Status Updates From The Failure Cascade

I drove back home, thought about nuking a Hungry-Man dinner, staying up all night writing some stupid book about a UFO cult.

Communism, said the farmer who gets paid by the government to plant corn and burn his crops for no reason.

A long time ago I was playing some game on the PlayStation 2 — it was Medal of Honor or Soldier of Fortune or Call of Duty or Fucker of Guns or something where you had to shoot a bunch of Nazis who yelled the same six German words at you. (This was back when killing Nazis was universally acceptable, which dates me somewhat.)

I lived on sweet and sour chicken back then, bought a gallon at a time from the crap takeout spot next to the Leather Daddy Safeway. I forget why we called it the Leather Daddy Safeway — I think there was a cashier who always wore assless chaps and had his significant other on a leash as he rang up groceries. I do miss those days. You won’t get that kind of service with a self-checkout line.

Vice President Jeffrey L. Dahmer gave a two-hour press conference on the latest financial meltdown, although he answered no questions and gave no details on anything about the economy. Instead, he spent the first hour talking about how to fuck the stab wounds in a corpse, and the best way to cook a severed head with only a low-watt rental apartment microwave.

Anyway — that hospital — I went in to take the piss test. I knew it was going to go south because instead of being owned by Kaiser or Beacon or some university, this place was operated by KFC. Awesome hospital food — you could get a bucket of chicken in your bed after major cardiac surgery, and they would even do a feeding tube of gravy. But for actual medical care, I had my doubts.

Someone told me you could kill bedbugs by listening to the third Stooges album at top volume, but you had to find the pressing with the original 1973 mix that Iggy did, not the bullshit David Bowie mix that is on most copies. I knew I’d end up with an entire shelf of various versions of Raw Power, and still have an extreme parasite infestation.

I managed to get home, change my pants, and live to see another day.

I never do this, the meticulous planning and pitching and plotting on index cards. I always write just to write, and then later try to make it into a book, which is probably why this entire book is 99% done and I haven’t even titled it yet.

I feel like I’ve written this same story a dozen times: “Jon rides the subway home, spends an entire weekend in isolation, trying to get laid online and/or find some meaning in life by pursuing a hopeless hobby.” And honestly, this basically happened every week for like five years of my time in New York.

I already knew this was going to fail spectacularly, but I couldn’t ignore it or walk away.

I only stay in horse-free hotels, as a general rule of thumb.

Not sure how I ended up in Dubai, but I spent hours walking in 117-degree heat trying to find a mythical Taco Bell day spa, where instead of hot stone treatments, they poured scalding nacho cheese on your back and packed your body in smashed-up tortilla chips. The salt is supposed to be exfoliating, I guess.

Lockheed Martin released full pro-edited multi-cam video evidence of the alien/human hybrid breeding program at Groom Lake, and nobody even noticed because the news wasn’t written in the form of a Buzzfeed quiz.

Days later, weeks later, I figured I needed something for PTSD, although I’m sure they’d want to know what one event gave me PTSD, and it was basically my entire life since birth.

The driver’s seat felt like putting my ass on a vinyl-covered George Foreman grill.

My car was one of the only ones left in the parking lot, except for a rusty maroon Oldsmobile Toronado with a dead body in it, a housewife suicide by valium and box wine. Her husband assumed she was on a dick-sucking/outlet mall shopping rampage and didn’t call in her disappearance; the authorities wouldn’t find her for another few months.

"Think about it. I’m all for french fries, french toast, and french whores, but the French swimming pool construction industry is a death cult waiting to infect us all. I AM AN AMERICAN!"

The beach smelled like raw sewage, a thick, fermented stench of pure death. Every fifty feet, signs erected by the local tourism board humble-bragged about the outstanding quality of their locally sourced excrement. I think it was some kind of new-age thing, E. coli for weight loss, the Raw Sewage Movement.

“You know all computers are sexist. It’s why computers only have female cable connectors on them. They’re implying females are objects for breeding for cock-oppressor cables. And computer memory is measured in bytes because they’re fat-shaming women who eat too much.”

America is nothing but a Slim Jim delivery system for the gun-toting morbidly obese.

I was so damn bored, I almost read the bible. (Instead, I tore out the pages of Leviticus about butt sex and wrote “OK BOOMER” on the inside front cover.)