The apartment had a grotesque, silent, and almost paranormal presence. As if thousands of glaring eyes were hidden in its walls. This was the premonition that found me upon my initial visit…
Moreover, the apartment’s air had a peculiar scent, a certain sterile acidity.
Similar to that of a cleaning fluid. And there was an unusual and occasional heaviness to the air, too, a passing pressure, much like the cabin of a descending aircraft.
However, despite my off-putting first impressions, the apartment’s pros outweighed its cons. The place was in a prime location, smackdab downtown, only a short walk to a subway station. In addition, it was sprawling, bright, and on an upper floor of a sleek, glass-plated tower. A building that looked sort of like a robot.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer But most importantly, it was cheap. Very cheap. The unctuous leasing agent averring that the bargain price was because of “COVIT” (as he pronounced it: koh-veet).
So I pounced on it, without hesitation. Scoring a place this big, in downtown Bangkok, a furnished apartment with floor-length windows and panoramic views of the “Big Mango” was having me feel as if I won the lotto. Then I remembered the alms I gave to that young muscular monk at Wat Benchamabophit, “The Marble Temple,” last year, and I supposed my altruism must be paying its dividends.
(That monk was shredded, too, his body cabled with rippling muscles. He appeared more like a pro kickboxer than a monk. Perhaps he was a Thai kickboxer, partaking in a monastic year, expiating his sins, collecting and distributing karma…) Note to self: Exercise more and practice more Buddhism.
Upon moving in, the cleaning fluid smells, declivity, and the ethereal presence remained but dissipated. And I’d been fascinated by the sound I’d been hearing. A sound I’d not heard in ages. The sound of silence.
I’d been delighted, enamored with the apartment’s silence. Unlike my last place, on the third floor of a five-storey building, here, in my new apartment, there were no hawkers outside my window, no-one pushing creaky carts or cajoling or honking squeaky little horns, and the ambient traffic sounds were merely a distant hum.
However, as is typical in Thailand, the silence wouldn’t last long.
Noises came forth. Noises crawling like hermit crabs from their shells; noises grinding like teeth in the night. The noises digging up skeletons. The noises casting spells and moving minutes. Noises buttfucking vampires. Noises birthing phantasms. Phantasms… falling out like popcorn… Phantasms… those chattering dark creatures of thought somewhere between the somnambulist and psychosomatic.
It was in this way that an onset of erethism ensued and thus began my descent into perdition.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The perdition began immediately after I’d moved in. An infernal sleeplessness washed in, washed over me, in a nocturnal tide. I’d lie awake at night and sense…
something. Something like an urge. An urge, compelling me, seizing me. It was an uncomfortable feeling, like I had an unfinished task, and it was nagging me, the feeling, but I didn’t know exactly what I had to do, which in turn, bothered me even more.
The urge would often be accompanied by nausea, and a tightening of the chest, followed by columns of tiny floaters in vertical, horizontal formations. The floaters fluttering by, caking my line of sight, the floaters like little fluorescent bottle caps, flashing neon dots as bright as Bangkok’s cyberpunk skyline.
Lying in bed, I’d know the floaters and not know them. I’d experience the urge and disavow it, attempt to ignore it. But I couldn’t. There’d be a tug at my guts, as if a ghostly hand were digging down my throat. I’d feel as if I wanted to vomit. But I couldn’t. I could only muster a pathetic hiss and a dry heave. I longed to vomit.
Longed for a pumping of the guts. The longing, it came and went, then vanished.
It was transitory as a flock of birds.
After a week in the new apartment, the nagging, the paranormal urges worsened to an execrable degree, and I began not being able to sleep. At all.
Day and night were becoming increasingly irrelevant. Whether the orb of the sun, or projected shadows, neither mattered. I was just stuck. I was contemplating visiting a fortune teller. I was wondering if I was shapeshifting into a water monitor lizard, because I was imagining myself as a water monitor lizard. I was seeing myself swimming in canals and crawling up sticky walls.
It was enraging. Whenever I’d try to sleep, I couldn’t. Then I’d hoist my head and check the clock. 4:35 a.m. It was always 4:35 a.m.
2
It was 4:35 a.m. I decided that since I couldn’t sleep anyway, I’d go stand on the balcony, stare at the ether. In the inky sky, I could see whirling patterns passing by, patterns passing into a sidereal distance; vivacious, complex patterns, patterns of
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer colored gemstones, tropical flower banks, Scottish stained-glass windows, mogul arches and suicide doors, peacock designs. The patterns flickered and glowered brighter than animated billboards, then disappeared like groups of penguins trudging into an Antarctic blizzard.
