Capitali$m $uck$ (TM)
Chapter One
Read the Prologue here:
By Bryan Gahagan
Assembled and Edited by Tessa Tillman
Collected by Bradley Nordell
The Short History of The Last Five Years
A possibly true story
[CLICK] [KA-LICK]
[The background hiss of tape. Then, the air conditioning kicks in the distance. There’s heavy, belabored breathing for about 20 seconds in the back ground. Some paper shuffling and a cleared throat.]
Like every successful Disney story, our story begins with the death of a parent…
[Pause.]
[Longer pause.]
I love that lede, but no…my mind is blank on where to start, but I can’t start there.
I mean, that’s how the other book started. That book is gone. Fucking corporate internet cops. Billionaire thieves.
The story has changed.
I don’t even know where I am. This looks like my apartment, but with a bunch of different shit in it. New mattress, different posters, same dumpy apartment. Even the burned hole in the door is there.
But no me, that’s good. Should I be here? I am here.
No Elliot Nester. No Edge Lord. That’s good. They didn’t find me, yet.
[Exhale.]
Back up.
Start over.
[Clears throat. Big breaths. Breathing slows.]
Hello. My name is Bryan Gahagan. I am the voice on this tape. As far as I know, today is August 30th, 2021. My 55th birthday is today.
Also, today is the day I’m supposed to be murdered. Dun-Dun-DAAAAAA!!!
[Coughing]
At nine am, actually. Murdered at nine. It’s now, um, 7:41. I walked into this bedroom at 7:32 exactly. How do I even know that? So, I need to get as much on tape as I can before nine. Before they kill me.
Just so we’re clear, U-Dub, The ‘they’ are Nester and Edge Lord. Again, Elliot Nester and the billionaire known as Edge Lord murdered me. Later this morning.
Ok, Ok. My name is Bryan Gahagan. I am the voice on this tape. Today is August 30th, 2021. I am 55 years old. A pandemic rages across the nation and Motherfucker Rand Paul is president.
And I think something weird is going on.
[Indistinct animal noise in the distance.]
[CLICK]
$$$
[CLICK] [KA-LICK]
OK, OK. I had to turn the tape machine off. Think. Think. And check out my surroundings. I heard an animal outside, looked outside, man the sky is clear today, turns out it was a dog, a dog! My neighbors, I have neighbors, own a great fucking dane.
It’s now 2:00 pm. I’m still alive. I think the bomb is still inside my head, but I’m still alive. I had to turn the tape machine off and check my apartment. No gun. My cassettes from college. Back. Score! My handwriting on stuff. The journals are there, I almost forgot them. My old projector, the one I sold, is back. A new bike. Different board games. The funky Frankenstein painting I bought over a year ago, off the wall and on the floor.
This me certainly is doing better than me me.
But, this is my apartment, I’m sure of it.
I decided to watch TV. I have a TV. Fucking TV. I hate TV.
Oh my God.
Here’s what I learned in just 10 minutes, before the eye sweeps started:
Sleepy Joe Biden is president. The pandemic is over with only 550,000 dead. And Donald Trump is still alive and was president.
….And Pitbull, still a thing. Just a pop star, not Piiiitttttbullllll! Still, though, crap rises to the top, right?
Can’t leave the TV on more than ten minutes a day, haven’t even turned one on in over a year.
Right, right 98?
I had to lay down. This was all too much.
Dear audience, U-Dubbers,
Since I was a kid and if I was under pressure or faced with some choice or just overwhelmed, I’d lay down and go into a blank brain sort of state. Some people use drugs or sex to escape, I sleep to get away. Much fucking cheaper.
But, when I have the cash, I can’t recommend drugs enough.
Also, where’s the weed, me? The Diet Coke Mellow? I’d store it in the fridge, but there’s just Coke Neutral in there. Nobody drinks that anymore. No, 6,000 dollars in the old times cash safe. No old time safe. Fucking corporate goons robbed me.
Oh, And frozen pizza in freezer. And cheese. A fuckton of cheese.
Still, eating great, huh, alterna-me?
So, anyway, I fell asleep. And woke up without my brains splattered all over the walls. It’s after nine and I’m still alive. Good news.
