Capitali$m $uck$
Chapter Four
Read Chapter Three Here:
Other Paths
$1$
September 3, 2021 3:35 pm
Dear Journal,
How are you my BiPolar pal?
Fine.
Just fine, you’re my rock on this earth that’s bent on spinning off its axis. And all I get is fine.
Been long enough, where have you been?
Here. Stoned. Faced with a mind melting fuck of a world and my genius solution is to get stoned on corporate weed.
Tsk. Tsk. Tsk.
Shut up. It’s legal. I took a short walk around the neighborhood. I saw a store that sold tigers and flyers for all sorts of goods. At the computer monitor at the OnlyFans retail store, I saw that Amazon sells all kinds of shit. I was in the store for two minutes and a very close approximation of my dream girl came up to me and asked if I wanted to go in the back room. Just looking, I squeaked out. Freaky, I didn’t even put anything in the computer.
Everything is fucking legal here and for sale in the free market. Weed. Shrooms. LSD. Prostitutes. Hobo fighting. Bazookas. Taiwanese fuck boys. Placentas. Livers. The concept of free will. Suicide aid. Abortions. Virginity. One second, one minute, one hour, one day, one month, one year, one lifetime of your body and mind. Your soul.
You don’t have a soul.
Your soul, colloquially speaking. Apparently, the market’s flexible on that one. Souls are on a downward trend. Dreams and hopes and passions and the voice in your head. All monetized, quantified and sold back to yourself and others. The minerals in your skin, the dust in your dandruff, doilies made from your hair, your blood and guts, all for sale. We’re all beggars, buying and selling other beggars and ourselves.
And how do you know this?
My doppelgänger’s journals, drug revelations, and George.
Who’s George?
He’s my boss, my doppelgänger’s boss, my boss now. He showed up yesterday at my door. He came to see if I was still alive. I had been drinking Mellow all morning and was pretty stoned and was thinking about masturbation because what else there to do and George just unlocks my door and walks in. A big African American, I literally stood there with my sweatpants around my ankles, tiny cock out, frozen and paranoid (fucking drugs).
He laughs, “Morning, baby carrot. Glad to see you’re still alive and whacking it. I thought you’d be dead, but the door was locked, so I thought maybe you ran.”
“Huh,” I just stood there, exposed.
“The bomb in your head, supposed to go off on Monday at nine.”
“Again, huh?”
“Wait, you’re not Bryan.”
“Yes, I am.” I pulled my sweat pants up, who knows, maybe this guy has seen my doppelgänger’s doppelgänger.
“Then why do you have a left foot.”
“What? Huh? It was infected in February, but it got better.”
“Yea, it was infected in February and we cut it off the first week of March. I was there, you got 20,000 dollars.”
Geez, sucks to be other me.
“So who are you, a clone?”
Wait, Clones exist?
“No, I’m just fucking with you. Who are you, Bryan from an alternate timeline?”
“How did you know?”
“Still, I’m fucking with you. That’s pure Montauk Project shit.” He laughed.
I started crying.
Why did you cry?
I don’t know. I’ve been crying a lot the last four days. Being stoned. No meds. Only eating crickets. The whole fucking world. Mix and match, take your pick. The pot mutes it, but there’s an emotional crash when it wears off.
Okay, anyway…
Okay, anyway. I told George about my alternate timeline theory. He immediately became stoic and unfazed. He seemed to act like what I was saying was reasonable and plausible, not the ravings of a crazy loon. I told him about my run-ins with the store owner and my police call and what timeline I came from. I think he believed me, but I don’t know. When I was finished, he said, “I have a job for you, Ryan.”
“I’m Bryan.”
“Not anymore, you’re Bryan’s twin brother Ryan. Have you checked the safe?”
“Yes.”
“There’s Ryan Gahagan identity cards in there. Bryan used it as cover. Also, some Bezo Bucks, VisaMaster and other digital currency. But don’t use any of it if you can avoid it.”
“Why?”
“They track you.”
“Who’s they?”
“Anyone with access to the credit network. Nestor and Edge Lord, for instance.”
“Who?”
“The people who put the bomb in your head.”
“Oh. Um…”
“We were about to bring them down, where are the tapes? The cassette tapes?”
“I have a micro-cassette tape. No regular cassette tapes, in fact I think they were stolen.”
“What?”
“Yea, I had a bunch of old cassettes from college that went missing after ‘The Jump.’”
“The what? Oh, Bryan must have them. That’s good news. Must mean, he’s around here somewhere or he mailed them to U-dub or worse case, they were taken by Nestor and we have to start all over.”
“We?”
“Yea, you. Welcome to the revolution. Be at Capitali$m $uck$ at nine Monday. In the mini-mall about a block away. Wear comfortable clothes. You have a job now, Ryan. Enjoy the rest of your staycation. I wouldn’t leave the apartment if I were you. I’ll fill you in Monday.”
George started to leave.
“Hey, why Ryan Gahagan and not something like John Barron or something?”