The street below was empty, graveyard quiet, save for the gentle rumble of a passing truck or the lowkey buzz of a motorbike. I’d never seen downtown Bangkok so desolate. I recalled complaints about legions of uncouth continental Chinese tourists trashing Thailand, and COVIT seemed like their perfect closing act.
I yawned, then sucked in a steamy breath of the outside air. I’d say “fresh” air, but the air is never actually fresh in Bangkok. It always carries a faint effluvium, and often packs a powerful stink; a stink of diesel fumes, a stink of sewer smells, or that distinct smoky stink created by local farmers slashing and burning nearby rice fields.
Again, I considered shapeshifting into a water monitor lizard. I seriously began to identify as a water monitor lizard. I saw myself in scales, saw myself with green skin. I saw myself with a forked tongue, claws instead of fingers, and my blood cold as ice water…
Night still hung like a cape over the city. I stretched and yawned again, then crossed my arms and leaned forward on my balcony’s railing and saw out to an abandoned building nearby. The building site, the development, was intended to be an audacious luxury condo, aimed at the continental Chinese market, but construction had been halted, and so it sat abandoned and half-built, its windows staring absently, such as the eye sockets of skulls in an ossuary.
Nowadays the abandoned luxury condo project was occupied by rats. Infested by rats. Big, ugly gray rats. I’d been seeing colonies of big ugly gray rats scurrying up the half-built building’s walls. Rats running around its hollowed shell. Rats living on its ossified floors. The rats really were gargantuan too, almost the size of small dogs.
There were packs of stray cats living on my street, and I wondered if the cats could tackle, maul the rats, do whatever cats do to rats, but I wasn’t so sure. The
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer stray cats were thin, brittle-looking, and some were tailless. And those rats were fucking monstrous.
The rats seemed to be growing larger, too, by the day. Perhaps the rats were a result of an experiment gone wrong or toxic waste, like the Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles. Somehow I didn’t see any physical confrontation between the hulking, toxic rats and the emaciated feral cats being a fair fight.
I imagined a feral cat being circled by rats, torn to shreds, the same way a hornet is swarmed and annihilated in a bee’s nest. Then I wondered if the rats would die of “COVIT.” Maybe that’d do them in. The rats, in an abandoned Chinese building, dying of COVIT. Sounds plausible and strangely inevitable.
I stepped back inside, into the tingly chill of manufactured air, and returned to bed. I’d been experiencing trouble striking the right balance with my new a/c system. It was always too hot or too cold. Never just right…
3
I wormed underneath the covers and pressed my head back into my stack of pillows. The pillows were soft as breasts. My bones heavy, I sank into the springs of the mattress. Tossing, turning, I was trying to position myself right. Yet sleep wouldn’t find me. My mind raced until the urge came back.
Sitting up again in bed, I coughed. A dry, hacking cough. There was something in my throat. Something bubbling up from my stomach. There was something inside me. I knew it. If only I had an X-ray machine, I’d know. When will phones have X-ray apps? When will that happen? Probably not soon. We still lack the flying cars I pictured for the 2020s.
Coughing more, a body-rocking cough seized over me. Then a cold quiver. Then my body trembled, so much it was like an earthquake. I worried I might have epilepsy. Or Parkinson’s. Or Lupus. Whatever the fuck Lupus is, I might have it and might be about to die.
Wait a sec, doesn’t Selena Gomez have Lupus? And she isn’t dead. But didn’t she need a kidney transplant? What if I need a kidney transplant? Is Lupus why so
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer many people wake up, in a bathtub, missing a kidney? The more I contemplated Lupus, the more I became unsettled.
But I would resist the impulse to grab my phone and check WebMD about Lupus. I would resist WebMD altogether. The NHS site is better. The British are typically better at accepting death. Americans act like it’s optional. A British coworker told me that. And it’s generally true. Just compare WebMD to the NHS website and you’ll see.
The NHS site even mentions “farting” as a side effect. Of what, I can’t remember.
Maybe it was Lupus. As scary as Lupus seems, I think Lupus needs a scarier name.
Lupus sounds more like a Sesame Street character than a disease…
I heard an obnoxious falsetto voice in the distance. It was crooning a horrific version of the David Bowie song “I’m Afraid of Americans.” It sounded worse than a failed American Idol audition. It sounded worse than fingernails on a chalkboard.
It sounded worse than Avenged Sevenfold.
