The following is the transcript of an unaired infomercial, circa 2009:

Torture Lite. It sounds like a new extreme beer -- "TORTURE LITE!  Blackhole stout!  It'll gangbang your brain!" -- but this is actually a term for the humanitarian direction torturers have tried to take.  
 
Inflicting physical pain is a vulgar process that leaves scars and has the potential to kill.  Torture Lite, however, leaves a detainee relatively intact.  In addition, it requires no more effort than pressing a button.  Just push play, and in a few short
hours, a day at the most, you'll have an incarcerated individual foaming at the mouth, begging to inform interrogators about... well, anything.  
 
In the past, torture methods involved draconian practices which often left subjects bloody, sweaty, and all around gross. 
With Torture Lite, detainees have no fear of being battered, skewered, zapped, pummeled, or half drowned.  They just have to sit in a room and listen.  The only assault is aural!  And when asked, most people prefer listening to music over getting punched in the face. So Torture Lite is technically a preference.  
 
This methodology is one of the many psyop applications being utilized to exploit the inherent fragility of the human psyche.  Did that sound too technical?  Then imagine this:  David Grey's Babylon playing twenty-four hours a day until you beg for sweet death.  And keep in mind, anyone afraid of melodic chart topping hits is probably a monster.  
 
But not everyone is affected by music in the same way.  So a variety of songs make up the Torture Lite playlist.  From
Deicide's Fuck Your God to Barney the Dinosaur's I Love You, a full musical array is used to turn a Closed Mouth Clara into a Chatty Kathy.  

Surfin' Bird by the Trashmen, Eiffel 65's Blue, Eduar Khil performing Trololo, and Atlas by Battles, can all be found on this latest rendition (no pun intended) of Torture LITE!  Nonviolent Devastation.  
 
Don't let the title fool you.  Torture Lite is an aggressive product, guaranteed to elicit any variety of reactions, especially when bonus tracks, such as Meow Mix remix featuring screaming babies, is applied.  
 
Worried about using the music of famous acts such as Metallica or Eminem?  Don't be!  Whenever asked about the use
of their music in Torture Lite collections all artists have expressed NO COMMENT, which is universally understood as a tacit That's okay (1).  Although, some, such as Metallica's own James Hetfield, have expressed no discomfort being featured.  When Enter Sandman was used on Torture LITE!  Iraqi Soundscapes, James Hetfield said, "We've been punishing our parents, our wives, our loved ones with this music forever.  Why should the Iraqis be any different." (2) 

Well said James.  

Normally, this ad would only be seen by military officials, but for the first time ever, their tactics are being made available to the public.  Employees getting out of line?  Children acting up?  Neighbors?  For the low, low price of 39.99 you can have access to a "nonviolent" solution for most of life's problem.  
 
Imagine being able to push play and knowing that in a few short hours, you'll have all your ducks in a row.  Speaking of ducks!  Call now to get the bonus track:  LLAMMA SONG (3).  Torture Lite is a scientifically proven means to break someone else's will without causing physical damage.  Instead of hitting your child, just a couple hours listening to only one track will turn your deviant teen back into the sweet angel you remember. Chip the intern not getting his reports in on time?  Then tell him, "Every minute your report is late is an hour with Pearl Jam's Don't Gimme No Lip."  

After a while you won't even have to press play.  Just hover your finger over the button.  

Where else can you get such incorporeal coercive material?  Songs by artists such as:  
  ·        
Britney Spears   
R.E.M. ·        
Rage Against the Machine·        
The Sesame Street gang·        
Drowning Pool·        
Meatloaf·        
Red Hot Chili Peppers·        
Don McLean ·        
Limp Bizkit ·        
Lil Kim·        
Christina Aguilera

and the Boss himself, Bruce Springsteen.  
 
ACT NOW! Operators are standing by.  number redacted



Footnotes:
 
1.  David Grey has expressed a certain moral discomfort with the use of his song Babylon. However, the significance of his opinion is directly related to his significance as a celebrity.
 
2.  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/19/usa.guantanamo
 
3.  http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/llama

The year was 1975.  Thomas Jefferson had just traveled through time to let us know, “Be cool to the Africans. Black pussy is amazing!”  It’s too bad we had to tell me we already knew -- civil rights movement and all.  He looked really pissed on his way back through time.  Still no telling what he did to the timeline, but I digress.  
 
1975.  (Or four? ‘74... No, it was five because Martha Dillingsley was still alive in ‘74. Why would I confuse the two?  Does it even matter?  What matters anymore?  … and I’m digressing again… but Martha was a fine woman.  Took it hard and deep when the Berlin Wall went up.  Too bad she always blamed West Germany.)

