WHY WRITE FOR SCREW?

When I was first approached and asked to write [this story] for SCREW, I felt an immediate sense of impostor syndrome.  Sure, I can write but can I live up to Honeysuckle Divine’s legacy of shooting pickles across the room from her vagina? You think I’m kidding. Those are big shoes to fill (with pickles).

I was born in the 1970s. I grew up in the 1980s during the Reagan years, the Just Say No years. As a child, I watched thrash metal music mock and laugh at the PMRC, as the Christians tried to label anything played through full cranked Les Paul and Marshall as devil music.

When Phil contacted me, trying to explain the background of the magazine, I said, “Oh I know who you are because my dad, the police officer, had a stack of your magazines under his bed.” I also thought, “Maybe this dude knows Nina Hartley…”  I am in love with her, but her from the 1980’s—it’s the primary reason I’ve perfected my patent pending time coils and I’m building a time machine.

As an alleged madman writer, a counter-culturist, general misanthropic agitator of society, and habitualriler-upper of the monkey cage at the zoo, nothing pleases me more than being welcomed into the ranks of legends and granted professional status by skipping the throat and going straight for the prolapsed anus of the evangelicals, the new Pharisees MAGA cult, and the moral majority—the leaking, festering, fetid trash bags they are.

As the founder of ToxicWasteSites.org, a fed watchdog group, there is a much more perverse motivation why I took the job than, again, my one-handed love affair with Nina Hartley. My work exposing the U.S. EPA’s Superfund toxic waste site cleanup program, lamplighting the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy and other federal agencies has made me persona non grata at virtually every media outlet in America.

No one more than me knows the feeling of inner torment and isolation of being an ostracized, exiled muckraker. Only a month ago, as I worked to fight a legal battle in Jonesborough, Tennessee—to shut down the development of the BWXT proposed depleted uranium processing facility,  by asserting lack of compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)—five separate Tennessee media outlets, both TV and print media, refused to publish my work, or admit that I even exist.

The results of my work forced the D.O.E. to perform a new environmental assessment. I won while alleged brave journalists still buried me. I have clocked over 43,000,000 readers in the last year; even that didn’t cause them to change their policy of covering up almost literally everything more controversial than a 15-year-old kid beating his meat in the Cleveland Public Library (that’s a real Regional Emmy winning journalist’s big story). I would like to say the suppression of my work is a media conspiracy but it’s really just corporate ownership, cowardice, and sheer idiocy which provides the darkness for the Kirkroaches to do their dirty little deeds and then systematically deny, deny, deny. 

I view writing for SCREW as a sign of the times, the symbol of the true state of American media, the failing of the infrastructure of the 4^th estate, that for me to educate the public and save lives, I have to take my investigatory work to pornographers to get it published. The type of sordid underbelly I’m shining the light on is far more offensive than Captain Ding Dong Dan’s Double Headed Dildo Dom Delicatessen Vol. 19, even if only slightly. 

America has moved right back straight the fuck into the 1970’s, and 1980’s, as a society. Nothing is more fair and just than teaming up with a legendary publication like SCREW to light the fuse of the fact bomb and deliciously watch the status quo freak out and scatter. Take that, you shart brained, honkeytrons. 

Also, all rationalization aside, I need work! I got kids to feed, man. Don’t hate the player, hate the game, dawg, because I’m no better than the next man, or lady. Who could pass up the chance to become not only a published counterculture writer but a self-made overnight hundredaire? I’ll be getting two, not one, that’s two strips of bacon on my McDoubles tonight, thank you.

If you are offended by my appearance of a blatant, total lack of integrity, ethics, common decency or honor, the President nails porn stars (seriously Nina, DM me), bribes her to cover it up and then brags about creeping on teenage beauty pageant contestants without consent. Writing for SCREW is surely a few steps up from that kind of arrogant, megalomaniacal depravity. In today’s world all I am to do to be the better candidate is to commit only thirty-six felonies and I’m the Republican nominee for 2028, so fuck y’all if you can’t take a joke.

—MB

Matthew Berdyck

Matthew Berdyck is an American filmmaker, activist, journalist, misanthropic satirist, founder of ToxicWasteSites.org and gives zero fucks.

He is a freelance contributor to SCREW.

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