Then I smelled a strong scent of gin and lifted my head. Startled and curiously intrigued, I scanned around the room and, standing beside the TV, I saw a bald, heavyset man; he was broad of shoulders, thick in the stomach, and maybe 50
years of age. The stranger stood on stubby legs and had freakishly long arms, arms that dangled like dead animals, arms that reached below his knees.
Stranger, too, was that the stranger was naked, and looked like a white ape, with how his bushy gray body hair coalesced, carpeted his pale skin. His simian face was twisted into a taut mask of pain, but once we made eye contact, a toothless smile stretched over his lips. Then he vanished into the darkness of my bedroom, instantly, as if a TV screen were shut off, and the heavy scent of alcohol also disappeared.
Must be the insomnia, I thought. Or maybe I’m dreaming. Whatever it was, I was disturbed by the vision but threw my head back into my pillows. Tried to let the night terror pass.
I tried to count sheep. I tried to think anodyne thoughts. But I was haunted, rocked by a bolt of fear, when I closed my eyes and saw the white ape again. He
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer was still naked but was crucified, upside down, to the wall of a Hooters restaurant, and his chest had a surgically implanted, heart-shaped computer monitor that was broadcasting leaked video of corporations chipping human brains, corporations broadcasting commercials into the populace’s dreams, corporations selling face tattoo advertising space.
I ruminated on just how much Coca-Cola would have to pay to slap a Coke logo on a customer’s cheeks or forehead… I estimated face tattoo ad prices would vary by country, region.
4
I melted into my indentation. Then I farted, a particularly loud, noxious fart, and stretched my arms and experienced another jarring body tremor.
I worried, worried about the shaking. Shaking is not normal. Was it a stroke?
What if… What if it was… ? I might have... How would I know? Who would know?
Phones don’t have body-screening apps! I could die right this second.
Anodyne thoughts! Anodyne thoughts! Be that water monitor lizard, I commanded myself. Have a lizard’s skin, integument. A lizard should be stoic.
But then another thought terror seized me. What if I grew to 100-feet-tall, and were just walking around as a giant, but not hurting anyone, just yelling, “Hey, I don’t know what’s going on here, I don’t know why I’m a giant! I come in peace!”
while the army, and enraged citizens are shooting at me, trying to slay me, treating me like Godzilla. That’s what I felt like, lying there in bed. I was an accidental giant.
I breathed deeply; my chest heaved and fell. Anodyne thoughts! I attempted to ponder the fresh and uplifting, like the documentaries my friend recommended about Yo! MTV Raps! And another about Death Row Records.
But… my mind kept churning… And I suddenly panicked. What if… I… What if I have AIDS? I’d had unprotected sexual intercourse with a trashy chick from a bar, only a couple months ago. But I read AIDS is easier to catch through anal, and I don’t remember doing anal with her. But just because I don’t remember it doesn’t
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer mean it didn’t happen. It was dark, and my aim might have been off. I do remember she was surprisingly tight.
SHIT! What if I have AIDS!?
Then I thought of the people I’d heard about, in Cuba, artists and street performers who were injecting themselves with needles filled with AIDS blood, in a quest to catch AIDS. “Bug Chasers,” or something like that, was their appellation.
There was also a guitarist from an old heavy metal band I like, Ratt, who died of AIDS. Do rats die of AIDS? I should play Ratt at an ear-piercing volume, blast it at the rats in the abandoned Chinese building. Why do I hate the rats, anyway? They spread diseases, though, right? The bubonic plague? Maybe COVIT and AIDS both came from rats…
The rapper Eazy-E died of AIDS.
Eazy-E died from Suge Knight stabbing him with an AIDS needle, though, right? I think someone told me that. Or maybe Suge Knight shot Eazy-E with a poison dart, a poison dart full of AIDS. I could see Suge Knight, as a ninja, hiding atop a fir tree, blasting AIDS darts at Eazy-E.
And what the fuck? How come the Ratt guitarist and the boxer Tommy Morrison and Eazy-E all died of AIDS and Magic Johnson is still alive? It doesn’t quite make sense. But I guess because Magic wasn’t involved with Suge Knight. That must be it. I don’t know if Suge killed the Ratt guitarist or the boxer, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Suge Knight probably killed a long list of people. More than Sammy
“The Bull”, I bet…
5
A string of fuzzy green floaters slinked over my line of sight, crawling like a neon caterpillar. Then I recalled that Sammy “The Bull” has a podcast. And he’s on YouTube now. Sammy “The Bull” Gravano killed 19 people. And now he has a podcast. Why do people listen to it? Why do I listen to it? For the same reason I’d watch OJ Simpson give relationship advice on Twitter.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The macabre is fascinating. People will always crane their necks at car accidents, plane crashes, Britney Spears, and reality television…
I wonder where he is, Sammy “The Bull”… What if Sammy “The Bull” Gravano were living next door? He’d fit right in, in Bangkok, another elderly expat. Sammy
“The Bull”, in a Bangkok whorehouse, getting sucked off right now. I could see it.
