Rancid - Clockwork Orange (by JourneyToTheEnd666)
and i was hesitant to buy B sides and C sides because i thought it would just be the unwanted leftovers cut from real albums. HA! it’s like a whole other album! foolish me, rancid never sucks!
ohh the treasures beneath tables!
cleaning up a table today at work, i looked underneath it, as i’m paid to, and spied a wallet. SCORE! kneeling down, i picked it up and opened it to see what i got and… ohh Norwood, you dirty dirty girl! it wasn’t a wallet at all, it was a legit Cincinnati Police Department DETECTIVES’ BADGE!!!!! my god, i’d found the anarcho-punk who resents authority’s holy grail! all sorts of devious plans drifted into my mind at that instant. i might even just hide it away in my room as a trophy. that moment the dining room leader walked up behind me and asked me what i found. upon turning around, she could see that “HOLY FUCK!!!!” look plastered across my face that i could not hide as i patheticly protested that i hadn’t found anything. “whatever it is, hand it over.” she said in that mom tone she always uses with me. eventually i had to, and she put it in the lost and found, locked away in the managers’ office. DAMN IT, WHY CANT I HAVE NICE THINGS?!?!?!
the destruction of my bubble
you are a 20 year old, relatively fit young man with a biting sense of humor and dumpster-loads of cynicism you believed would shield you from all harm. your friends consider you close, and you can tell each other pretty much anything. recently you started a prescription for Adderal (A.D.D. medication), which has done wonders. you can concentrate better than you have in years, and this has led to an explosion of artistic inspiration. you can express thoughts to words better, you can spend hours playing your bass guitar writing songs. you’re learned to take your time drawing, which is leading to better graffiti art than you’ve EVER designed. the writer’s block you’ve been suffering from towards the novel you’re writing was demolished. you feel better mentally than you have in years. you get more enjoyment out of music, something you never thought possible. things look bright for you. you aren’t even suffering from the dietary issues your doctor warned you about when he gave you that prescription. also, you’re getting tons of hours at work, 21 straight days with an unknown number more in the near future, actually. and that’s okay, because that just means a fat paycheck, and you NEED money right now. hitting that proverbial “wall” your coworkers keep warning you about couldn’t possibly happen to you. you’re physically fit, mentally stable, driven by necessity, and obviously, not like your coworkers. you’re different. you’re not like anyone else they’ve ever worked with. you’re BETTER!
lost in the supermarket
for reasons best left to your imagination, my work pants’ crotch ripped clean from front to back as i sat down into my car after i left the record store (the wrath of Napalm Death’s new album, which i had just bought, perhaps?). now if i had the day off tomorrow, this wouldn’t be praticularly urgent. i would head down to the thrift store and buy another pair for cheap, and nothing would’ve become of it. but unfortunately, that’s not the case. i work a double shift tomorrow, so things took a drastic turn. what can i do? the thrift store is surely closed by now, and i have to be at work at 9am, so going in the morning isn’t really an option either. slowly but surely i came to a miserable realization; i would have to go to Walmart. let me explain. i haven’t set foot in a Walmart with a genuine purpose for being there in about 4 years. sure i’d gone there with friends to fuck around as Walmart’s really intended, and once just to use the restroom, but never to seriously buy anything. i refuse to feed any corporate machine, especially one that presents a threat to all small buisnesses. if you do shop there, i’m not saying i’m holier than thou, but honestly you’re just contributing to the problem. anyway, now i’m furious! i literally had no options. Walmart’s closest, Walmart’s cheapest, i’m short on cash and i need to conserve my gas week to week as much as possible. so begrudgingly i hop in the ol’ Pontiac Grand Am, crank the Napalm Death (ironic in that there are few bands in extreme music who have taken a stand against corruption and corporate greed than they, and here i am headbanging my way to Walmart to them) and hit the gas. upon entering, i’m abruptly reminded why i loath the place apart from it’s attitude towards the working class. first, it’s agonizingly bright inside. between those giant unshaded industrial lights in the ceiling and those stark white linoleum tile floors, i damn near need sunglasses to navigate this strange purgatory of savings, and keep in mind this is at 9 at night as well. after my eyes adjusted, i started noticing the people around me. these are the “Valued Walmart Customers” that represent a cliche perpetuated by unoriginal stand up comedians we’ve all heard of. there’s the ancient smiling puppet cheerleader at the front door that conveys Walmart’s carefully groomed “folksy, salt-of-the-earth” atmosphere they’ve worked SO hard to try to convince us of known as the “greeter”. walking on i saw a haggard pregnant white trash woman, haggard white trash husband at her side, with their haggard greasy-looking offspring surrounding them staring deep into the clearance bin of a mixture of underwear and socks as i imagine Harry Potter stared into the pensieve (yes Lilly, an HP reference in one of MY notes, that just happened), with a mixture of curiousity and excitement. and if that’s not a beautiful portrait of the failure of our education system then i don’t know what is. next i