irony

Audiovision: Damn Hippies

The air above Bethel New York, on that muggy June afternoon, hung thick and viscous like raw maple syrup, but with a distinct, cloying undertone that set Roland’s teeth on edge. It wasn’t the sweet, innocent scent of verdant fields or the faint, hopeful whisper of a summer breeze. No, this was the unmistakable, unholy reek of patchouli – a pungent olfactory assault, clinging to the very molecules of the atmosphere like desperate, unwashed barnacles. Roland, a man whose befuddlement had, with each passing year, calcified into a semi-permanent state of bewildered indignation, felt a familiar tremor of primal loathing course through his very soul. He’d embraced post-hippie Americana with the zeal of a Trappist Monk. Glad to have purged himself of the “Happy Days” and “Leave It to Beaver” plastic conformity and suburban blandness. But a patchouli come-back? That was a bridge too far, a community sensory violation of the highest order.

Roland was on break from managing a fairly obscure death metal band on tour (hey, it’s a living). And since the band’s last stop was near Bethel, New York, he was on a pilgrimage of sorts to the hallowed, if now slightly commercialized, grounds of Woodstock. He walked with the determined, slightly off-kilter gait of his youth hero, Raul Duke (Hunter S. Thompson’s alter-ego)… his mind a furious, churning maelstrom of conflicting philosophies. He’d always championed the counter-culture’s crowning achievement: calling bullshit on the whole ghastly charade of using deadly force as the default geopolitical negotiation tool, specifically, the War in Vietnam. By God, those flower children had a point! Turning teenagers into stone-cold killers, risking life and limb for some phantom anti-socialism cause, all before they could even vote or legally drink a damn beer! That, he understood. That, he respected.

But then, the mutation. The festering, unholy blight that had slithered out of the psychedelic garden and into the crisp, digital air of the 21st century. The same crunchy-granola crowd, now with eyes glazed over by YouTube algorithms and a disturbing reliance on memes as verifiable truth, had morphed into the right-wing, conspiracy-obsessed, anti-vax movement. And that was Roland’s personal hell. That was the unholy alliance of utopian delusion and outright, fact-averse idiocy that made his blood boil like a forgotten stew on a low flame. He, Roland, the man who couldn’t fathom anyone seriously considering themselves “researchers” simply because they’d skimmed a few vax-skeptical tracts, was now face-to-face with the horrifying reality: formerly eradicated diseases, like Polio, was threatening a triumphant, macabre return.

Polio, for God’s sake!

His internal monologue was abruptly shattered by a voice, strained and vibrating with the nervous energy of a hyperactive squirrel on a double espresso. “Hey, brother! You feelin’ the energy of this place, man?” The voice got even more strident, “…the REAL energy… not what THEY want you to feel!”

Roland turned, his gaze falling upon a figure that looked like a bad acid trip had decided to grow a beard and buy a t-shirt that screamed, in distressed, tie-dyed font: “TRUST YOUR GUT, NOT BIG PHARMA!” The man was a former hippie, no doubt, but the peace-sign tattoo on his leathery forearm seemed to twitch with a manic, Meth-fueled intensity. His eyes, behind wire-rimmed glasses, darted around like desperate moths trapped in a jar, and strapped on his shoulder was a woven, multi-colored man-purse, embellished with some vaguely occult symbols. The patchouli, Roland realized with a fresh wave of nausea, was emanating directly from him. A walking, talking, perfumed monument to everything that had gone wrong.

“Excuse me?” Roland managed, his voice a tight, strangled rasp.

“The mandating, man,” the QAnonner railed practically vibrating with indignation. “They want to mandate our very bodies! The CDC, man, they’re just puppets for the globalists! It’s all connected! The RONA, the ‘vaccines’—” He leaned in conspiratorially, his breath, thankfully, less patchouli and more stale coffee and weed. “—it’s a control mechanism! A depopulation agenda! Do your own research!”

