Hostess Cupcake Motherf*ckers

When I was in college—lo, nearly twenty-seven, twenty-eight years ago maybe—I shared a dorm room with a big Black dude with dreadlocks who smoked a lot of grass. Dude was cool to me though, man. We used to have a good laugh at our lily-white, bourgeois fellow students and their often sanctimonious and totally naive worldview, which usually amounted to wearing their sanctimonious, woke—or whatever you call it these days—hearts on their designer sleeves.

His term for them? He called them “Hostess Cupcake Motherfuckers.”

And that description is even more apt to me, personally, almost three decades out.

(Once we smoked grass together, by the way, and I had this strange vision of an infernal, post-apocalyptic hellscape in another dimension, with mutant demonic crablike alien spiders crawling across the rocky surface of the world, and I felt a stab of cosmic terror, and realized only later that what I had seen bore a striking resemblance to the subpar and laughable stop-motion special animation effects from the obscure horror film Cataclysm (1980), starring the late B-movie character actor Richard "Bull Shannon" Moll, of Night Court fame. But I wildly digress.)

Everyone Everywhere Is Mentally Ill

Everyone everywhere is quite clearly suffering some sort of neurosis. You spend enough time around them—any of them—you begin to see what the major malfunction that afflicts them is. It’s like even when they’re wearing their Hostess Cupcake Motherfucker Pie-Eating Shitfaced Wag-the-Doggie Grin, right out of a bad, third-rung, repeat television sitcom so tepid and lame even crystal freaks could nod off watching it; right deep down below the surface, you see that weird, insectile NEED or delusion—or both—curling around like twin pythons with two spitting cobra heads. They bite you with the two sharp, pointed, poisoned fangs: Fear and Guilt.

It doesn’t take much to rile these assmonkeys up. Say the wrong thing, hold the wrong opinion, or refuse to cop to whatever hope-dope “truth” or phantasmal philosophic spook they’re peddling and BINGO! You’re suddenly unpersoned, or “cancelled,” or a moral leper, or a “Nazi” (difficult to define in an era when the anti-Semitism is mostly from the Left). I just got, apparently, banned or booted or cancelled or blacklisted or unpersoned or what-have-you from some chi-chi group that was too good for me. On Facebook, which is a yawn and only good for collecting half-nekkid pictures of Madonna when she was still, like, hot.

What was my crime against humanity? A piffling criticism of NO ONE IN PARTICULAR, but an assertion that AI had managed to “cancel” the brunt of human creative endeavor, a claim I stand by, even though certain jacked-up, self-appointed hall monitor Karen busybodies seem to take exception with that. Curious thing about people: if they hear something that they simply can’t process, they tend to stick their fingers in their ears, hum really loud, close their eyes, bounce on their toes, and refuse to try and understand even a modicum of your argument.

Everyone Everywhere Is Programmed and Delusional

Human beings are, by default, delusional creatures. They assume that anything and everything they do has some greater meaning, relevance—that there is SOMETHING, some key that will unlock the door to the sacred space beyond, a place of love and light and learning (and who knows, maybe lemonade rivers and candy cane trees) wherein, finally, EVERYTHING will make perfect sense, their life will have “meaning,” lion and lamb shall lie down together, and lo, men will “live like brothers, on terms of perfect equality.”

And they—and THEY ALONE—know just the route or pathway to get there. And you better follow that pathway, bubbelah, or… I dunno. Maybe you’ll go to the eternal land of frizzle-fry and be tortured by scaly things that look like spiders or crab-aliens from an old straight-to-video horror flick from the 80s. One that starred Richard Moll.

That was a program. And this is a program. Or viewpoint. And everyone everywhere has their personal program, their script they’re running, like a bad malware mofojo set to maximum destruct sequence. If they relent, they stare into the void, and it’s dark down there—in the primal place, where their fear of death is curled like a seething basilisk, waiting to emerge and devour them.

Everyone wants a piece of your consciousness. Everyone is playing a game of control, to validate themselves. Promise them a pot of gold, they’ll follow you to the ends of the Earth. And that’s why we have religion. It’s all a control mechanism, a ruse, a colossal con job. And for this, men bleed, and kill, and die.

But, in the fullness of time, even that is erased. I like to collect images of shuffling throngs in the street, from Victorian times. No one knows who these people were and furthermore, NO ONE CARES. They danced across the stage of the world for a brief period, and then—Presto! Gone forever, except in a split second of time captured seemingly as a random image, at a precise moment in cosmic time (which is a concept that is also arbitrary and meaningless), captured on a photographic emulsion. An image. An idea. A delusion. A brief flicker of light and shadow.

What were they thinking? Feeling? There was a Before when the single image was captured, and an After. What of the dead? Have they been waiting long? Is the afterlife an interminable period for them? Inquiring minds.

Illusion. Fraud. Weakness. Self-deception and programmed “truth.” Part and parcel to the world of the shadow men, the marginal and the outsiders, and the world of Hostess Cupcake Motherfuckers alike.

Now, one of my favorite songs by D.O.A. seems appropriate here:

Marijuana Motherf*cker

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