"The following is a tall tale so grotesque, that elements of it had to happen, curses to God!"

(Overlay with gagging sounds, of someone clearly disgusted with all this uber-sappiness)

Exasperated Voice-Over: "Sickening, isn't it? Whatever you want to say about our ideals of romantic love in a mass society of individuals squirming like worms, there are a lot of folks out there who 'don't get it'. It's like having a taste for artwork, or interior decorating, and most people out there have a sensibility that can be described as 'crud'. In a culture, in a civilization, there is the stuff that is golden and survives like a coin found in an ancient shipwreck at the bottom of the ocean floor but then again there is the material that rots away completely and is never heard from again, because it ain't worth giving two shits for"

"Of course, don't forget what it really comes down to. . . . .!"

Cut to shot of '70s porno set, add on "funkadelic" music with clicking "wahh" pedal

"Oh, come now. . . . . let's not be that cynical. Surely we're more than just shivering protoplasm 'glorping' around under a microscope on the cosmic scale of things, though there are some among us who would maintain that we're little more than maggots on a revolving nugget of horse shit going in circles around a light-bulb. A chaser of Prozac for your thoughts, but some days I'd agree with that"

Cut to shot of cars and SUV's caught in gridlock out on the freeway in the height of summer, people yelling and honking their horns as vehicles give off farting exhaust alongside noisy construction, which only congests things further

As horns honk and men holler and jack-hammers crunch into the pavement, cut to shot of Marilyn Manson album: "Portrait of an American Family"

Cut to shot of tractors shoveling through a landfill

"It can be said that man exists either as a mouth or an anus, or possibly both"

Cut to shot of squealing pigs, and a pig-shit lagoon off at a pig farm

FOLLOWED BY: A video of a port-a-John being knocked over by a crane as a practical joke and the hated boss sliding out with the sewage like a fish

MOTIF ABRUPTLY CHANGES

Cut to shot of Oswald Spengler, a very serious man who wrote "The Decline of the West", a grim post World War I tome that predicted that we were all doomed and living in the winter of our demise

"For me, romance was always the tantalizing "escape hatch" from the more sober, unpleasant facts of existence. And to the extent that people would toy with my sullen crustiness was pure torture!"

Cut to shot of girls sitting around in high school cafeteria, flitting around and acting like sluts. My younger self is sitting alone and drinking chocolate milk with a comically serious expression, like a young Republican all but wearing a George W. Bush t-shirt. They half look in my direction and laugh with mischief

"In all my joyless pomposity, my hero was Oswald Spengler, a grave prig who wrote 'The Decline of the West' after the end of 'The Great War' in 1918"

The scene changes to to grim streets of post World War I Europe, the hordes of bourgeoisie and commoners mulling around the cobblestone streets in suits, trying to come to grips with the loss of so much life in the battlefields at the announcement of war's end. Perhaps we cut to various shots of "No Man's Land" to add to the effect, the upheaved sod and blasted-away trees. Faith in everything has been destroyed, and everyone is "shell-shocked" with the heaviness of everything. Oswald Spengler, in a top hat and a monocle, comes out on the street and like a prophet tolling the bell of doom and tells the crowd "you may celebrate now, you simpletons, but Europe is destroyed". He then points his finger and says with great hollow certainty, "you're all DOOMED".

"Here was a stiff professor who never went out, but would retire alone to his study and drink laudnaum-- his sole conceit-- whirling around with his monocle to see if he was being watched, and slowly sip. Incidentally, he never had sex. Some people are born twisted. Other people GET TWISTED"

Cut to shot of Oswald Spengler doing just that, whirling around with paranoia to see if anyone was watching; uptight, as if someone might catch this great man of the European cultural stratum masturbating

SCENE CHANGES ABRUPTLY

My serious younger self is doing homework when the phone rings. It's a girl giggling on the other end of the line asking me out to the "Sadie Hawkins" dance. I stutter and agree. I hang up the phone and look greatly surprised, going back to work. Not many seconds later she calls up to cancel, her friends tittering hysterically on the line. I hold the phone up, looking comically dismayed

"I wondered why no one would take me seriously, like 'Death' playing chess with that guy in 'The Seventh Seal' or even someone so fearsome as 'The Hangman of Prague'. You know, an executioner going around, holding up a noose in order to strike terror in the hearts of the peasantry. The harder I tried, the more ridiculous I looked. And anyway, it was all probably just a mask for sexual frustration"

As this narration goes on, cut to shot of "The Hangman of Prague" graphic with clip of "Imperial March" from the Star Wars soundtrack. What kind of overblown asshole am I, anyway?

