Greetings, fellow scumfucks and voyeurs condemned to live vicariously thru the failings of others!
Some of you may know me as Rusty Shackleford, Bradley the Buyer, or any number of poorly disguised attempts at pseudo-anonymity, which in all honesty is an unattainable goal in our current historical epoch. Every dipshit in the entire world has their 15 nanoseconds of fame, via youtube, bandcamp, reverbnation, facebook, chat roulette, and any number of CIA DATA MINING EXCURSIONS conveniently marketed to your demographic as "social networking" - whether they like it or not. Memes are the currency of our generation, for better or for worse, whether it is an 11 year old girl getting her ass handed to her on 4chan or the newest celebrity OD- which I will get to, in a half-assed attempt at social commentary that will inevitably devolve into what I am best known for- hyphenated drunken rambling, pretentious gibberish speckled with commas and useless parenthetical asides.
Today is July, 23rd- a month anniversary to the day of the release of "Figurative and Literal Opiates" by Bradley the Buyer (another alternate identity of "mine") , and "coincidentally" happens to be the date of the overdose of a relatively more famous and internationally adored (and thus more valuable and economically viable) celebrity. AMY WINEHOUSE. Just wait for the meme generator captions to roll in- I am sure they will in about three hours now, as news of her death has just publicly hit teh intranetz.
This should ensure a bountiful harvest come fall.
The article I am scanning on the Examiner refers to the death of Winehouse as "tragic and shocking". I fail to see the tragedy or the shock appeal to another celebrity OD. Winehouse makes celebrity drug casualty number 678,557,000 if my count is accurate and it probably isn't because I'm going through severe withdrawal and 99% of statistics are made up on the spot.
I'm writing my second entry on this blog today. I find this to be appropriate. The last time you heard from Rusty Shackleford was immediately following the Charlie Sheen meme-blitz extravaganza, which died down in about three weeks. I used this opportunity, and the drug related death of former Alice In Chains bass player Mike Starr, to express some genuine concerns over renewed interest in Layne Staley and Junkie-Sex-Appeal heroin chic celebrity culture (buy my record). I have been lurking in the shadows, shooting enough smack to kill a small elephant and waiting for my opportunity to crawl out of the darkness and skull fuck you with my literary zen-dick. Wait for it... and...
Actually, that is only half true. I was letting the persona known as BTB ride my hollow meat vessel with a tongue-firmly-in-cheek satirical "postmodernist" dissection of contemporary culture known as "Figurative and Literal Opiates". I thought today to commemorate the passing of a beloved Junkie esteemed for her self-indulgent antics, and in a shameless self-aggrandizing attempt to capitalize off of my own misfortune and that of others, I would go ahead and give the curator of this blog a handful of free digital download codes for the record. Contact "RUSTY SHACKLEFORD, C/O AGENT 139 and MOTHERS OF THE CUBAN REVOLUTION" for your digital download ticket fnord.
It probably comes to you as no big surprise that I myself have been chronically dependent on Junk for a matter of years. Off and on, I had relative success kicking the habit which I cannot stand and think to be good metaphor for throwaway, "feel good" self-indulgence in America. Around the time I began work on my first full length LP, which I viewed to be a great purging of my soul and a sort of a spiritual Ipecac, I lost my fiance, lost my house, lost all of my money, lost most of my friends and pretty much every external "anchor" I had come to rely upon since recovery from the only substance I ever found myself having an issue with.
Enter Rusty.
Funny how this works- When you look at yourself in the mirror and no longer recognize the person you have become, when every day becomes the same... And if you are unemployed, (as I was at the time,) and weekends, holidays, vacations become meaningless due to all time being uninterrupted solitude in a darkened god forsaken hole... Your mind can begin to play tricks on you. Rusty Shackleford was born out of necessity. He was a character, a "fiction suit" I deliberately (at least, in the beginning deliberately) cultivated to say the things publicly that most people are too afraid to say. Rusty was designed to point out the proverbial elephant in the room that others failed to acknowledge- or maybe just to light a joint and drop trow in the middle of said room and defecate on the carpet, grinning like a kid with down syndrome, casually walking out like nothing ever happened.
