IOWA HIGHWAY PATROL

(excerpted from COME DOWN FROM THE HILL S & MAKE MY BABY)

After spending a couple of nights crisscrossing the Midwest, we conclude a gig in the roarin’ podunk of Iowa City. We leave the gig and hit the road. Our destination: Chicago.

Due to every other member of the Soundmachine mistaking our tour across America as a 3-month holiday (thus their constant imbibing of any libation and/or pharmaceutical they could inhale down their gullets), yours truly was voted the only member cogent — and sober — enough to guide our tour vehicle into Chi-town.

Reality tells me later that his descent into chemical depravity had been a reaction to my liaison with the Lebanese Lounge Singer. Her function was merely perfunctory and utilitarian, and her self-absorption was beyond insufferable. My sleeping with the enemy was a betrayal that he took personally. Looking back, he was right.

Cut back to I-80, Eastbound, I haven’t slept in damn near two days and all I want to do is get to the Windy City, get a hotel, draw the curtains and hibernate. Before we can make time on the interstate, however, we must appease the appetite of the Lindy, which contrary to the wisdom of Glen (the owner of the RV Emporium where we got the vehicle), consumed far greater than a mere 10 mpg.

In Tipton, Iowa, I find an exit with a convenience mart/petrol parlor; everybody in the Soundmachine entourage is either playing possum or is truly zonked, so I grab my traveling coffee mug and exit through the side door of the motor home, give the lady behind the counter a couple of twenties and commence dispensing with the fossil fuels.

After topping off the tank, I drag ass back and get my change from the portly clerk, refill my coffee and retrace my steps back into the Lindy. I turn over the motor, put ‘er in drive and SHIT!

In my haze, I neglected to disengage the fucking hose from the vehicle. The kiosk itself is completely thrashed… FUCK… As band members begin to wake up, I truck back into the convenience mart, humbled and completely apologetic. The counter wench is completely FREAKED and hysterical — “You’re the second asshole this week to ruin one of our pumps, yadda, yadda, yadda.” I’m calm in comparison, I offer my license, the insurance papers, and a copy of the rental agreement but she’s having none of this. “I don’t care about the paperwork, you’re gonna’ have to wait until the boss lady gets here.”

(It turns out that the boss lady lives over ninety minutes away. It’s now 1 AM — I need sleep! I tell the gal, “Look, call the Highway Patrol, I’ll fill out an accident report, here’s the paperwork…” “I don’t care about no paperwork, you’re gonna wait until the boss lady gets here.” “Look, I don’t how you handle traffic accidents in Iowa, but in California we show our insurance papers and the officers fill out accident reports.” More hysterics on behalf of the counter wench, she refuses to call the HP, so I leave.)

So there we go, EVERYBODY in the Soundmachine is wide awake as we motor for about one hour towards the Mississippi River, out of Iowa and into Illinois and Freedom! We get to Davenport, I can see the fuckin’ muddy-ass river and BHHWOOOPPP — it’s the law dogs.

I am asked to step out of the vehicle as Fingers and Reality are stuffing more pills that have long passed their expiration date into the crevasses of various analog, monophonic electronic keyboards.

“I understand you had a little trouble back there in Cedar County. The clerk at the Jiffy Stop said you fled the scene of an accident.”

“No, not really,” I say, “I offered her my license and proof-of-insurance, but she was having none of that.”

“That lady is my neighbor, she lives right down the road from me; Are you calling her a liar?”

“Umm, no not exactly, but she did refuse to listen to reason,” I backpedal.

They haul my ass back to Tipton, Iowa in the squad car, with Reality and Fingers in tow. We get to the Big House and the bailiff decides not to throw me in with the drunks, but with the felons who are waiting there until the State Penitentiary can create some more room for real criminals. Great. It’s about 5 AM at this point and I still haven’t slept. I decide to sleep on my back because if I’m going to be violated, at least this way I’ll see it coming.

