Jim Krakowski’s House of Mass Produced Trippy Shit for Stoned Teenagers

Howdy do, fellow duuuuuuuude!
You on druuuugs?
I know I am.
Are you tired of staring at the same old lava lamps and black light posters and other junk from Spencer’s while you’re on druuuuuugs?

Do those things no longer seem toooooootally trippy?

Well, maaan, have I got just the thing for you!

Hi, I’m Jim Krakowski!

Crow language educator, globe smasher, erotic author, and now, panderer to drug users!

Ha-ha!

If you crave new mass produced fake intellectual fake art to gaze upon, dead eyed and slack jawed, while you listen to terrible music, you need – NEED! – to come on down to Jim Krakowski’s House of Mass Produced Trippy Shit for Stoned Teenagers!

We’ve got it all!

Black light posters featuring new stoner favorites, like cats and whatever!

Lava lamps, but with a slightly different shape!

Incense burners made of clay crudely sculpted into something resembling the hideous noggin of David Matthews or whoever is his modern day equivalent!

Beads and junk!

Clothes with labels that say they are made with locally, organically sourced hemp but are probably some type of burlap!

Glass bongs so huge and elaborate that only Seth Rogan or a successful drug dealer can afford them!

Legal drugs that might make you feel like you might maybe feel a little weird somehow! In candy form!

You name it, we’ve got it!

So, shake the Utz potato chips crumbs out of your terrible beard and come on down to Jim Krakowski’s House of Mass Produced Trippy Shit for Stoned Teenagers, located in that building that used to be an ice cream place and then was a really sketchy looking daycare for a while before becoming a really sketchy looking car dealership and then was vacant for a decade and is now my store!

Come on! Up you go! You can do it, you lazy post-zelleniall, depression ravaged internet borg! Pornhub will still be there when you get back! Thaaaaat’s right, off your parents couch and right on over to Jim Krakowski’s House of Mass Produced Trippy Shit for Stoned Teenagers!

See you in a bit!

Uncle Franz

The first time my friends and I ate psychotropic mushrooms was terrible, as were the second and fifth time. Three was good and four was fine. The sixth was years later and I was very drunk, so I’m not sure they had any noticeable effect.

But the first was truly terrible.

It was New Years Eve, the final day of the year 2000. I had just turned 17. Drugs were not new. My friends and I had been smoking weed multiple times a day for a year and some change by that time and I think we’d smoked opium, but that could have been in the months after the mushrooms, I can’t recall.

Once, in the absence of the stem and beaner riddled, Autumn ruffage swag we usually had access to at the time, Marshall and I had each drank a full bottle of children’s allergy medicine before a showing of Yellow Submarine at the Fargo Theater. We both slept through the whole thing.

I don’t recall how we obtained the mushrooms, but I assume it was like how we obtained any such thing. Some semi-local old degenerate obtained a massive amount of a particular drug and sold it to the younger guys he always sold it to, word began to spread, and they sold it to every other aspiring drug dealer who sold it to his friends and eventually it trickled down to us. You’d hear a rumor of mushrooms or good weed or whatever and then hope you got there before it was all bought up, there generally being some little used parking lot, maybe behind the Mini Mart or Videoland or the bowling alley. You’d have gotten a number, and then you and your friends, packed into a 1987 Buick Celebrity Station Wagon with a v dent in the front from where it had hit a tree, pulled up to a lonely, street lit payphone in some other parking lot and called that number and maybe, if you were lucky, the guy would answer and, luckier still, he’d show up – the guy was always the third or fourth guy to have handled the drugs since the old degenerate – and who knows how many before that – and he always had on a baseball cap with a flat brim at some preposterous angle and a Doors or Sublime t-shirt or maybe just an implied Doors or Sublime t-shirt and drive a shitty car with a massive sub in the back absolutely mangling an already pretty shitty Eminem song almost beyond recognition and have prematurely too tightly drawn, dry skin – and you’d pool your fives and tens to buy whatever it was he was selling, and he’d look at the sad wad of too many bills you were handing him with disgust and maybe tell you to drive to yet another parking lot to make the handoff.

So we had the mushrooms and we set a date to ingest them. New Year’s Eve was a week away. Perfect. Momentous.

Early evening New Years Eve, we gathered at Ben’s house. His parents house, really. They were away, which was fairly rare. We gathered in the basement and ate some of the ultra-dry dregs of the batch, stems and a few caps and a lot of powder in each of our eight of a gram baggies. Then we waited.

