The Home Team

Turning 41 in about a month and a half. Whoopee fucking doo, people! What makes it more frightening? The fact that I have one foot in the grave, or the fact that I still act pretty much exactly like I did when I was 18? Yeah, sure, growing up is one of the more overrated proposals in American life; anyone denying this fact is a fucking coward. Putting all that in a box and mailing it far away, you are still left with the fact that I am a giant child.

It’s Mother’s Day. Or, you know, it was Mother’s Day. Now it’s just Monday. Way too fucking early Monday, yes, but Monday nonetheless.

I’m sucking down the 40s and basking in the afterglow of Will Arnett and Will Forte. And this in no way dispels the vision of me as an overgrown baby.

Oh, I can admit that.

Because I have no choice.

I wanna shift gears here and tack this ship in a direction that leaves you less clear on what I am trying to say, because I am tired of expressing myself clearly, all while being perceived as being opaque.

Fuck that.

It’s a graveyard, this place; full of it, full of agonizing loss and empty fucking what-have-you’s. You can stumble around on the stairs in the dark. You’ve walked them repeatedly over these many years. These years which have been so inconsiderate as to drift by in a matter of decades while you spent all of your time pretending to forget the way through.

Well, now it’s payback time, and you are all out of cash.

And that’s going to be a problem because the Home Team hires only the biggest, and the best, and these boys have come to play. They walk with very, very big sticks, and they know that though those Words hurt pretty bad, those sticks are definitely where it’s at.

Feel that? that’s what I’m talking about.

So, remember that day, the one during which you strutted in with a chip on your shoulder so big it pushed all of ours right off the edge of the table?

I mean, do ya? Muthafucka?

I do.

I remember the matching shirts that lit up the first week like a beacon towards the shores of pity. You, replete with your bacterial vapor, and your voluminously feathered coiffure. Oh, what a thing of beauty. It worked for us. How about you?

We sat in court, the stand-ins for loyal subjects milling about, on the quest for the delights of hormonal expulsion and dietary crimes. It was vast, it was temporary, but it felt like forever.

You would decorate the floors with your desperation. Await the fates that beg to swing down, terror on the wing, the red lights of tomorrow paving the way for disastrous release. There are triggers and signs. There are bright flashing lights that are set in place to guide you on your way into the great and ravenous maw. Mmmmm, you have been set down in this barbed-wire nightmare, and you have been neglected in a fashion that leaves you utterly incapable of explaining it in a way that doesn’t reek of artsy pandering, meandering, and outright nonsensical bullshit. Smell it? It grows out of the fields on the hottest, most humid days. Yours for the taking.

You think there’s a narrative, which I am extremely proud to announce is something that leaves your benefactors cheering with delight. They are simply beside themselves with the mere notion. Yeah, yeah, yeah... you think there is a motherfucking narrative, and I just have ta tell ya, the boys in the band are simply dancing the maypole with glee. It’s the most quaint of conceits, and wow how you have bought the plot, the farm, the five-year-plan, and so it is very much to be that your arrogant posturing has opened the eyes - yes, all 3 of them - that dot the faces of these hooded watchers.

Too much. Too soon.

It isn’t enough to squander yourself like a pathetic self-fulfilling prophecy.

I mean, you know, that in and of itself is pretty bad. I admit this readily.

But no, you had to go and sell it off to the highest bidder like the the gates have opened and capital is something with which you have been given the highest trust. It’s illusory at best. At best. And at worst? At worst, you are a total and complete fucking waste of carbon. And, guess what?

YOU KNOW IT!

So, where does all of this leave us?

Well, I don’t know. Where does it?