1975:  the year I met my mother.  She was working as a Vietnamese prostitute in North Korea.  A strange occupation for an Italian Apache from the Southside of Chicago. Maybe it was the Irish in her -- a pimp named Patrick -- who led her to that life.  I’ll never know for sure.  By the time I knew she was my mom, five guys from my platoon had run a train on her so gross I didn’t want to see her ever again.  It’s a shame the things a boy loses when he goes to war.  But it was my choice, and this isn’t about the war (fucking French-Mongolians).  This is about the day I invented the internet.

It all started with LSD.  Lake Shore Drive.  My friends and I liked to play a kind of chicken while high on acid.  Lake Shore Drive runs along part of the Chicago coast, a skyscraper stretch bordered by a highway just before Lake Michigan.  There’s always somebody cruising the scenic road into the city, though we preferred to play around midnight.  About then traffic is steady but not thick.  The idea is to run from one highway shoulder to the other. Whoever makes it back and forth the most wins.  One night Rob Hill tried to beat my record, seventeen times.  But Rob figured the Green Goblin bearing down on him was something out of a bad movie, an acid inspired terror -- I still remember him yawping as the semi ran him down.

I never liked Rob, but I didn’t enjoy watching him get splattered… maybe if I wasn’t high on acid, though I prefer thinking I wouldn’t have enjoyed it regardless.  
 
Now, computers had been around since 1905 (I probably shouldn‘t say I invented the internet.  After all, the first e-pistle was sent by the Titantic -- “Emergency! Send Help! Rampant social commentary on board!”  But no one really used the cyber-pneumatic grid for much more than communication. Letters whipping back forth at the speed of light, fast enough to inspire patent clerks.  What I should say is I reinvented the internet.), but the average person didn‘t tend to have one. 
Consider:  the first “home” computer was nicknamed The Beast.  In order to have it, a person needed a spare room.  It wasn’t until about 1955, after we landed on the Moon, computers started getting smaller.  (There are all kinds of crazy theories as to why, from Martians to human ingenuity.)  By 1969, computers could fit on a desk, and eventually, everyday folks owned at least one. But the internet was still developing.  

See, people have a tendency to see something for its obvious applications; who looks at a shovel and thinks handheld catapult first?  The pioneers of the digital frontier went straight for utilitarian ends:  enormous phone directories, instruction manuals on mass, dictionaries, poorly transcribed textbooks, television guides telling of the past and future,
first aid methods, providing a place for lunatics to rant without technically shouting, huge caches of random photographs, take-out dining menus, antiquated cartoon collections, simple instructions which confused old people in order to prove they were of no more use to society, job listings, translation forums which meant well but were ultimately useless, pixilated renderings, and epic volumes of multiplication tables, sometimes going into tens of millions times tens of millions.  Yet, few saw more than a digital warehouse.  
 
When Rob tried to stop that truck with his face -- a mean mug but no truck stopper -- I was glad for one thing:  I’d brought a camera.  Someone once said, “No one will believe what they can doubt.”  I’m shamefully quoting myself, but the point is still sound.  I learned early on that my adventures through life were too epic for anyone to believe out right.  Fair enough… pig fuckers.  The only way to prove is to have proof.  That may be a tautology, but it still gets the point across -- I took pictures of Rob’s remains.  My favorite is this one where most of his face is intake on a busted skull. 
A broken bowl glaring in disbelief.  
 
I wanted to be a photo journalist, and Rob’s unfortunate display of machismo (seriously, even supposing a semi-truck sized Green Goblin was actually bearing down on him, how the fuck was Rob planning to stop it?  Sic paraphrase of Rob‘s possible last thoughts, “Oh, I‘ll just pull my huge balls out, and that‘ll terrify it away I‘m sure; and remember: my balls come out my mouth when I scream.  HHHHEEEYYYYAAAAAA!!!!!”  … but I digress.)  looked like my chance to set that career in motion.  

Sometimes I wonder where I might have ended up if things had gone differently.  My article, Youthanasia:  how the young control the population according to Darwin, was never published.  The hot story at the time was Richard Nixon, stabbed to death by a sudden attack of conscience.  
 
But an odd thing happened.  Word of my grisly photos soon spread.  I kept getting e-pistles, anonymous and obvious, asking for copies of Rob’s final repose.  It never mattered to me why anyone wanted to see them, so long as people
wanted a look at my work.  However, I soon got tired of answering each correspondent individually.  So I set up a cyberspot.  One location where anyone could see what I’d seen.  
 
At the time, people could only access the photos.  The idea of electronic magazines was just starting to come into vogue, but I was wondering just what exactly folks wanted.  I’d put my article on the site and about fifty or sixty people downloaded it… by accident, as the downloaders indicated in e-pistles.  In just three weeks, the photos got downloaded almost seventy-five thousand times. I began to wonder if it really mattered what I had to say; and letters kept arriving, online, full of various statements (i.e. you‘re a sick awful bastard, thanks for the fap material, this is so awesome I puked, etc.) which got me thinking as well.  