Here are the two most important things to know about mushrooms: First, their effects last far longer than you think they will. Like, eight hours, but time is weird on hallucinogens – it skips and drags and disappears – so those eight hours, if things are not going well, will feel like days. If you don’t have a completely open schedule for the entire day and/or night, today is not a good day to eat a handful of mushrooms. You’re not going to want to, say, go to work at a grocery store. You will not be an effective worker and everyone will notice and, even if they somehow don’t, you will be positive that they do.

Second, they take some time to kick in. At least an hour. Be patient. Don’t, as I did, assume that you got a bad batch and just eat the rest of it after like 20 minutes. You will have ingested too many mushrooms and you will see shortly that, if you are like me, this is not a good idea. Give it time. It will creep up on you. First – maybe, I don’t want to mistake my personal experience for a universal one, it could obviously be different for you – first, your body will start to feel sensitive, and then, quickly, foreign, as though you are experiencing yourself as an outsider, and this feeling grows and grows until you feel that dreamy feeling of being in a particularly confusing, not very good David Lynch movie and watching it at the same time. This is pretty fascinating at first, but you don’t want to experience yourself as an outsider for eight hours, I promise. And for god’s sake don’t drive a car.

Alright, so, for the first hour or two after these things kick in, I’m feeling great. Ben’s parents have this picture of North Dakota State University alumni on the wall, and it’s just a sea of only faces – drawn, not photos – and among them, like a too easy to find Waldo on a Where’s Waldo page, are two police officers – the only two people in hats. For some reason this strikes us all as hilarious. Then I start to rub my own hair and that took up about 15 minutes. The otherness combined with the kind of tingling sensitivity makes this very appealing, like petting a dog while the dog pets back.

But now it was time to head out into the world – to a New Year’s Eve party at a friend’s home, which happened to be a trailer home. Now, I need you to understand that I come from trailer home people. I’ve spent a Christmas or two in a very nice double wide. I think trailer homes are perfectly acceptable abodes and that whatever reason you live in one isn’t shameful. I like a trailer park. I’ll go out of my way to ride bike or walk through one when I’m out getting some exercise. So this is not a criticism of trailer homes.

But a trailer home – this trailer home in particular – is not a big enough space for the mushroom experience. Really, you should be outside, but if that’s not possible – say on the last day of December in Fargo, North Dakota – you want a big space. And you certainly don’t want a crowded or a chaotic space, and this space was very crowded and very chaotic. As soon as we entered, half of us realized this was a mistake. I wandered into a bedroom lit only by black lights and a girl I knew fairly aggressively tried to convince me to hook up with her friend and, though I’m sure she was lovely and she was probably of a normal stature and there’s nothing at all wrong with a tall woman in the first place, this person struck me as gigantic. I mumbled something about getting a beer and fled.

The only thing I could think was – Brady. I need to find Brady. Brady being one of my friends who I find to be a very calming, rational presence. Another friend once called him the Jesus Christ of the Midwest while Brady hid under the bed listening and weeping, but that’s a whole other story.

So I began wandering through this too small but somehow also labyrinthine home, just repeating “Where’s Brady. I need to find Brady.”

Eventually, I wandered into the kitchen and what seemed to be some sort of oasis. It was calm. My memory is that Brady was sitting on top of the refrigerator, but that can’t possibly be true. He’s very tall and even in a normal sized home there’s generally not enough room above a refrigerator to sit comfortably atop it. And there were a couple other people who had also ingested hallucinogens and were not having a great time and just needed some space, and it felt very good to all be together, but, of course, this being a party, our serenity was soon broken, the oasis dissipated, and I realized that it was important that I leave this place immediately.

The timeline of this next part is blurry. I think it was after we left the party, but I also think my friend Jake was driving and I know that Jake stayed at the party long after we left and ate a whole other bag of mushrooms, which – I can’t even imagine. Maybe we left and came back. It’s not important. We left – me, Brady, maybe Jake – and were in a car, and seemingly from moment to moment forgot what we were doing in that car or where we were going. There wasn’t a plan, but it felt like that was because we kept forgetting it. There were arguments and shifting alliances and theories and worries and this was all probably, in reality, over no more than fifteen minutes and mostly in my head. At one point we decided that we needed to be around someone normal, so we would go to this very normal girl’s house and cool our heals, but as we neared her place it occurred to us that her parents would answer the door and neither she or her would be pleased to see us in this state this was a very bad idea.

Eventually, we managed to contact Ben, who was at home – maybe he had never left – and was also having a bad time. He told Brady and I that we could come over.

