August 1997
s m u g
mystery date
by Wiley Wiggins

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Wiley Wiggins is a movie star (Dazed and Confused) and the publisher of Unhappy, the online version of the print Zine he's also in charge of: "Happy."

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Die

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Televised image:

Surplus elderly are siphoned off from retirement homes in overlong black trucks and taken downtown to chewing gum factories to be processed into little pink cubes.

Tainted pet food is deep fried and coated in thirty year old macaroni & cheese "cheese" powder and resold as "the hottest taste you ever put in your face."

The latest in a string of tattooed, nose-ringed, acerebral oligophreniac rock bands launches into a bland, obnoxious, ironic pop-punk cover of the 'Brady Bunch Theme' which has already been covered by thirteen bands this week.

Suddenly there's a 3-D pink explosion and a cavalcade of "Stars" leap onto the screen, shaking their aging, surgically-modified genitals in your face; what's the movie that they're advertising? A film version of whatever sitcom was canceled last month. Hmmm ... Perfect Strangers the movie, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Jack Nicholson and the disembodied anus of Adolf Hitler.

Focus on a shopping mall the size of America, a million snotty teenagers stand slump-shouldered and pose, griping about how "malls suck, dude," even though they've been standing in the same spots for several days now, constitutions maintained by surgical-tubing pipelines of Taco Bell food, ground into a paste and pumped directly into their stomachs. A young man runs his jet-powered motor scooter through a plate glass window with eighty syringes hanging from his arms, one is stuck directly in the center of a bright red and blue tattoo of the Pepsi logo, which covers his mainline like a bullseye. Over the mall's PA system there are a couple of college kids spinning the latest indie rock album by "Joe the Venereal Hopscotch Cat," and guffawing like rabid hyenas as they pelt one another with compact disc inserts and complementary tie-dyed condoms.

"Dude," drools one of the DJ's as he tries to extricate a stray dreadlock from his mouth, "We sure are hella cool."

"Yeah," affirms the other, "Hey, why are we cool again?"

"Because we're white and we've got funny hair."

Freeze frame, video static hovers like white hornets, listening ...

*

The 90's are even worse than the 80's

(A twenty-something jerks his head up from a Details magazine "Totally 80's" CD compilation and disagrees with a smug twitch of his skin-cream stenching upper lip).

Well, Die.

Whatever force moved the stupidest portion of the population into a position where they seem to speak for everyone, I don't know. Whoever it was that convinced us that there were no new ideas left and we had to all start eating our own cultural shit, I don't really care. The fact is something better be done to remedy it or I'm going to destroy the world. That's not a threat, it's a promise. How is it that medialand has worked itself into such a smug self-referential circle jerk? Was it always like this and I was just too young to notice?

As a good friend of mine once said: "If it came down to a choice between what we have today and Nazi Germany, I'd have to start goose steppin'." Of course that was before he drove his RV off a cliff while masturbating with a handful of fish guts and an Entertainment Weekly magazine.

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History is grinding down on itself like a rusted pocketwatch. Culture is lapping at its own rectum like a flea-bitten dog.

Future generations will laugh at us if they even choose to remember.

The days seem shorter and it's getting harder to think.

Dreams are starting to be supplanted with commercials, you wake up at night in a cold sweat thinking about McDonald's.

Youth culture somehow got supplanted with stupid culture, drenched in acrid snot and attitude. Style without substance and even the style is bad.

Alanis Morrisette is more popular than Elvis.

Kevin Smith is put on the cover of Time.

MTV acquires its own army of shock-troopers to storm into peoples' homes and make sure they pay their monthly Microsoft-Cola bill.

The world groans on its axis and fragments of the crust start to fly out into space. No one notices, it wasn't featured in an episode of the X-Files.

Customers look up horrified at the cracking ceiling of the "ska department" at Sears as a blimp comes crashing in, trailing an advertisement that reads, "Abandon cliques! Abandon cliques! It's time to die and your life never meant anything!"

