OTCC Issue #1

MaRQUE REaVLEY

There Are No Trophies

He’s fantasizing...cranking up the heat feel good chemicals a lot in his system. trouble concentrating with him so hard a stroke ahead prone to premature ejaculation lube isn’t helping thigh perspiration ruining the experience easier for him to turn off his nether regions either lying or gay obsessive relationships draw him out.

She suffered wounds lounging in a wet bikini being broken frequently covered the scabs with makeup showed outward joy knows how to take a beating. was captured by repeat offenders requires pushing into sexual blunt-force trauma said she would cooperate wanted to be tied up arms, legs, abdomen and face contained in brick and mortar. this whore is worth dying for. visual creatures will dominate her as if putting out a cigarette.

The discolored stuff in your undies caused by a reaction could be poisoning you already feel bad. adrenaline and dopamine make you itchy getting sick of her unresponsive in her bed really want to pursue this more than you’re admitting breathe through your mouth you’ve contracted a sexually transmitted disease.

Neither woman asked for time to come misused dogs must be ridden must be muzzled and attached moaning and screaming. jabbing movement what they need the most. attention to the genital areas. knock on their door and take it dead creatures appeal to his vanity. but that hasn’t spared their uterine muscle They will not be embalmed.

A woman found dead surrounded by the fugitive squad men who fucked up take two pills trained to be strong. fuck-that-chick sort chop off her hair friend stood guard as the other comes a lot of blood stuck the wad in her dried mucus had gotten stuck her body was found a holding pen with a top and a lock. the knuckles of a human fist. labia and vulva covered in vomit.

Men are sprouting muscles bulging muscles take turns spraying It feels good to punch something. knocking a dude’s lights out semen to the membranes launch probes of harassment when things turn sour. protection for whatever criminal activity test their devices. most depraved thoughts can bring pleasure. hard to control the idea of playing with excrement

5 million hours to man up

pushing it because there are no trophies.

SAM SNELLER

EDITOR’S LeTTeR This is what happens when rejected artists take art into their own hands: a revolution.

T

his is not one of your mother’s magazines. This magazine was written for and by those crazy cats who sit at a typewriter with a coffee mug of Carlo Rossi wine in one hand and a pipe filled with shitty tobacco in the other – their foreheads slamming against the keys, creating their masterpieces.

And if that’s not art, then I don’t know what is.

Perhaps that’s the problem: maybe I don’t know what art is.

Is art something that has to be approved by a board of business executives who will base their decision on what college you went to, or what fancy publication has previously published your work, or how well you fit into their cloned army of artists? Well if that’s art, then I say Fuck Art. What I want is something that breaks the rules. Something that inspires new perspectives on the mundane and vile aspects of living on this horrible planet.

I want someone to submit to us their honest work, covered in wine stains – so I know they really mean what they say, so I know sacrifices were made to get their ideas to the world.

I had the idea of OTCC after realizing I would never get recognition from a world bent on opposing everything I find precious in my work. And after searching for a place to turn with my ambitions, and finding nothing, I decided I should say what I always say: “Fuck you, I’ll do it myself!”

So, here it is my friends. This is my dream come to fruition. A dream where all the outcasts and losers and fuck-ups and winos and bums and junkies – and truly honest (though, not always factual) people – can express their lives through

art. Our art. And for OTCC, every life is a work of art if it’s being lived to the fullest.

And that isn’t what “they” want you to think. “They” want you to think there are specialists out there who are the only people allowed to call themselves artists.

This is a revolution, my friend!

This is a giant middle-finger to the established way of presenting life through sensual stimulation! We at OTCC say no more to this elitist bull-shit and give the art back to the artists – back to you.

Some will probably call our work “amateur,” but if I have to sell my soul to be “professional,” then I proudly accept the label of amateur.

I want to first thank the staff who dedicate their time and energy for nothing more than to see this dream fulfilled. I want to thank everybody who has ever rejected our way of thinking, you’ve made this all possible. But most of all, I want to thank you, the most precious member of a writer’s life, the reader.

2 | Over The CounterCulture Magazine | otccmagazine.com | Issue #1

JAMES GARCIA

James Garcia Kaitlin Milligan Ethan Danger Doug Sprowls Ashley Windbigler Chris Pilkington Carly Kohake Nicole Garcia

Editor-In-Chief Managing Editor Associate Editor Art Director Fiction Editor NonFiction Editor Life&Style Editor Photographer

Contributers

Philip Howiler, Morgan Lloyd, Manuel Martinez, Joshua Robert Long, Mathew Schilchting, Joel K., Rick, Sam Sneller, Jonathan Lehman, and Marque Leavey.

Cover photo by Nicole Garcia.

With a special thanks to Manuel Martinez who is also the adviser to OTCC.

coun • ter • cul • ture n, the culture and lifestyle of those people, esp. among the young, who reject or oppose the dominant values and behavior of society.

We are currently accepting prose, poetry, photography, drawings, paintings.

Anything that can be considered counter-cultural.

To submit, please email otccmagazine@gmail.com with the form of submission in the subject line (ie Poetry Submission).

‘lIKe’ US ON FACeBOOK

facebook.com/otccmagazine

CounterCulture O ve r T h e

|in this issue| feature

tHE iLLUSioN oF ALEAtA

poetry

THERE ARE No tRopHiES poEMS FRoM tRANSLAtiNG THE AVENUES UNtitLED poEM FRoM cHiNA

non-fiction

WHAt iS coUNtERcULtURE? SpiNNiNG pop iDiotS tAKiNG oVER LEFt V. RiGHt: UNioNS wHAt i KNow ABoUt LoVE it’S NoRMAL to BE wEiRD FUcK YoU, DUDE! A StoNER’S cooKiNG GUiDE: HoMEMADE BUFFALo wiNGS

fiction

14 01 06 10 04 05 08 18 23 24 24 28

A RiDicULoUS HYpotHEticAL

05

ViRGiN BLooD

09 12

LEttER FRoM tHE poStiNDUStRiALS

LAME

13 20

indie shit reviews

26

tHE REAL ‘MERicA

Issue #1 | otccmagazine.com | Over The CounterCulture Magazine | 3

What is counterculture?

BY ManUEL MaRtInEZ

T

he word conjures up a few hapless, gentle hippies listening to Strawberry Alarm Clock in their VW wagon in vain pursuit of Further, Ken Kesey’s psychedelic bus. Listen to a rat-faced politician of the right-winger variety, and you’ll hear all about the death of patriotism and the onslaught of promiscuity and illicit drug use (is there any other kind?). Ask your parents to fill you in, and they’ll either give you a wan, secretive smile or clam up like they’ve been dragged in front of McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee. Ask a professor, and he’ll likely drone on about the cultural changes that the 60s brought about: Civil Rights, ending the Vietnam War, the birth of third-wave feminism, an awakening of the democratic spirit in the face of creeping fascism. I know—I am that professor. But put aside the politics, the historical contexts, the fearsome speaking of truth to power, and what you’ve got left is danger.

It’s always dangerous to wake a sleeping giant, to poke it in the face with a sharpened stick, to write profane slogans on its enormous face, and then douse his warm fire out with bladderfuls of hippie urine. The giant might get mad. He will have to step out of his comfort zone, and pester him enough, he’ll have to chase you into the woods. It’s a dangerous thing to tell people that their principles are empty like squeezed-out toothpaste tubes. Your elders don’t want to be shown that rather than being cynical, they are merely misled, that they’ve bought into the childish lies that the Power Elite has given them to get them through the night like some plush velour teddy bear.

Figures like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Diana DiPrima, Betty Friedan, Valerie Solanis, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Eldridge Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael, Hunter Thompson, Delores Huerta, Cesar Chavez, and Oscar Acosta, are still read because they understood the danger of their message. They each embraced their role in waking the giant. And they each paid the price for their dissent. Demonstrate

to someone that they’ve been fooled, and they’ll likely turn on you like a pack of rabid howler monkeys.

That generation’s dissent was powerful not simply because it brought about social and political change—oftentimes it did not. But what this art, this activism, this engagement decreed, was that sleepy-time was over. They’d been to the deep South and slums of America, the swamplands of Vietnam, the colonized nightmares in Africa and the middle east. And once you wake up, you can’t go back to sleep. In fact, you want to make sure that no one’s going to get a good night’s rest again if you have anything to do about it. So you howl like Ginsberg did, you offer your Whitmanic barbaric yawp, you sing your blues loud enough so people will hear.

The American polity has for too long enjoyed the privilege of drowsiness as a response to its continued criminal behavior overseas, its dunderheaded insistence on the myth of “American exceptionalism,” all the while drowning its social and political woe in blooddiluted petrol and the unfettered worship of the so-called free market. More than ever, Americans seem to be cloistered in the cheap comfort of pathological consumerism, sucking down the latest iteration of pharmaceutical coma, silently hoping the crises will just be polite enough to fade away.

But it isn’t going to happen.

Every writer you’ll encounter in the pages of Over the Counterculture has accepted a mission: wake the sleeping giant, poke it with a sharp stick till it has to take account, stir it till the bastard can’t get comfortable anymore, till it realizes this generation’s dissent isn’t just a nightmare. It’s the real deal. This generation’s got eyes, ears, and it’s got a voice. So don’t expect to get much sleep.

It’s late, and we’ve been sleeping far too long.

4 | Over The CounterCulture Magazine | otccmagazine.com | Issue #1

a ridiculous

hypothetical

BY CHRIS PIlKINGTON

SpiNNiNG

I

lift the arm, pivot it to the left, and let it fall onto the spinning black disc. Vinyl is the best way to listen to music. A click and light scratching.

“We’re goin’ down the road towards tiny cities made of ashes,” says Modest Mouse through my turntable speakers.

It’s a turntable made of plastic and the CD tray doesn’t open – hasn’t since I purchased it new a few weeks ago.

Sometimes life is spinning too fast and you just need a smoke.

“But you don’t smoke,” says the voice in my head.

“I’m gonna hit you on the face, I’m gonna punch you in your glasses. Oh no. I’m wearin’ a t-shirt that says, ‘The world is my ashtray,’ ” Modest Mouse says.

I’m not sure how long ago the day cooled off and became night. I climb on top of my desk, slide open my window and hit the screen ‘til it opens – stupid thing always gets stuck. I climb out the window onto the roof and I notice I’m not twelve anymore, so I light a cigarette, and gingerly push it into my cigarette holder. Sitting down, I breathe deep. Suck in the putrid smoke, let it fill me with its toxic fumes, like sucking off a tailpipe.

“Our hearts pump dust and our hair’s all grey and I just got a message sayin’ hell has frozen over,” Modest Mouse informs me through the open window.

I watch the cars driving on the cement river which runs behind my house. Some blast loud music, others honk, but they all glide along like a needle scratching around and around the city. Someone on a motorcycle yells something indiscernible to an imaginary listener. The trees are dark and dangerous silhouettes against the navy sky.

I lay on my back and I can hear the sounds of progress, of industry, of the city.

