WRITE CLUB - Belknap, Order - 9/27/11

Below is text of (narrow, so narrow) victory vs. Don Hall's Chaos.

Chaos surrounds us. It infuses everything. It awaits you at every turn, stands ready to unfurl without provocation. Whereas order. Order can turn shit around.

Order is taxonomy. Order musters the troops. Order gets shit done.

Order is city streets arranged in a sensible grid.

Chaos is that winding, miasmic clusterfuck of suburban streets where you need a GPS and a fucking Native American tracker to get anyplace. Otherwise you’re just circling around all day, going: “Another motherfucking golf course. GAH!

Order is reasoned debate that guides the policies of our Republic.

Chaos is ignorant and panicky throngs of Tea Partyers dressed as Ben Franklin and packing assault rifles.

Order is a ladybug.

Chaos is one of those gigantic centipedes with those sickening feathery legs that make you want to burn your house down and start over somewhere new.

Order is table manners.

Chaos is trying to eat soup on a fucking trampoline.

Order is turn signals – turn signals and the fucking presence of mind to understand who has the right of way at a four-way stop.

Chaos is the dick hammer in the pick up, leaning on his fucking horn, jumping the curb to pass on the right, while screaming obscenities at you and taking a giant divot out the parkway out front of the preschool.

Order is making love – two people getting busy.

Chaos is the orgy with the gerbil-stuffing, and the kiddie pool full of K-Y, and the ball gags, and the midgets – and yes, I am AWARE that they prefer to be called “little people”, but I say you relinquish a bit of your dignity and right to self-identification when you reveal yourselves to be the biggest freaks at the suck-and-fuck.

Order is a well-maintained late-model Prius – prudent, and just a little stylish.

Chaos is the rusted out El Camino up on blocks out back of the Aldi that’s got an insane hobo eating a live raccoon inside it.

Order is a rented apartment in a safe neighborhood near public transportation with a thriving commercial corridor within a short walk.

Chaos is a shitbox little house you could barely afford in the first place, all the nominal value of which has been vampired out of by a pack of greedy dickballs who burned the world economy to a fucking cinder and will never encounter anything like the kind of consequences they deserve. Not only is there NOT a fucking bonfire in every public square fueled by banker fat, these swindling douche-fuckers have succeeded in getting a shit-ton of the American people to believe that this clusterfuck is somehow the government’s fault, not the arch fucking criminals at Goldman Sachs who are the fucking architects of the whole thing AND who have profited from the downfall like the soulless plundering grave-robbing buzzards they are.

This example should in no way taken to be about myself or my own situation – I am in no way freaked out by the plummeting value of my house, nor am I plotting to head down to the financial district with vials of battery acid and coils of piano wire when the bank takes it off our hands. These are examples ONLY, and should not be interpreted as some desperate plea on my part to grasp at help that will never come. I’m not drowning. Why would you guys think that?

And finally, like most complex ideas, this dichotomy is perhaps best expressed in terms of pubes.

Order is a Brazilian wax. Order creates the clear border between the fur-bearing and the hairless. Order imposes shape and reason to that otherwise disquieting bush down there.

Chaos is a coarse and musky man-thatch - the impenetrable, bewildering snarl of say a Robin Williams. A galling and pungent confusion of dick fur that threatens to storm the castle of his fly and cover his entire body like kudzu – that is Chaos, my friends.

If for this reason alone – the knowledge that Chaos is a lumbering Robin Williams pube-Wookie, a Pube-bacca, if you will – you must find in favor of Order.

Which is not to say that Order does not have a downside. Too much Order, and you’re trapped in a carpeted warren of cubicles every waking moment, watching the sand of your life drain through a futile and frustrating hourglass populated by unimaginative and boring people you hate, in a pointless grind that makes you curse your student loans.

Too much Order, when unaccountably coupled with “Law”, and there are cops beating on mentally ill guys who are not resisting, and there are courts that permit the repeated execution of men on the strength of dubious and sometimes laughable evidence.

Too much Order, taken to its ghastly conclusion, and there comes a time when one kind of citizen is loading another kind of citizen into cattle cars.

But make no mistake: we NEED Order. To protect us from ourselves. Inside each of us, there is a steamer trunk full of Fuck It. It is Order that keeps this trunk safely locked. Without Order, we each of us pop the lock on the trunk full of Fuck It, and we will be unrestrained – unrestrained in our hatred and envy; unrestrained in our lust and avarice; unrestrained in our selfishness and want. We must each of us take a pledge each day we come into contact with one another – a pledge that we will reenlist in the Army of Order. For if we do not take this pledge, if we do not reenlist, then we are stranded in a world peopled by nearly seven billion of us, each of whom has opened the trunk full of Fuck It.

And such a world, as you can readily imagine, would make the zombie apocalypse look like an ice cream social. If we as a species permit ourselves to go unrestrained – in other words, if we each open the trunk of Fuck It – in no time the streets will be filled with naked men, carrying hatchets and machetes, dragging burlap sacks filled the heads of stray dogs and Girl Scouts. You guys know I’m right. Without order, it’s packs of naked maniacs as far as the eye can see.

Look, I KNOW it can be EXCRUCIATING trying to get along with assholes like me. But we gotta keep trying. We gotta reenlist. We gotta keep Order. Otherwise: nothing but naked maniacs.