Sunday, October 27, 2013

shedding dark


           “As a wise man once said under the signs of an imminent volcano eruption, ‘I choose hell. Hell is my natural habitat.’
            “So. Well. It seems, according to all signs around this joint, that I’ve got to start being successful. Maybe lose my derivatives in the process. But we’re drinking iced tea here. Figure that. It does. Figure. Believe me. Just started in, and now that hinge squeak of get-up-and-get-‘em rises like pulp to your lips, or mine, or, shit, anybody’s. Ditto the minting of bankrupt minds. Hug a cop. Root for the away team. Blow a mannequin. Go belly-down into the thin of it. Me? I’m purporting to snag a hold of what might as well be rightfully mine. And I’m coming for your children and your valuables. And I’m down wind of circumstances you’d never have the knack for understanding, even if you pleaded your scrawny, worthless, pansy-picking ass off for it. I’ll file that away, or you can, under Pending Travesties. It’s restitution, and it’s multiplying its way through subprime-loan and hedge-fund ravaged lands.
            “Of course I’m mended here. Of course I’m a smattering of cracked sealant and brittle bones run scapegoated to the wilderness. But who’s counting? Look. The pit, it’ll raise itself, and die to tell the tale. Pinched shut and sold out. Openings close, and you get tired. So, just give a shit about something besides that miserable nut-sac of a life you’ve been leading, okay? Believe you me, not one of you dick lickers here with your Brazilian rosewood veneers and your aluminum spines knows sweet Fanny Adams about what my whole here deviant situation is all about. There’s more philosophy in the toilet after I shit than any of you piss sippers could even fathom digesting in the first place. So, don’t ask for my ass on another day. By this time tomorrow I’ll be deep behind enemy lines, speculating T-notes well below any par you’ve ever known, always a skosh thirty-seconds of a point from the trenches of financial ruin. So put that in your stock quotes and smoke it while you pull those pants on two legs at a time, instead of playing grab ass with the rest of the jerkoffs in your soft-bellied, daycare cadre who eat crow for breakfast and suck from the tit of Goldman Sachs. Bring your lumber to the yard, kids.        
               “Success is coming. It’s getting to that bend that’s just beyond our tapering on Bond-Buying Stimulus Road. Remember, the pleasure’s not in the possession but in the pursuit, boys. Shyness doesn’t count. I get forthright and rude. It’s ordering and masking and cored to the mettle it takes to be just a pitch more than loud. Irate doesn’t slice to heal, but it curbs highlights of what might yet become a better character flaw than all the rest, a speculative draft of coffee futures doled out to paper-slip-wielding morons who can’t stomach the jiving around it takes to even take a glimpse towards the acme of high yielding returns. You IQ champions can diversify your portfolios until the cows moo the winning lottery numbers. I’ll let you in on a little secret, okay? Winning is everything.
            “By the way, none of this is rhetorical, dip shits. Get on board and howl fantods with me while we crush rudimentary cap-and-trade systems under our quid-pro-quo boots and blame the free market for our dalliances.
            “An attack backed on multiple fronts. Whimsy and deadlock and bored tempers that just won’t flare like they used to. Do not rain on my prescription pills, you sick son of a bitch. Do not walk this way. And, whatever the shit or Shylocked Shinola you come running back to, do not use my willpower as a dashboard reading for your special kind of flaunting. I flout that shit. Really. It gets up under my armpits and reeks and runs red-river-valleys of sweat down my sides. Look. I could shit in a paper bag, tell you it’s dessert, and you’d scarf it down like a Little Debbie Frosted Fudge Cake. It’s all a load of hokey b.s. to the milquetoast power of petering out, if you ask this thumb-biting bastard about it. Not that the price gouging that spells checks and balances for you would ever be in need of, well, support. Look. Debasement comes at a sliding-scale price, and I, for those who don’t know what they used to know was best for them, spend a pseudo-serendipitous time milking the bottom-feeder frenzy out of their dying-of-the-light raging. There’s no pie left in the sky, only luxury condos to sell to neo-yuppies, you know? And I’m not getting all fucking Paul Revere over it; but the yuppies, they’re coming none the less, and they’re taking over your neighborhoods, building coffee shops, brunching; and dining at chic pop-ups, raising your rent, and crowding up all the bars. And then somebody reads you The Ellis Act. And you, sir, are out on your whimpering woebegone ass. That’s a nutshell of it, in the most derelict ways of tonguing or toeing this sort of paid foraging. I am not at all fucking around here. And luck? Fuck luck. Luck be with or without you. I’m frozen peas and rubbed eyes and skunked, if you want to husk the veracious from the apocryphal. Well, shit. Go figure. It’s pajama time for the bedwetters, and I’m all out of diapers.
