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My Brother Died in a Clown Car Accident, You Douchebag

by Jon Konrath

I just got back from watching Godzilla is One Bad Motherfucker, starring Samuel L. Jackson. I went with a bunch of people from my Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, and we all got so fucked up -- we drank before, during, and after the movie. One of the guys, Vince N., who used to be in some pussy arena rock band back in the 80's, was shooting Jack Daniels straight into his heart with some kind of veterinary-grade needle as big as a fucking pencil. I blacked out and woke up in the women's restroom of a Kerasotes theatre with one of those nine dollar boxes of Jots shoved up my ass. And I don't even remember buying the Jots, or I would've given somebody shit about them being nine fucking dollars.

Back at the homestead, I undo the twelve locks on my front door and go to take a shit, first putting down my laptop, MiniDisc, combination MP3 player and vibrator, Palm Pilot, cell phone, GPS, scientific calculator, dosimeter, altimeter, belt-clip mounted electroencephalograph with 3-D spatial visualization goggles, portable defibrillator, and Game Boy with add-on camera, printer, and blow-job device. Some people say I have a problem with electronics, but my only problem is getting all of these fucking batteries recharged, because my piece of shit apartment has one electrical outlet, and I have a Mayan pyramid of power splitters and outlet trees and surge protectors coming out of the bastard.

Anyway, drop my shit all over the floor, go to the answering machine: twelve messages. The first eleven are wrong numbers for some guy that is probably dead also named Jon (or John, more likely) who, based on the fucked up messages, is either a priest or maybe he's involved with some kind of ponzi scheme with old people. It's a fine line, really. So the last one is a message from my friend Nick, back in Indiana, and according to the amount of time it takes my near-worthless recorder to wind the wheels of the tiny tape, it's gotta be a long one.

"Psycho, did you go see it? Did you go fucking see it? Jesus fucking Herschel Christ on a cross it was so fucking awesome! I saw it four times in a row! Go fucking kill someone and see it! I don't wanna ruin it for you, but Godzilla totally fucking destroys Japan! And the special effects are totally fucked out - he looks even more fake than in Godzilla 2000! Okay, other than that, nothing is going on here. I am doing a CD layout job for this jerkoff in a goth band and I told him to send me a slide so I could scan it, and he sent me a ViewMaster reel. I don't even know if he wants the left or the right eye for the scan, let alone how the fuck I'm going to bring a circular piece of fucking cardboard with Blue's Clues pictures to the photo shop to get it scanned, since those bastards barely know what to do with a roll of 35mm film. OK, I need to go, Friends is on. Hail Satan."

Shit. Shower. Several dozen Immodium AD tablets followed by a bottle of seltzer water mixed 50-50 with Johnson's lemon-scent floor wax, to coat the intestines from the barbaric effects of straight grain alcohol and concession-stand hotdogs. I needed sleep. I needed a day or two of rest followed by a grilled cheese sandwich and some Manhattan clam chowder. I fell into the bed, a Beretta 93-R 9mm pistol under my pillow, a copy of the Chevy '68-'73 big-block engine rebuild manual at my side, the only thing I can read these days. There is no literature anymore. The last good piece of writing produced was the terrorist manual We Shall Fight in the Streets, and you can't even find that at your local Barnes and Noble. Only VCR repair manuals, classified ads, and legal disclaimers are produced now, and The Idiot's Guide to Living in a Society Where Everyone is So Braindead, They Actually Elected a Cokehead President (Second Edition). The word has been dead for twenty years, and everyone's too busy watching Dawson's Creek to notice.

I smelled a Carl's Junior hamburger. I remembered how to cut and paste street signs into my Amiga. The temperature drifted, the walls filled with the static cry of a TV that was supposed to record Herpes Island but the fucking narcs at Time/Warner cut my illegal cable feed again. I saw Darth Vader at a monster truck show in 1992, carving Walt Whitman poetry into a skinhead's back with a butane-powered soldering iron. The smell of burning flesh filled my nose. Everything faded away.

I want to build a really fast car with an engine that sticks out of the hood and no exhaust. That's the first thing I remember, along with dating a woman that gradually shrinks to the size of an egg, and then I boil her and crack her head open with a spoon, but I somehow think that imagery is from the time I read Aesop's fables after two tabs of acid, because she was dressed something like Humpty Dumpty. I spent an hour of the dream reading a massive Web index of homepages belonging to every person I've ever seen in my life. I don't go through the list from A to Z -- I'm guided by a bizarre algorithm of data from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's clock in Boulder, Colorado and my Magic 8-Ball. My network connection from here to the list is not that stellar, so I open a second browser window, reading CNN news and going through pharmacological sites (they are usually the most updated thing on the web.) I also read a lot of movie information at IMDB, searching for that elusive furthest link from Kevin Bacon. I find out that the girl I went to the prom with was actually an android built by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but I can't remember past that.

I went to a college physics class and met a girl in clown makeup whose boyfriend had "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children." tattooed on his forehead. I told her about my brother that died in a clown car accident, then wiped off the red and black color makeup so she only looked like a mime before I fucked her in the ass. It was one of those "I missed half of the classes and had to get an A on the midterm or I was fucked" dreams. A lot of people talk about this dream and think it's funny, but I LIVED IT for six years, and usually when I wake up, my heart beats at like 310 for an hour until I walk around the house and convince myself that I'm not in college anymore. And by the time I realize I'm not, I'm even more depressed.

"Somebody set up us the bomb!" My X10-based security system electrocuted another idiot trying to cut through the bars on my windows. 3:22 AM. The girl upstairs was screaming at her guido boyfriend because he allegedly ruined her life or something. Buy the ticket, take the ride. Most of the women in this neighborhood only date men with kilos of fake gold chains and an IROC Z-28 with tinted windows, and only I see humor in this. Outside, twelve cars in front of my window have their horns wired permanently to the on position, like it will make a difference.

Fuck. I have at least two hours until my array of hidden alarm clocks will try to wake me. I want to write my dreams into a notebook and sell them as a movie. Instead, I dug up a M47 Dragon II medium assault weapon from under the bed, opened the window, and took aim at a ConEd truck parked backwards and across two lanes of the road. Someday they'll build a small missile that will home in on the BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP of the reverse gear on those fucking trucks.

The secondary explosions of gas tanks still feel like a dream, even with the empty launcher in my hand. I saw fields of soybeans melt with napalm, the thick black smoke of a crashed Huey UH-1 gunship, the out of control rotor blade slicing Vietnamese schoolchildren in half, a David Lynch porno with Cronenberg fucking a giant fake bug. I think of genetic testing and pure artesian water frozen into tiny cubes, and fall back asleep.