Manifest Destiny & the Beginners Guide to Surrendering Sovereignty

A hot wind curls the leaves and chases the dogs digging deep into the dry soil.

I live in the gut of the bright failure called America.

I live in this hell named [fill-in-the-blank].

It's one hundred and seven today and grasshoppers from outer space are dancing in my brain.

The air-conditioner is broke so I run a tub of cold water and submerge every half hour.

There's a wet trail from the bath to the couch and nearby fan.The air is heavy with grain dust.

The "wheaties" are up from Oklahoma with their caravan of combines.

I crave winter. I want a blizzard that blinds me to my fellow man.

These are my dark times.

Every other day I grieve for the me that was and every man or woman I see fills me with contempt.

These half-wit inbreds love to imagine that nine out of ten "Skins" in our Gomorrahs are hang-around-the-fort welfare sucking addicts.

Yet every weekend their violence and drunken wretchedness fills this county's jail, so I'm far beyond embarrassment by these fucks that are worse than the boogiemen they prod each other into fearing.

Varied branches of that inbred, toothless mountain trash in "Deliverance,"settled here and now own
the bank and most businesses.

It's undeniably true that these white people in Cowturdville could be hillbillies except for the fact that these are The Plains.

Drive on, rednecks, to the edge of your flat world and fall down to a better hell.

Every single thing about this town is sadly second-rate and I haven't been laid in more than two years and there's this fat lady with varicose veins who calls me late at night and begs me to come over to her trailer for a drink.

Here, in this Panhandle town, farm kids speed desperately up and down the main drag wearing baseball caps backwards and throwing gang signs they've seen on the tube and their parents, glad they're old and tired, truly believe that those pictures we're now getting from Mars have meaning.

As far as I can tell, I'm one of the few people in Cowturdville who's gone to college and I often wish I never had, but Christ on a pogostick . . .

I think I'm starting to like it here in this American heartland.[ease in to the cushion of our adjustable apathy.]

Thunderheads are forming and the sweet-ass rain of forgiveness is in the air.