I feel like I’ve not done a very good job of describing why I found this all so unpleasant. I think the worst part of it was something that also began to happen in the last of my pot smoking days: The varnish of life seemed to have been scraped away. Everything felt very real – though confused – and very . . . flawed and silly. Humans – myself included – felt very animalistic and foolish, like a penguin in pants who thinks he’s very smart and almost unbearably funny. It felt like I was just noticing how everything was very ugly and pointless, which I suppose I’d had an inkling of before, but now it was inescapable and it made me feel disgusted and filled with just a deep, deep grief that it all had to be like that, that we had to exist like this and pretend everything, and I wondered if I was ever going to go back to seeing things how I had before. In retrospect, this was my first taste of real depression. Depression had been with me, I think, for a very long time – I’m not saying that eating mushrooms caused it – but it did exacerbate it. That feeling of unvarnished, pointless, unpleasant reality is how my Depression always manifests itself now. I told someone a few years later that I felt like I’d never really sobered up from that night and they thought that was very funny, but I guess I meant that I’d never felt like my pre-mushroom self again after that night.

All right. We get to Ben’s house. Ben’s parent’s house. He let us in because he had locked all of the doors and lead us upstairs, to where he had been fending off his particular demons in his parent’s bedroom. He laid down in his parents bed. Brady and I sprawled out on the floor. Kubrick’s 2001 was on the TV, intercut with TV commercials, but no one was really watching it.

I don’t know how long we laid there without talking. There was some pained groaning, but no talking. Eventually I had to take a piss, so I crawled to the attached bathroom, pulled myself up and turned on the lights. There were mirrors everywhere.

People will tell you not to look in the mirror when you’re on hallucinogens, and that’s good advice, but I couldn’t have felt worse than I already did and I’ve never been great about taking good advice, and there were mirrors EVERYWHERE, so I really had no choice. I looked like I felt. Like a shaved, embarrassed, sad ape who needed some sleep.

I zoomed in on my face, neared a mirror, stared myself in the eyes, noticed every line and pore and blemish. Stared. Smiled. Couldn’t hold it. Frowned. Better, more accurate. Grimaced, twisted, inflated and deflated, distorted my face in every conceivable way, got lost in the idea that I didn’t really know my own face, had to look at it longer to get a real sense of me.

Have you ever seen an uncle after a very long time and realized that the platonic image of that uncle that you had in your head was pretty indistinct and not very well considered and extremely inaccurate, like you’re seeing this guy for the first time and recognizing him as a human being with an eternal life and feelings? It was like that, but I was my own uncle.

I stared and stared, drifted in and out of myself, and, eventually, I couldn’t recognize my face at all. It was gaunt. Older. Drawn taut in places and sagging in others, The eyes were still mine, but above them I was bald. And as I looked at it, the face changed. Though I had stopped contorting my face, the reflection continued to do so, less a contortion than a continual slow melting of one into the next, like the in the video for Michael Jackson’s “Black or White”.

And then I – it – spoke.

“Hello, nephew,” it whispered conspiratorially.

I stared right into it’s eyes. His eyes. Still my eyes, but in a different head.

“I am your distant relative – an uncle dead nigh these 200 years and more. In life I was Franz. I don’t expect you to speak back. This will be a monologue. Just keep staring.”

I thought to myself, “There’s more gravy than grave about you,” and nearly chuckled, but kept staring.

“How now!” I whispered back to him. “What do you want with me?”

“Only a small thing” he whispered back.

“Who are you again?”

“Ask me who I was.”

“Who were you then? You’re particular, for a hallucination.”

“In life I was Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, your distant relative. An artist.”

I sat, staring at those fixed glazed eyes, in silence for a moment and it played the very deuce with me. There was something very awful, too, in the spectre’s being provided with an infernal atmosphere of its own. I could not feel it myself, but this was clearly the case; for though the face was stationary, moving neither to the right or to the left, its hair and face continued to shift, at one moment grinning, the next pulled into a taught, toothy scowl, as though growling.

“Dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?”

“Man of the worldly mind!” replied my reflection, “do you believe in me or not?”

“I do, I guess. I must. But why do you come to me?”

“It is required of every man,” the Ghostly reflection returned, “that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellowmen, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to appear to only those who have taken too many drugs.”

“Your face keeps changing,” I said, trembling. “Tell me why?”

“I wear the expressions I forged in life,” replied Franz. “I sculpted them by my very hands, head by head. I molded them of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore them. Are they strange to you?”

“They’re kind of objectively strange.”

“Would you know,” pursued Franz, “the shape and textures of the feelings you bear yourself?”

“Fair enough,” I said. “Please, continue your monologue.”

“How it is that I appear before you in a shape that you can see, I may not tell. I have sat invisible beside you many and many a day.”

