Stairway To Vampires

Stairway To Vampires

 

which came first, the internet or the asshole?

spoiler alert: it’s the asshole

if only because assholes predate electricity

but this morning they’re interdependent upon each other

like they’ve-from-4-seconds-after-the-beginning-

of-goddamn-everything been interdependent on each other

 

like that Reece’s Peanut Butter Cup commercial

citizens my age have been raised on

‘You got internet in my asshole!’

‘You got asshole on my internet!’

‘Shit, am I the only one here who thinks this tastes delicious?’

‘Fuck no, buddy! Let’s be pals!’

 

It’s Saturday and I woke up pretty early

after day-before vowing that this weekend

I’d fucking accomplish some things

I promised myself that I’d do stuff like wake up,

eat a sensible breakfast, and finish hammering out this story about

Bon Jovi and volcanoes and bears

 

but when I woke up I didn’t have any real food in the house

besides half a pan of 5 day old fake meat

and a head of lettuce

the fake meat was fake edible

and who the fuck breakfasts on lettuce anymore? in this 2016 culture?

so fuck breakfast, as I like to pretend that Bea Arthur used to say

so what was next on the list? hammering bear things

so I sat down to do that but then I remembered it was early so I figured

 

hell, I’m already ahead of schedule

so I turned on my laptop

and because I’m a goddamn adult now

I have Amazon Prime

and I figured I’d watch a couple episodes of The Wire

before getting on with what I’d vowed would be

a productive day

 

(Historical Note: Screw you! No, I never watched The Wire. I’m only on episode 5 of season 1, but it’s not my fault. I kept meaning to get to it but I get easily sidetracked. In my defense, I’ve seen Planet of the Apes around 100 times by now though. Have you seen Planet of the Apes around 100 times by now. Fuck that! No you haven’t! So you know, Hodor! I mean, touché)

 

but before I turn on The Wire I semi-automatically checked Facebook

because that’s what us modern worlder’s are trained to do

 

it’s how we verify that other people still believe in our existence

or that we’re even still goddamn alive

 

so I fucked around for a while on Facebook, where I:

 

looked at photos from my Mom’s garage sale

allowed myself to get pulled into a debate with an obsessed Led Zeppelin fan

like-buttoned anything around that had anything to do with Cthulhu

and watched the new trailer for Jack Reacher 2

 

and honestly, collectively, as a goddamn species

we’re all globe ridden and concernedly fucked up

and I’m still not sure what’s more ridiculous

Led Zeppelin fans or the fact that they actually made Jack Reacher 2

 

but the majority of these action figures sitting

in the room right now agree:

spoiler alert: It’s not Jack Reacher 2

 

this Zeppelin chum was going on

responding to posts of his own posts

on top of his own posts

arguing the repeated point that Zep didn’t rip off

the riff to Stairway To Heaven because

that riff was actually an old folk song

that lives in the public domain

 

(Historical Note: The public domain was like an old folks home

for the un-copywritten aka uninsured.)

 

and his point was that it was ok to steal something

and pretend you wrote it if the thing that you stole

was in the public domain

 

and my point was: despite the fact that

I’d vowed Old Man Logan style not to get into

this back and forth Facebook shit again,

 

“I’m not like that anymore.” –Clint Eastwood*

 

*see how fucking easy it is to do that?!

 

but truth be told I’d just woke up

and hadn’t smoked any weed yet

so I was naturally organically jumpy

and hyped up what with reality chomping

and figured, what the fuck

 

so I jumped in with my point, my point being:

 

The novel Dracula is public domain, but if somebody decided to re-type it themselves and call it Stairway to Vampires and spend the next big chunk of years claiming it’s an original composition while refusing to mention Stoker, that’s not really rock n roll. That’s called being an dick. I haven’t heard Zeppelin announce that Stairway is an interpretation of an old public domain folk song. If they did, I apologize. Good for them. Naturally if they were borrowing an old folk song they provided the proper writing credits on the album when it came out. Did they do that? Or did they just re-typeset Dracula and hope like hell that everyone in the band would be dead before anyone figured it out? I mean what was it, the 60’s? How the hell was Led Zeppelin supposed to predict the internet? Dick casts for everybody! Who the fuck’s gonna find out?

 

(Historical Note: the Zeppelin fan doesn’t understand reason

the Zeppelin fan only knows that they really love Zeppelin.)

 

but this is what I’d jumped into

and four minutes later I was bored

 

so I shut down the internet

and my plans to watch The Wire

and I sat down to that thing that the day before I’d promised myself

I’d sit down to do, the story about Bon Jovi and the volcano and the bear

 

but remember that bit earlier

about my being easily distracted?

yeah, well I sat down to write that one thing

 

but another thing leads to another thing

and I ended up writing

whatever this thing here is

instead

 

(while listening to the albums Slippery When Wet by Bon Jovi and Eat Em And Smile by David Lee Roth)