Ugly Music for Stupid People (Or Should it Be: Stupid Music for Ugly People? How the F**k Should I know?)

I'm an ugly motherfucker. So what? So FUCKING WHAT?

(You got a fuckin' problem with it?)

"Well I've been to Hastings, and I've been to Brighton, I've been to Eastbourne, too, so what? So what?"

Anti-Nowhere League - "So What?" NOTE: EXPLICIT LYRICS.

(Just in case you've never heard that song by the Anti-Nowhere League, most famously covered by Metallica. Much like the Misfits, Diamond Head, and Angel Witch, they owe a HUGE debt to Metallica for getting them worldwide exposure.)

Anyway, back to it. I'm ugly. I'm putrid. I'm a scab upon the face of the world. I'm the Thing That Should Not Be. And well, IDGAF.

I came pretty close to dying a few years ago. But for an accident of fate, everything and all that is this reality would have been rolled up in a little snot ball and tossed into the eternal Void as far as I'm concerned. So I don't give a fuck about pretty anymore. Pretty is wormfood.

But I excel at ugliness. Hell, my art is ugly, my writing, though undeniably beautiful in patches, is mostly about hideous people doing hideous things in a manner most hideous to observe, cogitate, ponder, and reckon with. I was born, apparently, for hideousness, and that is my karma in this godforsaken world.

It's not as if I'm unbalanced. (Well, actually, legally I'm DEFINED as "unbalanced." However, society is itself unbalanced, as well as unjust, and not a helluva lot of fun on a Saturday night. At least not for Yours Truly.) I spent some time in an institution as a child, and that was not my first whiff of the depths of ugliness to which my life could plunge. Hell, I already had an inkling of that at age five or six.

Maybe they should institutionalize me or something...

Suicidal Tendencies - "Institutionalized" Frontier Records - Official Music Video

Unlike Cyco Mikeo, no fucking Pepsi is gonna cure what ails me. I exude a stench of sulfur. When I was in grade school or high school, or maybe it was university, some esteemed facilitator of the Higher Math explained to us younguns all about "mores" (pronounced "moar-EHS," NOT "moors") and "folkways", two concepts that I took with me on my long, cold sojourn through the American Night. One, the concept of "mores," stood for, like, "little violations" of societal norms, like maybe picking your nose while eating Sunday dinner. Other, more serious violations, constituted a skirting of the "folkways"; i.e. the ways and means by which a group or society itself hopes to preserve itself, keeping itself intact from outside forces that might seek to subvert or otherwise do damage to its hierarchical and highly-authoritative power structure.

I must confess: I don't give a fart in a hurricane (or other gale-force winds) about the mores or folkways. It's what's deep buried beneath this ugliness, just nihilism. Nihilism. Nothingness. You must be saying to yourself, "Self, that poor, hurting soul must need some warm, compassionate, gooey sticky, compassion-stuff (or years of intensive psychotherapy) to bring him out of the quandary of his dark existence." Well, no. If I've learned anything by this point in life, it's that people blather on and on with cookie-cutter homilies, exposing their programming in the hope that they can convince you that they hold the magic fairy dust of truth in the palm of their hand. But it's all a CON, on the part of the professionals, as well as the laymen.

Don't talk to me about this or that. No one allows you to let a single bean go uncounted in your mental storehouse. You have to take THIS side or THAT. They don't allow you any leeway, and you aren't allowed to be a complex or even multi-faceted individual. As an artist, they want you to pump out the same thing over and over again, with little in the way of variation, and NOTHING different ever allowed to slip through. You have to be consistent in your subject matter as well as your quality of output. And the shit will always float to the top. I'd rather just watch re-runs of "Greatest American Hero."

The Misfits "T.V. Casualty"

Ugliness is a sin in our society, which is ugly enough on its own without having to add insult to injury. I give back ugliness because that's what you've given to me. What did Manson once say, "When you look at me you see THE REFLECTION OF YOURSELF."

Stephen King once said, "I'm warped. I am. You don't do this sort of thing if you're --if you're all right!" (That was the "This Is Horror w/ Stephen King" special they use to air back in the Eighties, where he's dressed in a white turtle neck, has slicked-back hair, and talks about Gacy and Eichmann.)

I've walked through 47 YEARS of life, a lone, solitary ogre, a conundrum, something as overlooked as a hedgerow; a Bearskinner out of a fairy tale, condemned to my Seven Years Wandering through Seven League Boots of the Mind, thinking my own thoughts, working my own magic, having my own world. I don't NEED yours. "Prison is in your mind. Can't you see I'm free?" Charles Manson.

But they get you eventually, ugly, grim, determined ogre or not. In the end, Quasimodo is left in a tomb to clutch the bones of Esmeralda, forever. Bully for the world and such "justice." The Elephant Man lays down to sleep, "like other people." Sooner or later, we all take the dirt nap.

No one has ever wanted me for anything. When I sit alone in the darkness, waiting, I feel an affinity to that shadowed gloom. This world is not mine, I don't belong in it. And, furthermore, I no longer care. It's a temporary arrangement, and not worth the grief they try to heap upon you in the form of shame and guilt, those twin cudgels with which the world beats you. I do what I like, think my own thoughts, and "all other thoughts reject."

There's little left to say. In the end, the worms beckon, no matter how ugly you are, or how beautiful. You may be ugly on the inside. You may be a ravening beast with a beautiful exterior, a predator, or a lion from the dark side; Ted Bundy, maybe. The most hideous lies are told by sanctified lips.

Would you like to kiss those lips?

I never thought the future would be this. But here it is. There are no promises.

In the end, everything turns black.

That's decay. That's ugliness. It touches every face, with its eternal blemish. And it never. Misses. The mark.

In closing, if someone asks me on my deathbed what I thought the one redeeming grace of life was, for me personally, I'd have to say:

Punk rock.

(As Kurt Cobain once observed, "It's the total escape from pain." Or somesuch thing. The quote may not be exact, but there it is. Love and napalm, Tom B.)

"UK 82" Compilation (Exploited, Anti-Nowhere League, and others)

P.S. I don't sell myself. I find the idea of having a "brand," trying real hard to promote the things I do, and kissing a lot of ass to "build a following" incredibly dull and even humiliating. Tiresome. I'm fine with dying in obscurity.