The International Writers Magazine: What Me, Worry?

Wasted • Dean Borok Now that I’m older and miser, I’m not as indulgent as I used to be toward my contemporaries. I used to adhere to the dictum that I learned in the handbag industry that “you can learn something from anybody” - so I gave everybody a chance. Fat lot of good it did me! What was I expecting, that the loud, foul-mouth Puerto Rican lady running the shipping department would one day sing “Manon Lescaut” at the Met?

It’s good to be young and idealistic. Not that it ever got me far, surrounded as I was by a lot of ignorant, overstuffed reactionary pricks. They never laid a glove on me, and here I am in my old age, hardly changed at all. Unfortunately, the world around me hasn’t changed either, with the reactionary old pricks being replaced by reactionary young pricks who learned everything they know from reading their telephones.

Compared with what we have today, the 60’s and 70’s were like the Italian Renaissance before Savanarola and the Inquisition took hold. At least the younger generation has finally gotten rid of those freakin stooped baseball caps, although they went over en masse to the little stingy-brim fedoras and skinny suits that the African – American street hustlers used to sport around 63rd and South Parkway in Chicago during the days of my youth. When I came to New York I saw the same look on the Lower East Side and Harlem. Now those neighborhoods are completely gentrified. Nevertheless, at least it’s a valid fashion statement, if totally derivative.

What the younger generation needs today is a movement that is driven by artistic inspiration. When I was a kid we had Hendrix, Jim Morrison, The Who, you name it. We had 1968, Revolution in the Streets. Those days are over. You got some sixties bands staging a comeback, but they have to wheel their walkers onstage to get to their drum set.

Whaddaya got today? Lady Ga Ga in a meat dress. That’s all well and good, but she has no sound. The people don’t have no soul. I’m glad I lived to see it because when I die I’ll know I’m not missing anything good, going forward.

I tried to read an article by Frank Rich in New York Magazine. Rich used to be a fresh voice back in the 1980’s, but now he is limp. A couple of weeks ago he wrote an outrageously senile piece about how Obama was abandoning the principles of the Left. I don’t care to remind the reader of all the nice things Obama accomplished during his first two years in office, but those days are over and now he’s got the Planet of the Republican Apes on his back, and they’re sinking their fangs in his throat. Does Ol’ Frank believe he could do any better? Shit!

In Frank’s latest article he recounts his salad days (before he advanced to the main course) as the New York Post film critic when Rupert Murdoch took it over in 1978. Not that he has much to say. It’s not like Murdoch came down to the press room and consulted with Frank Rich, who was at the time too busy cleaning spittoons for the older reactionary hacks who were spitting blood into them.

This was nice for me to see, because when the crusading journalist Frank Rich was writing meaningless drivel for the Post, I had an exciting gig making leather clothes for bikers, rock bands and strippers in my own boutique on Montreal’s boulevard du crime, Ste. Catherine Street. Later on, in the eighties, when Christopher Hitchens and Fran Leibowitz were bloviating about meaningless horse shit, I had a fantastic career designing and turning out production runs of hundreds of thousands of pieces of a style for top Fifth Avenue accessory houses. Even now, when I am ancient and totally freakin useless as a person, I still get French translation gigs for Wall Street investment banks, where I am able to bear witness at first hand to the collapse of capitalism.

So, who are you going to believe, me or Frank Rich, who is now so fat he could be a gas-filled balloon in the Thanksgiving Parade? The Chinese like to say that it takes hundreds of years for the truth to shake out, but they’re all liars.

No woman ever tried to entrap me into fathering her children because they didn’t feel I was stable enough to stick around and pay, so I basically have no interest in humanity going forward. Nevertheless, sometimes I’ll take a couple hits off a joint and contemplate the future of world civilization. Basically, the world has lived through a lot worse than what we’re living today. The thing that worries me most is sunspots, which they say have lately been disruption telecommunications. Scientists all profess to claim that someday our sun will erupt into a supernova, obliterating the entire solar system, but that it won’t happen for hundreds of millions of years. How would they know? As Lenny Bruce used to opine, just because it never happened doesn’t mean it can’t happen, OK? It could happen tomorrow, and it wouldn’t even be a major event, as those things go. Old Father Sol could erupt a little O-My-Papa on the sun’s crust and the whole earth, the fauna, the flora, the people, the cities and culture could burn out in one second like a match head, and the universe would go on without missing a beat, get the picture?

Geez, I better lay off this shit for a while!

Anyway, right now in New York we got one dollar pizza and Häagen-Dazs Ice Cream just came out with Amaretto Walnut Crunch, so how bad can things be?
© Dean Borok August 8th 2011
Dean Borok deanyorkave@yahoo.com
Lets Get the Rats Out is now out - buy this and cheer yourself up

Anatomy 101
Dean Borok
We may be witnessing another defining moment in North Atlantic relations similar to Charles de Gaulles’ historical antagonism toward the U.S. for its humiliating treatment of him during World War II produced a trough in French-American relations that endured for 60 years.

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