“Do my own research?!” Roland exploded, his composure shattering like a cheap vase dropped from a great height. His face, already a patchwork of indignation and bewilderment, now mottled to a furious shade of beet-red. “My ‘research’ involved listening to doctors, to scientists! Not some basement dweller with a Wi-Fi connection and a penchant for YouTube conspiracy theories! What about Polio? What about the millions who’ve died from ‘the RONA’ while you’re babbling about ‘control mechanisms’ and ‘depopulation agendas’?” He was fuming, a human pressure cooker teetering on the brink of catastrophic breach. The audacity! The sheer, unadulterated stupidity of politicizing public health, of weaponizing fear against the very tools designed to protect us! This was no longer about geopolitical chess games; this was about basic, communal survival! Roland was teetering on the precipice of falling into a sort of “Incredible Hulk” rage. He was on the verge of running amok.

The QAnonner, startled by Roland’s sudden eruption, recoiled slightly, then squared his shoulders, a glint of self-righteous fury in his meth-charged eyes. “You’re a sheeple, man! Blinded by the mainstream narrative! You just follow what they tell you, like good little consumers! The truth is out there, man, but you gotta open your third eye—”

That was it. The straw that broke the camel’s back, then stomped on it, then set it on fire. The “third eye” drivel, the smarmy condescension, the reek of patchouli – it all coalesced into a single, unbearable affront. Roland’s hand, almost independently, shot out like a startled cobra, snagging the QAnonner’s flimsy man-purse. The man yelped, a high-pitched squeak of surprise, as Roland yanked him closer, fumbling with his other hand into the deep pocket of his cargo shorts.

It was a Keystone Cops moment of pure, unadulterated slapstick. Roland’s fingers scrabbled, missing the canister once, then twice, before finally wrapping around the cool, metallic cylinder. The QAnonner, still yelping, tugged at his man-purse, an absurd tug-of-war unfolding on the very ground where Hendrix once wailed. Then, with a decisive grunt and a theatrical flourish, Roland aimed the nozzle.

Pssssshhhhhhhht!

A thick, orange cloud erupted, engulfing the QAnonner’s face. He shrieked, a sound that could curdle milk, his hands flying up to his eyes. He stumbled backward, tripping over his own Crocs, performing an impromptu, flailing dance of agony and confusion. He spun around, arms windmilling, looking for all the world like a psychedelic dervish suddenly possessed by a swarm of angry bees. He crashed to the ground in a heap, kicking and gasping, his protests dissolving into a series of moaning gurgles.

Roland stood there, breathing heavily, the pepper spray canister still clutched in his hand. A thin sheen of sweat beaded on his forehead, but a strange, savage satisfaction bloomed in his chest. “Go home,” he rasped, his voice hoarse but firm. “Go home, and reevaluate your damn life choices. And for God’s sake, take a shower. And burn that goddamn patchouli.”

The irony wasn’t lost on him, even in his befuddled state. He, Roland the Roadie, who applauded the youth of ’69 for standing against forced participation in global carnage, had just used a weapon designed to hurt other lifeforms, on a man who once probably preached peace and love. But this wasn’t about bullets or bombs; this was about basic, societal survival, about the return of ancient scourges, ushered in by the very spirit of individual enlightenment gone horribly, batshit crazy wrong. And sometimes, even a bumbling tired death metal tour manager had to put down the decibel meter and pick up the pepper spray.

Onward through the fog… Rohlfie

HSoB: Dawg Dayz

Ronnie Hays, a man whose summer spirit animal was likely a slightly singed tumbleweed, had come to the nation’s capital with the best of intentions. The Hot Springs or Busk tour, a grand delusion hatched during a particularly brutal February, was predicated on the simple, Nietzschean idea that purposeful suffering builds character. Having already suffered enough, Ronnie decided to route his nation-wide tour to stay in climate zones ranging from fifty-five to eighty-five degrees, the sweet spot of human endurance, the crucible of the soul! He’d envisioned himself a Thoreauvian guitar hero, strumming universal chords amidst humanity’s waxing and waning.

Bullshit. Pure, unadulterated, desert-baked bullshit.

The “Heat Dome,” as the local news charmingly called it, wasn’t a dome at all. It was more like being trapped inside a giant, sweaty armpit, the kind belonging to a long-haul trucker who’d mainlined lukewarm coffee for three days straight. The air in Ronnie’s trusty Sprinter van, Rocinante, felt thick enough to chew. He’d envisioned festive busking celebrations, though getting him no closer to Saturday Night Live, would render enough spare coin to grab a meal at the local sandwich shop. Instead, he found himself sweating under a near ineffectual ceiling fan, each morning waking up feeling like a poorly wrung dishcloth.

