More Than Another Idea

More than another idea
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Keeping up with everything that is happening can be as maddening as the thoughts in my mind. This country hates this other country and oil is always going up because of events that never touch my life or U.S. soil. My car has become the biggest expenditure of what little money I make every month at a job that may not be here by the end of the month. Everything is going to hell and my parent’s generation has made the basket.

Even if I die alone my impending debt and collection of useless shit will have to go somewhere. The state will probably auction it off to settle my outstanding debts with six or seven separate collection agencies I had long ago quit contacting. Sure they would show up here and there at my doorstep but the lights would always be off and I would never be there, I’d hide inside my closet with all my expensive clothing. Is there a solution for this fate, a remedy for such a miserable life ahead of the millions now attending college and eager to start careers and make babies?

Revolution my brethren, running the streets covered by the night and Wal-Mart ski masks torching the establishment and all of their beautiful cars too expensive for us to even think about buying. We’re not the delusional ones running amok desperate for attention or for a lack of medication. We’re the silent and observant now seizing the moment to rampage the evils begot our land.

Death is a necessary evil in modern life. A good ol’ fashioned martyr to let the flood gates open. Drunk on cheap beer and whiskey, chain smoking to calm the nerves we will take hold of our guns and slings to torture the complacent. Those lying supine to our governments demands and accusations against each other, it’s becoming too much and man can only take so much before he ruptures letting loose the tension wound so tight a single yell will sound like the firing of a cannon. My lungs will shake and rattle with cries for REAL change and REAL progress.

This guy Charles and I talk a lot about these things. Never with any rancor or determination to bring these ideas to fruition but all the same it’s always in the back of our minds. Tunisia had the right idea. Take what belongs to the people, those certain unalienable rights and exercise them! Burn, fight, riot. Show the government that we outnumber them and our happiness and well being is their real job. Glorified baby sitters, making things easier for us and when they fuck up and it gets too hard we’ll take it back and start over. The pitfall of it all is not the taking back of the government but the decision on who to replace it with. You can’t take away power from one old stuffy man who is sorely out of touch and just put another one like him back into power. Change isn’t just rotating the characters; it’s bringing new ones in.

There’s a knock on my door. I slide out of bed and my head and shamble towards the door. I straighten up and clear my throat before opening the door. It’s just Charles.
“Hey man, what’s up?’ He says.

“Nothing, I was lying down and just thinkin’ about some stuff.” I really didn’t want him to be here.

“What sorta stuff? What we talked about the other day?” He winks at me a little when he says this.

“Yeah a little of it was about that. Mostly just about what I’m doing with my life, ya know?”

“Don’t we all think about that? Hell I still don’t know what I’m doing and I’m a junior!”

“Uh huh.”

This conversation was over for me. I walk into the kitchen and grab a coke, I don’t offer Charles one. When I sit down he looks at my coke and makes a face like he wanted one. I’m not going to offer him one so I shake it off and look at him over my can.

“What have you been up too? You still going to school?”

He swallows hard, “Yeah, for now at least. I’m kind of lost about the whole school thing.”

“That sucks man. Maybe you should just get a regular job and give up”

He scowls at me, “No, I’m going to try my best to stay in. I don’t want a fucking nine to five. That’s why I’m in school…”

“The schools are all a joke anyways. They just want our money. It’s not like there are any jobs waiting for us when we graduate. We’re not the elite Ivy League assholes. I’m just a kid that went to school to TRY and get a good job.”

“You think you have it all figured out, you always have. You could be completely wrong. It could just be that school is what we make it. Why is all the blame always on the institution? No one ever blames the kids…” He drifts off on that last word intent on changing the subject.

I shut my mouth for a change and take another sip of my coke making eye contact with Charles again, I’m always so spiteful. I lay back and make myself comfortable again and gaze at Charles. He’s such a stern fellow with a constantly furrowed brow and clenched hands. He’s good looking though and I’m sure he could just slay the women but instead he chooses to chase his dreams and those women that flock ever so fleetingly to an educated mans lap are never in his dreams. He may be gay. I’ll have to keep my eye out for any advancement.

It’s the dead of winter right now. I’m talking about ten degree days and below zero nights. The snow sticks around for weeks and the ice lies underneath the snow tricking the drivers and brave pedestrians that go out to do whatever regular people do. All this talk of revolution and revolt and whenever my breast swells with excitement I take a look outside and sit right back down. It’s too cold for a revolution. The Russians were crazy ass people running around shooting each other and staging coups in this sort of weather, it’s a wonder they didn’t freeze to death. The Bolshevik’s would have been a failure and communism as we know it never would have spread…would things be different? Would we all be less scared?

