A pack of thieves, not the recognizable gang you're thinking of. Overuse of commas, melodrama, and stinky grammar. Fragmentation of the divisions and sectors of the containers holding the units, pieces, and fractions of some small amount of power. It's a mess. It's a nation. It's derivative and contrived. The point to distract and waste and string along in sequence until enlightened or stopped by sense or reality. An intrusion and a starting point to a feeling that's not the least bit memorable but repeats and returns. A body of laziness launched upon a spit of land in a calm sea of commercials. Nothing subliminal, nothing useful, nothing for sale. Stopped to borrow sugar and ideas and pictures of your kids in the dark, left with the dishes and your grandmother's earrings. Wrestling with the confusing choices laid out at the intersection of every possible universe and inebriated by the staggering consequences of putting our pants on left leg first. Living in a noose. Hating writing and looking and pretending to be important and smart. Realizing the people surrounding us are robots just like us. This is bad on a small scale. The worst stuff shat out of a freshman creative writing course, the spewed debris of the kids that flunked out of art class, the facsism of self-publishing inflicted upon any fool snared by a loose link. Diarrhea of the mind. First draft thinking and stream of a shaky consciousness pouring out of the manhole covers of personalities at their weakest point. Filler. The hotdog in the hallway of your mind. Old news and bad ideas rendered poorly. Incompatible and proud. Antiobject. Sliding through life like another glob of tubercular sputum running down a crackhouse wall. There's no reason that the wounds couldn't be closed. Nothing's barring a grand design from coming to fruition. No stupidity, no hate, no lack of time. The engine is just weak and worn. The victim of overuse of all the vim and vigor of a youth misspent. Time misspent and wasted in the pursuit of ideals no longer relevant. Time bought and sold cheaply. Life squinted at with groans and shudders before pulling the blanket back up. Low-budget lovemaking. Survival. One more machine creating the uncreative, hoping one survives to continue it's imperitives. It is not the job of such parasites to entertain, provoke, and embrace the glimmer of intelligence you may possess. That reservation remains the domain of consumption, interaction, marketing, and transaction. This is not a dynamic space. This is not a static space. This is old glass running out of it's frame like molasses. A purpose served, but not well and with distortion. We still let the flies and the draft in, just to kill that metaphor. The tired and lazy being that is today's american. Not inventing or investing, just loudly complaining about nothing with one hand down our pants and one finger in our ear. Or up our nose. Lying to each other about our hopes and dreams, lying to ourselves about our future. Oh the depression of it all. Oh the horror! How can it go on? Why must we let ourselves fall prey to ourselves? With the smug satisfaction of a man who has never known hardship the answer always comes back that an easy life is a life not worth living. That life must be hard in order to be appreciated. You must experience want in order to revel in fulfillment. We tell ourselves this bullshit without experience, without ever leaving the nest, and believe it is a noble idea that we are just a tiny bit too weak to follow through on. Not a thought given to the billions of people out there carpe-ing the fucking diem with nothing but a mickey mouse t-shirt and some leperous callouses on their feet in the Horn of Africa or the wastes of Central Asia. Ah to gulp life down in great draughts like those fine human beings must be the stuff of legend. Pity we will never know such joy. Nothing to look forward to but another day in the office, another 8 hours in the machine. A cynic is a pig is a problem for the keepers. Another day another dollar another gun or pair of shoes. More work to do laying the blacktop of blame and the bright lights of public scrutiny on the easy targets. More children to protect, more jobs to create, more health to care for. We're all in our cages for one reason or another. The war on feeling. The war on difference. The war on the slowest monkeys in the herd. Even the smart ones climb out of one cage and into another. There can be no transcendence, clear cannot be attained, Jesus is not in your tortilla. We are the grimy specter of the elderly and worn out worker wandering through the streets in a fugue state, sputtering and staring at ghosts of the past, bursting with pain at the treacheries of a long life in the shadow. Darkness both literal and figurative, enough to make one squint and stoop, hide and hang one's head. We create the shallow happiness of the nose job, the bloated joy of undeserved wealth, the corpulent riches of corporate welfare. No explanations, no relationships, no continuity. All the terrific speed and dizzying action of daily life only broken up by the quick minutes vomiting toxic chemicals into a fetid public toilet. Is that the sound of the ocean you hear between the gagging and sputtering or just the onrush of the end of your life? No, it's just the muffled noises of badly rendered reggae music slithering under the door. More static for your life. Art input as advertising, advertising flushed into the system as art. Side airbags, sex appeal, inground pool, expensive women and cheap drinks. A complete family of reliable and secure products guaranteed to make life easier and get you to the top of the volcano in time to watch the virgin jump. You can't be saved for you've already been saved. Thousands of messiahs die daily for your sins and don't even get the attention and notice of an execution. They're crucified in the dirt they were born in and on the factory floor. They pay for their laziness and lack of free-enterprise. Your pets live longer. The world's top predator is a cannibal, all the testifying you've got in you cannot save you from us.