4/22/2012

The Cardinal on Student Loan Debt

Sorry to interrupt our serialized “lost footage” documentary series “Psychobilly Massacre” for a public service announcement by “The Cardinal.”
   Student loans, low interest investments in the next generation, not a controversial idea, except that as debt it is strangling us to death and has surpassed credit card debt as our supreme usury based vice. If that were not enough in 2005 legislation made it impossible for bankruptcy to wipe out these youthfully incurred debts. These loans have given generations of lower to middle class students the chance to major in drama, English, psychology etc. While going on mind bending four year journeys of sexual exploration and drug induced adventures all while building up five to six figures worth of debt with no concept or plan on how to pay it off. Of course the government could just award these loans to those pursuing in demand majors, but that would deprive minorities of the chance at squandering a small fortune before they're thirty in the name of their art. We could funnel the loan money to colleges with strict codes of conduct as far student fraternizing and underage drinking go, insuring the money is going towards fomenting usable skills and modes of thinking in young pliable minds, instead of cultivating a healthy campus musk of hash smoke and bodily fluids. Or, we could just continue to allow this tectonic change in funding, demographics and sobering economic realities return higher education to the realm of the rich. None of these options are socially tolerable based on a few loud angry voices which would drown out any honest debate on the subject, shrilly defending some narrow interest or fomenting phantom discontent to justify their position of authority, while the status quo is held in place as no generation wants to be the one to lose the right to a psychedelic threesome without being an artist or billionaire. No, we must save student loans by giving it the ole college try/spirit ( the college spirit is only worshiped in certain collegiate pantheons).

    How about producing and dealing drugs. I say produce and deal since we want to cut out the middle men and you will learn important lessons in entrepreneurship, accounting, horticulture, mycology and chemistry (if you wanna go hardcore).Also when you grow your own you can offer it a few dollars cheaper and thus be the cool dealer, you may need to invest in a large/multiple couches along with couch based activities from a game console to a risk board, in short make your vice den your own and potheads, weed whores and fiends ( since, remember, you have no friends, only customers) will do the rest. While the stresses of an unregulated business might take a tole on your GPA, you will be learning important lessons in life and business, ones that can't be learned in any classroom, even oaksterdam often gets lost in the minutia.

    This approach can be expanded to other vices, though with greater risk for ones investment. The gambler is a timeless classic whether it is as a lone gambler playing at traveling poker games, a gruff booky or an all out, off campus casino. Besides the fun of fleecing others under the guise of chance you can easily build up an unmatchable allure, a devil may care attitude, his cards in the wind, will he take you with him when he has to flee in the dead of night with only a few dollars, the shirt on his back and the promise of adventure? Maybe, maybe not but you better stick with this guy as he is a one way ticket to danger, mystery and teaching daddy a lesson all at once and to unlock his inner beauty and vulnerability from his wild uncaring exterior. Yes, you will know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, Know when to walk away and know when to run. You never count your money when you're sittin' at the table knowing There'll be time enough for countin' when the dealing's done, which is significantly more than the majority of our current college graduates come away with.
 
    Now, while a bordello seems like a natural solution, sliding across floors in tighty whitys and sun glasses, becoming a man and a master of ones fate, but there is a problem. Unregulated, the sex industry is a base and terrifying world full of coercion, violence, humiliation and intimidation. So do the classy thing, and put a camera between yourself and your work and maybe even earn some film credits while you are at it. While a reputation as a pornographer might hold you back in some circles, it wont as much as crushing debt, and as long as you wear a smoking jacket and smoke a pipe you'll be practically classy, hell you'll be 21st century aristocracy, haha! We are a classless generation.

