======================================== *** THE INNER SWINE *** Volume 2, Issue 1, May 1996 www.innerswine.com ======================================== "But it's the truth even if it didn't happen" -Ken Kesey CONCEPT BY: Jeff Somers, Robert Gala, Ken West, Jeof Vita COVER ART BY: Jeof Vita EDITOR: Jeff Somers INSPIRATION: Michael Jackson, for remaining weird under pressure. ADVICE & FREE DRINKS: No one, you cheap pricks! PROOFREADER EXTRAORDINAIRE: Karen Accavallo SUBMISSION SOLICITOR/ DISTRIBUTION TZAR/ OVERALL OFFICIAL COOL CHICK: Lauren Strutzel OFFICIAL MOVIE: Miller's Crossing (1986), in which Gabriel Byrne makes getting your ass kicked look cool. FRIENDS OF THE SWINE: Misty Sue "Marvelous" Quinn, for becoming a writer so late in life for me, and for continuing to tolerate my occasional presence at her apartment; Elizabeth Augoustiniatos whose friendship still seems too good for a lout like me; Lauren Strutzel who remains an inspiration and reminds me daily that there are mysteries left, as always; Rob Gala for moving to Seattle like we all wish we could; Karen "GG" Accavallo, because she'll hurt me if I don't list her name here; Ken West for cheerfully bearing with all the references to him in this grotesque creation; Laura Pergolizzi for acting excited when I gave her a copy; All the dummies who paid me for subscriptions; Joanie Chen, for (sniff) caring; Chris Stevens and Kieran Higgins for cutting checks; Rose Ann Haberman, who I don't see enough of these days, for admitting she still has not read 1(3); Too Much Joy, for finally releasing a new album; Wes Hegg, for ruining the youth of Calgary via the magazine; Kim Darconte, for keeping in touch despite urban malaise. ======================================== TABLE OF CONTENTS ======================================== EDITORIAL: Pig In Shit #4 "Pulling the Donkey Lever: Voting in Today's America" FICTION: "The Only Time" COMMENTARY: "There are no Little Green Men" COMMENTARY: "I'm A Believer" COMMENTARY: "We Love You, Chandler Bing" SELF-OBSESSED WHINING: "The Inner Swine: A Manifesto" PRODUCT PLACEMENT: "Thinking of You, Shithead" SELF-INDULGENT RAMBLING: "This Sucks: Why We'd All Rather Be on Melrose" FICTION: "The Hard Sell" SELF-INDULGENT RAMBLING: "Nobody Wants To Play Wit' Me" ---------------------------------------- The Inner Swine Volume 2, Issue 1 (ISSN: 1527-7704). Magazine published March, June, September, and December by Oinking Sow, Inc. (C) 1995-2002 by Jeff Somers. (There is no company, really) Individual subscription rates: $5.00 (cheap!) per year in U.S.; $6.00 (cheap!) per year foreign including Canada. Single Copy $2.00 (cheap!) but stop teasing me, you're never going to order a subscription, you heartless bastards. Free trades are absolutely entertained, send me something, and I will mail you treats. Checks payable to Jeff Somers, Editor. Address submissions and correspondence to Jeff Somers, The Inner Swine, POB 3024, Hoboken, NJ 07030, mreditor@innerswine.com. But let's face it, when was the last time we published anything not written by me or one of my cronies? Other people's pimply writing gives me hives. Still, all submissions or requests for Guidelines (there are no guidelines, though) must be accompanied by S.A.S.E. ======================================== *** EDITORIAL *** Pig In Shit #4: PULLING THE DONKEY LEVER: VOTING IN TODAY'S AMERICA It's Time to put on Make-Up, It's Time to Light the Lights ======================================== I don't vote. I don't encourage this reckless act of ignorance and irresponsibility, but I do defend it. The recent surge of voter registration mania which has swept the liberal mongrels of this country (like as not terrified by the simple fact that THE CONSERVATIVES MIGHT WIN! (ZOIKS!)) has placed not voting with murder as some sort of mortal sin. We even have Michael Stipe and Jon Bon Jovi, noted political theorists, telling us so in snazzy commercials (or at least we did back when they deluded themselves into thinking someone was paying attention). If you fail to vote and Lyndon LaRouche or some other quasi-nazi manages to gain power, it's pretty much your fault - not the fault of the millions who got off their asses and voted for the evil bastard, but your fault, because you didn't vote against him. The logic is suspect, but the emotional pull undeniable. Well, I don't buy it, for several basic reasons: Number one, and most importantly, I am under no obligation to make the world a better place. There is no law which states I have to vote, just as there is no law which states I have to get up every morning, no law to ensure I ever haul my ass off the couch, no law which forces me to give a shit, about anything. The whole point of a democracy is that you don't have to vote. It's a right, not a privilege, not a responsibility. A right. I have other rights I don't choose to utilize: that's part of the definition of a right -the choice. If you had no choice it certainly wouldn't count as much of a right; that would be edging over into the gray murk of duty. This whole country is supposedly based on the fact that if you want to be president you can be president, and if you want to be a slacker sitting about letting history wash over you like some incomprehensible tide you can do that too, and all shades of gray in-between. It is outrageously arrogant to assume that your one, petty opinion will make a difference. It's so Americanly arrogant and so silly. No matter what your high school history teacher, your Mom, your divinely political friends told you, your vote counts for so little in this country you need thirty or forty million friends to vote with you for it to even register as an opinion in the grand scheme of things. And even then you could be on the slim side of the equation, and all your civic-minded posturing and noble opinion-crazy voting would have amounted, essentially, to nothing. And to those of you who are won't to point out that if we all felt that way the whole system would pale and collapse I can only reply that on certain Friday mornings with my eyes glued shut by fast living and my weekend still nine or ten hours away, I would say to hell with it, let it collapse, and good riddance. So - slack away. It's your right. But even if you don't feel comfortable with that concept, even if you're one of that group of young Americans who feel responsible and reject the slacker ethic, I say to you: the world will not end if you choose not to vote, and the world will not change simply because you manage to squeeze out an opinion about something sometime. As a matter of fact, the end result of each action would likely be exactly the same. If you think your thoughtful vote changed the course of US history, think on this: our two political parties are incredibly similar. Vote for Bush? Vote for Clinton? Aside from a few hot- button issues, it most probably didn't matter. Think on this: a few months ago Bill Clinton unveiled a budget plan, and the republicans made fun of him and laughed at it and called it not enough, too weak, blah blah blah. After months of posturing, squandering, and whining, Newt Gingrich unveiled a republican plan in January that looks almost exactly the same, except it isn't as drastic. The gulf between the two parties is not exactly stunning in its breadth. Of course, there are differences, big red candy-like issues they can caw about on television (baby killers! violence on TV! drugs! those damned minorities!!). But even if some president or other or some republican congress or other manages to pass some startling law, it can all be reversed a few years later. Watch the republicans dismantle fifty years of democratic legislation in a few short years and then tell me if it made any difference in the long run that all those smart people voted in past elections. Over the endless tides of time, it all blurs together and leaves with something akin to illusion. You don't even need to have the most votes, you just need to get votes in the right places. You and forty million of your friends get off your ass and in a big politically responsible suckfest you all boogie down and vote for whichever candidate seems least offensive to you, and somehow the other candidate gets the nod. Why? Well, he probably carried California. Bill Clinton was not the unanimous choice, he didn't even have a majority. If it weren't for Ross Perot he would probably have lost to Bush, and it makes you wonder why the Perot people even bothered getting out of bed that day, unless Clinton was using his whitewater cash to pay them. You read sentences like that a few times fast and you get a head rush like you do watching Melrose Place. And now Chelsea is dating. Things ought to get real interesting soon. And then, once elected, all the major issues of our time are handled by our surrogates, without our direct input or even knowledge. You have to really work in this country to know what color manure congress is pitching on a given day, your average citizen (read: not someone involved with some crazy PAC or activist movement) has no clue what the androids they voted for are up to. So, you vote for someone and a few years later you vote again, and in reality your control of the situation is negligible and possibly amusing, as a concept. Can you have an impact? Yes. You will have to, I'm afraid, devote your life to impact as a goal. You cannot, is what I'm saying, sit on your ass and float serenely down to the polls three times a year and have an impact. You cannot make voting decisions based on Time magazine or USA Today and have an impact. Being politically active in this country means research and work and diligence, it means getting more deeply involved than bullshit presidential elections which are, I am often convinced, staged for their entertainment value. Instead of writing me angry letters about how dumb it is not to vote, get off your ass and make your vote mean something by doing more than voting. Voting alone is masturbatory and vicarious: essentially, useless. However, I am a swine. All that stuff I was just rambling on about, the work and research and diligence, is too much for me. You see, I am also convinced of our own temporary existence and transient effect on the universe. All the work in the world, All the smart voting and careful issue-watching will not amount to much, in the long run of the universe (which is measured in billions of years). One day, the sun will swell up into a red giant and eat us all, and every election will be atomized on the library shelves. When I come up with fevered statements like that, piggies, it's easy to see why I can't bring myself to get off the couch to vote; obviously something went very wrong with me at an early age and it's too late now. I refuse to be half- assed about the activities of living, I won't just vote for someone who looks good and then feel better about my selfish and short-sighted ways simply because I voted, as if voting is some sort of cleansing ritual, and I also refuse to do the work required to make an intelligent choice. I make no bones about my ignorance. I just don't feel particularly ashamed of it, because of the monumental insignificance of the issues I am ignorant of. After all, no matter who wins the election this year, my life will go on more or less undisturbed. Maybe some ancient forests in the west will be cut down due to environmental riders on bills passed by congress, but there are plenty of crunchy granolas out there fighting it every step of the way, they don't need me. Maybe pornography will be banned from the internet, but there are plenty of pedophilic chronic self-abusers who will fight that every step of the way and they don't need me either. The laws will inch first one way, and then the other, incessantly over my life and I will continue to exist despite them. You might consider that immature, or possibly ignorant. I consider it the only reasonable attitude to have, in this chaotic and doomed world, hurtling through space at 66,000 miles and hour, sure only of its own eventual destruction. If you assign the weight and girth of nobility and necessity to the frail workings of our imperfect democracy, it will turn brittle under the pressure and collapse. ======================================== *** FICTION *** The Only Time by Jeff Somers ======================================== I can remember the day Kramer just threw down his EV pack and rifle and walked away. It was a rare day on Hollith; sunny and damp instead of raining and dark. The eternal storm which was its atmosphere was taking a day to gather itself and catch its breath for the next assault. The Cap wouldn't let us scale-down the EV suits, but the sight of a sun, any sun, even one whose color was a bit too orange to be our sun, was enough to cheer us. Not even the Holls could've depressed us that day, or so it seemed. Even if a whole fucking tribe of them came hooting in from the woods around us, we would have stayed cheerful. At least until Kramer walked away. He just did it. We'd been humping it through hot Holl territory all cycle, hands on guns and ready to fight, and we'd stopped for feed. He was keeping watch. One minute he's crouched among the damp, tall weeds, chewing rations and hefting his rifle. The next he stands up, throws down his rifle, shrugs off his EV pack, and just starts walking away. The Cap screamed abuse at him, but Kramer couldn't hear. He just kept walking, and we all stared. Even the Cap didn't move. And in a few minutes Kramer was out of sight. Gone. Absorbed by the soaked Hollith jungle. It was a revelation to us all, I think. It was a common fantasy. I'd been on Hollith seven months and some days, earth time, and I always dreamt of it. Seven months of defending our oil pumping stations and conquering more of the planet to build new ones on. Seven months of wishing I could just drop my rifle and beat it, wondering why I could not. The latter was not easy. Looked at objectively, nothing could stop me. Even if the Cap ordered me arrested, and even if my fellow grunts grabbed me, all they could do was court-martial me. They wouldn't be able to make me fight any more. Once I went deserter even if only for a few feet, I'd be free. Nothing tangible held me back. Training, painfully burned in. Peer pressure, learned from birth. Discipline, taught tirelessly. Fear. Shame. All these kept me from doing what Kramer did. It was the same for all of us. I remembered the conscription alert, back home. I had considered running, then, just not going to my training point and waiting for them to arrest me. And then, I thought, I'd stand before them, and when they asked me why, I'd just say "I'm afraid to die." That had been my fantasy back on earth. To have enough courage to just admit cowardice and go to prison. If I hadn't the courage then, I had no hope on Hollith. I'd had my chance at glory. Now all I could do was hope to survive our endless war with the Holls. There was a one in four death rate on Hollith, amongst humans. No one knew how many Holls we axed, no one kept track. We made up kill reports, mostly, to keep from sounding too clueless. Twenty-five years ago, at the end of the noose it had been