Then I remembered that I read a book about a guy who fucked hookers without condoms. But he didn’t catch AIDS and was disappointed. Then he cut off one of his fingers in protest of Amazon’s effect on independent bookstores and mailed the severed limb to Jeff Bezos.
These were the thoughts plaguing me. The thoughts animating me. Like why it’s funny to see a fat person dancing or riding a motorcycle… And what does Elon Musk think about when he takes a shit… What does Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates think of when they shit?
I don’t think much when I shit. I look at sport scores and highlights. That’s probably the difference between billionaires and me. Billionaires are serious.
They’re probably working, thinking, inventing things, even when they’re shitting.
I wonder what Sammy “The Bull” thinks of when he shits. Didn’t Sammy “The Bull”
catch Lupus? Isn’t that why he lost all his body hair? These days, Sammy “The Bull”
looks like a burn victim or a cancer kid. He’s all fucked up, looks worse than Michael Rapaport. Michael Rapaport, “The Gringo Mandingo”, that dude has the face of a hairless cat.
Then I wondered if Sammy “The Bull”, when taking a shit, thinks about OJ
Simpson…
(Then I pictured Sammy “The Bull”, barefoot and in a wrestler’s singlet, an old school singlet, King Kong Bundy style... Sammy “The Bull”, running barefoot in Lumpini Park. Sammy “The Bull”, stopping midstride, Sammy “The Bull”, with his New Yawk accent, berating and cursing at an Asian Water Monitor Lizard, just assailing the creature with expletives…)
Anton Szandor LaVey wrote that Martin Luther thought up the reformation while taking a crap. I could never forget that.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer People always picture Satanists as chopping up puppies, Satanists painting themselves in chicken blood and dancing naked, chanting in front of full moons.
But not all Satanists are like that. I had a friend who was a Satanist, and he was an accountant. If you saw him, in his suit and cufflinks, you’d never think he was a Satanist. But he was.
6
I shifted in bed, sensed a stinging chill, a cold presence, and the hairs on the nape of my neck prickled. My eyes opened, mechanically, like automatic doors, and I saw that lying next to me lay a young Thai girl, maybe early 20ish. The girl was completely nude. She lay supine, and her protruding eyeballs were of an ungodly crimson-purple color, and her slim body, her golden skin was repaired in yantra tattoos.
The girl was sobbing and trembling. Then she screamed at the ceiling, bellowed out something in Isan dialect. Jolted aback, I jumped out of bed, and she immediately vanished.
It must be another hallucination. I can’t remember the last time I slept properly. I might even be dreaming that I’m awake. Or awake and wishing I was dreaming.
It’s confusing, jarring, a jolt to the senses, these circadian disruptions. The whites of my walls appeared as tall as snow-capped mountains, and sudden schools of greenish floaters swam through my vision like flocks of effervescent fish.
My ears popped. Then I yawned, sucked in a batch of pensive air, and cautiously crept back into the warmth of the bed and lay atop the covers, flat on my back. I wore only my Scooby Doo boxers. I looked around, both ways, like I was about to cross the street, but I didn’t see the crying Thai ghost girl. Though I could feel that noticeable chill of an invisible presence again. It was strong too. Stronger than ever. It was as if the walls were no longer snow-capped mountains, and were instead cloudy, unblinking eyes of a leviathan.
My eyes felt like peepholes, like two cameras, so I shut my eyelids. Spray-paint, street art visions cast across my psyche, animated graffiti visions of Eazy-E in a sea of flames. Eazy-E in sunspots, Eazy-E as a Greek God, Eazy-E atop Mount Everest,
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer collecting solar flares with his sunglasses. Eazy-E in a diadem, floating over Compton like a blimp. Eazy-E flying like Superman, Eazy-E in a spectral cast of gold.