So, the busking gear gathered dust. The call of the troubadour was drowned out by the siren song of the mall food court’s air conditioning. After a productive shift dodging rogue toddlers and the whispered anxieties of the internet-addicted masses at the public library, Ronnie would retreat to this muzak-infused oasis. There, amidst the clatter of plastic cutlery and the pervasive aroma of lukewarm orange chicken, he’d tap tap tap away on his tablet, crafting ironic insights (or at least, moderately coherent sentences). Roughing it, his ass. This was more like politely surrendering to the crushing reality of climate change and a distinct lack of masochistic tendencies.

He pictured himself now, a bumbling, modern-day Don Quixote, sweat beading on his five-o-clock shadow. His armor traded in for a Hawaiian shirt that clung to him like a damp second skin. On his head, not a gleaming helmet, but a decidedly un-gleaming bucket hat, perpetually askew. His trusty spear replaced by a backpack, its hydration bladder more vital than any lance against the oppressive thermal foe. Rocinante, the wheezing van, stood sentinel in the D.C. Metro Branch Avenue parking lot… a tin can beast of burden in this concrete desert. In the hazy distance, a monstrous broadcast tower pulsed with invisible signals, a modern-day malevolent windmill against a humidity-choked sky, a reminder of the information war that had lured him to the proud highway in the first place.

He’d braved the sweltering streets of D.C., a city buzzing with a nervous energy thicker than the humidity. The political air crackled with a pre-apocalyptic fervor, the news a constant barrage of impending crisis. A grumpy waiter here, a train car full of faces etched with worry there. And then, the memes. Oh, the memes. Those digital harbingers of discontent, the unfunny, menacing pronouncements hinting at a redux of some long-ago, blood-soaked uncivil conflict. Ronnie, with his comfortable former life in the ivory towers of academia, knew he was on the wrong side of that particular partisan divide, labeled with that delightfully reductive term: “woke.”

He’d spent hours wandering around the fenced-off National Mall, the intended epicenter of his social exploration just out of reach. Denied entry to the Pride Fest because of his backpack – a water bottle deemed a potential weapon, for Christ’s sake – he felt like a character in some absurdist Kafka adaptation. The irony wasn’t lost on him: all this purposeful social exploring he’d signed up for, only to be thwarted by something as mundane as a plastic water bottle and transparent back-pack.

He thought of Churchill, of course. That eternal optimist (or perhaps just a bloke with a stiff upper lip and a fondness for the drink). “Americans can be counted on to do the right thing once they’ve tried everything else.” Ronnie clung to that like a life raft in a sea of digital vitriol and oppressive heat. This flirtation with the dark side, this collective descent into the fever swamp of ethnonationalism – it was just a phase, right? A particularly sweaty, anxiety-inducing phase. Eventually, the fever would break, and they’d stumble back towards something resembling pluralistic sanity.

He hoped.

The Metro ride back to Rocinante was a sweaty, sullen affair. The promise of the night in a tin can under a sky slow to cool was less than appealing. Just weeks ago, he’d been shivering in that damned mummy bag, wishing for a single degree of warmth. Now, the thought of trying to sleep in a pervasive coating of sweat felt like a prelude to spontaneous combustion.

He’d had enough. This noble experiment in “Hot Springs or Busk” had devolved into a sweaty, keyboard-tapping surrender in a mall food court. Protest season in D.C.? They could have it. The call of the open road, the beckoning of cooler climes further north… that was the only pursuit that held any appeal now. Time to point Rocinante toward the hazy promise of something less… apocalyptic. All that said, and with all the hassle of dodging heat stroke, he’d still take these dog dayz over winter frostbite and existential dread any damn day of the week. Over and out, he muttered to himself, the glow of the tablet screen reflecting in his weary eyes. Over and out. Time to get back to the original plan. Time to head NORTH. And for the love of all that is holy, someone please convince the powers that be we REALLY don’t want to turn Earth into another Venus. Can we please get back to that Post WWII spirit of sacrifice in the face of collective crisis? Can we, PLEASE, start prioritizing a life-friendly climate over billionaires’ bank accounts?