Laying on the shingles, on the roof of my garage, I see the glare from a street lamp, the tippy-top of a large tree which peeks over the peak of the roof of my room – where Modest Mouse asks, “Does anybody know a way that a body could get away?” After repeating the question, Modest Mouse is silenced as the needle slides over the end of the song. But the record continues to spin, and crackle, and hum, and whisper an analog language to nobody.

The cig leaves a dry, stale taste in my mouth, but I suck away anyway, pretending

by

JAMES GARciA

to enjoy myself – pretending to be home.

Pretending to have a home.

I can see the bright cherry of my cigarette floating above my face, a stark contrast to the dark ocean of the sky, and I hear the plants, and the paper, and the cancer sizzle under the force of my lungs. It fills the sky with dancing clouds, twisting and snaking over and through itself.

“I wanna live in a city with no friends or family,” they say, but I don’t think Modest Mouse knows what that really means.

It means Starbucks, McDonalds, and Subway are your friends. It means Barnes $ Noble, FYE, and Hobby Lobby are your family. The cars spin and spin and spin. The blood of the city. And our hearts pump dust.

When did I have a place I could call home? My childhood memories feel like home, but it’s just an emotional nostalgia.

It’s something that doesn’t really exist.

Something warped by time.

“Slow motion for all. Dripped out of the bars. Someone smart said nothing at all.

I’m watchin’ TV, I guess that’s a solution.

They gave me a receipt that said I didn’t buy nothin’,” Modest Mouse cries.

My cigarette burns away and the record spins on.

“Well I don’t know – I don’t know – I don’t know,” the record skips, “ I don’t know what I’ve been told, but you’ll never die, and you’ll never grow old.”

The cars are slowing down, and the night air is shifting its weight and my cigarette is about to fade. The record plays me a slow guitar line, crying, crying itself to sleep.

“So long to this cold, cold part of the world.”

Crushing my cigarette into a shingle, the bright red ambers spark away, free at last, only to burn out and dim, disappearing among the grey shingles. There is only one star visible in the sky tonight. And it is so cold up there. So alone.

“Can’t blame me. Don’t blame me. Don’t.

So long to this sad, sad part of the world. So long. So long.”

The needle hits against the label, bouncing back for a second. It hits the label a second time, but fights back again. humClick-static, hum-Click-static, hum-Click.

And finally, the record stops spinning.

Finally everything stops spinning. ***

I

magine you are attending MIT. There you are, a lab assistant and student who is constantly overworked with studies and work and the traditional worry and stress that comes with being a college student. You have too much shit to do and of course, not enough time to do it.

One day you are working in your lab, doing assistant shit and you overhear two of your bosses, two highly esteemed chemists, are working on a secret substance that will eliminate the need for sleep. It has no name but you hear them joke around with different puns about sleep and insomnia and not needing rest or some other shit they think they’re so clever for. You ask one of the chemists about the substance and he explains to you it allows you to stay awake… forever.

Now of course they haven’t been able to test this on anything but rats and the results were inconclusive. About half of them died and seemed to go some sort of insane before they did and half are still awake, knockin’ about in their cage endlessly. The chemist assures you that the rats that died had other medical conditions they were not aware of.

“You will feel like you just had your morning coffee kind of perpetually.”

Now, if you like, you may undergo a thorough physical and assuming you pass, the chemist says that you may choose to be the first test subject for this radical new drug. You will not need to sleep or ever feel tired again. You will feel like you just had your morning coffee kind of perpetually. You will also not be able to sleep. You can close your eyes and lay down but you will always feel wide awake.

First, Do you go through with the experimental drug? Be assured that there are no side affects other than constant consciousness.

And if you say yes to this experiment, how do you structure your days for the rest of you life? If you didn’t have to sleep and felt like it was perpetually noon how would you change the way you lived? If you have the energy to be working all day every day, do you choose to do so? Basically, when does your “day” stop and start, if ever?

Issue #1 | otccmagazine.com | Over The CounterCulture Magazine | 5

Once more, or, It’s almost that time

Poetry From

Translating

the Avenues

It’s almost that time

a phrase that rolls

through villages

that have started

an occupation

from within the walls

all four walls

inside the skull

BY JoSHUA RoBERt LoNG

and it feels like comfort a favorite t-shirt it makes you sing the blues a trumpet of joy inside your throat

The saints

and

when the saints come marching in the rain will cease the birds will come back from their winter homes in the south and the motor will begin to run a bit smoother than the milkshake on the west-end of the coffee table. coffee tables are the avenues of the restless and the restless have all seen the light the same light that burnt out many stars and moons before I met the air outside of my mother’s cunt.

when the saints come marching in the nightmare of living will become more apparent and we’ll have wished the Nazis had won and we’ll wish the Allies had won and we’ll all have lost in realizing we let ourselves choose sides in such a situation.

when the saints come marching in the illusions which make us all collectively taller will come crashing down like an earthquake of our inner desires. we’ll ring bells and count whistles and mow lawns and tidy up the corners of our hearts but all cannot be forgiven and won’t be forgiven when the voice without body bears witness to all that we have built and sunk in the seas of our humanity.

when the saints come marching in the trumpets will roar the cannonball stories will all be changed-edited-revisedretold-and purchased by a company that will put a glossy image of them at the end of every aisle anywhere that aisles coexist with each other. the stories will all be the ones our grandfathers told their sons and their sons and their sons and their sons and we’ll all radiate with what we have done as a collective culture.

when the saints come marching in the birds will fall from the sky they’ll not simply die but they’ll cease to see the importance of living in such a way in such a manner and begin to wonder why they bothered with the vacation homes of winter in the first place.

when the saints come marching in the wind will have a rasp that speaks of emphysema and you’ll know the better days of Mother Earth have came and went and that she still hung on tightly to the fond memories of her youth smoking cigarettes outside of the bowling alleys off the highways off the small town of all of our collective middle American daydreams.

when the saints come marching in the sky will grow gray like the ash in the cups and the ash on the foreheads of all the weary of all the road-traveled beat-hungry-tired-misfortunates that still believed to the very last step that all would pay off in due time.

6 | Over The CounterCulture Magazine | otccmagazine.com | Issue #1

It’s almost that time

everybody is raining their intentions onto your flesh already wet enough from the last shower the last attempt at drowning

and

It’s almost that time

there starts a line at the cash machine you flirt with it everyday and you want it to be more than it is to you which is to think you’re financially stable every angle of society never having the brass for such a thing

and

It’s almost that time

so you go home

dry yourself out

downtown

like a taxi

in the cab-stand

driving like a compact

disc

skipping on words

languages you can’t

speak

because

It’s almost that time.

They told me I couldn’t write the spoons clank with the suds the bottom is out and the top is remembering this is America. the dream is running a twenty counting down counting up and believing in itself again it’s good to have your health, young man. it’s good to have your health. put pages on the words and call me when you turn into something substantial.

I’ll give you all the letters you want to read when you’re old enough to write them. but the spoons the spoons are still soaking the suds are undermining their future destination. we’re all counting on it but we don’t make enough an hour to be passionate about it. it’s good to have your health, young man. it’s good to have your health.

the chimes in my mind feed me, they try to breed with me but they never buy me dinner. the boys are across with the merry men blending together as they sing and sigh like thunder.

I snap out of it and fall back into the chair enjoying the fresh air of the porch. *** Waking up in the kitchenette oranges stay peeled bananas stay helpless the kiwis all slide into the hearts that aren’t known in mornings. the greens stay dry and hopelessness becomes appealing to the authors inside all of us. my thoughts start organizing the shelves like editing the daydreams of a child.

I stop and think I’m a child, and then get reminded by the daily mail.

I’m only getting better, I thought. but it’s only getting worse as far as I can see. the days all reading like the label on the empty bottle of scotch. my grandfather stopped drinking a long time ago, I’m okay with that though. *** Hangovers while hydrating myself with the notion that Jesus Wouldn’t Bother, I started remembering last night, and had already forgotten about tomorrow.

I was only dreaming about noon and us showing each other things we’ve already done with different manuals.

you’ve pulled my heart-strings, I was simply marionette-dancing through the parks the side streets all becoming verbs that held no weight inside of this headache. but you know, and I still can’t understand. before and after I was telling stories pilfering through the hops which still won’t leave the lingering avenues of my forehead. hopeless with ignorance the kitchen light hums. we go again I thought. its like I was still sixteen and telling stories. *** Poems originally published in Translating the Avenues by Walleyed Press.

*** Neighborhood Watch this place the rivers wreak the IRAs took my Adderal and I’m laughing about it tweens all strut college girls map their routes soon enough and they all wash their hands and ears and knees just like me. me, I’m living like a gentleman pulling a planter’s salary rolling in like the tides of uncertainty as the telephone squeals sounds like baby seals staring down the club.

Issue #1 | otccmagazine.com | Over The CounterCulture Magazine | 7

POP Idiots Are Taking Over

by Ashley Windbigler-Ekin

T

urn on your TV, and you’re sure to be informed about the newest celebrity drug scandal or which celebrities are getting married… again. We stand at the check-out counter at any grocery store and are bombarded by gossip magazines plastered with photos of Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus. I often absent-mindedly stare at these headlines while trying to refrain from cracking the spines. I am also guilty of being hypnotized by the rich and famous, after all.

Our culture’s obsession with celebrity status and who’s fucking who may seem shallow to the people in the world with actual lives, but here in America, we thrive off of it. Give us a drug-overdose any day, and we’ll drop everything we’re doing to get the “who, how, and where.” What is it that makes us so bored with our own lives that we feed off of the drama of others? The thing about celebrities is they seem unreal and untouchable. It’s almost like they’re characters in a story, but since watching them on TV is so much less time consuming than reading a book, our lazy culture is content.

Let’s take Jersey Shore for instance: MTV (which ironically has nothing to do with music, anymore) premiered this new reality show back in 2009, and the cast members have soared straight to stardom for acting like white trash on national television. Two of the members have even written, and I say “written” very relatively, books. “Snooki’s” masterpiece is about tracking down spray-tanned men in Seaside Heights, New Jersey while sucking on pickles and burning her pink fuzzy slippers.

“JWOWW” on the other hand went for a different approach and managed to get someone to publish an entire book about her dating tips. Tune into a single episode, and you’ll see some genuine fist pumping and lots of sex and alcohol consumption. These are the things the cast of Jersey Shore is famous for. So, what? In that case, The

“We idolize the idiotic” Ohio State University’s campus dorms alone should have their own television show.

Our culture obsesses over people who are famous for absolutely nothing.

Paris Hilton, anyone? The Kardashian sisters? The E! Network has at least four reality shows dedicated to the Kardashian sisters because they’re fun to watch, and that’s pretty much the only claim to fame they’ve got going for them. Paris Hilton is at the top of the celebrity “it girl” list because of her notorious last name and her star appearance in a sex tape cast in night vision that was seen around the world.

