I was alive during decadent times.

I was alive during decadent times. I heard about all of it on the "internet" Heard about "caring" for The Troops. They made a catch phrase, "wounded warriors," so I would have something to say to myself, over and over. "We support the troops," they say. They say that to us as we sit in cubicles, surfing the sports pages and celebrity-watch columns, and shopping for shit that we don't need and won't use. In our nation we support the troops by listening to sound bites, and watching three minute, seventy-five second "news pieces" about "wounded warriors." It was the in-depth piece, and having seen it, my nation is inspired to support the troops by buying magnets shaped like ribbons so the pollution from our automobile bowels can cloud over the ribbons on our trunk, like the bed sores near the tail bones of the "wounded warriors," on an IV drip, trying to avoid staph infection. These are the living monuments we've made of our "warriors of freedom." Machine-aided-breathing sacks of meat. Kept alive by the miracle of our modern medicine. But only alive like primordial plants, a brain stem connected to shreds of living ganglia crawling through the center of a hollow spine, with dead eyes, staring open, at the top; and a farting, shitting, fully fully functioning anus at the bottom. Brain dead with their eyes wide open. What do they see? I wonder if they still see the burst of light that was the last thing they saw before the rocks and rusty pieces of metal took out their visual cortex. Maybe that's the last thing they still hear too, and keep hearing, screaming in their dead brains; the last sound they heard before their eardrums popped. That was before the doctors cut open their skulls to relieve the swelling, and they looked like the Swedish Chef, with a mushroom top coming out of their heads. They aren't counted as casualties on the official lists that are read before the breakaway to the third and last commercial break of the evening, just before the prime-time lineup. The commercial break that tells us about the antidotes we need to deal with our lives. About the antacids and prescription laxatives that we have to take because of the shit we put in our faces. And the anti-depressants that we take because our lives are shit. And all the other pharmaceuticals that we need to help keep the system going, because it runs on consuming our shit lives. We had become machine-aided-breathing sacks of meat, sitting in our own shit and watching ourselves shit on TV and "online." It was a decadent time. We stared out with eyes wide open, watching; brain dead, as it all came down around us.