Every bear for himself. God against all.

I was sitting in my office doing nothing, just sitting and looking out on the city when Parker came in.

“Let’s get out of here.”

We exited out into midtown  and walked for a few blocks. Big white trailers were lined up along the sidewalks and people wearing vests were milling around. They were shooting a movie. Parker motioned towards it.

“Look at this shit.”

I nodded.

“Does anyone think this is going to get them anywhere? Christ.  Ah, what’s the point.”

“It’s just a job.”

Parker huffed. “Yeah right, these jerks are unreal. I’d like to drop a bomb on this place.”

One of the vest people was a cute young girl. Parker’s anger was all about that girl, I could tell. We passed by her and Parker slowed.

“What’s this all about?”

She looked away, hesitating, like you’d do if a bum bugged you for change, then turned.

“We’re shooting a movie.”

“Oh yeah, what? A porno?”

“You’re a loser.” And with that she walked off who knows where. Parker shrugged, jamed his hands into his pocket and we kept on.

It was a Wednesday and spring. A dark and cool and breezy day, but warm when you were in the sun. I was tired like I was every day, like I’d always just woken up from a nap.  It had been a long and grim winter.  Lots of terrible things had happened, none of which made any sense to me or anyone else.

At work people would whisper into the phone then run off to the bathroom for hours at a time.  The interns were crying. Everyone got fired. Some people had cancer. There had been multiple suicides at each of the hotels surrounding my office, some private and some not. The blogs all picked up on this stuff and wrote about it. Anna and I didn’t have much to say to one another either, we both knew what was going on and there wasn’t anything that could be done. The cats were acting weird too.

And when spring came, it didn’t feel like spring.  It felt like you could peel back something and winter was still there. Like it was always winter and spring just got painted over it. Everything in New York was like that it seemed.  Everything just got painted over again and again and again till it just fell apart. The subways, the apartments, the people, everything.

I went for a walk from my office in midtown to the lower east side.  I was supposed to meet people for drinks. A networking event. I couldn’t do it.  Some bum stopped me, or I let him stop me, and we chatted for a bit. Was he Christian? Wasn’t he? It was hard to tell. I guess he was just mad. I gave him five bucks, that seemed to make him happy, and kept walking.

Somehow I wound up at the bar I was supposed to meet everyone at. I guess I did want to go.

Bonnie was there.  She was drinking some rum drink called a Bull Frog.

“Hey Bonnie”

“Hey. I wish I was at Coachella.”

I nodded. Bonnie shook her head.

“Frightened Rabbit is going on right now.”

“Yeah man, sucks.”

Bonnie took out her iPhone and played with it a bit, then just walked away. Ok, I thought, I could go home.

Late at night.  The moon is out and full.  It’s brighter than most nights, maybe it’s the clouds, they look bright too.  Outside a bunch of people are screaming.  It’s hard to tell whether it’s good or bad, but it dies down after a while.  I can’t sleep.  I keep turning over in my head a conversation I had with Dr. Sackman earlier in the day.

After watching the Lions game at the Tap Room, we walked down Broadway.  We were both in strange moods, I could tell. I didn’t feel like talking but Sackman did, so I let him.

“Think about food, Fletcher.  Just think about it.  It will make you sick.”

I told him that things don’t make me sick, ideas don’t anyway, but I think I knew what he meant. 

“Yeah, well, that’s because you’ve never thought about anything in your whole life.” 

The streets were pretty crowded.  People out shopping.  Walking dogs. 

“My father was a mortician, you know that?  They’re disturbed people.  I’d say seventy five percent of all morticians are necrophiliac’s.  And that’s generous.  You don’t believe me do you?  Well, look it up.  The World Bank did a study on it in the 70′s – which was a bad time for necro’s in general – and they found some pretty horrible shit.  Agh, why am I even telling you this shit?  You’re ignorant, you know that Fletcher?  You’re a dumb ignorant man.”

The game was called halfway through by league officials in the opposing teams favor.  Multiple fights had broken out in the stands, mostly over long standing generational feuds, and a pregnant woman had been raped with a traffic cone by homeless vagrant under the bleachers. 

