By Alan Cabal

NYC=JFK(24/7)
Old New York, now departing, gate 5.

Things are pretty fucked up right now, and all indications are that things are going to get a whole lot worse before they get better. Nothing works anymore—a lousy little electrical fire on an obscure track shuts down Penn Station for three hours during the evening rush. It’s damn near impossible to get a human being on the phone anywhere, and even when you do, nine times out of ten they either pass you off to someone else who never picks up the phone or admits that they don’t have the slightest idea how to address your concern.

Meanwhile, pimply-faced teenagers in jungle camo are standing around our fair city with large automatic weapons waiting for Osama bin Laden to step out of the anxious teeming masses and blow up a pizza joint. The whole atmosphere feels like a less friendly version of Beirut. It’s as if the city has been possessed by the airport. As if the city has become the airport.

Ask anybody with a reasonable amount of travel experience to name the absolute worst airport they’ve ever been in, and JFK consistently makes the cut. JFK is hands down the most inhospitable and hostile airport on the planet, and this city is gradually morphing into a large-scale urban replica of that gleaming patch of hell: You can’t smoke anywhere; you can’t make any wisecracks about how wretched everything is for fear of being hauled off in the night; customer service is as dead as Marilyn Monroe; and people are improvising security blankets out of plastic sheeting and duct tape in some ghastly infantile response to bogus alerts emanating from the hideous lycanthropic junta that currently runs this madhouse of a country.

This is why I don’t take LSD anymore. It would be redundant. We are slipping down a rabbit hole that leads to a tea party where we’re no longer free. We’re in serious crank territory, and if I were ten or twenty years younger I’d definitely hop on the drug train for a major meth jag. Unfortunately, I’ve crossed the threshold into authentic middle age, and anybody over the age of 45 who uses white powder stimulants of any kind is on the fast track to a dirt nap. My advanced age and sedentary lifestyle have condemned me to a regimen of pot and booze, punctuated with the occasional dose of Immodium to stave off the body’s natural reaction to having a Bush in the White House.

I used to laugh at the Aryan Nation Nazis with their addle-headed notion of "ZOG," the "Zionist Occupied Government." But then Ariel Sharon stood up in the Knesset and said, in front of God and everybody: "We, the Jews, control America, and the Americans know it." The Mossad is boasting of sending roving death squads around the world to whack the "enemies of Israel" wherever they may be, including here.

I feel like I’ve stepped into some nauseating Nazi propaganda movie. The ADL sent a cease and desist letter to the proprietors of rotten.com claiming that their sensibilities were offended by a spoof involving the Pillsbury doughboy. What the fuck were they doing at rotten.com? That site is the Sistine Chapel of bad taste—it’s all pictures of deformed fetuses, monster turds and people who have been decapitated by helicopters. If the ADL thinks the folks at rotten.com give two flaming shits about offending the Holocaust Cult, Foxman and his gang must be huffing solvents. Abe Foxman should get a real job.

There’s an Ebola outbreak raging in the Congo, some nutjob incinerated a couple hundred people in a Korean subway system with a carton of "flammable liquid," Stalinist atavism North Korea is threatening us with nuclear war "at any moment" and three "mystery ships" are supposedly cruising around not communicating with anyone at all. Our military geniuses say that they’re refraining from boarding these vessels out of concern for the environment, should they decide to release some godawful bug they might be carrying. All you smugglers out there should be taking notes: Start slapping "anthrax" labels on those kilos of blow.

The economy is in freefall. The reason they call it "Smart Republican Money" is because when a Republican gets into office, they all go short on equities and move their money into hard assets. The housing bubble is about to burst. The price of gold is artificially depressed by the shady accounting practices of the IMF, and OPEC might demand euros instead of dollars for their oil.

The Bush Regime is clamoring for a ground war with a country that has never threatened us in the least, despite 12 years of bombings and economic sanctions, while an estimated 250,000 veterans of our armed forces bed down for the night in shelters or on the steps of churches in cardboard boxes. Most Americans think Saddam Hussein is Osama bin Laden. Personally, I think Osama bin Laden has all the flesh-and-blood reality of Yoda. Bush, on the other hand, is as real as Jeffrey Dahmer and six times as weird.

I make it a point to have two forms of photo identification with me at all times. I do not carry fingernail clippers, moustache trimmers, piano wire, boxcutters or any other implement that could be construed as a threat to national security at any time. My only investment plans center around shotguns, canned goods and gold. I only fly when I’m going overseas because I detest the American airport experience and I’m probably on some ultrasecret "no-fly" list owing to my exposure of the reptilian nature of the Bush Crime Family. I know this gesture is futile. I cannot avoid the American airport experience; it’s spreading like mold across the landscape. Where’s Lee Harvey Oswald now that we really need him? Amsterdam looks better every day.