stringing along, earth had finally found a planet with enough fossil fuels to keep us air conditioned for the next two hundred years, and ever since we'd been at war with the Holls, who resented the rape and pillage of their homeland. They were an indecipherable race, with indeterminate technology and no language we could figure out. We should have beaten them easily, years ago. But the Holls fought like banshees and were smarter than they seemed, and every year over three hundred thousand humans got axed on wet, sour Hollith. And none of us wanted to die, not for the Cap, not for the earth, not for oil, and not for our measly little paychecks, mailed home to parents and wives and mistresses. We all wanted to just drop our rifles and shrug off our EV packs and just melt away, hitch a ride on a Drum-Ship headed into the Chicago refineries and live the outlaw life. And that's exactly what Kramer did. Or at least what we imagined he did once out of our sight. He stood up from the guard position, dropped his rifle and shrugged off his EV Pack, and just walked away. We watched him. Twenty-four of us, armed and expected to apprehend him, staring at him as he deserted us, more in envy than anything else. The Cap screamed, shouting at Kramer, ordering him back, threatening all sorts of pain and punishment. But he never ordered us to apprehend, to arrest. If he had, we might have moved. But he just stood, short, bald and barrel- bodied, staring pop-eyed and blue veined after the ape-like form of Kramer as he disappeared from sight. It was hard to guess what happened to him, though we tried hard enough. Later that cycle, trying to sleep in the muck and the renewed rain and the weird, sometimes deadly bugs, we smoked stale, damp cigarettes and tried to guess the odds. The odds of making it back to Pump Station Six alive were slim; it was a four cycle hump and he was without his EV pack. Besides, the Holls faded in out of nowhere in packs of no less than fifteen and didn't quit until one side was dead. The odds of humping anywhere on Hollith without encountering Holls were zero. The odds of beating a pack of Holls unarmed in the jungle outnumbered fifteen or so to one were zero. The odds of bribing or lying or begging your way onto a drum ship once in Pump Station Six were less than slim, but not zero. The odds that no Federal Pigs would be waiting for you in Chicago were slightly worse. Still, we discussed all these odds and managed to conclude that Kramer was halfway to home free as we spoke. Our math was a little colored by envy and hope. None of us would stand up and shout it, but we all, or almost all, were happy for him. We stopped being happy for him two cycles later when two Holl tribes, over thirty of the fucking animals, hit us hard, falling on us from the twisted alien trees like solid, fearsome rain. We started to curse Kramer and hate him, then. We were three or four cycles away from clearing a new perimeter, another section of Hollith won for human development, and we'd all begun to secretly believe we were getting off easy. Then the Holls hit, and we started hating Kramer. He'd been our big man, our HG, heavy gunner. The HG's were big, usually dumb and primitive more Ape than man when it came to thinking. The Army gave us our jobs for reasons, after all. The HG's carried huge pulse rifles which fired explosive shells, and which had small grenade launchers on the sides. The HG's did major damage. They did the same damage as three of the rest of us, and in the first bloody minute of the battle when seven of us died and the rest of us screamed shooting blindly into the rain, it seemed obvious that we were going to die for want of our HG. We called Kramer everything. We called him a goddammed coward, a shit- licking pussy. A Fag. We drooled hate and fear and loathing as we shouted, pulling triggers spastically. It was suddenly clear. Kramer had known we were going to get hit, and he'd run away. All our awed thoughts of freedom and courage were replaced by basic instinct -hate. The rain, the mist, the trees -a fuzzy mass of damp gray. And the gray was moving, lashing out with inhuman cries and instant death. Everyone was screaming, everyone was dying, and then the Cap lit a nova lamp and in its brief, dazzling light he stood out like the god of war himself, standing atop a rock and shouting in his booming command bass. Five seconds and the light was gone, but it was all we needed. A minute later and fifteen of us formed a defensive position around the Cap and started killing Holls. We'd stopped hating Kramer. Most of us had seen a past HG get killed and had had to fight the rest of it without them. We just pretended Kramer'd been axed and it turned from betrayal into standard operating procedure. Twelve of us survived that night, and none of us thought of Kramer anymore. He had started off as an invitation to salvation, but had ended up as just another one down. We faded into pawns again. We no longer hoped he made it to Chicago. We listlessly pictured him nailed to one of the strange, leaning trees, as the Holls liked to do, sending us messages. And he deserved it. The Cap picked out the largest of us, a woman named Rebar who had horrible, disgusting teeth, which was why none of us had slept with her. The Cap gave her the HG and we went on, all fantasies discarded. I didn't discard mine, though. I buried them, forgot them, but retained them. I thought about Kramer just shrugging off the thirty-one pounds of his EV pack and I remembered myself, sitting on my bed back home, deluding myself that I wouldn't go to the Training Center, that I wouldn't go to Hollith. Not often. Usually when things were quiet, sunny, and damp. When you could hear yourself think. Usually I just forgot -until, one cycle from our return orders, when The Cap ordered everyone to turn over uneaten rations to me, because I was going after Kramer. Everyone stared as if they couldn't place the name. Possibly they couldn't. He was just another body left behind. We'd hit a clearing during a sunny spot and had taken the opportunity to beam in our Position, numbers, and activities. The Cap had mentioned Kramer's desertion, of course, and had read the reply with his usual squint-eyed demeanor. Then, half a cycle away from being shuttled back to Pump Station Six to re-arm and reform, he stopped us and ordered all rations to me, because I was going after Kramer. Everyone stared at me while they Passed back rations. I couldn't tell what they were thinking if they distrusted or envied or feared for me. The stares were generic and flat, and I ignored them. The Cap took me aside. We leaned against trees a few feet away and spent a few minutes getting cigarettes lit. Then he looked at me with his blue-red eyes and hard, leathery face, older than any of us had any reasonable expectation to ever be. He said it was okay to be scared, and I said I wasn't. He just smiled. I'd never seen him smile before. He said HQ reported a group of renegades, Special Forces assholes, gone bad. They lived on the move inside Holl-held forest, and had apparently changed sides. HQ figured Kramer had gone to join these traitors, and wanted him followed so as to ascertain their location. The Cap looked like he thought it was all bullshit. I'd heard of the renegade patrol. They called themselves the New Holls and according to rumor did indeed attack any human units they encountered. Rumor said they had been high-up Intelligence officers, gone native. If Kramer had indeed gone off to find them, I was not anxious to follow. But orders were still orders, so I just nodded and asked why me. The Cap spat out smoke and snuffed his cigarette. Because, he said, you wanted to follow him. While we waited for the shuttle, I wondered about those words as I cleaned and oiled everything up against the constant creeping rust that Hollith bred vicious and quick. I tried not to think the obvious, that held given me permission to run, to make my way to Chicago or the New Holls, wherever I wanted. That was dangerous thinking. I concentrated on tracking Kramer, suddenly remembered. A few of my fellows came up to me to offer a hand or a few words. Mostly along the "you were a good guy" line. It was like a wake, except I was alive. Rebar came up and I briefly wondered if I shouldn't have screwed her for the hell of it. Then, the, shuttle came, collected, and left me behind with Seventeen cycles of rations, my rifle, my EV Pack and suit, and the Beamer. I was supposed to keep HQ updated. I considered leaving the thing behind, but took it eventually, just in case I got in trouble. At least then I could tell them where to pick up the body. It took me three cycles to get rid of the EV pack, figuring that if I was going to follow Kramer I'd better do it the same way held done it -hard and slow. In the EV I might slog through rough areas he couldn't get through and completely lose the trail. On the night I slept with my twelve dead comrades in the rain, the possibilities occurred to me, about my mission. I didn't get much sleep. I was trembling with possibility. Kramer had stood up from guard duty and dropped his rifle, shrugging off his EV pack and melting into the forest. And I was following him. It didn't matter how or why. All that mattered was that I was a few cycles behind. If my reasons changed, so what? I was free to make choices. I had become a deserter. I remembered sitting on my bed at home and I thought that at least I'd do the next best thing: I'd just walk away and deny them all. I would follow my new messiah and do what I wanted. maybe go to Chicago. Maybe find the New Holls. Maybe something else. The point was, I'd do what I wanted. No orders. No SOPS. Just me. It was frightening. I shook with fear and purpose. The natural setting of Hollith wasn't very dangerous. No one knew where the Holls came up with their deadly skills. Unless they had wiped out any and all threats, they should have been as obscure and wet as their planet. There were all sorts of theories. Maybe they weren't native to Hollith. Maybe they hadn't evolved out of an old defense system they no longer needed. Maybe they needed it against something we hadn't found yet. Maybe they'd been invaded before, and remembered. Maybe they usually fought against each other. No one knew. They guessed, and we died. One cycle past the point where Kramer had thrown down his rifle and shrugged off his EV pack, I had a dream about the New Holls. They were only a rumor, so it was all imagination, but sleeping a thin combat sleep of terror it seemed real enough. They were ghosts. The forests of Hollith faded you, thinned you out. I'd only been there seven months and some days and I'd seen a lot of guys just fade away. Not like Kramer. His fading was a skulking, conscious, on-purpose fade. I'd seen many a grunt just get sapped transparent. They turned silent and sallow and drawn and eventually they faded away and just became part of the rain and the mist. Eventually, they died. By that time, no one noticed. I usually thought of them as ghosts, when they got like that. Now, I saw was wrong. In my dream, I saw real ghosts. The men and women of the New Holls had done away with their EV suits and packs but slogged through the forest like monkeys swinging from tree to tree, pale and dirty. They drifted by me where I slept, hefting guns and half crouched. For some reason, I saw their eyes perfectly. That was where the fade showed most. They saw everything, calculated everything. Every raindrop every bug, every branch, discarded clip, footprint and shift of wind was within their sight. They saw everything. But they didn't think about it, they didn't understand it. They just saw it. They were ghosts. They didn't live with me any more. They'd graduated into a new level of warrior. There were no problems, no orders or tactics or doubts. Just them and us, kill or be killed. They were one with the Planet. Waking up, I couldn't decide if it had been a dream or a nightmare. Waking up, I was alone. I pushed on. I caught up with Kramer not too long afterward. I found him nailed to a tree. The rain had paused to catch its breath and the sun sent its strange, damp light into the little clearing, and I saw him right away, suspended off the ground, pale and bloated. It had probably happened a day after held left. Probably a retreating group of Holls getting out of the area before the construction crews showed up. He stared at me while I radioed in the report. His eyes bugged out, yellowed and set. I felt guilty. I felt like I was supposed to follow him and join him, as if that would have changed the outcome. The New Holls, a bunch of MIAs killed alone, unseen, one with the planet. I fought the feeling, but as I made my report, I felt like I was being eavesdropped on. Waiting for the shuttle, I tied a hunk of rag across his eyes and sat facing him. It started to rain again. ======================================== *** COMMENTARY *** THERE ARE NO LITTLE GREEN MEN (Unless You Count the Ones Who Speak to Me After a Night of Grain Alcohol, Unfiltered Cigarettes, and Chaste Women) ======================================== The idea of alien lifeforms excites most of us, we would all like to think that there are other intelligences, other civilizations out there. Some of us wish that these aliens would be advanced beyond us, so that we might learn something from a superior race and perhaps avoid total catastrophic destruction. I will refer to these believers as the Pinko People. Some of us want the aliens in our midst to be below us on the civvie scale, so that we might swoop in and rape their planet for the materials we have squandered on our own. I will call these people the War Mongers. Then there are those of us who, with a Spielbergian wonder at life and all its grand mysteries want to meet their ETs in some mystic ring of trees, be abducted by them, have medical experiments performed on them by the martians, and be returned to our societies a drooling, raving maniac who will be immediately committed to a mental institution for the safety of everyone else. I will call these people Conspiracy Theorists. All of them, loony as no get-out. If you want to talk about insane people with strange ideas, let's talk about people who believe in alien life, despite a humongous lack of evidence. Oh, they will mumble about Roswell, they will grump about Project Blue and Area 51, they will quote Leonard Nimoy on In Search Of and wave blurry photographs under your nose. But the fact remains that these are the same people who tuned in to the Fox Network's Alien Autopsy back in November of '95, and as such have absolutely no credibility at all. While I would love to learn of other lifeforms in the universe, while such knowledge would give me a much better faith in the future of intelligent life (whatever that is), I cannot believe in something just because it makes me feel better. If that were the case I might start buying into Republicanism and the Jimmy Swaggert Heal Thyself technique. Unfortunately I cannot. I am cursed by this immense intellect. So I can say that I wish there were other intelligent lifeforms, and that in theory I suspect there