Let’s reconstruct. Last night, I stayed up all night on Diet Coke Original, man, I shouldn’t do that stuff. I wish Diet Mountain Dew was still around. It’d go great with cocaine. R.I.P. Pepsi, it was unfair what happened. But I always hated Pepsi. So…
So, my recollection is hazy. Oh, I always tell people that I’m an unreliable narrator. Always, double check what I say. It’s not that I lie. I don’t. It’s just that we’re all unreliable narrators to our own lives. You know? I’m always afraid I’m spouting bullshit and don’t know it. It ain’t conscious. Journalism, double-check your story. J-school 101. Look at me using my useless Journalism degree.
And that’s what I was up all night doing, using my useless Journalism degree, speaking the truth, my last will and testament, recording what I know onto old Maxwell tapes — they were hard to get — stopped making them in 2018, then all snapped up by the Moneybag Set. Maybe, I’ll play them for you, anonymous audience, but I don’t know. I promised them to U-U-A-W before nine.
So, I went outside and all the buildings were different. My building was the same, but all the new developments were gone. It’s all funky and ancient, like the old days. Did I travel back in time?
I had to go and lay down. I mean, maybe the Diet Coke Original fucked with my head and I rearranged my apartment, but this is serious LSD shit. Buildings don’t change overnight. No McChang’s. No McBell’s. No McSilvers. A comic book store? Capitali$m $uck$ was gone, just an abandoned pawn shop. So, no U-Dub. I saw my old Volvo in the parking lot.
Ok. Ok. Reconstruct. When I left this morning, at 7:32, what is it with that? That time sticks in my head like Grunt Glue. I strapped on my man satchel full of tapes, full of fucking evidence, for The U-Dub and walked out the bed room door of my room into my room again. I thought the Coke had me turned around, but maybe this was some old video game Portal shit. Maybe I went back in time. That’s why I’m not here cause if I saw myself, the Universe would implode or some shit.
Narcissist much? Ain’t no Universe gonna implode because of me. I didn’t do shit.
So, maybe I’m just out. Out to lunch. Out of my head. Phillip Morris peyote-style.
But…that can’t be right. I’m going to just wait here in this room, room zero, I guess, with the door closed and wait until I get home. Not let anyone see me. Not let me see me, so, you know the Universe doesn’t implode, just talk to me through the door. When I get here. I gotta be home soon. Or sometime.
[CLICK]
$$$
[CLICK] [KA-LICK]
Hello, my name is Bryan Gahagan. I am the voice on this cassette tape. I am 55 years old. Today is Tuesday, August 30th, 2021. It’s 9:22 pm according to my old clock. Who knows what date it really is? I stayed in all day, in this apartment. Avoided the internet and this iPad I found. Mostly, I just opened and closed the bed room door, seeing if it would change. See if some green Rick and Morty time transport hole would appear. Nope. Still here.
Also, today is also the fifth anniversary of my suicide attempt.
Am I dead? Some Stupid Lost shit. I need a drink, but no booze in the place. Or weed. Or cocaine. Or mushrooms. Or LSD. Or DMT. Or even Cokette for Kids. How do people cope drug-free? Sleep all day?
A lot of weirdness has happened in the last five years. Praise JR ‘Bob’ Dobbs. And I got time, bonus time, really. An extra life as they say in video game parlance. No brain speckled ceiling.
Let’s think.
[Pause. Drink of liquid] Diet Coke Neutral, I can’t believe I was just addicted to just caffeine, a lifetime ago. Oh, where to start?
This is your future, denizens of the past! But first a personal note.
Donald Trump saved my life five years ago today, sort of. I had the gun in my mouth and was just about to pull the trigger, when I heard the ’Tweet’ of a Facebook message. I walked into the living room, 7:32 am, natch. Fucking Lost. Oh, it was a message from Hersch on Facebook. Live video of candidate Donald J. Trump. He’d just accidentally driven a forklift into giant vat of molten steel at a Pittsburg steel plant. Fucker took Pence with him. It was some hilarious shit. I saw the live feed just in time to see the forklift start to melt and Pence’s head bobbing in the hot, molten steel. Fucking hilarious. That video was the most tweeted video of 2016, I must of watched it 10,000 times. Pence’s bobbing skull was on the cover of Time. Anyway, hard to commit suicide after that. Had to watch the news. Too strange to die that day.