Onward through the fog… Rohlfie

This Land – Mississippi

They say Mississippi is a great place to commune with ghosts, that Mississippians love a good story. And so, in honor of the great state of Mississippi, here’s a real doozy of a ghost story. Mostly inspired by a dream from our first restless night in here. For some reason, Ronnie awoke around 4:00am, probably from a limb scraping against the side of the van nudged by a gentle breeze (or something like that). Anyway, fragments of the dream are drastically embellished below… Enjoy!

The setting is a ghostly confab at a fabled haunted house, the McRaven House, in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

Attendees:
Sam Clemens
William Faulkner
Edger Poe
Margaret Mitchell
Ambrose Bierce
Kate Stone

The McRaven House, a skeletal silhouette against the bruised, twilight sky, pulsed with an unearthly chill. Inside, or rather, through the decaying grandeur of the parlor, a spectral congress convened. Skulking around the fringes of this gathering is the ghost of little Maggie, playing trickster pranks on the adults, generally bringing a sense of dark levity to the air.

We open with a tight shot on Mr. Clemons, a wisp of white mustache and sardonic grin, his cigarillo fuming. He’s leaning against the hearth, its phantom flames licking at the soot-stained bricks. “Well, gentlemen, gentleladies, and… whatever that is,” he gestured vaguely at a giggling, translucent figure flitting near the chandelier, “let’s get down to cases. How are our successors faring? Are any of them capable of spinning a yarn worth a damn?”

Mr. Faulkner, a cloud of tobacco-scented gloom, swirled into view. “Faring? They wallow, Sam. They wallow in the shallow pools of… of instant gratification. They cannot understand the… the weight of history, the… the tangled roots of the South. They write… tweets, truths, threads, blue butterflies. Shit postings! Hardly enough for Walt to call a ‘barbaric yawp,’ and this is supposed to encapsulate the human condition? Absurd.”

Edgar Poe, his eyes dark, hollow pits, floated near a dusty window. “They seek brevity, a fleeting spark of… of sensation. They have lost the exquisite agony of prolonged despair. They write of… of vampires with sparkling skin. My own horrors, once so profound, are now… romantic comedies.” He shuddered, a sound like a rustling death shroud.

Ms. Mitchell, her spectral Scarlett O’Hara flouncing slightly, adjusted a phantom shawl. “Darling, it’s simply dreadful. They’ve taken my beloved South, my tragic heroes, and… and they’ve made them into… into soap operas! They’ve diluted the very essence of suffering into… into sickly sweet drivel.”

Ambrose Bierce, his face a mask of cynical amusement, materialized near a broken mirror. “Irony, my dear Ms. Mitchell, is the universe’s most exquisite mistress. And it seems they have long since hung her in a cheap motel room. With the veritable parade of ironies cavalierly overlooked by average folks these days, one must imagine the poor girl spinning in her grave like a top. These mere mortals believe they have conquered death, disease, and ignorance. Hell, some of them actually believe their clever technologists have them on the verge of immortality! Absurd doesn’t even come close to describing their delusion.”

Ms. Stone, her translucent form radiating a quiet, melancholic strength, drifted near the window. “They have forgotten the true cost of war, the devastation it leaves in its wake. They romanticize conflict, turn it into… entertainment. They have no concept of the hunger, the loss, the sheer… futility. And now, they’re bringing those silly biblical prophecies into the picture… again. They can’t wait to launch a third global conflagration.”

A sudden, chilling giggle echoed through the room. Little Maggie, the spectral trickster, had replaced Faulkner’s pipe tobacco with a wisp of Spanish moss. He sputtered, the moss dissolving into thin air. “They also believe,” Maggie piped up, her voice a ghostly whisper, “that they can photograph ghosts with their… their ‘smartphones’. They take pictures of… of dust and claim it’s us.” She cackled, a sound like wind chimes in a graveyard.

Clemmons chuckled, a low, rumbling sound. “Indeed, child. They attempt to capture the intangible, the unseen, with their… their digital trinkets. They have become slaves to the very technology they believe liberates them. They spend their days staring at glowing rectangles, believing they are experiencing… life.”

Poe raised an eyebrow. “They believe the darkness can be banished with… with light. They illuminate every corner, every crevice, yet they remain blind to the true shadows that lurk within their own souls.”