“I am here to-night to warn you, that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate. A chance that you will disregard art and feelings and become a normal person! Never again must you write, never again must you draw, sing, obsess over music, watch art films – any of it! And there will come a day when a thing inconceivable to you now will come into being – a kind of internet radio show thing, and it will be very popular, but whoa to you if you attempt to partake of its siren song! Will the podcast – that’s what they’ll be called, terrible name – will the podcast that you create if you do not heed my advice be good? Nay! It will be great! A work of art! But it shall bring you no pleasure. It shall bring to you not but sorrow and ruin. Hear my words! The soul of an artist is within you, Nephew, but there is still time to banish it and be happy and normal! And, as a side note, maybe take it easy with the drinking for the next decade or so!”

I began to answer, something like, “Seriously? They’re going to call them podcasts?” but Uncle Franz would not let me finish.
“I have spoke all that I may! Heed my words nephew! Heeeeeeeeed myyyyyyyyyyy woooooooooords”

And then he disappeared. It was just my face in the mirror again, ashen and doughy, bags under red rimmed eyes.

And though the interaction with the reflected specter had seemed, in the moment, to take some time, now it felt as if it had just been a glint of a flicker between blinks of the eye.

“I hate these goddamn things,” I said.

So I left the bathroom and laid back on the floor. Brady had not moved. Ben had not moved.

We lay there, silent, for another eternity, until Ben said, exhausted, “It’s 12:01. Happy fucking New Year.”

The end.

Franz Xaver Messerschmidt

Franz Xaver Messerschmidt

Hello, friends. Welcome to another very special episode of The Irrationally Exuberant. So, three or four weeks ago I sat in my kitchen and, under the watchful, semi-mocking eyes of my wife and children, spit into a tube until I could spit no more, then mailed it off to the good folks at 23andMe to be tipped and toppled and spunned and broken down, analyzed and digitized and turned into data in an easy to read e-document detailing the very building blocks of the meat machine that is Reid Messerschmidt, as well as some information on the meat machines that proceeded me, my ancestors.

It had never occurred to me to do this before. I’m an artist, goddamnit! A man of feelings and knowledge! What business of mine is my disgusting body? And god knows I love a good story, but my ancestors? I’ve known a good swath of them over the years and, while some of them are great and a few I really love, there’s not a one whose kinship is a matter of personal pride. Gratitude, sure, but not pride. Still, my wife, understandably, I suppose, wanted to know what horrible syndromes and diseases would ultimately kill us and our children.

“Listen,” I said. “I know I’ve probably given my beloved offspring Clinical Depression and Alcoholism, do we really need to delve further? They’re going to start resenting my building blocks.”

She believed we did, and I was not uncurious, so a kit was ordered. Everything that could be known about me would now be revealed for a paltry $125. I only hoped it wouldn’t ruin my life, send me spiraling down a depressive, dissociative abyss, ultimately leading to madness.

On the other hand, I’d heard of people finding out their father’s were not really their father’s, and that sounded appealing.

Well, all of that information is now here, in front of me, in an email that I have printed out, because I am old fashioned, even at the expense of our fragile ecosystem.

Some of the information – most of it – is unsurprising. The genetic scientists in their corporate laboratory have discovered that it is likely that I have dark brown hair, blue eyes, and a taste for sweets. Bullseye! These things are true. They also found it likely that I have a muscular, athletic build. This is slightly less true. They further determined that I am unlikely to transmit a propensity for any horrible syndrome or diseases to my kids. Aside from the Clinical Depression and Alcoholism, of course.

Lucky them!

The scientists have also discovered some relatives of mine who were also coerced into sending this deeply personal information through the mail to strangers. Some of them I am aware of. Others I am not, because they are third or fourth cousins and I could not care less about them or their building blocks.

There was no conclusive information regarding my paternity.

But, buried amid all of this semi depressing data about the fundamental makeup of myself – easily communicated in a medium length email and indicating no particular gifts or promise – is one surprising tidbit. A tidbit I had long suspected, and has now been confirmed.

I, it turns out – and you may want to be sitting down for this – come from the same genetic line as Franz Xaver Messerschmidt!

(dramatic sting)

If this doesn’t spin you into a tizzy of excitement and envy or even touch off a glint of recognition, allow me to tell you about my Uncle Franz: He was an eccentric 18th Century Austrian sculptor responsible for the famous “Character Heads”, a series of 64 tin-lead alloy and alabaster busts of his own head, each displaying a different, peculiar, often extreme facial expression.

There, you are now free to spin into that tizzy of excitement and envy.

