I Hope You Like Run On Sentences
by Steven Taylor

---I regret every day that I didn’t go into advertising. As I sit, hour after hour, unemployed in front of my mother’s television, I wish that I had revolutionized the advertising industry - that everyone would be recruiting me for their companies, that television, for thirty seconds at a time, nine minutes per half hour prime time situation comedy, would feel my presence envelop the growing minds of little children, warp the sour brains of teenagers, burden the overworked heads of parents around the country. Not to be hearing the latest sellout campaign from the latest hard-up-for-exposure-and-money musician. Not to be looking at automobiles at every extreme angle possible. Not to be looking at some “Hollywood Ugly” guy wear the latest brand of cologne/body wash/hair gel/zit treatment/khaki pants/basketball shoes/leather gloves in his convertible and all of a sudden, from the minds of sex-starved quasi-virgin “creative” consultants envisioning a perfect geek universe, see him attract the attention of superficial “I love you for your hot hot pants and, oh wait, you’re actually a really nice guy too despite your appallingly unattractive face/body/hair/love handles” kind of women they covet so. If I had it my way, instead of enlisting the weight of washed-up B-celebrities to shill your latest incarnation of boysenberry-fused cola drinks, they’d get real people, on the streets, giving accurate opinions of the product. “This can of Fruity Cola tastes like a cross between a three-day-old open jar of out-in-the-sun jelly and the kind of watered-down flat soda you can only achieve through poor planning, horrible product research, and feet sweat sprinkled vigorously with desperation for cornering the food-regurgitation market.” Viewers will see this commercial right after the latest bug-eating-contest show and think to themselves, “You know what? It can’t be as bad as all that. I bet it’s, in fact, quite tasty and refreshing. I’m gonna go buy me a case of that right now!” Then, they’ll try it, vomit all over their giant white wooden spool doubling as a coffee table, ruining the latest issue of Maxim, and word will spread. They’ll tell their friends. Friends will buy it out of curiosity and doubt. Then, they’ll realize the devil does exist and Soda Conglomerates are canning and selling his urine. By that time, the natural running time of new sodas will have run its course, the company will still have sold millions of dollars worth of their bastard product, and-the best part - they will have told the truth in their advertisements the entire time. People will respect them for their honesty. They’ll be more willing to go out and buy variations of their soda they tout as “quality” and everyone will be happy. Meanwhile, I’ll get to sit in my mother’s new house (that I’ve purchased), watching her new 62-inch, plasma, high-definition television, reveling (while still in my hole-in-the-crotch, rust-colored stained long johns) in the fact that, in between pissing-contest reality shows created by fifty-year old men hiding in the trees in elementary school playgrounds with pads of paper, listening to five year olds talk about what’s fun and cool, I will have created thought provoking entertainment in thirty-second intervals, for nine minutes every half hour. ---But I didn’t and I’m not and I never will. I’ll remain in this one-bedroom house my mom’s still struggling to make mortgage payments on, sleeping on this bed-pulled-from-brown-couch with the lumpy mattress and an uncomfortable lack of springs all around my ever-spreading ass cheeks. I used to live on a university campus. I used to live in a university-sanctioned dormitory. I used to work as a food service type person who would scoop out bowlfuls of “healthy” frozen yogurt at a place where old ladies with permed hairdos resembling thick bushels of pubes on their heads covered by hairnets would accept payment with a cigarette-ravaged “Have a nice day. Please come again.” I used to study the great English writers of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries until I realized they were full of shit and they bored the hell out of me. Professors would try to tell me that my generation’s culture is too violent, too predictable, too derivative. From The Bible and Hamlet to Crime and Punishment and The Great Gatsby, I’ve realized that violence is necessary, that sex is interesting, that criminals capture the reader’s mind and tortured heroes sell manuscripts. I didn’t need Scorcese or Tarrantino or a six-hour block of South Park to figure that out. So, now I study the art of writing and I’ve found out some things about myself I’ve never thought about before. I’m a chronic procrastinator with no dreams, no goals, no determination, no drive, no persistence to finish, nor the ability to start well, intermittent flashes of brilliance drowning in a marinade of feces and I know this about myself. It’s good that I know this. It gives me the confidence to go up to my mother after her 10-hour shift at I-hop where tight-assed college