Sock It To Me, Sock It To Me, Sock It To Me – David Lohrey

December 25, 2022

It’s funny, I think, that America was once a country that produced
the kind of women whose all-time favorite movie was It’s a Wonderful Life, 
but now it’s men who name it as their favorite while women say they prefer anal
sex to watching movies and complain that their men apologize too much.

The overlords and the underlings…we are very much becoming a society
of stratification, with obermenschen and untermenschen. I never believed 
I would hear Americans speak of the underclasses as subhuman but now 
that is all one hears. 

The middle class has all but disappeared. All of my rich friends speak of 
the poor as garbage, filth. They have no compassion for them at all. I fear 
we shall see people lined up and shot here as we saw in Cambodia and Russia. 
It’s coming. First, dehumanization, then mass murder. 

People will applaud. They’ll be thrilled. The training manual says it is best 
to remain calm and unruffled, even as they inspect your ass. He removed 
my ear piece. I’d been listening to Louis Armstrong’s “Cornet Chop Suey.” 
He was a morose figure. I found his unraveling elegance disarming. 

He was so unlike anyone else I had ever known. I sat crushed. I felt lonely, 
but also, free. Like a braid, my favorite hair style…a tight weave…my favorite
loaf, the cardamom twist…once proved, impossible to separate, sure to rise.
Something makes me think of something he once said, “All brides are groomed.”

Isn’t that what honeymoons are for? He thought the availability of a queer cemetery 
might attract investors. Acquire a few choice acres, get a couple of celebrities, offer 
the chance to be buried in drag, provide special services to trans loved ones, blast Judy,
Joel Grey, and Elton John over the loud speakers. He suggested I call Pope Francis.

He talked a lot of nonsense. His big thing? “There are no mashed potatoes in Japan.” 
Today he said his new hair represents everything he has had to overcome to be who 
he was born to be. It was snow white, shaved on the sides, no sideburns, long on top.
I didn’t see how he could get a job looking like that. He looked like an undertaker.

Some people hate success. “You should know that.” It contradicts their philosophy
that life sucks and failure is inevitable. People are fucked, people deserve an apology. 
Life is a pity party. Success contradicts all of that, defies it, rejects the life of failure. 
It repudiates the pathetic. Failures feel better surrounded by failure. 

Don’t you think it’s a little funny that nobody in all of Saudi Arabia has ever heard
of Lawrence of Arabia? Just a little odd? The most famous movie ever made, and 
very possibly the best film of all time, although that is debatable? Not one soul there
has ever heard of it or has the least bit of interest in knowing how it came to be made.

These days, people beg to be free of holidays back home, denounce Christmas, while 
others dream of having Sunday-less days and boycott Halloween. I never once heard 
an Arab ask to be free of a Friday or a Saturday. Arabs love holy days, love weekends, 
and dread Sundays as much as Americans once loathed Monday mornings.

Thing is, America doesn’t produce glamorous junkies like William Burroughs anymore;
neither does England which counts Will Self among its most erudite. Smack is no longer 
cool. Living in the shadow of death has made suicide less desirable, or so one would hope.
The lunatic bins have been emptied and bedlam reigns.