We go from bees to teas, dear reader, as today—May 21st, this very annum of our collective unraveling, 2025—is International Tea Day, a evidently hallowed 24-hour span where we’re supposed to genuflect before the steaming altar of Camellia sinensis and its myriad permutations. Tea, that ubiquitous elixir, that alchemical slurry of leaf and water, which, let’s be honest, is less a beverage and more a civilizational crutch, a liquid tether to sanity for billions. It’s the drink that’s been sloshing through human history since some ancient Chinese mystic decided to boil a bush and call it divine. And here we are, centuries deep, still worshipping at the porcelain shrine of the teacup, still chasing that delicate, tannic high.

Imagine: a world awash in tea, from the bone-white cups of Darjeeling in Kolkata’s crumbling colonial haunts to the chipped mugs of truck-stop Earl Grey in some godforsaken Midwestern diner. Tea is the great leveler, the one addiction we don’t whisper about in shame. It’s the morning jolt for the bleary-eyed salaryman in Tokyo, the afternoon ritual for the tweed-drenched Brit, the late-night muse for the poet scribbling in a Marrakesh souk. It’s the drink that says, “I’m functional, but only just.” And on this day, this International Tea Day, we’re supposed to celebrate it—not just the leaf itself but the whole sprawling, caffeinated cosmology it drags in its wake.

Let’s not kid ourselves, though. The tea-industrial complex (aka Big Tea) isn’t all Zen and jasmine-scented transcendence. It’s a brutal, sweaty business, rooted in the calloused hands of pickers in Assam and Yunnan, where workers—mostly women, let’s not dodge the optics—pluck leaves under a sun that doesn’t give a damn about fair trade certifications. The supply chain is a labyrinthine nightmare, a global pinata of exploitation and middlemen, where every sip of your artisanal oolong carries the faint aftertaste of someone else’s misery. And yet, we sip. We steep. We pontificate about mouthfeel and terroir like we’re auditioning for a Wes Anderson film. The hypocrisy is exquisite, a Möbius strip of self-awareness and denial.

I think we’d be remiss on this International Tea Day to not talk about coffee, that overrated, bean-derived sludge, the poor man’s stimulant for those too impatient to court the sublime. Coffee is a sledgehammer—crude, bitter, a one-note adrenaline spike that leaves you jittery and hollow, like you’ve just mainlined an Excel spreadsheet. Tea, by contrast, is a scalpel, a symphony, a goddamn love letter to nuance. Where coffee stomps in with its acrid, burnt-rubber swagger, tea seduces with layers—floral whispers, earthy depths, astringent kicks that evolve with every sip. Coffee chains you to the grind, a caffeinated hamster wheel; tea liberates. You want health? Tea’s got antioxidants out the ass, while coffee’s just a diuretic middle finger to your kidneys. The choice is clear, you philistines: tea is the poet, coffee the propagandist.

But screw the guilt for a second—tea is also magic, pure and simple. It’s the only drug you can serve at a toddler’s birthday party without raising eyebrows. It’s the potion that fueled the Opium Wars (irony thicker than a London fog), the Boston Tea Party (revolution in a crate), and every late-night dorm-room bull session that ever veered into the meaning of life. Green, black, white, oolong, whatever the hell pu-erh is—it’s a spectrum of obsession, a taxonomy of taste that makes wine snobs look like dilettantes.

And the ritual! Oh shit, the ritual. The kettle’s banshee wail, the precise alchemy of water temperature (too hot, you scald the leaves; too cold, you’re drinking lawn clippings). The slow bloom of the infusion, the way the steam curls like a ghost’s finger beckoning you to some ineffable truth.  That’s fuckin’ poetic.  It’s meditative, sure, but it’s also a subtle fuck-you to the instant-gratification slot machine of modern life. Tea demands patience, demands you sit still and shut up for five goddamn minutes. In a world of algorithm-driven dopamine hits, that’s practically punk rock.