I’m awakened at 6 AM — “Getup!” — for a meal of flapjacks and coffee. I refuse the coffee, because I am going right back to bed (or so I think) after some carbo-loading and a phone call to my lawyer. I am told I’m in for “criminal mischief.” Worst case, according to Lolita’s Mom’s Attorney in Los Angeles: “Ten years.” But that’s worst case, he assures me. Until the phone call, I have refused to make eye contact with my fellow cons because I was sure I would be released at any moment. Wrong. After a morning of cleaning the jail bars with a tooth brush (I actually didn’t want to interfere with the other fellows routine, it kinda’ looked like I would just get in the way — ironically, these guys really knew how to work a toothbrush, although you would never know it from their smiles) and putting Field & Stream magazines in a stack (“They’re already in a stack,” I tell the trustee, “Put ‘em in another stack,” he counters), I am finally shuffled off to the Courthouse to see the Magistrate around noon.

Handcuffed, I pass Fingers and Reality in the corridor as they take snapshots of me with their Instamatics. Their goddamn cameras have flashbulbs popping and I feel like Frances Farmer on her way to the Funny Farm. Two hours later — after sixty minutes of shuteye in the last two days, I am led into a small office with the “magistrate.”

The judge is in a wheelchair and his hands are all sclerotic and discombobulated. He immediately tells me that he was interrupted from a luncheon and a golf game (!) to come review this matter. He then feebly attempts to turn the page in the police report concerning my arrest. Great, I think to myself, I’m going to jail for the next ten years because I put a crimp in social calendar of the Stephen Hawking of Jurisprudence — who apparently golfs.

At this point the Magistrate’s phone rings. And rings. I’m new at this: I don’t know whether to help him left the receiver off its cradle or whether that will piss him off more. I decide to let him struggle with the telephone. He finally gets it positioned in the groove of his shoulder blade and tells the party on the other end: “Yes, I’m reviewing it right now; I’m really disturbed by this.” Ten Years.

He wrestles the phone back into its holster. “It says right here you accidentally destroyed a fuel pump at the Jiffy Mart out on I-80.”

“Uhh, yeah, I accidentally destroyed the fuel pump.”

“If it’s an accident, then how could it be mischief?”

“Uhh, yeah,” I say.

“I suggest you get Iowa in your rear view mirror as soon as possible — like now.” Not a problem…

+++++++++++++++++++++

Come Down from the Hills & Make My Baby: Second Edition

Due to popular demand — and the fact that used copies of the book were fetching nearly 50 clams on Amazon.com — KBP announces the release of a second edition of Cole Coonce’s Come Down from the Hills & Make My Baby.

More details are here: Second Edition Available Now!

Next up (and coming soon): A Kindle edition of the book!

DISTURBING HISTORICAL DISTORTION/WHAT THEY DIDN’T MENTION/GHOSTS

by Cole Coonce

(excerpted from THE DEVIL’S OWN DAY; Release date: Summer, 2008.)

DISTURBING HISTORICAL DISTORTION (1933)

As the film continues rolling, children play with sheets and scare each other, apparently an eureka moment for the formation of the Klan. This historical distortion disturbs Rommel.

“This film is less than useless,” he barks. “This is not the history I expected at all. Is this not the story of the origins of the Ku Klux Klan? Where is the ‘Wizard of the Saddle?’”

From the stuttering turntable Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries pitch-shifts in full song. Onscreen, Ku Klux Klan vigilantes battle a hapless militia of black men.

After grunts of disapproval, Rommel rises suddenly and walks towards the film projector. A hyper-real superimposition of Klan footage on the Lieutenant, with two hooded horsemen galloping and holding a cross, make the staff officers scrinch their eyes.

“Turn it off!” Rommel fumes and whacks a rostrum with a pointer. The adjutants jump, reach for a light switch and fumble with the film projector.

“Enough of this buffoonery and propaganda. I am unconcerned with cartoonish portrayals of final solutions.”

WHAT THEY DIDN’T MENTION (2001)

The more I study the collectibles store, the more I realize the place is a shrine to Nathan Bedford Forrest. Despite interrupting their lunch hour, the husband-and-wife antebellum memorabilia merchants spend the better part of the afternoon discussing the myths and folklore of the object of their passion, Forrest.

The stories are legend. One tale after another of Forrest risking his own neck in some daring ill-advised personal assault on enemy positions while his inferior forces triumphed exquisitely over a legion of bamboozled Yankees, each battlefield assault punctuated with pithy, percipient yet cornpone punchlines such as “Get there firstest with the mostest” and “Never stand and take a charge… charge them too,” also “Get ‘em skeered and keep the skeer on ‘em.”

“This Forrest fellow was epic,” I tell my Cousin.

