SHORT: Howl [2023]

HOWL

I

I saw the greatest minds of my generation
co-opted to write back-end coding for the likes of Google, Amazon and Facebook.
Starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through line upon line of proprietary algorithms
then hauled before Congress and told to explain themselves
Which of course they could not.
Alexa: sell my data to the Russians.

I sometimes wonder if any moment in human history
can ever, or will ever be as great
as that scene in Problem Child 2
when Junior pisses in the lemonade
and his obnoxious adult neighbour drinks it.
Consider the conceptual brilliance in an act of comedy so sublime:
a 10-year-old child urinating into a glass pitcher
and handing it to the adult who has previously insulted him;
while we, the audience, all know that it’s actually a jugful of piss.
He chugs it down merrily,
smacking his lips at the end
and uttering the masterful one-word synopsis:
“Tangy”.
What is the point of even going on
when the greatest artistic endeavour in human history
has already been achieved.
I ask myself this daily while contemplating life here on earth.

I once had a dream
that the lovely Hollywood actress Anne Hathaway was my wife.
In this dream, we would awake each morning
and she would proceed to sit on my face and disco dance.
It was a glorious dream
Vivid and stimulating
So you can only imagine how upset I was
to awake and find
my actual wife lying beside me instead.
Extremely upsetting,
and not at all how I wanted to start my weekend.

I saw a piece of graffiti once
written on the cubicle wall of a public toilet.
It said, in plaintive text without punctuation:
“What is love
Baby don’t hurt me
Don’t hurt me
No more” – Haddaway, 1993.
That struck me as curiously profound
for some reason.

On the subject of love, I sometimes play a fun game
in which I substitute the word ‘love’ in any given song title
for the word ‘muff’.
It brings me endless amusement
giggling at the likes of
How Deep Is Your Muff
Make You Feel My Muff
Muff is a Battlefield
Need Your Muff So Bad
Muff in an Elevator
Can You Feel the Muff Tonight
Bizarre Muff Triangle
and Can’t Get Enough of Your Muff, Babe.
It is a childish game
Infantile, even
But it brings me comfort in this world of pain.
Try it yourself sometime
and you too may know what true spiritual fulfilment feels like.

II

Did you ever stop to consider how,
prior to the release of the most recent Rambo movie,
The fifth in the franchise
That this would be, quite literally,
Rambo Number 5.
A little bit of violence, all night long
A little bit of slaughter, in the sun
A little bit of massacre, here I am
A little bit of gore makes me your man.
Aaaaaight.
As it turns out, the series denouement was basically just
a really nasty version of Home Alone set on a ranch,
though I certainly enjoyed myself.
But to think, all this could have been easily avoided
John Rambo’s 40-year orgy of destruction across multiple continents and American states
If they’d just given him what he asked for at the start of First Blood
and served him breakfast when he wandered into town.
All this needless bloodshed, for want of a bacon sandwich.
It truly
beggars belief.

Can you imagine what it would be like if the Go Compare Man was your Dad.
How would that conversation go at school during Show & Tell, I wonder
“And what about you, Timmy?
What does your Daddy do?”
“My father is Gio Comparo
He puts on a silly moustache and acts like a cunt on national television
Nobody likes him, least of all me;
My mother exists in a perpetual state of loathing, embarrassment and shame
No longer able to show her face in polite society for fear of violent recrimination
Now flush my head down the toilet, o willing tormentor
It is no less than I deserve
For being the son of a national disgrace.”

The only thing worse is those fucking meerkats
Aleksandr and Sergei
Twatting about in their oligarch’s mansion
Doing the two-handed hoover to MC Hammer.
What must it be like
to be one of those people
who collects limited edition soft toys of the awful furry bastards
and their insufferable rodent offspring?
Are they proud
to be someone
who goes onto comparethemarket.com
and enters into a commercial dialogue with a price comparison search engine
simply for the purposes of obtaining
a Sleepy Oleg toy.
These people must exist somewhere
There are millions of them out there in the world
And yet I have never met one.
A bit like George Michael fans.

