William S. Burroughs. February 5, 1914 – August 2, 1997. Born “into a prominent St. Louis family. His parental grandfather and namesake was the inventor of the modern adding machine and his maternal uncle, Ivy Lee, was one of the founders of modern public relations.  In work and in life Burroughs would turn this family inheritance against itself as part of a lifelong subversion of the morality, politics, and economics of modern America” (Junky – 50^th Anniversary Definitive Edition bio).   A lot can be said about this unique individual.  Genius, heroin addict, homosexual, beat writer, poet, prophet… There are plenty of words I could use to describe this man. However, there is one particular word which fits Mr. Burroughs rather well and is related to the many other words that characterize him.  Rebel. Mr. William Seward Burroughs was a rebel till his dying day. He rebelled against a society that told him to be clean strait & narrow in order to succeed in life. He calmly replied with a very dry Fuck you. Fuck your clean strait & narrow. I want to live a life of crime and adventure. I want to be a junky. I want to be a queer. I want to be liberated from your polished plastic sanity. I never want to be disconnected from the dirty gutter and the dark alley. Fuck you. Fuck all the bullshit that you wrap in your flag, dress up in your prayers and try to shove down my throat with your apple pie & ice cream. I know where your apple pie & ice cream comes from. Iknow where you hide your skeletons. I know you. I know what scares you.  Freedom. It is the hollow slogan you use for your tyranny. It is the lie that I pervert and make true. I scare you but you don’t scare me. You wish I had been vacationing in Hiroshima or Nagasaki when you dropped your magnificent shiny bombs, Fat Man & Little Boy, but to my good fortune I was hiding out in Mexico City, Tangier, Paris and London waiting for the statute of limitations on those drug charges to run out. No I was not among the 220,000 plus which you annihilated in less than one glorious week of victorious achievement. As difficult as it may be to believe I am not afraid of you but you are scared of me.  I’m your filthy junky, I’m your damned faggot, I am your crooked madman. I am the ugly rotten fruit of your hypocritical American dream. Take a good long honest look. Remove those cum stained stars and bloody genocide striped hands away from your eyes. Look closely. What do you see? Do you see the dirty gutter and dark alley? Good. Now you know what I see when I look at your arrogant flag, when I look at your hell churches, when I look at your sexist bigoted morality. What you see when you look at me is what I see when I look at you. Ignorant scum. Go sell your bullshit to someone else cause I aint buying any of it.  You go ahead and go with God and I’ll stick with the devil. I will rebel against your cage till the day I die. Fuck you, you pusillanimous, craven savages.

Amen.