Hench!

Well, Well, Well. It’s been fun writing in the Hench blog, but this is my final communiqué. All things must come to an end, and it’s time for me to sign off. Three reasons:

1. In the blue trunks, Time’s Fleeting Nature. In the red trunks, Pressing Responsibility.
2. I’m sick of seeing my writing (even if it’s dashed off in eight minutes for thirteen people and not proofread) bracketed by advertisements.
3.

This isn’t to say that I won’t set up a new Henchquarters somewhere else at a more auspicious time.

In the meantime, if you like what you’ve read here and would like to read more, you’re in luck. Provide me with—

your physical address
your email address

—and one of my Henchworkers will send you writing and correspondence as it is produced.

A caveat: When not writing little anecdotes during my lunch hour, I produce works of fiction. I spend more time on my fiction, and the results are a lot more interesting. Frankly, I’d be surprised if you didn’t like it a whole lot better. And it’s yours for free, post paid. That’s right, free. It will travel to your mailbox by land, sea, or air; all you need to do is say the word.

Thanks for reading.

—Rick

PART I: Inexplicable Book Trends Toward Narrow Focus

I went into the bookstore today to look at books. Like a lot of bookstores, this one had a wall of new releases, which seems to get updated about once a month. So I generally stroll into this place about once a month, flip through the stuff that’s come out, and then take a walk. Fascinating, right? Anyway, I’ve noticed that every month’s new releases always contain the following:

1••• A book with a pair of shoes on the cover

They might be big shoes next to little shoes, elegant high heels on rusty corrugated metal, a sole brown wingtip, tap shoes on fire, but there’s always shoes. Sometimes there’s feet in them. They’re usually outside, but not always.

I’ve noticed that the trend in modern book design, especially for fiction, has been to have some bullshitty visual pun on the front, but enough already! Seems like I can’t pick up a book nowadays without having to look at some photo of a burnt out light bulb next to a working lightbulb, some whimsically arranged scissors, a bunch of little boxes full of things like buttons, fingernail clippings, and gumdrops, a hat on a mesa, an egg and a spoon, or some other stupid fucking thing.

This is just in the genre of book design for an audience that probably subscribes to the New Yorker. Otherwise you have your trashy book covers with the embossed lettering and drawings of nooses or ships, your romance book cover with the heaving bodices, your Penguin Classics book cover, your urban erotica book cover, your Dover Thrift clip art book cover, your author-on-the-cover book cover, your illustrated by a prominent graphic artist book cover, your inspirational title in big friendly letters book cover, and a lot of other kinds of book covers.

So I guess that pictures of shoes book covers are a genre within a genre. I can’t wait for this precious crap to pass over.

2••• A pop history book about something insignificant
You’ve seen these around. They’re always like “Oysters: the Shellfish That Transformed Lower Manhattan,” or “Hats: the Thing That Covered People’s Heads.” “The Something That Changed the World.”

Who reads these stupid fucking books? I’d like to know. I mean, I read a book about cockroaches once, but it was because I had an infestation of cockroaches and figured that I ought to know what made them tick. I suppose that these books are innocent enough, but they often involve a kind of willful misreading of history. Much in the way that overzealous college students can reinterpret popular media to support their theories about gender, politics, labor, etc., these authors filter a shitload of history through a seemingly insignificant object. It’s a neat trick. Kind of reminds me of when a friend of mine got obsessed with that Antique Roadshow show. It’s captivating to think that something sitting in your attic might be valuable.

3••• A work of fiction beginning with “The” and ending with “-ist”
You’ve seen these around as well. They’re very similar to the pop history books described above, but they’re fiction. I complain about these all the time. Off the top of my head, I have seen:

The Aerialist
The Archivist
The Lobotomist
The Intuitionist
The Verifactionist
The Orientalist

And I’ll bet there’s a ton more. Now, I haven’t read a single one of these, so I don’t know if they’re good books or not. Well, I read part of the Intuitionist and thought it was pretty good, but then I had to return it to the library and some other jerk checked it out and then I got sidetracked so I never finished it. So keep in mind that the sweeping generalization I’m about to make is pure conjecture and may not have anything to do with the aforementioned books—in fact, I don’t even know if they’re all fiction—but there is a definite trend towards dumbed down metaphor and symbolism nowadays. It seems that a good number of novels involve someone who has some sort of profession, hobby, or neurosis. Sometimes the book is actually named after this. Anyway, this provides the engine of the book. The plot moves along, and the writer kind of just keeps bouncing events and characters off of the wall of this profession, which provides the reader with a cubic shit ton of easy to understand symbolism.

Now, I’m not saying that writers have to cloak things behind all sorts of layers of meaning or anything like that. I’m just observing a trend, that’s all I’m doing here folks. I’m not saying that this is the dominant trend in modern American fiction, but it’s there.

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PART II: A Pile of Little Perfect Things

Like most people of my generation, I have a pretty easy time learning computer programs. If you spend a little while screwing around with a program, you can pretty much figure the thing out. I remember when stuff like Photoshop started getting popular, and everyone was crowing about how this was going to let people who didn’t have technical illustration skills be able to create art. Of course, this turned out to be a big pile of bullshit, as there is no technological thing that’s going to allow someone to be good at something that they have no proficiency for. A computer program can make it easier for a person to edit video, but it can’t make them a good video editor.

Anyway, this hasn’t stopped every asshole under the sun from using their computers to make things (including me). So you start getting this weird effect where things are shitty in a technically perfect kind of way.

For instance, most people are terrible at designing posters. Back in the olden-timey days, that would mean that their posters would be sloppily hand-lettered, you know, with some public domain image that looked all xeroxey and terrible. Still, there was a weird unity to the shittyness; it bore the mark of a human hand.

Nowadays, making a shitty poster is a whole new ballgame. There will be three or four different fonts that clash like a motherfucker, all of them perfectly aligned and spaced. Maybe one will have a stupid “twisy” effect, and another will have a drop shadow. Serif fonts, sans serif fonts—they’re all just thrown together.

Let’s say that there are three pieces of clip art beneath. Two are by the same artist, and the third is by a different artist, but they’re all the same size so your eye gives them all roughly equal consideration. The shadows cast on the objects in the three pieces of clip art don’t match each other, nor do they match the drop shadows behind the poster’s lettering. So what you get is a poster lit from four different light sources. The perspective in these posters is usually a non-Euclidian un-fucking physically impossible migraine-inducing nightmare. And the poster says something like “Bean Supper at St. Mary’s Parish Center.” It’s gotten so I barely notice this stuff anymore.

So what you have is just an assemblage of unrelated yet perfectly formed things that don’t go together. It’s kind of funny, but this is becoming a style, and it’s being co-opted by actual designers. They sort of knowingly toss these things together for effect, and sometimes it can look pretty good. Most of the time though . . . it’s like a weird old woman who collects little Hummel figurines and keeps arranging them on little shelves. But no matter how she arranges them, it’s just a bunch of little Hummel figurines.

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PART III: It’s Not There So You Can’t Hear It

So, a lot of albums are being recorded on people’s laptops using ProTools these days. It’s innaresting, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. First of all, you ought to know that I have a bunch of records. I like records for the usual reasons. They’re big with big colorful sleeves, you can get them cheap, none of my friends try to borrow them, and they sound better. Yeah, I said it, they sound better.

Now, I know there’s been a lot of studies that have supposedly disproven this, but fuck ‘em. They’re wrong, and I’ll tell you why. It’s pretty obvious that I’m an armchair audio guy, I don’t know what hertz are or any of that shit. And my understanding of how sound reproduction works is limited at best. But from what I understand, CDs work by sampling sounds very quickly—it’s like the audio equivalent of making a flipbook or something. This means that not all the sounds being generated by the musicians are making it onto the recording. I guess that’s kind of abstract, but I liken it to the first time I got a stereo with buttons that controlled the volume rather than a knob. It was infuriating: most of my CDs sounded either too quiet or too loud, and it was impossible for me to find the comfortable in-between.

With vinyl, however, you get all the sounds. Unfortunately, you get surface noise as well, and playing a record will eventually wear it out. So it’s a trade off—sound that can get damaged vs. sound that is incomplete. I prefer the former, and find the latter a little bit creepy. Or depressing. Or something. Absent and erased.