Then I cringed, witnessed Eazy-E lassoed and jerked down from the sky, gored by a syringe-wielding Suge Knight. Suge Knight in a wolf gray, flat-brimmed Stetson hat. Suge Knight as a werewolf, Suge Knight howling at a full moon, Suge Knight’s eyes full of blood as he sadistically stabbed a crouching, crying Eazy-E… I imagined Suge Knight being a violently peremptory fuck.
“Youse a penguin looking motherfucker,” the Dr. Dre song sounded in my mind.
I used to memorize gangsta rap song lyrics, sing them in the shower. Gangsta rap is the most authentic form of music, the only art that is real, the only art form that is true to itself, the only art that is pure, the only art that purports to be nothing other than what it is. Gangsta rap is the most quintessentially American music in that it unashamedly, unreservedly, unapologetically celebrates the pursuit of happiness...
7
A mosquito the size of a grizzly bear could be in my room, and if it were quietly buzzing, the a/c might obscure it. So I cracked my eyes open a tad and saw nothing but the darkness. Though I wasn’t convinced there weren’t any prehistoric creatures living in the bowels of Bangkok’s sewer system.
I flipped over, onto my stomach, and stretched into an X shape. My mind moved and I wondered if maybe karma came back to bite Suge Knight in the ass. Or shoot him in the ass. I remembered that I was in Miami Beach, right down the street from the party where Suge Knight got shot in the buttocks. Yes, oh yes, I heard the police sirens, ambulances, and commotion.
The news reports said Suge had been shot in the leg, but I knew a guy who worked at the Shore Club, and he heard the pop from the gun, and said he saw the assailant, a dude in a pink shirt, opening fire at Suge’s table, and when Suge ducked down, Suge covered his head like it was a Cold War schoolkid drill. And that’s when Suge took a bullet in the butt.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer I’m not sure if the person who shot Suge in the ass was ever apprehended. I’d like to think it was Eazy-E’s ghost. A poltergeist, hellbent on vengeance, hellbent on shooting Suge in his big fat ass. I wondered if the bullet was intended for Suge’s back but trailed lower, due to bad aim. Just like a penis, whether in the bathroom, or during drunk sex, guns can be difficult to aim.
In movies, people fire guns like clicking off and on a light switch. Remember that scene from Goodfellas where Joe Pesci is shooting at Spider’s feet? Funny as it was, in reality, everyone’s ears would have been bleeding. In reality, guns are loud and heavy. Was it an amateur, shooting Suge, or a rushed shot? Not everyone shoots with the acuity of Chris Kyle.
Who shot Suge Knight in the ass? The mystery was consuming me.
It coulda been Vanilla Ice. I saw in the doc that due to a financial dispute between the two, Suge Knight strangled Vanilla Ice, then dangled Vanilla Ice, upside down, by his legs, from a high-rise hotel balcony. Suge Knight then strong-armed Vanilla Ice’s publishing money, took Vanilla Ice for five million dollars! FIVE million fucking dollars! That was how Suge got the seed capital for Death Row Records.
Maybe Vanilla Ice blasted Suge Knight in the buttocks. Vanilla Ice, in a pink shirt. I could see it. I could understand it.
I once saw Vanilla Ice driving in Miami Beach. He was behind the wheel of a white Suzuki SUV. It was definitely him. Did he drive that same SUV to shoot Suge in the ass? It’s not impossible. Anything’s possible.
Who shot Suge Knight in the ass? It remains a mystery, at least to me. I could google it, but I won’t. I prefer the incident’s shadowy, unimportant ambiguity.
It could have been Biggie’s ghost. It should have been Biggie’s ghost. I remembered a documentary I saw, about Biggie. In it, he sang a few bars of a song, and I was floored by his singing voice. Biggie should have been the next Barry White…
A pink shirt, in Miami, that doesn’t narrow it down. I wore pink shirts in Miami.
Many people wear pink shirts there. A pink shirt is just a pink shirt. It doesn’t mean the person shot Suge Knight.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer I knew a Colombian guy who got his arm bitten off by a shark while surfing in Miami Beach. He wore a lot of pink shirts. But he probably wasn’t the assailant who shot Suge Knight, because if it was a dude with only one arm, that’d be a far easier suspect to apprehend. Probably not a lot of one-armed, pink-shirt-wearing Colombians running around Miami Beach, shooting people. There might be a couple of others, but there are not, like, thousands of them.
8
I tossed back over, lay on my back, feeling like a turtle lying on its shell. Shifting again in my bed, onto my side, my pillow was wet. Drool, sweat. It could be either.
I’d been sweating profusely at night ever since I moved into this apartment.