Miley Cyrus, who has actually done something to earn her fame (well, kind of) was only fifteen-years-old when she posed topless for the cover of Vogue, a magazine for adult women with a child posing for its cover, using only a sheet to cover her breasts. If these same photos were to appear in Playboy, it would be considered child pornography, but since Vogue is a “well-respected,” high-fashion magazine, there were few repercussions.

The following is the message these women – or girl in Miley’s case – send to girls who look up to them: look pretty, and the rest will follow, regardless if

8 | Over The CounterCulture Magazine | otccmagazine.com | Issue #1

you never pick up a real book in your life or if you date complete idiots who belittle you. As long as you’re a size two and smile at the appropriate moment, you’re golden. Not to mention, these women give men high and unrealistic expectations of what females should look and act like. Sorry boys, not all of us are willing to get drunk and immediately crawl into your beds like our Jersey Shore girls.

Some feel comforted by living vicariously through those who can be reckless and get away with it, especially because the common person can’t do what celebrities can. Charlie Sheen, Kanye West, and Chris Brown are all known for the fits they throw and their shitty reputations, but because they’re famous, their punishment is nothing short of an immense amount of publicity. We idolize the idiotic.

Of course, it must be taken into consideration that celebrities are, in fact, humans. They can’t be expected to be flawless, regardless of what their airbrushed magazine photos portray.

Celebrities are piles of bones, organs, and blood just like everyone, yet we treat them as if they’re the epitome of the lives we should be living. In fact, we have become so infatuated with celebrity status that we use Facebook, blogs, and other social networking websites to broadcast our own daily activities as a declaration of our microcosmic, personal fame, however minor it may be. Our generation is desperate to be recognized, and as long as our names are on people’s lips, whether we’re being praised or slandered, we really feel like we’ve accomplished something worthwhile.

I’m not going to tell you that cutting the bullshit Jersey Shore quotes out of your ten Facebook status updates per day is going to be life-changing, but I’ll tell you this: it will help.

Paris Hilton going down the long, hard road of becoming an American pop icon.

VIRGIN BlOOD

P

reparing to take the virginity of my girlfriend, I am reminded of my first girlfriend and the night I lost mine.

She’s already changed into her leopard print silk pajama bottoms and oversized night shirt.

She was wearing a tank top and short skirt with knee high leather boots. We went to my room and put on some music.

We’re in her room – alone. *I’m glad you came over, but we have to be quiet. My parents are asleep, she tells me. *Okay, that’s fine. What did you want to do? I ask. *I didn’t really have anything planned, we can do whatever you want. *So, when will your parents be home? She wanted to know. *I don’t know for sure. Sometime late tonight. *Good for us. *I know! What would you like to do? *Maybe we could..... She pulled herself towards me. *Maybe we could..... I pull myself towards her. *I was definitely hoping that’s what you would suggest, I said. *Okay. She says coyly. *Are you sure you’re ready? I ask.

She threw me back on the bed and pushed her face close to mine, our mouths almost touching. *I think so but... can we turn off the light? She asks.

I felt her tongue glide between my lips and slowly stroke mine. *Sure baby, I tell her and flick the switch to the off position.

We stopped necking, she took off her shirt. I followed suit.

I make my way slowly back to the bed and crawl in, sliding my hand up the sheets until I find her side. Using her side as a guide in the dark room I pull myself up between her legs.

She kissed my neck and quickly made her way down my chest to my stomach. She unlatched my pants and ripped down the zipper fervently.

BY PHiLip HowiLiER

“My dick slid in her easily, and she sat on it, hard.”

I kiss her gently and move down to her neck, pecking her cheek and nibbling her ear along the way. She squirms underneath me and reaches up my shirt, caressing my chest.

My cock fell out of my boxers.

Her mouth closed around the tip of it. I could feel her tongue swimming around the head.

I reach down and untie her pajama bottoms. She is sopping wet. My finger glides easily between her labia.

I rub her clit softly. A muffled shudder escapes, despite her efforts to keep quiet.

After a few minutes of fellatio she stood up and unclasped her bra.

Then, she pulled my pants the rest of the way off.

I pull her silky pajama bottoms down her legs, off her feet. I grab a condom strategically placed in my front pocket and slide it on.

My dick slid in her easily, and she sat on it, hard.

She is tight. After a small struggle trying to get inside her, she winces in pain then moans from pleasure as I carefully ease myself inside of her.

Violently thrusting her body up and down I felt the pleasure building. *I love you so much, I tell her as I’m pulling myself slowly in and out of her.

She went harder and harder. *I fucking love you, she panted.

I feel her vagina start to tighten and I go faster so we can climax together. *I’m going to cum, I told her.

Her cunt becomes even tighter as I speed up.

Pulling herself down she put my dick in her mouth and sucked all the semen from it, swallowing all of it.

We come at the same time. I can feel the walls of her pussy contracting while I blow my load into the condom. *I love you too, I said.

We lie completely still for a while, catching our breath. *I love you too, she pants.

Issue #1 | otccmagazine.com | Over The CounterCulture Magazine | 9

Jittery visions of neon sin Blinding hits of chemical bliss Smothering out all fire within In lonely land of Love-less Kiss Unwashed sheets, reflecting walls Leopard prints hide long black hairs Needing god, someone to call Finding no one there to care Burning brain and shaking body Every high was meant to fall Nothing left to keep holy We answered all the Devil’s calls I wrote this poem in Hong Kong, shortly after a serious overdose on antidepressants, booze and hash. In a room full of mirrors in a seedy rent-by-the-hour hotel.

Kim Dae Sheek

PHotoGRApH BY SAM SNELLER

Letter From The Post-Industrials Words and Photograph by Rick

Dear Post-Industrials; You people (will) have terrible typing skills. You’d think ya’ll would have advanced beyond typewriters and brown construction paper... What happened to Twitter and shit? Furthermore, “Mad Max”? “Waterworld”? Do those pass as representations of good films from my time? Why not something more recent and decently produced like “The Book of Eli”? “Mad Max” just makes me think of Mel Gibson, which makes me think the human race deserves whatever horrible catastrophe is coming to us. And “Waterworld” didn’t seem too terrible a fate. And did you mention the Talking Heads? Love that band. Instead of focusing on our treatment of the planet, can’t we talk about something more positive, like our similar taste in music? “Burnin’ down the house! Hold tight! Wait ‘til the party’s over!”

-Sincerely, Post-Post-Modernists JAMES GARciA 12 | Over The CounterCulture Magazine | otccmagazine.com | Issue #1

The Real ‘Merica: a Tea Party Satire I

BY MAtHEw ScHLicHtiNG

don’t trust government. You shouldn’t trust government. People working in government shouldn’t trust government. Yeah, government is supposed to make our lives easier— but it don’t! Look how much money they spend. I don’t care none what they spend it on, but anyone spending a trillion dollars is too damn rich in my opinion. I make $7.75 at Wal-Mart, bein’ a hard working American in a 100% American store and I spend my money on things that matter to me a whole lot as an individual—food, water, and donating to the tea party.

But some of them things government spends money on just don’t make one bit of sense. Like the mail system. You know the postal service is government run? That’s why it takes five God-damned days for me to send a letter to my brother in San Diego.

If we privatized the postal service I bet we could send letters to Singapore or any of those other back-wood places in Australia in six hours. It’d be dirt cheap, too, because privatizing things drives competition!

Whoever does it best for the least gets the business! Now why ain’t we teaching our kids this sort of thing in our schools?

Because education is government run, too! What a goddamn waste of money. We hire the dumbest teachers and keep payin’ them to tell our children how to cut paper up until they’re age eleven. When that’s done they start tellin’ em hair’s gonna grow on their balls. Really? We ought to privatize education, too. Let people start companies

“Maybe then we won’t get anymore queers parading around this country like that fuckin’ faggot Neil Patrick Harris.”

that educate children. You want your kid to just learn Math? Go to the company runnin’ the math school. You pay for the amount of time you spend in the classroom, and whoever does it the cheapest and the best gets the most business. Hallelujah, Jesus!

It works. I know our kids can be a hundred and ten percent reliable when they tell us how their school day goes, and how much they’re learning in class. We can trust this system as much as we trust the good Lord.

And then we can cut out those useless faggot classes like music and drama. Maybe then we won’t get anymore queers parading around this country like that fuckin’ faggot Neil Patrick Harris.

And what really gets me? The Police Force.

GOVERNMENT RUN. And look at how much crime we’ve got in these fuckin’ streets! All them drugs! All them kids smoking crack, fuckin’ other men and knockin’ over liquor stores! It’s like Sodom and Gomorrah out there! We wouldn’t need police if every redblooded American citizen born and raised in this fine country had an assault rifle. If some Mexican spic tries to rob you, blow his goddamn head off! If a drug lord is trying to move into your part of town, lob a grenade under his ass and watch that junkie dance.

Hell, we’d be a lot more civilized to each

other, too! I bet my neighbor wouldn’t let his dog shit in my yard if I could point a rifle at that fuckin’ terrier and tell him to scram.

Or if I popped a couple rounds into my neighbor’s Mercedes. I bet he’d be a whole lot nicer and keep that pooch off my grass then. And he’s such a fuckin’ yuppie hipster anyway, carrying his god-damned coffees out to his car and kissing his wife good-bye.

I lay next to my wife every night and she knows I’m honest when I say I would fuck her if I wasn’t too tired.

See, that’s the problem, is you got these God-damned liberals bitchin’ and moanin’ about how individuals can’t always do better for themselves than government can do for ‘em. Bullshit. If we didn’t have to pay so much to take care of the old fuckers suckin’ our blood and cash, we could afford to buy more medicine and be healthier! And if we didn’t have government restrictions on what kind of drugs we could buy we would all feel healthy even if we weren’t!

You know what, I’ve got so many good ideas. I’m done talkin’ to you all, we’re on a college campus and ya’ll are probably liberal queers anyway. I’ve got too many good ideas about government! I got to use them. You know, I ought to run for office and campaign on shutting down the government for good.

We can all function fine on our own — we got the best religion and some damn fine guns to cling to, and we shouldn’t let some commie bastard stand in our way.

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THE ILLUSION OF ALEATA

By James Garcia | | Photographs by Nicole Garcia

death has never looked so good. this isn’t aleata illusion’s first time in a cemetery, and it definitely won’t be her last.

I

’m in my sister’s van which is stuffed with lighting equipment and camera shit. We’re driving much too fast through a cemetery in Wooster, Ohio.

“Fuck. I don’t know where we’re going. She just said, ‘Big monument,’ ” I say.

“Oh! Wow! Look at that mausoleum!

That’s pretty cool,” my sister says.

“I want to be cremated when I die.

This all reminds me of the pyramids. It’s downright arrogant.”

We’re in the back of the graveyard when I notice a girl standing alone with hair whiter than cocaine on Gwen Stefani’s ass, in shorts with fishnet stockings, red and black striped long-socks and a Blondie t-shirt. We’re here for a photo shoot and an interview. But I don’t have time for an interview – I’ll do it later. (I won’t.) We drive by her, I wave like a tool with a shit-eating grin on my face.

