Because like my good friend Kathy Acker likes to say, ‘When they go low, we…(smiles)…we shove our fist up a defenseless trout’s asshole.’
It all makes sense once you realize that everyone in this country is fucked up on drugs. All the stupidity and selfishness, the poor driving skills, the total & complete lack of critical thinking skills—all of it can be explained by drugs.
Because everyone you meet is strung out on pills, strung out on powders, upscale & downscale, expensive & cheap. The person ringing you up with slurred speech and half-opened eyes, the car in front of you that keeps drifting onto the shoulder, that crater-faced guy talking to himself in the parking lot, in 2017, that’s simply America.
It’s also the mother of three loading the groceries into her Lexus, the grad student sitting across from you on the bus, the congressman, the senator, the president, the pundit. It’s the ADHD middle-schooler walking down the street with chapped knuckles and sunken eyes at three in the afternoon.
We’re talking everyone. A whole country full of nasty self-medicated dirtbags.
Rural USA is fucked up on oxycontin. And if the pills run out they turn to heroin. Of course the good thing about living in West Virginia—quite possibly the only good thing—is that the pills never run out. 780 million pills in six years. In one fucking state. Of course, it’s good for the pharmaceutical companies, good for the doctors, good for the customer service reps and their commissions. Good for everyone, except for the people who take them.
But at least they, along with most of suburbia, are slamming the good stuff—that is to say it’s all legal and verified by the FDA, unlike the street shit that’s cut with christ knows what.
Then the suburban kids move to the big city—no one else can afford to live there anymore—and when they aren’t popping their meds (anti-depressants, anti-anxieties), they’re shovelling coke up their nostrils like it’s going out of style. And please let it go out of style soon.
Of course everyone’s smoking pot. But nobody cares about that unless you’re black, or Jess Sessions, in which case the latter will be throwing more of the former in prison than ever before.
And then there’s crystal meth. Which is the devil.
No drugs for me, of course. Just a little coffee, a multivitamin, maybe some probiotics if my digestive system gets surly about having to process so many corn dogs. The only upside of spending three years working the graveyard shift at a semi-rural California 7-11 is it makes you really, really, uh, skeptical about the benefits of drugs.
Because in my experience, people on drugs make impulsive decisions. They are some of the most selfish people you’ve ever met. They have an unmatched capacity for self-pity. They surround themselves with people as fucked-up as they are because it makes them feel better about themselves. Drugs give you an inflated sense of your own self-importance. You find yourself up at all hours, posting misspelled gibberish on social media. You want your family as far away from you as possible, preferably in an entirely different state.
You know, now that I think about it, white working class rage may not have been as big a factor in this past election as people think it was.
Look, I don’t blame anyone for using drugs. Nobody wants to feel the way that they’re feeling, however they might be feeling at any given time. Most days, it seems nobody wants to feel anything at all. The problem isn’t a lack of good jobs, it’s lack of good anything. In a country like this one, a pigfucking backwater of perversity & incest where the game is rigged for or against you on the day you’re born, there’s not much point in, like, striving to better yourself. And it makes you kind of just want to pull the curtains if you know what I mean. Like first you obliterate the view and then you obliterate yourself. Because to be alone in a room with only one’s own thoughts for company in 2017, direct & unfiltered, seems almost cruel.
And that’s as true for the children of the aristocracy as much as it is for the children of Elizabethton, TN. Everything around us is monetized & beige & crumbling & screaming. And to try to hold on to one’s soul in the face of all that, to refuse to buy what’s being sold to you, is just…uh, it take heroic amounts of restraint.
And restraint isn’t good for the economy—legitimate or otherwise. The nation is a cesspool of amoral greed & consumption and the best we can hope for is a little distraction to take our minds off the suffering all around us, and who could deny someone that?
I, uh, actually, uh, now that I think about it, I, uh, got something I need to take care of. I’ll be back later. I need to call this guy I know. See what he’s up to. I’ll, uh, I’ll give you a call later maybe.
Trout Fisting In America appears every Tuesday right here at this site. We’re going to keep going until we reach #50, or until the Trout begs for mercy. Check out previous installments HERE.
Scott Creney 