So here’s the deal, you jittery, over-caffeinated reprobates: today, on International Tea Day, pour yourself a cup. Doesn’t matter if it’s a $200-an-ounce Silver Needle or a Lipton bag you swiped from a motel breakfast bar. Raise it to the pickers, the blenders, the smug baristas who correct your pronunciation of “matcha.” Raise it to the billions who’ve made tea their north star, from samurai to suffragettes. Then drink deep, caffeinated reader…let the warmth hit your marrow, and feel the world slow down just enough to remind you you’re still human. Or at least close enough.

N.P.: “Fuck Me Up” – Pokey LaFarge

Today, dear reader, is allegedly National Bee Day, some granola-crunching, flower-crown-wearing, save-the-planet hippie holiday that’s got everyone cooing over the fuzzy little pollinators like they’re the second coming of Christ in a yellow-and-black tracksuit. And yeah, I’ll concede—bees are the least contemptible of the insect world’s miserable menagerie. They’ve got their pollination gig, their honey hustle, which, let’s be honest, is a goddamn miracle of nature, a golden elixir that laughs in the face of expiration dates. Bees, with their chubby, fuzz-dusted thoraxes and that almost endearing bumble-waddle, are the only bugs that don’t make me want to reach for a flamethrower. Kids dress up as bees for Halloween, for Christ’s sake—those little sugar-fiends know a mascot when they see one. Nobody’s out there trick-or-treating as a wasp, because wasps are the sociopathic cousins who’d steal your candy and piss in your pumpkin.

But let’s not get too misty-eyed. My general disposition toward insects isn’t fear—fear implies they’ve got some kind of upper hand, some psychological leverage. No, it’s contempt, pure and unadulterated, a seething, bone-deep loathing for the skittering, buzzing, biting bastards that seem to exist solely to fuck with humanity. Scorpions? Those armored little psychos with their smug, pincered swagger and venom-tipped tails? I’d rather square-dance with a rattlesnake. Camel spiders? Jesus wept, they’re like something Hieronymus Bosch dreamed up after a bad acid trip—eight-legged nightmares that look like they’d eat your soul if they could figure out exactly how to chew it. No fear, mind you—just a visceral desire to see them obliterated, preferably by a meteor strike.

Most insects are just evolutionary fuck-yous, pointless irritants that contribute nothing but chaos. Hornets and wasps?  There’s no justification for their existence, no ecological PowerPoint presentation that could convince me they deserve a place on this planet. They’re like the drunk uncles of the insect world, crashing the picnic, stinging for no reason, and leaving everyone worse off. Zero redeeming qualities. Zilch. Nada. They don’t pollinate, they don’t make honey, they just dive-bomb your beer and ruin your day. If I could Thanos-snap one species into oblivion, it’d be a coin toss between those two.

Even the so-called “good” insects, the ones that eat other insects, are barely pulling their weight. Spiders, for instance—sure, they munch on flies, but let’s not pretend they’re out there waging some noble war on pestilence. They’re lazy, web-spinning opportunists who maybe catch a gnat once a week, then sit there like smug little landlords collecting rent. Inefficient doesn’t even begin to cover it. A single bat could clear out more bugs in a night than a spider could in a month, and bats don’t make you scream when they scuttle across your pillow at 3 a.m.

But bees—regular, non-Africanized, star-spangled American bees—they’ve got a pass. They’re the blue-collar heroes of the insect kingdom, clocking in to pollinate the flowers that keep our ecosystems from collapsing like a house of cards in a windstorm. Their honey is a sticky middle finger to entropy, a substance so perfect it’s practically immortal. And yeah, they’ve got that cute little aesthetic going—those stripes, that fuzz, that buzz that’s more charming than menacing. You don’t see kids dressing up as scorpions or camel spiders, because no one’s writing love letters to a creature that looks like it crawled out of Satan’s anus.

