Burn Bridges, Stay Warm

Ken Lomax tiptoes the fine line between genius and insanity ever so gracefully. He’s a man who lives like he drives – a hundred and ten miles per hour with the seatbelt unbuckled, blasting Frank Zappa’s “Watermelon in Easter Hay” or something of the ilk, with a giant Styrofoam cup filled with Glenfiddich resting between his legs. Always a loner, Ken avoids long-term relationships on all fronts and deems the institution of marriage old hat. He considers himself an advanced species that has evolved past basic, primitive needs such as sex, ego, and emotional attachment. That is for beasts, he claims. He personally performs all maintenance on his car and can’t fathom the notion of another man tending his garden, yet he handles currency with tweezers and avoids coins like the Plague. His trusty bottle of anti-bacterial soap has become an extension of himself, always toting the lotion in case he must engage in the barbaric ritual of shaking hands with strangers.

Like I said, Ken is a genius and, like the old saying goes, most geniuses are misunderstood. He graduated Summa Cum Laude from an Ivy League college with a degree in Engineering. From there, he received a full ride to a prestigious medical school where he graduated at the top of his class, though he claims to have never been interested in pursuing a career in the medical field. According to Ken, he took the ride to obtain a more thorough understanding of the human body’s mortality and possibly prolong what he believes will be a short existence on this planet in terms of the modern-day life expectancy of man.

“I’m a trial run; the first of my kind off the conveyor belt,” he once said. “Remember when the hybrid cars first came out? They were ugly, crude, shoddy pieces of shit. But eventually the manufacturers perfected them. Now every company has multiple hybrid models. I’m not built for a long life. I’m lucky if I see forty…but I’m okay with that.”

Nowadays, Ken spends the majority of his time on the road, hopping red-eye flights from state to state, earning his income monitoring the development and implementation of the high-tech software brand over which he presides. He spends his free hours in hotel rooms, finishing New York Times crossword puzzles and bottles of Johnnie Walker in record times. He always packs his own sheets and linens and refuses any maid services wherever he goes. The middle-aged, upper-crust conservatives whom he encounters along his journeys are bewildered by this specimen, having never before experienced a foul-mouthed, hard-drinking yankee with the brain waves of Einstein on psilocybin. He enjoys getting his associates shitfaced off incessant shots of tequila and gin. If they refuse his generosity, he acts offended and disrespected, using his reputation in the industry to coerce them. Those who black out, unable to handle the large volumes of liquor, are often subject to odd experiments. He practiced his med school expertise on one intoxicated colleague in particular, wrapping his entire leg in a plaster cast after a long night of binge drinking. When the rube came to the next morning, he told him that he was rushed to the hospital after falling down the stairs and breaking his femur. If he’s feeling especially giddy, he’ll hide forks, scissors, or even action figures beneath the plaster to add some pain to the area and intensify the effect. He’ll wish the gentleman a speedy recovery and vanish to Gary, Indiana or Jackson, Mississippi or wherever the job requires him to travel next. Shortly thereafter, a licensed medical professional will examine the victim’s injury and discover nothing but a healthy lower extremity and a six-inch Jake “The Snake” Roberts figurine with a rotating torso for delivering a nasty clothesline to his plastic opponents. This has become his calling card.

Well, maybe his tightrope walk between psychiatric labels isn’t that graceful. But he emits an unexplainable electricity wherever he goes. If you were to meet him, you’d know exactly what I’m talking about. As soon as he walks through the door, everyone in the room instantly knows that this guy’s some kind of different. I felt this electricity for the first time in the seventh grade when he gave me my first cigarette – a Virginia Slims Ultra Light he confiscated from his mother’s purse – and taught me how to inhale in the woods behind middle school.

It’s not ironic that the same feeling permeates the air on this fateful autumn night.

If It Bleeds, It Leads

When Jesus comes back, he is going to be mobbed by paparazzi. Unless, of course, L.C. and Heidi are spotted shopping together on Rodeo Drive at the same time the Messiah returns to raise the dead, judge the world, abolish evil, and rule in righteousness for eternity with an iron scepter. In which case, it will be quite a laborious task for society to determine which event is more consequential.