Mitchell sighed dramatically. “And the fashion! Oh, the atrocities they call fashion! They wear… leggings as trousers leaving nearly nothing to the imagination! It’s simply… barbaric.”

Bierce, ever the cynic, added, “They have created a world of… of curated perfection. Every image, every interaction, filtered and polished to remove any trace of… of authenticity. They live in a world of lies, and they call it… social media.”

Maggie, now floating upside down near the ceiling, began to hum a discordant tune. “They think they can solve the world’s problems with… with the pound sign, they call it a ‘hashtag.’ They use it to pass around short photoplays like chain letters spreading like the plague, and say these picture shows can change the course of history.”

Faulkner, still slightly flustered by the moss incident, muttered, “They cannot grasp the… the cyclical nature of time. They repeat the same mistakes, generation after generation, oblivious to the… the echoes of the past.”

Clemons, leaning against a bookshelf, concluded, “In short, they are a collection of self-absorbed, technologically addicted, historically ignorant… fools. And they think we are the phantoms.”

A chorus of ghostly laughter filled the McRaven House, echoing through the empty rooms, a testament to the enduring irony of the mortal plane. Little Maggie, her eyes gleaming with mischievous delight, began to pull the spectral drapes from the windows, plunging the room into an even deeper, more unsettling darkness.

Onward through the fog… RH

In the town of Vicksburg…
In the house McRaven…
You may encounter…
Some ghostly maven…
And like the flow of…
The Mighty Mississip…
Everything that changes…
Stays the same.

Audiovision: Meet the New Baus

Delicate Donny Goldencalf the Third, a lad whose lineage boasted more dollars than sense, awoke with a start. Not from a dream, mind you, but from the lingering echoes of a rather unfortunate encounter with a gastroenterologist and his trusty colonoscope. He found himself not in his gilded, monogrammed boudoir, but in a… well, a place. A place teeming with flora of improbable hues and fauna that looked like they’d escaped from a particularly vivid opium dream.

Goldencalf, you see, harbored a secret ambition. Not a secret secret, mind you, as he’d bellowed it from the rooftops of his father’s Fifth Avenue penthouse often enough. He yearned to be a King. A great King. Powerful, virtuous, the whole shebang. The slight snag in this grand design was that Goldencalf’s experience with courage extended only to ordering the household staff to adjust the thermostat, and his virtue was mostly theoretical, confined to dusty volumes he’d never actually read. However, he possessed a talent for self-promotion that would make P.T. Barnum blush. He’d convinced a surprising number of sycophants that his utter lack of substance was, in fact, a profound and nuanced form of… something. They just had to, you know, overlook the fact that he was, metaphorically speaking, starkers.

Now, here he was, in this outlandish land, feeling more metaphorically naked than ever. He’d heard whispers of this place – something about a yellow brick road and a wizard. A wizard who, presumably, could bestow upon him the kingly qualities that he so desperately lacked. So, with a newfound, if somewhat shaky, resolve, Goldencalf set off.

He hadn’t gone far when he encountered a signpost, helpfully pointing towards the aforementioned road. “To the Riviera,” it proclaimed, in lettering that seemed to shimmer with an almost sinister glee. Goldencalf swallowed hard. He’d faced down his father’s investment bankers without flinching, but this… this was different. This was uncharted territory.

He found the road easily enough. It was remarkably yellow, almost garishly so, like a jaundice victim’s complexion. He trudged along, the silence broken only by the frantic thumping of his own heart, which he tried to convince himself was the sound of his burgeoning courage.

Suddenly, a rustling in the undergrowth! Goldencalf froze, his eyes wide with terror. From the bushes emerged… a small, fluffy dog. A lapdog, really, the kind that rich ladies carry in their handbags. It yapped, a high-pitched, insistent sound. Goldencalf yelped, leaping back with a cry that would have shamed a banshee. His carefully constructed facade of bravado crumbled faster than a cheap pastry. The dog, unimpressed by this display of royal fortitude, continued to yap, tail wagging expectantly.

Goldencalf stared at it, his face pale. This, he realized with a sinking heart, was not going to be as easy as he’d thought. He’d faced down dragons in his limited imagination, but a yapping Terrier? That was a foe of a different caliber altogether. He was, it seemed, the naked, Cowardly Lion. And the quest for courage and virtue, he suspected, was going to be a long and humiliating one. After all, how could one rule a kingdom when one was empty of conviction and terrified of a fluffy handbag accessory? The irony, as they say, was thicker than appointing someone rich from government contracts to oversee the federal treasury.