might be, but in real life we have zero proof thereof. As a result, I cannot accept the idea as fact, and any other normally intelligent person has to agree with me. If you feel otherwise, you're coasting on pipe dreams and bullshit, and self-delusion of a most incredible sort. FACT #1: The United States Government cannot even balance its own checkbook, much less contain a conspiracy of the size you morons think it can. Paranoia is a drug-like state, it addicts and become self-justifying, especially if you can find a few people to share it with. You can get high on the bullshit factor of conspiracy theory, from the magic bullet to the secret LSD tests, to little green men in a hangar in Colorado, being something-or-othered by grim men in government gray. I doubt that an entity the size and mess of the US Federal Government could keep something like that secret. They can't even stop people from flying planes into the White House, they can't even keep themselves out of the front pages for larceny, adultery, what have you. And these same people are keeping little green men and their wonderful gadgets in a fucking hangar, for Christ's sake? Moving them around in trains? Plucking technology from their fruitful brains? Please. Grow up and start watching the X-Files, not living them. But, what about the Shadow Government, you ask? You know, that secret network of government agents and unofficial powers that exists behind the sham elected government which makes so much noise and distracts us? Sounds like a good idea. Douglas Adams once theorized that in the future the president would be chosen to be the most outrageous and unsuitable candidate, one who would break laws and flout tradition, to distract the public from the real goings-on of the government. If you're a little paranoid, as we all should be, this sounds like a good theory. It's fun to talk about. I myself am partial to it. But is there any proof? Please god, if there's any proof, bring it forth and let us all ooh and aah over it and grab up our rifles and start the revolution today. Until then, let's not get crazy, okay? I mean, the very idea of a shadow government starts to get ludicrous when you examine it. While there have been men who have wielded power beyond elected officials in the past (J Edgar Hoover comes to mind) it's not as if these men were complete secrets. Sure, while Edgar was alive and flaming, he kept up a good image. He hasn't been dead that long, and we know all about him. It scares me that someone as deeply weird as he had so much unofficial power. That doesn't mean that there are dozens of Edgars running amok with our tax money. I mean, if you dug up a complete copy of the budget, not the tightly edited one we actually get to read, maybe there would be a big section entitled "shadow ops" or "secret government". I doubt it. And until we have such proof, the shadow government theory remains just that. FACT #2. The fact that a lot of "alien abductees" have drawn pictures of aliens that are startlingly alike, despite the fact that they had never met each other, means almost nothing. This appeared on In Search Of, for Christ's sakes, and I think we all know that Leonard Nimoy is a loony. I don't believe it for a minute. It seems like a shocking coincidence, something that is too much to be coincidence, right? Maybe. Until you start to think about how long we, as a culture, have been fascinated by this topic. Since at least the earliest years of this century, the concept of alien lifeforms has held our imaginations. In that time, especially during the height of the pulp sci fi magazine era from the '30s to the '50s, there were literally thousands of illustrations and movies depicting various aliens in various poses doing various things. In short, I can't get over how much those "startling" pictures of aliens look like the aliens from an episode of Star Trek I saw once. Need I say more? FACT #3. People who claim they have been abducted by aliens are loonies. Number one, how come no one is ever observed being abducted? Even if the aliens involved are from the planet Ugh and are very low tech, and sneak up on people from behind, club them over the head with a frozen piece of Yak Leg, drag them bodily through cornfields to where their saucers lay quietly after a particularly easy landing, you'd think someone would see them, at least once. At least once. If the aliens are these high-powered masters of the universe, maybe when they beam us up there would be some sort of evidence? Maybe the same people who wander the countryside filming surprise tornadoes might catch an abduction on film, too, once in a while. Maybe all these people wandering around with transmitters in their heads would set off a goddam metal detector some time, or have them found in x rays. I guess I would lend them more belief if they didn't turn up in the pages of The Weekly World News so often. Okay, so maybe our little green men are just so darned advanced that our creaky technology has no chance of ever detecting them. Maybe they can walk amongst us invisibly, pass any screening, hide anywhere. Maybe they are only an inch tall and are living with us right now, chowing down on roach bait and crumbs. Maybe they are the roaches!!! Who knows? Okay, okay: maybe our resident alien abductors are just way beyond us. Maybe they can edit our memories, control our machines, master our simplistic computers. In that case, why is there any evidence at all? You can't have both, my loony friends. Either they are so absolutely awe-inspiringly powerful that we cannot see them or stop them, or they are just like us and therefore amazingly incompetent in matters of security. You can't have amazingly advanced, undetectable aliens who leave behind enough evidence to start a fucking cult. FACT #4. It is a fucking cult. Line up for the cool aid. Okay, okay, a lot of you alienists are normal, hard working, semi-reasonable people. So are Scientiologists. But you are putting faith in something you have no real proof of, only each others' faith to support you. When confronted with the complete lack of facts, you lean on each other for validation, using the old saw about how a million people can't be wrong. Uh-huh. At least a million people voted for the president. Any president. And every one of them was wrong. Every single election. FACT #5. And this is the one that boggles my mind, folks. Because this is, after all, The Inner Swine, I find it hard to believe that even aliens would allow we simple earth apes to kidnap their citizens and keep them under lock and key for decades. Fucking decades! These same aliens who can supposedly kidnap our own citizens and do whatever they like and we can not only not stop them, we can't even prove it. My ass, you morons. Get a grip. If Emperor Ming were out there watching us keep POWS, for Christ's sake, I'm sure he would want to do something about it. Maybe they're kidnapping us in a prisoner exchange program? Maybe -ooh, this is good- maybe they are working with our government in conjunction! Cool! My goodness! A conspiracy to mother all conspiracies! I saw a picture of President Clinton shaking hands with aliens once. It was in the Weekly World News. Apparently, they are going to give us a cure for AIDS. Okay, that's my opinion, and only my opinion. No one else told me any of this, I thought it up myself, which is more than I can say about the various conspiracy nuts and alienists who populate the waiting rooms of our fine country, all of whom have sweated out the various booklets and pamphlets and other literature that this cult of paranoids has adopted as scripture. There is a difference in theorizing something and hoping it is true, but admitting a paucity of evidence, and being a fanatic who believes simply because that is the way he sees the world. Your basic alienist is one of those people who likes being in on things that no one else knows about. They absorb Roswell and the rest of it and walk around with the smug assurance that they know something the rest of us fools are ignorant of. As if this supposed knowledge will save their ass when the Mother Ship lands and the Venutian Commandos stream out, as if they can stand there making the Vulcan peace sign and chant "I want to believe" and they will be raised up, befriended, and offered the post of military governor of the new colony. You know that's crazy, I know that's crazy, but your average alienist is resistant to logic. That's how they can cling to bullshit so tenaciously; a complete lack of reality will give you amazing powers of self-delusion. I would like to close by underlining that I really do hope there is intelligent life out there, that someday we find some race of slugs or reptiles or what have you flitting about the universe. Then we can all sign a bunch of treaties, unify the world, end hunger, and start concentrating on blowing the damned aliens out of the water. I really do believe there is a strong possibility that they are out there, somewhere, and that someday we will meet. I just don't believe it's happened already. Who could? Aside from all you loonies, of course. I have this annoying demand for evidence, you know, the whole scientific method. Until you can show me some aliens, or show me a ship, or anything that can't be explained by a) madness b) a cry for attention, or c) cynical hucksterism, I will carry this cross of common sense and refuse to believe. I want to believe, but I can't. ======================================== *** COMMENTARY *** I'M A BELIEVER (The first in a series of Jeff, You Ignorant Slut Editorials) by Jeofrey Vita ======================================== "We are either alone in the universe or we are not. Both ideas are overwhelming." -Arthur C. Clarke Everyone is entitled to their own beliefs without judgment by others. I will not try to persuade anyone reading this into believing that aliens are visiting the planet. Right up front, I simply cannot offer any proof to that end. Instead, I propose to offer arguments that there is the POSSIBILITY that there is life on other planets, and that some of them are indeed visiting us for whatever reason their advanced minds can fathom. First off, I am not crazy. I am not some backwater country bumpkin that has been sniffing too much marsh gas. I am not a glassy eyed recluse who retreats into his own private world to escape all the nasty little germs of our society. I am a rational, sane, and reasonably intelligent human being. I admit to having an overactive imagination from time to time. I am curious and I have an open mind to the endless possibilities of this or any universe. You may wonder why it is that I believe in alien life. To me, it is as simple as reasoning that as incalculably vast and unimaginably old as our universe is, we on earth simply cannot have been the only ones to have unlocked the secrets of life. Believing in the existence of alien life does not make me feel better about myself. All it does is show that I have not closed my mind to the endless possibilities, and I stress POSSIBILITIES, this world has to offer. To me, a closed mind is like a pair of blinders you only get half the picture. For us to believe that we, humans, are the be all and end all of life and evolution as we know it is, in a word, ridiculous. We live on one blue ball in a solar system of nine such balls in a galaxy of thousands of such systems, in a universe of an unimaginable number of such galaxies. And we have the gall to believe that we are all there is? Any one person who subscribes to that belief is entitled to it but he is also suffering from the worst case of hubris in all of history. But why is that? Could it be because we as a people are so egocentric that to admit the existence of any other life in the universe would be to admit that we are not the best and the brightest star in the cosmos? Lets call the kettle black, shall we? We humans like to think that there is no one above us. We are control freaks. We like to feel that we are the masters of all we survey. If we are challenged with the unknown, we scramble to find an explanation to fit it and we sit on it until we lull ourselves into accepting it without question. Out of sight, out of mind. Distort the facts long enough and we, like the addle- brained crows that we are, find a new shiny object to chase after. Well, think about it. In this vast universe, which reaches far beyond what we could ever hope to reconnoiter, only the earth has locked in on the magic formula for life? And am I to believe that since the earth is only about five billion years old, that time in the entire universe should be measured accordingly? Because after all, the universe began with the birth of earth, dammit! As a planet in this system, we are quite the baby. Who's to say that there weren't galaxies that have been teeming with life billions of years before we, earthlings came along? If that were the case, I have no trouble believing that the earth is the red-headed step-child of the universe. Now I know how Galileo felt when he tried to persuade people that the earth wasn't the center of the galaxy. The lack of evidence does have to be addressed. Again, I have no proof to support my beliefs. However, I also have no proof AGAINST them. In other words, I challenge Jeff, the government, and any other agency to provide a solid, air- tight explanation for every single Unidentified Flying Object ever recorded. I want an idiot-proof case to disprove every video tape, every photograph, every recording, and every account ever made regarding UFOs and aliens. Belief is a powerful thing. Only a thorough breakdown of every account will close my mind to the possibility of alien life. But here's the catch ... Jeff can't provide that information. The government won't provide that information. Why are requested UFO documents always blacked out? Why were facts regarding Roswell distorted and changed? Why is Area 51, an alleged UFO hangar, patrolled regularly, chasing away the curious? Why are photographs that can't be explained, simply marked UNEXPLAINED and filed away? Why does no one address these inquiries directly? Because they can't. If they could, I would gladly listen. That is the basis of my belief. Until I am given cause to NOT believe, I will continue to theorize on what may or may not be out there. Now, lets address Jeff's insightful commentary. 