Life Is Hell

...I live. I travel back and forth across the Goethal's Bridge, the Jersey Turnpike . It's a dirty gulag. I hate this country, what it does to it's people, how it lies like a dirty whore, and I yet I wake up, day after day, and slog through; emerging brutal and hairier.

I come home and hate myself.

My life is a series of daydreams. I'm constantly tripping over my own two feet. I've written 27 different first chapters of the same book. They all end the same way. To be continued...

And yet they never are. Why? Because today when I was buying a new lid for the garbage can I could feel the death rays emanating from the cinder blocks of Wal Mart. I didn't even know I was standing next to a WalMart. This ominous sense of our dark future just sort of came over me. Then I realized where I was and it made complete sense.

I thought to myself if I ever ran for president this is where I would come. Forget the rallies and the speeches. I would just stand in front of WalMart. So many people go there; it's a perfect cross section of America.

And then I just can't go back and pick up where I left off. I have to write a new chapter. I have to somehow redeem myself and iron out the spastic karma in my mind.

So I go to the convenience store and stand in line. I watch as the snaggletoothed hags of Milltown queue up to buy lottery tickets and get into a give-and-take with the plumber-pantsed Joes.

"So when a ya' goin ta A.C.?" they crow.

A shudder passes through me as the nightmare takes form in my mind. The Corporation sets the parameters and dictates the terms. The mass of humanity is then poured into the mold and we have to live our lives accordingly, even though it's against our nature. We live in cookie-cutter subdivisions, we go to work in office parks, we eat lunch in bourgeoisie vomitoriums (all-you-can-eat Chinese mega-buffets), we take leisure in strip malls, and we watch The Plastic Surgery Channel while we jog. This is the greatest country in the world.

I struggle all week just to get to the moment when I can sit down, break the seal on a 1/5th of bourbon, and watch- as a faint wisp of vapor escapes from the bottle- then vanishes like a spirit.

Otherwise, my jaw is clenched tight as a fist as I travel back and forth, up and down the mudvain of the east coast.

Exit 11, and I've got a boner. Goddamn I'm sick of all music. I pull my shades down snug on the bridge of my nose to shield my eyes from the blinding, glacial death star afternoon sun. My mind wanders back to that little igloo of peace I had built yesterday afternoon at the coin-op laundromat.