“Yes, he was,” he agrees, “but these fine folks didn’t tell you about all of his exploits.”

“Really? What did I miss?”

“What they didn’t mention was that Forrest was also the founder of the Ku Klux Klan.”

GHOSTS (1933)

“To know Forrest, I must go to the source,” Rommel cries. “To Brice’s Crossroads, the site of Forrest’s greatest triumph and the battlefield where he exercised his infamous pincer movement, movements to the detriment and annihilation of superior Northern forces. Find me a guide – a survivor… somebody who was there.”

“Herr Rommel,” Burgdorf reasons, “that was seventy years ago. Is there anybody there who is even still alive?”

“If not, we shall be guided by ghosts.” -30-

CLOSED FOR LUNCH (2001)

by Cole Coonce

(excerpted from THE DEVIL’S OWN DAY; Release date: Summer, 2008.)

CHAPTER 5: CLOSED FOR LUNCH (2001)

The hand painted sign hanging on the door of Coontail Collectibles reads: “Closed for Lunch.” The store looks deserted. I knock anyway. Inside, a back room door opens, a matronly proprietress emerges, motions with a forefinger for us to wait, makes her way through the aisles and aisles of antebellum-era thockes and then lets us in. We are joined subsequently by her husband.

“Is there anything in specific y’all was interested in?” she coos.

“Naw, just kind of tire kicking,” I answer. “And trying to get a bead on the store’s etymology.”

“Well,” she replies,” we specialize in Suth’n memorabilia, if that’s what you mean.”

“And some Confederate artifacts as well,” her husband chimes in.

“Indeed,” I say. Pointing at a painting of a Rebel officer in a nest of dozens of Yankees who had taken aim with their rifles at point blank rage, I ask: “What’s this then?”

“That is a battlefield portrait of Nathan Bedford Forrest taken at Fallen Timbers,” the husband explains.

“He looks like he’s in a lot of trouble.”

“Oh, he made out all right,” the husband says. “Notice how he has hoisted a Yankee soldier as a shield.”

“The damn Blue Bellies shot their own man and Bedford Forrest made it out unscathed,” his wife adds.

“The Yankee died, but Ol’ Forrest lived to fight again… and again,” the husband finishes.

The Fallen Timbers yarn has the elements of proper Civil War folklore: Southern chivalry, Northern ineptitude, replete with tragi-comic results.

“Well, I’ll be dipped in dogshit,” I say. -30-

THE AIR STINGS OF CELLULOID (1933)

by Cole Coonce

(excerpted from THE DEVIL’S OWN DAY; Release date: Summer, 2008.)

CHAPTER 4: THE AIR STINGS OF CELLULOID (1933)

In a strobing smoke-filled classroom at the Potsdam War Academy, a silhouetted quartet of uniformed men puff cigarettes and fidget and watch a screening of D.W. Griffith’s Birth Of A Nation. The air stings of crackling celluloid, and of the soot of history slowly melting from the heat of a movie projector’s lamp. As the film strip burnishes from age and friction, emulsions decay and nitrates metastasize, mixing with hot balls of dust that float through the tobacco haze like dirty satellites in space. It burns the nostrils and the singes the eyelashes.

In lieu of an orchestra or a proper pipe organ, the soundtrack to the silent film is a perpetual whir of the projector’s motor, a clattering grind of mechanical teeth champing on 16mm sprockets interrupted by a smattering of coughs from the assembled military staff.

A plump adjutant fiddle-fucks around with a flakey phonograph machine. A pair of staff officers, Burgdorf and Maisel, befuddled by the movie they have been forced to watch – an American film which purports to explain the necessity of the Ku Klux Klan in the Age of Reconstruction – squirm from boredom. A fourth viewer, Lieutenant Erwin Rommel, equally impatient with the movie’s plodding plot and maudlin histrionics, taps his creased thighs with his leather field gloves. “If Goebbels made such shit he would be shot,” the Lieutenant quips, and the rest of men chortle. The screening is Rommel’s idea; he commissioned a print because of his interest in Nathan Bedford Forrest, the savage and savvy Confederate General who, after the Civil War, became the Klan’s inaugural Imperial Wizard.

“Schneider! The needle!” Rommel urges, his frustration with the film compounded by the gnawing silences of the malfunctioning phonograph. The portly adjutant prods the phonograph, and strains of Wagner’s Die Walküre jump starts to life.