Aleata Schaffter (she tells me her last name means weapon maker in German – or something like that) is a unique specimen, for sure. She’s punk meets hipster. I’ve decided I will call her look “color-goth.” She’s quiet at first but opens up after I start blabbering on about my family’s birthday dinner, which I am already late to. My sister gets started, having Aleata pose in front of a massive tombstone/monument of phallic proportions. Even in death everyone is

trying to have the biggest boner.

I remember the time I first saw Aleata.

It was at the Wayne County Fair, she had been talking with my friend, Fat Phil. But I couldn’t concentrate on the conversation. Either the drugs were kicking in or Aleata’s arms really were made up entirely of scar-tissue.

It wasn’t the drugs, Fat Phil had assured me. She had a fetish for selfmutilation. Badass.

We’re talking about her tattoos now.

She has more tattoos than I will be able to recall, since like the excellent journalist that I am, I am not taking any kind of notes. My favorites are a Courage the Cowardly Dog on her right forearm, on the backside of her right hand is Willie Nelson (from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, not the undead musician) and a “Rambo Street Shark” (remember that show??) on her left forearm. Across the knuckles of both her hands is a film strip. She says it was one of her best tattoo ideas. She had to cover up the “fuck love” tattoo she had on them before for work. She works in retail. I don’t ask where, because good journalists don’t ask too many questions.

We’re done with the phallic tomb now, so we’re moving on – walking past normal-sized gravestones – the people who worked at McDonalds

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“I’ve never puked on a grave before, but I pissed on one.” or in cubicles for the entirety of their mundane lives and couldn’t afford a pyramid built in their name after they got Alzheimer’s and their livers gave out and their kidneys failed and their hearts stopped pumping dust.

“I puked on a grave once,” I say, laughing at the memory. She and my sister laugh.

“I’ve never puked on a grave before, but I pissed on one,” she says. She explains that it wasn’t intentional or out of jealousy for the poor dead fellow upon whose sad remains she pissed, but simply an urgent biological need to urinate – probably due in part to the excess of alcohol she had been imbibing that night. “One time a group of us were here and we all puked off the ledge of that monument.”

This cemetery is a good location for a photo shoot. It wasn’t my idea. Our dear friend Aleata has had a fascination with death and death-like things for quite some time. A childhood friend of Aleata’s recalled seeing her first horror movie at the Schaffter residence, which traumatised her young mind.

Strangely enough, I had never really had the opportunity to spend any time with Aleata, until now. She was around when I was around, just not around me. She was hanging out with the same people I hung out with, drinking the same beer I was drinking and doing the same drugs I was doing. But all I knew about her were stories. And they were some strange stories. I will tell you one of these stories, but you have to promise to keep in mind it’s just a story that I heard from other people. A lesser journalist would have attempted to confirm the story with Aleata. But I’m awesome.

After her and her sisters had consumed an inordinate amount of cough medicine, Aleata and company broke out knives and/or razorblades which they began dragging across their own and each other’s bodies. (And in my imagination they were all moaning in weird robotastic ecstacy and giggling with demonic pleasure.) And when a friend showed up, the gang tried to start their cutting game with this new person. The friend was less than enthusiastic about it, however, and called the police. When the coppers arrived to find this weird scene, the blood-thirsty Shaffter girls tried to cut the badge-fuckers. And this is usually where the story ends, without a sensible resolution, and I’m left with a

feeling somewhere south of belief. But it’s just another Aleata allusion.

But when she’s not (allegedly) trying to cut cops, she’s quite a busy girl. Under the name Aleata Illusion, she’s a writer, a director, a model, a cinemetographer, a fashion designer, a photo journalist major at Kent State, a horror movie reviewer (a “gore hound”), and runs the movie group Maggot Mosh Productions.

Just an all-around badass. Oh and her hair is constantly a different vibrant color. Fuck off, Scott Pilgrim, this ain’t no Ramona, this chick will eat you if you start acting like a whiny bitch.

She’s telling me the best ways to

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make fake blood and scolding me for not telling her to bring some for the photo shoot. I’m considering just slicing open one of my veins with the edge of a tombstone and using my own blood, because I’m pretty sure that would make a stellar photo. But I don’t do it, because I’m a professional.

Nicole Garcia | Photographer

Left vs Right:

unions the debate Wages on

We here at OTCC do not want to throw ridiculous partisan propaganda in your face in order to serve our own agendas.

So, here are the liberal and conservative takes on the issue of state worker’s unions. Senate Bill 5 was passed into law in Ohio, which limits collective bargaining of 350,000 public workers. The following arguments were made prior to the bill being passed. This is an ongoing issue.

the left:

W

ere you forced into employment at the age of eight? Has your boss demanded you work 80 hours a week with no overtime? Have you been fired for taking a sick day? Did your boss bring in the National Guard to burn your family alive when you started to strike?* If you answered no to any of these questions, then you can thank a union.

I grew up in a union house, and I will be the first to admit that unions are nowhere as effective as they used to be and reform is certainly needed. With that being said, I still feel that unions are the only way that the working man can make any meaningful stand against his employers, whether he be demanding safer working conditions or fighting against a decrease in pay.

At one time in America, some companies didn’t pay you in money.

They paid you in script, which was that company’s form of money, and it could only be redeemed at a store owned by the company. Workers were forced to work for up to 16 hours a day, often without bathroom breaks and only a short break for lunch.

Safety regulations were practically non-existent, and if you got hurt and couldn’t work, you were on your own.

Vacations and benefits were unheard of, and you could expect to work 6-7 days a week. And you started working at around age 10, give or take a few years. To add insult to injury, if you got with your fellow employees to protest these conditions, you damn well better be armed, ‘cause you could expect to be fired, beaten, arrested and sometimes shot. Unions changed all of this.

Obviously times have changed, and

you don’t hear too much about changes in the workplace brought on by unions.

That’s because now unions spend most of their time defending the freedoms we all now enjoy and provide for their members in need. I know it sounds odd, but big companies are driven by profit, and one of the best ways to increase profit is by decreasing all of those pesky health and safety features and making employees work longer for less. I don’t trust the government to stand up for the workers, and you know damn well the corporations aren’t going to have a change of heart. So unless a single worker can stand up against their company and the government by themselves, they need a union.

Unions are democracy. You vote for your leaders directly. There is no electoral congress bullshit or any appointed positions. Any member who wants to vote can vote on (or run for) any position or on any issue. Want to vote on an issue that’s not on the ballot? Propose a vote on whether or not it should be on the ballot. It really is that simple.

So unless you think you can take on a giant corporation or the government alone, you should be concerned about how the right is trying to remove power from the unions. Sure, we may not need them now, and they certainly aren’t perfect, but it is way easier to protect your rights when you don’t need them than to fight for them after you have lost them and need them once again. *Armed conflict between union members, private security forces, and sometimes the National Guard, were common in the early years of the industrialization of the U.S. This particular incident is known as the Ludlow Massacre and occurred in 1914.

ETHAN DANGER

←

“Just because a few assholes took advantage of the system, doesn’t mean you completely shut the system down.”

What I find odd is that every time we as a nation enter a recession, the far right immediately tried to limit the power of unions. Reagan did it in the 80’s and it’s happening again right now.

I understand that we are in a budget crisis, and so do the unions. Many are willing to take pay cuts for the time being. This, however, is not enough for the right. They want to take away the unions right to collective bargaining.

This means that the workers have no ability to negotiate pay, benefits, safety issues, and a multitude of other things.

I don’t think public employees deserve a raise during this trying time, but I damn sure don’t believe you should take away their right to negotiate with their employers. Call me old fashioned, but I believe my children should have the same rights my parents enjoyed.

Shouldn’t we be demanding more freedoms instead of accepting fewer?

Sure, some unions are corrupt, but you don’t buy a new car just because the oil needs changed. Just because a few assholes took advantage of the system doesn’t mean you completely shut the system down. Hell, by that logic we all shouldn’t use money anymore because Bernie Madoff took advantage of a bunch of people.

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VS→

S

the right:

ince the ignition of the Wisconsin and Ohio bills, there has been much smoke generated over the nature of public unions and private unions and they are made to appear indistinguishable. But let me clear some of that smoke.

Protestors of the union bills have warned that all workers are in danger, when only public union members will be affected.

Healthcare and other benefits will be taken off the negotiating table. New contracts will be drawn up yearly. Pay raises can only be implemented according to the Consumer Price Index, in other words, proportional to inflation. Union dues will no longer be directly deducted from paychecks. Strikes will be banned.

All these things mean, to the protestors, the beginning of a slippery and apparently short slope toward the abolition of all unions, both public and private. One gathers from the pundits, Collective Bargaining is a “right,” and that right is being taken away.

First, it’s not being taken away (yet), there are just fewer items to bargain over.

Thankfully, wages are still on there. One could argue (and several Conservative pundits are arguing) public unions never should have been allowed to bargain at all, much less should they even exist.

Second, in what way is collective bargaining a right? There has been plenty of rhetoric about collective bargaining and union formation standing at the level of a sacrament (simply, a right). But just where did this right come from?

Since the passage of the bill in Ohio, one Bexley teacher wrote in an email to the Governor, “Are we in the year 1930 or 2011?” She continued, “When I read the proposal for Senate Bill 5, I could just hear Woody Guthrie singing to help laborers have the courage to stand up for their right to have a union.”

Here again is the equation of private and public unions, as well as the false declaration that Unions will be disbanded. There is at least one huge mark of distinction between public and private employee unions and their manner of Collective Bargaining. In a private industry, three forces – laborers, management and stockholders – all tugging in separate directions must balance their costs, distribute their earnings and make compromises with each other over the quality of their enterprise. In the public sphere, two forces - “laborers” (union members) and the management – tug their separate ways and the third group (in this case a group called “tax-payers,” similar in abstract, but not entirely like the stockholders crowd) misses out on the whole process. When governmentemployed public union members “bargain” with the also-government-employed management, revenues (taxes) to pay their wages and expand their dominion can simply be raised arbitrarily unlike profits in a private company which are dependent on consumers.

The period the Bexley teacher was referring to was a time where trade unions exploded into activism and carried on through the following decades with increased membership and brought severe changes to the industries that employed them. But they were in private industries such as mining and manufacturing. They had nothing to do with State, Municipal, or Federal workers. It wasn’t until John F. Kennedy’s administration that public employees were allowed to form unions.

Collective bargaining is a “right” they say, but the source of this right never gets any attention. Does just repeating a slogan enough make the slogan true? That seems to be the strategy here, as any teacher can tell you “Repetition is the mother of Wisdom.”

Just say it often, and loud. Waving signs around and having sleep-overs in the state capital can’t hurt, right?

Never does the Constitution come up.

Jesse Jackson gave a different answer though. It seems the Constitution has the day off and there’s a substitute standing in temporarily. Quoted from the Chicago Sun Times, Jackson said, “The right to organize, to bargain collectively and to strike are basic human rights, enshrined in International Law.” How can we really trust those loyal to forces outside our country to still embrace and uphold the American form of government and treat American citizens justly?

