As I kicked him once more, feeling my steel-capped boot connect with wet bone; I watched as my valkyrie took to his ribs with a pipe. Spattered in blood, her face contorted in joy as she looked over at me, poking her tongue out and giving me a cheeky wink. When we were finished she turned to me, panting, hands on her knees as she caught her breath. She was tired, we both were. Finally standing, she walked over to me, stepping carefully around his spattered remains and gave me a exhausted hug. I wrapped one arm around her, taking the steep pipe out of her hands with the other, and dropped a loving kiss on her forehead.
"See this is why I love you." I said, speaking quietly as we stared down at black, wet conrete. "It's never a matter of why I'm beating up a clown, it's just 'grab a pipe and join in.'"
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Saturday, February 21, 2009
This is my (extended) take on an alternate version of the 'choose life...' monologue from trainspotting.
The sad punk
Say fuck you.
Get pissed off.
Use all the swear words you know and make up some new ones. Roll them off your tongue and into the ears of the girlboymanwomanpersonsocietysocialmovement that’s pissing you off. Give them the peace sign to their back, but put your index finger down first. Say yes, no, give them the contrary answers to what they’re looking for. Don’t be someone’s salvation, be their destruction. Be someone’s pathos, ruin lives. Break things, cause a disturbance; wear Doc Martens and studs. Defy societal expectations; drink ethanol instead of vodka, meths instead of gin. Go nowhere in life, maintain a vegan lifestyle, be an active member of a society for the protection of something or the other.
Wear a leather jacket the entire time and pretend you’re not a hypocrite. Have a smart mouth, better yet have a foul one. Choose to be different, choose to stand out. Choose to live up to the clichés of society's perception of you. Be unique, be like all your unique friends; remember to talk about the differences between you and the mainstream (you’re not sheep like them; that gives you the rights to mock). Listen to metal, punk, and oi! Listen to nothing but Oi Polloi and The Exploited. Get high (take acid, mushrooms, weed or e) and think impressive thoughts that could solve the worlds problems if someone only put them into action (though that person sure as hell isn’t going to be you). Ignore the inevitable frustration of being seen as a second class joke, doomed to never be taken seriously. Get drunk every weekend and throw up on girls while you’re fucking them, let the sweat and vomit wash over both of your bodies. Be disgusting.
Go to university to learn better ways to say ‘screw you’ to the man. Laugh at the corporate shills who make passive aggressive threats when you get their coffee orders wrong at the machine your dad got you a job at. Realise that the best way to bring it down is to take stabs from the inside, internal bleeding has always killed our best and brightest. Let a few years go by. Start wearing chucks, act like you never claimed they made from the souls (soles?) of exploited Chinese children. they're only shoes, fuck off you're still cool (or anti-cool, pick which ever one validates your self esteem problems more). Get a degree, first in class. Doing well in school is punk, it's whatever you want it to be at this point. make a five year plan even though the only plans you used to make were to get drunk and dumpster dive.
Get a job at a big firm where no one cares what your agenda is, tell everyone that you're still going to bring corporate New Zealand (now there's an oxymoron for you) down to its knees. Hide the fact that you love the health benefits, Christmas bonuses and communal coffee. Not to mention Amy from Human Resources who always signs her name off with a little love heart and a smiley face. But she only likes Menchildren who wear ties, she hates tattoos, punk and boys who wear the scars in their hearts on their faces. So the plan for the back piece go on hold for now, but when things don't work out you can always still get it later.
Your first date you feel like an asshole as you try to think of polite conversation to make, but you feel like a Goddamn king when she lets you kiss her at the door. Let the decades speed by, stretching out your skin like the torn insides of a rabbit that couldn't make it across the road in time. You know, the one that's slowly leaving a trail of blood down highway 74 on the wheels of exhausted cars. Support the wife so she can stay at home and raise your family, watch the kids at Wednesday sport and place an disproportionate amount of importance on insignificant details; like when that punk kid at work got your coffee order wrong.
The sad punk
Say fuck you.
Get pissed off.
Use all the swear words you know and make up some new ones. Roll them off your tongue and into the ears of the girlboymanwomanpersonsocietysocialmovement that’s pissing you off. Give them the peace sign to their back, but put your index finger down first. Say yes, no, give them the contrary answers to what they’re looking for. Don’t be someone’s salvation, be their destruction. Be someone’s pathos, ruin lives. Break things, cause a disturbance; wear Doc Martens and studs. Defy societal expectations; drink ethanol instead of vodka, meths instead of gin. Go nowhere in life, maintain a vegan lifestyle, be an active member of a society for the protection of something or the other.