So, fine, National Bee Day, I’ll tip my hat to you. I’ll raise a spoonful of honey and toast the one insect that doesn’t make me want to nuke the planet from orbit. But the rest of the creepy-crawly brigade? The wasps, the hornets, the scorpions, the camel spiders, the whole chitinous cabal? They can burn. I’m not afraid of them. I just hate them with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns. And if that makes me the villain in some vegan’s insect utopia, so be it. I’ll be the one with the honey jar, laughing while the rest of the bug world gets what’s coming.

N.P.: “Switchblade” – Link Wray

There’s too much nudity in this society.  Literally everywhere you look, regardless of what you’re looking at, it seems like you can’t go 10 seconds without some girl who doesn’t know how to wear a bra coming into frame, turning around, and twerking.  We reached critical mass with this years ago.  It actually got to the point where such things were no longer interesting, on a sexual, sociological, psychological, or any other level to most men.  In my case, it now elicits nothing but an eyeroll from yrs. truly.  I never thought I’d say this, dear reader, but fully clothed, even conservatively clothed women are now far sexier and attraction-inducing than their scantily clad, ass-jiggling sisters.  I am actually hopeful that our ridiculous culture does a take a hard turn back to the way things were when you had to a lot more than buy a $5/month subscription to see some girl’s butthole.

That having been said, I have tragic news on this completely mundane Monday: the neon-orange heart of Americana is bleeding out.  Hooters – yes, Hooters™, dear reader, that bastion of buffalo sauce and unapologetic cleavage – has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and the news hit me like a barstool to the skull.  “Son of a bitch!” I said when I first heard the reporting.  This isn’t just another restaurant chain gasping its last (we’ve had plenty of those recently); it’s a cultural artifact, a garish monument to a bygone era when we could still wink at our baser instincts without a morality cop screaming from the digital rooftops.  The end of Hooters is the end of something bigger, something raw and reckless, and I’m sitting here, gut-sick, watching the vultures circle.

The numbers are indeed grim, a $376 million debt pile that smells like overcooked ambition and undercooked strategy.  Hooters of America, one of the two outfits slinging wings and dreams, threw in the towel back in March, citing the usual suspects: inflation, labor costs, and a dining public that’s apparently too woke or too broke to drop $20 on a pitcher and a plate of curly fries.  Many of the restaurants are still open, limping along under the Chapter 11 umbrella, but the vibe is funereal.  Sure, the waitresses still smile, but it’s the smile of a boxer who knows the next punch might be the knockout.

Enter Hulk Hogan, of all people, striding into this mess like a bleached-blond-and-bandana’d deus ex machina.  The man who body-slammed Andre the Giant now wants to suplex Hooters back to relevance.  Through his Real American Brands, Hogan’s tossing an all-cash bid for the chain’s intellectual property.  Not the restaurants themselves…he’s not here to flip burgers or mop floors.  No, the Hulkster’s eyeing the brand, the logo, the mythic Hooter’s essence, to slap on beer cans, T-shirts, and maybe a slot machine or two.  His camp calls it a “perfect match,” a chance to resurrect Hooters as a symbol of “unfiltered Americana – fun, fearless, and proudly American.”  Fuck yeah.  Hogan’s Real American Beer, already a hit in Clearwater dives, was one of the first beers Hooters ever poured, so there’s history here, a kind of sweaty, fist-bumping loyalty.  But can a 71-year-old wrestling legend, more caricature than capitalist, really drag this sinking ship to shore?  I want to believe, but my faith is as thin as those shitty paper napkins at Hooters happy hour.

Hogan’s not alone in this crusade.  The original Hooters founders, led my Neil Kiefer, are clawing their way back into the game.  They’re part of a buyer group snapping up 151 corporate-owned locations, promising to steer the chain toward (mainstream acceptability.”  Translation: ditch the bikini nights, swap the low-cut tanks for something less likely to offend the TikTok censors, and maybe throw in a kale salad for the health nuts.  Kiefer’s got skin in the fight – his crew runs 30% of the franchised spots, including the top-grossing ones – but the plan feels like a betrayal to me, a neutering of the very soul Hooters once flaunted.  They’re betting on a family-friendly pivot, but who’s taking their kids to a Hooters for chicken tenders when Chuck E. Cheese is still wheezing along?  It’s a desperate gambit, and desperation is a lousy architect.

