Things are Better When They're Ugly

Call it "Shit I Could Watch Over and Over and Do # 14.0000000000".

I could watch this shit over and over again.

Ugly. Ugly. Ugly.

(I was born for ugly.)

Beauty—the rare crystalline surface of a flower, for instance—is much improved by the application of napalm. I don’t even like looking at myself (not that I’m anyone’s idea of beautiful). But I like watching others, for my own purposes—others in whose reflection I see… what, exactly?

Eventually, everything decays into the same fractured, rotten, incohesive state of pestilent stench. It all loses its savor. The salt no longer stings; beauty doesn’t just fade, it chokes—a surfeit of poisoned, acrimonious micro-organisms crawling across its face. It withers in the stink; it “rots and lies stinking in the earth,” to quote that lovely little Regan MacNeil.

Life can be pulled out from under you in a moment. Charlie Kirk discovered that. (I’m not saying anything about him one way or another—I don’t make moral judgments because I don’t, strictly speaking, believe in “good and evil,” except as abstract concepts. I believe, most certainly, in “here and now.”)

Kurt Cobain once said, before he ate the barrel of his own gun, “Punk rock is the total escape from pain.” Maybe not the exact quote, but it hardly matters. His definition of punk rock, and what it represents, was different than mine. Crusty politics and other bullshit aside, punk is the music of survivors.

What others don’t know about me is that I live every day in chronic pain, both physical and mental. With so many disabilities and so much ugliness foisted on me, I sometimes wonder that I can detach from it all so effectively. But I know that fundamentally it’s all a dream, you see. An illusion—a torment of the consciousness, born of electrical impulses decoded by the hypothalamus, the nervous system. Brother, we ain’t never seen the world with our eyes. But they assure us, nonetheless, that this is so.

Most are convinced this world, and its attractions, are a wonderland of the gods—a terminus point on their ascension to some higher state of being. They posit religion, or status, as the key to unlock the Beauty Gates of Immortal Truth. But it’s ludicrous. Everything they cling to can literally disappear in the blink of an eye.

The song above is by the punk band Teenage Head, from the movie Class of 1984, starring Perry King, Michael J. Fox, Timothy Van Patten, and the late, great Roddy McDowall. It features a theme song by none other than Alice Cooper, plus music by Fear and Teenage Head (and maybe one other band I’m forgetting). It’s not the great soundtrack of Suburbia or Repo Man, but it still has electrifying moments like that scene.

The film is about violent punks taking over an inner-city school and trying to kill a socially conscious teacher (King). Exploitation violence runs wild. Roddy McDowall loses his shit after they kill his rabbits. Van Patten gives a harrowing performance as Stegman, the mentally troubled, talented young psychopath who straddles two worlds: the middle-class suburban “good boy” to his mother, and the dark, Clockwork Orange-style urban warlord in back-alley dives.

He understands the dual-bladed world of illusion, where identity is just a surface concept, tooled for group approval. Inside himself, though, the duality still burns bright: punk and prodigy. A “good boy,” and a monster. A consciousness searching—through illusion, through pain.

And I’m not sure what I was trying to say here. But it doesn’t really matter. Fuck all.

Nihilist Revolt—spray-painted on an alley wall in Muncie, Indiana, circa 1999.

POINT BEING:

Life is brutal, ugly, arbitrary, and senseless. It can end in a flash. Everything “beautiful” will die, decay, and be cast aside. You will stop breathing one day, fall over, and never move again. Famous or not, your memory will fade. If you’re just a common person, you’ll be forgotten almost instantly. And that’s assuming “reality” even persists once you’re gone. If your consciousness—the you that perceives the world through the five gates of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell—ceases, what does it even matter if “reality” persists? (If a radio is playing in an empty room, no one around to hear it, is it still making music? Who cares?)

As William S. Burroughs once observed: “You weren’t here for the beginning. You won’t be here for the end. Everything you know is relative and trivial.” Not an exact quote, but there it is.

Fuck all.

Love and napalm,

Cretins from Indy