*

The image of the dance floor, refracted, warped, and distant, stared back at me from the lens of a camera as it craned smoothly up to get a view of the crowd. I know I wasn't supposed to look into the camera's eye, pretending I was just bopping around having fun. Not looking like I had been doing the same set of moves on command over and over for hours. All this work and all anyone would ever know of me was a split second glance into the camera, and maybe my hairdo. That was going to be my whole life for the rest of the world.

Hi, mom.

It's me, hairdo.

Your little hairdo is all grown up now.

Shaking her tits like a goddamn whore.

"Alright, cut, cut... bring in the elephant."

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"Floopy the rockin' elephant" entered the studio on a large iron chain. He wore a large lime-green afro wig. Tired gummy eyes stared out through giant plastic sunglasses. Hundreds of bouncing, dead-eyed teenagers are mirrored in the lenses. The music comes back on, synthetic thump and synthetic voice, the animal handler gives Floopy a smack on the ass. "Dance, you stupid fucking elephant!"

This is the last smack that the trainer ever administers. The tusk that is thrust with an explosive roar through his chest makes that certain. The dancers scream, but they are packed in too tightly to evade the sweeping tusks and trampling feet of Floopy. The pool begins to fill with blood. Bloody bikini's, leather jackets ... The fashion consultant runs out screaming to try and save the merchandise but Floopy throws him to the floor and skewers him ...

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One day it rains cans of Budweiser and millions are bludgeoned to death in the streets. Blood and beer run down rain gutters to fatten and eventually drown rats. The combined blood, beer and rat corpses back up sewers and overflow toilets in a Kentucky-Fried Chicken piercing and sky-diving accessory shop and smash out the doors, full of chicken grease, body parts and surgical steel. A passing group of vegetarian psychic friends see the tidal wave of meat, blood and beer, and begin to vomit in horror as they are swept up in it.

And today on "The Dating Game", meet Sara. She's a twenty-three year old administrative assistant, she likes horses and gardening and once helped catch a purse thief in Paris! Sara, let's meet your potential dates!

"Hi, my name is Frank. I'm a six-thousand year old duck who's worshipped as a god in parts of Wisconsin."

"Hey, Sara. My name's Eddy and I like to surf!"

"HELLO SARA. I AM THE DARK LORD LUCIFER. I HAVE COME TO CONSUME YOUR SOUL AND SHOW YOU A GREAT NIGHT ON THE TOWN."

Image warps, a nest of plastic hornets falling out of the air like novelties from a bubblegum machine. I'm still screaming, turn the goddamn thing off but televisions don't have off switches any more and now they follow you around your house on little duck legs making sure you watch, quacking, "McDonald's: we're the new Bob Dylan!"

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They're called the "laxative hunks," and these sizzling-hot soap opera stars are helping sell laxatives like never before with their sexy commercials!

"I think we're communicating the essence of the product ..."

A tsunami of stupidity, videotapes melting, compact discs shattering, buildings fall, screams, lights go out around the world.

The Church's chicken restaurant was jam-packed with children in formal dress, squirming and itching from long hours of Sunday school. Eyeing each other suspiciously, the students made their orders (The children from St. Mary's Catholic ordered no. 1 meal deals and the children of Greensdale Baptist ordered no. 5's) and sat separately. Pre-teen snarls of hatred.

"Idolaters," comes one hissing voice.

"Blasphemers!" shouts another.

An explosion of chicken. Trays fly and mashed potatoes hit the walls. Ties flap like flags as gravy-blood is spilled. Dress shoes sail like rockets. Little girls pull each other's pig-tails screaming in the extra-tasty-crispy fires of Jihad.

A mall explodes and millions of children die.

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wiley@smug.com

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in the junk drawer:

July 1997
June 1997
May 1997
April 1997
March 1997
February 1997

featurecar
net
worth
chair
bumping
uglies
gun
smoking
jacket
barcode
ear
candy
pie
feed
hollywood
lock
target
audience
scissors
three
dollar
bill
dice
compulsionvise
posedowncheese
the
biswick
files
toothbrush
mystery
date
wheelbarrow
and such
and such
hat
blabfan
kissing
booth
martini






     
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