It’s ironic. With all the cloudy talk about the holiness of Collective Bargaining, one Ohio professor was quoted as saying “[John Kasich] is trying to kill collective bargaining and collective bargaining is democracy in the workplace.” The governor isn’t killing collective bargaining. And that Collective Bargaining is democracy in the workplace

is vastly disputable. Representation is an essential part of our form of government, after all our country was born out of a war fought over representation. And, as was mentioned above, representation of all parties involved is exactly what Collective Bargaining fails to do in the Public sphere.

But, that aside, grant that it is democracy in the workplace (the union members’ workplace), this question still has to be asked, and answered: Does democracy in the workplace conflict with just plain, original democracy? Is it democratic to channel money collected at the barrel of a gun to a minority of people to pay their bills while the rest of the country makes vast cutbacks? That better suits the definition of the tyranny the American founders sought to escape.

“If any union member fears these changes, it is because they are the first ones to go under the reform, and rightly so.”

Moreover, when public employees vote, and one candidate (and one party) promises to increase the funds from taxes that go to their respective departments, can they be blamed for voting on that basis, despite any other undesirable characteristics that candidate happened to possess? Such a condition cannot but make otherwise uncorrupt people do corrupt things.

And “corruption” is the right word for what’s happened to the public school establishment. The opposition to both the Wisconsin and Ohio governor’s efforts lament the changes that will be instituted.

In particular, these include a system of implementing pay raises based on merit.

Another adjustment breaks from the old method of laying-off teachers according to their seniority (those higher in seniority are more likely to stay, while newer younger teachers, no matter how exceptional, are the first to go). Why did the school system operate in this way to begin with? Why hasn’t it been changed earlier? Students are graded and allowed to pass according to their merit (most of the time), but teachers can pass into the next school year, no matter how inept they are, just because they got their job before any number of younger, fresher, potentially more competent teachers. If any union member fears these changes, it is because they are to be the first ones to go under the reform, and rightly so.

Another protestor writing to the Governor

of Ohio said, “You were not elected to eliminate unions [or] destroy public education.” This is yet another example of the misrepresentation of the bill. In fact, so long as the governor only does one of the two things listed in the man’s email, he will ensure the success of the other.

In other words, the success of the unions has lead to the decline of public education, and the rebirth of public education would have to begin on the ashes of the teachers unions as they now stand. The blanket term “education” itself is loaded. Funds entitled for “education” haven’t in fact increased the quality of education for students. Public Schools in the United States have been on the decline for decades. The money went somewhere though and there is a lot of overhead to go through before any funds trickle down and reach the children so often invoked. With their pocket books to look after it’s hard for all that overhead to be thinking about the kids at the bottom. And it’s not a good sign when they send their own kids to private schools. No, the actual flesh-and-blood children in the classroom are seldom taken care of, but “education” is so important to these teachers they’re willing to skip work to lobby on its behalf.

While Collective Bargaining is not an inherently evil practice, it has been excessively abused. Private unions are made up of workers in a private enterprise, the conditions of work, rates of pay, benefits offered, are solely up to the parties involved, each of which has their own form of representation. This is not so in the case of Public unions. Their stockholders, who are also their consumers - all tax-payers have no representation to offset the union’s special interests. How would everyday citizens respond to a local firefighters’ strike while a fire is tearing someone’s house down?

Or if all nurses in one hospital called in sick, delaying a life-saving operation. There was a reason public employees were barred from forming Unions in the first place. It wasn’t to repress some of the most valuable citizens in the community, it was to ensure these valuable roles would be populated by people who had the best interest of the whole community in mind, as well as the skills and training to execute their jobs to a satisfactory and just standard.

OSCAR RAY

NICOLE GARCIA Issue #1 | otccmagazine.com | Over The CounterCulture Magazine | 19

A

hmed’s last source of income had been Burger Hut, where he worked as an assistant fry clerk.

He was on his way to becoming fry manager when his boss, Rosalyn, accused him of eating a freedom fry that he had not paid for. He denied the allegation, but to no avail: an investigative committee concluded that Ahmed was a thief, resulting in the immediate termination of his employment. From there, Ahmed’s life took a high velocity plunge towards a completely empty bank account, and before he could blink, he was out on the streets. The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away.

Fortunately, this sudden bout of homelessness came during the warm season, so dealing with the elements was not as harsh as it would have been during the winter. For this, Ahmed was thankful.

He had a tent, so he hitchhiked out of the city and moved into the wilderness. There had to be more to life than wage slavery and eviction notices. Perhaps he would meet a woman of the forest and start a family outside the confines of idiotic civilization.

Ahmed thanked Infinity for this new opportunity to achieve happiness.

Ahmed’s optimism was quickly depleted.

He had neglected to bring an adequate amount of food and water on this venture, and the forest was engulfed in a severe drought.

It took only eight hours of excessive heat and no water to make Ahmed realize that he was on the verge of an early meeting with the grim reaper. He set out to find nourishment.

After a half hour of wandering, Ahmed came upon some sort of farm. On this farm was a man clearing rocks out of the soil. He greeted Ahmed with an insincere smile.

“Greetings, brother,” the man said.

“Hello, can I have some water?”

The man gave Ahmed water, which he was grateful for. “Have you heard the good news?” the man asked. Ahmed could tell that something stupid was about to happen.

“The messiah is walking the earth. He is my master.”

“That’s fantastic.”

“My name is Pralatamah. My master gave me this name. His name is Kunya el Saki.”

“Why would you make another man your master?” Ahmed asked.

“Kunya is no man. He is the Supreme Creator.”

“I was under the impression that the Supreme Creator transcends all form.”

“I must go into the barn and pray to the messiah’s image,” Pralatamah said, ignoring Ahmed’s proposition. Being that he was homeless and had nothing better to do, Ahmed decided to join Pralatamah and see what happened next.

“I would like to learn about your Kunya,” Ahmed said. Pralatamah agreed to this and led Ahmed to his barn-temple, which was decorated with various depictions of Kunya el Saki. Pralatamah began to weep.

“I always get emotional at the sight of his holiness,” Pralatamah explained. Ahmed could tell that Pralatamah truly believed that these pictures depicted a holy man. As Pralatamah prayed, Ahmed looked at the

LAME pictures of the so-called messiah in disgust.

Pralatamah was too stupid to realize that he was worshipping a demon. He began to chant: “Kunya el, Kunya el Savior of Earth Master and friend The Source of mirth!”

“Humans were designed to be slaves, and if an individual wanted to evolve beyond this state of violence, it usually had to be done alone.”

It was a stupid chant, but Ahmed knew that this situation was potentially interesting, so he took up the chant and began to dance. Pralatamah was pleased with Ahmed’s apparent enthusiasm. Ahmed had enough experience with various forms of demon worship to know that there was always a large horde of cash being siphoned off its subjects, and he figured that maybe he could find a way to direct some of this money toward himself.

One carefully planned robbery could potentially result in Ahmed having enough funds to pay for rent and groceries. And there was always the possibility of obtaining a high-level position within the religion itself. The economy was structured in such a way that only the most devious could thrive; Ahmed had once dreamed of pursuing a lifestyle of idealism and justice, but quickly learned that the practice of such ethical consideration only led to people trying to take advantage of its practitioner’s kindness. Humans were designed to be slaves, and if an individual wanted to evolve beyond this state of violence, it usually had to be done alone.

Meanwhile, although he did not like it, Ahmed had accepted society’s embracement of Darwinian economics as cold, objective fact. If pretending to give a damn about Kunya and his religion could result in a steady supply of food, Ahmed would give it some serious consideration. Ideally, Ahmed preferred the quick robbery to a tedious infiltration of Pralatamah’s religion.

After prayer, Ahmed asked if there was any work to be done in exchange for food and water.

Pralatamah said he would give him two meals per day if he helped pick rocks out of the soil. Ahmed agreed to this transaction. For six hours, Ahmed performed this tedious task while listening to Pralatamah drone on about his master: “I used to smoke marijuana in Florida with my cousin, but later I moved to the jungle and smoked marijuana there.

I

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by joel k.

also did LSD and that was when I met my master, Kunya el Saki. He floated down from Heaven and explained that he was the creator of the entire universe; I felt so grateful that Kunya came down to talk to me because I was pretty much a complete simpleton and loser, but now I was talking to the creator of existence, so I knew I was a winner. I asked Kunya what I could do to please him and he told me that signing over all my financial assets to him would be a good start. As luck would have it, I had just received a one-hundred thousand dollar inheritance, so I quickly obliged Kunya’s request. He was so pleased with my act of devotion that he gave me my very own hook to hang my sash on! For five years, my only possessions were that sash and a piece of cardboard, which served as both my bed and prayer mat. Serving Kunya has made me complete as a man. For my obedience, I get to run this farm for my master…”

Ahmed was paranoid enough to know that Pralatamah was showing the symptoms of a man who had been thoroughly brainwashed. There’s a sucker born every minute, and Pralatamah radiated the truth of this philosophy magnificently.

“Is it time to eat yet?” Ahmed asked.

“Yes, we will eat now,” Pralatamah said.

Pralatamah led Ahmed to his modest living arrangement, a hut decorated with Kunya el Saki paraphernalia.

Before eating, Pralatamah lit a candle and sang a song to one of his Kunya statues. Lunch consisted of orange peels mixed in porridge. Ahmed was not pleased.

“Motherfucker, you gotta be kidding me,” Ahmed said. Pralatamah was confused by Ahmed’s anger and responded with only a vacant gaze.

“I want a god damn steak,” Ahmed declared.

“I don’t eat steak. It takes eight hours to digest a piece of flesh. It is extremely difficult for your body to process.”

“You better at least give me a slice of cheese or something. I demand adequate pay for my hard work.”

“This is all my master will allow me to eat.”

“Your master will only allow you to eat orange peels? Does that not strike you as suspicious? A human cannot think straight on a malnourished stomach.”

“Kunya says they’re the most nutritious part.”

Pralatamah was beaming at the thought of his master.

From a Machiavellian perspective, Ahmed could respect what was being done to Pralatamah. The man was clearly an idiot and very likely could not handle a lifestyle outside the jurisdiction of this

“Was the LSD forced into your body while you were strapped to a table?” mind-controlling cult. However, Ahmed had a soft spot for the plight of humanity and realized that there was an entire stream of events to consider which led Pralatamah to his current state of subservience. Maybe he was a milk carton child and was introduced to this religion completely against his will.

“Who fed you the drugs that led to your meeting of Kunya?” Ahmed asked.

“I got them from my friend inside the jungle.” Ahmed doubted if had ever heard a more ominous explanation for the obtainment of drugs.

“Did this friend wear sunglasses and have a really ridiculous haircut?”

“He had long hair and he wasn’t wearing sunglasses.”

“How did you meet him?”

“We crossed paths because it was meant to be. It was Kunya’s will.”

