I almost grew my hair out, happened just the other day. You see, I do not cut hair well, and still have never paid money to cut my hair, but it gets this weird short-hair length that’s too long for regular shorthairs but seems sell-out length to me still. But it gets Kenny Powers curls at the back edges and shags out on the sides and if I touched one of those frizzle balls from the Science Museum, it’d all stick out like crazy.
But this is the world I navigate currently, taking a break from the life of a guy who does not give a fuck, to pretend to give a fuck just enough to hold down a regular job and keep the mortgage people from making us homeless again (although if I find a good schoolbus on the government auction site somebody hipped me to for under $1200, we outta here anyways! Fuck y’all bitches! Enjoy your own slow death!). I am immersed in bureaucracy, where you have to fill out four pieces of paper to move one things three feet, or you can build relationships with actual other people and circumnavigate all that bullshit as much as possible. That’s how I try to roll, both in employment and in my every day life. Rules are for assholes. Seriously. Assholes have no idea how to behave amongst other people, and screw it up for all the rest of us, so much so that you have things like the past week’s election where people actually think all that nonsense makes a difference, and actual friends of mine (so I think) who otherwise seem like normal outside the box individuals get all hung up on whichever flavor of white guy in a suit they’ve come to identify as government jesus for theyselves. I don’t get it. I mean, I vote every year, more for the experience than because I care about the outcome (I try to throw my vote away as often as possible).
But I digress. These are fucked times where people are fucked but we have somehow mastered this ability to put a nice façade on everything and act like it’s all good. I had some line to an old Solaris Earth Pipeline song (R.I.P. S.E.P.) called “Minimum Payments” where it went “I’m staggering through life making minimum payments, drinking beer popping pills hoping my mind stays bent, because that’s the only time this crooked ass world even makes sense” and really, that shit is probably more true now than it was when I wrote it, because it’s minimum payments until I die. Get rich or try dying, from womb to tomb.
That’s what gives me hope – the words that come out my goddamned brain. I don’t plan it, and haven’t really learned at this point how to organize it that well, but it comes, constantly, like a curse from beyond. If I don’t poke it into a machine or paper or dremel it into the backside of guardrails at night, it clogs up inside my brain and makes me crazy and self-destructive. And even at my advancing age, I have faith in my destiny that these clusterfucks of words are one day going to bring me enough security to make my minimum payments without having to chop my hair off like Samson under Delilah’s vagina spell.
I watched Honeysuckle Rose the other night, and the whole reason I chopped off my dreads a few years back was because I missed having regular longhair that I could put in Willie Nelson braids. (Also, the dreadlocks were literally locking my dread next to my head, clogging up my personal aura, turning my natural purples and lime greens into greys and mustard yellows.) Watching Willie rock Willie style in that flick, and everybody standing around drinking all the damned time, it made me stoked to get back outside the gridlock and get my hair stupid looking, now with Karl Marx whiteness to my hillbilly beard, and rock them damn braids again.
It also made me want to drink beer watching that movie, but I held off. I’ve got to finish this one book, final draft, before I drink another goddamned time-wasting beer. That might be a couple years away, but fuck it, carrots make muleheads move faster through the ruts of their daily life. I hope.
STEAL “You Make Me Die”
NEXT UP: Shit white people like!
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