The private equity sharks, Nord Bay Capital and TriArtisan Capital Advisors, still own the carcass, but they’re not exactly weeping into their martinis.  They’ve been milking Hooters for years (heh), and now they’re ready to offload it to whoever’s dumb enough to bet on a comeback.  The bankruptcy court’s got the final say, and the clock’s ticking – 90 to 120 days, they say, before Hooters either rises like a big-breasted phoenix or gets carved up like a discount turkey.

What stings the most is the symbolism.  Hooters was a middle finger to propriety, a greasy, glorious celebration of excess in a world increasingly obsessed with sanitizing everything.  It was where you went to forget the cubicle, the mortgage, the slow drip of modern life.  Now it’s another casualty in the culture wars, another tombstone in the graveyard of casual dining.  Red Lobster, TGI Fridays, Buca di Beppo – they’re all crumbling, and Hooters is just the latest to stagger.  The American appetite for shared plates and shared fantasies is shrinking, and I’m left wondering if we’ve lost the stomach for joy itself.

Hogan’s bid, Kiefer’s buyout – they’re sparks in a storm, flickers of hope or maybe just denial.  I want to root for them, to believe that somewhere, in some dive bar of the soul, Hooters can still serve up a plate of wings and a side of defiance.  But the air’s heavy with defeat, dear reader, and the jukebox is playing a requiem.  Pour one out for the owl, friends.  I’m afraid the party’s over, and the tab’s come due.

N.P.: “I Want To Know What Love Is” – Laibach

Dear Skutch, you festering carbuncle on the ass-end of civic leadership,

I’m writing to you from the greasy edge of despair, mainlining black coffee, whiskey, and rage, because your little Podunk hellhole—Fecal Creek, CA, a name so on-the-nose it might as well be a metaphor for your administration—has become a labyrinthine death trap of traffic circles that would make Dante himself weep into his beard. I’m talking about the roundabouts, Skutch, those asphalt whirlpools of doom that have popped up like zits on a teenager’s face over the last five years, turning every drive through this town into a white-knuckled, zig-zag gauntlet of despair. It’s outrageous, man, a cosmic-level fuck-up that reeks of your special brand of ineptitude.  It’s depressing the shit out of me, Skutch.  We were good friends…I thought we had a relationship.  But this ridiculousness has made me question everything I thought I knew about you.

Let’s break this down, you bureaucratic bottom-feeder. Five years ago, Fecal Creek had one traffic circle—a quaint little novelty, a roundabout with delusions of grandeur that the locals could handle with a shrug and a prayer. But now? Now you’ve got them everywhere, Skutch, metastasizing across the town like some kind of malignant urban cancer. I drove through seven—seven!—of those godforsaken loops just to get from the the Safe House to the Burger King last Tuesday, each one a fresh circle of hell where the rules of physics and human decency go to die. The drivers here, Skutch, they’re old and scared and absolutely not equipped for this. They’re simple folk, raised on straight lines and stop signs, not this European nonsense you’ve foisted upon them. They weave and zag like drunks at last call, their eyes wide with terror, their hands trembling on the wheel, and I’m one of them, man, screaming into the void as I dodge a Prius driven by a soccer mom who’s clearly on her third Xanax of the morning.

And here’s the kicker, you soulless suit: the good people at the Fecal Creek Police Department (FCPD) are clueless. For the last two years, every single driver they’ve pulled over for DUI has been sober—sober, Skutch! These poor bastards aren’t drunk; they’re just trying to navigate your dystopian hellscape of roundabouts without losing their minds. But the FCPD, in their infinite wisdom, assumes every erratic turn is a sign of bourbon-fueled rebellion, so they slam these innocent souls down Main Street, cuffing them in broad daylight while the real crime—your urban planning disaster—goes unpunished. It’s a travesty, a grotesque miscarriage of justice, and it’s all on you.

