The United States of Delusion

Dear United States of America,

We’re family, so I feel like I can tell you something very personal, constructive, and from my heart.  I wanted to say to you in the nicest and most respectable way possible, USA,… Fuck You.

I just left the library because it’s too cold despite the 100+ degree outside temperature today.  I forgot to bring my parka and ski mask to study comfortably in the 57 degree paradise of shamefully disgusting excess that has become the United States of Indulgence.  The United States has become a place where all day long I fight to see the really good shit and get hammered down by the barrage of throat-closing horrible shit.  I am assuming that despite my affection, service, and dedication for several decades this is your way of telling me to Fuck Off.  Okay.  Since we’re so close, USA, I feel like you need to get slapped around like a misbehaving mule today.

Love it or leave it?  Well, I’m not going fucking anywhere.

What was I studying?  Marketing:  the study of merging statistics with stupidity in order to prop up the unproppable.  It’s becoming increasingly difficult to escape air-conditioned madness in America.  Despite the refrigerator-like temperature that made my ears sting and my fingers numb, I just witnessed 3 separate fat people fanning themselves.  One of them was a 12-year old child.  What the fuck is a fat 12-year old doing in a library in July?  Five hundred feet away there is 196 acres of forest where 2 rivers meet.

I had to leave.  The blast of hot air outside was most welcome but the Americans on the street can all fuck off for all I’m concerned today.  The first 13 people I encountered were all massively overweight and were lined up outside the Dominoe’s Pizza and the 99 Cent Shop to buy worthless plastic food and worthless plastic crap.  That’s Marketing right there.  The United States of Zombies makes me want to fucking vomit today.  This shit that gets sold for the sake of being sold is like having crack available for $3 every five feet.

Making my way up Broadway to the polluted banks of the Harlem River I encounter the ephemeral mass of unemployed on the park benches sipping rum, staring blankly, or yelling through their cell phones.  All around is a nest of plastic trash swirling about in the hot breeze at the feet of the plastic-filled people sitting in old plastic-laced clothing despite the 4 empty trash cans set out within sight.  Nobody can give himself a fucking job apparently.  Nobody can figure out that work doesn’t have anything to do with money.  I don’t care if you don’t make money.

I am reminded of my unemployed wife who, this past 4th of July weekend, spent the afternoon picking up trash in the park as hundreds of people walked by in celebration of American Independence by sucking down sugary drinks and ingesting conveniently packaged coronary bombs.  The optimally marketed packaging is discarded haphazard to create a sort of mine field of insanity.  I watched kids using trash as makeshift “safe zones” in a game of tag while my wife and I worked.

“This is embarrassing,” is the only thing she says.  Of course, she’s embarrassed by the waste part — not the picking up part.  I’m thinking silently, how is it possible to survive so much waste and addiction?  How can we get anything else right if we can’t get the really easy stuff right?  But, I shook it off with the echoed chants in my memory, “yes-we-can! yes-we-can!” for the sake of the holiday.

“Huh?”  I had to ask, because I can’t hear above the cacophony of pimped-ride, hip hop music blasted like a dance club on wheels from the downed-windows of an Escalade.  Windows down, AC cranked, $4000 stereo transported atop $4000 rimmed wheels under the control of $4000 worth of tattooed forearms.  $12,000 of Premium Dumbfuck all designed for the LOOK AT ME! generation.  Welcome to the United States of Excess.

The trash piles tell a sort of archeological story:  plastic soda bottles, ice cream wrappers, empty beer cans, fast food packaging fills the voids of Kentucky Blue Grass empty space between the lolling, lightly clothed, heavily oiled, fat people.  The scene looks like a sort of twisted war movie where aliens have been slaughtered by a plastic shrapnel bouncing betty — the aliens are all suffering out on the battlefield wearing uniforms of enormous cock-eyed baseball caps and sports jerseys.  There’s little movement amongst the alien casualties but lots of noise.

Out on the ball fields, city kids are getting scouted for minor league ball.  Behind the dugouts, grown men are gambling on the outcome of kids’ performance and the 75 mph fastballs.  Throw a ball, and you might become a hero.  Catch a ball, and you might gain respect.  Hit a ball, and you might get a job.  Welcome to the United States of Distraction.

Here in the States excess = comfort.  Here in the States we’ve got so much “money” we can burn it.  If we need more, we go and take it.  Here in the States, you’d better beware if you don’t believe in Freedom, because Freedom is on the march, you raghead, camel-fucking, Haji-Motherfucker! U-S-A!  U-S-A!  U-SA!  Welcome to the United States of Intimidation.

Here in the States. we got things called rights, and 57 degree libraries are a right.  The irony of posting a sign that reads, “help support our Library!  The budget has been slashed by $37 million dollars!” right next to the thermostat goes unnoticed.  At the counter I motion to the sign and suggest, “maybe we should turn down the AC — you might be able to buy more books.”

“We don’t control that.  The AC is controlled by Facilities,” the Librarian dismisses.

Ahhhhh… Facilities is the culprit — as if I know what the fuck he’s talking about.  I wonder silently if Facilities is also responsible for the shit that is creeping out of the toilet, the wireless not working, and the books from 2007 being shelved in the “Newly Published” section.  Welcome to the United States of Bureaucracy.

I left and went back to the park to watch young fat kids sweat like greased pigs after a 4-minute softball warmup.  I sigh as I breath in the New York City atmosphere of Mr. Softee jingling in the background enticingly, long strings of profanity coming from the mouths of teenage women aimed at their children, and the fecal smell of the Harlem River at low tide. Ahhhhh….summer.

Back to the Marketing chapter entitled, “Multivariate Techniques & Data Mining.”  Back to the United States of Delusion.

But, goddammit, USA… I fucking love you. I will never give up on you even when you’re a bleeding, disgusting pile of shit. I still believe there’s plenty of good bones, and I will never fail to dig deep and pull for you.