder and divide, those who would perceive it. I present you soft target information, the False Flag in flames. Boy, such mincing of words is required to deprogram a populace. Thankless…like trying to cure the runs with a toothpick! Very few possess the athletic verticality to dethrone from the claw that operates them. Who parked their muddy boots on the origin of your tongue? Who keeps speed bagging your speech? Can you read through the obfuscation of fur upon – nevermind deep state pluralities – how about its palm? But no, there are no psychics in a sewer. Allow me to divulge for you hell’s chiefest minions. Their handiwork is what keeps the backs of milk cartons so grotesquely populated. Spray paint it on my grave, if they gave me one: died because Satan took his temperature with the peace sign… As your uber-hawked flunky – self-hatingest of Jew haters – Karl Marx remarked: “Peace is the absence of all opposition to socialism.” How obliging. Pardon my effeminate sarcasm, but it’s appropriate to the subject.
Cooper wipes his face with a large cloth. Pulling it back, he notices and shows that his face has left a detailed imprint.
BILL COOPER: Ain’t sweating ‘cause I’m horny, sickos…Oh, the Veil of Veronica, except it’s me – blasphemy’s clichéd as its target…I come from a – quote – retro era – unquote – that emphasized a healthy and proactive amount of cynical individualism – a post-Kennedy assassination mistrust of toeing the party line – favoring debate over abuse, a counter-intuitively humane zeitgeist – because free speech meant steam got vented, pressure released – back when a person’s voice – picture this – stayed fixed to their intended context. When I was in my prime, privacy occurred on occasion. I’m also a decorated war veteran whose message concerns freedom for America and Christian harmony, so what follows is, to a large extent, embarrassing for the suspicious handlers and provocateurs behind tonight’s façade.