Bonus post! Less an experiment, more a snapshot of my brain.
Enjoy it? Share the wealth. Hate it? Make someone else suffer.
I still play “Mural” on loop because despite reaching a dire enough level of black nerdom to cite Lupe Fiasco in the opening words of anything or consider writing blerd for brevity I’m not deep enough to catch every pun or joke or allusion or mistake he puts in any song so the planet-glassing punchline barrage in “Mural” lets me live honestly and admit that I’ll never know what’s going on for at least half of the track but its a ride and I’m on it and if you think he’ll slow down for anyone on board you can follow J. Cole’s midwit parade off a cliff and that’s a long conga line when everyone has a megaphone no ears and negative memory making every conversation sound like a hyperactive child describing homework they haven’t touched to a teacher waiting for today’s shellshocked plague survivor to lose hope and wander off as Someone Else’s Problem until humanity kicks in and the adjunct gives the hungover frat star an extension or so I hear though now at least the Fresh Disaster lets me mention the Last Disaster without someone curling up and screaming until we both forget dancing in Prospect Park when Store Brand Caligula lost the atomic briefcase but I guess we got bored and like Fallout more than John Stuart Mill essays with big words and no super mutants and that includes me since back in adland I ignored deadlines to outline six issues about a nameless vagrant stumbling onto Vault 85 you know kind of like a player character anyway like all vaults 85 is paradise and the story ends there until The Vagrant learns that paradise’s citizens/prisoners live under the steel fist of the last nameless scavenger to stroll in and depose their tyrant so The Vagrant applies the lessons of the past to break the cycle and launch a beheading spree that would make Robespierre blush or wouldn’t because he’s just Robespierre and dies the same way but with super mutants so maybe I’m not a genius but Fallout’s thesis is that history recycles material unless you ask Bethesda then it’s adding jazz to the same live service template that’s collapsed under twenty different names and while I never tire of watching trash burn I avoid the topic since panning games summons the Wehrmacht fan club an endless wave of failures so obsessed with dry dick that their unfuckability shapes geopolitics in a new low for primates as a whole that replaces “war never changes” with “war is embarrassing” a line I hope keeps us out of Tehran but won’t bet on since satire is less preventative and more reactive in fact expecting satire to stop insanity is like expecting air bags to prevent car accidents or expecting thoughts and prayers to prevent tiny coffins so if you want your writing to change the world then study econ at a school that bleeds evil and join a think tank that bleeds more evil so you can sneak a few words of light into the PowerPoint slide that sets climate policy until the last beachside condo sinks into the Atlantic and proves that everything has its upside even the naked hypocrisy that ends all my interviews since 2015 with “satire can change the world” plus a matching Power Rangers pose after deflecting questions about race and process and race and inspiration and why exactly a sane adult coats five boroughs in fake signs and race and while I’m slightly more open in person last week someone asked if I regret anything I’ve written and I lied like a champ instead of copping to ever tapping buzzwords like love bombing or exposing holes in my invincible Jamaican psychic armor or sniping someone I know reads this thanks to analytics that tell me way too much yet nothing about an audience I still suspect is a long con ending in my dad bursting through the wall Kool-Aid Man style and revealing my nascent career is a collective prank which would still rule because I could commit the kind of horrorcore murder that lets true crime podcasts thrive or maybe just say something clever i.e. my only skill after robbing the Ivies to train for an anime podcast and advanced bathroom graffiti and weekly asylum art reviews the only definition of success I care for after chasing Draper’s shadow and drinking Draper’s breakfast and watching my entire yearbook turn The Service of All Nations into Selling a Shittier Mousetrap though I guess admin noticed too and hoped The Service of Humanity obscured Mammon’s scent a little more neatly than George II’s aircraft carrier party obscured a nation trading sanity for kayfabe a grand joke I consider my origin story unless you count my early crayon masterpiece My Crazy Brother lionizing a sibling that now preserves family tradition as an intergender kickboxing champion but I suspect my true origin’s the simple inability to lie properly inspiring a pile of paper inching towards heaven which our mass nostalgia addiction tells me is a stick figure drawing of the past without the awkward parts that will derange us until we burn it or at least add all the gratuitous Tarantino-meets-Miike violence defining every era except just kidding it's all of them and the human story is a gorey fresco of hell I find pretty funny and think can work out which brings us back to my present dork-ass fixation on “Mural” where Lupe Fiasco paints a fancy picture with words and Fist of the North Star jokes an impulse I envy enough to steal outright and call “Self-Portrait” but I’d never open an email with that title so I’ll try something oblique instead.
Enjoy Christmas or sleeping in. If you enjoyed or understood any of that, consider preordering my much funnier book. It keeps me out of the news.
-DD
OMG, what a ride! I love the fact that I don't quite understand most of your references, but still enjoy the journey.
Two thoughts:
1) If satire can’t change the world, we’re doomed, but at least we can laugh on the way out.
2) As time goes on I am more and more convinced that Trump’s infamous cofeve tweet was a typo and he meant kayfabe.
Make that three thoughts:
This piece is brilliant, thank you, it has my world better.