Wear a leather jacket the entire time and pretend you’re not a hypocrite. Have a smart mouth, better yet have a foul one. Choose to be different, choose to stand out. Choose to live up to the clichés of society's perception of you. Be unique, be like all your unique friends; remember to talk about the differences between you and the mainstream (you’re not sheep like them; that gives you the rights to mock). Listen to metal, punk, and oi! Listen to nothing but Oi Polloi and The Exploited. Get high (take acid, mushrooms, weed or e) and think impressive thoughts that could solve the worlds problems if someone only put them into action (though that person sure as hell isn’t going to be you). Ignore the inevitable frustration of being seen as a second class joke, doomed to never be taken seriously. Get drunk every weekend and throw up on girls while you’re fucking them, let the sweat and vomit wash over both of your bodies. Be disgusting.
Go to university to learn better ways to say ‘screw you’ to the man. Laugh at the corporate shills who make passive aggressive threats when you get their coffee orders wrong at the machine your dad got you a job at. Realise that the best way to bring it down is to take stabs from the inside, internal bleeding has always killed our best and brightest. Let a few years go by. Start wearing chucks, act like you never claimed they made from the souls (soles?) of exploited Chinese children. they're only shoes, fuck off you're still cool (or anti-cool, pick which ever one validates your self esteem problems more). Get a degree, first in class. Doing well in school is punk, it's whatever you want it to be at this point. make a five year plan even though the only plans you used to make were to get drunk and dumpster dive.
Get a job at a big firm where no one cares what your agenda is, tell everyone that you're still going to bring corporate New Zealand (now there's an oxymoron for you) down to its knees. Hide the fact that you love the health benefits, Christmas bonuses and communal coffee. Not to mention Amy from Human Resources who always signs her name off with a little love heart and a smiley face. But she only likes Menchildren who wear ties, she hates tattoos, punk and boys who wear the scars in their hearts on their faces. So the plan for the back piece go on hold for now, but when things don't work out you can always still get it later.
Your first date you feel like an asshole as you try to think of polite conversation to make, but you feel like a Goddamn king when she lets you kiss her at the door. Let the decades speed by, stretching out your skin like the torn insides of a rabbit that couldn't make it across the road in time. You know, the one that's slowly leaving a trail of blood down highway 74 on the wheels of exhausted cars. Support the wife so she can stay at home and raise your family, watch the kids at Wednesday sport and place an disproportionate amount of importance on insignificant details; like when that punk kid at work got your coffee order wrong.
Friday, February 6, 2009
Sunday, February 1, 2009
"I'm scared, scarred and probably irrevocably fucked up. But you're the fucking scum of the earth."
I spit the words at the dirty bastard, a thick, white, wad of spittle flicking onto his cheek with the force of my words, and it looks like something completely different, like he's finally the cocksucker I've always thought him to be. Maybe now he'll take a shower. No one should stink like that, a smell that wafts off his body and drags itself down my throat so that I can taste it with my every breath. Cigarettes, sweat, and food, lost forever under the folds of bulbous, yellowed skin. He laughs, and I watch his jowls shake with a kind of abstract disgust; that whole 'there-but-not-there' illusion has always been my best friend. My eye catches on a black piece of something rotten stuck between one of his dirty nicotine stained teeth and I stare at it in something like horror. Horror that this gelatinous creature could be related to me in even the remotest sense of the word. I refuse to believe that we’re even of the same species, the contrast between my stunted body and his too extreme to even consider a resemblance.
If forced, I think I could classify him as Homo erectus. Never did quite make it to modern man, did you dad? Not that there’s anything erect about him, I think as a sardonic grin slides across my face, the face that refuses to see any similarities to him when I stare at myself in a cracked mirror. No, nothing erect, he hasn't stood in about two years. Housebound (couch-bound if we’re being honest here) for as long as I can remember, he makes his nest in our soiled living room. And I get the filthy job of looking after him. Running out for cigarettes three times a week, for greasy buckets of fried chicken from the corner store everyday. The gnarled old woman at the take-out always marvels at my ability to eat so much chicken and stay as skinny, or runty like she really thinks, as I do. Whenever she shares this pearl of wisdom, I laugh. The idea of me even getting one piece is hilarious. I don’t touch the things, except to bring them to this monstrosity before me and watch with some sick fascination as the grease slides down his tremendous face onto his stained wife-beater as he feeds. They’re about the only thing that fits him these days, especially since my mother gave up sewing for him and just started buying them in bulk from the Warehouse. A wife-beater for a wife-beater, my mother used to joke, her blackened eyes swollen as much from tears as anything else. Not so much of a wife-beater now, he can make no more than weak swipes at me, leaning forward on those fat stumps that he used to called his legs. My mother’s long gone anyway, now that he can’t chase after her. She didn't take me with her, and the smashed furniture in my bedroom and holes where my fist connected with my unpainted walls are the only witness to my forever unanswered questions of why.