“Was the LSD forced into your body while you were strapped to a table?”

“No way, dude. I was just vibin’ to the tunes of the jungle with my naked jungle friend when he asked me if I wanted to try something way cooler than the marijuana we had been smoking.”

“So you ingested the LSD in a completely free and sovereign manner? You were under no sort of compulsion?”

“Of course not. I have found true freedom as Kunya’s slave.”

Ahmed knew that there was absolutely no point in continuing this conversation.

He ate his porridge in silence. Afterward, Pralatamah said he needed some alone time with Kunya. One of the ways he related to his master was as a lover.

“That’s a little weird,” Ahmed said.

“Kunya manifests himself in myriad ways.”

“I’m going home. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

Ahmed walked back to his camp, which consisted of a one-man tent hoisted up by a rope tied between two trees. He was not particularly bewildered by the events of the day. Though he was not jaded enough to say that he had seen it all, he had certainly seen enough. He could not be surprised by anything sinister or creepy that a human chose to engage in. Ahmed was curious about the world of Kunya el Saki, so he decided that he would return to Pralatamah’s farm the next day. There was really nothing better to do.

A

hmed’s second day with Pralatamah turned into the beginning of quite an ordeal.

Though Pralatamah began work at dawn, Ahmed didn’t show up until four in the afternoon.

“Kunya will be most displeased with your tardiness,” Pralatamah warned.

“Yeah, well Kunya can kiss my Polack ass,” Ahmed responded. He was ill from meat-withdrawal and not in the mood to be lectured by some brainwashed dipshit.

“You shouldn’t speak of my master in

such a disrespectful fashion.”

“I’ll talk however I god damn feel like.”

Ahmed was making Pralatamah feel awkward. The news of Earth’s savior usually made people happy, but Ahmed’s heart had obviously been hardened by devilish forces.

Pralatamah made an attempt to lighten the mood with the story of Kunya’s birth: “Kunya was not born of a virgin mother; in fact, he was spawned from the womb of a common streetwalker. He made himself the product of such a sinful union in order to show humanity that it can be redeemed from its sins if only it listens to the songs of divinity beating inside each and every heart.

The streetwalker knew that pregnancy was bad for business, so she opted to have what this life-ruining glob of goo extracted from her body. But of course, this was no ordinary glob of goo; this was the savior of humanity.

Just as Kunya was about to be vacuumed out of the physical realm, Kunya’s mother heard the sound of a trumpet. Before the doctor could perform the abortion, Kunya emerged from the womb as a fully developed god-child.”

“That’s reasonable,” Ahmed said.

Pralatamah continued: “’Greetings, mother; I am Kunya, the creator of existence,’ Kunya said. The doctor trembled in fear, as he realized that he had almost aborted this magical being and feared the possibility of violent retribution.

However, Kunya simply smiled and forgave the doctor for his indiscretion. ‘Go and sin no more,’ Kunya told the doctor. The next day, the doctor closed up shop and finished out his days bombing abortion clinics as a sign of his devotion to Kunya.” Pralatamah smiled at the thought of the savior’s birth.

“So what happened to Kunya’s mother?”

Ahmed asked.

“She was freed from the tyranny of her pimp and ascended to the fifth dimension, where she sits on her throne in perfect joy profound.”

“Is she equal to Kunya?”

“Of course not, she’s a woman.”

Pralatamah chuckled at the notion of such an absurdity.

“Kunya teaches that women are the spiritual equivalent of dogs: kind of dumb, but fiercely loyal if molded in the correct fashion.”

“Isn’t that philosophy kind of stupid as fuck?” Ahmed asked. “If you’re trying to evolve beyond mankind’s current state of savagery, it would seem most expedient to have your masculine and feminine energies in balance.”

“Kunya teaches that women are the spiritual equivalent of dogs: kind of dumb, but fiercely loyal if molded in the correct fashion.”

“My mother would slap the shit out of me if I ever brought a philosophy like that to her attention.”

“If she does not submit to Kunya, she will spend eternity being tortured in hellfire for her disobedience.”

Ahmed looked into Pralatamah’s eyes and saw that he was being completely

forthright and sincere in his espousement of these beliefs. Such was life in the waning days of civilization. The apocalypse couldn’t get here soon enough.

“What does your family think about your religion?” This question made Pralatamah angry.

“This isn’t a religion. Kunya is the truth.

He is your creator and don’t think that he’s not taking note of your disrespect.” Ahmed looked around.

“I don’t see anyone else here but you.”

“Kunya is omnipresent.”

“Then tell his bitch ass to manifest himself in an obvious manner.”

“Please do not refer to my master as a bitch ass.”

“I apologize. Tell your Kunya to come hang out. I’d like to speak with him. Maybe he could cure me of my existential angst.”

“Do not test the Supreme Creator. Your arms are too short to box with Kunya.”

“I don’t know about that. I know there is something my arms can’t reach, but I don’t think it’s Kunya. I’m guessing I could catch him straight in the jaw.”

“Don’t you dare touch my master!”

Pralatamah shrieked.

“How can I punch someone in the face when he’s not even here?” Ahmed asked.

“Kunya is everywhere.”

“Is he in the water?”

“He is in the water.”

“Can he build a mountain that he can’t move?”

“Kunya can do whatever he pleases.”

At this point, Ahmed ended the conversation. There were better bridges to burn.

T

hat night, there was a gathering on a nearby plot of land, a celebration of Kunya and his benevolence. The gate to the camp was guarded by two soldiers strapped with AK-47s.

“What’s up with that?” Ahmed asked.

“There are devils who want to assassinate our beloved master,” Pralatamah explained.

“So the sight of unmarked soldiers dressed completely in black is a fairly typical scene in your life?”

“Kunya must be protected.”

“Why does the creator of existence need protection from his subjects?”

“There has been a rebellion in Heaven.”

“You know, there are usually reasons why the peasants try to overthrow their master. Perhaps Kunya isn’t as benevolent as you profess?”

“Wrong. The peasants rebelled against him simply because they are evil. Kunya is the light.”

Ahmed followed Pralatamah towards a temple. There were many people on this property, and most of them seemed to be performing some sort of chore. The laborers were picking fruit, tilling the soil, giving the cows therapeutic massages, etc. They were distinguished by their red sashes. A significantly smaller portion of the population were the guards, fully armed and ready to put a quick and terrible end to the existence of anybody acting out of line.

There was an obvious caste system at Camp Kunya.

Issue #1 | otccmagazine.com | Over The CounterCulture Magazine | 21

Pralatamah and Ahmed entered the lesser temple to meet with a priest. Before entering the priest’s abode, Pralatamah knelt before an image of Kunya. Ahmed disregarded this asinine formality. He wasn’t exactly against the practice of bowing before a graven image, it was just that Kunya looked so fucking stupid. If he was going to engage in statue worship, the image better evoke some notion of respect. Whenever Ahmed saw an image of Kunya, his immediate reaction was to spit in his face, or maybe kick him. Ahmed’s thoughts were interrupted by a disgusting smell. It was the temple priest.

“I’d rather put my mouth around the barrel of a .22 and squeeze the trigger than pretend I have respect for your fake-ass god.”

“Why did you not bow before the likeness of Kunya?” the priest asked.

“You know, I just really didn’t feel like it. In fact, I’d rather put my mouth around the barrel of a .22 and squeeze the trigger than pretend I have respect for your fakeass god.” There was a moment of awkward silence, as neither Pralatamah nor the priest were accustomed to such frankness.

Ahmed’s rudeness was an intrusion upon the usual state of bliss they had achieved from living only for Kunya’s pleasure.

“Such insolence will not be tolerated,” the priest said.

“Oh, you’re going to tolerate my insolence,” Ahmed assured. “Otherwise, you’re going to have my trey-five-seven pointed at your chest.”

“Are you threatening me?” the priest asked.

“All I’m saying is that if you can’t respect my freedom and natural boundaries, there will be consequences for your infringement.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Karma is the underlying principle of sentient existence.”

The priest had heard enough. He called in the guards, who beat Ahmed without mercy. Afterward, they took him inside the torture room and waterboarded him for two weeks. They were happy to serve Kunya in such an important capacity.

A

fter the torture, Ahmed found himself in a red sash picking bananas for sixteen hours a day.

For the first week of his new occupation, Ahmed was quite out of his mind. He had journeyed into the depths of hell and was still processing the experience. However, when he finally emerged, his sense of freedom was fully intact.

Upon acknowledgment of his indentured servitude, he immediately laid out a course of action to get himself out of this most treacherous situation.

“Get back to work, asshole,” one of the guards said, interrupting Ahmed’s realization that he was now a slave. He continued picking bananas until he noticed a female giving him looks. At the first opportunity, Ahmed introduced himself.

“I’ve heard about you. You’re the guy who threatened to murder the priest.” Ahmed

was pleased that his attitude had resulted in an attractive female whom he had never met knowing about his exploits.

“I am that guy,” Ahmed said, flexing.

“You look like the type of man who wants to get free.”

“I am indeed that type of man.”

“Well check this out; I have three friends who are going to help me escape this hellhole and I would like to invite you to accompany me.”

“I accept your invitation.”

Ahmed and his new friend, Anya, began conspiring to escape from Camp Kunya.

I

t was vegan pizza party night, a favorite amongst Camp Kunya inmates. The festivities began with the reading of sacred scripture, followed by dancing and chanting to the name of the Supreme Creator, Kunya el Saki. The night ended with pizza and salad. It was a nice break from banana-picking.

Ahmed fell asleep during the scripture reading, which resulted in several evil eyes being directed in his general vicinity. His obvious lack of respect was duly noted by those secure in propping up this demented power structure.

The bad vibes woke Ahmed up in time for the dance, where he noticed several men dressed in traditionally female attire--and one of these men was Pralatamah! Ahmed was overcome with anger at the sight of the man who led him to this ridiculous camp and his subsequent waterboarding holiday. He took a coin out of his pocket and decided that he would resort to violence if it landed on heads. The coin landed on heads. Ahmed knew that his coin demanded obedience, so he went about his revenge in a quite vicious fashion. He quickly found himself the target of a very unfriendly-looking AK-47.

“Hands off Pralatamah,” a guard said.

Fortunately, Anya was prepared for this confrontation. She had procured her very own semi-automatic weapon and had a money shot aimed at the guard’s skull.

“Point your gun away from Ahmed’s throat,” she commanded. This reversal of affairs put the guard in a state of distress; he had spent the past ten years as a guard at Camp Kunya -- he was known as the harbinger of death -- and not once had his physical existence ever been in any real peril. Anya could sense the novelty of the guard’s fear.

“This is exactly why you shouldn’t be a murderer, even if the demons supporting your sinister endeavor have given you permission,” Anya explained. The guard directed his barrel toward the ground. Anya never intended to kill the guard. She was a lover; therefore, killing was not her business.

She would leave decisions of life and death to those in the correct position to make such a call. Vengeance is mine, saith the Elohim.