"I might as well have looped the noose around my hard-on and jacked off with it, because I wasn't getting anywhere fast!"

Off-screen voice: "Not even when you tried to fuck your married French teacher?"

"ESPECIALLY when I tried to fuck my married French teacher!"

Cut to shot of my teenaged standing there earnestly, and a woman calling out "YOU BASTARD!" and slapping me across the face in a petite French accent

"Love, love, love. It was like I had been bayoneted in the belly and crawled home to die. So one became very nihilistic, living this hand-to-mouth existence where one's entertainment got ever more squalid and extreme. War movies. Gangster Movies. New York City movies. The glittering, gaudy rhinestones of the '70s became my toast-- suitcases of cocaine, starry eyes, and bodies washed up on the beach. I wasn't even 18 yet, and I was seeking the outer limits of human existence, only coming out at night like a salamander from a dark, moist cave"

"My favorite band at the time was 'Primordial Atrocity'", a death-metal outfit that looking back I can't decide was parody or not"

Cut to shot of concert-goers hanging outside venue, "The Creepy Crawl"-- what is emphasized is our pure marginality. . . . .

"But in our own way, we formed a tribe. . . . . set up against "goody two-shoes" Christian hypocrisy and their finger-wagging pecking order. There were plenty of us dumbly mouthing off: "bring it on, man" as if we were willing to unleash limitless violence on those who infringed on our right to assembly. Fortuitously, no bible-thumper made themselves apparent. . . . . almost as an omen nodding in favor to our collective, ghoulish bestiality. You see, we were open-minded. When we ran out of heretical Christian evil, there was always ancient Arabian evil, a swordsman swishing his weapon through the air with a sly smile. Then there was ancient Chinese evil, Fu Manchu with long tapering finger-nails and a crooked mustache being "serviced" by Geishas. I wouldn't be surprised if some of us dabbled in Wicca and danced around to the pipes of Pan"

Cut to shot of "Primordial Atrocity" doing "their magic" up on stage. Their singer looks like this:

After the "song" ends the entire hall erupts in a collective "eeeeeeeagh" the sound that evil, primordial slop would make in a belching, sulfurous crater.

Narration in hammy, fist-swinging voice: "Oh, we sure seemed like wholesome boys. . . . ."

My younger self is sitting out against the wall with a friend, a 15 year-old who speaks in a deep, morbid voice. A black bum, comes up and squats down in front of us with a whoosh of sweet wine and holds out a ring in his palm

"Gentleman, gentleman", he says with slowness, with weasel-eyed intent, his teeth all yellow and depraved, his face all grizzled.

"I haven't eaten anything in three days and I have this ring. Now, I stole this ring, and I'm willing to sell it to you good-lookin' cats for $80. You amenable?"

We look back and forth and I say:

"Uh, accepting stolen property would be a felony, sir. We don't have $80"

The bum stalks off, spitting "FUCK YOU, man" over his shoulder as if he had bitten down on a rotten crawdad.

We look after him shocked, then to each other, barely comprehending what has occurred as death metal kids stand around outside the clubs in cliques and half look on

Narration Overlay: "There was this song from that 1983 Slayer album called "Evil Has No Boundaries". Well, for us that night it certainly did! And do you want to know what that album was called? 'Show No Mercy'!"

Cut to shot of "Show No Mercy", a giant goat-headed man with a sword looking ready to cut down peasants like a Beserker as I make a bestial growling sound

"So it was. . . . . . life in the gutter. At a certain point you can't go any lower, and the only way "out" is "up".

Cut to clip from "Alien Resurrection" towards the end when Winona Ryder is confronted by a half-human, half-alien hybrid growling over her menacingly as the space-ship heads to earth. Culminating in the ultimate scene of pure tastelessness, the creature is sucked out the window-- its guts trailing in space-- as it mewls for its mother in piteous frenzy. As all of this happens, play the 1980's song "Here She Comes" by Bonnie Tyler

Narration Overlay:

"I said that the only way "out" was up. . . . . but it was certainly a zig-zagging path! Yes, the wonderful Winona Ryder-- the face of moody discomfiture, beautiful Russian-Jewish waif of lemony sugar-spun dreams; perhaps she taught me there was "a better way". Even if it didn't have to do with hulking creatures tearing humans asunder in some tasteless science fiction universe"

Cut to shot of "Alien Resurrection" playing in theater, and some doofus in the theater laughing uproariously with inappropriateness when an alien bites some guy's head off in a most tasteless fashion

"Call it a 'civilizing influence', but it was all mostly "a lost cause".