His words are muffled by yards of fat, as he asks me exactly what makes me think I'm anything better than the same scum he is. No job, no friends, no fucking life. Scum, just like him. And he takes a bitter delight in it, thinking that he's rubbed off, slithered between the layers of my skin so I'll one day become him too. He doesn't know anything about nights I've snuck off to the abandoned buildings where we would bootleg cheap alcohol that tasted sweet like freedom in its cheap bitterness. Where we danced and fucked and fought. We made our own little crucible of what we thought a teenage world should be. We fought with more ferocity, seeing walls that held us back instead of the bloody faces beneath our fists. We loved harder, frantically shoving down our pants in dark corners, silent but for the slapping of flesh against flesh and then the always-cold sound of metal against metal when we did up studded belts. And we lived faster; injecting, snorting and smoking what we could get our hands on, fuck consequences. We welcomed consequences, loved every minute there was pain and upset. Pain reminds you that you're alive, that you're still up and running against the metal machine that grinds your teenage heart and soul into a cold block of ice that sit behind desks day after day talking about when you were young. He doesn't know about that, couldn’t understand even if he tried. Nights when I would steal his ever-precious bottles of bourbon; not even to drink (vodka got you drunk faster, cheaper and nastier), but to smash against brick walls with all the rage that I’d never managed to express until now.
I think fuck you, and then, remembering the packed duffel bag that lies across my unmade bed, say it out loud. I say it once quietly to myself. Once more, louder this time and then I scream it, scream the years of hate-filled rhetoric that I've whispered to myself at night for years on the promise that I'd say it to his face one day. Fuck you for the years when you came home drunk. Fuck you for the years of teachers looking at me with pity in their eyes. Fuck you for not having enough money for shoes, but always having enough to make me go buy you cartons of Marlborough’s. Chest heaving, and completely spent, I run, fearing I'll lose the nerve if I walk, pick up my duffel bag and grab my bus ticket off the scarred wood of what passes for a dining room table these days. He see's the load I bear and his squinting eyes recognize the determination in my face. He stutters, trying to push himself off the couch that has moulded itself to his body long ago, whining in a voice that suddenly sounds pathetic to me that I cant leave, who'll take care of him.
I'm not listening; I'm walking out the door. Then, just before I hit the dirt, I turn. Can I leave? My nerve is failing, faltering to a stop as I realise the finality of what I want to do. I step back in through the door, the fight mostly gone from me, and he laughs. The bastard laughs in my face and tells me he knew I was too pussy, and to get my ass back in here, shut the hell up and get him some chicken. That seals it. I turn back to my purpose, out the door and into the blistering sunset. His voice is growing louder, following me as I walk, and then run, and finally sprint away from him. When I'm far enough that he'll barely be able to hear me I come to a dead stop, dirt clouding over a pair of sneakers that were ruined long ago. I turn calmly around, and scream as loud as I can.
Get your own damn chicken.
I spit the words at the dirty bastard, a thick, white, wad of spittle flicking onto his cheek with the force of my words, and it looks like something completely different, like he's finally the cocksucker I've always thought him to be. Maybe now he'll take a shower. No one should stink like that, a smell that wafts off his body and drags itself down my throat so that I can taste it with my every breath. Cigarettes, sweat, and food, lost forever under the folds of bulbous, yellowed skin. He laughs, and I watch his jowls shake with a kind of abstract disgust; that whole 'there-but-not-there' illusion has always been my best friend. My eye catches on a black piece of something rotten stuck between one of his dirty nicotine stained teeth and I stare at it in something like horror. Horror that this gelatinous creature could be related to me in even the remotest sense of the word. I refuse to believe that we’re even of the same species, the contrast between my stunted body and his too extreme to even consider a resemblance.