Speaking, though, of MC Hammer
I once bought a doll of him
from a knick-knack shopfront in Singapore
for the princely sum of $10.
That’s £6.10 translated into British currency
at the time of writing, though obviously subject
to future market fluctuations.
I’m sure you think that I am joking, but I can assure I am not -
Look, I have it here in this orange carrier bag.
Behold the wonder of MC Hammer in moulded plastic form
The craftsmanship is quite exquisite
Right down to the sparkling baggy Hammerpants.
Spare a thought for the artist formerly known as Stanley Kirk Burrell
A man who once had everything:
Gold-plated toilet seat
Saturday-morning animated kids’ TV series
and, most importantly:
pumps and a bump.
Jamie Foxx got an Oscar for Ray
But where oh where was Romany Malco’s award
for his scintillating portrayal in the lead role
of the made-for-television biopic Too Legit: The MC Hammer Story.
Again, I’m not making this up, I can assure you -
I own it on DVD.
Look, here it is.
Foxx gets all the plaudits
while Malco goes home empty-handed from pretty much every awards show going.
I ask you,
a bit like Lemar off of Fame Academy in that silly song of his,
where is the justice.

III

Why is it
that every fucking idiot you ever went to High School with
insists on having three children.
Not content with just one, or two,
they must continue their spree of aimless procreation
and shat out a third
just to make sure their appalling gene-pool lives on in the collective consciousness.
As if the world weren’t over-populated and headed for catastrophe enough already
They marry into their own kind
The sort of women who cry at Ed Sheeran and the John Lewis Christmas advert
I am so glad these people find each other
So the rest of us don’t have to.
Three, is the magic number
They give their progeny Playstations 5s
Down another four-pack of Stella with the lads
Then go back to being idiots
And we wonder why
The world is so fucked.

What will the aliens say
when they land on our abandoned planet
centuries after the Climate Emergency has washed us all away.
“Were they kind people?”, they will ask;
“Were they wise people?”
“Behold”, they exclaim as they consult the historical record;
Behold, the Sistine Chapel
The collective works of Swedish pop duo Roxette
And that bit in Marc Cohn’s Walking in Memphis when he sings:
“Tell me, are you a Christian, child?
I said: Ma’am, I am tonight”.
Or will they say:
Behold, Cher Lloyd’s Swagger Jagger
A record so mind-meltingly, staggeringly awful in its sheer obnoxiousness
As to attain a sort of zen perfection.
They were capable of so much
But they spuffed it all on Celebrity Love Island, fast fashion and Business Studies textbooks
How will we explain to them
the enduring popularity of Spandau Ballet
as evidenced in footage of full-time accountants in dreadful hats having it large at a festival
to the risible strains of Gold
on Spandau Ballet’s much-hyped 2010 reunion tour.
Tony Hadley! I am with you
in the pseudo-ironic 1980s Romo revival
Tony Hadley! I am with you
in occasional news reports of your latest solo offering
I am with you
in that god-awful chord which follows the chorus in True
For if this is the sound of your soul
It is truly akin to Donald Duck farting in the bathtub
Hadley be playing on the jukebox;
Worldwide, brute force, and full of money
Worldwide, brute force, and full of money
Tony Hadley, I am with you
For your inevitable appearance in the I’m a Celebrity jungle
alongside coat-hanger-faced 90s songbird Sophie Ellis-Bextor
and no doubt also Keith from Boyzone.
I am with you, you floppy-haired fucking git
I have no choice, since the great British public
simply refuses to let you die
I am with you, Tony Hadley
As your simpering fucking aspirational yuppie yacht-rock
Reverberates in perpetuity at the end of time.
I am with you
in countless landfills full of discarded Funko Pops
I am with you
for the 59-thousandth retrospective documentary about the making of Back to the Future
I am with you
for the announcement of LadBaby’s 537th consecutive Christmas #1
I am with you
as Salt Bae infiltrates NORAD
and brings about the end of the world
by pushing the nuclear button live on Instagram.
The ultimate viral moment:
Don’t forget to Like, Comment and Subscribe
as nuclear fire
rains from the heavens.
For that is how humanity ends:
Not with a bang, but with a TikTok
3000-plus years of human history
selfie’d into oblivion
for 10 seconds of internet fame.

I picture a dystopian future in which literally every fucker has a podcast.
We’re basically already halfway there.

C.C. January 2023