    If the idea of mixing business and education don't appeal to you, probably because you are lazy and unthankful, than go ahead have your fun four years, flounder about for a few more were you try and apply your degree to a trade, but the loan payments become too much and you can't make it. Welcome back grasshopper, but now your in too deep, debt has piled on debt, it is time to disappear, a rose by any other name does not carry a roses debt. This is not going to be easy, and you will probably never see your friends and loved ones again, at least until the law forces them out of society as well. You will want to invest what little liquid cash you can into an RV, solar panels and weapons and prepare yourself for a life of nuance, challenges, bricolage beyond politeness and convention and into the uncomfortably real. Value will be assigned by utility, people and things lacking utility will quickly find there way into the junk to be picked over by bottom rung opportunists. You will live by your hunger, survival will be your passion, all those things that you used to worry about will fade in comparison to keeping warm at night and something to eat in the winter. Who worries about loans when there are wolves and frostbite.

  These are your options when dealing with the sinking ship known as American Higher education: game it or opt out of it, engage with it and you will just get pulled down in its wreckage. Just remember that the night is always darkest before the dawn, but also remember that the night gets continually darker as it progresses, so what you might believe is pre dawn darkness, might just lead to even greater darkness of an arctic night we may never live to see the end of.

4/19/2012

Psychobilly Massacre- Part 1

We failed at our last chance to stop the Psychobilly chief Old Buck Three tooth, after our tribute of Pseudoephedrine, inhalants and spent ammo cartridges, since they deemed purchased ammo as filled with blanks by the Zionist homosexual conspiracy with the proceeds going to fund inner city crack armies, came up short. He invoked the laws of the Backwood, to those unversed in the laws of the back wood, imagine war and then total war, now imagine total- deliverance chainsawgeddon. We appealed to the local sheriff, but we were to late. The overweight sheriff with a voice that dripped from his ampel mustache like cold molassses had been bought off with fine Cuban cigars and a generously galloned stetson, he had evoked super double secret Posse comitatus and just like that, unbeknownst to us we had been declared outside the laws.
All we ever wanted to do was build a community based on six blue prints and a central pool in a cheap real estate market ripe for development. How did we know that our “fancy pancy” medical clinics and high faluting ways would lead to a secret pact among neighbors to take on raw extrajudicial powers in regards to our moderate gentrification. Levied from the various casts of the counties natives,”they” went about sealing off our neighborhood with burning tires demanding wild things with even wilder explanations why a more common/cheaper item would not suffice. Failure to comply was met with a wild meth charge of belligerent pillaging until a important lesson was learned, or a wise family hedged their bets with planted heroin and barbituates stashed in areas likely to be searched as sleepy addled neighbors shamble back to the now immense laager of opportunistic trailer folk. And that’s how I got the idea for the beheading, take a few heads, give as good as we got maybe get them to turn down the music and to recycle their recyclables, show them the ole neighborhood spirit.
I happened to know of a stash of college age dealer who was killed early on due to his demanding need for proof of why a shot gun wielding group of freebooting thugs was an entity that required anything more than its native authority, and thus, was one of the first to die leaving me one of the few “”groovy” individuals left amongst our harried band of survivors who knew of the stash. Turning my coat to look more like the rustic garb of our complacent aggressors I found a small group manning a nomadic checkpoint and toll collection service who I offered to lead to a stash, for some of their artisanal meths, since I couldn't seem to be altruistic, or they might know. Their intense tribal paranoia had thwarted every attempt so far to ingratiate ourselves amongst them, no matter what, they would eventually call you a cop, and then, the bludgeoning, always the bludgeoning. We were desperate, I just hoped I would be the first to do it right, for long enough.

4/18/2012

The Butter battle a Generation lost

This little work is one of my favorites as it is a mix of something I love- the Dr. Seuss classic The Butter Battle as well as other classic works of his, and something I loathe- the Sixties melodrama with its discordant messages of moral relativism and generational alienation. It is meant to be a collection of clichés and tired conventions placed in the whimsical fantabulous world of Dr. Seuss.

[The Son walks in from stage left, father is at the table reading the paper]

Father Listen to this, a new study proves buttering your toast on the bottom side causes stomach cancer, intense allergic reactions, homosexuality, and in rare cases Germanization. Just another reason all good G-d fearing Christian heterosexuals put their toast butter side up.

Son


[Stage whisper] You’re such a tool, dad.


Father:


[Folds up paper] What did you say?