This is how I foresee the news of the Second Coming being delivered exclusively by TMZ.com:

Main Headline: Amy Winehouse Hospitalized After Smoking Poison Sumac.
Subheader: Christ Returns, Mistaken for Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes.

This is assuming that Angelina Jolie did not recently give birth to the Prodigal Son, which is an exceptionally distinct possibility considering the media fare her latest additions to her multicultural menagerie have received.

Blessed art thou whom are able to transcend greed and the cravings of immediate satisfaction. May Mother Angie watch over we victims of first-world consumerism and protect us against a culture that deifies quasi-celebrities with no discernable talent. The meek are still waiting to inherit the earth from such physically and financially beautiful luminaries and, until that day comes, they shall transmogrify their psychologically oppressive environment into the Church of Jolie-Pitt.

Society is an association of institutions held together by a set of artificial values. Your prestige in society is measured by the degree to which you choose to conform to its values. Deviation is met with indignation. Consider the values of your society. Deviation is essential.

Life Soundtrack Vol. 1

Sweet skeletal remains of D.B. Cooper decomposing under my neighbor’s backyard swing set, do my eyes deceive me? An update regarding music that isn’t an in-depth analysis of a time-honored hair metal video? I’ve been devoting more time to experiencing a gallimaufry of live music—ranging from D.C. area doom metal to the most bestial death metal to ever come out of Austria— and, at the risk of transposing this misanthropic mecca of madness into generic blog # 479532, I cannot fight the urge to inform you of the audio pastiche currently tickling my eardrum with wet pinky fingers made of music.

Witchfinder General: Death Penalty




When I hear the term doom metal, the first band I think of is Black Sabbath. Obviously. They’re also the second, third, fourth, and fifth band that comes to mind. The sixth is Trouble. But the seventh is Witchfinder General. Besides staking claim to one of the greatest album covers in the history of recorded sound, Death Penalty makes me want to smash a hobo on the noggin with his flask of Canadian Mist. Its primitive style sounds like it was recorded on a boom box in a Stourbridge garage over a twelve hour time period. In a utopian society, every jock douche bag that claimed to be a Metallica fan in 1993 who didn’t own a copy of this album would have been molested extra hard by his wrestling coach as “Enter Sandman” played over the weight room’s loudspeaker.

The Mountain Goats: All Hail West Texas



Lo-fi urban folk at its finest, this album actually was recorded on a boom box (a Panasonic RX-FT500 to be precise). I know it was released way back in 2002 and, although I regretfully admit that I was not as familiar with the Mountain Goats’ catalogue six and a half years ago, I haven’t been able to remove this CD from my rotation in a biblical week. The hiss of the Panasonic creates a backing track to John Darnielle’s adept lyrics creating a colorful tapestry that could bring a smile to my face even if La Chupacabra killed my dog and left its carcass on my porch drained of blood. Put All Hail in your stereo and listen to it for a couple days. If you don’t love it, start to question the existence of your soul. Tallahassee, also released in 2002, is a marvelous record as well, despite the fact that it was recorded in an actual studio with an actual band.

Valient Thorr: Immortalizer






Finally, a band whose members look like the bikers from the “now yous can’t leave” scene in A Bronx Tale. The riffs are melodic and Thorr doesn’t give you any ballads or bullshit. On top of that, the bassist’s name is Dr. Professor Nitewolf Strangees. If that doesn‘t do it for you, the following is a history of the band per their publicist:
The band landed their spaceship in North Carolina in 1957. They then left this time stream and came back to it (20 years later), having never returned to the same time stream more than once before. They hid a time machine near Virginia, and set off again to explore the past, and the effects of the Earth's weather on the seeded Venusian babies, who would become the first "Earthlings". They returned for a third time to this time stream in the year 2000. This time they became stranded on Earth because Walt Disney had stolen their time machine 21 years earlier.
Thorr, however, manages to deliver beyond the bloated backstory. At least for now. The Venusians prove metal can have a conscience and still be gritty enough to leave particles of sand in your ears. “Infinite Lives” compares war to a video game without a Contra Code. If the boogie metal sounds of Valient Thorr ever make their way to commercial radio, I will chug a 20 ounce glass of paint thinner.