On the screen, former friends — and now adversarial soldiers — shoot at each other with primitive rifles and then a Title Card reads: “On the battlefield. War claims its bitter, useless sacrifice. True to their promise, the chums meet again.”

The scene cuts, and Griffith’s portrayal of hand-to-hand combat in the American Civil War resumes. A Confederate soldier is shot and drops to terra firma. His “chum” from the North attacks with a fixed bayonet, and just before the inevitable skewering, recognizes his fallen Southern pal, smiles and puts his weapon down.

“Why doesn’t he kill him with the blade?” Maisel asks, his lanky frame bent in a ball of confusion.

“His enemy must be his brother or his cousin, I think,” Burgdorf responds.

Their discourse is interrupted by Rommel. “In war, there is no room for sentimentality,” he argues. “Americans lack the cruel instinct necessary for pure, complete domination.”

Birth Of A Nation continues in background; as strings swell, the compassionate boy is shot and falls over his dead friend. Dying, he caresses his chum’s lifeless body. “The American’s last great conquest was maybe manifest destiny,” Burgdorf says. “Then they got soft.”

“Yes,” Maisel nods. “Maybe nothing was left so they turned on each other.” -30-

COONTAIL COLLECTIBLES (2001)

by Cole Coonce

(excerpted from THE DEVIL’S OWN DAY; Release date: Summer, 2008.)

CHAPTER 3: COONTAIL COLLECTIBLES (2001)

“The South has got some sins on its soul that it will never be able to get clear of. But so has the nation. And quite often the attempt to correct these sins leads into still greater sins through the method in which they were corrected.” – esteemed Civil War historian, Shelby Foote (1916-2005)

When Grandma died in 2001, she was to be buried in the same cemetery in Aberdeen, Mississippi that interred Nathan Bedford Forrest’s brother. Before her burial, I left the Episcopalian Church where she lay in state and I gathered my cousin to accompany me on a tour of Aberdeen (a town I lived in briefly as a youth — and as a teenage rebel, one I couldn’t get away from fast enough) … We walked through the downtown area to see what was left of it – to see what hadn’t been usurped by the local Wal-Mart on the outskirts of town. Beyond the machinations of market forces, I also wondered how much of the so-called “New South” and its enlightenment about racial co-existence had taken root there – had rural Mississippi finally followed the societal vicissitudes most of the country had taken for granted a long time ago? During our walk many things were as gothic and languid as they had been twenty years earlier, the last I had visited the place: For example, the diner was still there – the same lunch counter one of my spinster Aunts had picketed in the 1970s when the restaurateurs had belatedly acknowledged the 1965 Civil Rights Act and finally started seating and serving blacks. The local walk-in movie house was still there – the same bijou that as a teenager in the 70s I patronized and watched Joe Don Baker portray Sheriff Buford Pusser in “Walking Tall”; back then what struck me as curious was that the theater owners made negroes sit in the balcony.

Nowadays the theatre is shuttered. My guess is that videotape rentals at Blockbuster had taken care of the actual movie-going experience and had rendered discussions about segregated seating in the local nickelodeon moot.

After marching up and down the Main Street with my cousin, we take a wider orbit into residential area that surrounded downtown. This is not the richest section of town nor the poorest, but here blue and white-collar blacks and white co-exist on streets where antebellum mansions can be scored for $70,000 or so. Encountering sundry slices of life sipping soda pop and swinging on porches or walking down the street, my cousin and I acknowledge that everything seems peaceful if not simpatico.

In our travels, I see a sort of Quonset hut turned into a store. The sign outside reads “Coontail Collectibles” and its iconography featured a raccoon.

I cannot figure out if the semiotics and semantics of the sign are harmless enough or are an outrageous racist caricature. Do folks actually collect coontails around here? Is that a euphemism?

