Yikes in Normal entries

Facebook has me linking memories to dead OD. I almost pasted it there, where, you know, there would be some thumbs — I actually read through and think Facebook is too genteel for this;

January 1st, 2011

2011 has started it’s spree, let’s hope there will be witness’s. I tried to write something important, some sweeping broad statement to encompass my generation, my country, my own place in history. Didn’t work out as well as I was hoping it might. There’s tomorrow, I could write again tomorrow. Maybe I’ll paste my piss poor attempts at the end of this whatever-this-is. What do you call a diary entry that makes it sound like something other than a diary entry? An Essay? I tried thinking of paralleling Ginsbergs poem and realized something, a diary entry is sort of the key to it.

There are things about my generation that are a bit disturbing and that we take for granted. One might be that we’ve been wearing portable headphones for more than thirty years; you could be on a crowded subway and everybody on the train could be listening and nobody talking. From AM radios to portable cassettes, Diskmen, portable game systems, we’ve been carrying our own alienation in our pockets.

Another might be anti-depressants, even though we watched our mothers on valium our siblings on Ritalin, we’ve taken the kool aid ourselves. Not out of rebellion but out of conformity, are we that depressed or is our threshold unbearably low? Mood stabilizers, the whole generation is on mood stabilizers. It sounds like something from an Orwell or Dick novel.

And diary entries. I’ve been keeping an online account of my life for ten years now, available to the entire world. I have the entire world at my fingertips and have nothing to say. And we, my generation, we, as citizens of the world, we take this for granted, use it to sell erection pills and breast enlargement, scam and spam, flame and slap and tickle. If I were to imagine the Nazis having this, or Constantine or Christ, it would never occur to me that they would squander it as we have; instant mass communication and I have nothing to say.

Of course it’s a bit like the walkman, I’m not really in your company or anyone elses when I sit down in front of this thing. I’m alone in a room somewhere and I might be naked, I might be a little girl or an old (well, older) man, I might be mad as in crazy or mad as in angry. I might not even be me, I might be high jacked and some other idiot is babbling inanities in my name. But that’s not the point, the point is the wider the world opens the more isolated it becomes.

Or that’s one point, possibly not even a very good one or true one. Maybe the failing is just mine own, the failing of defining my generation in some terms that make sense to me. I feel like we have failed though, like apathy, inertia, entropy and ennui define us as much as anything. We’ve allowed ourselves to come here, us Americans have created this America. You can trawl the internet and find plenty of fingers pointing; partisans, terrorists, corporate corruption or incompetence, mismanagement, foreign influence, immigrants. We were all once on the playground kicking red rubber balls or chasing each other or swinging from the monkey bars, all those fingers are pointing at one of us. I’m fifty fucking years old, we are in charge. Well, not me precisely, not really anyone I know exactly, but us just the same.

We’re in debt up to our ass so we can fight two wars that can’t be won. I don’t mean we can’t defeat these countries militarily, I mean there is no prize anywhere near worth the cost. And what the fuck ever happened to the idea that human life had value? Where are the protests? I know it’s a volunteer army, Christ it’s damn near a private army, but I always, naively thought, that the protest of war was a moral one. There is no moral high ground in Iraq or Afghanistan, not for us, so why isn’t anyone in the streets? Anti-depressants? Isolation? Honestly, it should be the kids, it should be the kids protesting against us. The fuck do I know.

Ok, here’s the stupid shit I wrote last night, I’m out —

Broke ass, broke down, stone broke cold. Take it to a bone cracker, grocery, taco cart broke. Isn’t just me, I’m a voice in a choir, million strong, can’t get no harmony. Blake had his angels, Dante his devils, we just got you and me and that’s enough to turn this broke ass out. Night people, lost things, buck a pop, you sir, something for the little lady?

What answer will I have when death comes asking’? How to account for my generation, these children grown old? To divest of our wars or lie to the cowl, hours locked in tiny rooms before the screen, the font read round the world without a message in its maw? What battles did we chose and which did we walk from, and the turned out tuned out disenfranchised from nothing in particular, those hemming the seams and them off the grid, the grid, we have a grid now, seems. Seams seems are busting, busted, torn along the narcotic fabric decades wide, where did they go?

Raucous rock and whiskey socks, a bare and broken bulb, pussy, cock and yellow rocks in a glass pipe for three, money mute and poverty talks, whiskey socks, disclosure, foreclosure, how many times can it all burn down?

It’s not a rat race anymore, it’s a dog fight and it’s fixed. It’s not a cabaret it’s a fucking circus. Aw Jesus we’re in the third world and the other worlds hold our paper, pink slips, promissory notes. We put our money down to win or place, and we barely show, empire lost on a bad tip, a torn trifecta. We fiddled while New York burned and lashed out at the first sucker to take the taunt. Someone buy the fiddler a dram, the set is over.

The last generation fought and lost immaculate, we haven’t the will to lose anymore, and it only works in conflict. There is no system without an honorable, naïve, hopeful adversary. There is no system without pristine and angelic treason. No sedition without a faded truth shouting out it’s one song, it’s trumpet of dissent and reason. We’re left with the blind groping the naked, the stoned leading the dead, the bastards claiming their birthright. Culled from the pack the lone wolf is just a dog.

No more catfish or railcars, sweet marijuana smoke spilling from the lip like poetry or blood, no more songs of the morning or mating the rhythms of the heart with the swinging hip, free your ass and your mind will follow no more, no one, not one some, no heroes. I came here in the hope to lead or follow and wander aimless or stand stock still. I came from America to America and found it had gone off to Mexico or china or India and left this husk, this shell of industry, skin and hair in the drain. I came on foot, by thumb, in empty boxcars, through airports and bus depots, through the Texaco, BP, through truck stops and roadside attractions, I came with the carnival, revival tents, I came in the bed of 78 ford with a family of six under serapes and ponchos. I came in my hat, in my boots, I came unashamed and stubbled, eyes wide open, half erect in my Levi’s, hungry and insatiable. I came in Americas gaping honey pot, the suckling Hooch, I came in her hair and on her thighs, I fucked America with nothing but love and lust on a public bench, by the wharf, in the Rockies, Adirondacks, white mountains, I sucked from her rivers, the Missouri, the Columbia, the grand Ohio, and nothing fucked me back. I spilled my seed on the ground to make it sacred, but it lies fallow.