Wetnurse: Wetnurse




I’m not quite sure how to describe Wetnurse. NYC sludge with elements and tones that range from the AmRep school of ugly noise rock to Voivod to Die Kreuzen to Candiria. Their eponymous debut, self-released in 2004, is thrash meets hardcore meets Nikola Tesla on LSD with a loaded handgun. Rumor has it that scientists in Cambridge, Massachusetts have harnessed the unadulterated energy of Wetnurse to power a Prius from New England to Oregon. Do your part for the environment; scratch and scrape your way through the bowels of the Internet and purchase this gem, then cop their Seventh Rule follow-up, Invisible City. Go ahead.

Jail: At the Crossroads




Imagine JPT Scare Band or Bloodrock with a menacing vocalist that sounds like he has gargled with hydrochloric acid. This is Philly scum rock. I saw these beasts for the first time recently and I didn’t know what to expect when they took the stage and I realized they were the strange looking fellas adjacent to me at the bar swilling Rock & Rye and PBR moments prior. The lead singer/guitarist looks like he’s going to bust out into “Free Bird” at any minute, the bassist has a rather unassuming presence, and the new drummer is a humble, pony-tailed gent with whom I might have smoked a joint at a Pink Floyd laser light show a few years back. The only disappointment was that the three bands that followed Jail seemed insentient and pedestrian in comparison. If you’re ready for a blues injected sludge-oil riff rock hellride crushed by the hand of doom, then get on the train.

ASRA: The Way of All Flesh


If you have the chance to experience this band live, please do so. If ASRA were playing on the eve of Armageddon, I would forego spending my final earthly minutes with my loved ones to attend the show. Or at least strongly consider it. The decision would be difficult. I am also taking into consideration that the band’s acronym stands for Alleged Satanic Ritual Abuse, which I’m sure won’t earn brownie points with the Man Upstairs. H. Christos delivers devastating vocals and shifts from death growl to ferocious grind shriek smoother and faster than a Porsche shifting gears on the Autobahn. The Way of All Flesh is such a truculent cacophony of rage, I feel like I should be arrested for a violent crime upon listening, which is a feeling I wholeheartedly embrace.

GridLink: Amber Gray




Eleven brutal songs in under twelve minutes. You can listen to this album twice in the time it takes you to listen to Reign in Blood. If it were any longer, you would need a doctor's prescription to purchase the album as it would be likely to induce miscarriages among pregnant women and potentially lethal heart attacks. Former Discordance Axis front man, Jon Chang, transcends superlatives. His savage shrieking is adamantine and Takafumi Matsubara’s riffing is merciless. Amber Gray will make you feel like you’re jumping rope with a downed power line in a torrential rainstorm. I was lucky enough to experience GridLink in the flesh along with Chang's Hayaino Daisuki project, which is an equally refreshing, frenzied kick in the face. The only way I can describe Hayaino Daisuki, which translates to "I Love Speed," is a mountainous line of white china cut with The Berzerker and Dragonforce. Seeing GridLink and Daisuki live is comparable to a vision quest; a feeling of insanity may set in, but it is a rite of passage in which the end result makes one spiritually whole.

Vote or Die...Okay, You Won't Die, But You Will Feel Like Shit

If you would be so kind as to direct your attention to the right of this entry, beneath my handsome profile pic and the blog archive, you will notice a waggish little poll where your feedback is both requested and valued. I humbly ask your assistance in helping designate the self-loathing subgenre of writing which best applies to that which you have come to appreciate at United States of Apathy. Your choices are as follows:

- Pre-Apocalyptic Midnight Core
- Arctic Neo-Glam Death Prose
- Cerebral Slaughterhouse Basement Braintrust
- Aesthetic Homicide Belles-Lettres

Rock the vote. Choose or lose. Smackdown your vote. Let your voices be heard. Just click the goddamn button. Thank you.

