The Self-Congratulatory Circle Jerk Challenge

The Pitchman sidles up to the Bally Platform. He clears his throat, and begins.

"I'm now hereby instituting the Self-Congratulatory Circle Jerk Challenge, a challenge to challenge the challenged about how challenging the worst of their personal challenges has been.

"Much like swimming through vast pools of pabulum and creamed corn, this challenge may make you feel slightly nauseated, as if you just got off the pretentiousness turnpike with an entire Hellspawn legion of weepy, smarmy, sniveling, rat-assed, cross-eyed, punch-drunk, pudge-butted human anomalies, fearsome to man and bestial. This challenge will defy the challengee to keep a straight face while being fondled incessantly by the stiff, probing, robotic fingers of the Challenger, all the while delivering lines of poetic wit so utterly mordant and obtuse even Solomon, reigned in all his finery, could not pluck the pea-sized granules of truth from these disastrous doggerel. Step right up, Human Gerbils, and SEE!:

"Witless monkeys type untold oceans of mediocre dreck, all the while patting their hairy asses with semen-slicked gutter paws of Divine Truth!

"Thrill to the tiny violin strains of the same five chuckleheads reaming each other with leathery tongues lolling from slack-jawed faces while dim, half-narcotized outer space gazes look into the redundant dawn of Yet Another... and another... and another..."

He stops, waves his arm dramatically, and then--

"The clowns!" he cries. "Goddamnit, send in the Goddamned clowns!"

A little car pulls up to the curb. Out flies Ding Ding, a noted Berlin Brain Extortionist, and his female sidekick, Wingles, obsessed with cybernetic labia enhancement and forced sterilization through post-structuralist, neo-Marxist Deconstructionism.

And then, "I got my cock-a-doodle caught in the tarpit, baby, and Wence went toodle-e-ooooo!"

"Who the Hell is singing that noise?" asks Ding Ding, brandishing a nine-iron baptized in the blood of a half orangutan with a snide, wax moustache and a Leave It To Beaver lunchbox.

He turns to Wingles. "Best damn Girl Friday I ever had was that orangutan. Bessie we called her, and she was really one for the boys. She could play a harp with one buttock while doing calculus left-handed in the mirror. Never even broke a sweat. Of course, we made sure she was always powdered, brushed, perfumed, diapered, and wearing lipstick. The lipstick was my idea."

Suddenly a cacophonous artillery blast of flatulent anuses blows reveille, knocking every doghouse, hash house, flophouse, whorehouse, and shithouse from here to the Upper Baboon's Asshole down. Marks, hustlers, stool pigeons, croakers, dingbats, cons, and rubes all cavort lazily in the post-atomic sunshine breeze, writhing in orgiastic fury as the cuckold Earth heaves and cracks beneath the combined weight of their sanctimonious philosophical bullshit.

"Phony, goddamnit! All of it a goddamned sucker-play! Take that, you puerile, drip, drip, drip of self-righteous highfalutin puffery!"

And Ding Ding starts ding-dinging invisible specters, sloughing out their half-life on the phantom cyberwaves of the dubya, dubya, dubya. "Download this, motherfucker! Eat my algorithm, you petulant, whiny, self-flagellating, masochistic, passive-aggressive, pious peckerwood!"

"Pious old thing!" agrees Wingles, shaking her shaggy locks and revolving her head knowingly while placing her hands on her hips.

Suddenly a huge crack opens in the earth, exposing the winking Brown Eye countenance of the one, the only, ARM FARTER THAT ATE MINNESOTA. But that's another story.

The Devil himself was shot out the backside of the crack, ascending on a hot wind of sulphur and mediocrity, with a smell that proclaimed, "This way out the street from mine!"

I'm not certain how all of this ended. Life begins and ends in darkness. In between, we have a deep-dive into the absurd. As Tristan Tzara reminded us, "Dada means NOTHING."

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

(word count, bitches.)

So hey, anyway...

Dahdah.

(And, finally, I ask you: Just who the hell was singing that tune?)

All Writing is Pigshit! / Antonin Artaud / Audiobook I 1920

Connect with me on Facebook

My book: Molotov: Poems by Tom Baker

Ebook