OCB and I waited for the stadium to clear out. 

“When I look at a high school football field, I have terrible thoughts.” OCB observed.

He was right.  There was something awful down there below us.  The greeness.  The lights cast bad shadows everywhere. The place smelled like popcorn and sugar.  It was a stage.  A perverse “battle field” for young sexual deviants to act out their worst fantasies, most of which were so dark they could only be fulfilled in public.  We waited there in those bleachers till long after the game had ended and the crowds had gone their ways. 

Later, we drove around.  The air was moist and heavy and cool. There were clouds.  In the yards and ditches leaves were burning.  In Bedford this is still common practice, burning leaves and trash.  Locals, OCB explained, believe the smoke helps to ward off evil spirits and improves ejaculatory function.  

We went to a bowling alley.  It was full and loud.  Out front people were playing volleyball under lights.  We started drinking and just kept drinking and drinking.

I went back to Bedford one weekend. I hadn’t been there in a decade.

Unemployment is high, far higher than the national average, but difficult to calculate. Are drug dealers employed? prostitutes? Maybe one in five houses is actually occupied by paying tenants. The rest have either been gutted for scrap or been converted into meth labs. Three out of the town’s four licensed bars, including MT Looney’s, now offer live sex shows on a nightly basis.

Whatever money in this horrible little stretch of suburbia I once called home goes back and forth for utterly arbitrary and inexplicable reasons and each time a rich man in New York siphons another penny or two away and no one notices. Pretty soon there will be nothing left but the people, their idiotic ideas and a wasted, flattened landscaped sealed in plastic.

I met my friend OCB at Burger King. We were going to a High School Football game later.

 I asked OCB how things were going. “I finance abortions. I tell you Fletcher, things are bad.”

We ordered and sat down.

“It seems like something is always on fire. A house or a car. Everything is polluted. The collected IQ of the entire population might be equal to that of a house cat. These people are scum. They like filth and they like being filthy. The problem is, the dumber they get, the richer they get, or the richer they think they get I should say. So there’s no stopping them. They’re on a race to the bottom and so long as one of them is alive they’re all alive. The stupid mongrel race of idiots. They need to be stamped out. It’s awful.”

I couldn’t argue. We were surrounded by people so obese were only barely recognizable as being human.

The football game was a terrible spectacle. Due to Bedford’s long standing “white’s only” policy, and its generations long history of inbreeding, the team was barely able to function in even the most basic ways.

A fat, sunburned man I was told was the coach was wandering up and down the sidelines screaming obscenities.

A drunk old “football mom” leered at OCB and me. “Wanna suck my tits?” She asked, then laughed a diseased smokers laugh.

The pavement was still wet from the rain but fine for fast driving. It was late and the streets were empty anyway. Professor Yummy and I had been drinking all night and the day before. Mostly at home but at bars too. I felt terrible. Not hung over really, just twisted up inside. Sick in a chronic sort of way.

I thought about telling the Professor to pull into the Four Seasons and let me out. I had enough room left combined on my six remaining credit cards to cover a suite for a few nights. I’d take a bath, sleep for 24 hours, get a massage, take another bath then that would be it. I’d have room service bring up the largest knife they had and cut my belly open with it like they do to water horses in Russia…

 Before I could decide we pulled into a filthy little all night truck-stop/diner and got out.

 ”This place is called Breakfast Christ. A lot of tweakers hang out here,” Professor Yummy pointed out. “Mexicans too. They have a back yard. It’s full of aborted fetus’. Back in the day, in the 50′s and 60′s, this used to be an underground abortion clinic. When it rains man, heavy you know, look out. It’s like jellyfish out there. The Mexican kids used to come by and use it like a slip and slide.”

In order to drum up interest in fussybear Baker booked me to speak at a round table discussion in Williamsburg, titled: So Yesterday: Bloggers and Twitterati discuss blogging and twittering for the NOW generation both today and tomorrow.

