Thank goodness I'm still young. I can safely navigate through all of the nonsense until I find my way. I think of someone like Al Goldstein. The wreckage of my life is about .0000000000000001% of his because I'm still young enough to do just about anything (if the world doesn't end on December 21st, 2012.

What's odd about reading Al Goldstein's blog on "Booble" is that it makes ME bitter. Or rather I identify with some of his bitterness. I think of him and perhaps someone like the Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey. Both men were somewhat contemporary with my Grandfather. Think Lawrence Welk to Elvis Presley to Charles Manson, etc... Watching interviews with them they speak in the vernacular of that time. And I think: Wow! That time was superior! I was born toward the end of that time, but by the time I was old enough to go out and enjoy for myself things had become just so bland and lifeless.

Al Goldstein certainly lived the life. He fucked over 7,000 women, hung out with Hugh Hefner, fought First Amendment battles, and made Plato's Retreat his home away from home. He watched Lenny Bruce in the Village. He interviewed John Lennon, etc... Where are all of these people today? Just a bunch of bland corporate clones. Why was I not young and viable in the New York City of the late 1970s? People of quality in my generation have missed out!!! All we have are the Pussycat Dolls and Disturbed. Not to mention bland, lifeless, soulless corporate porn.

I lifted this from Al's blog:

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"I just got back from a four-day trip to the Internext Expo in Fort Lauderdale where Booble sprung for my flight and a swank hotel room to press the flesh and present the Booble Girl of the Year award to Lisa Sparxxx. The plan was to make a speech, continue my run for the presidency and hopefully get laid.

Booble treated me very well and they are a great group of people but I have to say that meeting the other companies down there made me want to blow my brains out. The pornographers of today are complete bores. It was like being at an accountant’s convention without the fascinating spreadsheet macro-shortcut presentation.

Speaking to the pseudo-dead webmasters was like talking to a bunch of corpses in a cemetery. As I walked around the expo and met people, I kept waiting for a dead hand to grab my leg from underneath the floorboard.

Two years ago or so, I worked for a streaming video company and there I learned that nothing distinguishes one porno company from another. Differentiating them is like studying the anomalies in assholes and splitting asshairs.

Fuck films are identical as turds and nowadays so are the companies that produce and deliver them. Some are shaped like a snowflake and others like the letter “L” – but they both smell bad and both are still shit.

The movies are one cliché piled onto another and the men who purvey this are equally dumb and boring. The guy I worked for at the streaming video company was actually a good guy and I was sorry that I quit. I was just embarrassed by the content of the product.

Even though I still masturbate every other day, which is impressive at my age, I am still handcuffed to the same footage. The girl’s faces and bodies change but it’s the same moaning and groaning. Each girl carries on like she has never seen a cock before or looks like an emaciated Auschwitz survivor with garish fake books. To this day, and all the women I have been with, not one has ever begged me to cum on their tits, like I see in porno films every day.

Porn makes marriage and intimacy much more difficult and these knowing, cold-hard-fact webmasters are pimps in a black ghetto pushing their hookers onto unsuspecting welfare-check recipients. They are manure pushers (except for Bob of course).

At the end of the Expo, when there were just a few straddlers left, I felt like I was in a leper colony filled with young, yuppie, pimpled punks. None of them had ever even heard of me! If it weren’t for me they wouldn’t exist.

I did not get laid either but I did jerk off in my expensive hotel room to some run-of-the-mill porn. There were many 18-21 year old hot girls down there yet because my empire and to these webmasters, my legacy, no longer exists - they had no use for me."

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Al mentioned in another blog that he felt like an anachronism. I think anyone who ever had a heart, a soul, a belly full of guts or a head full of dreams must feel like an anachronism. I know I do.

Think of just one person from the past (Lenny Bruce, etc...) and one place from pop history (Plato's Retreat, etc...) and one will realize what horrifying times we live in.

My problem is not that our society has become decadent or depraved. My problem is that our society is not decadent or depraved enough - at least not in the proper way. At least not in a HUMAN way. Our strongest instincts have become the most soulless of commodities, as depressing as the Wall Township Kmart.

And, yes, in a Hegelian fashion, the heroes of the past like Al Goldstein have created the HELLISH anomie of today. Come to think of it, from day one Al Goldstein built his own HELL, PRISON CELL, and WORST NIGHTMARE.

Yes, nowadays porn producers are pimple-faced California jocks who have never READ A BOOK or heard of Al Goldstein. Al Goldstein made it possible for JOCKS who hate both the body and the mind to produce the ultimate oxymoron: STERILE FILTH. (That's a good one! I wonder if I thought of that or accidentally plagiarized it? Who knows and who cares nowadays? Nowadays accidental plagiarism or Anxiety of Influence should be the least of an intelligent person's worries.)

I must say that I also like Al Goldstein because Al Goldstein brings me back to when I myself was happier and, yes, more successful even! Al Goldstein saved me from the loneliness when I moved to a tiny little room in Manhattan when I was just 19 years old. I had just escaped from a horrid, brutal, violent, provincial cesspool in New Jersey and I had this whole new world of sex, drugs, and Rock N' Roll right before me. Then I had my own pitfalls.

By the time I had pulled out of that mess I was writing for metro which, unfortunately, has still been the closest I have come to any kind of mainstream or even counterculture success. When I think of what it was like to see my very original thoughts in a major publication almost every week I too have to remind myself that I am only 28 and that I can get published again. But whooey! Will I ever be able to recapture the magic of my time with metro? I hope so.

But anyway, by this time I found out Al Goldstein had ended up homeless and I wrote a metro column about him, indentifying and sympathizing with his plight. So Al Goldstein played a part in two of the happiest and most productive periods of my adult life. One before my mess and the other just as I was pulling out of it.

But then even THAT time seems like a long time ago. The summer of 2004 when everyone was talking about Bush vs. Kerry and New York City seemed like the only sane place in the entire country (most of the country was Red back then.) Now when I talk about 2004 I sound like an old fogey. I sound like Anton LaVey talking about pulp fiction and Tin Pan Alley records or I sound like Al Goldstein talking about Studio 54 or John Lennon's assassination. Even I am OLD!!! I sometimes feel like I've been aging by the second and time is somehow speeding up before we all get sucked into that black hole in 2012.

No wonder I never fit in. No wonder I was always ready and willing while the others appeared clueless or uninterested.

But are there any answers? I think of an acquaintance who wrote a poem in which he mentioned the post-postmodern. Is the post-postmodern possible? Now I suppose it is. The postmodern was roving teen gangs and orgy clubs. The post-postmodern are skateboarding black kids talking on i-Phones and Internet porn produced by brainless surfers.

Things have gotten so bad that I think the only answer is to become a Luddite.