For instance, one of my favorite bands is Public Image Limited. They recorded a great album called Metal Box/Second Edition. Most of the songs were kind of made up on the spot, and they were great. The sound was incredibly bass heavy. They got that sound by having the bassist play a Fender P Bass into an Ampeg Bass Amp with the cabinet pointed at a wall in a concrete room. Rather than have a mic directly in front of the speakers, room mikes were placed around the space to pick up the ambient sound and vibrations. The resulting album was originally pressed onto a bunch of 45 rpm records, which are especially good at replicating bass sounds. I buy a copy of this record and put it on my turntable, and a vibrating needle reproduces the sound waves created in that room nearly 30 years ago. It’s amazing! Having a CD of that album doesn’t really measure up. And mp3s . . . bleah.

Digital audio technology takes masterpieces and chops them up into a bunch of unrelated stills, and it’s a bunch of crap. I read an article recently about a band where the musicians live in NY and the singer lives in LA. They write their songs in Pro Tools by just sending the digital files back and forth until, somehow, a song is made. Weird. This means that they have an infinite amount of time to make things sound infinitely perfect, and the timing is infinitely precise because none of them are playing at the same time so no one has to follow each other. On one hand, that’s kind of neat. On the other hand, it’s like a science fiction movie about teleportation that goes horribly wrong.

Or—

A singer sings the saddest song about heartbreak that was ever voiced by a human being, but she sings it into a computer. The computer understands this wrenching vocalization of love and pain as:

10101001010100101010010100101001
10100101010100101010100001001001
00000101001011000001010101101010
01010010101001000101011111100100
10101001010100101010010100101001
10100101010100101010100001001001
00000101001011000001010101101010
01010010101001000101011111100100

etc.

The computer takes these 1s and 0s and make an ersatz replica of what the singer was originally singing. You buy the CD and understand: this singer is singing about heartbreak. The message got to you through an army of robotic interpreters. People who champion digital audio are the only human beings on the face of the earth who would claim that something is gained, rather than lost, in translation.

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PART IV: The Forest, the Trees, etc.
We’ve all had shitty jobs and annoying bosses. I’m actually on fairly good terms with my job right now, if you want to know the truth, but I’ve had a bunch of bad jobs in the past. These jobs were bad for a bunch of different reasons, and different people bring different problems. I had a job once where I was driven crazy by a supervisor who micromanaged everything. He was always on everyone’s case, and everything took forever to accomplish because of all the oversight. I felt bad, because he was a nice guy. It was just that he drove himself batshit trying to make sure everything was exactly perfect, and the company suffered as a result. No one could get anything done because everything had to go though him, and it created a bottleneck sort of effect.

Had he just been a manager, people would have resented him for that. Instead, the resentment was toward his percieved ability to understand their jobs as well as they did. “Who the hell is this guy to tell me how to do my job? Hell, I been doing this longer than . . . ” By looking so close at every little thing, the poor guy just set himself up to be fallible in a whole new set of ways. He lost all critical perspective.

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Part V: Lightbulbs Aren’t Important
I was flipping though a Joseph Campbell book the other day. I haven’t had time to sit down and read any Joseph Campbell books yet, but I’ve been flipping through them. I wish I had time to read them cover to cover. This particular book was transcriptions of lectures he gave.

One of the lectures dealt with him trying to explain the concept of reincarnation to his students. He did so by pointing at the overhead lights in the classroom, saying that the lightbulbs weren’t important, but the light they generated was. No one cries when a lightbulb burns out, they just replace it.

Well, I though it was pretty interesting. I really wish I knew where to find it, so I could quote him directly, but my books aren’t in alphabetical order, and some of them are in boxes.

I was going to write something about the resemblance between Gary Busey and Nick Nolte, and how the two actors are very similar and always play the same rolls except for the fact that Gary Busey has big horse teeth like Mr. Ed, and that Nick Nolte always plays a cop or a basketball coach. If there was ever a feature-length Mr. Ed film, Gary Busey would probably snag the role. He wouldn’t even have to wear a costume. If you know your Mr. Ed, Mr. Ed was always helping people out or playing pranks. For instance, a bus driver would get sick, and Mr. Ed would take over driving the bus. There would be a shot of a hoof on the steering wheel, a hoof on the accelerator, and then a shot of Mr. Ed in a bus driver’s cap, and then someone would pay to get on the bus and would do a crazy Don Knotts double-take.

In the movie I was going to describe, Nick Nolte would play an undercover cop posing as a college basketball coach whose cover story was that he was originally the coach of the Indiana Pacers before drug problems forced him away from the game. The college was more than happy to have him, unaware that he was actually tracking down Mr. Ed for bus theft. The night before the big championship, the Nick Nolte character would get shot by a KGB operative. Mr. Ed (played by Gary Busey) would come to his rescue, and take him to the hospital in the stolen bus.

At the hospital, the Nick Nolte character would give him his tracksuit and say “Mr. Ed, those boys need direction on the court. Direction that only I can give. But I got this goddamn lead in my ticker. I’ll be all right, but those boys will be devastated if there isn’t someone directing them on those fucking pick and rolls against Northern State.”

Donning the tracksuit, Mr. Ed (Gary Busey) gallops to the game and leads the team to a victory. See, but no one will be able to tell that it’s an imposter, because the two of them apart.

Anyway, that was the idea, hatched this weekend whilst driving around upstate New York with my pal Greg Platkin. As I was looking for photographs to postt here, such as this amazing snap of Busey’s sick horse teeth:

A dead ringer for Mr. Ed, right?

Anyway, while poking around for that, I came across a web site that is about 1,000 times funnier than this one, called Busey World. I’m not in the habit of using my crummy blog to post silly links, but rest assured, gentle reader, that this site contains the kind off humor that I’d hoped to deliver to you but was sadly unable. I can’t compete with the wealth of material this guy has compiled. It’s really beyond the pale. So, here you are:

(h t t p colon slash slash buseyworld dot com)

It’s true that you can’t tell Busey and Nolte apart. Here they are, Busey on the left, Nolte on the right:

When I was a kid, I had to learn about all 50 states. I had to learn where they were on the map, what their principle products (coffee and steel, for instance) were, and their state capitals. Today I find that I probably couldn’t place most states outside of the northeast on a map.

I chalk this remarkable deficiency up to the fact that, until I was about nineteen, I’d never left the northeast. Since then I’ve done a little travelling through this country, and have formed some minor opinions about some of the states. Some of my opinions are valid, some are complete bullshit. Regardless, I’d like to say a few words on each state.

ALABAMA: I’ve never been to this place, thank fucking god. Isn’t the state flag of Alabama the rebel flag? [does some Googling] Oh, it’s a big, scary red “X” on a white background. Looks like a white power symbol, to tell you the truth. Fuck Alabama. I’m sure there are some nice people there, but I am personally of the belief that the North should have never reconstructed the South. I hate euphemisms like “the War between the States.” It was the Civil War, and the confederates were guilty of treason! Treason, treason, treason! Now the south has all this fucking power in this country, passing laws that slowly further the confederate agenda. Those treasony assholes and their pecan trees.

ALASKA: Always wanted to go to Alaska. Not much of an outdoorsman, me, but I do like the cold and glaciers and all that. Seems like it’s probably much different from anywhere I’ve ever been. I hear that Anchorage is a beautiful city. On the other hand, the two people I’ve met from Alaska were complete fucking certifiable psychos.

ARIZONA: All the charm of a corpse in a frying pan, not that I’ve ever been there or anything. You know those establishing shots in movies that are just heat shimmering over the surface of the road? Arizona is like that all the time, but without the promise of a car cresting the horizon and kick-starting the plot. Cacti, vultures, and sadness.

If you went to live there, you would spend months trying to find someone cool to talk to. After half a year, you’d see this remotely interesting girl at the grocery store, but when you got closer you’d realize that she has a Kokopelli tattoo and she’s buying way too much Bisquick. How many pancakes can a person eat? There’s such a thing as too much goddamn Bisquick. That shit will make your complexion go bad from all the butter and flour.

ARKANSAS: I’ve been to Arkansas, and let me tell you—it’s the future. There are strip malls everywhere, and every town looks exactly the same. Me, Sarah, Sarah’s sister Bip, and Sarah’s cousin Jordan drove through the whole state, and it felt like we just kept driving through the same town over and over. I was expecting Rod Serling to step out from behind a mural of a razorback and tell me that I had to set things right before I’d be able to continue my trip to Memphis. This is the home of Wal Mart, and at the University of Arkansas there is a bronze bust of Sam Walton . . . wearing a bronze baseball cap that says Wal Mart. It’s the tackiest piece of shit I ever saw. A branded bronze bust. Beautiful, the future, right? I think it was J.G. Ballard who said that the future was going to be a vast suburb of the soul. The people were nice there, although they all really like the Eagles. “The Eagles said they’d get back together when hell freezes over, but then they got back together and—you know what? They called it ‘The Hell Freezes Over Tour.’”

