In Capitalist America You Can't, And I Can't, Suck On Nipples All Day, Even Though They're Magic, And Especially Because They Belong To Mother Nature by Christopher Forsley

Let’s talk about drugs, friendly drugs, not dangerous drugs.  Lenny Bruce – Saint Lenny, that is – said no drug is dangerous, that they’re all friendly.  But his friend, Morphine, killed him.  Was Saint Lenny wrong?  Are some drugs dangerous?  I don’t know.  Maybe Saint Lenny’s friend, Morphine, did the comedian a favor.  Maybe Saint Lenny wanted to die.  Maybe the New World Order schmucks fucked him one too many times… for using words like, “schmuck.”  I don’t know.

I do know that Hugh Hefner, another one of Saint Lenny’s friends, wants all drugs legalized – legalized like Viagra.  Hefner loves Viagra.  Without it he couldn’t put his schmuck into young, big-breasted blondes… especially not twins. Viagra, in Hefner’s opinion, is a friendly drug.  But middle aged women think Viagra is an unfriendly drug that causes their once lifeless husbands to take their newly awakened schmucks to wetter, healthier, better manicured pastures.

Everyone, I guess, is friends with different drugs.  When Manny Ramirez is being Manny Ramirez, a friendly drug gets him cash money and fine honey.  But a friendly drug for a horny man who has neither fine honey nor cash money transports him to a planet populated entirely by females who value the dick more than the dollar.   And in the opinion of my fat fucking landlord, a friendly drug is that which dissolves into his wife’s nightly glass of wine and knocks her out so he can eat popcorn while watching porn instead of her can of SpaghettiOs while she watches porn.

Then there are the Big Pharmaceutical Companies that consider any profit-creating drug a friend. And the Food and Drug Administration which believes any taxable drug is a friend.  And the fuckers behind the War on Drugs who are only friends with drugs that keep America’s sick locked-up and pigs well-fed.

Yes, every entity is friends with different drugs.  But I and anyone who has researched drugs – either at the library or in Crackhead Joe’s trailer – know the truth: the more natural a drug, the friendlier it is.

All pills, then, are unfriendly and dangerous.  Robots make them from the unnatural chemicals that seep out their pores.  These robot chemicals contain so many impurities that you’d be better off swallowing the detached plastic legs from your GI Joe collection than the pills The Doctor gave you.

Some may argue that cocaine, which comes from the same plant as Cocoa Puff cereal and Conan O’Brien, is friendly because it’s natural… but unless you live in Columbia or are the daughter of George Jung with access to an inheritance hidden under a Puerto Vallarta palm tree, those lines you snorted while playing Guitar Hero with your buddies last night were about as natural as Michael Jackson’s late nose and were stepped all over with shoes made of robot sweat and Novocain.

I know someone, somewhere is reading this and jumping up and down screaming at the top of their lungs while sitting on a couch not saying a word.  That someone is saying, in so many words – or none at all – that magic mushrooms are friendly because they are natural.  That someone, though, is wrong: Yes, magic mushrooms, like all mushrooms, are natural.  Robots don’t go hiking and can’t step or sweat on them.  But magic mushrooms aren’t friendly because, though naturally grown on Earth, they didn’t get here naturally.  They came from a foreign planet, making them – like those who brought them here – alien.  We have nothing in common with aliens, so, unless you enjoy talking to yourself, magic mushrooms make bad friends.  Oh well, oh well, oh well says Jack White.

Jack White smokes cigarettes. Cigarettes are made of tobacco. Nicotine is the drug inside tobacco, and tobacco is one of Mother Nature’s oldest plants.  The American Indians believed it was a gift from the Creator and that exhaled tobacco smoke carried one’s thoughts to the heavens.  I believe the same.  My heavenly thoughts on nicotine are that it’s a difficult drug to make friends with, not because it’s unnatural itself but because it’s unnatural to rebel against the leaders of the New World Order.

The leaders of the New World Order don’t want us making friends with nicotine.  They have bombarded us with anti-smoking campaigns, photo-shopped the cigarettes out of Humphrey Bogart’s swollen lips, and brainwashed entire generations so that it is now impossible to smoke a cigarette in public without getting glares from women, insults from men, and gags from children.  These women, men, and children all have McFlurrys and Big Macs in their hands.  It’s what they eat and what they do… they’re lovin’ it.  The leaders of the New World Order are loving it too – and the more of us who make friends with the drug-filled offspring that Ronald McDonald shits out under every golden arch the more they’re loving it.