1) The government can't even balance the budget much less contain a conspiracy of the size that you morons think it can. What is that? Is that another shiny object? Let me go and chase after that for a bit...excuse me, will ya? OK, I'm back. So, the government is a mess. That much I agree with. I even agree that the government is, as a whole, incapable of conceiving and containing a conspiracy of this magnitude. But, lets address facts. Fact, the government does have branches whose sole purpose it is to investigate and report on cases involving UFOs. Why? Does the government have nothing better to do than to go around chasing shadows? Reason tells us that these branches, usually sub-divisions of the Air Force, are there to protect against the possibility of foreign invasion and air strikes. Apparently, the radar systems that we have pointed at all of our potential threats just aren't enough. The conspiracy theorists that Jeff mentions would stress that the government has established this branch to retrieve any alien bodies and technology so that we inferior humans can steal ideas and thus catapult us to the head of the class. There's that egocentricity working again. Fact, the government has reports on file detailing UFO encounters. If UFOs do not exist, why doesn't the government simply release these reports, undoctored, to the masses and put an end to the lunacy? The easiest way to quell the rumors is to simply state the obvious. Unless of course, the obvious proves the rumors true. We have all heard of the fear of causing a national panic should the government release the reports. Does it seem odd to anyone else that reports containing nothing but debunked cases would cause a national panic? 2) Pictures of aliens are all startlingly alike. I have to admit it. Even I have trouble believing that all aliens look like the nuggets that came out of the ship at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. There is no doubt that the image of the gray head with the big black eyes has become a part of the collective consciousness of UFO enthusiasts. Furthermore, without an actual body to compare it to, I'm afraid that there is not much more I can say on that subject. However, what about the reports of the wide variety of UFOs that have been recorded throughout history. There are no coincidences there. The size and shape of UFOs have changed and morphed with every generation. We have the cigar shaped type, the diamond shaped variety, the Lubbock Lights over Texas, and the garden variety discs of Roswell. Can these too be attributed to our long-standing love of Sci-Fi? Sure, except that these accounts have been documented from as far back as the 1800s. I don't think that Star Trek was quite as popular then as it is today. 3) People who claim abduction are loonies. This statement hardly warrants argument. But, it highlights that egocentricity I talked about earlier. I AM HUMAN AND THERFORE I AM THE BEST! In similar vein, our technology must by default, be the best. As Americans, the Japanese are already doing things better than us, so it isn't that hard to extrapolate that into universal proportions. Again, we are but children in this universe. Never mind the fact that we have only fully explored a mere fifth of our entire planet, if that. Never mind the fact that humans only use ten percent of their brain. Some of you less than that, right Jeff? In any case, the search for evidence that Jeff cries out for is shared by UFO enthusiasts. Believe me, Id love to be the one who brings the entire UFO question to light...or closes it out forever. 4) It's a cult. This statement does not warrant argument. 5) Shouldn't aliens come back for their own? Here's my question. Why are aliens even visiting us at all? Do we inferior humans warrant such investigation? Why would such advanced civilizations even bother coming down to our puny little mudball and poke around with us shaved apes? Can we be that interesting? And yet...we humans finance trips to the bottom of the Marianis Straits, a full 38,000 feet below sea level to see if life exists there. And when we do find that there is life in the form of simple crustaceans, we oooh and ahh and study these pathetic, blind, and stupid creatures to learn all we can about them. My how interesting these little things are! How much we can learn from these inferior little crustaceans! Feeling a little crabby Jeff? All life is curious about other life. It is a behavior that has been witnessed in animals and it is a behavior that we practice. Is it that hard to believe that aliens might simply be curious as to what it is that keeps us shaved- chimps happy? So what have I proven? Absolutely nothing. But, I hope that I have at least given you pause to consider the possibilities. These are my opinions. I do not condemn you if you do not share my beliefs. Yours are yours and mine are mine. I will continue to try to learn what I perceive to be the truth. And if ever it is learned, one way or the other, then and only then will the case be closed for me. My other argument went something like this ... Fuck you, Jeff ... edit that you asshole! EDITOR'S RESPONSE: No, Jeof, I won't edit that, because you wrote it and your opinions, however fevered, feeble, or peppered with profanity they may be, are precious. That you would end your piece with such a blatant personal attack on me saddens me, and all other swine who wish only for peace on earth, good will towards men, and free love/drinks. Why must you hurt? Let out the hate, Jeof, let in the love. A difference of opinion no longer requires a primitive pissing contest as it once did, in our younger, moodier days; today, thankfully, we can settle every argument in a calm, civilized manner: a game of chess, a potato- sack race, building a house of cards. Watch your Brady Bunch, mi amigo, therein are the answers. Greg Brady never once uttered profanity to Bobby when they fought. Look to the Bradys, my young friend, and perhaps you will learn to release your negative energy into the cosmos and embrace plaid as a fashion choice. The Editor would like to commend Jeof for a thoughtful and thought-provoking essay, although, of course, he is wrong. ======================================== *** COMMENTARY *** WE LOVE YOU, CHANDLER BING Television as Tool of Evil by Jeffrey Somers ======================================== WHEN discussing that hit show *Friends*, the idiots I know and love have a tendency to call everyone by their characters' names, even when speaking of the actors themselves. This is natural and common, because you don't get to know Matthew Perry, that disgustingly, revoltingly successful young man getting paid to be himself on a sitcom, you know Chandler. That's who stops by your house every Thursday night to make a few sarcastic quips and move on. This blurring of reality is an interesting phenomenon in this country, it reflects a sadly backwards population that often forgets that television, as art, blows, and that it is all manipulation on a grand scale. Let me stress that I am not speaking out against television; number one, I enjoy some of it, number two, the government would have me killed by some crazed loner if I did so. *Unknown writer murdered by escaped loony, all works of genius burned in oven. Police suspect suicide.* I like manipulation, it gives me direction in my life. Besides, the crude manipulation television attempts to foist down our throats is usually easy to identify and make fun of, thus providing hours of conversation amongst me and my friends, with whom I would otherwise have no topics to discuss, and we would just sit there staring into our beers wishing that the jukebox wasn't stocked with so many damned Elton John Records. If you don't believe you are being manipulated, then you're kidding yourself, my little pig. Its a subtle exercise, I admit, and it doesn't always work, and I do not, ever, intend to suggest that it is on purpose. No one in this country is that smart, especially not anyone in the entertainment industry. There are no effective subliminal advertisements, no mind control going on. What there is is a very subtle shading of your perception, because what you see on TV is often presented to you as reality: either actual reality (COPS) or someone's interpretation of reality (dramas, commercials, sitcoms, etc). If they get some of the details right, you start to identify with a show, and when that happens, all hell breaks loose because if you identify with a show, saying, in effect, that you view your life the way the show presents reality, suddenly that show can have a great effect on you. Doubt me? Of course you do, I'm smarter than you are and the great unwashed often distrust their saviors (kill your idols, you little creeps). Lets take a look at two concrete examples of this sort of subtle reality shading, and then you can judge for yourself whether or not I'm just a washed-up pseudo- intellectual who never wanted to work hard enough to actually learn anything so he makes everything up: we'll discuss that uber-sitcom, *Friends*, and, startlingly, the Bud Lite commercials starring the "*I Love you, man*" guy. Both of these disturb me, when I am in a thinking mood (translation: sober) and that's because of the unending manipulation both works push on us. First, *Friends*. If you're under 30, have white-bread sensibilities, and like cute actors/actresses, you probably watch this show. Even if you don't think its funny or entertaining, you probably watch just for Jennifer Aniston's pneumatic breasts (I'm beginning to think the Beatles had her in mind when writing Polythene Pam) or Matthew Perry's sardonic grin. If you don't watch it, lord knows what you talk about to your co-workers on Friday mornings. Maybe you're standing around staring into your coffee wishing they didn't play so many Elton John Muzak versions in you office... *Friends* is a study in bamboozle and misdirection. It is presented, on paper, as a generation-x show about young people trying to make it a hard world of shrinking salaries, unsafe sex, and a complete lack of socially acceptable drugs. Listen to that theme song, kids: its a litany of twentysomething grousing. "*Your jobs a joke/You're broke/You're love life's DOA*", not exactly *Open Up Your Heart and Let the Sun Shine In*, you know? We're supposed to identify with this. This means you: not anyone secure in their jobs or relationships (you bunch of boring, miserably together shits, you probably wouldn't read this rag anyway, would you? Christ, I hate all of your ilk) but the rest of us, people like me who hate their jobs and wonder whether there isn't something better we could be doing with our time, people like me who haven't had anything resembling sex recently, or least not anything resembling sex that didn't turn into something grim and ugly at the first touch of dawn. The premise is given to you: six kids struggle to make a life and not get creamed by it in New York City, amidst heartache, lost jobs, and sexual tension....and hilarity ensues! So, we watch the damn show. And when Ross falls for Rachel and pines away for her, buried under assumptions and social conventions and other brands of bullshit, some of us say: hey, I've been there. When Monica loses her job and gets depressed, some of us say: hey, I've been there. We identify with the show, because on paper it sounds like our reality. The problem is, it isn't our reality. Not even slightly. The kids never worry about paying their bills, it just happens. They live in New York City and have known each other for years, none of them have moved away. Their apartments are huge and spacious. They live across the hall from each other, like dorm roomies. Their jobs are vague and apparently do not value attendance, and Rachel is a 27 year old waitress, for Christ's sake, and this is not considered a problem. Their romantic relationships are clean and easy, and, worst of all, sitcom logic rules: all problems are solved within 26 minutes, and no one harbors a grudge for more then four episodes. If you begin identifying with this show, what you're doing then is comparing your life to the one illustrated on the screen. And you will never measure up. Why can't we all hang out with our friends every day and never get tired of each other, never get into fights, never be bored? Why can't we live across the hall from our best friends? Why can't we always be funny, good-looking, and five minutes away from a resolution? How come the fact that I'm a 27 year-old waitress isn't cool? Once you start thinking like that, and we all do, sometimes, you're caught. There's a fundamental dichotomy here: on the one hand you're identifying with this show, and on the other you will never measure up to its standard of living. You will never be as cool, attractive, happy, or funny as these people. They have makeup artists, script writers, and sets, and they only have to muster up that type of glamour for 26 minutes every week. You've got to do it 24 hours a day. No wonder you look worn out. And then, when you're lusting after the whole Friends lifestyle, when you trying like hell to make your new perception of what reality ought to be fit what reality really is, that when the commercials start, and suddenly you can own *Friends* coffee mugs, cookbooks, and Diet Coke. Bit by materialistic bit, you can stitch your reality into *Friends*, or so the theory goes. And POW!, you've been manipulated. Speaking of commercials: Let's talk Bud Lite, shall we? Beer and cigarette companies are all just testing grounds for hell, only evil, little people work for them, yeah yeah, we know that. Doesn't stop me from drinking and smoking me all-too-brief youth away. I don't believe that Joe Camel makes little kiddies smoke cigarettes and I don't think that those funny, funny beer commercials make us into alcoholics; this country had been a wet one since the moment it was born. We like beer. We don't need to be convinced. Budweiser is one of the most popular brands of beer in this country: they advertise to maintain their market presence and to sculpt their consumer base. You probably couldn't sell more Budweiser to the discriminating lushes of this country if you had a billion dollar advertising campaign. So when a commercial like the "*I Love you, man!