“Change one letter and you don’t exist in the system. It’s easy to remember. Buttle. Tuttle. Have a monied day.”
$2$
September 4, 2021, 3:12 am
Hey Journal,
Wake up Bi!
What?
I wanna tell you a story.
I’ve heard all your stories.
It’s my earliest memory.
Heard it.
But the telling is the important part. The telling helps me sort it all out.
(Sighs) Yea, fine. I’m here to serve, master.
I’m five years old, just before my parents divorced. The only memory I have of my parents being in the same place at the same time. They bought me a little wiener dog, Candy, I think to cushion the blow of the upcoming divorce. We lived in Texas, it’s summertime and in the summer there’d be these flash rain storms, extremely localized, so that you could see clear weather a half block away while getting soaked. Literally, the embodiment of the cartoon character with the storm cloud over his head.
So, I’m playing in the big backyard. I’m making a mud castle. It had rained earlier. Candy is rooting around in the grass nearby. And the sky cracks open and the rain suddenly pours. Hard. I sink into the mud. My arms got stuck. I couldn’t breath. I couldn’t move. My earliest memory is of sheer panic. I screamed for my mom. Both my mom and dad came running out the screen door. I had just seen a Tarzan movie where someone got trapped in quicksand.
“Help me, quicksand. I’m drowning.”
What I remember most, like the clearest ringing of a bell, is my mom’s laugh. Somewhere between a snort and a donkey’s bray. My mom then ran back in the house and returned with a camera. She must have emptied the roll. My dad stood and watched, slightly annoyed. After my mom finished taking pictures, my parents and Candy went back inside.
They left me. They didn’t help me. This is my earliest memory. And I don’t remember much between five years old and high school, just a series of let downs, of people who should’ve helped, but didn’t. Memories of secrets about my life, held from me and only revealed long after any usefulness. I’ve always felt large chunks of my life are just missing or a lie.
I know.
I struggled, but was already tired, so I just went limp. I laid in the mud until supper, staring at the clouds passing by. Supper was cold by the time I cleaned up and changed.
And why are you telling me this?
Because these memories are also my doppelgänger’s memories. And yet he changed, hero’d up, became more, um, of an activist.
And you think this is in you as well?
Maybe. I don’t know. On Monday, I take over my doppelgänger life and I don’t know if I can. I’ve been reading his journals. I’m only a few entries in from when we split and the world went to fuck on a hell-bound fuck cycle fast. I mean, we both attempted suicide, so are we dead and what I do doesn’t matter. I don’t know. I feel alive, super stoned, but alive. Maybe I’m the activist I’ve always wanted to be, maybe I’m a fraud, maybe I’m the humiliated failure my mom took pictures of mired in the mud. Most of life up to this point has been life acting upon me and me not having to make choices of any consequences. Ethics and morality have been, for the most part, a small concern. Ethics and morality have been subconscious. Now, I may have to make choices and live with those choices. The world seems stark.
You know,I always got into journalism as I thought it was one of the only paths, along with science, to the truth. But no one even wants the truth anymore, much less journalism.
We’ll find out.
We’ll find out.
Bye bye bi.
$3$
September 5, 2021, 5:12pm
“I spend about three hours a day looking at dicks. Big dicks, little mushroom dicks, curved dicks, black dicks, white dicks, Hispanic dicks, dicks of all colors, but mostly black dicks. Real live dicks so close I can blow on them and they move in the wind. That’s my life.”
Dear Journal,
How are you?
Wait, what? I was going to say hopeful, but why are you looking at dicks all day?
Why are you hopeful?
Life’s changing. You’re gonna rise to the occasion on Monday. Blah, blah, blah, I’m hopeful. So, why are you looking at dicks all day?
Yes fucking way! Life’s changing, Pollyanna. But I’m not looking at dicks, not me, Herschel.
How’s Herschel?
Um, good? He came by this morning with Dunkin Mellow and some apple-flavored fritters. Remember how in my timeline, Hersh worked for the private prison industrial complex putting in vending machines in prisons to soak prisoners and their families with overpriced goods.
Yea.
He still works for the same company, but his work has changed. He still installs the vending machines, there’s new prisons everyday, he says, now called ‘Work Rehabilitation Centers.” But also, he installs Pay Patches into prisoner’s hands all day, so they can use Bezos Bucks to use the overpriced vending machines. The special Pay Patches can transfer credits from friends and families to the prison workers.
Why the dicks?
So, some prisoners smuggle in hacked chips in the tip of their penis or under their balls or taped to the taint. The chips give them more credits and disable the trackers. The prisoners with bloody penis heads are usually the chip smugglers. Hersh has to check. Up close. With rubber gloves and everything.
That’s number of the beast shit.
The SKU number for the Pay Patch is 666. Somebody has a sense of humor.
Sounds rough. Hersh was always so ethical, annoyingly so. Why doesn’t he quit?
The perks. He gets a free car and gas. The pay is good. He naively signed a five year contract, but at least his pay wasn’t cut. Most people were forced into lower pay with the pandemic a new laws. Plus, he gets one 50,000 dollar ‘Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free’ card.