Son


I said, you’re a tool, you listen to everything you read, it so like your generation, butter side up this, butter side up that, you’re a broken record.


Father


You don’t know what your talking about, you didn’t have to spend your birthday in a bunker because those pagans over there were threatening you and everything you believed in with big-boy-boomaroos, you never had to fight for anything, you kids with your flinger-mago’s, HornWazlers and a roof over your head, you should talk.


Son


We’re not like you, we’re not stuck in your [finger quotations] “ world,” we’re not carrying on your fascist ideas and wars, were not pawns of oppression.


Father


Oh, so now all those brave men down in Whoville, trying to protect the world’s right to butter their bread the proper way, are pawns. Have you ever seen some one butter their bread on the wrong side…


Son


Not this story again…


Father


Listen to me damn it, back in the war I saw some kids playing with some old butter and bread, thought they were real cool too One girl put the butter on the bottom side, I guess no one told her better. The butter, of course, dripped off the hot toast all over her hands, burning her. She ran for the water but slipped on the puddle of melted butter and pushed into one of her friends, they fell together[wipes a tear from his eye] against the faucet and it split his head open like a melon, brains everywhere, she tried to close the wound but here hands were too slippery, too damn slippery and his skull kept slipping out of here hands again and again… The doctor said if it wasn’t for the butter we might have saved him. [sobs openly]


Son


So you’re saying that story justifies the atrocities down in Whoville, the massacres, the constant killing, and the conscription of kids just out of high school to do it.


Father


What are you talking about, we are offering them freedom and prosperity, a life better then they have ever known!


Son


Where was that freedom and prosperity when we were supporting the Grinches occupation? He wouldn’t even let them celebrate their traditional festivals, stealing everything they had, everything except for a crumb that was too damn small for even a mouse, is that your freedom and prosperity, Dad?


Father


It was the lesser of two evils.


Son


What about those with stars on thar’s down in the south, they are still denied their freedom and prosperity so what are we doing trying to export it when we don’t even have enough for our own countrymen


Father


Oh, and let me guess, Mister Tolerant, the only time you even talked to somebody with star on them was that girl you brought home to try and piss me off! But when I was courteous you ignored her for the rest of the night- and remember when I invited the pants with no body inside them from work over for dinner? You spent the entire evening hiding in the bushes outside.


Son


Well guess what, me and my friends have been buttering our bread on the bottom side, so how do you like that [father slaps son]


Father


Where do you get off, we live in the greatest land in history and you’re buttering your bread like. Like- Like one of them. Where did you learn to do something like that?


Son


I learned it from you, Dad I learned it from you.


[They embrace. we all shed a tear. close curtain]

4/17/2012

Wendel Capone Speaks: A public service announcement

We all live lives of quiet anonymity, we have to, or names, our lineage speak louder than our pitifully human voices ever can. I Wendel Capone the President and founder of the Historically Marked Surname Association have made it my goal to allow those with Historically blighted surnames to live full, happy, social lives while maintaining a connection to the majority of their past. I unfurl our banner, the Sanskrit Right-facing in the decorative form used to evoke Shakti swastika and demand equal treatment, we can't all be lucky like the Bundies and have a loveable TV series made with the name and we can't keep our anonymity in this high tech surname centered society, gone are the days of so and so son of so and so, of attaching ones christian name, that right no holiday names here, we are proud of original people going by their original names, to ones occupation like Jamie Whore son, or Dwanye the Bull milker, merrily going to Canterbury, telling our bawdy tales, no, this is the twenty first century and it is your last and final name that defines you. Whether its Superintendent Himmler being called a Nazi for doing his job or Dave Dallas being asked if Debbie was his mom, last name abuse is a soul shattering experience. Imagine, someone,making fun of...your mom, with an attached racial slurr, now apply it to everyone in your family, that's right, ouch. So whether it is at work, around the neighborhood or in our schools we need to remember to look at everyone of us as an individual and not a bunch of Hitlers, because if you actually went through the trouble of getting to know a Hitler you might be pleasantly surprised to find something more than funny mustaches and virulent antisemitism.