Williamsburg, as many of you already know, is a ridiculous, prefabricated mall-like “neighborhood” conceived and built in the mid-1990′s by developers hoping to lure in the coveted creative over-class demographic. It’s worked – so far as anything as disgusting and obscene as that can work – and Williamsburg has become THE neighborhood for the wealthy, college educated scions of child porn, puppy mill and hedge fund magnates.

The auditorium was accessible only through an unmarked sewer grate which I was required to fart on to gain access.  Inside the auditorium was about three fourths full.  I didn’t know anyone else on the panel.  They all look younger, wore plaid and seemed to know each other. 

I stumbled through a couple of questions, blushing heavily.  Midway through I awkwardly got up and left the stage.

Baker and Bonnie, who had escorted me to the event, and were sitting in the back of the auditorium sipping wine through straws, just shook their heads. 

 I stumbled around for a bit looking for a bathroom.  Finally I found the event organizer, some kid named Terin, and asked him where it was.  He looked at me blankly, then said “bathroom?”  Then he laughed.

Last night I met my Press Secretary, Baker at McGee’s. She had called me the night before and demanding a meeting to discuss “business.” She was sitting in her usual booth towards the back reading the latest issue of Rape Room. When she spotted me, her face brightened and she set the magazine aside. “Fletcher, please, sit.”

We both ordered pints of Allagash White and got down to business.  “We’ve got real problems Fletcher. Fussybear’s traffic is down 83% since this time last year. And to make matters worse, your precious dildo factory is loosing money hand over fist.”

 ”How serious is it?”

“Serious. You’ve got major cash flow issues and that’s not going to change if you keep writing the same half-assed bullshit about marijuana farming. In the public’s mind, you’re over.”

 ”What are our options?”

 ”We need to refocus. Get back to your core audience. I’ve already taken out full page ads with NAMBLA and American Rapist. Then we need to sell the Dildo factory. I’m sorry, but there’s no choice.”

 I was devastated. “To whom?”

“Well, I’ve got a buyer…”

“Who? No! Patches?”

 She nodded yes.

 ”Ah, fuck it, right? The whole world is collapsing. The computer has officially killed us. Our brains have turned to shit the rest of us is just cancer and corn syrup.”

“I agree. Fuck it. Let’s rent an RV, fill it up with gasoline and vibrators, and drive it off the Empire State Building. Thousands will be killed. The only questions is, what song should we listen too on the way down.”

We spent the next three hours debating the song choice but didn’t come to a satisfying conclusion.

Michael Jackson is dead and the world is better for it. I met MJ once at Patches, a notorious gay bar in Toledo’s east end. He held up his gloved and said, “I jack off with this.” We talked for a while about the Mud Hens – MJ was a die hard minor league baseball fan – but it was awkward. He offered to pay for my Long Island Iced Tea, but I declined. I knew where that could lead and it was no place I wanted to go.

 A month later I saw him again, this time in the press box at Ned Skeldon Stadium. He was chatting with Neil Kwiatkowski about Propofol. I said hello and we shook hands.

“You look well, Fletcher.”

We exchanged pleasentries before Michael excused himself.

 ”Sorry guys but I must run, I have a date.”

After he left Kwiatkowski turned to me.

“You know who he’s dating, right? BB Nichols. The gay icon and cultural avatar? Shit. Some guys have all the luck.”

The majority of residents in Toledo, Ohio have turned to hunting squirrels, raccoons, and feral cats to survive.  The local government has collapsed, and, along with it, all essential services.  Last week during a late night, unpublicized session of congress, the federal government quietly washed its hands of the mess, effectively declaring the city a separate, unsanctioned demilitarized state.  Officials, in off the record comments, called the region “totally ungovernable.”  

The area has been home, for the better part of the last two centuries, to the dregs of human civilization.  For reasons that are not entirely clear, pedophiles, drug abusers, murders, sex addicts and mongloids of every stripe have flooded the region since its founding on the early 1800′s. 

The Maumee, once a source of potable water for area residents, has become glutted with human remains, raw sewage, and toxic chemical waste.  That, however, has not stopped locals from using its water’s for personal bathing and an idiotic recreation known as “jet skiing.”