I have known about Franz for many years. Messerschmidt is not the most common of names, and there are very few famous individuals who bear it. Really, there’s only the despicable Nazi inventor of the Messerschmitt, a German warplane prominent in WWII. The plane is spelled differently – with a tt at the end instead of the truly baffling dt concluding my surname. Doughy middle-aged men with terrible beards who are far too invested in Nazi trivia and mostly work at gas stations mostly don’t know this – the spelling difference – though, so I’m often forced into conversation with these degenerates, which has always been painful, and now, through both two masks and a half inch of plexiglass, is both painful and impractical.

Come to think of it, I don’t really know enough about this Messerschmitt fellow to call him despicable or a Nazi. It’s entirely possible that he was just a particularly gifted engineer and put together something he thought was wonderful and told his kids about and stayed up nights imagining all of the great things it could do and then it ended up a killing machine for a death cult army led by a lunatic with a memorably terrible mustache.

These things happen.

Regardless, his name is close enough that some Nazi association is to be expected, and has prevented much delving into the Messerschmidt past, as you’re sure to come across Nazis pretty quickly and nobody needs that in their life. I’m told my great grandmother had a Nazis flag in her home, and that’s about all I need.

A quick story about her, because this is my show and I’ll do what I want:

At my great grandma’s memorial service, after the funeral, the pastor – who had not known her – asked if anyone had any good memories of their time with her that they’d be willing to relate.
Nobody in a room of every living person she’d ever known said a word for a solid 3 minutes. She was an awful woman.
Finally my Dad – with his first and last selfless, heroic move – stood up, walked to the front and said, “She made good creamed peas.” Everyone solemnly nodded in agreement, sighed with relief and exited the memorial to maybe have a smoke or discuss more important things like the weather and football or how good they were at basketball in high school.

The moral of this story, like all stories with a moral, really, is don’t be an asshole.

Anyway, Franz Xaver Messerschmidt is different. First, he was not a Nazi. Maybe a Monarchist – he did some work for Austrian royalty – but that’s not so bad, in context. Second, and most importantly, he was a fucking artist, as am I. He made artistic heads by forcing earth to do his will and I make heady art by forcing words to make a podcast, which they couldn’t possibly want to do. “My god!” they must think. “Couldn’t he have made us into a beautiful poem on some paper in a book like respectable words instead of this hideous spoken nonsense broadcast into the void?”

Cram it, words, I’m in charge here, more or less.

Uncle Franz’s art has been immortalized more than mine, but I’ve no doubt that in 300 years from now someone will be creating a podcast about this show too, probably via a laudatory psychically transmitted, immersive futuristic tableaux or something. Or maybe the future is more dystopian and they’ll create the tableaux from sticks, rocks, and trash or crude drawings on the walls of a cave – the circle of life and all that. Either way, I’ve no doubt it will be a tableaux and I am honored and humbled by the gesture.

Also, Franz was a depressive recluse with a shaky hold on sanity and I’d bet dollars to donuts I’ll end up the same. I’m well on my way already, sitting in the dark, in my basement, alone, typing and doubting myself even while projecting bravado, staring into the glassy eyes of the taxidermic gator head on my desk, imagining the gator telling me that none of this is very good.

Kindred spirits, and, as it turns out, actually kin.

The moment I saw the first Character Head, as they’ve come to be called – Uncle Franz never put a name to them – I was smitten. They are deeply weird and weirdly modern. Out of context you’d assume they were an inspired conceptual project from some pre-Burroughs Bohemian of the 40s, maybe someone who made time with Buñuel or, probably more likely, given their shared nationality, Fritz Lang. One of the weird but not so weird as to be unpalatable pre-war outré art guys. A pre-irony guy with ironic leanings.

Their modernity comes from their simplicity and a very modern sense of humor, though I doubt the artist had humor in mind when he made them.

They are difficult to explain. If you want to see them, you know, the internet, obviously, but this show’s artwork also features two of the heads – the ones known as The Vexed Man (the brownish one in front with an aggressive frown), and The Yawner (the gray one in back that looks much more like he’s screaming in despair to me, but probably a lot of the power of the piece comes from the unification of existential terror and ennui or something).

The heads in the pictures are cheap, smallish imitations that I bought on Amazon – there are a few of the heads you can own for under $100, and I have all of them. I wanted them as the artwork for the show for obvious reasons – they look cool and have a personal meaning, but also as a gentle, winking siren song to anyone who actually knows who the fuck FXR is. So I set them among some plants in my yard to represent the complex relationship between man and nature and snapped some photos. I think they look nice. It’s probably some kind of Copywrite violation, but no one has caught on because, you know, who’s listening really, and besides, he’s family! And long dead.