Stiffneck Hermit Cabin Blues

Floating on a river of corpses,
The howls of my ancestors reverberate through the air ducts
As I inhale the dreams of all those who slept before me.
They smell like gasoline.

Smoke gorges the velvet throat,
Pupils dilate, conjunctivas evaporate,
Ghost children giggle in the hallway
Incognizant of the flames engulfing the building.

The birds talk dirty to the gods,
Defecating acid and scorching the earth.
The water supply is tainted, the air you breathe is poison,
And the hourglass has been trampled under foot.

Tiny shards of glass implanted in the heel,
Sands of time travel like pale riders on the back of the wind’s cold gale.
Nothing left to do but choke on memories length-wise
Not of better times, but of better mind
For it is not the memories you miss.
The time to move is now.

Empirical Evidence that Consciousness Continues to Exist After the Transition Known as "Death"

There’s an old song by Three Dog Night about “I’ve never been to heaven, but I’ve been to Oklahoma.” In the case of my neighbor, Fritz, it’s exactly the opposite. Literally, he has died and at least knocked on heaven’s door, but never gone to Oklahoma. He has, however, been to Arizona, California, and Nevada (twice). He won $2,000 playing baccarat at Circus Circus and subsequently lost three grand at Little Darlings, a seedy strip club where he claims he was mugged by management after questioning why every girl in the all-nude revue was wearing cheap Halloween masks in February.

His home smells like a library. He is seated with a Luger semi-automatic pistol on the end table. A Mauser rifle rests against a display case holding his collection of Viking ship models and German beer steins. He's wearing a sweat suit and a plethora of jewelry, including a gold Odin's hammer pendant and a silver ring fashioned into an SS Totenkopf death's head. One entire wall in his study is stocked with Hitler-Jugend memorabilia, belt buckles, armbands and merit badges.

He introduces his wife as Barbie. "Like Klaus Barbie [the Nazi war criminal], not Barbie the Jew-made doll." Barbie is suffering from Alzheimer's disease, her husband explains in a whisper, as she totters aimlessly around their cluttered home wearing a flower-print housecoat and matching slippers.

"Hi there, Barbie, show us how high is the snow in the Alps," Fritz suddenly calls out in a thick German accent. Barbie stops on a dime, spins toward her husband, and thrusts up her right arm in a sieg-heil salute.

"That's my girl," he says with a grin.

Fritz claims he had an aneurysm in the mid ‘90s for which he underwent an experimental operation. His body temperature was lowered to 60 degrees, his heartbeat stopped, and his brain waves flattened. The doctors call this time “standstill.” Fritz, however, claims he can describe in detail the events that transpired while he was both clinically dead and brain dead, including verbatim conversations in the operating room and the unique details of the intricate surgical instruments used to drain blood from his cranium.

He will draw you a picture of the Midas Rex bone saw from memory if you ask.

He will engage in fisticuffs with anyone who disputes the pretense that the mind is separate from and higher than the functioning of the brain.

He contends that Mussolini stored all the gold the Nazis looted from Spain and Portugal in the Vatican and, after the war, the Catholics let the Nazis escape to South America dressed as priests on jets. He knows exactly where the treasure is buried in the cellar. He will draw you a map if you’d like.

Fritz also claims he joined the Hitler Youth when he was ten years old, an allegation that is almost certainly false. Fritz was born in January 1939. While the compulsory membership age of the Hitler Youth was lowered to 10 near the end of the war, the Hitler Youth was disbanded in 1945 when Fritz was only six.

How does this impact the credibility of his assertion that immortality is conferred on humankind through natural law alone, rather than by an omnipotent, monotheistic deity? The world may never know.