Meanwhile, Ahmed had seized the guard’s weapon and had it aimed at Pralatamah.

“Ahmed, don’t be a scumbag,” Anya said.

“You know Lucifer?” Ahmed asked.

Pralatamah responded in the negative.

“You’re about to meet him, motherfucker.”

Ahmed squeezed the trigger, resulting in a clicking sound indicative of an empty

22 | Over The CounterCulture Magazine | otccmagazine.com | Issue #1

clip. Ahmed had removed the bullets from the apparatus because he did not believe that Pralatamah deserved to die. Sure, Pralatamah had led him to Camp Kunya, but Ahmed wholeheartedly lived by the philosophy that there are no victims, only volunteers. He only wanted to give Pralatamah a good scare for being stupid enough to be involved with this ridiculous organization.

At this point, enough chaos had ensued as to let Ahmed and Anya slip out the back door. Their actions had led to an all-out uprising, as is wont to happen when a segment of the population has been violently oppressed. Ahmed and Anya walked handin-hand to an open field underneath a beautiful night sky. Anya sang a song of the heavens, and a giant wheel appeared in the sky. They spent the next year sailing across the galaxy with a trio of reptilians.

JOEL K.

“Their actions had led to an all-out uprising, as is wont to happen when a segment of the population has been violently oppressed”

SAM SNELLER

S

hakespeare once said that, “love is an ever fixéd mark / that stares down tempests and is never shaken / it is the star to every wandering bark / whose worth’s unknown, although its height be taken.” A tempest is a storm; A bark is a ship. If you can’t figure out from there, your middle school English teacher made a mistake when she passed you.

What do I think about love?

I believe in love at first sight. I think it happens every day.

ways to reach anyone’s heart, and the only thing they have in common— you have to start trying.

What do I know about love?

We spend too much time talking about it. We use the word too freely.

I love cookies. I love Glee. I love my North Face. Your North Face jacket?

You love a seventy dollar fleece jacket? We say we love things that we really have no emotional investment with, but by the end of the day, how often have we let the people that we care about know?

she’s away after you jumped off of a ferris wheel because she was cute. I don’t think that love is sending her off on a plane with Victor Lazlo or making her join your sports agency or letting her lie down on the door while you freeze or surviving a zombie onslaught in order to repopulate the earth together.

Love is when you see the look of happy surprise on their face at what you’ve done for them. Love is knowing that when you squeeze a hand it will squeeze back, a little harder than

“Love is knowing that when you squeeze a hand it will squeeze back, a little harder than you did.”

I believe the youngest understand love the best, and the oldest have made too many mistakes with their lives and don’t want the young to get hurt. That’s why they tell us there’s no such thing as falling in love when you’re sixteen, or even twenty.

We put too much weight on the word itself! If I love you I’m going to tell you that I love you. I don’t care if you tell me that you love me right away because I love you. So don’t feel like you have to say it back, and for heaven’s sake, don’t freak

you did. Love is sitting on a couch drinking coffee feeling perfectly content to spend the evening chatting and doing nothing else but enjoying her company knowing you’ll wake up and see her first thing in the morning and do anything from ice skating to

What I Know About Love

BY MAtHEw ScHLicHtiNG

Bullshit. I fell in love three times before my twenty-first birthday.

I believe there shouldn’t be any rules about the beginning of relationships. Don’t wait for two days to call her. Don’t wait for two days to call him back once he calls you. We’ve got one life and one chance to get everything right. I’m not going to waste any time making sure you don’t think I’m some sort of creeper. If I had a good time, and I have every reason to believe that you had a good time, I’m probably going to call you the next day because I want to see you again. If you think that’s creepy, you have some pretty tremendous issues with security and commitment. Psychiatrists help with those things, you know.

I believe that everyone will find someone that makes them as happy as they can imagine being if they look hard enough.

I believe that there are a thousand

out and start dating Brad Bradford, who doesn’t love anything about you except your fitness level. All I mean when I say that I love you is that I care about you, I think you’re beautiful, I want to spend time with you, and I hope that you do too. I don’t think love goes deeper than that. People do, but love itself? No. Love, like water, finds it’s level based on our depth as human beings.

And for heaven’s sake, we don’t even show what love is on television or in movies. I don’t think that love is writing a letter for every day that

bear baiting to crocheting to grass seeding whether you want to or not and still at the end of the day you’ll watch her breathe in the moment before sleep and thank whatever you believe in for giving you a chance to have these moments with her.

But then again, what do I know?

It’s not as if I’ve succeeded. I like to think that the effort put into failure is what makes the pay-off of success so wonderful. I suppose I’ll find out, eventually.

SAM SNELLER Issue #1 | otccmagazine.com | Over The CounterCulture Magazine | 23

These two forms of ‘flirting’ I’m talking about, texting and clubbing, each (in my opinion) flawed in various ways only serve to put two distinct parties at disadvantages/ advantages. There are the people who can play with words and such, the ones who, when given ample time to formulate a response to a text can be articulate and witty (this, as you may have guessed, is the group which I vaguely belong too). Then there are those real attractive guys with the pecks. And believe me, they know who they are, those dudes with affliction t-shirts and shit too small for their builds, shit you know those nerdy looking dudes that are good with words should be wearing because, I mean, fuck, those shirts will actually fit those scrawny dudes (I’m stereotyping here

language usage over text message can vary from person to person and we relinquish any and all authority over the ambiguity of a specific text because in the end it is just a person, alone, deciding what you said.

3 A generic rapper…

4 Not a lot of people grinding to Mozart these days.

5 The parenthesis wasn’t enough…please forgive me for my broad generalization.

things that every single college boy seems to have in common.

ONE – An overwhelming fear to commit to any plan that does not have an immediate personal gain in plain sight.

What is that? Why are you guys only about instant gratification? Furthermore, you dudes seem to be in it solely for your own personal pleasure. Let’s just say I have never overheard two dudes talking about how they can’t wait to go down on their girl, and on top of that they just are bursting to swallow everything that comes their way in salute to how awesome they think that girl is.

TWO – A fear to label the time being spent together with their lady friends. I’d like to say here that it is my personal opinion

acting like a man!

I recently got revenge on the guy who screwed me over! I went to a party at one of his friends house, and not one, not two, but three of his friends were hitting on me. And even if things don’t work out between the dudes that were hitting on me – and trust me, I don’t think they will – I will at least have the satisfaction of knowing his friends like having me around, some of them more than they like having him around. I’d like to quote a horrible pop song I heard in the car today and finally understand the meaning of: “Truth be told, I miss you. Truth be told, I’m lying. When you see my face, I hope it gives you hell.”

CARLY KOHAKE

SAM SNELLER

24 | Over The CounterCulture Magazine | otccmagazine.com | Issue #1

5

quite a bit, pardon me).

But when you’re 140 pounds and look like you’ve never seen the sun then its hard not to look creepy, and let me tell you, if you feel even the slightest bit “creepy” or “weird” then you’re fucked; girls can somehow sense that shit and you’ll undoubtedly come off as creepy or weird by your body language and facial expressions you try to force out just so you don’t look creepy, but that makes you look creepy.

In reality though, isn’t it the guys who don’t see any of this interaction as creepy that are in fact creepy? These are the traditionally attractive ones who have had girls petting and nervously touching their hair since they hit puberty. These are the dudes who find none of this weird or peculiar. But judging by the popularity of such dance clubs I always end up feeling like the weird one; weird for thinking what everyone else seems to unquestioningly believe to be normal to be weird.

I guess this is just how things are though.

Fucking weird. I guess I need to learn to live in these settings because it seems to me that this is the only world in which I’ll ever live. So I need to work on not being ‘weird’ to everyone else, but to be, in their eyes, ‘normal’ which is weird to me so I guess I need to become more weird and creepy to be normal, right? Does that make any sense? Is that weird?

CHRIS PILKINGTON 1 This may sound sexist but I have no intention for it to sound that way. If I were, for example, a homosexual, the device would hold true for all the dudes I found attractive as well.

2 To make my point, a buddy and me got into a discussion about the use of ellipses in text meassages and what they mean. He was under the impression that they indicated anger and frustration with the last text, which im sure many people use it for but personally I do not. When I send ellipses in texts it is more of a trailing thought or an idea I didn’t feel like finishing. This is a perfect example how

Fuck You, Dude!

I

feel that I should start this off by telling you that I am no expert in dudes, nor am I completely oblivious.

I am just an observant college girl that is trying to make her way through the murky quagmire that is college dating. That said, FUCK YOU, DUDES! What the fuck do you think you’re doing? Who gives you the right to be the dating equivalent of a horny dolphin?

Here’s a little background story to understand where I’m coming from. I recently met someone who I thought was a cool dude; someone that would be nice to hang out with and bring to social events – whether that be a house party, family reunion, or my couch. Needless to say we were on track to being something more than just friends. He made me laugh, complimented me at the right times, and was good at math. And to top it all off, I met him through my family and his dad loved me when I met him. That’s where I was.

Flash forward a couple of months. We have a lovely evening out, partying with our friends, we go back to his place and he tells me that I make him feel like he’s never felt before. In the next breath he tells me that he doesn’t want a girlfriend. I’ll let that soak in. He’s mentally and physically attracted to me, but doesn’t want a girlfriend. Has it soaked in? Good. Now you know where I’m coming from. Now, WHAT THE FUCK? How am I supposed to respond to that? Where the fuck did that come from? FUCK YOU, DUDE! Now that that is out of the way, and you know where I am, I don’t think he is a total douche bag. Nah, I don’t even hate the guy.

What I have a problem with is the fucking epidemic of noncommittal bullshit that is happening all over college campuses in this twisted generation.

In my multitude of years as a college coed, I have had the “pleasure” of suffering through an endless amount dates. And through those mounds of dining excursions and dating adventures, I’ve noticed some

that labels are not permanent unless there is a ring on the finger. So why are all of these college guys flinching away from relationships? My theory is because our culture has perpetuated the college boy stereotype of sleeping around and keeping their options open. Not to mention reality shows like The Bachelor or Rock of Love promote the ideal that women are all catty, slutty bitches fighting over a man because he has wealth, looks, or celebrity status.

These shows only vindicate the idea that commitment is a nonissue, as well as the fact that winning over a dude is not through his stomach or your mind, but by using your vagina. I’m not saying that reality TV is wholly to blame. Nah, I’m saying it’s our fault for buying into it all. Ladies, treat yourself with a little more respect. And fellas, just call it a date; not just “hanging out.”

THREE – An overwhelming penchant for sending mixed messages. Now, I’m not saying that girls don’t do this too, but dudes do this much more often than girls, who usually only do it because dudes do it first. (Hey, I never said girl rules were fair.) Dudes, just pick one, for at least for as long as you’re hanging out with them.

Let me drop a piece of knowledge on you, stop looking at other ladies when you’re already with one (BECAUSE WE NOTICE).

We notice. We notice. We notice. Even the girls at the table across the restraint caught you letting your eyes wonder. And don’t think you’re the exception to this rule, girls notice when an acquaintance parts her hair a different way. Think about it, dude.