I’ve never had the opportunity to see the real heads in person as that kind of thing doesn’t typically come anywhere near Fargo, North Dakota – at best we maybe get Norman Rockwell and Ansel Adams, at worst terrible stadium versions of long out of fashion Broadway shows and the occasional Vatican relic – but they are just over a foot tall, slightly bigger than a real head. Some are metallic, chromish – the tin/lead alloy – and some kind of an aged beige stone – the alabaster. Each is just a head and a neck – no shoulders and no detail in the eyes, giving them a kind of blank, hypnotized, disconcerting look. Some of the heads are entirely bald, with lines etched on the dome to indicate a couple days worth of hair growth. Some are only partially bald, with longish flowing hair circling the crown, pushed back behind delicate, realistic ears. The bald ones give an impression of musculature and health – almost youth, maybe some vigor – but the others are an older man, thin and deeply lined, with more birdlike features. All of their necks are excruciatingly tensed, veins and tendons and Adams Apples, sometimes an impression of a second chin, bulging as though reacting to an electric shock – which they might be, as Uncle Franz was rumored to have been good friends with Anton Mesmer – namesake of mesmerism and purveyor of a crude form of early shock therapy. That’s probably not the case, though.

The story of Messerschmidt and his heads, like any good story, is riddled in mythology and speculation, and, as with most things, I prefer the mythology. It’s more fun.

The mythology is, basically, that Franz Xaver Messerschmidt was an accomplished sculptor and benefactee of royals in 18th century Austria before going insane, losing all employment, attempting to become well via Mesmer’s new methods, failing, moving to the country, living as a recluse and sculpting head after head of his own visage in various forms of distress to ward off the evil spirits that tormented him, specifically something he called The Spirit of Proportion, and ultimately dying by his own hand in an institution, the heads all but unseen, until his brother began to sell them off to various collectors and traveling exhibitions of oddities, to be scattered across the world, then reassembled and given the names they bare today and slowly discovered and even more slowly recognized for their brilliance and kinship to modern semi-absurdist art.

It’s a good story. The fact is that many of the heads seem to be of different people – experts can only agree that one is really the artist, the one whimsically titled “The Artist As He Imagined Himself Laughing”, which depicts an aging man in a fez with a semi-mad, dead eyed smile. But the more I look at them – and I look at them a lot – the more it seems to me that they are all of the same guy, in different peaks and valleys of mental health. My image of myself varies drastically depending on my mood, it was probably the same for my dear Uncle. And artistic license – even with oneself – is to be expected.

Anyway, I don’t particularly care what the real story is. Every character in that story is long dead and why not go with the good story over the true one? I’m not, as I think I have mentioned here before, fucking Tom Brokaw, after all. This is, theoretically a comedy podcast, even if there hasn’t really been a joke in a while.

Here’s a funny story to justify my genre.

My six-year-old son and I often do would you rathers before bed. The other night he came up with, “Who would you rather eat, Hulk Hogan or a regular old man?” I think he might be a genius.

Back to Franz.

As I said, there were originally 64 heads, but only 49 are still known to exist. There’s A Strong Man, A Hypocrite and A Slanderer – his head hung low with regret, The Ultimate Simpleton – the only one with a torso connected to the head, Inflicted with Constipation, and An Intentional Wag, among others. The names may not be what the artist intended, but you have to admit that they are pretty solid, even when they don’t really describe what I see at all. Any one of them would make a tremendous band name. I imagine the heads were created in a spirit of distress, in contrast to the light hearted posthumous names which were applied to the heads by the organizer of a traveling exhibit featuring them. The traveling exhibitors – glorified carnies – were probably a fair bit more mirthful than the reclusive, insane genius.

And I don’t really have to imagine them being created in a spirit of distress. There’s some documentation that this was the case. One man – I forget his name, and it’s not important, let’s call him Kent Butnickel – made a pilgrimage of sorts to Franz’s humble home, partly out of admiration, partly out of morbid curiosity. Rumors were, he’d lost his mind.

Butnickel’s visit did, in fact, confirm that Franz had lost his mind, at least to some degree. He spent his time jabbing and pinching himself while looking in a mirror, said it was to assuage the evil spirit that was assailing him – The Spirit of Proportion. He was also up to his ears in the heads, which, as an art piece are brilliant, but to find a shut-ins cottage filled with them would be alarming. We don’t know how long Butnickel stuck around, but I can’t imagine he spent the night.

And, really, that’s all we know for sure. There’s some record of him possibly selling miniatures of the heads, and the next thing we hear is that, after his death, his brother – my great great and so on Grandfather, perhaps? – took possession of the heads.

Or did they take possession of him?!

(dramatic sting)

No, they did not, or, anyway, we have no reason to believe that they did. He eventually sold them off and went about his life, continuing the genetic line that, ultimately, would lead to me and my children, just after my Grandpa Roy, who I once tried to show a book about Franz – he did the thing he used to do where he kind of grunted and then ignored you – and who knows who else. Perhaps a future librarian or some such noble being.