My mind raced, snapped back. Who did it? Who shot Suge Knight in the ass? Like Oswald, he/she could already be dead. The person who allegedly shot Tupac was later shot and killed. Shot by a person on a motorcycle or shot as he rode a motorcycle. I can’t remember. Maybe he was shot by Vanilla Ice. Or Suge Knight.
But probably not the pink-shirt surfer, one-armed Colombian guy. The one-armed Colombian might have shot someone, but I don’t think he shot the guy who shot Tupac. But I can’t state this with 100% certainty…
Maybe Suge Knight killed Tony Soprano, at the end of The Sopranos, in the series finale. That would have been a better ending than it suddenly cutting out. Mind you, I sorta liked the obscurity, the fuck you-ness of that abrupt ending, but still, Suge Knight, strolling into the restaurant, Suge Knight breaking out nunchacku and attacking Tony. A brutal fight to the finish. That would have been more entertaining and satisfying.
They don’t make TV shows like The Sopranos anymore. I miss that show…
I farted again and coughed. Shit, I hope I don’t have the Lupus.
The power structure of China flashed through my mind. That they use prison labor.
My computer, like most of the items in my apartment, was made in China. The computer I use was maybe built by a political dissident or just a plain old-fashioned rapist. I don’t like thinking of rapists building my computers. But you
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer never know who’s a rapist. The guy at the grocery store counter, the person next to you on the subway, he could be a rapist. He could be worse than Bill Cosby.
Bill Cosby was raping people. That still fucks with my head. I watched his show when I was a kid. I watched a rapist. I admired him. He was America’s Dad. And he was drugging and raping people. A piece of me died when I learned about that.
Although I was grown, had experienced hardships and had heard, seen many horrible things, Bill Cosby raping people, that kind of killed the last of my innocence.
I wondered if China has a Bill Cosby. A beloved celebrity who rapes people.
I’d read that China has a huge gender disparity. The country long had a government-imposed, strict limitation on child births, so they could tackle their exploding population, and families were limited to one child. The families there traditionally favored boys over girls so women would have selective abortions, or give girl babies up for adoption, and I heard stories of doctors casually snapping the necks of newborn girl babies, then tossing the dead babies into the garbage.
9
I unloosed a whimpering fart and again thought of China. I keep hearing about China. I keep thinking about China. There’s always news about China. Just today, I’d seen a story about a man in Anhui, China, who went on a knife rampage, a stabbing spree, and he hacked five people to death and injured 15 others. I imagine he’ll be in jail, making computers or phones, iPhones. Or they’ll kill him.
Quick too. I heard the death penalty in China is expedited, done in about the time it takes to order a sandwich at Panera Bread.
I constantly read of stabbing sprees in China. Why are people in continental China always stabbing each other? Attacking one another with knives? Why?
I contemplated the pros and cons of knife attacks as opposed to mass shootings.
A mass stabber can’t kill as many people, but a mass stabber could be less conspicuous, because knives don’t make so much noise… Still, it’d be far easier to defend against a stabber, and if you’re in good physical shape, you could even outrun him, whereas with a gun…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Then I contemplated just how many Chinese people would be stabbed at the condo next door. How many people would be raped there? Now only rats live there. Toxic rats. Rats maybe with COVIT and AIDS.
My stomach tightened, then rumbled, and my ass erupted, ejaculated a trombone honk of a fart, and then a bass-heavy fart that broke so violently it shook the coils of my mattress.
And the chattering in my consciousness continued, unabated… Like, what if everyone in China and India, all 2.4 billion people, what if all of them farted at the same time? I could see that causing Earth to break from its orbit, blasting the planet, caroming off into the dead of space, like a wayward pinball...
China. There are always stories about stabbing sprees in China. Stabbing sprees in kindergartens. I read elementary schools there have erected barriers, fencing around the exteriors of their campuses to stop stabbers.
Who the fuck wants to attack, slash and stab schoolchildren? What exactly was going through their minds? Who are these people? Yeah, it’s annoying when a little kid is screaming in a restaurant or on a plane, but have a heart, man, fucking come on… Buy noise-cancelling headphones or some shit…
Maybe it was Lupus. Stabbing sprees in China, maybe it’s a side effect of Lupus…
You get Lupus, and then you just gotta go and fucking stab people…
I read China is like a giant prison, a giant concentration camp, that there are police, cameras and surveillance instruments everywhere, lampposts, walls and mirrors that can see, and that even private messages on social media are monitored. Well, if it’s like a colossal prison, it doesn’t surprise me people are stabbing each other, because that’s what happens in prisons, right? In China, there are probably hundreds of people being stabbed every day.