If forced, I think I could classify him as Homo erectus. Never did quite make it to modern man, did you dad? Not that there’s anything erect about him, I think as a sardonic grin slides across my face, the face that refuses to see any similarities to him when I stare at myself in a cracked mirror. No, nothing erect, he hasn't stood in about two years. Housebound (couch-bound if we’re being honest here) for as long as I can remember, he makes his nest in our soiled living room. And I get the filthy job of looking after him. Running out for cigarettes three times a week, for greasy buckets of fried chicken from the corner store everyday. The gnarled old woman at the take-out always marvels at my ability to eat so much chicken and stay as skinny, or runty like she really thinks, as I do. Whenever she shares this pearl of wisdom, I laugh. The idea of me even getting one piece is hilarious. I don’t touch the things, except to bring them to this monstrosity before me and watch with some sick fascination as the grease slides down his tremendous face onto his stained wife-beater as he feeds. They’re about the only thing that fits him these days, especially since my mother gave up sewing for him and just started buying them in bulk from the Warehouse. A wife-beater for a wife-beater, my mother used to joke, her blackened eyes swollen as much from tears as anything else. Not so much of a wife-beater now, he can make no more than weak swipes at me, leaning forward on those fat stumps that he used to called his legs. My mother’s long gone anyway, now that he can’t chase after her. She didn't take me with her, and the smashed furniture in my bedroom and holes where my fist connected with my unpainted walls are the only witness to my forever unanswered questions of why.
His words are muffled by yards of fat, as he asks me exactly what makes me think I'm anything better than the same scum he is. No job, no friends, no fucking life. Scum, just like him. And he takes a bitter delight in it, thinking that he's rubbed off, slithered between the layers of my skin so I'll one day become him too. He doesn't know anything about nights I've snuck off to the abandoned buildings where we would bootleg cheap alcohol that tasted sweet like freedom in its cheap bitterness. Where we danced and fucked and fought. We made our own little crucible of what we thought a teenage world should be. We fought with more ferocity, seeing walls that held us back instead of the bloody faces beneath our fists. We loved harder, frantically shoving down our pants in dark corners, silent but for the slapping of flesh against flesh and then the always-cold sound of metal against metal when we did up studded belts. And we lived faster; injecting, snorting and smoking what we could get our hands on, fuck consequences. We welcomed consequences, loved every minute there was pain and upset. Pain reminds you that you're alive, that you're still up and running against the metal machine that grinds your teenage heart and soul into a cold block of ice that sit behind desks day after day talking about when you were young. He doesn't know about that, couldn’t understand even if he tried. Nights when I would steal his ever-precious bottles of bourbon; not even to drink (vodka got you drunk faster, cheaper and nastier), but to smash against brick walls with all the rage that I’d never managed to express until now.
I think fuck you, and then, remembering the packed duffel bag that lies across my unmade bed, say it out loud. I say it once quietly to myself. Once more, louder this time and then I scream it, scream the years of hate-filled rhetoric that I've whispered to myself at night for years on the promise that I'd say it to his face one day. Fuck you for the years when you came home drunk. Fuck you for the years of teachers looking at me with pity in their eyes. Fuck you for not having enough money for shoes, but always having enough to make me go buy you cartons of Marlborough’s. Chest heaving, and completely spent, I run, fearing I'll lose the nerve if I walk, pick up my duffel bag and grab my bus ticket off the scarred wood of what passes for a dining room table these days. He see's the load I bear and his squinting eyes recognize the determination in my face. He stutters, trying to push himself off the couch that has moulded itself to his body long ago, whining in a voice that suddenly sounds pathetic to me that I cant leave, who'll take care of him.
I'm not listening; I'm walking out the door. Then, just before I hit the dirt, I turn. Can I leave? My nerve is failing, faltering to a stop as I realise the finality of what I want to do. I step back in through the door, the fight mostly gone from me, and he laughs. The bastard laughs in my face and tells me he knew I was too pussy, and to get my ass back in here, shut the hell up and get him some chicken. That seals it. I turn back to my purpose, out the door and into the blistering sunset. His voice is growing louder, following me as I walk, and then run, and finally sprint away from him. When I'm far enough that he'll barely be able to hear me I come to a dead stop, dirt clouding over a pair of sneakers that were ruined long ago. I turn calmly around, and scream as loud as I can.
Get your own damn chicken.
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