I can see you now, Skutch, over there in your Mayoral Loft, sitting in your faux-leather mayor’s chair, ignoring the phone, probably sipping a lukewarm Coors Light while you dream up new ways to torment your constituents. You thought, “Hey, roundabouts are trendy! They’ll make Fecal Creek look cosmopolitan!” But you didn’t stop to think about the human cost, did you? You didn’t consider the existential dread of a 77-year-old retiree named Doris who just wants to get to her bridge club without being sucked into a vortex of perpetual left turns. You didn’t think about the kids on their bikes, the delivery drivers, the stray dogs who now live in the median of Circle Number Four because they’re too scared to cross. You’ve turned this town into a Kafkaesque nightmare, a place where the very act of driving feels like a punishment for sins we didn’t even know we committed.

And don’t even get me started on the special needs of Fecal Creek drivers, Skutch. These folks were barely managing the old grid system, and now you’ve thrown them into a geometric Thunderdome where the only winners are the tow truck companies and the shrinks treating everyone for roundabout-induced PTSD. Back when the traffic circles started sprouting, they seemed like they might need a little extra TLC—maybe a few more signs, a driving class or two—but now? Now they don’t stand a chance. You’ve abandoned them, Skutch, left them to fend for themselves in a world where “yield” is a foreign concept and “merge” is a declaration of war.

So what’s your endgame, huh? Are you trying to drive us all insane so you can sell the town to some Silicon Valley tech bro who wants to turn it into a drone delivery hub? Or are you just so drunk on your own power that you get off on watching us suffer? Either way, I’m calling you out, you miserable son of a bitch. Fix this. Tear down the roundabouts. Give us back our straight roads, our stoplights, our sanity. Or I swear to God, I’ll rally every last one of these shell-shocked drivers, and we’ll march on your office with pitchforks and tire irons, demanding your resignation in the key of pure, unadulterated rage.

This is what it feels like to live in your Fecal Creek, Skutch—a recursive loop of frustration and futility, where the infrastructure itself becomes a metaphor for the failure of late-stage capitalism to address the basic human need for a straight fucking line.¹

Do better, or we’re coming for you.

With all the love of a howler monkey in estrus,
The Writer Formerly Known As Jayson

¹ And if you think I’m exaggerating, Skutch, try driving through Circle Number Six at rush hour with a toddler in the backseat screaming about goddamn Paw Patrol while a semi-truck driven by face-tattooed illegals con riflés cuts you off and a gang of wild turkeys decides it’s the perfect time to cross the road. Then tell me I’m wrong.

N.P.: “Think Twice (Version X)” – Jackie Wilson & LaVern Baker

Gather round, younger readers, because grampa’s about to wax nostalgic for a time when danger was the spice of life, when we played hard and lived harder, before the world got overrun by a bunch of sniveling, bubble-wrapped snowflakes who can’t handle a little risk without clutching their emotional support water bottles. I’m talking about Lawn Darts—those glorious, foot-long harbingers of chaos, with their weighted metal spikes and plastic fins, designed to be lobbed underhand at a plastic ring on the grass, sticking into the earth with a satisfying thunk that said, “Yeah, I’m alive, and I’m not afraid to prove it.” They were the backyard gladiator’s weapon of choice, a game that separated the reckless from the timid, and I miss them with the kind of aching, bone-deep longing that makes me want to scream into the void until the universe gives me back my damn Jarts®.