Next time on The Irrationally Exuberant, we’ll delve into my first experience with psychotropic mushrooms, meeting my Uncle Franz, and realizing that I have Clinical Depression and am just not really a drug guy after all.

Don’t miss it!

The Tom Waits Institute of Lucid Dreaming

The piano has been drinking, the piano has been drinking, not me . . .


Oh, hello. I didn’t hear you come in. I was busy writing a new hit song and preparing my brain for tonight’s, ah, lurid lucid dreams.

Name’s Tom, by the way, Tom Waits – I’m the owner of this glistening institute.

And you are?


Uh-huh. Well, I’m pleased to make your acquaintance. You’re a comely one, aren’t you?


Why don’t you pour yourself a drink, help yourself to a cigarette or two, and fold into that arm-chair under the portrait of Schlitzie the Pinhead Girl while I tell you what The Tom Waits Institute of Lucid Dreaming is all about.


Well, you’re probably asking yourself why Tom Waits, the man responsible for such landmark albums as Swordfishtrombone and Mule Variations has any interest in opening a Lucid Dreaming Institute in the first place.

A fair enough question.

You’re very astute.

The answer is simple as JoJo the Idiot Circus Clown. I’ve been a lucid dreamer since my parents left me at an abandoned bus depot in Atlantic City to live with the hobos and tramps when I was 7 years old. A tattered, one-legged bum on the lam from the law, name of Shitmouth Charlie, The Rail-yard Privateer, taught me how to do it. And I want to share the gift that Shitmouth Charlie, The Rail-yard Privateer gave me with as many folks as’d care to listen.


So, when you’re here at the Tom Waits Institute of Lucid Dreaming you’ll learn how to slide into a deep, active sleep using the music of me, Tom Waits.

I’ve been known as both a whiskey soaked beat troubadour and a rail riding industrial carnival barker, but all along the mission of my music has been to induce lucid dreams and there have been subliminal messages in these tunes starting with Closing Time.

Like my song, The Earth Died Screaming, for instance. It may seem to the untrained ear like nothing more than your typical nightmare environmentalist screed, shrieked by a drink and drug addled lunatic great grandpa, but listen closely. There’s a constant whisper behind all of that madness, telling you to be mindful and relax.


(Earth Died Screaming)


Did you here it? No? Your subconscious did.


Try this one on for size. It’s called Singapore. It was on my platinum selling album, Rain Dogs. At first listen, all you’ll hear is a hell circus hosted by a blood spitting wino with post traumatic stress disorder. But there’s more to the song than meets the eardrum, so to speak. See if you can hear the underlying message that you are safe and secure and should feel free to fully enter your dreams and experience true beauty for the first time in you life.


(Singapore)


Yeeaaah. Now you’re getting it.


Here at T-WILD we’ve created the perfect environment in which to tumble into slumber and finally know what it feels like to live without boundaries. To experience all of the enlightenment and serenity that lucid dreaming has to offer. You’ll nestle into a dusty bed of burlap and horse hair as you’re coaxed to sleep by the flashing of dozens of strobe lights and the perpetual spinning of our neverending Poe themed Merry-go-round, while my dream inducing music plays at deafening volumes.


Or, if that doesn’t suit you, you can drift into your own unconsciousness in our room of carnival freaks and clowns, now stocked with 75% more clowns, who will jump about and groan encouragement over songs such as Tango Till They’re Sore and Cemetery Polka.


It’s a real scene, let me tell you.


So, don’t waste any more time passively sleeping your life away. Awaken to the miracle of lucid dreams at the Tom Waits Institute of Lucid Dreaming. Sign up by finding me and asking about it.


Thanks for stopping by.