Cut to shot of split screen between Winona Ryder gracefully walking along side Daniel-Day Lewis in the film adaption of Edith Wharton's "The Age of Innocence" and on the other side Hulk Hogan exploding out of the roof of a car in "No Holds Barred" and kicking ass inside a parking garage to a rock in' roll soundtrack. Two worlds shall never meet!

Next is a stop-motion montage of a giant poster-board being piled on with Winona Ryder pictures-- getting tacked up with increasing frequency

My younger brother comes in and calls out, mock "Wayne's World": "Give it up, man-- she'll never go for you!"

I call out, laughing-- "Well, at least I don't have a statue of the Virgin Mary in a black veil and covered with a necklace of bloody tampons and call it 'Winona'!"

"But you would if you could find the tampons. . . . ."

I yell out in mock anger, "YOU MOTHERFUCKER!" and chase after him

The board tips over, and I holler out "OH, SHIT!" and run back over to straighten the board back up

Narration: "But I may as well have been trying to take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. . . . . marooned on a desert island. . . . . . for the lack of women in sight. Oh, they were around, all right, but I had no idea how to go up and talk to them in a million years. I had so much bundled intensity in my young inner person that felt like a bonfire of passion--"

Cut to shot of raging bonfire out in the country, flames shooting up into the night

"But who could ever understand that in this world of filth and woe and mortality, when all you really wanted to do was to speed up and exceed the speed of light? Pure consciousness, with dick & balls included! Ride this spaceship, and fly around the galaxy like a roaring sex machine of the pure primal force. . . . ."

Cut to shot of "Austin Powers" where the midget, "Mini-Me" is situated next to an observatory telescope so it looks like he has a giant erection 200 feet long and fifteen feet wide

"But alas, one was confined to this vale of sorrow, and sometimes my enthusiasm got the better of me. There was the time when I wrote the Led Zeppelin-inspired lyrics for the girl over at "Circuit City"

My teenaged self is playing the computer game, "Doom" when the phone rings. I answer it, and there's this dispassioned Spanish voice on the other end of the line.

"I'm looking for Michael Adams"

"This is he"

"This is the manager over at Circuit City in Crestwood. You left a note for a salesgirl with your number?

"Yes"

"What did you mean by it?"

"I think it speaks for itself"

"Were you trying to be like-- romantic?"

"Yeah. What else could it be?"

"Well, she's here about to call the police. She is very frightened"

I lean forward, shocked & in disbelief, and mouth:

"No, no. . . . . . what do you mean? That's not what I meant. I'm-- I'm so sorry"

"It's very unfortunate"

"Can-- can I talk to her, and apologize? I'm very sorry. . . . . . I feel terrible!"

"No, that won't be happening. Just make me one promise"

"What's that? Anything. . . . . ANYTHING I can do to make this all better!"

"Don't ever come in here again"

He then hangs up the phone.

I hold my head in my hands for a long time

MOTIF CHANGES

Narration: "My nickname back in high school was "The Unabomber". I hated that name-- the idea of Ted Kaczynski: domestic terrorist, and how when he was finally scooped up from his isolated cabin out in 'bumfuck', Montana he looked like a drowned sewer rat dragged out from the bottom of the river. Then he tried to hang himself in jail with his underwear, and couldn't even manage that! I knew I had my problems, but there was no way in the world that I was as twisted as this guy. . . . . though it could be said that our comparative isolation and lack of women in our lives was both making us crazy!"

 

"One increasingly turned to the internet for some kind of answer, mostly out of boredom, but didn't have much luck. . . . . because cyberspace is such a random mix of random noise and the cruddy markers of stupid people. I tried internet dating, and certain vile creatures loomed out of that chaos like beasts from the sea--"

"Fat, loud, and dumb-- those seemed to be the only girls left who weren't taken, and with good cause. There was a certain Social Darwinist logic that asserted itself-- the law of life. And there I was, at wit's end. . . . . gallstones in my kidney, hellhound on my trail!"