Picture this: it’s the 1970s, and you’re a kid in the suburbs, the sun beating down on your un-sunscreened shoulders because nobody gave a rat’s ass about UV rays back then. You’ve got a set of Lawn Darts—12 inches of pure, unadulterated potential, a metal tip that’s not sharp enough to look dangerous but heavy enough to do some real damage if you’re careless, which, let’s be honest, we all were. You’d stand 35 feet from the target, or closer if you were feeling particularly unhinged, and you’d toss those bad boys with a flick of the wrist, watching them arc through the air like a Roman plumbata—yeah, those ancient war weapons from 500 BCE that inspired this whole beautiful mess—hoping to land a ringer and score three points, or at least get closer than your opponent’s throw to snag a measly one point. It was a game of skill, sure, but also a game of guts, because you had to stand there while your buddy chucked a metal spear in your general direction, and if you flinched, you were the loser in more ways than one.

But here’s the rub, the dark little footnote that makes the safety police clutch their pearls: Lawn Darts were dangerous as hell, and they racked up a body count that would make a slasher flick blush. From 1978 to 1986, the Consumer Product Safety Commission tallied 6,100 emergency room visits—81% of the victims were under 15, half under 10, with most injuries to the head, face, eyes, or ears, leaving kids with permanent scars, blindness, brain damage, the works. Three kids didn’t make it out alive—a 4-year-old, a 7-year-old, and a 13-year-old, their lives snuffed out by a game that was supposed to be fun but turned into a tragedy when a dart went astray, piercing a skull with the force of 23,000 pounds per square inch, according to one researcher’s estimate. The tipping point came in 1987, when David Snow’s 7-year-old daughter, Michelle, took a dart to the brain in her own front yard, thrown by a neighbor kid who didn’t know any better. Snow went on a one-man crusade, hounding the CPSC until they banned the sale of Lawn Darts outright on December 19, 1988, urging parents to destroy their sets and keep them away from kids. Canada followed in 1989, and just like that, the Jarts® were gone, relegated to the black market of flea markets and yard sales, where they still lurk like forbidden fruit, tempting the brave and the stupid.

Now, I’m not saying those injuries and deaths weren’t heartbreaking—because they were, and I’m not a complete monster—but let’s talk about why it’s time to lift the ban and bring back Lawn Darts in all their perilous glory. We’re 37 years past that 1988 ban (which is personally unbelievable…seems like just yesterday), and in that time, we’ve raised generations of the softest, most coddled kids this planet has ever seen, kids who’ve never known a world without safety nets, both literal and metaphorical, who’ve been swaddled in so much bubble wrap they can’t even handle a scraped knee without a therapy session and a participation trophy. These snowflakes have grown into adults who are terrified of their own shadows, who’d rather sip oat milk lattes and whine about microaggressions than face the raw, unfiltered reality of life. They’re clogging up society with their weakness, their endless need for validation, their inability to take a risk and survive the consequences, and frankly, there are too damn many of them. We need to thin the herd, and I don’t mean that in some dystopian, eugenics-fueled fever dream—I mean it in the primal, Darwinian sense that says if you’re too dumb to dodge a Lawn Dart, maybe you’re not cut out for the long haul.

Bringing back Lawn Darts isn’t just about nostalgia; it’s about restoring a sense of toughness, of resilience, of living life on the edge and not crying to the government to save you when things go south. We’ve got trampolines killing 11 people between 2000 and 2009, skateboards claiming 40 lives a year, swimming pools drowning 390 kids annually, and hot dogs choking far more children under 14 than Lawn Darts ever did—yet we don’t ban those, because we understand that life comes with risks, and mitigating them is on us, not some faceless bureaucrat. The CPSC’s ban was a knee-jerk reaction, a capitulation to a culture that’s forgotten how to let kids be kids, to let adults be adults, to let us all take responsibility for our own goddamn choices. Lawn Darts taught us that—taught us to be careful, to be aware, to respect the danger and still have a blast, because what’s the point of living if you’re not willing to tempt fate every once in a while?

