Rodney is America, America

At the age of seventeen, Rodney Aiken resolved to base his entire existence upon the example given by popular culture. At the outset his hope was to become a kind of living mockery of his age. The late 80s - the time in which he began - was the most confusing for him, as he had difficulty climbing the corporate ladder with fish-net stockings and poofy hair. He tried to explain at his interviews that despite his appearance he wanted "to make truck-fulls of cash," "do cocaine," and "fuck lots of women, just like every other man" did.

Rodney was turned down by every interviewer, except for the human resource manager at Goldmann-Sachs, who appreciated Rodney's "enthusiasm and straightforwardness."

"To tell you the truth," he confessed, "you can...make love for hours on that stuff...fuck for hours, I mean," he added, more softly.

Rodney excelled at his new position as stock broker until the early 90s when his mood became decidedly more "depressive" as his supervisors called it. After Rodney appeared at four board meetings in flannel overshirts, interrupting his superiors with one-liners like "corporate pig," and "stuff it fascist," he was quickly fired; however, due to obligations insisted upon by Rodney's earlier, more vigorous glam-rock incarnation, the company was forced to dole out hundreds of thousands in severance pay, a handsome retirement portfolio, as well as a ticket to the Grand Cayman Islands, which his previous boss laughingly agreed upon.

By the time Rodney was thirty years old he had squandered the bulk of his fortune on Backstreet Boys albums and Limp Bizkit paraphernalia. He was also fond of "rockin' the gange" and when his mother made her annual call to invite him for Thanksgiving he replied, obligingly that he was "stoned out of his gourd" and that "stuffing would be awwwwwweeeeeeeeesoooooome."

9/11 caught him off-guard but he soon found himself at home in the new right-wing order, clogging up the 1-800-TIPS-LINE with reports of his suspicious Muslim neighbors, whom he had previously smoked marijuana with only a few years prior. He felt comfortable protesting his Constitutional right to free speech in the designated free speech zones, threw a massive fund raising party for Bush's re-election bid and within a few years was the most active member of Houston's local Anti-War chapter.

In his remaining days Rodney alternated between paranoid hatred of Obama's "Socialist policies" and the "Fascist right-wing take-over" he perceived in contemporary life. He left himself messages on opposite campaigns and in his political criss-crossing, mistakenly showed-up at a McCain-Palin rally in his Abort Sarah Palin t-shirt.