China is weird. It has nets outside its factories so if the prisoners, workers jump, the nets will stop them from dying. I wonder if the nets could be trampolines, and bounce the jumper back up to the roof or window and then a boss man snatches them back in. Maybe with a fishing net or a pair of giant tongs…
China… China just oozes evil. China seems like the evilest, scariest, most pestiferous place in the world. I saw news footage of their government meeting,
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer and they had red flags, hammer and sickle flags adorned everywhere around a huge assembly hall. All their leaders, representatives were scary-looking men, serious-looking men, sharp-faced men, men with sullen eyes and hard jaws.
The Chinese leaders all looked like rapists. They all had evil, searching expressions on their faces. Probably planning, fantasizing about the next person they’d rape.
Didn’t a high-ranking official in the Chinese Communist Party rape the tennis star Peng Shuai?
Bill Cosby could have been the leader of China. Although I heard most Chinese hate Black people, so Bill Cosby probably couldn’t have been Prime Minister of China. But that scenario certainly would have made an interesting sitcom.
10
The pungent scent of alcohol returned, and I mechanically slid open my eyes again. In the corner of my room cut quite the scene. The crying young Thai girl, now dressed in a blue jean skirt and hot pink tank top, was being strangled by the ape I’d seen before.
The white ape was refulgent, immolating, steely blue phosphorescent flares licking over him; the flames dancing, reflecting in my eyes. The white ape’s whole body blazing afire as he gripped his bearish hands around the young girl’s pencil thin neck, strangling her, squeezing the soul from her bony body.
Watching the scene, a shadow of fear crossed my consciousness, and I thought about how if I killed someone, I’d probably strangle them, because that’d be the most satisfying method of murder. Particularly if I really detested the person...
Then the flaming ape cocked back his right hand, balled up a fist and began bludgeoning the young girl, each wild punch splashing into her face, each wild punch landing with the sound of an axe striking a block of wood. Blood oozing and streaking from the girl’s nose and mouth, a chuckling hysteria erupted from the ape’s throat, long jerking cackles that grew louder and higher with each blow he landed.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Then the flaming ape went silent as he tossed the poor girl to the floor, grabbed a clump of her jet-black hair and dragged the girl by her hair, pulling the poor girl across the floor like a bag of garbage. The girl gurgled blood, flailed, slapped at the ape’s hands, kicked her legs, jabbered and screamed. But it was feckless. The flaming ape easily overpowered her.
The two continued their horror show to the balcony, where the flaming white ape promptly hoisted up and flung the small girl over the balcony railing, sending the girl screaming and tumbling, ten stories, to the pavement below. Then the girl’s screaming abruptly ended when I heard a faint, tiny splat, like someone stepping on a grape.
The flaming ape calmly returned to my bedroom, scooped up a bottle of gin from next to my TV, twisted the cap off and began to guzzle it, flipping the bottle upside down, chugging it and chugging it, his fiery hand then clinching and cracking the bottle, the bottle bursting into a crystalline explosion of glass. Then the white ape once again disappeared, repaired into the darkness.
Only a hallucination. Only a hallucination. Only a nightmare… I reassured myself and pressed my eyes closed…
The air was without sound, but my mind was a confusing conflict of noise and imagery. I saw a tornado of incandescent white roaring through an unnamed city.
I saw falling houses. There were building collapses, thuds of falling trees, flashes of flames and cable news reporters standing lamely in city streets, the reporters clutching microphones shaped like dildos, the reporters standing outside in the ass of the storm. The reporters with face tattoos, the reporters yelling out dick pill ads over the howling wind… The reporters bursting into fireballs… The fireballs then rolling, collecting mass, cataclysmic orange-black boulders swallowing city streets…
Dense black smoke rose from a river of fire. Then the scene faded into grainy video imagery of the living dead reporters dancing luridly in Russian graveyards.
The dead reporters freezing in monster movie poses and confessing to cannibalism. Then I saw the reporters reincarnated as monitor lizards and jumping off high-rise buildings and other monitor lizards doing cannonballs into
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer another river of fire… Finally, the fiery river solidified into a misting white-green vapor, and the vapor formed into fuzzy green floaters, awhirl in a starless, coal-black sky…
11
My ears popped, like I’d just pulled out earplugs, and sounds of my psyche sounded once again. I’d recently been reading a lot of Breitbart. Earlier that day I’d read an article on the lab in Wuhan, the WIV, Wuhan Institute of Virology, where many hypothesize COVIT came from.