So here’s my demand, you pencil-pushing cowards at the CPSC: lift the ban on Lawn Darts, effective immediately, and let us badasses reclaim our birthright. Let us toss those metal-tipped beauties across the lawn again, let us feel the adrenaline of a near miss, let us laugh in the face of danger and teach the next generation what it means to be alive. The snowflakes can stay inside with their iPads and their safe spaces—we’ll be out back, playing a real game, thinning the herd one ill-aimed throw at a time. Because if we don’t toughen up this society, if we don’t reintroduce a little chaos into the mix, we’re doomed to a future of mediocrity, and I, for one, would rather go down swinging with a Lawn Dart in my hand than live in a world that boring.

N.P.: “Girl U Want” – Robert Palmer

Dearest readers, friends, miscreants, and assorted malcontents, I regret to inform you that we’ve reached a new nadir in the never-ending corporate hijacking of art, rebellion, and everything holy that once made rock’n’roll a weapon, not a beige commodity slathered in nostalgic platitudes and sold back to us like overpriced junk at a yard sale.  What I am referring to, nay railing against with every ounce of venom my synapses can muster, is insult of cataclysmic proportions masquerading as a “Sex Pistols” tour.  Newsflash, you clueless cash-drunk husks clinging desperately to your fading youth like it’s an oxygen mask on crashing plane: without Johnny Rotten (John Lydon), it is NOT the Sex Pistols.  It’s a farce.  A sideshow.  A garishly bad cosplay act smeared together with the sticky residue of corporate nostalgia and aged opportunism.

I’ve been up most of the night having a goddamn fit about this, dear reader.  I mean, really, who are we kidding here?  Two original members.  Two.  That’s what we’re left with.  A skeletal, emaciated version of one of the most incendiary bands whose sheer existence once sent puritanical tabloid hacks scurrying to their typewriters in terror.  Nobody would have ever even heard of Steve Jones and Paul Cook if not for the raw, uncontainable vitriol that spewed out of Johnny Rotten like a Hellfire missile shot at the vinyl-soft underbelly of 1970s British society.  But here they are, zombifying the entire concept of the Pistols, dragging its bloated, lifeless corpse onto a stage to jiggle it around as if that crude facsimile could even begin to conjure the anarchic genius that defined the real deal.

And for what, exactly?  Spare change?  Relevance?  Some morbid desire to prove to themselves that they weren’t just side characters in Rotten’s caustic, venomous opera?  Because whatever it is, one thing is abundantly clear: it’s not integrity.  It’s not art.  It’s not even rebellion.  It’s the opposite of rebellion.  It’s compliance.  And worse, it’s embarrassing.

The Sex Pistols I remember would never have done this.  My first memory of them was when I was about 8.  My mom was driving us to church, and we’d listen to a Top 40 radio countdown show.  One week, Dick Clark or whoever it was came on and announced there was no #1 song on the British charts that week because the #1 song that week was, in fact, God Save the Queen by the Sex Pistols, which song had been banned in England.  The BBC and many independent radio stations refused to play it, and major retailers declined to stock it, Dick said, due to its controversial lyrics and timing, coinciding with Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee.  As an 8-year-old in suburban America, I did not have enough of an understanding of England’s politics or culture at that time to truly appreciate the lyrics, but the song itself was unmistakenly assaultive.  It made me want to sneer, which was new to me at 8.  Fast forward a couple of years…I was still a kid living in Suburbia and I remember hearing about Sid Vicious dying in New York City.  That one made me want to both sneer and change my name to something as awesome as Sid Vicious.  The next time the Pistols showed up on my radar was just after I graduated from high school with the release of Sid & Nancy, the biopic released in 1986, directed by the execrable Alex Cox and starring Gary Oldman as Sid and Chloe Webb as Nancy.  Though Johnny Rotten said the movie had a “duff script,” and its historical accuracy has been oft-debated, the film quickly became a cult classic, and I was very much a member of that cult.