A picture is worth a thousand words, but whose words?  
 
I got my buddy, Abe Stone, to whip up a sort of instant forum.  People could “comment” on a picture they saw right away without joining any kind of group.  Everybody already has an opinion.  They’re just looking for a place to express it.  The cyber-verse turned into that place.  

Mine was the first of its kind, but the idea soon caught on.  It seemed like a good one at the time.  Democratizing everything.  From the encyclopedia to the Sunday sermon, anybody anywhere anytime could “comment”on whatever they found in the net.  

It’s funny (like if you can laugh at the Holocaust) what people are like when they think they’re anonymous or
being clever or both.  Expression without consequence.  I wouldn’t say I got to know the world.  I got to know how the world wanted to be seen.  
 
But I could have been wrong.  It’s a big world after all.  Maybe people are different in other parts of the globe, I thought.  So, since I couldn’t afford to travel on my own -- not all ideas make millionaires -- I joined the military.  If I’d known a war was about to breakout I might have waited for peace. 
 
I’m still not sure if I’ve experienced people the way they really are. At least I got to see my mom.  I just don't care for some of the comments people leave about her.    

The Sins We Forgive aka Sins for Forgivin‘.
 
In the year that we knew as 1800 and two
The communists had shot FDR;
And though they shattered his spine
He said he felt fine
So we let 
the matter 
Slide.

Too Ra Loo, Too Ra Lay,
You can shoot, but I won’t run away.
No matter who you are
So long as whiskey’s in the jar
You’re welcome to have yourself a stay.

At the fall of the Moon I saved a wooden spoon
To carve the spot of my car.
But the keys to my Ford
Were stole by Mongol hordes
Or the Chinese
Delivery
Boy…

Too Ra Loo, Too Ra Lay,
You can shoot, but I won’t run away.
No matter who you are
So long as whiskey’s in the jar
You’re welcome to have yourself a stay.

There are sins which we avenge and those for which we mend
But the choice is never what you choose.
I wanted fries with my shake
Though I’ll take what you make --
Onion rings have always been okay.

Too Ra Loo, Too Ra Lay,
You can shoot, but I won’t run away.
No matter who you are
So long as whiskey’s in the jar
You’re welcome to have yourself a stay.


The Face of Rose.

The face of the rose lays in quiet repose 
as she sleeps off the evening before.  
I spent my last coin 
to help my girl join 
in a toast to the dying queen:  
Elizabeth is dead, 
may god shit on her head, 
the English are a fucking disease.  
 
Chorus:  
Say your please, 
a little kindness or else she’ll just tease.
The face of the rose
In quiet repose
mo chuisle(1)

More than a blue moon 
the rose is known to bloom 
and smile 
in suggestive ways.  
I’ll unfasten my britches 
and screw her to stitches -- 
Doc’ll sew her a virgin again.  
 
CHORUS.  
 
On nights at her mother’s 
I’ve fought with her brothers --
she doesn’t clean off her chin.  
But the family is ready 
to call me friend gladly 
cuz I’m taking their fatty to bed.  
 
CHORUS.  
 
She seemed she’d die spinster, 
and I’ve nothing against her, 
so long as she eats out my ass.

…never once even asked.  
 
CHORUS.  
 


Riastrad(2)

 
"The world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed."
        - Sean O'Casey
 
"Those who drink to forget, pay in advance."
        - sign above the bar.


The IDs from my brother 
got us past the bouncer 
and bad cess(3) me forever 
that's all I remembered 
till Bloom came and screamed,
 
"Nuair a bhionn an fion istigh,
bionn an ciall amuigh(4).
You boys are quite lucky,
The cops arrive shortly,
And the mob'll let you leave.
The lynch crowd's been brewing
Since you first tasted ruin --
I wouldn't believe if I didn't see:

"Two on the road to block and fall 
 suddenly felt eight feet tall 
and soon spread an awful pall -- 
you've redefined the sins.

"You hybridized the seven worst 
to find delights to make you burst
and what truly makes it all perverse 
is you did it all so well.

"As if you're schooled in devil craft 
you drained the last of every draft 
then embraced the deepest daft, 
burning poor bartender Krafft, 
for cutting off your beer.

"His wife complained 
so you ate her brain 
and in the midst of that coup de main (5)
you're balls began to drain.

"Like demons in human costume, 
sea gulling(6) around the room, 
you inspired every doom 
and invented sixteen more.
 
"Tommy McGee with two or three 
tried to end it speedily, 
but disbelief in their eyes,
they ended up crucified.

