The Playboy Magazine from Hell

DATELINE: Playboy magazine, Vol. 17, No 2.  February, nineteen hundred and seventy, in the Year of Duece Fuego: 

Playmate of the Month, 19-year-old Lucky Linda Forsythe, hails from the dangerous vice-presidential dueling grounds of Weehawken, NJ, a routine ferry ride from Manhattan. Forsythe plans to study social work at NYU, adopt a child, and if she's lucky, birth one of her own. The young woman enjoys nude modelling.

But that's not important.

-- Know-it-all futurist seer and Newt Gingrich hero, Alvin Toffler, foists upon the next several generations the dystopian prophesy: 'Future'.'Shock'

'Future Shock' includes:

1) An abrupt collision.

2) A menacing malady, the disease of change, chronic confusion, anxiety, hostility, physical illness, senseless violence, self-destructive apathy, painful adaptations, mass neurosis, irrationalism.

3) Culture Shock.

4) A blind fury and a bone-deep apathy, accompanied by bewilderment and distress, frustration and disorientation.

5) At least one hundred and forty-seven column-inches of supporting verbiage from his book of the same name. Toffler wore out his thesaurus writing this.

Fuck Toffler. 

But, that's also unimportant.

Blow the delicious taste and aroma of a Tipalet cigarette in her face and she'll follow you anywhere. 

OK. Now we're getting somewhere.

-- This fucking blond guy in his dock siders: sipping a Schlitz on the teak-wood deck of an aggressively tilted sailing yacht, gazing into the distance. One assumption is that he's assessing a worthy blond competitor who's also sipping a Schlitz in his dock siders aboard his aggressively tilted yacht. Both of these hapless white male fuckups are engaged in a casual, life-or-death naval battle to be the first in glory, fame and pussy.

[Who the fuck is driving the boat?]

-- Get your ass behind an A&C Grenadier. Now that's a cigar -- a cigar for a proud kind of guy who's kid just scored the winning touchdown. A guy who deserves the mild tasting unique blend of imported and choice domestic tobaccos.

-- Californian education officials ruled school science courses must include equal time to both Darwinism and the Bible. Welcome to the future. 

 'Future.Shock.'

Same as it ever was. 

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

-- Letters to the editor re: Doctors and abortions, sex law revision, help for homosexuals, marijuana, birth control, the sickness of homosexuality,  sex education for the blind, sex in the great state of Sweden, the sentiment that sex education for children in the midst of 'Freudian latency' isn't a bad thing.

[is it 'sex' that sells?]

-- And now: a three hundred and seventy-five miserable god-damned column inches devoted to nine know-nothing, know-it-all pundits in a desperate intellectual cage-match to settle, once an for all, the upsides and downsides of drugs. 

Seriously could use some frontal nudity about now.

-- Some prude Asa Barber novel excerpts.  

[How much reading must a man do to view a naked woman?]

-- Biba & Barbara: co-stars in the new John Huston sexpionage thriller, 'The Kremlin Letter'

-- Lead Women Around By The Nose... and the bitches come sniffin' every time a man packs his pipe with the mysteriously aromatic blend of Flying Dutchman legendary mixture.  

[20 years later: I got bitches in the living room gettin' it on and they ain't leaving 'til six in the mornin'. I got a pocket full of rubbers and my homeboys do, too.]

Deep Breath. Long Exhale

 -- The Rebirth of Yost excerpt: '... on the Merv Griffin show, he decided to die that night and would be coming back, but as whom?' [Guinness Book of World Record holder for worst subhead ever. Congratulations.]

-- Playboy's Weekend HouseYacht Party: Paid lovers embark on boats in the Florida Keys. Hijinx and debauchery ensue, with predictable and monotonous breast-only female frontal nudity. Where's the passion, people?

That's not important either.

Nothing is important. 

This volume of this magazine... this exact number of this exact volume... is both a metaphor AND a simile of a James Joyce novel recited at length over dollar-store loudspeakers to a class of 23rd-century school children trapped in a windowless, cinder-block gymnasium while a warm spring afternoon breeze tosses golden leaves in the playground. It's as gray as a month of Mondays soaked in a week of Tuesdays, diluted in wastewater saturated with iron filings and turpentine. 

That's hyperbole. That's also fact.

Lucky Linda Forsythe is still alive today. She is a grandmother.

Her grandchildren are the peers of my children.