Eat Shop Sleep Fuck

Bean Newton

Issue 10 * Fall 2006

When re-inspecting the more polemic aspects of Bean Newton's later works, one comes across such as "Eat Shop Sleep Fuck," a po-mo pastiche that may be an early attempt at current anti-consumerist, anti-globalist screed. Or maybe not. -- E.W. Wilder

Eat Shop Sleep Fuck

Jellybean trilobytes smack kippered steak against my window. Tonite, oh breathless Deborah, tonite. The Drive-In amphitheater's one bad speaker crackles in the blue-fish dawn, elemental, my dear Watt's son, the steam from a million outlets sing Volta, the Teslonic gospel told in the whistle and pop, the snappy dresser of electron-scanned glory-a in excelsior diorama of infantilist Matchbox phantasy, cars crushed into greased-out plastic city-scope, ice-cream melting in miniature over the tiny streetwalker's tanktops, right down to her 1/32nd scale vaccu-form titties. That, my friend, is market saturation, the suck and glow of a diesel engine idle beneath the clatter of a pancake-fed aftergloom, grooving into neon. After the meeting at the IHOP, the night has been descried from the gaps between the sidewalk tiles, slabs, actually, abs, lab coats, scientifically proven to give you a six-packed mid-section in the time it takes to say "corn-fed beef cubes and black mushroom sauce." Anchor me, spanker me, tanker me too, I'm on coke in a flying zoo: "We no longer appreciate the animal in the wild, at one with its natural environment," "Stacy" told me over our fruit smoothies in Hell, an upscale juice joint downtown. The brass fit the tumbleweed decor the way a paper bag fits a girl's ass. I didn't wonder anymore, couldn't with the theme song from Gilligan's Island pissing through my head like a robot on Rohypnol, shackled with student debt and rolling on a dorm-room floor. This is what I've worked for and fought wars over - the freedom to roil, insensate, on vinyl tile. Even the top of the existential heap succumbs to the same fucked phenomenology: blotter acid and bacon, weasels in suits and full-fledged faggots in jock-straps slapping butts on Sunday night Defbowl Jam Machine Spaceliner. I've seen better. In fact, I've seen the best fags of my generation . . .

But they'll never come out, too afraid of the state of their balls in the locker room, their contracts blood-splattered and looped around to form their numbers. What do you think bought you that mink, bitch? Slap-happy homeyhands and churchgoing addicts. I gave at the door, spank you very much. Mulch-headed freakshows gabbing on about milkspots in your toaster ovens and screed-infested blackhole nosebleeds and monster truck rallies on the moon. It's all about modern selling techniques: disappearing car ads and toothnail paste cream from problematized, stigmatized areas I didn't even know I had. You couldn't even show that on the air 10 years ago, but the air now, well, you can, and that's the important part, blast a light-stream at any given of the sounds of clouds of protoplasmic fog. It's all about creating new life forms, like cyborgs or the house-sized roaches who'll soon knock on your door and tell you to turn the music down, some of us have jobs. I'd like to crawl inside that one and creep around for awhile, systemetizing my food route through the city with preprogrammed randomness. Now they've built new robots designed specifically to "think like a bug." As if, in some minuscule parts of our brains, we didn't already. Cheaper by the billion, really, rode the six dozen to the unchartered territory of the Northboast coast, up by Nucrosoft, a pilgrimage we'll make by day, health and war of Billwilling. It's peanut butter and Dr. Peeper along the way, El Camino, the Tao, perhaps that crimson path all lined at the side with greenbacks. I've sacrificed a lot to get me here, a deer, a ram, a budding career in alchemy. Imagine my surprise when they said they didn't do that anymore. They said "We don't do that anymore," just like that, like it was something over which they had no control. But we know who makes the rules, shitting back in their sleazy-chairs swaying slightly in the breezes that blow the to and fro in the ivory towers. They're the interrectual elite, the high-dollar high-class jet set culture makers. They might even make $40,000 in a whole year. Imagine that, when corporate America is barely squeaking by with stock options and a new BMW in every pot. Promises, promises. It's medicinal, of course - for my glaucoma.