You're Making Me Hate You (30 page)

When we drive we’re in a constant state of either Schumacher or shmuck, dodging traffic while texting or sucking off our significant others—anything besides paying attention to the road ahead. In that way we drive a lot like we live. Seeing a pattern? It’s pathetic, but not nearly as pathetic as what we spend our money on: the latest crazes for the earliest phases, ready and willing to take our minds off the fact that maybe we put too much emphasis on how much money you do or don’t have to begin with. Some of that pressure, of course, comes from our families or our wives/husbands or our boy/girlfriends or our regular J-11 friends or society in general, putting more strain on already impossible relationships and steering that ship toward oblivion … or green Jell-O. Because we can’t get our relationships together, we can’t get our kids to keep it together. They’re turning feral and, indeed, turning on each other. The abuse is starting younger and younger, to the point at which they’ll need to start holding Bullying Seminars at Lamaze classes. Because we’re getting dumber and dumber, our music—and taste thereof—is getting shittier and shittier. Which came first: the ass or the twerk? I really,
really
,
REALLY
fucking hope it remains a mystery to me.

Speaking of which, it’s still a mystery as to why I am just as dumb today as I was before I was filling my own pants with the Brown Sound. Even though there are still times when the tiniest hint of the “underwear parentheses” finds a way to appear (shut up …), I consider myself a savvy cat with a handle on the times and places. But just when I think that, I walk head first into a door because I wasn’t wide enough awake, or I piss on my brand-new Dalek socks because I always think I’m smarter than I actually am and decide I can go pee in complete darkness and be perfectly fine. I
know
for a fact that spicy food absolutely destroys my stomach, and yet I eat vast quantities of it, only to
suffer the consequences in stunned disbelief. Yeah … if this is what a so-called genius looks like, I can only speculate how many times Einstein went sissy on his bedroom slippers. Trust me: I’m no Einstein. But I know my way around it.

So, for the most part, why are we all so fucking stupid?

Maybe it’s a part of our DNA. Maybe it’s a countdown of sorts. Maybe, if ancient astronaut theorists are to be believed (I just want to work that phrase into every book I write from now on), maybe when we were being groomed and grown by the Thetans (that’s a nod toward those kooky Scientologists) or other aliens that may have been involved, they installed a fail-safe. See, I’ve seen a lot of movies and read a lot of big, thick, smarty-pants books. I know that if you’re going to create a new version of life, a version that can learn and excel at leaps and bounds, you don’t do it without making damn sure that it can’t get too big for its own britches, whereupon it would rise up against its creators. That wouldn’t make for a very nice Father’s Day. No, no—the creators couldn’t have that. So they put in a “safety valve” of sorts.

Maybe they installed in us this fail-safe that would kick in once we hit a certain capacity for intelligence and violence. Knowing that one could very well feed the other, once we’d peaked as a sentient species, the time would come for us to be devolved as one giant genus. Much like a cell that can be programmed to break down with the right stimuli, we humans could have been predisposed to a monumental trigger, ready to go off if our intellect became a threat beyond our own solar system. In order to protect themselves from these crazy mammals they’d helped to make rampant and reproduce, the alien uber-lords would develop a way for that trigger to go off without their own interference being discovered.

A trigger like, say, splitting the atom?

That’s a nice story, and for fuck’s sake, I’d laugh my balls off if it were true. Then again, it doesn’t change the fact that 99.99999 percent of the population is a heaping mass of messy headcheese, nearly as smart as the average pet rock. I see it all the time. Worse yet, I have to wade through it just to live a life that doesn’t involve a cave, a gun, and a lot of “get off my lawn.” I might be more angry if I didn’t smell the same pheromones coming from my own neuro pits. To quote anyone who ever saw M. Night Shamalama-Ding Dong’s movie
The Happening
… is that
it
? That’s fucking
IT
?

Someday—and when I say
someday
I really mean most likely not in my lifetime—maybe we’ll right this ship of fools and seek out smoother waters, cooler breezes, and better climes. That day isn’t too far-fetched to dream about; life doesn’t have to be fucking rocket science, and being able to think and act like better human beings isn’t too much to hope for. Natural selection could easily come knockin’ on our front doors with a warrant to besmirch the premises. But I tell you one thing: we may be dumb, but, motherfucker, we are
stubborn
. All it would take is for some force of nature to attack us, thinking we’re too stupid to care or defend ourselves, and BAM! We’d kick ourselves into PhD mode just to prove a point. We are obstinate, cocky, committed killers when we want to be, and if we need to do some of that there “fancy book learnin’” to keep the wolves at bay, we’ll fucking do it with relish (mainly mustard and ketchup, but also some relish).

Me? Well, if I live to see the troglodytes rise, I’ll make peace with this warrior asshole who has it out for civilization—hell, I might even have forgiven you by then. I do know that even though you are truly making me hate you, my evil passion won’t sustain itself very long. I totes heart chew guys (that sentence was for the younger kids). But until that glorious day I’ll just go
on hating you, as my tired bare feet seek out the warmer stones, my eyes adjust to squinting all the time, and, in the quiet of the midday sun, I calmly wait for that genetic alien bomb in my head to go off, putting myself and all of you out of my misery.

Thanks for reading.

My name’s Corey Taylor.

Go home and fuck yourself.

As always, there are so many people to thank and only so many fingers to count on, but I’ll give it a go, nonetheless! First off, my wonderful group of “Archetype Acolytes”: Uncle Tony, Brian and Casey, Dacia and Jimmy, my sister Jackie and those DAMN kids, Pam (Pand?), Sam (Sand?), The Band (The Bam?)—Jared, Bear Arms Drew, Andrew and Bruno, and, of course, Lady of the Face. You guys were all supertroopers! My buddy Strati Hovartos for the amazing photos; my sister Christine for making sure we looked great in said photos; Ben Schafer, Amber Morris, and everyone at Da Capo for their help and continued belief in me; Marc Gerald for getting me into this mess; Brennan, Diony, BoJo, Kimbo, and everyone at 5B (4B, 3B, and right on down the line); Gram and everyone else in my family—immediate, extended, and otherwise; the people of planet Earth who put the “Duh” in “Does this shirt make my ass look fat?”; last but not at all least … my wife, Stephanie, The Boss. I couldn’t do any of this without you. Thank you for being my muse and my lucky charm. I love you so much.

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Epub ISBN: 9781473503519

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Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing,

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Copyright © Corey Taylor 2015

Corey Taylor has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published by Ebury Press in 2015

First published in the United States by Da Capo Press in 2015

www.eburypublishing.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9780091960315