Arthur Graham’s Reviews > Atmospheres > Status Update

Nobody fully understood why Ozzy took up NASCAR racing so late in his career, why he felt a need to give up singing “Crazy Train” a thousand times a year and strap himself into a Gen 6 stock car. [...] When he plowed into wall four at the Daytona 500 going 160 miles an hour, true fans knew it was the ultimate tribute to Dale Earnhardt, and not an accident. So metal. So fucking metal.

A highway patrol officer wearing mirrorshades and a high and tight marine haircut beat an amish horse laying on its side with a billy club while a group of barefoot children sat and watched. He worked up a sweat, grunted on each downswing, like a portly bowler trying to fuck a canned ham. Each three or four strokes, he’d stop to chug another thousand calories from his fully loaded Ultra Fucking Big Gulp.

The president was growing one of those Freddie Mercury mustaches, just to piss off the religious right. After his post-Camp David psychogenic fugue state, brought on by a bad batch of home- brewed mead accidentally mixed with psilocybin, he addressed the nation at a Ryan’s Steakhouse buffet, playing with the soft-serve ice cream machine while talking to a CNN reporter.

“Play Tetris, motherfucker,” he said. “Start at level one. And make it slow and sexy. I’ve got three armed guards with sniper rifles trained at your head, so don’t start dropping pieces too fast.” I looked around, but when you’re standing next to a megalomaniac with a gun in one hand and his penis in the other, everybody looks like a shooter. This would be the longest game of Tetris in my life.

A guy from my freshman physics class later made his first million repurposing those baby womb speaker things that you use to play your unborn kid classical music, instead using them to play the sounds of pornography from RedTube and those other x-rated online streaming services. “Just because a kid isn’t born yet doesn’t mean they can’t jerk off,” he said at an interview at CES. “Amniotic fluid is lube, you know.

The addict dipped his cock into a quart jar of Minwax polyurethane, and hoped the coating of golden wood syrup would prevent the AIDS and not cause a frantic sweating, like when that Trout dude in Breakfast of Champions got his feet plasticized in the river of industrial waste. Vonnegut worked for GE, so it could be true.

His three cup-holders held a warm drink in play, a piss-catch, and a tobaccy spit jug. They all had a sickly brown-yellow color to them, so he drank all three and got mighty high. Jesus was his copilot, sitting next to him in the Peterbilt, talking to him about the best way to get no whammies on the Press Your Luck game show.

It’s always the same dream, the same nightmare, the unfinished college semester, the missed class you forgot you had, trying to memorize half of a textbook the day before a final, trying to find a magic Matrix pill so you do your best Keanu Reeves voice and say “I know calculus!”

Drink the blood, drink the blood, screamed the crazed shop teacher, severing his hands with the table saw and spraying down the fourth period industrial arts class with his arterial jism. “Vampires suck blood not cocks!” he yelled, right before collapsing from shock. They took up a collection and bought him a coffin at Target, with ironic sans-serif motivational slogans and a UPC code on the bottom.

Sometimes the idea of sleeping in two shifts of two hours a day seems like the perfect plan for getting Tesla-like amounts of genius work accomplished, and sometimes you wake up from a blackout in the middle of a Hobby Lobby getting a beatdown from the security guards while you try to give yourself a Miley Cyrus tattoo on your taint with a floor model Singer sewing machine and a packet of Rit dye.