*" guy runs you have to look at what they're saying to the country. Not in words; those commercials and ones like them (humorous, silly, etc) rarely have any coherent message (think of those damned frogs). Its all perception. Its all about making us identify with the commercial so we'll drink Budweiser. From viewing these commercials, I can only conclude that Budweiser views its consumer base a bunch of rednecks suffering from clinical alcoholism. Think about it, think about the "*I Love you, man*" guy: he is your basic stereotype of a worthless drunk. He is presented to us as unshaven, sloppily dressed, and apparently unemployed, the sort of guy who wakes up and has nothing much to do. He is desperate for a beer, will go to any lengths to get one. His friends and family distrust him and reject his false affection because they know, apparently from long experience, that he is only trying to use them to get alcohol. In the commercial co-starring Charlton Heston, his pathetic attempts to ingratiate himself are wincingly insincere. When Chuck says "Frankly son, you frighten me" he might as well be saying "Get help." The act of using a thinly-veiled problem drinker as advertising tool is disturbing enough, but then you have to ask yourself why. The only answer is, Budweiser thinks a great number of people will identify with this pathetic fool and therefore buy more beer because of it. "Look at him," the drunks of the world will say, "he's like me, but he's having a good time, meeting movie stars, never looking worse for the wear." Maybe they'll conclude that all that's wrong with their lives is the brand of beer they drink. As for the rest of us, by clouding the issue with humor and hyperbole, Budweiser can safely assume most of us won't even notice the sickness underneath. So, television is evil. We don't, of course, necessarily view this as a bad thing, just a happy fact you ought to know. I don't really mind their *attempts* to manipulate me, I would only greatly resent it if it was successful, but I probably wouldn't know about it if it was, so......screw it, I'm going to continue to drink beer and lust for Rachel, and nothing you say is going to stop me. If nothing else, I have this: I have yet to purchase anything with a *Friends* or * Bud Lite* logo on it. Editor's Note: Please do not take this message so thoroughly to heart that you refuse to purchase Inner Swine merchandise; we're not trying to manipulate you, we're just trying to make a buck off of you. Isn't such honesty worth something? Like, say, $18? ======================================== *** SELF-OBSESSED WHINING *** THE INNER SWINE: A MANIFESTO by Jeff Somers ======================================== We find these truths to be self-evident: people suck, nothing is forever, there is no god. Living by these three dictums makes you a Swine, kids. Living by one or two of them makes you a person evolving into a Swine. Living by none of them makes you a fool. It's pretty much your choice, I guess. In response to a growing demand for a better understanding of this thing we call The Inner Swine (Well, one phone call from a drunken friend at 2am demanding this counts, doesn't it?), I have decided to define some terms for easier understanding of this magazine and the theories and concepts behind it. Once you have digested these easy definitions, the rest will come to you naturally; slowly you will become a swine or, as other have termed it, a bastard. But do not fear! Is being a bastard really so bad? I think not. Being a bastard means: - Never having to say you're sorry (or at least never meaning it if you do accidentally say it) - Never having to lose sleep over someone else's problems - Never having to pay for anything (though this also requires talent, not just attitude) The Inner Swine celebrates the pig inside of us, the little crapper that doesn't give a shit, that is selfish, and arrogant, and hopelessly self- obsessed. That's the way we really are, kids, and no amount of altruistic bullshit will change it. The Inner Swine believes that we are all assholes, and that any goodness perceived is PR. Thus, some terms: Pig: Contrary to popular belief this does not merely mean a churlish man, this applies to everyone. We are all pigs, and when I use the term I am hugging the world, dammit. Piglet: See above Baby Levon: See that little baby all over this rag? The one with the diaper and the balloon? That's Baby Levon, and he is our mascot and symbol, because babies are such perfect little pigs, such sucking little monsters. The universe revolves around them and it never occurs to them to think otherwise. We at The Inner Swine hate the babies. The Editor: Jeff Somers, the bitter man who puts all this together for fun and profit. We believe in the basic evil nature of man, we reject salvation as a concept and assume that not only is there no justice, but that we wouldn't want it if it really existed. And the main point is, we don't think any of this is bad, this is not the failure of man or a terrible state the world has descended into, it is the natural way and we celebrate it. We get naked, build a pagan bonfire, and celebrate the fact that we would all eat our own children if pushed hard enough. Join us! Throw off the false facade of civilization and admit that you like to sin, that you enjoy sinning, and that you will continue to sin until John Q. Law catches you at it. It is incredibly refreshing and freeing, it allows you to be a bastard without remorse. And, most importantly, it allows you to place yourself at the center of this cartoon universe without guilt, or consequences, unless twelve-step programs can be counted as consequences. The Inner Swine Guide to Better Living Through Lack of Morals (3 easy steps to being a pig) 1. Avoid sentimentality: children are "rats", animals are meant to be eaten (even cute ones), everyone is assumed to be less intelligent than yourself. 2. Avoid weak-minded equalism: no one has the right to tell you what to do, no one is as important as you are, your opinion means everything; theirs, nothing. 3. Embrace self-interest: we're all really self-centered, why not admit it and exploit the dimwitted humility of others? ======================================== *** PRODUCT PLACEMENT *** THINKING OF YOU, SHITHEAD The Inner Swine Launches Line of Greeting Cards ======================================== The greeting card has become the shorthand of our dysfunctional society, the way we "say" the things we either find ourselves reluctant or incapable of saying. Basically, we're all too scared to say anything, so we send cards. Anything you cannot dredge up the courage, sincerity, or language to express yourself has already been expressed, in pre-packaged form. The thing that bothers me most about this is the simple fact that if someone sends me a card that thanks me for being a good friend, I am warmed by the knowledge that this same card has been mailed to 13,000 or so other people. This wall of silence effect, wherein we never actually "say" anything and even the most touching, deep emotions we experience can be denied in a moments notice because somebody else wrote them, is, of course, evil, which is why we here at The Inner Swine adore greeting cards. For those of you who also wallow in insincerity, you will understand what I mean. What it comes down to, of course, is cash: greeting cards are a huge business and rake in the cash, so of course we here at The Inner Swine wish to get involved in it. But what we wish to do is fill a void in this market, a void which I will term Evil Thoughts. Enough of this "feel better soon" and "I love you" crap, what about the sad, angry thoughts we have on a daily basis and do not express more because we dare not than due to any lack of intent. If we are going to be an idiot society conveying all thoughts and emotions via professionally written, amateurishly drawn cards, why not go all out and print up the fuck yous as well? Then, we can conduct our personal affairs entirely via prepackaged writings, prepared by your bitterness professionals, the hyenas at The Inner Swine: *** The Inner Swine Greeting Card Categories *** White Rage Black Rage You Suck I Slept with Your Sister I Stole that Stuff I Quit, You Fat Piece of Shit If You Think I'm Supporting that Kid, You've got another Thing Coming I Refuse to Pay for the Damages I Will not Post Bail for You This Time Stop Calling Me I'm Going to Track you Down and Beat you Until You Can No Longer Think ....and many, many more We here at The Inner Swine think that this is an idea whose time has come. Think about it! In any adverse or rage-inducing situation you might find yourself in the future, you can select a card and express your innermost disgust, anger, or contempt without having to waste time and precious energy thinking/writing/speaking. Just scrawl your "mark" at the end of the blast o' vitriol written by a Pig Professional Staff Writer (me) and voila! Instant satisfaction. And for those of you looking for that special touch, we will be proud to offer our select special Karen Accavallo line of cards: You Fill me with RAGE I Despise your Boyish Ways Eat Me How Sad for You You Big Fuckhead Do You Find Body Hair Attractive? Should I be Worried About this? If You Can't Remember my Name, I will Kill You. And just like that, you can experience the chill wind that blows through Karen's life on a daily basis. Now you too can cultivate an insulting superiority complex and draining attitude problem, all with the help of inexpensive Inner Swine Greeting Cards. If you're having trouble being a bastard, we can help! Now, you too can be a smart ass, all with the help of our special intimate line of cards, The Jeff Somers Deepest Thoughts: This is What I Should Have Said Back to You Yesterday This is What I meant to Say When I said "Of course I love you." All that Stuff About Being There for You Was Bull I'm Only Said I was Sorry to Get Out of There Secretly, I Despise You I Ran Away, but Lord Help You if I Ever Get the Drop on you. In the pursuit of the silent society, we are trying to be as specific and verbose as possible with our cards in order to prevent the need to speak to one another from ever arising. Soon we'll have greeting cards on hand for even the simplest social occasions, the sort of things we now use clumsy and easily misunderstood verbal communication for. ======================================== *** SELF-INDULGENT RAMBLING *** This Sucks: Why We'd All Rather Be on Melrose by Misty S. Quinn, Esq. ======================================== Monday Morning: you roll out of bed, stumble to the shower and wonder why your life sucks the way it does. You manage to get to your place of employment at a reasonable hour and settle in for what most think is the worst day of the week. You can only grunt to your fellow employees as they pass you and somehow make the special effort of saying "good morning" to you (how they manage it without drugs, you have no idea). Around mid morning you find the strength to face your desk mate and discuss your weekends; you make up things you did, people you saw, places you went, until around 11am you're depressed enough to begin working, only to stop an hour later to lunch. After lunch you again think about how your life sucks, but this time you consider the job aspect of said suckage, and start thinking about what you'll eat for dinner. Dinner is important, it sets the tone for your Melrose Place watching pleasure. If you eat the wrong thing you'll begin spacing out during the show, possibly missing one of Billy's stupid looks (indistinguishable from his other looks: anger, happiness, drowsiness, hunger, pain, etc) messing up your weekly tally for the show. Actually, the worst thing while watching Melrose is the sound of the phone. "It can't be anyone I know!" you think; your friends know better (from bitter experience) than to call you on Monday night. "Maybe," you think suddenly, "its that guy I met the other night -wow, he's calling me!!" Thinking you are about to talk to your future husband you answer, only to hear a bored woman ask if you got your paper this morning. "HOW DARE YOU!!!" you reply, "DON'T YOU KNOW WHAT'S ON TELEVISION!?!" - CLICK - You tune back in just as it is fading to commercial. What happened? Did you miss Jane and Sydney fighting? No, this can't be! I've waited all week to see it! Why do these awful things only happen to me? I have found that most people don't understand the addiction that is Melrose Place. It always amazes me when people say, in mock astonishment, you watch Melrose? Yeah, and I used to watch CNN, but the drama on that show is genuine and frankly not as entertaining. I would rather watch Jake sleep with 20 women and never worry about AIDS, Billy, who is a Vice President at his company, wear jeans every day at an office that Amanda says with a straight face has a strict dress code - the woman could go to work naked and no one would care. This is what people love about this show, the life of these young Melrosians. Viewers wish they could have a small piece of it in their blah lives. Who wouldn't love to go to work stinking drunk, slap your boss and never worry about the consequences? Perhaps you could become addicted to drugs, booze, and sex, blackmail everyone, blow up their apartment complex and still have some guy take pity on you and help you get your life back in order. With the exception of Sydney, everyone has a lovelife, they all have jobs (which they don't have to go to if something better comes along), a decent apartment, nice cars, cool clothes and a group of friends (!) to call their own. They rarely all get along, but if they did, why watch? Who wants to see a bunch of friends hanging out, drinking coffee? If you find yourself depressed, lonely -looking for something fun to do on Monday nights, join a club or a gym and quit whining. What you need if you are tired, mopey and not sure if you will make it through the week is to switch on that box and tune into Fox, and watch Melrose Place. Cable -who needs it? Sure, the character's are not complex, nor well acted -but that's part of the charm, dammit. You never have to admit to watching, (but come Tuesday morning you won't want to resist). The day you start watching is the day you realize your life is over and all you have to look forward to are Aaron Spelling productions. Thank God, he has a show on almost every other day. ---------------------------------------------------------- ***THE INNER SWINE GUIDE TO SUCCESSFUL MELROSE WATCHING*** 1. Play Melrose drinking games: every time Billy scowls, drink; every time Amanda's skirts ride up her thighs, drink; every time someone in the room groans with the difficulty of swallowing a particular plot twist, drink lots. 2. If you miss a portion of the episode, simply pick one of these convenient endings to scenes to complete your experience: a) ".....and then they slept together" b) "....and then he blew her up!" c) ".....and then she slapped him!" d) "....and then they went to commercial!" 3. If at any time you miss an entire episode of Melrose and cannot find a kind soul who taped it, watch a rerun you have on tape, and have your friends make up new dialogue. It will be good enough, and it might even be an improvement. 