Cut to shot of picture-- one of a man standing on a bleak, windswept landscape with a wolf on his trail-- the ultimate in existential absurdity

"There was this story by Jack London where this man was making a grueling hike without foot or water, and eventually this sickly wolf began crawling after him, ready to eat him when he stopped struggling. It was either him or that wolf as they crawled on mile after mile up in Alaska, the man trying to reach rescue on the shore. That's what it felt like, at least"

"I began taking extreme flights of fancy. . . . . hell, I even went to the websites of hookers and fantasized that somehow, someway I could win them away from their $500/hour profession of ill-repute and that they would shack up with me, my Dad, and my dog Buckley instead. Needless to say, I didn't get any takers. . . . ."

"On some kind of black humor binge, I even went to a Russian mail-order bride site, figuring "what the fuck"-- I couldn't sink any lower-- and I was smirking at probable destines of men who frequented such places. . . . ."

*******************

Go into side skit entitled "Russian Mail-Order Bride", a curtain pulled back to reveal the title with the "bom" of kettledrums and a piteous violin that goes into a frenetic Russian folk waltz

Start off with this picture-- and as the narration plays, show action that accompanies the words like a screwball cartoon

"He had an interest in the CIA, the KGB, and international intrigue: this white, middle-aged loner from the Midwest. From the novelty catalogs he got ahold of, he ordered all sorts of "secret alternate identity" Cold War-era replications. May a nuclear submarine rise up in the water in salutation, after-all, but the reality bespoke of something far less. . . . ."

"What woman would understand his fascination with UFO/Illumanati/New World Order conspiracy theories? The cabal of secret industrialists and bankers and little green men who controlled everything? Why did they laugh at him at bars? What the hell was this "age of irony" about anyway? What ever happened to respect, like how a boy like him was taught in high school?"

"Maybe he'd find it in the old world. . . . . in the heart of the evil empire that finally saw the light of freedom. So he laid down his $6000 and flew to Moscow to meet some ladies willing to leave their poverty-blasted homeland and gamble it all on a guy like him back in the states"

"And there she was. Younger than him, taller than him, but she held his eyes-- giving him a Slavic wink. That was the mating habits of BIRDS, wasn't it? She spoke to him in a semi-fluent, halting English and he responded back in mostly shy monosyllabyls. Love at first sight, apparently. Like in the wild. After two days, the agreement was set. But she'd be taking her 20 year-old son, Pavel, with her to stay at his house. It was a small ceremony, overseen by his militia-type friends and his family that stared on with the same owl-like expression"

"The wife and his step-son seemed to spend a whole lot of time on his computer, while he was off working at the hardware store. He didn't know that they were part of the Russian Mafia, until the FBI kicked down the door one Saturday while he was snoozing innocently on the couch. The Feds confiscated his computer, but the wife and step-son had fled with the husband's truck"

"He vowed to kill that bitch if he ever saw her again, but alas, never did."

********************

"I had to laugh, and to think of myself as a better judge of character. As far as Slavic people go, I have only basically seen two types-- broken-down and piteous, like the Bosnian landladies with the weeping heaviness of life as they scrape the bottom tiers of society to make a living down here in South St. Louis in pursuit of the American dream. Houses, cars, better schools, imparting "Uncle Pavel" from war-torn lands. You're either that, or sly and devious-- playing the blindness of the system to the fulllest extent of sly efficiency, like a crooked bank taller stuffing roubles down the front of his overcoat like a gangster"

"I wasn't expecting much from this bottom-of-the-barrel pursuit. But then I saw her, my cute Russian dream girl who seemed to be the answer to all my problems and the solution to all my prayers. So what if it said that she only haltingly knew bits of the English alphabet and various bits & snatches of words & phrases? Can you see "Glasnost"? Can you say "Perstilokia"? Can you say "McDonalds"? Can you say 'Nintendo Tetris'?"

Cut to shot of "Tetris"-- video game music plays, "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies"

"That's when I wagered it all and rolled the dice. . . . ."

(TO BE CONTINUED)

*******************

SORRY KIDS,
BUT READ THIS NOTICE:

© 2008 by Insufferable Industries

Drop "The Bard" a line at
michaeladams_s@yahoo.com

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