They love us making friends with alcohol too.  Even though every year it kills about a hundred thousand people in our country alone, alcohol, they say, makes a great friend.  And if you have Irish blood, like me, they’re right.  Alcohol, in any form, is natural and friendly.  We spawns of the Irish have evolved not only to accept it, but to need it.  If alcohol didn’t exist, redheads wouldn’t exist.  Instead of sleeping all day and drinking all night, we’d be out soaking up the sun and dieing of skin cancer.

But if you don’t have Irish blood pumping through you, then alcohol isn’t your friend.  It’s your enemy.  Look at the Red Man: Before the White Man introduced him to alcohol he ran through deserts and forests, bow and arrow in hand, with the grace of an elk and the strength of a bear.  And he was an American Indian, not the Red Man. It wasn’t until the White Man sent a river of malt liquor flowing down his throat that he lost his identity as an American Indian, became all red and bloated, and then accepted the little shack that the White Man built for him on a useless chunk of land.

Saint Lenny never did a skit on American Indians, and he never mentioned the Red Man.  But he did do a skit on African Americans and he said the word, “nigger,” over and over because he wanted to prove that it was the word’s suppression that made it evil.  He thought if the President went on television and yelled, “niggerniggerniggernigger,” that the word would lose its meaning and become harmless.  Saint Lenny never dated an African American.  I know this because he said he could never discuss anything he was involved in…so he probably dated a lot of American Indians and fucked the Red Man at least once.  But who hasn’t?

I fuck the Red Man on the fifteenth of April every year.  But I still discuss him and the American Indians he once was a part of because, unlike Saint Lenny, I could never discuss anything I’m not involved with.  So, because I don’t have health insurance and can’t get pills from The Doctor, don’t make enough money to buy cocaine, am scared of magic mushrooms and the aliens who brought them here, not brave enough to rebel against the New World Order and smoke cigarettes, I will discuss and support THC and caffeine.  Not only are both drugs natural and friendly, they are also – since I have a Medical Marijuana card and a Peet’s Coffee hook-up – cheap and easy to get.

I would also discuss and support my friend, alcohol, but that would be irresponsible. The Irish don’t read my writing.  I don’t blame them.  I’m a hack compared to Beckett, Joyce, and O’Brien.  Oh well, oh well, oh well.  American Indians are my only readers because they can’t read any of their own literature.  The White Man keeps it out-of-print.  And I don’t want to influence any American Indians into making friends with alcohol.  I don’t want them becoming all red and bloated like the Red Man, or – even worse – all pale and violent like the White Man.

So, my dear American Indian readers, forget alcohol and the White Man who creates it.  Marijuana and coffee are the only friends you need.  Dank, ganja, herb, reefer… mud, joe, wakey, tar – call them what you want but marijuana and coffee, even though they’re as cheap and easy to get as a whore in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, are the only friends you need.

Not only does marijuana make listening to the song, “Bo Diddley,” on the album, Bo Diddley, sung by Bo Diddley on repeat like a never-ending orgasm, but it’s also Mother Nature’s most powerful medicine.  It replaces the symptoms of Alzheimers with the benefits of High Timers. It helps those with Crohn’s disease smell less like Crohn’s ass. It stops Epileptics from break dancing at funerals.   It gets victims of Tourette’s Syndrome through airport security without yelling, “Bombs up your ass,” and becoming victims of Bush’s Syndrome, Guantánamo Bay style.  It gives Rheumatism suffers the ability to type faster than Jack Kerouac and his friend Benny.  It puts those with Satre’s Nausea asleep before learning that they exist only to exist.  And, unless you let your munchies get the better of you and decide to battle through rush-hour traffic to buy a box of Twinkies and then gouge on them until your stomach hurts, marijuana will also eliminate stress, reduce blood sugar, and relieve pain.

I’ve heard it all – from the born again Rasta I blazed with in the jungles of Jamaica who said, “Ganja, man, freed me from the White Man’s oppression because I stopped getting locked up for drinking and driving once I started smoking and flying,” to the Scumfuck I ate special brownies with in the Haight who said, “The herb stopped me from jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge when the yuppies built Whole Foods because it gave me a craving for organic hummus” – and I believe it all. Marijuana plants and the buds they produce are Mother Nature’s magic nipples.  And perfect nipples they are.  They cure our diseases, and they taste great too… like fresh blueberries dipped in syrup oozing from a 300-year-old Maple Tree.

The best blueberries come from The Berkshires in Western Massachusetts. I once fought a small black bear who tried to steal my basket of recently picked blueberries.  The bear was stronger than me, and he tried to get me to brawl with him.  But I wasn’t fooled:  I boxed him – stuck and moved, stuck and moved.  I was Arturo Gatti, the bear was Mickey Ward, and it was the final fight in our trilogy.  Wait. What was I saying?  Scumfucks… magic nipples… blueberries…

Oh yes: I was saying that Saint Lenny was right when, back in the 1960s, he predicted that all the pothead law students would eventually become senators and legalize marijuana to protect their asses – protect their asses from getting busted by cops, but also from smelling like dirty Doctor Crohn.  No one wants a smelly ass, but especially not a senator who gets his kissed daily by Capitalist America’s most powerful CEOs, lobbyists, media tycoons, pimps, and, of course, prostitutes.

And today in San Francisco, just as Saint Lenny predicted, all you need is a hundred dollars, ten minutes, and the address to Green Relief – 1224 Sutter Street – and you’ll be sucking Mother Nature’s magic nipples whenever and however you want, legally.

But Saint Lenny was wrong when he predicted that once marijuana became legal no one would want it as a friend.  Now that people can suck on Mother Nature’s magic nipples without risking job loss or jail time, more people than ever want it as a friend.  Whether legal or not, marijuana has always made a fun, funny, and good fucking friend, and it always will.  You can’t blame Saint Lenny for his failed prediction.  He never gave friendship with marijuana a chance, and he said there were two reasons why: one – “I have enough shit going around in my head.” And two – “I like being with you all the time.”

Saint Lenny didn’t realize that most people are like me: one – I too have a lot of shit going around in my head, but I like having the ability to lie on my taxes while I imagine playing heads-up poker against Stu Ungar in a backroom on the Death Star.  And two – I enjoy being with marijuana, laughing and whistling, far better than with you and the gloomy reality you represent.  If Saint Lenny took the occasional marijuana vacation from you guys, he probably wouldn’t have made friends with all those unnatural, dangerous drugs like Morphine.  If it was up to me, I’d be vacationing with my friend, marijuana, all the time.

But it’s not up to me. In Capitalist America you can’t, and I can’t, suck on nipples all day, even though they’re magic, and especially because they belong to Mother Nature.  We have careers to pursue, bills to pay. There’s no time for nipples.  A few minuets of sucking will turn into hours.  What then?  I’ll tell you what: someone else will get ahead.  They’ll get the pay raise, the new car, the fine woman.  I would say oh well, oh well, oh well – but we can’t all be rock stars.  We have a race to win.

And it’s coffee that will win us that race.  Just one cup of coffee significantly increases activity in the part of the brain that controls memory, focus, and energy.  Along with a chronic amount of greed and a high tolerance for verbal abuse, those are the exact ingredients needed to succeed, or at least survive, in Capitalist America.

Just look at Benjamin Franklin, one of the founders of Capitalist America.  It was the coffee he needed to rise early that made him healthy, wealthy, and wise – not the act of rising early itself.  Without his friend, coffee, that fat bastard would be in bed with his friend alcohol all day, and then alcohol would damage his health, empty his wallet, and turn his brain to mush because he wasn’t an Irish nationalist, he was an American rationalist.  And those fools can’t drink.

It’s the same with all American businessmen.  If it wasn’t for their morning coffee, their bathroom business would disrupt their other business and they’d neither have the time nor the energy to make the money that creates and defines success in America.  Instead they’d be sitting on the toilet all day constipated with those same traits – greed, vanity, anti-intellectualism, and cruelty – that make them fitting gears of capitalism and which would eventually, if coffee doesn’t help release those traits, make them fitting gears of robbery, rape, racism, and murder.  So next time you bitch about the leaders of the New World Order putting a Starbucks on every corner, remember that Starbucks helps keep America’s businessmen in their cubicles and off the streets.

I’m not saying your suspicion of Starbucks is unfounded.  The leaders of the New World Order didn’t put one on every corner in American just to ensure businessmen are shitting and getting to work on time.  They also use Starbucks to spy on those creativity rather than financially inclined Americans.  Artists are what they call these people, and artists have embraced coffee’s friendship just as the businessmen have.  They are in Starbucks across America reading, writing, drawing, and pretending they aren’t in Starbucks.  The leaders of the New World Order are watching them to make sure they don’t hangout with nicotine and smoke cigarettes.  But the coffee in Starbucks, like all coffee, is drama free.  It helps its artist friends regardless of what other drugs they hangout with.

Earnest Hemingway hung out with alcohol a lot, but coffee wasn’t jealous.  It helped the great writer sober-up enough to remember and then write about 1920’s Paris in his memoir, A Movable Feast, which I believe is better than any of the fiction his friend alcohol helped him scribble.  Coffee also helped the filmmaker David Lynch, who owns his own organic coffee company, lose so much sleep and become so wired that he met the Lady in the Radiator, the Man in the Planet, the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall, and then gave Charles Bukowski an excuse to take a break from writing poems and watch Cable Television.

Frank Zappa, the incredibly prolific and influential founder of the band, Mothers of Invention, knew how important it was for an artist in America to maintain a good relationship with coffee.  Just ask his ghost:

“Ghost of Frank Zappa,” you ask, “is it true that you were good friends with coffee and the drug, caffeine, that’s inside it?”

“I’m an absolutely sober person,” reads the Ghost of Frank Zappa from a 1976 transcript. “I don’t consume alcohol. I don’t smoke weed. But I drink gallons of coffee.”

Frank Zappa knew that the only way to succeed in Capitalist America was by hanging out with his friend, coffee, on and off the stage.  He even forced his band-mates to make friends with coffee because it was the only way they could last, both mentally and physically, through his fifteen hour jam sessions.

But coffee helps all its friends, not just those overachieving businessmen, slaves to the pen, filmmakers with Zen, and musicians on Rolling Stone’s top ten.  It even helps the average Joe.  In the graphic novel, A Joe Story – which I wrote and you should buy – there’s a bunch of average Joes, and coffee helps them all get to the Joe Corporation on time to make Tubes in a fast and efficient manner so they can go home and make love to their creations before waking up and making more.

Coffee helps the not so average Joe too.  It helped Joe DiMaggio – the face of Mr. Coffee – get the energy boost he needed after his 56-game hitting streak to sexually satisfy Marilyn Monroe for 274 days before she got that seven year itch and started letting other men around the world, including John F. Kennedy, see under her skirt. It helped Joey Tribbiani – who served coffee at Central Perk because as an actor he was only as talented as Matt LeBlanc – get the confidence needed to make unfunny jokes in front of Tube-watchers around the world for 236 episodes of Friends and another 46 in his self-tiled show, Joey.  And coffee helped my friend Crackhead Joe come down from a 15-day crack binge and drive his trailer out of the desert and back to Phoenix without Sheriff Joe Arpaio pulling him over for sleeping behind the wheel, putting a gun to his head, and then forcing him to wear pink panties and say, “ride me like a horse, you cowboy you,” while moaning like Mrs. Arpaio never has.

Like marijuana – the other natural and friendly drug – coffee is a gift from Mother Nature, and it helps everyone.  If marijuana is Mother Nature’s magic nipples, than coffee is Mother Nature’s sexy asshole.  And like all assholes, coffee will help you regardless of your life choices or given birth name.  It’s true that an anorexic blueberry-nibbler may not benefit from having an asshole as much as an obese hotdog-inhaler would and that an average Joe may need coffee more than an unemployed Moe, but everyone takes shits and has to get out of bed eventually.  Coffee exists to assist.

And it’s been assisting Man for a long time.  I’m talking Big-Bang shit.  Man is the Big-Bang’s shit, and the Big-Bang occurred only because a single coffee bean containing all matter and energy of space exploded.  If it wasn’t for that coffee bean, we wouldn’t be here.  I wouldn’t be writing this, and you wouldn’t be reading it.  You couldn’t buy your Big-Macs and McFlurrys, and the leaders of the New World Order would have never written the Bible, which is Man’s shit.

After studying the Bible and Man’s other shit, Modern Science, I’ve concluded that coffee first introduced itself to Man as a plot-point in the Adam and Eve story.  Let me explain: Science proves that both coffee and Man originates from the Ethiopian Highlands, so it’s clear that the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden was really a coffee tree and that the apple which both Adam and Eve took bites from was really a bright red coffee cherry.  The sudden dawn of self-awareness –“the eyes of the two of them were opened” – Adam and Eve then experienced was caffeine induced: that raw coffee cherry stimulated their brains enough to figure out how to use each others sexual organs and then, after reaching their orgasms and coming down from their caffeine highs, it made them depressed and insecure about their malnourished bodies.  Oh well, oh well, oh well.

Naturally, coffee tastes like shit.  But it comes from Mother Nature, so it’s free of robot sweat and extremely good for your body thanks to your booty.  Coffee, Mother Nature’s sexy asshole, helps rid your body of the toxins that enter it due to Capitalist America’s habit of releasing carbon dioxide into our atmosphere, chlorine into our water, and pesticides into our food by encouraging your booty to discharge these toxins in the form of a large, steaming morning dump.

I take three large, steaming dumps every morning thanks to my friend coffee.  The first dump occurs after I chug the previously frozen, but iced by morning, cup of coffee that I leave on my nightstand to thaw-out while I sleep.  This first cup of coffee not only wakes me up but also – unless I want to spend the day cleaning sheets – gives me a reason to get out of bed.  By the time the first dump and all the toxins inside it is swimming away in the sewers, I’m in the kitchen watching Joe DiMaggio’s favorite coffee-maker drip the hot, black juices of Mother Nature’s sexy asshole.  And even before the coffee-pot is half full, the aroma triggers my need to take a second dump, which is always more leisurely than the first and is usually accompanied by a Scott Fitzgerald novel because his uninhibited and flowing prose inspires my shit to behave same.  But reading about the love triangles of the 1920s Ruling Class makes me doze off, so I have to run back to the kitchen and start reading the morning news with my friend coffee who – before too many tales of Capitalist America’s corruption makes him cold – convinces me to return to the toilet for a third and final exploding dump that launches me out my apartment and into a shitless, toxin-free day.

Before I made friends with coffee, shit dictated my life.  I rarely took a single morning dump, let alone three, and I’d go out into world with the toxins of Capitalist America slowing me down, damaging my cells, and fogging my thoughts.  If I got lucky and my booty decided to rid a portion of these toxins from my body unassisted by coffee, it was always without notice and at the worst of times: I’d be playing hide-and-seek and a shit would begin to reek… I’d be ripping up a skateboard contest and a shit would start dripping… I’d be running from the cops and a shit would start running into my Hi-Tops… I’d be in a job interview and a shit would come into view… I’d be getting my poke on and a shit would poke out… I’d be flying naked in a dream and a shit would start flowing like a stream.  Then, in each of these cases, I’d have to use a public bathroom and risk catching an array of dangerous diseases from some toxin-filled coffee hater.

Coffee haters have all kinds of diseases because they don’t get the health benefits that coffee provides its friends.  They don’t get coffee’s encouragement to piss and shit out Capitalist America’s toxins from their bodies and so have a fifty-percent higher chance of developing colon, liver, and prostate cancer.  They don’t get coffee’s help in controlling their appetite so are more likely to suck down heart-attack triggering Big-Macs and McFlurrys.  They don’t get coffee’s gift of antioxidants so must either rely on Capitalist America’s toxin-filled fruits and vegetables to boost their immune system or on a daily multi-vitamin which is really just a brain chemical supplement that makes us crazy so the Big Pharmaceutical Companies can sell their pills and the leaders of The New World Order get their kick-backs.  Oh well, oh well, oh well.

So don’t be a coffee hater. Don’t do what Saint Lenny did and make friends with unnatural, dangerous drugs.  They’ll kill you.  You don’t want robot sweat in your body.  Instead, make friends with natural, friendly drugs.  Be a coffee lover.  It will make you more successful and healthy, and, according to Stephen Wright, it will even make you dream faster.  And the faster you dream, the faster you can figure out how to escape the influence of Capitalist America and start sucking on Mother Nature’s magic nipples all day.

Christopher Forsley writes and lives in San Francisco. He contributes to 16th & Mission Comix and his book of satire, Bums of the Bay, was recently published by SEVEN7H TANGENT. Later this year, or maybe next year, Spark Plug Comics will release his first graphic novel, A Joe Story. The illustration was created by his brother, Cameron Forlsey.