All in all, dudes, just be upfront an honest.

Don’t say one thing and immediately turn around and say and do another. Don’t be afraid to call time spent together a date.

Don’t stare at another girl at a party when you went there with someone. And don’t be afraid to go against what reality TV has subliminally taught you. I mean you got past being 16 and now don’t have a baby, so don’t be tempted to start auditioning for The Real World dating game in the middle of real life. FUCK YOU, DUDE and start

This Modern Love Wastes Me It’s Normal to be Weird

I

mean, what the fuck am I supposed to say, like, you know? There is just this omnipresent noise and these apparent 1 sex dolls just gyrating everywhere.

You can’t really use words can you?

Do you? If you do then, please, I want to know how. It’s like the complete opposite of texting. It’s just all these facial expressions, smiles, winks and a whole mess of other shit that can be hard to make sense of in a dark room with hundreds of other intoxicated people around. I mean, it seems fucked up that this generation can’t have it all in the way of social context when we interact with each other. It’s either the subjective constraints of texting that rip away inflection and leave only words on a phone for some other person to decipher your true meanings, whether it be a joke or worry or excitement, it all hinges on that persons understanding of you and how many fucking exclamation points you put where2 or we just eliminate the nuisance of words all together.

So, I’m at this club and there is just this incessant Soulja Boy3 song, which by the way, isn’t the most romantic thing to dryfuck some girl to, but I guess it may be the only socially acceptable type of music to dry-fuck to.4 I mean, god-forbid people use their fucking words to interact. Am I even supposed to introduce myself to a girl before I walk up and just begin to dry-fuck her? Doesn’t that seem creepy and, well, rude? But it seems just as rude to shove my face into some poor girl’s ear who I hardly know and try to scream over the music to convince them I’m a normal guy, nice, with emotions who isn’t just interested in rubbing his half-hard dick against you for a half-hour then consequently bailing because I’ve been drinking and need to take that extra long piss one often needs to take after he’s had a half hard dick for half an hour while at the same time consuming copious amounts of alcohol. You know?

How does one convey such things? I’m serious, how?

Issue #1 | otccmagazine.com | Over The CounterCulture Magazine | 25

Reviews These Coyotes Can Howl

“

Karate Coyote

Screaming, ‘Hallelujah,’ while our blood spills on the wall.”

This is just one spectacular line from the chorus of Karate Coyote’s newly released single, Pegasus, from their forth-coming album.

Big Blowing From Little Big Meschiya Lake & the Little Big Horns

F

or my 21st birthday, I took a little weekend trip to New Orleans to have my first legal drink in style. I fell in love with the atmosphere of the city, and before I knew it, I was eating beignets and slurping

iNDiE SHit |MUSic|MoViES|BooKS|

The song is catchy as fuck, so check it out on YouTube.

Karate Coyote is a collaborative “progressive indiepop” band composed of six members. Each member has a very unique taste in music, some play more than one instrument, and each one is trained in different musical styles. But each one brings something personal to the overall sound.

Which is somewhat rare. Many bands have one or two main members constructing the majority of songs, while the others just play – more or less – what they’re told.

The band’s debut album, Inner Animals, features 12 original songs exploring the musical dynamics between male and female vocal harmonies and the subtly intricate instrumentals. Each instrument pulls its

own weight in Karate Coyote, providing a full and progressive sound keeping the music twisting and turning pleasantly without overloading your senses.

The music video for the single “ICU2(RN4A187)” got to the top 8 of Universal’s competition for the film Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World. Songs like “Is That the Best You Can Do?” are fun up-tempo numbers that take advantage of the band’s impressively diverse array of sounds – plus I friggin’ love that chick’s voice.

KC is currently working on their second album, to be released later this year.

Their live performance is goosebumpworthy, what with their confident and spunky stage-presence. Each member displaying the diversity of their personalities on stage while performing uber-catchy tunes.

The band plays live shows around the Columbus area regularly. Catch them live before they’re huge, so you can brag to tweeny fans of the future that you saw them before they rocked the charts.

JAMES GARciA

hurricanes like I’d lived in New Orleans my entire life.

Part of my journey to the “Big Easy” involved locating the best places to listen to the best jazz bands. A member from Jumbo Shrimp Jazz Band (also a fantastic group) at Fritzel’s bar invited us to The Spotted Cat for just that. The band member didn’t lie, and we heard the kind of jazz music I imagine whenever New Orleans comes to mind. Thus began my love affair with Meschiya Lake and the Little Big Horns.

Their album “Lucky Devil” has a smooth, vintage sound I can’t get enough of, but if you’re looking for something to dance to, put “Joseph!

Joseph!” or “The Curse of an Aching Heart” on your stereo. Meschiya’s 40’s-sounding voice makes me melt, not to mention she’s a savvy

dresser with a decent amount of gorgeous tattoos covering her body. You can find her playing both classic and original songs to packed houses at local jazz clubs or strolling down Bourbon Street.

Her band is sprinkled with instruments from banjo to trombone, and don’t be surprised if you find yourself closing your eyes, tuning out the commotion in your life, and swaying back and forth.

Meschiya Lake isn’t like any kind of music one hears on mainstream radio stations, but they’re worth a listen. You never know, you may even like them better than that Katy Perry song you hear 45 times a day.

ASHLEY WiNDBiGLER-EKiN

26 | Over The CounterCulture Magazine | otccmagazine.com | Issue #1

“‘Spider web cake,’ what the fuck is spider web cake?”

The Orange Eats Creeps

by Grace Krilanovich

I

’ve never been very creative and my college teachers have sucked out every bit left of it, now I don’t know how to write. I immerse myself in “bad” writing as a result. I wrote so many

Like This Band Or I’ll Kill You

O

.357 String Band

K, I understand that not everyone is down with punk/bluegrass hybrids, but if you’re not, you suck. The .357 String Band’s new album,

papers last quarter that writing this isn’t even fun. But it should be because this book is awesome. A great example of “bad” writing. I wanted to put commas where there weren’t any and take away the commas that were there... this is what college has done to me. Fuck commas.

There’s a reason Krilanovich didn’t put a comma there, and if she really didn’t think about it then fuck it. She has combined words together it the most unique and ridiculous ways, better than a lot of the authors I love. Like “spider web cake,” what the fuck is spider web cake? It made no sense in context either. But she gets the point across. Thanks to her weird word arrangement I can visualize a spider web cake. Using those words would never cross my mind, and this is where she is amazing. Each word creates a picture in my head and the combination of individual words creates a feeling, and these pictures and feelings are the story.

The story is about a teenage girl, in Oregon – lots of clouds and trees. The book is just pieces: trees, gas station bathrooms, grocery stores, “dead space,” trains, creeks, rock concerts, creepy dirty couches, beds, closets, floors. The girl is supposed to be on Robitussin throughout the book. It’s as though it was written on

Lightning From the North, jams hard. If you can’t find one song you love on it I will break up with you, because that obviously means you are a horrible, horrible person, and I deserve better. It’s hard to explain in words how hard I would want to kick you in the throat.

Now I’m angry. At least do this. Next time you get on the internet, don’t immediately look at your facebook or porn, instead, check these guys out. If you don’t like it, just go back to your life of porn and facebook and not being my friend. If you do like it, pour yourself a shot of anything because you just took your first step towards being awesome. Listening to these songs is just like hanging out at your shady, unemployed uncle’s farm, you know damn well you’re gonna catch hell but maybe if you

a focused robotripping-binge. The drug references are vague, perhaps disguised as blood sucking? Who knows. The line between nature and civilization has been obliterated, where there was a shrub is now the inside of a gas station. There is no easy way to make sense of the book as a whole, you just have to take it word for word and process it, then discard it piece by piece, taking it as a series of pictures and feelings and understanding it in that way.

For a novel not even 200 pages long The Orange Eats Creeps would probably be better as a short story or novella.

The writing itself is amazing but since it reads more like a prosey poem written in a stream of consciousness haze it gets to be enough about ¾ of the way through.

Regardless, I think it is still worthwhile.

Pay attention to the words, it will be well worth it in the end. I don’t know if I would put Krilanovich on the shelf with all of the guys (literally there are no women writers on my favorite shelf, unless you count my Once Upon a Potty book), but she definitely wont be sitting with the Bronte sisters and Jane Austen, she’s too badass for them.

Apparently Krilanovich is the only badass woman since the 19th century.

KAitLiN MiLLiGAN

get crazy enough it will all be worth it. Trust me, it’s always worth it.

Check ‘em out at streetgrass.com.

P.S. What’s with bluegrass bands havin’ awesome names? I want to buy a .357 mag now just so I name it after this band.

ETHAN DANGER

Issue #1 | otccmagazine.com | Over The CounterCulture Magazine | 27

A Stoner’s Cooking Guide: Homemade Buffalo Wings

with Severed McFoot & Goofy Pepper

Part One: “Put On Your Game Face” In my experience, a meal is only as awesome as you are while you’re cooking it. And you can’t burn it either.

But you are going to have to get into the mood to do this right. This is a fairly simple dish, but it takes a little prep that can be time consuming.

With that in mind, the first thing you’re gonna want to do is not go to school. We live in a fast paced world, and there is just not enough hours in a day to wake up, buy ingredients, check the mail, try to justify spending thousands of dollars on college education, do dishes, cook food, and go to school. That means something has got to go. You can do all that justification while you do the dishes. That means either the letter has to go or school. Goofy and I chose to drop school.

Also, both of us are high as fuck during all of this.

Part Two: “Ingredients,” or “Holy Shit I Am Far Too High To Be In Public” Now that you have set the tone for the day it’s time to get down to business and get some shit done. Do the dishes. I know it sucks but by now you should be high so it wont be too bad. Then clean all the other shit you need to clean you fucking pig.

At some point you should get some ingredients. I have no idea how much of this shit you need. Just use common sense.

You will need: Chicken, oil, sriracha hot sauce, cilantro, butter, and lime (for zest).

I know I’m forgetting something, so if you wanna mix something else in, do it.

The worst part about this step is going out in public to get the ingredients you don’t have. Goofy and I do not encourage driving while under the influence of marijuana or any other mind altering substances, but that’s because were both fuckin hypocrites and, to be frank, we are way better at it than you are. Goofy is like a goddamn wizard when it comes to driving with a buzz. Either way, bring a gun.

Driving to the store will be the easy part. Going inside and realizing that other people do exist, that they go outside and need food, and that you hate them and are now forced to interact with them can be shocking the first 600 times you do it. Just remember that they probably don’t know you’re fucked up, probably.

Part Three: “Game Time” Now comes the best part! Prepare all that shit and cook it and eat it.

Part four: The End The end.

It was garlic. Fuck. That’s what I forgot... garlic.

For complete cooking instructions please visit OTCCmagazine.com.

28 | Over The CounterCulture Magazine | otccmagazine.com | Issue #1

Photo by Sam Sneller

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