4. Everything is more believable when you're drunk. ---------------------------------------------------------- Editor's note: Ms. Quinn is well known for her love of Melrose Place and her ongoing struggle with television addiction. While she knows that too much TV watching is super bad for your eyes, she persists in viewing and will grow violent if prevented from seeing her beloved "tiny TV friends". She kindly took time out of her busy viewing schedule (translation: she found free time during commercials) to try and explain the perplexing mystery of Melrose to The Inner Swine, and we thank her kindly. If you ever see Misty Sue walking around free, please do not attempt to pet or feed her. ======================================== *** FICTION *** The Hard Sell by Jeff Somers ======================================== Goodbye and fare you well; You can't defeat the Hard Sell. RAIN on the windshield, a familiar sight. A hundred jobs, I'd guess, done in the rain. The copper smell of blood completed the picture, and I was nostalgic. I was just driving aimlessly, enjoying a rainy night and listening to the soft radio, thinking, staring, relaxing. Milken, who we always called Milk -everyone, ever since they meet him, it was the most natural nick-name I'd ever heard- he's just along for the ride, helping me reminisce. I've never done a job without Milk, though I guess I should get used to it. We became partners so long ago I didn't think I could remember, and I know Milk doesn't -he's in the trunk. Every time I go over a bump, his head smacks hollowly into the gas can and I'm reminded of him. That's fitting. He ought to be remembered, at least for tonight. The storm started out a few hours ago just as I was finishing up. Usually I'm in a hurry to clean up and distribute the evidence (they don't call me Hacksaw for fun, after all) but there's something about driving in the rain that I can't resist. It's like being in a movie. So I just loaded up Milk and off we went. Milk was always easygoing about stuff like that, and even though he doesn't have much choice, now, my mind wanders back to other times we drove together in the rain. I can remember a job a few years ago -one, actually, we fucked up. We were supposed to just beat this old guy named Baxter a little, bloody him up and remind him who we worked for, in case he got to forgetting about The Boys. So, we did a smooth covering scam, got him alone in the bathroom of this really nice restaurant (where I still like to eat) and I dropped him with a smack to the nose that laid him out. So, we're kicking the old bastard, yelling about how you're not supposed to fuck with our bosses, and all that shit, that hard-ass crap you learn to parrot and it doesn't mean anything. Suddenly, Milk looks down and starts to laugh. Milk was always more observant. Always. Even as little kids he was quicker. I'd say he'd been the brains of our little operation, if our operation'd needed any brains. So, he stops kicking the poor son of a bitch, and starts to laugh. Tears were running down his face, he was leaning against a urinal, gasping, flushing it over and over again. I stopped. There was blood on my shoes. I wiped sweat off my face and stared. "What?!?" I snapped. I remember being really, really pissed. I have to smile at that, now. Milk was almost blue, he was laughing so hard. "He's dead, Mack. We offed him, Hacksaw, didn't we?" Milk was always unstable. It got worse as the years went on, but even as kids I knew it. I think I cursed. Everyone in the place had seen us go in, you see. You could walk away from a beating and no one would remember you. Walk away from a killing, and they lined up for the lineup. We were in a jam, and all Milk could do was laugh at me, with blood on my shoes. We had the door propped shut, so we had a few minutes to think, as if that ever did us any good. As always, the solution was simple, as simple as squeezing ourselves out the window and having done with it. We were in big trouble with The Boys, and I was upset that we'd fucked up. I was understandably tense. I just hopped in the car with good old Milk and drove around, thinking, for a while. He was always cool about letting me get my shit together, and he was never more happy to listen to me than tonight. The night was cool, the wind and rain a thought provoking hum. I turned left on Brooks Street, headed for the cabin. I met Milken when we were just juvenile delinquents, twelve and still beating eighth graders up for lunch money or just the hell of it, to stay in practice, whatever. You know how kids are. I went to public grammar school. PS #31 was one of those faded modern buildings built during better times, long unrepaired and abused by budding adolescents. I was one of a few tough guys in the old yard, beating more for the hell of it than anything else. I'd learned early; I knew big words and liked to read, and at that age you had to be ready to fuck back when you talked dainty. In the graffitied, aging halls of that brown and white building it got so I never really thought about much else -if I didn't pounce on all the other scrubbers, I'd have just been another runt. I wasn't big -I fought dirty. Everyone does, when you're a kid, I guess, but I was ruthless. That's what this old chum of mine used to say. Gonzalez, Mark Gonzalez, that was his name. Fourteen and still in grammar school, the fucking moron. But I could kick his ass, that's why he followed me. Milken, Thomas A., transferred into PS #31 when he was thirteen. Milk didn't have to fight dirty, he was huge, back then. As time went on, he shrank to normal size, but back then he was the incredible hulk. He wore jeans and a white T-shirt, his dark hair short and combed back; at the time I favored flannel and corduroy, my blonde mop spiked up like a punk though I thought the punks were just closet fags and didn't run with them. He got transferred to PS #31 because his old school was sick of him and all his discipline problems -but I didn't know that. I saw a big asshole of a kid swaggering around like he didn't know I was there to run things, so I hiked over with my gang and gave him a shove, on- purpose like. I can always picture him then, because Milk stopped changing the next day, aside from the shrinking, and pretty much always has the same look on his face when he's staring down at a fight. His eyes squinted, his teeth clenched, he stared at me for a minute and then spread out his thoughts to include the whole gang. I'd never seen anyone take so much time and consideration with a return shove before, and I guess that's where I started being fascinated with the thinking processes, or lack thereof, sometimes, of Tom Milken. "What?" was all he said. We shared a dislike for conversation. Thinking, yeah, sometimes I liked to think. Fighting, of course, you had to or your life got slow real fast. But I'm no conversationalist. I swung at him in reply. The fight was short; Mr. Chaney, the vice-principal, happened to be near. Mr. Chaney, whose nose was huge and whose lisp was ridiculouth -that's really all I can recall about Mr. Chaney. But after only a minute or so, Milk had knocked out two of my teeth and I had bloodied his nose and bruised his balls possibly permanently. Five minutes later we were bleeding in the principals office, bonded by blood and blame. Sitting in the hard plastic chairs waiting for our daily dose of discipline, a partnership was born. Actually, all it really was was that we joked around and realized we weren't likely to start winning these fights any time soon, either one of us, and so we never fought again, until tonight. Grammar school was glorious, then. Before it had been fun, but Milken added a spark of evil to it all -even at thirteen he had no fucking conscience. The rest of the gang slipped away and it was just Milk and Me, sitting in the back of class and living the good life. After school, we'd go and score some booze (blackberry brandy, sweet as sugar and just the right size for Milk's back pocket) and we'd hit the Mall for a few hours, getting tanked and shoplifting. Most of the shit we stole we threw away. We just wanted to have fun. After a while, even that got boring, first with Milk and then later he convinced me to be bored, too. Once, we got caught ripping off albums. The problem with those electronic sensors every record store has is that it makes the clerks feel like they're un- robable, which is bullshit. This store in the mall was called Disc-Us, and it was staffed by all these guido losers from the high school. They all wore name tags so me and Milk used to call them by their names, which they hated. This one guy named Lucas really hated our guts, we fucked with him so much. I guess he was used to the littler kids being scared of him, but me and Milk knew the secret: it's not how big you are but whether you knew how to fight. Lucas used to sit in the little register booth and call his girlfriend for hours on end. We knew his schedule and every time he worked we'd go on a spree. I kept watch, leaning against the poster racks with arms crossed and glasses lowered while Milk liberated cassettes from the plastic wrapping. People are sheep, a lot of our fellow consumers saw us, none of them ever did anything about it. Me and Milk, we were living off of the fat of the land, and so I smiled at all the shits who glared past us. So anyway, one day Lucas must have actually been watching us, because one minute we're taking our share of the good life by force, and the next we're running for our lives from the asshole, shoving old ladies loose on power walks out of our way, and hopping over potted plants. Milk was laughing as he ran, and that started me guffawing, too -and we knew we could outrun Lucas any day of the week, so we led him on a merry chase, pausing outside of Disc-Us on our way out to turn and flip him off. I was hooked. Walking home, I knew I never wanted to play by the rules again. I wanted to cheat. I liked to cheat. Milk, he just liked doing whatever felt good. Milk was a child of instinct. So, I've known Milk for just about eleven years. Eleven years I was partners with him, trying to figure him out, watching him slowly fuck up. Sometimes I'm amazed he lasted that long. Brooks Street starts out dense and bright, part of the city, and thins out into route 134, a two lane road which eventually finds its way to an interstate or two. In the middle is a lot of forest and some very deserted property. The cabin sits up there, hidden by a few acres of forest, out of sight and so out of mind I sometimes doubted it existed. It was perfect for the dirty work I've gotten good at since Milk never could stomach it. Funny, that. Graduating grammar school wasn't too difficult, so me and Milk scratched by and barely made it out. High School, though, was a burden of discipline. Too many teachers, too many structured programs, at least that's what my guidance counselor called them, when he thought I was paying attention. Much easier to hang out there than to go there, so it was no shock to us that we dropped out in sophomore year. That was when we met our future organization, you see. They were looking for some smart-assed, no talent white kids to deal some dope for them. Me and Milk, fifteen and healthy as Wonder Bread suburban brats were perfect for the job. We had style, for drop outs. We still shook the lambs down, even though we didn't go to class any more, and afternoon found us smoking cigarettes by the b- ball courts at D. Thomas High, leaning against a wall and looking tough. That was where Large Louie spotted us, that day. We didn't have much else to do, you know? It was that time of your life when smoking cigarettes is a bona-fide activity. Large Louie wasn't fat, but he was loose-skinned and chubby, dressed in a bad polyester suit and filled with too many calculating grins. He walked up to us, and I stared at him while Milk stared off into the distance, looking bored. Large Louie Drexel introduced himself as if he wasn't talking to a pair of burn- outs, and I liked that. Everyone else -my Mom (hail hail the bitch is dead, rub your eyes get out of bed) my teachers, everyone- looked at us like we were lost causes. Maybe we were, then, but we didn't know that, and Large Louie maybe knew it was gonna change. "Hey boys, how are things?" he said, looking around. He had a cheesy mustache even then, and one of his eyes wandered. Large Louie, we learned later, owned a restaurant. And he did a lot of little jobs for The Boys, like recruiting dead- heads for the hooks. "Things are fine, shithead." I said. "How about you?" He just nodded. Large Louie wasn't much for the social niceties. "I gotta proposition for ya kids." I immediately thought he was fag, but Milk perked up. I don't know what he was thinking, he was in one of his manic moods. Milk could be dangerous, sometimes, when he got into his fuck-everyone grooves. Milk shines this happy happy grin at Louie, suddenly all charm and grease, easing any imagined ruffled feathers. A few years later, that weird look usually meant someone was going to die. Back then, though, it just meant life was dangerous. "'bout what?" Milk asks. "I've seen you 'round here a few times. You looking to pick us up?" Right out in the open, that was Milk's way. After a few years with him, I was a more honest person, because every time I tried to lie, the bastard would just walk up and spit out the truth. After a while I figured it out -if you're willing to kill, the truth never hurts. We let Large Louie take us out for burgers, and so we became pushers, the bottom rung of organized crime. Faceless, expendable, soon to be a different pair of burnouts. Milk took to it like gangbusters, both the business and the dope. I never liked it. Too much money involved. I only like enough money to get by on in good style. All that cash made me feel like spending it, and even then I knew that if you spent other people's money you ended up being visited by people like Milk and me. From experience, I can say that that isn't very fun. Milk didn't care much for cash, either -as he got older- well, as we got older, we both garnered a taste for clothes, but aside from that we usually spent most of our money on dumb shit. Albums, books, movies, stuff you can't take with you -stuff that ran on batteries. So we stopped shaking our fellow kids down and pushed them instead. Milk and me had moved up in the world, from staring up at the fire-escape to hanging from the bottom rung. We were good at it because we worked at it, we saw promotion ahead if we did good. Every week Large Louie came back to see us, and every week he was surprised at how little we stole, compared to the usual rednecks and assholes he had working for him. And we had style. Louie called us his Little Executives. We got busted a few times, but we never got caught selling, and we always took the heat and came back to our little share of the business. Milk was hilarious, in Juvenile. He called everyone "your honor". That, for some reason, made all the pork chops mad, They hated it, him calling them "your honor". We used to pose for the mugs, giving them our best hard-assed stare, and imagine that some day Rolling Stone would publish those pics when they did an article on us. The most dangerous kids in America, eh? Sometimes I'd see some cop wander by, and I'd have to laugh because we were selling his kids shit when he wasn't looking. I was full of secrets, and it drove them crazy that I wouldn't spill. But the Boys were watching, and I wanted out of the dope biz. You had to play by somebody's rules, after all. Of course, it was fun. Dealing dope in high school is a must for anyone looking to enjoy their salad days, I always say, when I'm in a joking mood. It was a gray, mirthless fun, but it was fun, a mean, angry fun that ate people up and spit them out and sometimes when I'm sitting alone in diners smoking cigarettes and staring at myself in the dark windows, I feel evil and mean and worthless when I think about those years. Not often, but often enough to make me not want to think about them. The half-mile road to the cabin is dirt, more a trail than a road. My high beams dance on the leaves crazily, and with every bump I wince at the thumping from my trunk. Poor Milken is getting a bit tossed about, I'm afraid. "Sorry, Milk." I whispered. "But you know the name of the game. Never change the rules and never take no for an answer. You can't escape the hard-sell." My eyes catch themselves in the rear-view, and I wink. That's what we used to call our services, the hard-sell. I don't remember when it was made up, just that it made us laugh. I can remember Milken saying that if we were selling death, we certainly used the hard-sell. Ever since whenever we were talking shop we used that as a code, so we could sit