One lab. That’s all it took. Maybe a worker there, being sloppy, led to unconscionable emotional suffering, the deaths of millions, and caused catastrophic economic damage. One lab. That was all it took, one lab leak, and everyone on Earth suffered.
I wondered who Patient Zero was. If that person was dead. If that person even knew. If a janitor at the lab caught the COVIT from a lab door not being shut or a loose zipper on a hazmat suit. I wondered if the Chinese government killed that janitor, like they did to that whistleblower doctor, Dr. Li, so the world would never know the truth.
Patient Zero… Who is Patient Zero?
Was he or she murdered by malevolent technocrats? I’d read that the Chinese Communist Party wants to be more likable, wants to have better PR, wants to make friends. Of course, that’ll be hard, with COVIT, the lab leak, amid their other malfeasance. These days there’s probably no country in the world as hated as China, thanks to its government.
Then I wondered why the guy in Anhui stabbed those people.
But would knowing change anything? Like the Vegas shooter, everyone wanted to know “the motive.” But what would it matter? Maybe they were just mentally ill or were simply sadistic pricks who wanted to kill people, for whatever societal grievance. Why was I even thinking this?
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer I coughed again, then sprang up from the bed. I ran to the bathroom, hoping I could throw up. The urge simmered. Then the pull poked into my throat once more. I wondered if maybe a rat from the abandoned building had crawled down my throat as I slept. I wanted to vomit out the rat, see it scurry and flail its little rat legs as I pushed it from my throat and it plopped into the toilet bowl, into the toilet water, like the piece of shit it is.
But no. No rat. Nothing. I dry-heaved once again. Only a string of spittle dangled from the corner of my mouth. Then I ambled back to bed, closed my eyes and lay in the sticky wetness of my sweaty sheets and mattress.
Then I wondered where Suge Knight is… What he’s doing… Isn’t he still in jail?
Didn’t he join the Taliban? Or did he carjack an Uber driver and then go Grand Theft Auto, recklessly driving down a city sidewalk, randomly running down pedestrians?
Then I wondered where the Anhui Stabber is now. What the prisons in China must be like. Maybe the Anhui Stabber already died from the Wuhan Virus.
Another tremor rocked me, and I let out a gruesome, violent fart, a stink bomb of an eruption. It stank worse than a rotting body. Then Lebron James flashed into my mind.
Lebron James crying about social justice but turning a blind eye to the crimes of the Chinese government. Because it pays him. But how many others would ignore COVIT if the Chinese government gifted them, bribed them with millions of dollars?
Most people, I bet. Why was I thinking this? I know Suge Knight would ignore any crime for millions of dollars. Suge Knight would throw his own mother off a hotel balcony for Lebron money. Suge Knight probably did throw his own mother off a hotel balcony.
Then I remembered that impassioned speech Lebron gave, lamenting the emotionally and financially taxing experience of Daryl Morey’s Hong Kong tweet.
I pictured Lebron, in drag, a red dress, at the Beijing Winter Olympics. I pictured Lebron James ice skating. Lebron James ice dancing. Lebron, naked, addressing the Chinese parliament. Lebron wearing a triangle hat and stabbing people in Anhui. Those were the things flitting through my mind.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer My skull felt like a jalopy, and my ears popped, my chest tightened, and I felt as if I were under water.
Choking, I gasped for breath, and I slid my eyes open and saw WebMD robots, the ghosts in my apartment, Suge Knight, Vanilla Ice, Chinese Emperor Xi Jinping, Sammy “The Bull” and a naked Lebron James, all of them, standing arms akimbo, all of them in a semi-circle around my bed. All of them staring and standing in judgment. All of them then throwing monitor lizard shit at me. All of them then pointing and yelling that it was Lupus, it was fucking LUPUS all along!
I gasped again, pressed my eyes shut, then popped them open. The clock read 5:21. Why does time shift so fast when I’m half-awake, half-asleep? COVIT time acted differently. It was time suffused with energy and lethargy, if that’s possible.
Anything is possible, I remember Kevin Garnett screaming after the Celtics won a title in ‘08. I sat up in bed, shrieked “ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE” and then sank back down. My bed felt colder, slicked with sweat. My body choked and shook again.
Then relaxed with celerity. There was no rat in my stomach. No-one, not even Suge Knight was there. There was only me and the soundtrack of my thoughts.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer
