“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains, and go to your gawd like a soldier.”

Rudyard Kipling

I’m driving to Hollywood, the cosmic center of the cultural universe, to well… It doesn’t matter why I was heading to Hollywood on this particular morning. It’s really none of your…

Okay, fuck it.

I was going to make ten grand for fifteen minutes of work. Okay? I’m not gloating over this small jackpot, I’m just as confused as you probably are why someone would pay me for just showing up. Though it’s not unusual in this town, where money is passed back and forth like a half-smoked joint. If you’re lucky enough to be in the circle at the right moment, you get a nice toke. So I was good for at least another couple of months in this nightmare factory call Hollywood.

There are some who hit a jackpot or bigger like that numerous times ten. Then they are called brilliant. Then they are praised for proving that the American way of hard work and industriousness works. Only thing, it’s nothing but pure unadulterated luck.

Anyone who tells you different is lucky themselves and doesn’t want to own up to that reality. They’re too embarrassed to tell their friends they don’t know what the fuck they did to deserve such a gift of pure fortune.

For every stiff who grabs the brass ring with a screenplay or an acting gig or a movie production, or fucked the correct person, there are ten thousand others who have a bookcase full of screenplays gathering dust or fucked the very wrong person, over and over again.

If you swung a cat in this neighborhood, you would inevitably hit someone with over a million dollars in their bank account. And I don’t mean blindly swing a cat. I mean if you were to deliberately come up to someone in a Gucci suit standing next to their Porsche and swat them in the puss, pardon the pun, with a yowling flea bitten feline well, you might be on your way to making a deal and on the road to success and riches. And I highly suggest you do that the next time you’re in LaLa Land.

As I’m exiting the 101 at Cahuenga…I’m sorry, my bad. If you’re not familiar with the Hollywood area, I’m talking the exit ramp off the 101 where on one side towers the famed Capitol Records building and on the other is the Scientology Celebrity Center.

Right in the center of Yin and Yang. The building on one side is a spiritual Mecca that people flock to stand in the very spot where gods have dwelled. And the other building is the Scientology Celebrity Center. Look it up on Google Maps.

Now you get not just an idea where I’m talking geographically but also financially.

On this particular day, at the bottom of the exit turning onto Cahuenga there’s this homeless guy. Actually, on any particular day. They’re as prolific as the pricks in their Porsches. Now, seeing a homeless guy at the exit of a busy freeway is probably pretty common all over America. But in the entertainment capital of the solar system it just feels…awkward.

The guy is your typical homeless guy with a sign that reads: “Please Help. Afghan Vet.”

If this guy is telling the truth on his makeshift billboard (under an actual billboard of Angelyne, the buxom blonde in pink ostrich feathers who’s a perfect example of my premise that it’s all about fucking the right person.)

Funny, I see billboards in the hands of former military vets from Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam just as much as I see actual billboards for bad movies in this town.

If this guy is telling the truth and not just holding a sympathy sign for cash, I’m a little alarmed. Why are most of the people begging for money in our country the ones who should be the most financially secure?

Why isn’t this guy, who stopped everything he was doing in his life at the age of eighteen to get dressed in a funny, drab outfit and carry a gun, why isn’t he the one in a Gucci suit standing next to a Porsche?

I mean, just reason it out with me. He invested years of his life to cross the globe to go kill people for his country. He compensated with pennies to do it. And, more than likely at least one of his friends got blown up. And he gets a few benefits for a handful of years. Meanwhile, Gucci Boy is cutting a deal about some unmemorable movie about a guy who crosses the globe to go kill people for pennies and Gucci is going to reap a couple of hundred grand. And he didn’t even have to risk his life. Or see his buddies around him get shredded by shrapnel.

This is not a recent thing. This has been going on for centuries in this nation. You have the rich kids who feel their interests are endangered and feel the necessity to drum up a few hundred thousand people to protect those interests under the fictional premise that our nation its security, its values, its raison d’etre is endangered by THE OTHER.

The result —Vets.

Vets like our buddy at the 101 exit.holding up a crudely designed advertisement for the consequences of those rich kids; the Civil War vets, vets from the PhillippinesPhilippines (which is the war that gave birth to the VFW. Veterans of what? Anyone? Anyone? Oh, that’s right, fForeign Wfars. Which was a new thing back then because before we invaded the Philippines, the U. S. had never crossed the globe to wear funny outfit and carry a gun and kill total strangers.) Who else? WWI vets. Boy that was a rich Gucci Boy’s wet dream, WWII vets, Korea, ‘Nam…

Tell you what, you name the decade, I’ll name the jive ass call to arms.

I have a plan. Make the people who cross the globe to kill for us the millionaires. Tell Gucci Boy, “you want a fucking war because your stocks are down? Pay up, motherfucker.” You know, like the Mafia. Yeah! You want someone whacked? No problem. But it’s gonna cost ya. Then we’ll see how selective they are in their invasions, their “police actions”. Their hits. Pull out yer check book, Gucci boy,and then we can talk.