in bars and discuss technique and not fear having a dime dropped. I stare at myself, not watching the road. Without Milk, I suppose I'll have to talk to myself. I used to be good at it. Sometimes I think the main reason I didn't like pushing was that at the end of the day I still had to go home. Looking down, my knuckles whiten on the wheel. Thinking of Dad always does that to me, even today. Back in high school, I used to sneak out of my house after Dad had finally passed out. Dear old Dad used to amaze me, how he could drink so much and still beat the shit out of me. Fists, my Dad had. Not hands, not that I ever noticed, but fists, some sort of circus freak born without knuckles. I took it all, knowing someday I'd slit the bastard's throat. I used to sneak out and wake Milk up (Milk had his Mom and Dad pretty wrapped; his Mom acted like Milk had beat the crap out of her years ago and the memory still lingered. For all I knew, he had) and we'd hang out on his porch, smoking until sunrise. What the hell, we had no school. We'd learned the only lesson worth learning: people were dogs. Beat them and they begged, feed them and they rolled over and waited for their stomachs to be scratched. Take your eyes off them, though, and they went for your throat. Large Louie made us the offer we'd been waiting for a year or so later. Milk was always agitating for some "real" work. The sad fact of it is that we were the garbage men of our profession, we were piece of shit white trash idiots with no education or noticeable links with the community. So we were hired to deal drugs, rub people out, beat up old codgers who didn't want to pay. We did the shit no one else wanted to, because they had better options, and because no one would miss us much if we got killed along the way. There were always more white- trash idiots dying to break into the real money. Milk was one of those dealers who did as much crap as he sold, and by seventeen he was already a major shithead, with little vials in every pocket. I didn't mind, as long as he kept professional. Nothing lasts forever, after all, and to his credit it did take him seven years to complete lose, and of course it was none of my fucking business. Milk liked to get high, so he got high. I didn't much care. I think that being high made Milk want to kill people, and that was why he was so big on getting the guns. Me, I wanted the gun because it was better work than pushing. Fewer hours, more style, more money. Then again, I was sober. Louie Drexel owned a restaurant, which was his true love. He invited us down there and fed us spaghetti with his personal sauce -not bad, really. Milk and me, we were dressed up -unfortunately we were only eighteen and as yet had no real taste in clothes. The ties were loud and the shirts short-sleeved, the shoes cheap, but we felt cool and that's half the battle, really. Louie talked us up for a while, telling what a great job we were doing, and how we shouldn't pass up investment opportunities with our new money. Louie could really be a pisser, sometimes. So he invites us into the kitchen, hands us each a shiny Beretta and asks us if we want to do a little job for the Boys. Milk was grinning a wine-soaked grin, and he held out his gun and dry clicked it at Louie. The big man jumped, and instantly began to swear. "What if it had been loaded, man?" Louie demanded. Milk actually shrugged. "I guess you'd be dead, your honor." I was cracked up. Louie was glaring about and looking mean, Milk just waited for the rest of the lecture. Louie saw this and sighed. "Alright, boys," Louie finally said, "let's act professional." That sobered us, Milk and me. We very much wanted to be professionals. It was nothing big, just some asshole on the take who needed a lesson he'd never know about, if we played our cards right. Nothing big, but -if we fucked up, we were small fry dealers forever, however long that was, and if we did good we were on our way to being bigger. It wasn't money, really, if we wanted money we would have skimmed more off the profits. It was more the quality of life. And we were made for the game, really. I'd been planning one murder for years already, meticulous in detail, and I felt familiar with that scene, and Milk, well Milk just didn't give a fuck. I had bought this old heap of a car a few weeks before our meeting with Louie, a Dodge Dart, pale green, with a hungry engine and a kick-ass radio I don't think I've played recently. Milk and me went over the situation while driving, the first of a million conversations between us in this car. I always drove, Milk never bothered to learn. There was a dealer from across town who was more or less skimming more off the top than he was giving the Boys, which is, I'm sad to say, the main reason most people get shot in this business. Anyone that dumb deserved it, I said, and Milk laughed for fifteen minutes. His front (we were duly impressed; we had never had a front) was a little candy store all the kids went to for candy and crap, a few pick-me-ups before classes. Milk and me, we actually staked the place out -we wanted to do it professional, you know? We didn't want to fuck up. We bought new suits, white shirts and the rest all black, and sunglasses, because we felt that this was our job interview, and we wanted to have some style. We'd seen it in movies, how all the killers wore black, looked mean. We liked that look. So, we watched the place all day, and waited til just before closing, before going in, all smiles and how-do-you-dos. You never make a mark nervous, you know. Smiles pave the way smooth. So, we grinned our way in and shot him dead before he could smile back, easier than I expected, didn't even think about pulling the trigger. Two shots, one in the head, the other in the chest, to make sure. Silenced shots, but not as quiet as you'd think, not like in the movies. We walked out -there was no reason to hide the carcass that time. Since then, the phone hasn't stopped ringing. Since then, Milk and me were up and coming. We were eighteen, and known. To celebrate the occasion, I invited Milk over my house to kill my dear old Dad. I did it over the phone, which maybe wasn't too wise, but I didn't need wisdom, I was eighteen. I'd been thinking about it for years, and I thought that as soon as we moved into that line of business I would take care of it. I'd been planning it for too long to let it pass, even though the fucker was old and didn't have much over me any more. Too many people like me give up on their little private dreams, and more often than not they end up in the nut house. I was nervous when I rang up Milk, I don't know why. I'd like to think it was just excitement, but I genuinely scared, I think. Maybe my Dad would prove un- killable. "Yeah." "Milk, it's Bill." "What's up?" "I need a hand, chum." "Eh?" "Another hit, Milk, this one pro bono." He paused, wondering, and then sucked in breath. "Arthur?" Dad's name was Arthur. "Arthur." "Good show!" and he hung up. We had to get drunk first, because no matter how much I hated the fucker, he was still my Dad and even though I was bigger than him then, all of a sudden, it seemed, I was still afraid of him. Back then only bars that knew who the fuck we were would serve us. Me and Milk settled into the Full Moon Saloon around eleven and ordered shots, telling the tender to just keep 'em coming, or we'd shoot him. Milk just up and said it, out of nowhere, and it cracked me up. "Shots of cheap, cheap whiskey for me and my buddy, and keep 'em coming or we'll shoot you!" he said, slapping the bar, and I almost couldn't breathe, I was laughing so hard. And as we got drunker, it became an increasingly loud joke. No one else, I think, got the joke, but no one else, of course, mattered much. We were there until a little after one, by which time we were pretty well soaked. The level of humor, of course, had deteriorated by that point; we were pointing at each other with mental guns and making slurred gunshot sounds. Walking to my old home, this never failed to start new waves of laughter. As I stood on the porch, dropping my keys in the dim light, we were still giggling. How we made it into Dad's bedroom without waking the old asshole up, I don't think I'll ever remember. But there we were, standing on either side of his bed, whispering and giggling, trying to figure out how to off the son of a bitch. "I always wanted," I paused for breath, "to slit his throat." Milk shook his head. "Too common. We could always shoot him!!" We stumbled about for a few moments, giggling through our noses and waving our arms about. When we'd finally calmed down again, we resumed our discussion under the sworn agreement that neither would mention gunshots. If Dad hadn't been so soaked himself, I don't think he would have slept through all the racket. "Poison?" Milk suggested. "Might not croak quick enough." I pointed out. "One desperate call...." "Beating?" I shook my head. "Too long." "Hanging?" "No rope." "Knifing?" "Couldn't do it." "Beating." "You already said that, you drunk son of a bitch." "Oh, right. Strangling?" "Too much work involved." "Well, smothering, then." I snapped my fingers. "You've got it, Milk. But it'll need some pizzazz, some little bit of poetic style, don't you think?" Milk shrugged, he wasn't very illuminated in that way, he suggested we just kill him and then I could work on the style points in my leisure, which I agreed to. "Right. hand me that pillow, sir." The trick to smothering is how long you hold the pillow down, especially if you wake the sleeping sod up and he starts struggling. Never do like in the movies and accept limpness as death; more likely the victim has simply passed out. A thorough job takes patience. I jammed a heavy feather pillow down on my Dad for almost five minutes before I was satisfied. Then I peeled it off him and checked to see if he was breathing, which of course he wasn't. I was sweating and out of breath. Milk was smoking. "Any creative ideas?" he asked. I ran a hand through my hair. "Yeah." I breathed. "Yeah. Get me a bottle of Scotch from the cabinet. Let the fucker drown, Milk." And so the fucker drowned. Five years slipped by, dozens of jobs a year. Milk and me got pretty slick at it, pretty creative. We added a bit of poetry to our jobs and the Big Boys loved it; we became favorites when they wanted a message sent. What really set us apart, though, I think, was that we were ruthless and loyal. You see a lot of people in our organization with one or the other, but very very few with both. There are thugs who don't give a shit about anyone and who'll do anything -but they usually get taken out at a certain point. Ruthless fucks don't give a shit about anyone, and that includes their bosses. The boys know this, so like clockwork the ruthless fucks die in bizarre accidents every few years, and a new wave claws their way up to replace them. There are also loyal little people -the Boys like them, they make good middle management: paper-pushers, accountants and such. They never betray, don't steal much, and like their jobs. They last a long time, but they tend not to get very far, which isn't very surprising. Loyal, all too often, translates into "afraid" in this business, eh? But Milk and me, we were both. Ruthless because we enjoyed our jobs and loyal because we didn't do any of it for the money. So, the Boys loved us, After a while we even got our claws into some of the big shots, because almost everyone had their own interests. It was capitalism, after all. The better at it you were, the sooner you woke up dead. When it was supposed to teach the next generation a lesson, we usually got the call, usually, at first, from Large Louie. The first time the call didn't come from Large Louie was when it was about Large Louie (Louie's fingerprints having been found all over one of the little princesses the Boys called daughters), and we were instructed to pay him a call and leave a message for all the other little shits the Boys suffered to exist in their world. The Boys can be really old-fashioned sometimes. We made a production of it, eager to impress and, after all, I figured that after all he'd done for us Louie deserved something special, to go out with style. No matter what, he was a dead man. Milk and me had a chance to make him famous. Milk was at his best, that day. We both dressed for success once we'd moved up in the world -not expensive, but neat and respectable. Striped shirts and solid ties, sportsjackets. Short hair. And sunglasses. We looked cool. That day Milk was scrubbed clean and shiny, wearing a new set of clothes, just a little high but mostly sober, in one of his manic moods. Milk and me, we made up an occasion and made reservations at Louie's restaurant. Louie came out to say hello personally, because we were old friends, then, and because at twenty three we were the top of the short list and everybody knew us. We made Louie take a seat and eat with us, we slapped him on the back and made jokes and laughed until we choked. In with a grin, right? Milk started to bust Louie about the recipe for Louie's personal, sort-of-secret sauce. He kept asking exactly how much Ragu was in it. The whole place was laughing, and Louie was taking it in good humor. We spent an hour drinking with Louie, trying to wheedle the recipe out of him, all out in the open. When he finally led us back into the kitchen to show us how it was made, I think the idea of being drowned in a big vat of his secret sauce was about as far from his mind as can be. I just stood there, smoking, inspecting the silverware, while Milk held Louie's head in this big pot. So he's holding Louie down, his arms up to the elbows in sauce, his new clothes ruined, and when it was done he steps back, licks a finger and grins at me. "Too much oregano." he says to me. I laughed all the way out to the car. Walking out to the front, I was laughing. In the car, Milk turns to me and says "Actually, not too much oregano. Too much Louie." and I almost crashed the car. We had to pull over. That was Milken when he was at the top of the short list. It wasn't vicious. It was a job. Generally, though, we had to get rid of the body after a job. High-profile jobs like Large Louie were usually message jobs, so we left the body to convey the message. Mostly, though, people got killed to get rid of them. Once the mark was dead, we had to clear the area. That's where I am came in. Milked liked to kill them, but I had to take care of the details afterward, He didn't like the messier parts of the job too well. My trunk has seen a lot of leaking bodies while I smoked and drove -Milk tended to nap while we cruised for the cabin. I think it was the only time he even slightly slept, those days. We never dug them or dunked them, that was too obvious and I guess too easy. We had professional pride. Also, for some reason, buried or drowned, bodies always popped up again. We wanted them to disappear, after all, and the reason we were known as the best was that our dead bodies disappeared, and never came back to haunt, never floated up to wash ashore, never got dug up at groundbreaking ceremonies. When we got through with them, it was like