A GUILTY PLANET IN REPOSE by John Grey | Main
July 20, 2008
A Minimum Threshold of Coolness by Robert Ciesla
There's something about fluorescent lights that I had forgotten long ago. It's not the schizophrenia-inducing short-wave ultraviolet or the constant low buzzing that's designed to comatose kids into submission. It's the property to display the full atomic spectrum of the basketball-toting guy who was spoon-fed with confidence since day one only to take a dump on kids like us. It's the smirk of an asshole. It's time to re-unite with the class of '98. Only this time I have my mentor with me.
Avoiding eye-contact we sit down beneath the potently fluorescing phosphor with the rest of them; we walk as one. My pupils still belong to a highschool play version of Barnes in Platoon: take the pain motherfucker! It's those insomniac's 4 am astral claymores that make you limp like me. Throw in a few non-productive panic attacks and all the websites you browsed like the other kids exchanged STDs by the Amazon river and you'll know exactly what I went through.
Let's take a moment to assume the tear-jerking position. In it there's no room for social relativism.
During the somewhat lamented socializing the two of us stand back and visualize robberies in Bali, threats by a mob of passing militants, hep C, and lots and lots of wasted stock market options. Let's long for all the things you and I managed to draft-dodge because we stayed home and took the pain of being who we really are. This inner odyssey of unsung heroics, one you can' t buy from a cheap airliner to some troubled continent as your once-rebellious bandmates turn into these hate-filled insurance men with the same hunger in them before their conquests began. Their parents still deal in law, international politics, BMWs, and now they share the same foreign bungalows.
What about the breeders? The salt of the Earth, Mars, and Distant Cluster Z. Without these guys there wouldn't be class reunions, let alone a mankind. It is through their zygotes that we celebrate our continuing existence. Their primordial urges and terminal normalcy set them apart from you and I. It is this grave lack of enthusiasm and karma, this care-free abandon to baby-shit on all forms of the extraordinary and treat regions beyond their A to B with some unfounded arrogance.
You start to flicker and we both fade in-out-in.
The mercury vapor suddenly discharges its flow of electrons. The following crackle confounds them, but to us it is a repose. We are immersed in a purifying confusion as all visible light dissipates during a speech by one of the former-hipster-turned-lawyer who just seconds ago displayed an inherited baldness pattern. This should've been the energy policy around here. The only equation for the elimination of school massacres worldwide is "no neon gas equals no typecasting - keep 'em in the dark!"
A majestic life will decorate one's trophy cabinet not just with blowjobs from fashion designer babes, but with fiery sorrows as well. For each Adolf Hitler -treatment from an art school and for each hand-me-down from bi-sexual women, dark side kids get something the alpha mutts will never achieve: synaptic impulses of utter and complete failure, a touch of the void within. Darth Vader moments without which one can't even fathom to cross that elusive threshold.
It's in this darkness that you fully emerge, bright as a class M star. My lonely guy -pill took me to you, and you were right. My seventeen-year old self with the big Marshall amp. You're the only one who changed and change is the only constant in the universe. Those who embrace it are welcome wherever they are. The others never left this place and they're falling to pieces over a little photon-loss. They had to learn what you already knew.
Now that I've found you, I am unstoppable. Seriously broke and bordering on saccharine, maybe, but still pushing the fucking envelope. As for you, we'll be friends to the world. It's back to the amps once more.
Cue Bon Jovi.
Posted by Overlord at July 20, 2008 10:55 AM
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