CALIFORNIA: Oh, shit. This one is tricky. I’ve only been to Northern California, which is cool as shit. I love it there. Oakland, SF, San Jose, uh, Mendocino, Fort Bragg, Berkeley, all great. I mean, I can’t say enough good things about the place. If I ever get enough dough that I’m not dependent on the publishing industry for work, I’d seriously consider moving out there. Maybe. A lovely place. Pretty much everyone I’ve met from Northern California has been cool as hell.

That brings us to southern California, which looks completely unbearable to me. I don’t know. Many of the people I’ve met from there are really, really, really shallow. A few are really cool, though. K.J. Swanson is cool, but then there are these other . . . well, I don’t know how many of you have seen the Stepford wives, but . . . It’s weird. A lot of southern Californians seem like they stepped off of some shitty gameshow. But some are all right. So I guess I can’t make the same kind of sweeping generalization about this state that I’m making about all the others.

Some people from northern California who I think are really cool have moved to southern California. I plan on eventually making an expedition there and passing my worthless judgment on the region. I’ll bet it’s not as bad as I make it out to be. I’ll bet the food’s good.

COLORADO: Went through the rockies on an Amtrak with my friends Tom and Dave. At one stop outside Boulder, this rangy old cowboy got in and sat next to us. He was about seventy something years old. He coughed a couple of times and then pulled out a pack of Kents. The train was about to go into this tunnel, so he leans over and says “This here’s the train, and that’s the tunnel. The train goes in the tunnel. If you have any other questions, let me know,” and then he got up and left. I didn’t have any other questions. He was the Essence of Colorado.

CONNECTICUT: Way back when, this state was the birthplace of John Brown, the ass-kicking abolitionist and the subject of the song “John Brown’s Body.” Hartford, Connecticut is considered to be the “Insurance Capital of the World,” which sounds like a lot of fun. I don’t really know much about Connecticut.

DELAWARE: Connecticut’s vestigial conjoined twin that is also retarded. On edit: It turns out that they aren’t actually conjoined, physically. Only in spirit.

FLORIDA: The home of cockroaches, geriatrics, death metal bands, corrupt politicians, 2 Live Crew, and serial killers. Florida looks like a big barrel of fun on paper, but I’ll bet you it isn’t much fun at all, really. If I never find myself in Florida it will be too soon. It seems inevitable that I’ll have to pass through there at some point, unfortunately, a fact which makes my hatred of it more acute. I’ll be the Cuban section of Florida might be pretty cool, but, you know, I’d rather go to Cuba. But I can’t. I hate fat white people in pastels. They look like walking advertisements for dying of heart disease during the Easter holidays. Like they’d be jiggling along in their pastels and then suddenly cough up a flood of pastel M&Ms and then die. Florida is just asking to be written with an exclamation mark at the end, like “Florida!”.

GEORGIA: Georgia peaches, Georgia on my mind. Except I hate peaches, and I never thing about Georgia at alI think that this guy Garin I know is also from Georgia. He seems like a nice guy, but I don’t really know him that well.

HAWAII: Eh. I like to experience Hawaii via tiki bars and Les Baxer records. That way I can turn it off and void it from my bladder when I’m done with it.

IDAHO: Potatoes—I love potatoes! But seriously, Idaho gets my vote for “Stupidest State Shape.” I’ll bet it sucks to live in that weird, extruding pseudopod part of Iowa that reaches up towards Canada.

ILLINOIS: I was in Chicago once for three hours, and it seemed like a nice city. Afraid of getting lost and missing my train, I only went to the top of the Sears Tower and back down. A lot of good comedy, music, and literature has been produced in Chicago. Not sure what happens in the rest of the state. There’s this really good zine called Roctober that gets printed there. I know that’s a fucking stupid name, but it’s an absolutely terrific publication. Another place I keep meaning to visit but the timing is never auspicious. I think it’ll be pretty cool, and I look forward to it.

INDIANA: I’ll bet they eat their Wheaties in Indiana. I’ll just bet they do. With their bare hands.

IOWA: One of my favorite people that there ever was in the world, Annie Edelman, is from Iowa. Now, I don’t know about the state itself, but Annie was one of the coolest people I ever met in my entire life. She drank a lot for a while, which I suppose earned her a small measure of infamy, and then she stopped. Last I heard, she was still living in Vermont.

Anyway, Annie and I had a lot in common and had a great time hanging out. She was a really sweet kid, and was a fantastic photographer. She was an incredible driver, and drove everywhere at an average speed of 87 mph. She ate all this fast food and threw the wrappers in the back of the car, and then her car got infested with silverfish. So I’d drive around with Annie at 87 mph., in this car that smelled like rotting tacos and was writhing with bugs, listening to Prince full blast as Annie leaned out the window and took photographs. If everyone else in the state was that cool and fast and smart, I’d move there. But I’ll bet they’re not. I’ll bet Iowa sucks.

KANSAS: Kansas City is in Kansas, and I’ve heard that’s it’s a cool place but I’ve also heard that it isn’t. Makes me think of the Wizard of Oz, which I never liked. Dorothy dreamed the whole thing? What the fuck! Dorothy has stupid dreams. I had a dream that I was hanging out with Iggy Pop because we both got short stories published in the Alaska review. I was going to talk to him, but I admired him so much that I was afraid I’d find out that he’s an asshole and I wouldn’t like him, which would make me sad. Also, I was only familiar with his music and not his literary output. Then I woke up. See? That was a stupid fucking dream. Last night I had a dream that I was a champion cyclist, and every time I’d pass other cyclists in this race I’d yell stuff at them. Specifically, I’d yell this quote from the New York Daily News, which was “famously eccentric cyclist.” So when I passed Lance Armstrong, I yelled “The Famously Eccentric Cyclist takes the lead!” That’s another stupid dream. Not all dreams make good movies.

But actually, thinking about it, I really liked the flying monkeys in that movie, and hum their leitmotif whenever I’m trying to quickly make my way through a crowded area, like Penn Station.

Oh, I’ve just learned that most of Kansas City is actually in Missouri. Who knew?

KENTUCKY: “Kensucky.”

LOUISIANA: I don’t know if New Orleans will emerge from all this flood nonsense intact, but it was one of the coolest, funnest, most fucked-up cities that I have ever had the pleasure of visiting. The tourist parts sucked, full of white-hatted douchebags slurping strawberry daqueries, but some of the most brilliant music in the world has come out of New Orleans and, in fact, continues to come out of there. Being there made me feel like I was in another country. If I could take the heat I might have moved there. The food is fucking great, too. Sarah took me out for this one meal where I drank a bottle of wine, ate alligator sausage, rattlesnake, crawfish, and potatoes. Holy shit, you know? That’s the kind of meal that Screamin’ Jay Hawkins eats. Then we took a rickety streetcar for an hour to what seemed like a really dangerous bar where Sarah’s magician friend Ryan did tricks for the patrons. Or did it happen some other way? I don’t know, they sell alcohol in their laundry mats there. All I know is that New Orleans is like this amorphous cloud of priceless memories for me. Everyone I met there was so incredibly cool, except for this one hippie guy I didn’t like much. Why couldn’t Florida have flooded? Further proof that there is no god, really. I’m not sure about the rest of Louisiana.

MAINE: I’m not sure that I can fathom myself venturing that far in to New England. Aren’t there a bunch of islands in Maine? Fjords? Everything I know about Maine I read in Stephen King books when I was in junior high school. A lot of men I’ve met from Maine seem like they’re wicked fucking manly, but then it turns out that they’re really not. Remember the Maine! God, what does that even mean? Clearly, I don’t remember.

MARYLAND: If Maryland could be a person, it would be a wan, skinny young man with a wispy moustache and long, stringy hair who wears purple corduroys and listens Dream Theater while filling out their tax forms because Maryland is contrived like that. Maryland doesn’t like to get dirty but emanates this disgusting, sweaty funk all the time. Maryland has constipation and clips coupons to buy stool softener and doesn’t even blush when the cashier asks for a price check because Maryland is too busy flipping through the Enquirer to look at Demi Moore’s fake-tanned fake tits. Maryland could also be a forty year old man with a plastic khaki-colored backpack and cargo shorts who is buying a nonstick frying pan. Or, conversely, Maryland is a 500 pound woman who sells Hummel figurines for a living and is in debt for her dental work. Maryland sucks. I’ve never been there. Delaware and Maryland should team up to form the Mid-Atlantic State Shit Twin Alliance.