they'd never been there. This was how I got my nick-name: Hacksaw. I could understand why Milk didn't really like the second half of the job, I guess. I'd cut them up into really small pieces, up at this little cabin in the woods no one even knew still existed. Each piece went into a little plastic sandwich bag, and each little sandwich bag went into a big green garbage bag, which in turn went into the first butcher's scrap dumpster we could find. Whoosh! Disappeared. I suppose a few carcasses turned up in dog food or something, but hell, a little soylent green never hurt anyone. If you knew the dirt roads off of route 134 you could drive all the way to the cabin and not see a single soul. If you don't know the dirt roads, you got lost and still didn't see a single soul. No one but Milk and me knew about the place, I supposed. Now, there's just me. I can make the turns with my eyes closed. I guess it was only a matter of time before the crap went to Milk's brain and started scrambling it. It took a while, but when you don't eat, hardly sleep, and tend to be always stoned, even a new suit doesn't help much. He started getting paranoid and that crimped the creativity, because he was always sweating to get the mark done right away. He was still professional. He still got the job done. He just wasn't any fun to work with any more. After a while, I started to do all the work, Milk was just along for the ride. I was killing and bagging, waiting for my partner to clean himself up. It never happened. He started to really fuck up, after a while. Drugs do that sooner or later, if its a day to day deal. I'll tie one on and get fucked up now and again, if I've got a major reason to celebrate, but when it becomes a day to day deal, well, sooner or later it eats you up. Milk was getting sucked down through a straw and when he screwed up the Betty Scawalski hit it was obvious - to everyone. The Betty Scawlski hit was one of those pure deals I loved, perfect in almost every way, oozing with potential for a work of art. It was a blank canvas, and Milk seemed almost reasonable when the order came down. I was cheerful about it. Betty was a small time scammer, pulling cons for some of the bigger Boys. She'd been a Job before then, when she was younger and prettier, one of those girls the Boys gave to their friends when they flew in on business and needed to relax. But Betty had a brain hidden somewhere, and as she got older and the mascara began to run she didn't just fade away like all the others, she hooked on as a scammer running cons. Now, all scammers skim, it's known and expected. but betty had a brain, and people who think too much tend to plan retirements, and lavish ones at that. Betty started to leave the skim and keep the rest, and it was almost funny that she expected no one to notice. It was so simple. Just blow her away and leave her there, let all her co-workers know the Boys don't like getting dicked. I was in a good mood about it, I was ready to have fun. By the time we left for it, Milk was a mess. He was convinced it was a set-up, we knew too much and we were gonna get nailed. I told him they only waste people who fuck up, hell, we should know that, right? It took all I had to calm him down and get him to clean up and come along. I was pissed that we were going to have to just do a generic job, in and out, because Milk's nerves wouldn't have been able to handle anything more. But, pissed or not, the important thing about a hit was the hit -you had to end up with a dead person at the end of it, or it didn't matter how cool you were, how much poetry you pumped into it. It was okay to put a little beauty into the business, as long as you didn't lose sight of the objective. So, Milk's nerves in mind, we just walked into her apartment and introduced ourselves, plain and simple. I apologized, told her to be more careful in her next life, and stepped back to let Milk ice her. I was getting some of my cheer back, because that had been pretty cool, like a movie. Walked in dressed nattily and looking cool in the shades, said a few cryptic words of wisdom, and pow! She's iced. It had a nice closure to it. But Milken was losing it, and he had the stupidity to forget his silencer. The shot sounded like a goddammed peal of thunder in her fucking shoe-box of an apartment, as did the next three as he tracked her around the living room while she screamed and went absolutely insane. He dropped the piece in shock and started to freak out. I think I cursed then, too. By the time I had picked up his gun, grabbed him, and run for the stairs, almost seven other tenants had popped out of their apartments to see what the noise was. They all saw us - fuck, considering how long it took to get him to move, some of them could have made sketches, you know? In the car, as I raced away, Milk laughed like a god-dammed hyena, saying it was the most fun he'd had in years. So, I'm in trouble. I would be in more trouble if Milk were still breathing, but with him ventilated there is hope -I'll still have to be careful, I'll have to lay low, or the pigs'll snag me. Based on descriptions, they must know it was us, and a few of them, I don't doubt, would love to see us fry for as much as they can scrape up. Fucking Milken, swiss cheese for a brain. The cops'll oink about for a few weeks and then they'll either move on or get paid off -the Boys owe me that much, at least. But if I get caged before then, I'm a dead man. There's only one rule, once you get a serious rap: you talk. The Boys assume so, so you might as well. Once you're dead, loyalty is wasted on the living, you have to let your ruthless side shine, and blab. So that'd be the end of Hacksaw Dunston. I'll lay as low as can be -the cabin seems natural, not to mention convenient, since I still have Milk to deal with. It's not very well stocked, but it'll hold me for a few days, until I can get some shopping done. Milk was nice enough to die with his wallet in his pocket, stuffed with ill-gotten gains. I'll live off of the Milken estate for a sight, I guess. Outside my car, it's quiet. I lit a cigarette and puffed in the cold, damp air, looking around. The cabin is a shadow to the left of me, my car the same to the right, and me and the crickets the only thing moving in all of the forest, it seems. For a while, I can't help but just smoke and listen. And, unfortunately, think. I probably owe Milk something. He was the only person I knew, so I guess I owe him something -a decent burial, a tribute, a eulogy, something. But there's no help for it. There are no choices, anymore. I began to talk to myself. Or, I was talking to Milken, who was dead, so it was like talking to myself. The cabin is one big room, with a lot of shelves and a few ragged pieces of furniture. In the center of the room is a stainless steel slab -it always reminded me of an operating table. Directly across from it, hanging on pegs in the wall, are the butchers tools -knives, saws, chisels and hammers. There's not much else in the place, but junk. I don't know where I got the junk from, or why I kept it. Milk is cold and stiffening, his mouth and eyes open, his suit wrinkled. Getting him onto the slab is not the easiest thing I've ever done, and without Milk's nonstop sarcastic drawl to cover it up I heard all my gasps and grunts, all the dull thuds of his limbs slamming against the table. They all echo too loudly and I feel a need to make noise. "I think you've been gainin a bit a weight there, Milken old Hoss. Bloatin out on the sweets, I'd say. And you used to be such a trim fucker." Milk stared. The problem with talking to yourself is the distinct lack of surprises in the conversation. "I swear, Milk, I swear you gained weight to make this hard on me." I imagined a grin playing across his gray face. "I don't deserve that, you know." I turned away to study the rack of tools for the hundredth time in my life. "I had no choice, man, no choice at all, thanks to you." I stopped, forcing myself to stop, grabbing the big cleaver and hefting it. I loosened my tie and patted myself down for matches, finding none. Grimly, I sucked on my unlit cigarette and stared at Milken, feeling the weight of the blade, thinking about all the other luckless fucks I'd dismantled here, in the silence in the dark. For a moment, I wondered if maybe I didn't at least owe Milken a burial. No one was going to dig the bastard up out here. I didn't have to give him a headstone or anything, after all - just the right to decompose cleanly, in the good dirt, instead of rotting with cow parts and getting ground up into dog food, gnawed by rats. I shrugged, suddenly. "Gnawed by rats," I muttered, "eaten by worms, who's to say there's any fucking difference?" I asked. I always started with the hands, worked my way in. I splayed his hand with a practiced motion and brought the cleaver down. ======================================== *** SELF-INDULGENT RAMBLING *** Nobody Wants To Play Wit' Me by Jeof Vita ======================================== Ed. Note: The Coolio lyric the author wished to quote here deleted due to banality. Hello you little piglets out there...all two of you. My name is Jeof Vita. Please note the pretentious spelling of my first name...I'll get to that in a second. I am one of the founding (that is to say I was there when Jeff thought it up) members of The Swine. I provide covers, spot illos, and an occasional article or two when the mood suits me. You've had a chance now to peruse not one, not two, but three issues of this not-so-humble publication we like to call, The Inner Swine. What do you think? No, seriously. Did you ever even pause to consider why we're doing this? During all those countless hours that you've spent pondering the wisdom contained within, did you ever stop to wonder how this endeavour got started? Yeah, right...well, I'm gonna tell you anyway. Way back when, during those college years (read the years when some of us actually attended college while others of us just lived in the area because we had nowhere else to go) we, the founding members of The Inner Swine, got together around a filth encrusted kitchen table to map out our fame and fortune. We did it for one simple reason...because we wanted attention. Sure, some of us fool ourselves into believing that there are loftier goals but when it comes down to the brass tacks ...we just want someone, anyone to notice us. In my case, it can be summed up in three little words, "...by Jeof Vita." "...by Jeof Vita." Those words ring so sweetly when they roll from my lips. Why? It means I did something and there is proof that I did it. "In New Brunswick today, a family of three was brutally murdered by Jeof Vita, an unemployed editor who, according to police reports and eyewitnesses, attempted to force the family into reading him a story." See how cool that is? Well, it's cool to me because I am an incurable egomaniac and the consummate swine. I love to do things and be recognized for it. I spell my first name differently because it is a shrewd marketing ploy. It's memorable. I wear a ridiculous haircut because you won't soon forget it. Shallow, perhaps but I don't give a rat's ass what you think of me...I only care that you think of me. Now, before you turn that snotty nose up at me, stop and take a look at all of yourselves for a minute. "Good job, (insert your name). That was a hell of a plan. We're promoting you to (insert insignificant job title)." Or how about, "Oh, (insert name) that was the best anyone has ever given it to me! Pant, pant, pant." I rest my case. Believe you me, it is no different here at the Swine. Just take a look at the very issue in your hands. How many times do you see Jeff Somers' name in the book. Go ahead, count...I'll wait. I'm up to 116 myself. My point is, Jeff's a pig too. Oh sure, he'll argue that he writes everything because no one else will, but if you ask me, that's a flimsy stance. He doesn't really want anyone else to write anything. Ok, he does throw the occasional article to that rage-filled loony, Karen Accavallo. You might even see some poetry from that Lauren Strutzel gal. But, c'mon! Think about that for a minute. Jeff is the Editor...Karen and Lauren are female...with the title comes power...with power comes sex...and my favorite color is blue. The only reason I'm writing anything is because I can beat Jeff up. The other members of the Swine are no different. Rob Gala, tree-hugging wearer of socks and sandals loves getting credit for anything! True story, he even relished the credit of recruiting the finest pledge to the Iota Psi Chapter of Sigma Chi[1]. He took credit for delivering a human being into the hands of an organization that would make that human being pay for friendship. And pay I did. Ah well, these are the lessons of life. Kenneth West. An enigma wrapped in a riddle contained within a puzzle. You never see anything written by him in the Swine. But you will always find stuff written about him. You see, Ken is the most insidious of the Swine. He doesn't seek to be given credit. He seeks to be made into the stuff of legend! All these wondrous tales that Jeff spins about him, all those funny quotes, all those horror stories of walking in on Ken as he steps out of shower...Jeff didn't really write them. Ken made him write them. Somehow. I can't even tell you why I am writing this paragraph, but I simply know that I must or bad things will happen to me. Ahh, the Inner Swine. A forum for us to plaster our names everywhere. And as time goes on, we'll want more. We'll want our names stretched 20 feet high on the silver screen. We'll want them sky-written above our heads wherever we walk. We'll want you to hum them to yourselves as you sleep. It'll happen too. Just you wait. So, there it is. The Inner Swine doesn't want to change your life. It doesn't want to influence your thinking. It doesn't claim to be the voice of reason in a topsy turvy world where OJ walks, the Cowboys still win the Super Bowl every cold, unfortunate year, and the New Jersey Nets sign Shawn Bradley as their superstar. All we want is for someone to see our names, on screen or tattooed across your mom's butt...and to pay us for it. At least, that's the way I see it. Thanks for your support. This article was written, pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, de-briefed and numbered, by Jeof Vita. [1] Ed. Note: this pathetic reference to the author's boyish Fraternity is left in to avoid silly tantrums. If the kid needs love so desperately as to join a frat, and continues to need it so desperately that he continues to mention said frat even years after graduating college, why upset him? Awwww.....he still loves his brothers. The Editor finds fraternities ridiculous and unnecessary for the healthy individual, natch; our advice to Mr. Vita is simply: grow out of it. ======================================== 'They can't censor the gleam in my eyes' -Charles Laughton ======================================== WHY NOT SUBSCRIBE TO THE INNER SWINE? $5/year, $9/two years, four issues a year. A BARGAIN, YOU CHEAP BASTARDS. Write us at PO Box 3024, Hoboken, NJ 07030 or subscriptions@innerswine.com for more information.