The greatest idealists would have nothing to follow. Hippies would have fallen to the drugs with little thought. Nuclear arms wouldn’t have been produced at such alarming rates and pushed down everyone’s throat suffocating on Uranium, bloated and green from radiation poisoning. Children sick with this losing their hair and nails becoming creatures from the abyss but walking around their village as if things are as they’ve always been. Revolutionaries should have stayed indoors damn it.

Me, I’ll stay indoors tonight and tomorrow and the next few weeks. Getting fat, writing bad poetry and talking to women that will never make me happy. This revolution can wait and this world can go another month or two without the students making a disaster out of the campus for the sake of sanity and supposed change. I take another pull off my coke. Set it down and smash the can. Charles hasn’t said another word; I guess I got to him finally. Poor bastard thinks too much and worries too often.

We should all just sit back, relax and do what we do best while the bombs plunge Russia into disarray and men wielding shotguns shoot the men and women set to protect us. They all sat unknowingly targeted by yet another disillusioned sheep. One month into this New Year and already hell is upon us, our own hell that we made. Not the one promised to us by the preachers and street urchins but a determined setting aflame of all established order by the order we elected.

We’re to blame for letting the fat get so backed up it drowns us like the broken bag of lipo suctioned rich bitch blubber. Money made the waste and money is supposed to free us? We don’t need any more money or more promises. We don’t need more panels and political analysts, we need action and determination. These ideas can quickly become those of a revolting youth and an idealist destined to become a slave by 30, but who needs all the same cliché’s when there is a burgeoning squallier of misinformed and misled youth filling college campuses and vacant warehouses grinding themselves out with the only escape coming in the form of rolled grass and bottles emptied before their check clears.

Me writing this may not equate to any more than the ramblings of a false prophet of the hippie generation promising hope and freedom with a little help from LSD and pot. I might just be another idealist headed towards the kennel, chained to a pole in the yard yapping and snapping at the heels of the rich and famous who all but run our little country. Chinese politics be damned, we owe them money but we owe the American elite our souls. Born from an open wound to be wiped clean and chained to the innards of our lame fathers. We’re Led astray that day and forever more, lack luster educations and misinformed by a media outlet with a radical agenda paid and delivered by those whom we’ve been indoctrinated to hate with every fiber of our red white and blue soulless bodies.
Death to Fox, MSNBC, BBC and whoever else wants to tell us how to feel about the tragedies they’re not doing shit to absolve or stop.
Death to European socialists and Chinese democracy, they’re as empty as us but look better doing it.
Death to dictators across the globe, they can choke to death on the cigars and women bought with the blood of their “people”.
What am I even talking about? I’m more inclined to squat down in front of my plasma screen and suck down soft drinks like they’re going out of style than take action. I could never do it alone. Charles wouldn’t be enough and neither would his friends. We’re all just the same. Full of hope and lead.
Death to us, the sad sap generation X with a mountain of debt and full bellies if we cannot stop the things to come. Tunisia has tried. Greece has tried and London did the same. Watch out for Yemen and Pakistan. This world is going to stop for just a moment in the eye of the Milky Way and start over again, revolutions of man and the universe.

I look up from my day dreaming and stare Charles right in his eyes,
“Why don’t you get up and do something you sad sack of shit? Huh? Quit complaining and make something, make whatever you want!”

Shocked and taken aback Charles stutters a bit before answering.

“What the hell man? Why’re you yellin’ now!?”

I looked mean; I’m trying to look mean. I’ll put the fear of God in this guy.

“I’m yellin’ because this whole planet is going insane and losing their heads all the while we, the rich American swine are sitting in our warm homes letting our wealth go to waste. Slipping through the sausage fingers of CEO’s and board members. We have the means and the man power but we are content getting fat and stupid complaining about how fat and stupid we are! We need to do something about this, enough with the charities man. They’re just using the money to get drunk, stoned and spread STD’s from their pudgy little dicks!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about…I’m not complaining and I don’t know where all this came from, I thought you hated this entire idealist BS?”

“I do, but this isn’t idealist. It’s plausible. Feasible. Do-able whatever you want to call it, let’s just get it done.”

Charles just nods his head in agreement. He knows it has to begin. Something new, a start maybe not an absolute solution to everything that is wrong but a start. Baby steps for a generation of toddlers; a kick in the balls is all we need now…