MASSACHUSETTS: I’ve actually been told “You can’t get there from here” in Massachusetts. First of all, that statement is fucking impossible, because you can get anywhere from anywhere else.

“How do I get to the highway?”
“You can’t get there from here.”
“Yes I can, because three days ago, I got here from there.”

Jesus! I can’t believe a New Englander really told me that. It would be as if I went to Ireland, asked an Irishman for some money, and he made me catch him before he put on a hat with a belt for a hatband and led me to a crock of gold at the end of the rainbow and then got drunk and had too many kids to support and then died in the potato famine and was buried in the Catholic churchyard, his final resting place marked by a tombstone reading “Here Lies Seamus Paddy McMick.” You know what I’m saying? I think you do.

Anyway, the thing is that, although my interactions with strangers have been shitty in MA, a lot of my closest friends come from there, and are the warmest, funniest, smartest people I know.

Maybe I’m the problem? I don’t know. Probably.

Like most of New England, Massachusetts is very pretty, and I’ve had a lot of fun going to various places there. I’ve been given several tours of Boston by my pal Matt Kelly, who knows a lot about the history of the area. Actually, everyone from that state knows the entire history of the state and are all really good with directions and navigating those fucking traffic rotary things that are all over the place.

“Dood, where you from? Bucklebuck?”
“Nah, dood! I’m from East Bucklebuck.”
“Yah dood?”
“DOOD!”

Also, some people in Massachusetts sometimes say “Yah” instead of “Yeah.” They also say “dood” rather than “dude.” You can just tell. A lovely state. New York, Vermont, and Massachusetts are the constituent states of my “East Coast Trifecta of Awesomeness.”

MICHIGAN: The Stooges were good. The MC5 kind of secretly sucked. George Clinton is good. All Motown is great. Destroy All Monsters more or less sucked, despite having a great name and an ex-Stooge on guitar. There’s this whole Detroit techno thing, but I never heard it before. I’d like to visit the city of Detroit, but I never seem to find a reason to. I wish someone I knew would move there.

MINNESOTA: What the fuck is a Raspberry Beret? I don’t know, but I love that song. This might be a controversial opinion, but I think that Around the World in a Day was Prince’s best album. I woke up to it every morning for three months straight.

MISSISSIPPI: Em eye ess ess eye ess ess eye pee pee I don’t give a fuck about Mississippi. It’s annoying to type, first of all. Second of all, can you say “big fucking racist shithole?” If you’re from Mississippi, you probably only speak in monosyllables.

All right, I know one woman from Mississippi and she’s cool. The state flag, however, is the rebel flag in one corner and three stripes (red, white, and blue, of course). In my brain, Mississppi encompasses everything that I hate and despise about the Old South, which—I admit—is a really easy enemy to hate and despise. Still, I can’t believe that people are allowed to fly the rebel flag. It’s a symbol of treason as far as I’m concerned. March to the sea, Sherman, and seed the ground with salt.

I’ll get off my fragile little soapbox now. All right, a lot of really good music came from there (Robert Johnson + all the other Delta blues to start) and some pretty remarkable writers (William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Tennessee Williams, etc.). I guess I would have had Sherman march selectively. Like most of the states I make fun of here, I’ve never been there.

MISSOURI: I don’t know a goddamn thing about this state except that I pronounce it different than people from that area of the country. I say “MIZ-oar-ee” and they say “Mizz-err-AH.” Ha! Stupid assholes. I’m right. “Mizz-err-AH, mah home. That thar dog has burrs.” Ha ha! That sounds so fucking stupid! Ha ha ha! Assholes!

MONTANA: You know how sometimes, when you’re driving somewhere, you pull off into a highway rest stop to take a piss and stretch your legs? Always makes you eager to get back on the road, doesn’t it? Everything is dirty and stupid, all the food is going to make you feel like a fat piece of shit because it’s in a vending machine, and there’s a picnic table with a sour woman smoking a long, bad-smelling cigarette. There is an impossibly boring sign somewhere that serves as a banal historical marker, and some kind of half-assed nature admonishment on a wooden sign, like “Don’t Disturb the Pine Cone,” or something. You hate the other people in the car. Your feet itch. There are bees near the trash can. Just when it seems like it can’t get any worse, you go into the rest stop bathroom and encounter a snowman with a top hat pissing in the urinal. That snowman is Montana, and it hates your guts.

NEBRASKA: The spelling of Nebraska is visually repellent to me. States with too many broad vowel sounds in their name suffer from an inherent lack of potential. Nebraska sounds like Saskatchawan, which means that I don’t like the sound of it. For some reason, it’s also a word that wants me to make a pun out of it, but I can’t because that would be impossible. “Nebraska? I ask ya! It’s a blast-ah” See what I mean?

NEVADA: What can I say about Nevada that hasn’t already been said about letting pets near your sandbox? Las Vegas is like a big, tawdry turd in the sandbox of Nevada. Lardy, lardy, lard! $5.99 T-bone steak with chicken-fried cheesesticks. If I lived in Nevada, I would have nightmares about being cornered by a guy who has a playing card face and one of those playing card swords and is wearing a track suit. I’d unzip the front of his tracksuit, and a bunch of used breast implants would fall out. Thusly disemboweled, I would take the man’s silicone remains, put them in a garbage bag, and use it to float back to the East coast via that secret waterway that explorers were so bent on finding back in olden times. The Nothwest Passage, I think? They never found it, but I know where it is.

NEW HAMPSHIRE: You know, I always liked Vermont better.

NEW JERSEY: Hey, what an awesome fucking state. First of all, New Jersey has my favorite ever radio station, WFMU, 91.1 FM. Second of all, it’s the home of awesome fucking bands like the Misfits and the Feelies. People often accuse Jersey of being “the armpit of New York,” but that’s not true at all. It’s an awesome state with its own thing going on. I like visiting Jersey. Many of my dead relatives are interred there. I’d like to live there one of these days, but I’m not sure I’ll get around to it. Maybe I’ll get buried there? I’ll have to see if there’s a family plot.

NEW MEXICO: Let’s eat flapjacks!

NEW YORK: The jewel of the empire. I love New York State. From the primitive, unpopulated microvillage that is my hometown to one of the coolest cities in the world, New York pretty much runs the gamut. The best part is that upstate New York has nothing at all to do with the city, and vice-versa. I’ve never been happier or more miserable than here. Upstate is very beautiful, although it is economically fucked, being part of the rust belt and all. I like to call upstate New York “Shitty Canada.” It’s just like Canada, except the schools are bad, medication is expensive, there’s no free health care, and everyone is fucking violent. Oh, and assholes from the city move up there and make these ridiculous little cottages and become all precious and drive up everyone’s taxes.

New York City is a wonderful place where cool shit happens all the time and there’s all kinds of people up to all sorts of stuff. I’m getting all misty-eyed just thinking about how wonderful this place is, so I’ll spare you. Really good bagels here. And music, and theatre, and all the rest of it. Hooray, hooray, hooray New York.

Interesting mind set of New Yorkers, much different than people from California and the mid west. The people who lived in those states often kept going west, you know? “This homestead act is sweet. Let’s throw down on some free land and build a farm, kids. We’ll be able to buy all the gingham that we’d ever want!”

Not my family. My family was like “Fuck Ireland, let’s go to New York. What, we have to live in some teeming ghetto and die of tuberculosis? Aye, Seamus, that sounds good. How soon can I put the kids to work 140 hours a week at the blacking factory? Tuesday? Not soon enough. Let’s see if I can’t get a job flensing pigs at a slaughterhouse for a haypenny a week. Hell, I’d be happy getting paid in cockroach legs.” Two months later: “What? Homestead act? Is there flensing involved? No? Well then I ain’t hearin’ of it. Horatio Alger says I’m on the right track. Pull myself up by my bootstraps. I don’t need no fancy land, just some dead rats to make shoes out of and a cockroach to milk for the baby. Someday I’ll flense an animal with a skin so big, it’ll wrap all the way from New York to Ireland, where your old granma is eating three centipedes and a potato rind for dinner.” Not that it was easier in the rest of the country, but you know what I’m saying.

New York is a big state and it takes a while to drive around in. There are parts of it that I’ve never been to. Western New York is like a foreign land to me. People often ask me if I’m from the area near the fingerlakes, and I say “Oh no. No, no, no, no no no. Not even near them. Never been there. They’re nice? Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that, now, would I?”