Like most underworked, overly skilled (or is that overly worked, underskilled?) white male American primates, I was FRUSTRATED. I couldn't find legitimate "adult" "9 to 5" work that would pay me in actual currency, versus the off and on studio tech work that paid me in drugs and the occasional sexual favors. I didn't feel my skills were being properly utilized or valued by the culture I was forced into as a child, raised to be subservient to as an adolescent, and coerced into selling my ass like a hooker with a penis to by the time I hit what most people mistakenly refer to as "adulthood". I needed an OUTLET.
After losing the only people I cared about, hitting a complete financial bottom and finding myself incapable of sustaining adequate housing and taking care of basic needs, slaving away in a darkened room for months completing my "magnum opus" I was convinced no one would ever listen to or give a fuck about, a part of me snapped. I was maintaining total sobriety and walking the line. I was doing yoga and meditating. I had a family life as a happy domesticated primate. And it all fell apart through no fault of my own and due to circumstances completely out of my control. And so I did the only logical thing there was to do: I injected enough of a legal and highly dangerous experimental designer drug that apparently has caused people to claw their eyeballs out and hack up their mothers with machetes to give Charlie Sheen a brain aneurism. And I morphed into an alternate identity so aggressively psychotic and unpredictable it would have caused Palahniuk to shit his pants.
It was all good though. Never had a problem with flesh eating psychosis inducing amphetamine emulating designer drugs that cause people to murder their family in cold blood and talk to the rats in the walls for hours on end while dancing naked with a .45.
This was around the time Rusty wrote his first and up until now single entry to this blog entitled "HOW TO BE A BI-WINNER (TM!)" The responses to the piece from its readers were amusing, and Rusty kept using the drug in question while descending into a month long endlessly deconstructionist manuscript filled with parenthetical statements inside of bracketed statements inside of parenthetical asides and long unreadable self-referential masturbatory gibberish that he deleted promptly upon waking up from a benzo and alcohol induced blackout three months later.
Winning.
Yes, and then after I pulled the pieces back together again, I rebuilt my life. And it fell apart again. Back to the drawing board. And junk. Copious amounts of junk. I would like to take this opportunity to say publicly what I can never say in polite conversation when people say things like "I never understood why anyone would want to fuck with heroin." Unless you mean "I don't understand why you would fuck with heroin when you could just procure hydromorphone from a pharmaceutical vendor," you are a fucking idiot. Everyone knows why someone would choose to use junk. IT FEELS FUCKING FANTASTIC. Yes, it is a disposable, sleazy throwaway commodity that has no real value or nutritional content to it. Yes it isolates you from your true self and from other human beings and takes you off the path of becoming a self-actualized individual capable of living in a healthy manner. But so do most of the things you enjoy, you beer swilling taco bell munching high fructose corn syrup sucking scum. Go watch your big screen TV with your trophy wife you can't stand and break your back as a corporate work slave the rest of your life. Leave the intravenous hard drug use to me, and to Charlie Sheen and Amy Winehouse and all those throwaway dying stars you live vicariously through.
This is not a justification. It is a simple admonition. JUNK IS NO GOOD. This is the thesis and the key to deciphering the entire concept behind the Bradley the Buyer LP "FIGURATIVE AND LITERAL OPIATES". There is more than one kind of junk. We are a society of lobotomized worker bees, directionless except when directed by the next big thing, the new craze, the new memes. We are so seldom aware of how manipulated we are by the men behind the curtain. We never take the opportunity to open our eyes and see that it is not "SHOCKING" and "TRAGIC" that yet another "troubled, brilliant and gifted" celebrity dies of an overdose. It is trite, overdone, and fucking CLICHE. But you eat it up. Because you are a junkie. And so am I. We're not so different, you and I.
(Rusty Shackleford would like to apologize to you, the reader, for his edginess. He is restless. He is out of his prescription benzos and won't have his buprenorphine fix until the beginning of the next work week.)
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