            “American Depositary Receipts, Real Estate Investment Trusts, tracking stocks, and foreign listings. It’s all broadly enough put, staked out and unclaimed for all the moons that’ve ever arced their way over Manhattan. I measure it all out in the gegenschein anyway. Not more than a dim touch of free-float, market-cap weighting. It takes one to never know one too, you know? I’m right, alright? Just need to get up on and over that. It’ll free up the deadweight in your skull to do better things with what’s passing as time here. There. It’s as done as a dealt and folded hand, and there sure aren’t many contestants left to challenge the Value Line Composite Index’s hold on sure things. So, maybe a little Rimbaud in the back pocket. A scrap of Dostoyevsky in the wallet. Some leaky faucet of Buckminster Fuller’s drip. Mickey Mouse in the medicine cabinet. The lumpy ticks of things that get by out there, in here, and clanking on all goddamn cylinders throughout the concrete swirl of it all is one happy fat chance to prey on the blisslessly ignorant, to scream, ‘Eureka!’ through the clogged arteries of rollicking arenas and neon-lit halls and the amplified balagan of the petty and the meek who’ll never for the life of them figure out how to grow a pair and sell high. Me? Well, my ‘too much’ is never enough. Automated quotations be damned. I’ll get on my own charming way to Hades, if you don’t mind. Thanks but thanks again, if you will. Shit, I spend enough time trying to figure out what class I should align my debts with, not to mention compostable bins of shame that need to get buried or chucked into the drink, and probably will now or never anyway, so, well, why the fucking cinderblocks should I bomb the message for the mule about it, you know? Fuck it. I’m gassed with deleted joy.
            “While I’ve got you nibbling at my scope here, I might as well make one Shop-Vac of a thing clear: fluted slats of daily trading values transcend whatever purpose one might impose on their highfalutin transcendence, Buckaroos. Borrow a lender’s beehive of chance in the continuative auction format of settled outcries, floor-bound in the industry of averages of course, and we’ll all dispense ritualized retreat at untested dosages, tossing scraps of our soul into the fray just to see how long we can float along without something so irksome as dignity or bonhomie to keep us buoyant. Unflappable belief in par values, negative equity capability, and reinvested dividends pave these streets with pyrite. Bountiful and scarce we flail along in the draff and glitz of this polished yet oil-leaking corporate machine. Who pushes the button? Who makes the bed? And who serves, and for whom is this slush fund supper served? Do any of you rinky-dink, sycophantic, credit-card wielding, cringe-riddled assholes even care? Shit. 
            “Look. It is never all the same. Barriers are reached and breached. The hills are made of briar-patched and honeyed wonder. Ladders of not-so-intrinsic value are walked under. Sometimes you hide in reinvested time. Sometimes you catch raindrops in your pocketbook. And sometimes, well, sometimes you ride all over town on empty, clinging to a rubbed-raw steering wheel in a rented Bentley, headed towards shiny new places that might only exist in a place just beyond where you’ve always been too scared to drive. Cash flow forecasting belts out a cash-is-king tune. The amplitude of liquidity undresses in the mirror. We hide beneath a blanket of trade-credit insecurity and pretense, turning ourselves into consignment shops of another’s design. A quaked moan of doing a little wrong to do a great right, of well-dressed constancies that expire before their fashions go out of style. Well, we can’t all dessert on worms. It’s microprocessing on the most claustrophobic of levels. It’s Dewey-Defeats-Truman hot air being ballooned and disenfranchised. It’s a coffle of nincompoop asses run amok, a costumed stunt of ever-lasting faith in the dollar’s worth. Hear that? It’s the motherfucking closing bell. And it tolls for all of us. I have come to warn you. But…I’m sick, and miffed and worn out of going on and on. Shit. There is no wilderness left, and it’s been many a fiscal year since this here margin-walking bastard, yours truly, has cried. I mean, really: we are but figments and figures of digitized wraiths floating ever closer to the fiduciary scoreboard of what’s always been our own demise. Hey, but maybe that’s just me.”