NORTH CAROLINA: Everyone in North Carolina smokes Newport cigarettes and drives around in white sedans all day and all night for all of eternity. Christ, what am I going to say about South Carolina. I actually don’t even like the word “Carolina.” You know what it must be like to live there? I’ll bet everyone is trying to live by the water, which is hiding this universe of blind, gilled monsters who look on the residents of North Carolina with nothing more than a hungry indifference. Go swimming off the shore of North Carolina and you’ll be smothered by the rubbery wings of the manta ray.

NORTH DAKOTA: The other “North” state. Is this where Mount Rushmore is? [googles] No! It’s in South Dakota! Why the fuck would you want to go to North Dakota, then? You probably wouldn’t. That’s why this is the least densely populated state in the nation. Or is that some other place? Wyoming? Oh, who cares. I do know one thing about Dakota: Dakota! There’s one guy in North Dakota, and he has his own area code and zipcode. If you call him up, he’ll say “Yeah I got my own fuckin’ area code, and you’d better not fucking forget it, shitstain.” This guy frequently eats alone. If you ever got invited over, you’d probably be eating Fritos. “ I love this shit,” he’d say, “this is the best shit in the world.” Dakota is also the only state in the union where people who get lost in the mountains are eaten by trees. Their bones are never found. His name is Dakota.

OHIO: I never been there, but I’ll bet you my bottom dollar that you’d have a whole lot more fun in Ohio than you’d think you would. First of all, Ohio has produced a lot of awesome fucking music. Second of all, everyone I ever met from Ohio was really fucked up and really fun. I worked in a bookstore with this kid from Cleveland with a pile of blond hair who was one of the fuckedest guys I ever saw. He would tell you these stories that wouldn’t go anywhere but usually ended in this noncommittally dirty manner. For instance, he’d go “I don’t know about that shit. I mean, I want to play my music, but I don’t want to like, you know, be like Bowie or something. I just want to play my shit. I fuckin’, I mean, I work at the museum selling audio guides and I work here, so I mean . . . fuckin’ I watch TV and shit later on . . . you know, like that show about that detective in the wheelchair. What’s that shit called? It’s a funny show, kid. I bet he can’t even get it up. You think he pisses himself? Fuck that. I, fuckin’, I wouldn’t want to be on the case with that dude, in a car with his stink pisspants. He’s fuckin’ smart though. I also watched that movie—what’s that shit called? You know, that fuckin’ movie about the kids who get high and listen to Zeppelin. They all go to this school. Then in the bathroom, right, there’s this mirror that says ‘big hairy pussy’ on it. What is that shit called, asshole? I don’t remember, but Ironsides is probably into that shit, big hairy pussy, ha ha ha. Right? Ionsides is the name of that wheelchair shit I was watching earlier, ha ha ha. Ironsides likes big hairy pussy. You know that. You KNOW that shit, man!”

OKLAHOMA: I can’t believe they used to make musicals about people who lived in flat farming states amidst corn and wheat and had all these stupid down home values. I hate “down home” anything. When people are into down home values, something is fucked in their head. It’s like they wish they were stupider than they were, and they’re forever striving for this state of perfect ignorance that somehow also involves cinnamon buns and horseback riding. You know what I mean? These phony salt of the earth values that don’t exist, and simple people with chapped hands that forever spout out homilies about life don’t exist. Wilford Brimley is nothing more than a deranged fiction for people who have purchased books on how to make their own soap.

You know what that down home okey-dokey romanticism reminds me of more than anything else? My mother used to work with mentally handicapped kids, and then later I got a job where I worked with mentally handicapped kids and adults. It was probably the best job I ever had. Anyway, some people know how to talk to a person with Down Syndrome, and some people talk to a person with Down Syndrome in this fucked up, condescending way. That’s what it reminds me of. These health workers who, for whatever reason, infantilize Down Syndrome people.

“Oh, Eric, what a good job you did stacking these chairs! Such a good job! You’re a good boy! Oh yes you are!” It’s just like they’re talking to a dog. Disgusting. Meanwhile, Eric isn’t a boy, he’s 36 years old and could give a fuck about those chairs. He wants to talk about Metallica. He likes cooking and has interests and hobbies. The least interesting thing about his life are those fucking chairs he just stacked.

I feel that I may be in danger of losing my original thread here, but bear with me. People who like Oklahoma (the musical, which I guess is actually Oklahoma!, with the exclamation mark) probably wish that Oklahoma (the state) was this big Eden for cowboy-booted simpletons who can’t wait to eat a big ‘ol plate o’ tater pie and see Hoss shuck some husks. I’m sure that Oklahoma is nothing like that. For instance, I know exactly two people from Oklahoma, and they’re very smart, funny, and stylish. I’ve never known them to churn butter.

But, it should be noted that, much like Idaho, Oklahoma is another state with one of those stupid extruding things sticking off the side. Locationally, it’s situated right above the Texas panhandle. That’s crazy. If you were walking around that part of the state with a compass, it probably wouldn’t give you a correct reading. At least the useless part of Idaho is partitioned off by a river. This part of Oklahoma is like a shitty land-locked peninsula, roped off from the rest of the country by a straight line. I wonder how that happened, you know? I’ll bet that, when they were dividing up the country, Oklahoma was all like “This is mine, fuckers!” and Texas was all like “Take it, you butter-churning fucks! We’re trying to fight off Santa Ana over here! Lend us some bacon, a corn cob pipe, and a little rusty can full of tacks!” But Oklahoma lent them none of that, and Davy Crockett died.

OREGON: I spent a miserable two months in Oregon and had a terrible time. Portland, to be specific. Had a bad time. Maybe, under different circumstances, I might have had a better time there. But I didn’t.

One thing I did do was get to see the band Poison Idea. I don’t know how many of you like actually like punk rock, but Poison Idea were great. First of all, they were all really fat. I mean, fucking really fucking fat. The guitarist, Pig Champion, weighed in at about 450 pounds at one point—and I’m not embellishing that. Pig Champion tipped the scales at 450, and he wasn’t a tall guy. His guitar, which he thrashed viciously, would just sit on top of his big fat belly, which shook as the lard inside approximated a choppy sea. It was a beautiful show. I was flattened up against the back wall of the place by their malice, and felt slightly relieved when the whole thing was over.

But then one night I was riding the bus and reading a book. There was no one else on the bus. Suddenly, I smelled this awful fucking wretched stink. I turned my head, and the singer from Poison Idea was looming over me. He sat down in an adjoining seat and stared at me psychotically for the duration of his ride. Fuck! It was terrifying. I was afraid I was going to be eaten. This isn’t what I wanted out of Portland, but it did teach me a valuable lesson: I had to learn how to believe in myself.

The weird thing about a lot of the shows I saw in Oregon is that they were at this place called the Robot Steakhouse. There were always vegan brownies for sale, you know, but they didn’t charge admission at the door. They’d pass a hat, and you were encouraged to put in $5 or something to help the band pay for gas to get them to their next gig. The thing is, though, is that I didn’t like most of the bands, and had a hard time putting that money in the hat. You know, I think it’s a better idea to make people pay up front. Because by the end of the night I have a couple of drinks under my belt and thought all the bands sucked and am less inclined to pay. It was weird, because there was this pressure to pay, like you were expected to drop a couple of bucks into the hat. That may sound like the same as just paying up front, but it’s not. It’s one thing to purchase admission, it’s another to support the band. I’d rather just purchase admission, but I’d RATHERER see shit for free. Surely there’s a game theory problem about this somewhere. I do applaud the owners of the Robot Steak House for putting on the shows that they did, and for their admirable and unshakable dedication to doing it their way.

PENNSYLVANIA: The name Pennsylvania sounds like Transylvania, but it’s different. That’s not all that’s different, though! (kaPOW!) Transylvania is the home of borscht and vampires, while Pennsylvania is the home of nothing interesting at all, except for maybe something in Philadelphia but I wouldn’t know because I never visited there. Pennsylvania is a square state, and the square is not a shape suited to withstanding pressure. The circle is best at withstanding pressure. Pennsylvania is weak and will cave in to pressure. It will rat you out.

RHODE ISLAND: They say Rhode Island isn’t really an island, but that’s not true. It is an island. It’s a secret island that floats a hundred miles above the earth. The state that we know as Rhode Island is an imposter. Don’t let it fool you. It’s a piss poor replica too. You know how you can tell them apart? The Rhode Island in the air has unicorns, and the Rhode Island on the ground has an excess of silverfish. A rainbow bridge connects to the two, and you can only ascend it if you die a proud warrior. Both Rhode Islands have a town called Woonsocket, however.

SOUTH CAROLINA: See North Carolina.