The Long Kiss Goodnight

I can’t pay homage to hair metal grandeur without mentioning the makeup-wearing progenitors of rock and roll capitalism, Kiss. After their larger-than-life stage shows and poseable action figures solidified the band as a legitimate force in the '70s, their attempt to cash in on the disco trend, “I Was Made For Loving You,” proved to be as infertile as a woman with a chromosomal translocation. Around this time, I’m pretty sure the only person who still thought Kiss was cool was Sebastian Bach of Skid Row and my cousins in Cranford, New Jersey. Regardless, after making the ingenious decision to remove their war paint, Kiss rocked on into the decadent 1980s with half of their original lineup intact, repulsive spandex outfits, and enough Aqua Net to cause a decrease in stratospheric ozone over Earth’s polar regions. The result: the objet d'art that is “Lick It Up.”


The video takes place in some post-apocalyptic junkyard (think “California Love” on a college student’s budget) where scantily-clad women are leaving their underground dwellings and crawling out of manholes. Two skulls rest on the ground, one of which may very well be a primate specimen. Paul Stanley’s leopard print boots and tight dungarees amplify the intimidation factor of the skeletal remains. The ladies circle around a fire while one rugged woman appears to be squirting deli mustard in her mouth. Their attention is diverted from the flames by the four band members, all of whom are lip syncing the chorus. The image of Gene Simmons, Inc. in that black vest and low-cut hot pink shirt that barely covers his nips has been burned onto the back of my eyelids. He is a vile, repugnant creature and Vinnie Vincent looks startlingly like a woman. Seriously, if he was skulking around on sewer grates with the rest of the skanks, I would be none the wiser.

Dude, would you hit that?

Now it’s time for some food and drink. The women entertain their male guests with gasoline canisters of liquid that I presume to be a crudely-made alcoholic beverage with motor oil serving as one of the primary ingredients. The rest of the video involves the band performing live outside the Thunderdome or wherever the fuck they are supposed to be. Unfortunately, this involves close-ups of Gene Simmons, Inc. (sans God of Thunder makeup) and Vinnie Vincent trying to look masculine with a hot pink Flying V.

Honestly, I could write a thesis long enough to earn myself a full-fledged PhD in Vinnie Vincent. And perhaps I will commence in a future blog. Just recently, however, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to reconsider a lower court's dismissal of a suit filed by Vincent in which he claimed he is owed $6 million in royalties for his work on “Lick It Up.” If the Dylan-esque lyrics alone (“Lick it up, lick it up, oh oh oh, lick it up”) don’t warrant significant compensation, perhaps Gene Simmons, Inc. should cut him a check for briefly donning makeup that was shockingly somewhat lamer than Eric Carr’s fox-themed character. Ladies and gentleman, your fourth inductee: “Lick It Up.”

Crossing the Rubicon

Throughout the years, I have said that I hate multitudinous people, places, and things. Hate was just another monosyllabic four-letter word in my vocabulary that effortlessly rolled off my tongue. On occasion, I have expressed my feelings of hate in the presence of an annoyingly virtuous person who will say, “Hate is a strong word,” a banal utterance I generally disregarded before reaffirming my hyperbolic feelings of hate. When I put things in perspective, however, I don’t believe I have ever met someone whom I truly hate—someone whom I would perform a Mexican Hat Dance on his/her grave rather than attend his/her funeral without blowing snot rockets in the open casket—until now. Hate is a strong word because it is a strong emotion. True hate is like true love. If you question whether or not you have ever experienced it, the answer is a resounding no. But once you feel it, you’ll know it.

Mexicali Free Verse: Reverse Engineering a Particle Beam Projector

God owns the Nikes that Marty McFly wore in Back to the Future Part II

You know, the ones with the power laces

When he walks in airports, people throw streamers, girls swoon and faint, and flight attendants scatter rose petals at his feet

He endorses consumer products in Japan and manufactures his own energy drink

He has read The Secret

He contemplates Pierre Bourdieu’s investigative frameworks of cultural and social capital and argues that judgments of taste are related to social position

His jeans are made by Dolce & Gabbana

He was spotted leaving Coco de Ville with Brody Jenner

Who the fuck is Brody Jenner?

TMZ is reporting a sex tape has been leaked with he and Miley Cyrus

His publicist declines to comment