You probably know all the weirdness, the terrible weirdness, that happened after that. If you don’t, time travelers, here’s a short history of the last five years:
Motherfucker Rand Paul and ‘Goofy’ Gary Johnson became President and Vice President because only 19 percent of the electorate voted and none of them voted for a woman, especially one with e-mail theft and Parkinson rumors. Hillary Clinton died a three weeks after the election, walking in the woods in an ‘accident.’ Then Bernie Sanders, died of a heart attack. Rest in Peace, keep fighting in Heaven, my Democratic Socialist brother. Yea, I said it, throw me in jail, motherfucker! Dem-O-Crat-Ic Soc-Il-Ist! Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died after a barbell slipped and smashed her head open like a cantelope. Damn, man, it was dark November.
In his first 100 days,Motherfucker Rand Paul set about privatizing everything through executive order right away and a conservative Supreme Court upheld it: prisons, schools, the police, the courts, everything the government does except the military. From school lunches to roads. Everything. All in corporate hands. No goverment handouts anymore. No driver’s licences. Then motherfucker Paul slashed taxes to a 2 percent flat tax for everyone. He rescinded all regulations and monopoly laws. The Republoshits gerrymandered the fuck out of the 2018 elections and Democrats only had 12 seats in the House and three in the Senate. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez was the only angel among a sea of corporate devils.
What else? All drugs were legalized. Prostitution was legalized. The minimum wage was eliminated. Kids could work an unlimited work week, just like everyone else. Unions were dismantled. Sci-Infinity was the hot new religion. Most foreign aid was eliminated. All troops withdrawn from around the world. The rest of the world disowned us, even England, France and Australia. Only Israel remained, the only country The US still finances. Waiting for the end of the world.
Then in 2020, The ‘Ching-Chong’ Flu hit. What the fuck, government? The government said it was ‘business as usual,’ you could be arrested for skipping work or wearing a mask in public due to the flu, no money for vaccines. When a vaccine was developed in Russia, the Sputnik Five, it was ten thousand dollar a dose, smuggled in, 30 million people died. Motherfucker Rand Paul declared a State of Emergency and the 2020 Elections were suspended. The flu is still rages on. Nobody leaves their house and everyone is unemployed. Or under work contracts with no insurance. A strain of the flu killed 80 percent of dogs. I mean, dogs, man. That’s fucked up.
All the while, freed from regulations, corporations snapped up and eliminated most smaller businesses. Consolidation. Most areas of commerce were now monopolies. Chevy beat Ford. Amazon absorbed Walmart after Walmart absorbed 95 percent of retail sales. Pepsi lost the cola wars in a violent coup. McDonald ate Burger King for lunch. Clear Channel and Fox owned all the media outlets and stations. Google/Time Facebook owned everything online. Apple bought up all the PC companies and Microsoft became vaporware.
The Supreme Court case Citizens Divided said corporations could own people if both sides signed a contract. Contract law was king. Everything had a contract attached. A lotta people signed up for slavery, just to have a place to sleep and two meals a day. Black Lives Matter was declared a terrorist group because of some minor property damage. Underground culture blossomed. But that also meant blacks only restaurants, white only restaurants, Asian only restaurants, men only restaurants, women only restaurants. And stores. An anti-capitalist underground blossomed. Everyone I knew was off the radar, unemployed and underground. That’s how weird it got.
Maybe I was sent back to tell you not to fuck it up.
It was a Libertarian, capitalist paradise. 1830 with internet. Motherfucking Rand Paul.
Oh, and I lost my foot in February. That sucked. And I think I have cancer, but who can pay to find out?
Also, I don’t think I have my under-the-table job at Capitali$m $uck$ anymore or an exclusive with U-Dub.
But hoo-ray. My head didn’t explode today.
I gotta go lay down again.
[CLICK]
$$$