SOUTH DAKOTA: If you build a house in South Dakota, you have a 63.4% chance of building it on an old Indian burial ground. Those Indians would haunt your house and scalp your family with a Ouija board, or whatever they used to say happened when you built your house on an Indian burial ground. Rumor has it that Mount Rushmore is there as well. If you’re the kind of person who would drive through the wilderness to see a shitty rock sculpture, well then: Well! Mount Rushmore was also built on an Indian burial ground. At night, the stone heads open their mouth and bats fly out.

TENNESSEE: NN SS EE, you know? That’s a lot of doubling up on the letters. Anyway, when I was in Tennessee, I was sitting on a porch with Sarah’s cousin Jordan and we were in rocking chairs. He said “I could get used to this, you. Sitting in a rocking chair while a nice old lady brings you lemonade and shit.”

Memphis was a real cool town, I’ll tell you what. I had an excellent time there, although, frankly, I didn’t see all that much of it. Just the tourist stuff, and couple of out of the way places. I’d wanted to visit Jerry Lee Lewis house, where you could hang out and watch Jerry Lee Lewis drink Kool-Aid and yell at the TV, but there wasn’t time.

Do you have any idea how much good music has come out of that state? Any fucking idea at all? A lot. A whole lot. You could spend all year listening to cool music only from Tennessee. Do you know how long you could do that with South Dakota? One minute. Think about that. But even if you took that one minute to listen to it, it probably wouldn’t change your entire life and they way you listen to sound.

TEXAS: People seem to have a lot of opinions about Texas, but I’d be the first to admit that I’m not one of them. I do have night terrors about being forced to live in the panhandle, thought. Could you imagine that? It’s like some fucked up landing strip. It’s not even really part of the state. Most of the people you see in the panhandle are probably just “passing through,” you know? Lightnin Hopkins was from Texas, though, as were the 13th Floor Elevators. In fact, the two parties made an album together in 1968, and I want a fucking copy. If anyone out there can provide me with one, you get extra Henchpoints.

UTAH: When Tom and I took the train to San Francisco, this couple in Utah thought that we were a charming young gay couple. I also talked to this kid whose name was Elvis. Utah was mentioned in Angels in America by Tony Kushner and is often the butt of Mormon humor. I don’t really give a shit about Mormons. What I want to know is why they get to call their basketball team the Utah Jazz. Shit. That would be like having the Delaware Zydeco or the fucking Arizona Gamelans.

VERMONT: If I ever run into some kind of horrible trouble in my life, like I end up being a castrated burn victim with no friends or eyes, I’m going to move to Vermont. It’s pretty, people are mellow, and everyone seems to appreciate softball, beer, ice cream, and swimming. Everyone in the state owns a Frisbee as well. Even though Vermont borders upstate New York, it’s a thousand times nicer than upstate. Whenever I crossed the border into that state, I felt sort of like the Von Trapp family must have felt once setting foot in Switzerland, or wherever it was they fled to in that movie that I’ve only seen the ending to.

VIRGINIA: I get the feeling that this is the Connecticut of the south. The only time I ever went there, it was about 104 degrees and my parents had a car without air conditioning (as usual). Too fucking hot, too fucking boring! Fuck it.

WASHINGTON: Back in the early 1990s, I really wanted to go to Seattle because that’s where grunge music was. I didn’t know much about it, but I sent away for the Sub Pop record catalogue and checked out the photos of the bands, and I thought they looked cool. I mean, if you grow up in rural America, you already have the clothes. My f’ed up old denim work jacket that I’d worn for years to cut wood in was now like a fucking cool piece of rock’n’roll clothing, you know? Stick a Ramones pin on that I was in style. I grew my hair real long and tried to find grunge albums. I didn’t find any. I did get a CD with the first Mudhoney EPs and singles, which was actually pretty good. Grunge rules, I thought. But then I listened to other stuff that was passing as grunge, and it was really bad. I didn’t like Pearl Jam, or Soundgarden, or Our Lady Peace, or Seven Mary Three, or Candlebox, or any of that shit. I found out later, of course, that all that music was considered “fake grunge,” or something. Then I found out that grunge didn’t really exist, or was made up, or whatever. Who cares! Before I knew it, all of my f’ed up lumberjack clothes weren’t cool anymore. In fact, they hadn’t been cool in ages. I just looked like some redneck. So I cut my hair, dyed it black, and wore pressed shirts and polyester pants and sweaters in an attempt to look aggressively studious.

WASHINGTON, D.C.: Interminable non-state with some interesting relics such as the Brooks Brothers coat Lincoln was shot in. Also home to a mysterious kind of music called Go-go, which is sort of like hip hoppy funk but more organic, with a lot of drums. Go-go never really took off, unfortunately, so it’s nearly impossible to find any CDs of the bands, like Trouble Funk. Last time I was there, I had to ask the record store clerk if he had any Go-go, and he brought up a CD wallet full of bootlegged shows. I bought one, and it was pretty cool, but I would have preferred something that was recorded with a little higher fidelity.

WEST VIRGINIA: If someone is a coal miner, they’re always from West Virginia. That’s where the coal is, apparently.

WISCONSIN: The most interesting thing anyone seems to be able to say about Wisconsin is that cheese is made there. Well, cheese is made in like ever other fucking state in the union. On television, I always see people with these cheese wedges on their heads yelling at some football game, but then the Wisconsinites that I know are incredibly smart, well-spoken people. One is a director getting her PhD, and the other is a political science guy who was going to school in Budapest. Their secret? They didn’t eat the fucking cheese, that’s their secret.

WYOMING: It’s fitting that the least interesting state in the entire country the last state I’m going to cover here. If any of you have actually read all of these in sequence, that means you get to end on the boringest fucking state in the whole country, Wyoming. Why? Why, “Oming?” Jesus. It evades my best efforts to make it interesting.

So to hell with Wyoming. Fuck you, Wyoming, with your 1890 admission to statehood, your 97,818 square miles, your 307 area code, your fucking “Western Meadowlark,” and your border states of Idaho, Montana, Colorado, Nebraska, Utah, and South Dakota!

I’m not being fair to Wyoming. No, instead I think that I should take a second to apologize to all of the states I’ve unfairly maligned. Most of them I’ve never visited. Generally, the longer that I stay in a place, the more that I Iike it. I tend to think of myself as a fairly open-minded person, but I gleefully get drawn into the most base regionalism, which I both spoofed and vented here. In many cases, I went back and toned down some of my more ridiculous tirades against certain states. I actually do hope to see some of these places, but I’ve only started traveling in the last few years. Before I met Sarah, I’d never really left the northeast. If I’d written this in, say, 1999, it would have been even more ignorant and ill-informed.

The epigrammatically-inclined Mark Twain once said: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”

I think that’s true, albeit in a very minor way for me. Which is a very roundabout way for me to say “I’m OK, you’re OK,” really.

But actually, we’re not.

After waking up the other day, I hung around the apartment for a while and then got bored. I decided to wake up Sarah, even though I knew she wanted to sleep in. It was getting late.

“What time is it?” she asked groggily.
“Twelve thirty,” I said. Her face assumed a stricken look.
“I had a dream that it was ten-thirty,” she said fretfully.

That is the best dream I’ve ever heard. She had a dream that it was just slightly earlier than it really was. Brilliant. Sometimes, the unconcious is miraculously untroubled.

Today, annoyed at poisonous jackal-faced invisible shits who somehow conspire to make life miserable all the time for just about everyone, I decided to go get a couple of bottles of beer to try and relax. Well, I can’t say that it’s been particularly helpful.

Gee whiz, sometimes things aren’t very easy. For instance, winning a game of Monopoly is often difficult, because even if you’re ahead some wee fucker stays alive with his mortaged Baltic place for like three years or until you claw your own eyes out, whichever comes first.

Also, now that I am growing old and gray like some weird saggy mule, I think that I perhaps should have picked an occupation/past time that involved more movement. I’m not much for movement, but not because I have a hard time performing physical feats of derring-do and action stunts. Instead, I decided that I should do something that involved not so much moving and more thinking. Now I walk down the street and think that I should have been a ballerina or maybe a BMX bike racer.

Right then: let’s cut the crap. Has anyone else had the peculiar sense that time is speeding up? Maybe even just slightly? As if maybe, for no real reason whatsoever, our perceptions of things are slowling down? I’m fairly sure that this is the case, and—in fact—I’ll do you one better. I think that this has more than a little to do with the fact that the magnetic poles of the earth are drifting, and that the North pole is drifting more than the south pole. The axial tilt of the earth has also been compromised, and its rotation is irregular, like a heart beating arrythmically.