came upon a very old, very obese woman in a “Jeff Dunham” tshirt (that she no doubt bought here as well. if there’s any more proof necessary that Walmart wants you to shop ONLY at Walmart, it’s this dottering old moron. somehow, some way, Walmart effectively brainwashes it’s customers into returning, even with their eerie “come here for the rest of your life” vibe that stalks their aisles. I’m not going to pretend to understand how they do that, but make no mistake they are and if you’re not smart enough to get out alive they could get you too) looking at the magazine section with her equally old, equally obese husband with a look of contempt. i slowed down my pace. whether or not i’m just trying to get out of there as fast as i can, i cannot deny the people-watcher in me a potential moment of pure entertainment, and a look like the one this lady was giving the magazines is usually a good indicator. sure enough my instincts paid off, and she looks over at her husband, offended, slightly violated look still clinging to her face as she said not at all quietly in a voice remeniscent of the witch in Snow White “i jus’ can’t believe they allow somethin’ like Ebony (an african american culture mag if you are unfamiliar) in this place, let alone next to m’ Home ‘n Garden! damn niggers are evr’where nowadays!” HOLY FUCK!!!!!!!! needless to say, my pace sped back up pretty fast. i do NOT need to get dragged into a racial arguement with 2 GIGANTIC rascists (physically and in practice). the civil war is over and the south lost, white trash! it’s time to put the Dixie Flags back in the attic and stop beating off to your poster of the Dukes of Hazzard car and give tolerance a chance.
AND THIS ISN’T EVEN FUCKIN’ OVER!!! you’d think “peter, SURELY there’s nothing else this place could throw at you”, but you’d be wrong! after finding the work pants (no small feat since they’re tucked away between to very close together shelving units that dont have any notifications on them at all. i really more stumbled upon them than actually “found” them) i started digging through looking for my size, the not that uncommon “34-32”. but with at least a dozen piles of what had to amount to near 100 pairs of pants overall, there was not one “34-32”. they had “33-32” which i tried on and promptly lost all feeling to my feet for a few seconds. just 1 inch less in the waist, my ass! heading back, i carefully dug through again, paying close attention to the size labels, and started seeing some strange ones. i was damn near transfixed by a pair of “50-29”s. think about that for a sec. that’s a little under twice of me around, and 3 inches shorter than me. what kid of crazy fucked up dimensions for a human being is that? was god trying to create a bouncy ball to play with but since the head kept getting in the way he gave up and sewed the genetics for this fucked up goliath into some poor pegnant woman expecting a cute baby? then i stopped to think for a second. i had to remember that i wasn’t in Hot Topic shopping for skinny jeans, i was in WALMART!!! ohh yeah, i thought to myself, this makes a little more sense now. that said, who was the outraged behemoth that complained they didn’t have their size? if i was Walmart, i’d have said sorry dude, i didn’t know they made you, now go loiter around next to the bakery or something. but Walmart being Walmart, they said fuck it, call up Nicaragua and tell the sweatshop employees that one of them is going to have to give up one of their shabby tents they live in because we just got a special order. all the while, even since i walked in, the sound of a crying baby has been echoing off the bolt-on high metal ceiling of this place. now i dont know about you, but for me, the sound of a crying baby causes me measurable amounts of physical agony. i believe that is rooted deep in my psyche by my year and a half i have spent working at a restaurant in the ghetto where crying babies are a constant and inescapable reality that usually means a larger than average mess on the table. needless to say, the sound gets to me. it crawls in my ear and runs it’s fingernails down the chalkboard of my soul. but the way it echoes off the roof gives the entire store (i tend to think of it as a “territory” myself, due to the tremendous size) a haunted vibe, like an old British prison where the executioner used to rape and torture death row inmates, except it’s a Walmart in Cincinnati where some bad parent neglected her kid. tomato, tomahtoe. eventually i settled for a pair of plain black jeans instead of work pants. i had to do SOMETHING to get out of there! and that’s where the story ends, i hopped back in my car, cranked the Napalm Death, and got the fuck out of there before the guys from Deliverance showed to pick up a copy of Guns ‘n Ammo. the morale of the story here is, so long as you’re not a dirt-poor white trash fuckhead who cant afford anything else, try to budget away a little extra so you don’t have to visit PurgatoryMart any time soon
p.s. if you dont know, that title is a reference to an Clash song. and if you have any interest in the origins of punk at all, you are doing yourself a serious favor in looking that song up, or ANYTHING on London Calling for that matter. it’s catchy as fuck, and i’m pretty sure it’s a satire about…. well, something. problem is the Clash were so goddamn talented with their use of metphor in their songs that it’s hard to desern the true meaning. good luck figuring it out, and thanks for reading!
WTF BASSIST CHICK?!?! DONT JUST STAND THERE!!! THE OTHER 2 ARE PLAYING, GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER!!!!! or is this some weird new wave hipster shit where the bassist is only there to occupy space