students go for their 95-cent bottomless cups of coffee and leave 5-cent tips, and say, “I don’t want to be a teacher anymore. I don’t want to believe the façade that I’ll make a difference on some 9th grader’s life thereby instilling the ethic in her to work hard and nurture her poetic talents. I don’t want to make $25,000 a year, working long hours for 9 months, living in debt until I’m 50 and burned out and cleverly known as Mr. Assface (when my real last name is Jones) hanging by the neck from a noose connected to one of the many exposed pipes in my 1 bedroom basement apartment in downtown Fuckville, California. I’d rather make $00,000 a year as a freelance writer (by name) where I find writing inspiration only when I feel so depressed about my life that I create manuscripts about suicide and esophagus raping and child-killing, and then send these to Better Homes and Gardens magazine as a joke and wait for the professional, courteous responses in the mail, laughing all the way to the nuthouse. Aren’t you proud of me, mom?” ---I didn’t graduate college-imagine that. Yet, I still find the time to complain about my life to my one and only friend, Robert Pussymore. He started hating school long before I did, so he dropped out at 17 and joined the army at “18.” I still write him 20-page rants, no page breaks, no paragraph indentations, no lack of run-on sentences, haranguing the perils of the downfall of old rock bands of the seventies, Paper Mate black-ink pens that run dry in mid-sentence, my run-ins with public library security guards. ---But, if I’d majored in advertising, or anthropology, or archeology, or even Arabic language, then maybe I’d be in a different place. Maybe I’d have a job. Maybe I’d have something to do to pass my days besides 12-hours of Cheetos and Saturday Night Live reruns, with brief periods of release in the local romance sections of my own version of hell. At the very least, I could have avoided two years of “What are you going to do?” What are you going to do after college? What are you going to do with an English degree? Isn’t dropping out the equivalent of an English degree anyway? Shouldn’t you just prepare yourself for asking this question, “More coffee, Mr. Buttshire?” When that’s all you hear from family and friends and your only responses are, “I want to be a teacher / I want to be a writer / I could always go into editing / Hmm, you know, I really don’t know / Maybe I should just find a job now, just in case,” then you know you’re doomed. I never had much of a plan going into college. I never had a plan during college. I never planned on finishing college. Now I have to face, “When are you going to get a job?” from my mother when she gets home at midnight and I’ve just finished cleaning out my bong. ---It appears I’m in a similar boat my mom was in twenty years ago, only with slightly more testosterone, slightly smaller bosoms, and a complete lack of a uterus for which to have a seed planted in me on a drunken evening after being consoled by a guy I just met while at a bar with my friends because some sleazebag called me a slut. Without the crying, screaming, puking, slobbering, toothless mouth to feed, for some reason I don’t feel the same motivation to spend the next score of years being talked down to by customers who hate their jobs almost as much as I hate mine, who feel vindication in flaunting their “customer is always right” power by pounding on the table while crying out, “Where’s that glass of milk I ordered? I wanted that milk before the meal!” ---Is this what I busted my ass for in high school? I figured then, once in college, the people will be more like me, I’ll date and get laid and drink and party and I’ll learn everything I ever wanted and I want everything I don’t and the freedom . . . the glorious freedom will propell me to bigger and better things! I’ll be published by 23, have an 8-book deal by 25, kill myself through overindulgence at 27. Then, I get to college and I find out it’s just accelerated high school with more free time on your hands to spend being similarly ignored, ridiculed, alienated; holding your dick under your sheets in fear that your roommate rustled about in his bed-bunk below and possibly heard the piston-paced penis-wrangling, waiting fifteen minutes for him to fall back asleep before taking a breath again. When I realize what I squandered; not giving a fuck about a social life and strictly focusing on some career should have been my only objective. But, then I remember my complete lack of drive and patience and I stop worrying about it. ---Now, at nights, before I go to bed, I think about school again. I think about taking a writing class, writing about my adventures. I think about going to class one day, before everyone else gets there, after they’ve all read my obscene self-fornication stories, sitting completely naked on the teacher’s desk, masturbating, with the words “Life Imitates Art” painted on my chest. Cliché, yes, but still more creative than 95% of television commercials today.

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