Try this simple experiment: Check your watch every time that you think that fifteen minutes have passed. Chances are that you’ll check it too often at first, because you’re being eager. Once you let it alone for a while, and get into a “groove,” as they say, you’ll check it every twenty minutes or so. Proof positive.

Bang fucking bang, you know what I like to eat? Food. That’s right, real, edible food. If you’re hungry, there’s nothing like some food to fill your stomach so you are no longer hungry.

So, before I met Sarah, I used to eat really abysmal shit. I just don’t think that I understood food, and eating out always seemed expensive. Besides, growing up my parents never really ate out. Not like there was many places to eat where I was, but you get the idea. So I just kind of ate whatever the fuck.

Sarah has convinced me to try eating other things, and so for a number of years I have been known to try my hand at making all sorts of fancy stuff, and go out to eat all the time.

Recently, however, I’ve had to save money. A lot of money, which I’m going to keep in big canvas bags with dollar signs on them under my bed and deposit in offshore accounts. So, as you can see, I’m tightening the belt and revisiting some of my favorite recipes from the past. Shall we take a stroll down memory lane together?

***Rice & beans

COOKING INSTRUCTIONS: This is a staple of the RKS diet, as many of you know. Basically, to make rice and beans you make some rice and add about half a can of beans. If you want to be healthy about it, make brown rice. WARNING: Brown rice takes a long time to cook.

You can spice this dish up with basically any spice that there is. Pepper is good, but so is curry and stuff like that. Add garlic to the beans for an “Italian” flavor.

***Indian Food

COOKING INSTRUCTIONS: Make some basmati rice and add half a can of chick peas. You basically want to get some curry sauce for this.

***Rice

COOKING INSTRUCTIONS: Make some rice and add soy sauce or, if you’re feeling frisky, teryaki sauce.

***Steamed Spinach

COOKING INSTRUCTIONS: Steam spinach.

***Bagels

COOKING INSTRUCTIONS: Eat bagels.

***Eggs

COOKING INSTRUCTIONS: Eggs are good for you. I think that we all know how to make eggs. I would recommend combining them with toast for particularly a particularly “homey” feel. Eggs can also be boiled and stowed away in your pocket for enjoyment later on.

***Tofu sandwich

COOKING INSTRUCTIONS: Place tofu, mustard, and onions on two slices of rye bread.

REMEMBER: The important thing is not what you eat. The important thing is that you should be careful to visualize that the food you are eating is more substantial than it actually is. Lets say you have to eat rice for three days. You should pretend that you are a monk, and that it is nourishing your spirit. This is easy to do when it is a financial necessity—however, when you’re trying to sock money away, it becmes much more difficult.

To maintain my concentration in this mad pursuit, I meditate every evening. I imagine a glowing ball of white energy entering my mouth and exiting my rectum. It bores a hole into the center of the earth, releasing lava. Consumed by the lava, my body disappears. My spirit form climbs a chrome staircase into the center of the sun, where I find a green door. I open the door at the exact moment of the first solar eclipse in 100,000 years, where I find a magical flying space horse that ferries me off to Xanadu.

So fuck you!

Anyway, I’m going to go take a stroll and let the lentils digest.

I was once very interested in history, and attempted to become a
history student. Unfortunately, while I was very good at reading the
books, I was very bad at analyzing the content, and subsequently I
often felt like a jerk. I’d get frustrated, and my history stuff
would, throughout the term, would become less of a priority, and then
at the end I’d desperately try to write some paper that made sense.
Sometimes it worked, but often it didn’t.

The trouble is, as I found out, is that there’s two kinds of
history—popular history, and then actual history. Popular history is
like History Channel stuff—wars, boats, kings, that sort of thing.
Actual history includes that stuff, but is largely composed of stuff
like how rubber tariffs caused Midland manufacturing to move to
Rochester, and their subsequent success in transforming Rochester into
an inland boomtown thanks to the Eerie canal, and stuff like that.
More gifted people than I can make something interesting out of that.
I, unfortunately, could not.

Popular history is a little easier. It’s like this: “The Civil War.”
And then it just tells you what happened during the Civil War, and
make it sound like the whole thing was just a dust up between
Stonewall Jackson and Sherman. And then they signed some shit over at
Appottomax, and it was all over, and a new day dawned. Meanwhile,
there were a lot of cool uniforms and muskets and things like that.
Ken Burns slowly zooms in on a photo of young guy holding onto a horse
bridle, and the narrator says “In the Civil War, brother fought
brother.” You know, I don’t really see that as a great tragedy. At
least one of those motherfuckers was on the right side!

Or it’s even more vague, like “Battleships of the West.” This kind of
history is more aimed at people like myself, you know, history
dillettantes. Which is what I am. This kind of history is sort of
like collecting. You read about battleships, watch movies about
battleships, maybe go walk on a battleship, and then you know a lot
about battleships and wars in which battleships were used. You don’t
have any insights into battleships, and could sort of give a shit
about what conditions battle ships are made under, or whatever. Maybe
battleships are a bad example. What the fuck! I try.

If that wasn’t mundane enough, there’s all these popular history books
that are like “Lightbulbs: The Invention that Changed the World,” or
“Chairs: The Invention that Changed the World,” or “Microbes: The
Microbes that Did Things.” Or just “Thimbles!”

I didn’t really come here to put myself down. Instead, I came to
share an interesting story wiith you all. Part of my job requires me
to research odd things from time to time in order to clarify facts,
write captions, etc. And I learned that, not far from where my
apartment building now stands, one of the most important battles of
the RevolutionaryWar was fought. It was called the Battle of the
Gowanus, in reference to the Gowanus Canal, which is not far from me
at all. In fact, my mother, who lived not far from the canal as a
girl, still remembers its distinctive odor. Recently, while
investigating the Gowanus for PCBs or dioxins or some fucking thing,
they tried to measure how deep it was. The thing is though, the
Gowanus has no “bottom.” It’s just dozens off feet of sludge and silt
and chemicals.

Another good Gowanus story I have involves Sarah and I walking home,
and seeing three jellyfish (no shit) floating along. They looked ill,
as if they were suffering. I know you’re probably thinking “how can
you tell that htey were suffering? They don’t have brains!” Well,
you don’t have the kind of empathic connection to the living world
that I do, and you’re nothing but a shit-eating philistine.

Anyway, the Battle of the Gowanus took place in 1781, and involved the
forces of commander Thomas Greene, a second cousin to George
Washington. Greene encamped in the area now known as Brooklyn
Heights, concealing the inferior numbers of his forces by setting up a
main camp behind a ridge, where it was concealed from the sight of the
British, and settting up a decoy camp in plain sight of the redcoats.
The British, led by Col. Nigel Beamish, crossed the Gowanus on
purebread mottled roans, many of which would miraculously survive the
ffurious hail of musket balls that Greene’s forces rained down upon
them from ttheir position on the ridge.

It’s amazing to think that such a simple tactic would trick Beamish,
who was well known for his relentless tactics on the battlefield. Of
course, such an analysis overlooks the fact that the British were used
to fighting in rows, and had little to no experience fighting a “wily”
enemy. That day, the Gowanus ran red with British blood. There is
nothing to mark the location of the battle besides a weathered
historical marker, which is easy to miss if you’re not looking out for
it.

For a long time now I’ve harbored a desire to live a communal existence. The commune I imagine, however, is a mobile one. Everyone in it would travel around the country together in a red schoolbus. We’d go from town to town righting wrongs, singing songs, and generally just wrecking havoc.

This mobile commune would have several interesting features that most communes do not have:

1.) No farming. Fuck farming! We’ll get food some other way.
2.) Everyone has a job title. I will be the Minister of Information. Someone else will be the Minister of Transportation. There will also be a Minister of Entertainment, a Minister of Cooking, and several other ministers that I will not name.
3.) People will have fun on the Red Bus. The Red Bus will always be a lot of fun.

Here’s what would happen:

The Red Bus would pull into a small town. There would be a second of silence, and bird would twitter in the the trees. Then the door of the bus would open, and a member of the commune would step down onto the frozen ground, their face obscured by a scarf and sunglasses. They would slowly unravel the scarf, and then breath out a cloud of condensed breath into the wintery morning.

“Here.”

That’s what they would say. It would be 5 AM.

The next morning, the townspeople would awaken to the Red Bus Commune setting up tents in the town square. There would be music, juggling, and all sorts of other amazing shit that they would hardly be able to believe. People would put on plays and stuff. We’d have time to develop plays and music, see, because we’d be living in the Red Bus, travelling the country. The Red Bus would have berths, right, sleeping berths, and everyone would sleep in them and tell each other stories.

