Doom, gloom and flowers bloom

I sit in Starbucks and I am already a cliché, like every aspiring screenwriter, every dwid without a job who has to get out of the house or they will decay to the humming of Days of Our Lives. You know, the sullied underclass hoping to touch the stars just like every douchebag in America. The dream of that attainment of something we are bred to know is our inalienable right flickers like a candle, hoping, ever hoping that it will be ours. Behind me is a FIDM student doing her best to achieve conformity with her yellow riding jacket designs, which she lays over a lovely stock image of some wonderful muckety-muck at the Hampton Classic. There is a headline and a tagline, the perfect Mad Men comp, the perfect embodiment of American culture. American decay. A nation past the tipping point of its decline, with nothing but the fall remaining. I know what Hunter Thompson felt as he hammered his keys, and fired his shotguns off the porch of his Colorado homestead. Filth. A nation of filth.

I must avoid popular culture. It dulls the senses, kills the imagination, creates little automatons out of perfectly viable human beans, little consumer soldiers marching to the five and dime for plastic shit and petroleum pork rinds. Dressed in see-through fabric and black finery, the Whore of Babylon strolls the corners of my mind, so I can think about the teats of falsehood and the transiency of pleasures known and unknown.

I just finished a partial draft of my latest book, my latest dream, the first sitting in some drawer like somebody’s dusty scrapbook, of memories discarded, rotting like the flesh of the corpulent woman with her troglodyte offspring who just smiled at me with brown café mocha flowing through the unfortunate gaps in her teeth.

Ugliness reflects back to me. Am I lacking the eyes with which to see the beauty? Or am I looking at myself in the looking-glass? I don’t mean to alienate you, dear reader, for I am not merely resigned to the failure of our race, of our culture. No, I am full of hope, full of optimism, full of clear vision that it is possible to purge the massive dog of humanity of its fleas. It may be possible. It may very well be possible. Until the seals are broken and the Four Horsemen ride, I will continue to tear the building down.