"And I haven't even said how you pissed the floor, 
the eight year old you turned to whore,
and tried to have Glenn immured(7) , 
and twenty fucking midgets dead --
what was going through your head? -- 
bled the lot for gold.  
 
"...but take heart lads,
your first 
wasn't as bad as your dads'."

 
 
Footnotes:

1.  Pronunciation:  muh khish-la.  Translation:  my pulse.

2.  Loose translation:  warp spasm.

3.  Translation: luck.

4.  Pronunciation.  Nuh-ar a vee-on fee-on iss-chih, vee-on an keel am-wih.  Translation: When the wine is in, sense is out.

5.  French, meaning a sudden, fierce, and successful surprise attack.

6.  The act of throwing handfuls of semen at others.

7.  To seal someone inside of a wall while still alive. 

In 432 C.E., a young British priest suffering from Stockholm Syndrome returned to the land of his captors, Ireland.  He forgave them for his kidnapping, believing the people of Éire had called out to him in a vision, "I imagined in that moment that I heard the voice of those very people... and they cried out, as with one voice:  'We appeal to you, holy servant boy, to come and walk among us.'"  With this delusion of grandeur in mind, he spent his time driving snakes off the isle, presumably drowning in the ocean, and missing the point about clover leaves (for every ten thousand three leafed clovers there is only one four leafed) in order to over simplify a complex theological concept.  But this must have all resonated with the Irish on some level because over time he became the patron saint of the emerald isle... an odd thing considering his British origins.  However, the genesis of a holiday often has little to do with how it's celebrated.  Just look at Christmas:  originally a hedonistic celebration, at one time considered so debaucherous it was banned in parts of
the United States, Giftmas is now a quiet occasion to bribe love and affection from family and friends.  And
similar could be said of St. Patrick's Day.

Though typically associated with drinking, St. Patrick's Day was originally a solemn religious affair. Marked as a holy day of obligation, taverns would be closed to respect the occasion honoring the death of Patrick. Of course, this didn't mean that drinking wouldn't occur in the home.  Liquor had long ago been discovered as a cure for riastrad.  Loosely translated as "warp spasm",riastrad is what we would nowadays call ADD.  The desire to have the warp spastic calm led to the common practice of alcohol being present on St. Patrick's Day.  Children who grew up in the tradition associated alcohol so much with the day that it became commonplace to imbibe a bit of the craythurcome March 17th.  Over time the real reason for liquor's presence disappeared as generations grew up drinking without thinking about it.  As such the catatonic consequences of consuming vast quantities of booze is considered a negative outcome rather than the intention.  
 
Despite losing the reason behind the drinking, at least the consumption remains as part of a part of tradition.  Unfortunately, the same can't be said for blue.  Yes, once upon time the traditional color worn on St. Patrick's Day was not green.  The sovereignty of Ireland, Flaitheas Eireann, used to be represented by a woman clad in blue.  However, in the 17th century a case of color blindness led to a transition from blue to green.  For a long time the Irish coat of arms displayed the menacing golden harp against an azure background.  But in 1642 an exiled soldier by the name of Eoghan Ruadh O'Neill, returned to Ireland to fight in the Irish Confederate Wars.  The ship he arrived on flew a flag featuring the harp only now it stood out against a green background.  Reasons for this transition are sketchy at best, and most historians prefer not to accuse a folk hero of what might have been color blindness, but the fact remains that from then on out the green flag became an Irish symbol (e.g. it was carried by the Irish Brigade fighting for the Union Army during the American Civil War and St. Patrick's Battalion fighting with the Mexican Army during the Mexican-American War).  The point here is that identity is colloquial not necessarily cultural.  To this day the Irish government still uses blue for a background, though the national flag itself has no blue.  For the average person the use of green in relation to the Irish is so common it becomes a tautology:  the Irish are green; and one wonders what purpose is really served demonstrating
that a St. Patrick's Blue even exists?

The meaning of things is expressed through its symbols.  However, the way in which those symbols are interpreted can change, rather easily and without much explanation, over time.  Blue used to be a mark of Irish cultural identity, but now green is the predominant hue.  It just goes to show that a holiday is more about what it is than what it was.
 
Nowadays St. Patrick's is, for many, just another excuse to get wasted.  The closest semblance it has to its previous religious aspect is the shamanistic state of delirium most people drink themselves into.  Yet, though few ever stop to think what the occasion might mean, outside of a reason to get pissed, maybe this year someone might stop before a predictable pint of Guinness and/or shot of Jameson to consider:  St. Patrick's Day transmuted over time from the somber remembrance of a departed patron saint to an annual celebration of all that makes the Irish Irish, which itself has even faded into the background as March 17th becomes a time for friends to gather and enjoy each other's company during a time some set aside as one more of few chances during the year to revel in life's brighter side.  So, perhaps, it's not such a bad thing when holidays change their meaning.