Guest writer Bill Leighly -- poet/prince of the Midwest -- logs in:

Turn Away from the Machine

I  got home from work yesterday and grabbed a busch light and turned on the news... preface this with the fact that I have been in intense pain since Wed. after having a fucked-up root canal, and that the right side of my face has swollen to the size of a moderate softball (yes I am now on strong antibiotics and I have some vicadin if necessary) and that my mood under severe pain and sleep-deprivation always swings into the intensely cynical... anyways I had walked home from work thru the rain, picked up some drugs at Walgreens and then a six-pack and some smokes at the Licka Stoh (no I am not an alcoholic... I only drink on certian days at certain times... the same goes for the smokes... actually I am a long-distance runner but somehow started smoking only while drinking beer, I now have a hard time separating the two activities)... so I had arrived at my decrepit flat, exhausted as hell from no sleep Wed. night (that night I spent moaning in misery and watching my face swell up while popping codeine pills every hour to absolutely no effect) and flipped on the goddamm tube... I don't watch too much T.V., hardly any in fact... but because I had arrived home early (leaving work due to the discomfort) I was in time to catch the World News on one of the networks (I don't have cable)... I believe it was NBC... I lit up a Camel and took a sip of beer and leaned back to relax... after absorbing 30 minutes of theWorld News on NBC I had come to the conclusion that it was nothing but propoganda interspersed with multitudinous automobile commercials... later that evening I headed out into the cold rain for a beer or two at my pub... there I watched more goddamm automobile commercials interspersed with a basketball game... anyways the purpose of this rambling blog is that I am FED UP with American middle class society, FED UP with the gluttony, the wastefulness, the materialism, the mindlessness that constitute its foundation... FED UP with this modern existence under the Empire where every original thought has been extracted as ruthlessly as the root from my throbbing tooth...so I shall turn away from the Machine...