A What?
If Hersh commits a crime that would cost up to 50 thousand dollars to buy his way out of, the company will cover it. They have a discount with most police departments and prisons.
What crimes could he commit?
Mostly white collar stuff. Light fraud. Scams. Uninvited rape. Of course, he’d lose his job because committing a crime, any crime from misdemeanor to felony, invalidates his contract. So besides the um, ethical considerations of rape, he’d lose money. He wants to quit, but one of his girlfriends…
Oh, good for him…
Yea, Andrea, Nikki and Hersh live in a two bedroom apartment in the nice part of town. Andrea lost her job when Amazon bought FedEx. She wanted to be a mechanic or driver for Amazon, but was turned down because Amazon was only hiring men because they could quote “pee in a Mickey’s bottle and get back to work.”
Did she sue?
Apparently the Doritos Supreme Court case Citizens Divided ruled that job creators and owners could hire whoever they wanted for whatever reason they decided. Amazon did offer her a job at a private nude sex farm detasseling corn, but she turned it down.
What?
Fresh Vegetables and meat are pretty rare commodities, except at corporate entities. They own the supply chain. So, Amazon makes the employees work nude, so they can’t steal product. Plus, rich people can watch for 50 bucks an hour. Most jobs for women at Amazon are nude because Bezos was pissed at his ex for giving so much money to Third World countries and West Virginia. So, Bezos is now contractually married to 365 women — one for each day of the year. He even legally named them after their day of the year with tattoos and outfits and everything. Alimony is obsolete through contracts. And with only a two percent flat tax for everyone, there’s no more financial tax benefit to marriage.
Is Hershel still a vegetarian and runner?
Everybody’s a vegetarian if you don’t count bugs. And he’s given up running for THC-coffee and donuts. The air’s too thick to run. He still doesn’t have a TV.
And how’s Nikki?
So, Nikki is one of the few teachers left. The pandemic has killed a lot of kids, Hersh said, in fact, about a fifth of children after Covid deniers — eighty percent of the country — pushed for open schools, open businesses and no masks. The Russian Sputnik vaccine is two thousand dollars a shot. Some parents were too scared to let their kids go to school. Some couldn’t afford it. The rich home schooled. And the poor had their kids go to work and work with them, so the kids earn money for the family as well. At 2.13 an hour, everybody in the family works.
Nikki works at Lincoln Frito-Lay Elementary training fifth graders for a future in retail. Most kids now graduate in the sixth grade and go into a job internship. Nobody goes to the tech schools — middle school and high school — and only the rich go to college. It’ll be a generation of the dumb, Hersh said, Generation Duh.
Did Hersh know you weren’t Doppelgänger Bryan?
Yea, I told him I was his twin brother Ryan and that Bryan disappeared. He didn’t seem to know about the revolution stuff or the bomb in Bryan’s head. Apparently, the last time Bryan saw him was about a month ago. In a fucked up world, nobody seemed fazed by the weird.
Hersh took me out to lunch to one of the only independently owned Mexican restaurants that allowed white people and people of all genders. I had the spicy Cicada salad. I told Hersh I’d been living in Europe and didn’t know much about this new America. What advice did he have for me?
Move back was his immediate response. Hersh wondered how I even got in because of the worldwide pandemic ban on coming to America, I shrugged. He said leaving would cost a lot of money and only the very rich travel, because America needed the workers and the monopolies who owned the planes picked who came and went.
Use a coyote and sneak into Mexico or Canada was his advice. But if I had to stay:
Avoid the cops. They have quotas and commission-based arrests and the prisons need workers. If they show up to your door, someone’s going to jail. Thirty-five percent of labor in America is done by the free prison population and once your in, you’ll never leave. Manufactured infractions keep most people incarcerated and stuck in the system until their deaths. Only money gets you out. Capitalism.
Stay away from screens, the internet and digital currency. They all track you.
Barter and cash wherever possible. Always carry cash.
Don’t sign contracts, they’re traps.
Stay stoned, because why not?
And People are scum, avoid them.
Well, at least, that’s the old Hersh I knew.
Hersh sounded like the conspiracy theorists we used to make fun of. I guess when the conspiracy is real, you don’t sound crazy.
At the Mexican restaurant, there were small, weird details that seemed off. Sugar packets of edible pot at the table. Child servers who rattled a tip jar every time they brought a plate or took a plate away. One offered to shine my shoes — sneakers, ha — — for five bucks. One adorable little girl just waved a .45 at my feet and sweetly asked for five dollars. I obliged. We bought fireworks, bottle rockets with a M80 tip on the way out.
Back at the car, Hersh took the empty Dunkin Mellow cup out, went behind a tree, filled the cup up with his urine and shook it up. He then set the cup on the curb. I asked him why he did that and he said indigents take empty branded cups and would resell them with ground up crickets and flavor balls as coffee.
“Fuck ‘em,” he said.
That sounds like Hersh.
Have a monied day, ha.
And stay stoned, my friend.
Bye Bye Bi.
$$$