Stay tuned, for more ironic adventures… Rohlfie

Irony is Dead (v42a)

Ah, the irony, it burns like a habanero dipped in turpentine! These self-styled patriots, these bastions of bootstrapped prosperity, these impotent congress-critters, now want to pull the ladder up behind them, leaving the rest of us to drown in the fetid swamp of their hypocrisy.

For decades, they’ve feasted on the fruits of immigrant toil, their pockets lined by the sweat and tears of folks who crossed deserts and oceans for a shot at the American Bait-and-Switch. They’ve built their empires on backs bent under the sun, minds dulled by the drudgery of minimum-wage purgatory. All the while, they (the ruling elites) sang hymns to liberty and opportunity, their forked tongues dripping with a molasses-thick patriotism that choked on the merest whiff of diversity.

But now, the winds are shifting. The browning of America, once a distant tremor, is an earthquake at their door. The faces they once exploited, the hands that picked their crops and cleaned their toilets, are no longer content with crumbs from the master’s table. They dare to aspire, to dream of a slice of the pie they helped bake. And that, my friends, is the real culture war.

Suddenly, the land of the free morphs into Fort Knox, the Statue of Liberty replaced by a gargoyle with a padlock for a mouth. Walls rise like monuments to their own fear, moats filled with the crocodile tears of those who once swore by the great American melting pot. They rail against “invasion,” these architects of exploitation, while forgetting the original sin – the forcible dispossession, the bloody conquest that birthed their precious nation.

The irony is enough to make a jackass weep! These masters of the oligarchy, these captains of energy-independence, these dismantlers of democracy, now reduced to trembling toddlers clutching their sandcastles against the tide. Their gilded cages, built on the backs of the forgotten, suddenly seem awfully fragile. And as the waves of change lap at the ramparts, they scream for walls, for moats, for anything to keep the ghosts of their own greed at bay.

But let them not fool you, these wall-whiners, these moat-mongers. Their fear is not of immigrants, but of justice. Their gated communities are not sanctuaries, but confessionals, where they whisper the sins of a nation built on stolen land and desperate workers. So let the walls rise, let the moats fester, for in their fetid depths lies the true face of American hypocrisy, a monument not to liberty, but to the fear of its own shadow.

Irony is Dead (ch42)

Ah, the self-checkout. Symphony of beeps, purgatory of plastic bags, and the Mona Lisa of retail scams: the ol’ banana-on-the-sensor switcheroo. You gotta hand it to Buffet, the ol’ bastard knew what he was talking about. Class war, indeed. Only now, the battlefield ain’t some picket line in Detroit, it’s aisle number six at the super-center, and the weapons are kale chips and discount laundry detergent.

See, the suits figured they were playing checkers, right? Replace checkers with cashiers, cut costs, boost profits. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. Except, these aren’t checkers, folks, this is three-dimensional chess played with avocados and expired yogurt. People get creative, real quick. Bananas become batteries, steaks into socks, and suddenly, that self-checkout scanner becomes Robin Hood of the corporate super-mart.

Take Mildred, bless her lace doily heart. Sweet old lady, wouldn’t hurt a fly unless it was buzzin’ around her gingerbread house. But stick her in front of that self-checkout screen, and suddenly, she’s MacGyver with a coupon for cat food. Scanning a grapefruit for a Granny Smith, weighing a cantaloupe as a zucchini – it’s like watchin’ a hummingbird rob a bank vault, one avocado at a time.

And the irony, oh, the irony! Suits pattin’ themselves on the back for saving a buck on payroll, while Mildred’s walking out with enough T-bone to feed the bingo hall. It’s like they built a casino and forgot to lock the doors – except instead of poker chips, it’s Brussels sprouts and frozen éclair bites.

So next time you see someone getting the “unexpected item” flag, remember, it’s not just a glitch. It’s a tiny act of rebellion, a hint of class warfare in the aisles of capitalism. And who knows, maybe, just maybe, it’ll be enough to tip the damn scales, one avocado at a time. Now, if you’ll excuse me, i gotta go practice my quiet patience while “help is on the way.”

Loopcircus