The Red Bus would have a band balled the Incredible Red Bus Band, that would be made up of whowever happened to be on the Red Bus at the time. There would be a lot of tamborines, ya know? And we’d all write songs together. It would be pretty good.

I suppose that the Red Bus will never really come together, though, and it’s a fucking shame. It would be Red, right? And it would be a Bus. Red. Bus.

This evening I was taking a stroll to the deli to buy a bottle of beer (I got Rogue Deadguy Ale, as a matter of fact. I thought to myself “you know, Rick, maybe these beers with the stupid fucking labels aren’t bad. Just because beer usually has this whole fake story about how it was brewed on the side, doesn’t mean it’s bad.” All those stupid microbrew stories are really ridiculous, as if the beer you were drinking was some kind of eugenically engineered racehorse fathered by pegasus or something. ‘Brewed by Trappist monks in Oregon, three handfuls of old growth barley are tossed into every vat of our cold aged porter, after which a choir of castrati with bound feet weep pure liquid hops into the kegs to ensure a crisp brewing process.’ They don’t advertise on television, which is a shame, because the advertisements would be hilarious. For instance, Sarah and I came up with a fake New England microbrew called Hale Ale. There would be a brand called Hale Pale Ale, and the little blurb on the side would go ‘Hale Pale Ale is brewed in Connecticut, by white people. Hale Ale: for when you just don’t feel like dancing.’ You know, aimed at the sort of Lands End catalogue perusing jerks who read these descriptions and think about them when drinking their beer. This Rogue Deadguy Ale basically sucks, it’s like drinking a fermented gingerbread man or something. I should have bought some orange juice. I could discuss the merits of orange juice, but this is a long fucking parenthetical, yeah?) and I began thinking about bats.

In the city I only ever see bats if I’m in a park at night, because they don’t really like to be out in the open, and I’d imagine that all the tall buildings fuck with their sonar. Bird watching had come up somewhere in conversation this week—I forget where and with who—and it occured to me that bat watching would be a hobby if bats came out during the day. Then I started thinking that if nightvision binoculars ever came down in price, than people could actually go out batwatching. It would be real fun, too. Bats are pretty interesting.

I say this, but I should admit that I basically don’t know anything at all about bats. I do like them, however. As a kid I used to ball up little pieces of white bread and throw them up to bats at night sometimes, especially if I’d been out fishing and it was getting dark. The bats would dive for the bread, but usually they’d veer off at the last second.

My parents had this crazy house that had been a barn which they decided to renovate. The renovation took a long time and the place was never completely airtight, and as a result bats used to worm their way in to the house. Bats can squeeze through extremely tight openings, actually. Anyway, the ceiling in the living room was about 25, 30 feet high, and bats would cruise around the living room. This was great when I was watching old horror videos, but sort of scary otherwise. Like if I was trying to take a piss in the middle of the night and this leathery flapping thing buzzed by my head.

When I was very young, I’d wanted a pet bat, but bats don’t really domesticate that well. At least I don’t think so. Let’s put it this way—I used to have a pet mouse, and that thing hated my fucking guts. I imagined that a pet bat would be the same, but it would be able to fly. If a pet hates you and has the ability to fly, it won’t be your pet for very long.

Although I never did own a pet bat, I used to draw a lot as a kid. In fact, I can still draw a pretty good bat if called to do so. I used to daydream that I would have a leash for my pet bat which would be a chain with very fine links. The leash would be more or less unnecessary, though, because the bat would be willing to do my bidding, and we’d hang out an be pals. Kind of a normal kid dream, I guess.

Seeing as how we lived in a barn, my parents had a lot of storage space, and when I got bored I’d dig through it constantly. There was all kinds of really interesting stuff in there, but that’s another story for another time. The point is that I dug up all their old records, which basically sucked, but there were some winners. In summation, the winners were:

• A copy of Tommy by the Who
• A lot off Harry Belafonte
• 1 dozen Sinatra records
• Heartland Music’s “Funrock” collection
• Abby Road
• Creedence Clearwater Revival’s seminal album Cosmo’s Factory, which was scratched to shit
• Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, and other country legends
• A six album collection called “Jazz,” which was actually really good and had real, real early stuff on it. In fact, it was compiled in the early fifties, I think, and had Jelly Roll Morton and all that stuff on it.

And that’s it! The rest were fucking terrible. Bread, Mantovani, the Mello Organ, and shit like that. Damn! There were piles and piles of records, you know, and it seemed that I discovered more every year, and they were all bad. Still, I listened to a lot of them, and became sort off obsessed with audio. When you find weird shit like that and really listen to it, and really pay attention to it, and give it serious consideration . . . it could actually be pretty interesting. Even the terrible shit, like the endless albums that featured a pipe organ cover of Stardust.

Some of the most interesting music I found was my mother’s 78 collection. I should inform you that my parents are now in their 70s. They were not hippies because they were too goddamn old, which means that their music collection sucks. Anyway, they have all these old-ass formats like 78 rpm records. They even had 16 rpm records. 16 rpms! Can you imagine such a thing? Who thought that was a good format? Could a record even generate sound at fewer rpms? I’m surprised there weren’t 8 rpm records, made by people who really wanted their music to sound like shit.

I had a record player at one point that played 16 rpm records, but I didn’t have any good 16 rpm records to play on it. 16 rpm records are really big and usually only pressed on one side, and they were a format in which nothing interesting was ever released in. I used to get really drunk, put my Ramones records on the record player, turn it to 16 rpm, and listen to “Half Ramones.” Because it’s more or less half the speed of 33 rpm, ya got me? I’m sure that none of you have a 16 rpm record player, but I bet you could simulate this monophonic listening adventure with modern computer technology; my only fear is that your Half Ramones will lack the Warmth and Presence of mine, considering mine was 100% analogue.

My mother had some pretty good 78s, which I listened to a lot. I remember coming to her really sad after I broke a Gene Krupa 78, and she told me that it was all right, and that she broke the fucking things all the time when she was my age, and that I should just get a Gene Krupa CD.

There were some real weird records buried among the treasure though, or at least stuff that seems weird today. Actually, weird isn’t a good word to describe it. It would be better described as “incredibly fucking stupid.” There was a lot of real banal music back then. Digging amongst these sad crooners belting out vanilla bland renditions of “Buttons and Bows,” I came across a record by a guy named . . . you know, I can’t remember his name. No wait! It’s Burl Ives. Anyway the record was called Cotton Eyed Joe, which was a popular song by some awful country-techno band at the time that was being played all over the radio. I thought “Huh. No shit,” and put it on the record player.

I didn’t listen to the whole thing. I’m sure that Cotton Eye is a traditional song and all that, but the Burl Ives version is like funeral music for a pile of dead earthworms in a wonderbread coffin or something. Man! It’s just bland, and awful, and slow. It’s so bland it writhes in your ear. I get the jimjams just thinking about it actually. Before I tossed Burl back into the box of my mother’s 78s, I checked the name of the song on the other side, and it was called Little Leather Winged Bat.

“I like bats,” I thought, and listened to the song. It was all right. The first verse is classic, and it was running through my head just a little while ago on my way to the deli. It went:

I am a little leather winged bat
and I’ll tell you the reason that
the reason that I fly through the night
is because I lost my heart’s delight

It’s a real good verse. Minor key, and all of that. The other verses are really stupid. They’re like “I’m a little chicken sitting in the pen/something something something I can’t wait then” or something like that. Who gives a fuck about a chicken in a pen? Burl, if you’re out there, I’d be fucking surprised because you’re ten years dead. But if you’re listening, you did yourself wrong! Talking about chickens and shit, listen pal—chickens are comical. Or menu items. People don’t take the chicken seriously. A lonely bat is fucking poignant! Stick with the bat. Burl didn’t stick with the bat, though, because he was a maverick. A maverick with poor taste. If he’d stuck with the bat I’d be prostelytizing (sp?) for Burl right now, instead of tell you he’s a chump, but: “Burl Ives is a chump.”

I sort of miss having bats around. I turned to wikipedia to satisfy my bat loneliness, and came across this unsettling paragraph:

“Although one should not have an unreasonable fear of bats, one should avoid handling them or having them in one’s living space, as with any wild animal. If a bat is found in living quarters near a child, mentally handicapped person, intoxicated person, sleeping person, or pet, the person or pet should receive immediate medical attention for rabies. Bats have very small teeth and can bite a sleeping person without necessarily being felt.”

Now I never see any bats at all.