Big jump to August 23, 1996…I was in my mid-20s and living in San Francisco when I saw the original Sex Pistols line up (with bassist Paul Cook resuming his role) when they brought their Filthy Lucre Tour to the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View.  That reunion tour marked the first time the band had performed together since their initial breakup in 1978, and it was amazing.  And I would be remiss in not mentioning my trip to Manhattan in 2000, when I first visited the Chelsea Hotel, where Sid and Nancy had been living in Room 100 when Sid allegedly stabbed Nancy to death in October, 1978 (Sid was charged with her murder but died of a heroin overdose before the case could go to trial).  The room numbers had been changed, but sneaking up the stairway to the first floor, I felt some very heavy vibes in that place (not just from the Sid debacle, but the many other personally influential artists who had lived there).  I decided it would probably be interesting to spend a year living in the Chelsea, but that never came to fruition as I started having a lot of success as a freelance writer in San Francsico.  Whilst living in San Francisco, I was a frequent patron of the Beni Hana in Japantown, which Beni Hana was located in the same mall as the Miyako Hotel (now the Hotel Kabuki), where Sid famously walked through a glass door during the Pistols’ infamous 1978 U.S. tour.  That chaotic incident occurred on January 14, the same day as the band’s final show at the Winterland Ballroom.  Sid, in a drug-fueled haze, smashed through the glass door, injuring himself in the process.  When I’d come stumbling out of Beni Hana, toweringly drunk on sake bombs and Sapporo, I’d often threaten to go around the corner and go ploughing through the glass doors as a sort of moronic tribute to Sid.  Fortunately my people never allowed that to happen.  I say all this just to show that for good or ill, the Pistols have oddly informed many instances in my life as I was growing up.  But I do digress.  Returning to the travesty at hand…which was the shameful bastardization of the greatest punk band in history.

Because, believe it or not, dear reader, this fever dream somehow gets worse.  What got me really worked up about all this nonsense was hearing that this contraband knockoff of the Sex Pistols has been invited to open for Guns N’ Roses?  G’n’F’nR?!  Far be it for me to throw shade at Axl Rose, who, for all his faults, has at least managed to preserve the rough-edged lunacy of his legacy (even if he has done so while occasionally resembling a sleep-deprived Willy Wonka whose chocolate factory has long since closed).  But endorsing this sacrilege?  Giving this shameful cover band some shred of legitimacy by lending them a prime spot on your globally adored, pyrotechnic-heavy circus tour?  C’mon, Axl.  Is there no sense of responsibility anymore among the elders of this subculture we once dared call “countercultural”?  How much more abuse can the spirit of punk endure before it just curls up and dies, exhausted, in the corner of some overpriced arena hosting another “nostalgia night”?

This absurd Karaoke Kabuki is insulting, not just to the legacy of punk or the Sex Pistols themselves, but to anyone who once believed in the raw, pugilistic necessity of rock as an art form.  Anyone who screamed along to “God Save the Queen” or shredded their vocal cords to “Anarchy in the U.K.” because for once, someone out there seemed real.  Rotten wasn’t just a front man…he was the face of punk’s refusal to be nice, digestible, or safe.  He was the shard of glass tucked under the rug, the sputtering voice that declared with full, unrestrained fury that everything the establishment told you to believe was a bowl of beige horseshit.  He was the heart.  The lungs.  The fire.  And without him?  Without him, the Sex Pistols are just a hollowed-out carcass, trotted out in front of audiences who don’t seem to care that their rebellion has been taxidermized and sold back to them at $120 a ticket.

This isn’t punk, this is pantomime.  A travesty wrapped in a tragedy, shaved down into a palatable consumer “experience.”  And I, for one, refuse to clap politely as legends deface their own mythology for another damn payday.  Rotten may be absent from the stage, but his spirit cries foul from the shadows, mocking this grotesque imitation for what it is.  A scam.  A theft.  And a reminder that no matter how loud their amps, Jones and Cook have proven that the sound of desperation is deafening.

N.P.: “L F C L” – Public Image Ltd.