“C’mon, man,” I tell my cousin, pointing at the smiling ‘coon. “We have to deal with this place.” -30-

Prick Magazine Review of “Come Down from the Hills and Make My Baby”

The second book from journalist Cole Coonce, Come Down from the Hills & Make my Baby, is a semi-autobiographical tale of a band obsessed with drag racing, drag queens and the apocalyptic downfall of the entertainment industry. The first person narrative chronicles the struggles of the Braindead Soundmachine, a disco punk metal band from L.A. that creates artsy noise with guitars, keyboards, and a revolving door of drum machines and whacked out female singers. The band ends up being sponsored by a drag racing pit crew, befriending a down-and-out filmmaker, hiring a manager with one eyebrow, finding spiritual guidance in a Japanese transvestite, and touring with a German industrial band called DMFDM. Throw in a little drug abuse, infidelity, cowboy hats, and technical difficulties and you’ve got a volatile band on the brink of self-destruction. This angst-filled tale is like a beat novel for today’s disgruntled youth. -Jonathan Williams, February 2005 Prick Magazine.

Amazon Review of “Come Down from the Hills and Make My Baby”

Come Down from the Hills and Make My Baby

5.0 out of 5 stars

Unusual title — unusually good book!

By vaughn “dupont” (portland, oregon)

First of all, with a title like “come down from the hills and make my baby” it isn’t suprising that this book caught my eye.

I’d never heard of Braindead Sound Machine but that didn’t stop the book from engaging me immediately, almost like being told a really fascinating story by a remarkably lucid drunk or recently recovered drug addict in a red leather booth in a some dive, which can be a good thing in theory.

I was impressed with the author’s ability to sustain my interest in a musical group whose music i was (and am) unfamiliar with — in fact they should have given away a cd with the book for free. this is more a cautionary tale about the record industry and the damage done than a self-serving ‘music’ book about some band’s career. and i suppose that’s what is MOST compelling about it; the author’s slow realizations about the nature of his dreams and aspirations (however subversive they are)can’t survive in the even more hostile environment of the idiocy of the music biz. any musician, and anyone that likes music, should read this book. -30

cf. amazon.com

ROMMEL OVER SHERMAN/WHISPERS IN THE WIND

by Cole Coonce

(excerpted from THE DEVIL’S OWN DAY; Release date: Summer, 2008.)

CHAPTER 1: ROMMEL OVER SHERMAN/WHISPERS IN THE WIND (1942)

In North Africa, on the simmering southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, Nazi Field Marshall Erwin Rommel raises his binoculars and attempts to make sense of the swirling fans of desert dunes. In a maelstrom of blood, motor oil, grinding wheels, sand and tank snot, men are chewed up like gristle in a series of slow industrial accidents. Rommel is indifferent to the suffering.

The wind blows and the Field Marshall wipes his eyes. It wasn’t supposed to be this difficult… but Berlin had insisted on splitting the Reich’s firepower and manpower into two fronts — on separate continents, making the strategic deployment of arms and bodies half as efficient and twice as bloody.

His troops are getting pummeled, but they continue an inexorable march into the shape-shifting sands of utter annihilation.

“Hit them on the end!” Rommel growls, but his famed pincer strategy cuts no muster on a battlefield mushy as Malt-O-Meal.

It all continues to turn to shit. Disorientation is now situation normal. Infantry is immolated and Panzers are pummeled. The desert heat, the fumes, the bone-shivering bombardment, the earth is made of marshmellows and quicksand. Rommel wipes his eyes with a gloved hand, disbelieving.

Still trying to gauge the size, strength and position of his foe, he looks through his glass once more and the dust parts just long and wide enough to create a hole in his consciousness. He shakes his head. He cannot believe what he is seeing: The Allied forces are not in tanks, but are on instruments from a forgotten century. It’s Yankee cavalry. From the American Civil War… “Hit ‘em on the end!” he repeats, oblivious to the absurdity of the hallucination.

“Vas is Das, Field Marshall?” an adjutant inquires.

“Sherman,” Rommel exhales.

“Sherman tanks?”

“Nein,” Rommel mutters, lowering the glass again. “William Tecumseh Sherman.”

“Scheiße,” the adjutant whispers. -30-

“THE DAY OF THE HOUSE OF PIES”

“THE DAY OF THE HOUSE OF PIES”

by Cole Coonce

(excerpted from PULL THE PIN: The K-Bomb Reader; an extract of COME DOWN FROM THE HILLS AND MAKE MY BABY)

THE DAY OF THE HOUSE OF PIES

I meet BZ the Screenwriter for a cup of jake and some lemon meringue at a place called the House of Pies on Franklin and Vermont in East Hollywood. The HOP’s habitues are old folks, the last vestiges of another Los Angeles, another Hollywood. Or maybe another lifetime on another planet. They are from an era when folks dressed in suits and put on a hat just in anticipation of a trip out of the house to get a piece of banana crme pie. In The House of Pies. Its architectural design is a weird, flattened variation on the Googi architecture that dominated the landscape in Southern California back when the car culture really took root in the 1950s and 60s. Sharp, salient and pointy, Googi would puncture the sky and catch the attention of passing motorists by its very shape.

