Transmetropolitan, Vol. 5: Lonely City

There's one hole in every revolution, large or small. And it's one word long— PEOPLE. No matter how big the idea they all stand under, people are small and weak and cheap and frightened. It's people that kill every revolution.

Journalism is just a gun. It’s only got one bullet in it, but if you aim right, that’s all you need. Aim it right, and you can blow a kneecap off the world.

- You know what this is? - Nope - It's a bowel disruptor. And you are just full of shit.

I want vasopressin, washed caffeine, Jumpstart, ginkgo biloba, guarana, and any intelligence enhancer introduced in the last five years.

I'm sorry. Is that too harsh an observation for you? Does that sound too much like the Truth? Fuck you. If anyone in this shithole city gave two tugs of a dead dog's cock about Truth, this wouldn't be happening.

TRUTH comes easier when you're nine years old, too. Everything's a lot less complicated. This or that. Us or them. Truth or lie.

You people don't know what the truth is! It's there, just under the bullshit, but you never look! That's what I hate most about this fucking city-- Lies are news and truth is obsolete!

The point is, the only real tools we have are our eyes and our heads. It's not the act of seeing with our eyes alone; it's correctly comprehending what we see. Treating life as an autopsy.

A Kenyan man once said to me, 'You can get used to anything when money's involved.' He used to stick mice up his ass for twenty bucks at a time." -Spider Jerusalem

Do you want to eat Peyotl and human flesh on the path to spiritual enlightenment? Or just for the hell of it? Join the ancient cult of Anasazi.

I'm nuts about him, i've told him everything there is to tell about me, and he spends every night balls deep in me and it's GREAT, and i love him, and I look down at him when we're fucking...and it's like looking in an empty house.

So this zealot comes to my door, all glazed eyes and clean reproductive organs, asking me if I ever think about God. So I tell him I killed God. I tracked God down like a rabid dog, hacked off his legs with a hedge trimmer, raped him with a corncob and boiled off his corpse in an acid bath.

I feel...a terrible need to piss in a Christening font.

It's been so long, i'm afraid to get laid now! I got so much internal pressure built up that i'd probably blow a hole in a woman the size of my fist!

All people are scum. No matter what they look like.

...You people don't know what the truth is! It's there, just under their bullshit, but you never look! That's what I hate most about this fucking city-- LIES ARE NEWS AND TRUTH IS OBSOLETE!

We may have been crazed, strange and entirely too eager to find new things to have sex with - but we went out to preserve great chunks of this planet's cultures and we damned well did it with some style

Think about it; the quicktank is given a job most of us would laugh out of town. Build a sophisticated camera capable of full 3-D input and peripheral pickup, using only water and jelly. Build an eye.

And someone, somewhere, is saying What the fuck? Why not?

You want to go out to dinner sometime? Sorry, no. I'm married, not hungry, infected with seven unknown diseases, gay, pregnant with lizards and clinically dead.

Yesterday, here in the middle of the City, I saw a wolf turn into a Russian ex-gymnast and hand over a business card that read YOUR OWN PERSONAL TRANSHUMAN SECURITY WHORE! STERILIZED INNARDS! ACCEPTS ALL CREDIT CARDS to a large man who had trained attack cancers on his face and possessed seventy-five indentured Komodo Dragons instead of legs. And they had sex. Right in front of me. And six of the Komodo Dragons spat napalm on my new shoes.

It was like washing down a bucket of peyote with a vatful of absinthe.

Did you ever want to set someone's head on fire, just to see what it looked like? Did you ever stand in the street and think to yourself, I could make that nun go blind just by giving her a kiss? Did you ever lay out plans for stitching babies and stray cats into a Perfect New Human? Did you ever stand naked surrounded by people who want your gleaming sperm, squirting frankincense, soma and testosterone from every pore? If so, then you're the bastard who stole my drugs Friday night. And I'll find you. Oh, yes.

My grandfather had died, and my mother was trying to explain it to me. . . .Grandpa isn't coming back? No, she said. Not ever again. . . . And I remember saying, hold everything right fucking there. You went to all the trouble of conceiving me, and giving birth to me, and raising me and clothing me and all . . . and you make me cry and things hurt so much and disappointments crush my heart every day and I can't do half the things I want to and sometimes I just want to scream -- and what I've got to look forward to is my body breaking and something flipping off the switch in my head -- I go through all this, and then there's death? What is the motherfucking deal here? I wasn't having this. This was not fair.

I remember first learning about death quite vividly. I'm not sure how old I was, but I remember the conversation like it was yesterday. My grandfather had died, and my mother was trying to explain it to me. 'Sometimes, when someone gets ill, and they're very very old, they don't get better again. They just get iller and iller and then... then their body stops working.' 'I don't understand.' 'What's in them just goes away, and doesn't come back.' 'Grandpa isn't coming back?' 'No,' she said. 'Not ever again.' 'Grandpa said he was going away and not ever coming back after he held Grandma's head in that cotton-dump outside of town and kicked Skeeter seventy-three times.' 'Grandpa was very drunk. That's not the same as being dead. Grandpa's dead, son. He's not there anymore.' And I remember saying, 'Hold everything right fucking THERE. 'You went to all the trouble of conceiving me, and giving birth to me, and raising me and feeding me and clothing me and all-- and, YEAH, whipping me from time to time, and making me live in a house that's freezing fucking cold all the goddamn time-- and you make me cry and things hurt so much and disappointments crush my heart every day and I can't do half the things I want to do and sometimes I just want to scream-- and what I've got to look forward to is my body breaking and something flipping off the switch in my head-- I go through all this-- and then there's death? 'What is the motherfucking deal here?

Time was this place didn’t make sense and I could live with it. Either it’s changed, or I have.

THAT'S what we achieve. We show them they're accountable. We show them that just as they try to herd us back into cages of quiet mediocrity, we can chase them back to fucking hell with the TRUTH. It's THE JOURNALISM OF ATTACHMENT. It's CARING about the world you report on. Some people say that's bad journalism, that there should be a detached, cold, unbiased view of the world in our news media. And if that's what you want, there's security cameras everywhere that you could watch tapes of. I want to see humans talking about human life, personally. I want to see people who give a shit about the world.

Terrible goddamn place. Some days it's like some bastard nailed a ticket for the bus tour down to fucking Hell to the front of my brain. For every wild everything-depends-on-it first-week-of-being-madly-in-love kiss on a streetcorner, for every beautiful woman stopping to feel the sun on her face and every child dancing in clean rain, there's a kid living in its own shit in a dumpster somewhere while Daddy sells his ass for milk money, tanks breaking down unwanted houses just to stop homeless people squatting there... Time was this place didn't make sense and I could live with it. Either it's changed, or I have. There's all the good things on this ticket, and pure fucking evil too. And all the same, I'm going down with you.

You went to all the trouble of conceiving me, and giving birth to me, and raising me, and feeding and clothing me and all... -- and you make me cry and things hurt so much and disappointments crush my heart every day and I can't do half the things I want to do and sometimes I just want to scream -- and what I've got to look forward to is my body breaking and something flipping off the switch in my head -- I go through all this -- and then there's death??