*****

Except for the House of Pies and some forgotten car washes in the ghetto, Googi has all but disappeared. Los Angeles has always possessed a real hankering to obliterate its past. It has no sense of history, and doesn’t want one. What earthquakes and fires fail to accomplish, the limited intellect and attention span of Los Angeles does. Most examples of Googi architecture were razed and bulldozed long ago, but somehow — perhaps because it was a muted variation on the style — the House of Pies survived the purge. In that tradition, the House of Pies angles are smashed two-dimensional and obtuse. It is one of the few buildings left that survived LA’s architectural purge of the 1980s, when boxy mini-malls, industrial complexes and 99¢ stores infiltrated the landscape like a virus.

BZ fits right in at the House of Pies. There is something about the old gomers there that makes him feel right at home. BZ is also not of this time. He considers this modern era — the Infotainment Age — a mistake.

*****

I am late and when I get there he is already working on his pie as well as a weathered copy of the Nathanael West novel, The Day of the Locust. I order a cup of jake and a piece of pie. I ask about the plot and the theme of the book, which BZ tells me debuted in 1939 and scandalized Hollywood as an expose on the damaging effects of the motion picture industry.

“West not only tapped into the hubris of this town, but how the Dream Factory creates not just illusion, but its logical byproduct, disillusionment.”

BZ stabs the air with a forkful of gooey pie foodstuff. “It’s not that different from the people who make this pie filling.” Jump-started by gobs of processed sugar and caffeine, BZ is off to the races, kicking into high gear on a soliloquy on the Entertainment Industry as the New Military Industrial Complex.

“Hollywood is a self-perpetuating cottage industry,” he continues, “that must churn out more and more entertainment in order to survive. To grow. To flourish. Its insidious nature is such that it has to convince the Locusts, the consumers that they need to purchase and absorb this stuff in order to make their lives meaningful. Which was a lie worthy of Goebbels, who was just beginning to reach his stride in the Third Reich when The Day of the Locust was written. West was prescient in that he knew that entertainment is merely cultural fascism.”

“Are you telling me that there was little difference between, say, Irving Thalberg, Paramount Picture, pie filling and the Third Reich?”

My coffee and rhubarb arrive.

“The manufacture and distribution of pie filling is the least problematic. There is very little difference between what product is coming out of the studios and what propaganda was issued from the Politburo or the Reichstag after the fire.”

“But isn’t a screenwriter such as yourself equally complicit? Aren’t you as evil as, say, some Kraut in a guard tower at Dachau?”

“That is where you are wrong, sir. It all boils down to self-awareness. Read this book. No one in it is exempt from West’s wrath. But the protagonist-slash-anti-hero, Tod Hackett, shows uncanny and astute self-awareness that makes him the least dubious character in the entire manuscript.”

“Self-awareness?”

“Yes, self-awareness. It makes all the difference. Tod Hackett shows such traits in a painting he calls ‘The Burning of Los Angeles.’ Hackett finishes this painting just as Locust reaches it denouement in the form of a holocaust of fire on Hollywood Boulevard.”

“So this book is about the Apocalypse?”

“Yes. Rapture. The Judgment.”

“So you’re saying Hackett’s self-awareness spares him somehow? Umm, I still don’t see how self-awareness gives any of us an exemption.”

“Of course you don’t. You do not possess any. You are lost in East Hollywood and you happen to play guitar, the most reductive form of expression since the Sex Pistols immolated in San Francisco in 1978. You have this delusional idea that music is somehow different from the other forms of electronic media that corrupt the sanctity of the human spirit.”

“I am trying to reconcile this with your script, Zombie Cop.”

“You are missing the point then. As an artist, you are fucked but you do not know that you are fucked. Therefore, you are truly fucked. On the other hand, I am fucked, but I know that I am fucked. Therefore, I am not truly fucked.

“Do you see the difference? Of course not, because you are truly fucked.”

-30-