Lucid Dreaming

Intro: Dream

It is light.
It is dark.
It is light again.
It is very dark.
Dusk settles - something like dusk - a queasy, night vision green, stamped with a throbbing amber moon.
It is my backyard, but it isn’t.  Josh is there and Ben and Ryan, but he’s very young, and then not Josh, and me, and Tony, and Brian Lauers, from high school, and Jake, and then Josh.
They are golfing, and then not Josh, hitting balls, and it is light, silent, and I am watching, and it is dark, and I am not me, but I am watching me, and then Josh.
And there are pigs in the yard - first the impression of pigs, followed by pulsing pig representations - and it is yellow dusk, and the pulsing pig representations are too big, and then Josh, and there is a baby that is not mine, that I need to take care of, that looks like me, and then not Josh, and then Josh, and then not Ben, and Josh is going into the neighbor’s house to take a piss and they aren’t home but the lights are on and I am furious, and then not Josh, and the pulsing pig representations are again just the impressions of pigs and they are many, and the pigs are in danger, I can feel it, and then Josh, and it is light, and the pigs are pigs now - tangible pigs - and have green eyes, and then Ben, and then not Josh, and Marshall is in the house, and I am in the house, and Josh is in the house, and then not Josh, and Kelly wafts through, blinking her eyes wildly, and it is very bright, and then Josh - and where is the baby? - and then not Josh, and I can hear an uncle in the other room, and it is very bright, and then Josh and Ben and Marshall and Tony and my brother and me and a pig and the baby and then not Josh and this doesn’t make sense,  I realize this doesn’t make sense, and I realize I’m dreaming and then it is light and everything slows down, comes into focus.  Everything is focused and still. Lucid.
The house is mine and I am lucid.
I am dreaming.  I say this aloud and the words pulse through the air in concentric circles.  I am in my kitchen.  Everything is there.  It is my kitchen, but more - ethereal, maybe.  And Josh and Ben and Tony and Ryan and Jake and Marshall and Brian Lauers and the green eyed pig are just standing still, staring at me, waiting for me to do something.  So I put a hat on the pig, with my mind.  A beautiful deep brown bowler.           Everyone smiles.
I breath.  This is my dream and I can do literally anything I want.  The laws of physics and morality do not apply to me.  I could fly through the air like a crow.  I could make Josh do things to the pig.  I could combine Josh with the pig to make a pig-Josh and have Ben do things with pig-Josh.  I could punch pig-Josh into a billion smaller pigs with spaghetti knuckles.  I don’t know what that means, exactly, but I could do it.  I could make them all perform an elaborate three part very special episode of Charles In Charge, where the pig plays Charles and Tony plays Buddy, and Buddy is experimenting with PCP, and Charles has to help him and hide it from the kids. It could be brilliant and disgusting.  And I could play Mr. Belvedere, hell, I could be Mr. Belvedere, even though he’s not even in Charles In Charge.  I could make Mr. Belvedere a member of the Charles in charge universe with my mind. Anything.  This world, as they say, is my oyster.  I could literally make this world into an oyster.
Instead, I retreat to my studio to record - this - podcast . . .

Part I: Lucid Dreaming
In 1902, Willis Carrier recorded a remarkable dream in his dream journal. Two dream descriptions in a row might be a bit much, but bare with me.

July 16th, 1902

Dearest diary,
Last night I dreamt the most remarkable dream.  To call it a dream, in fact, does it no justice.  It was more than a dream, I believe.  Vision may be the word.  Revelation, perhaps.
It began ordinarily enough. I was trudging through the disgusting streets of Brooklyn on yet another punishingly hot day, stinking to high heaven as everybody does all of the time , cursing the three piece wool suit that people of this particular point in history are cursed to wear, no matter the weather.  My god, life is a nightmare!  Good lord, the stench!  Heavens to Betsy - the rashes!  Oh, the rashes! It’s a wonder that a person ever accomplishes even the most menial of tasks whilst drenched head to toe in sticky, hot sweat, his crotch dappled and scarlet red, itching like the dickens, his olfactory sense barraged from all corners each and every moment of each and every hellish day with the ghastly odor of three million retched, reeking New Yorkers, barely holding on to consciousness as they teeter on the precipice of of heatstroke or wage a futile battle against retching from the pungency.
I was contemplating all of this, praying for the sweet relief of the Reapers refreshingly cold, gnarled touch, when a curious storefront caught my eye.  One I hadn’t noticed before, though I have made this walk innumerable times.  It was called, “Breezy Jeff’s Emporium”.  
“What kind of name is Jeff?” I thought. 
I felt compelled to step inside, so I pushed through its unornamented door.
The most wonderful thing happened as the door opened.  I was enveloped by cool, soothing air, the likes of which I have never felt before.  It was as if God himself had exhaled upon me!  I began to weep with joy.  
When I had regained my composure, I looked about myself to ascertain the nature of the establishment, but there was little to see.  The walls stood bare, and I appeared to be alone.
That is when it struck me: This must be a dream.
Surprised to find myself so aware of this fact while still in the dream state, I nearly awoke.  The store began to fade.  Not wishing to ever leave this icy paradise, I willed it back into solidity with great effort and found that I was able to move about of my own free will.
I heard a loud humming noise from the back of the store, but was unable to see its source.  I went to investigate and found, around a corner, a strange contraption which seemed to be the source of the noise and, to my amazement, the cool air.
“My God,”  I thought. “A machine that cools the air.  This could change everything!”
I had to bring this miracle to the real world!  A dipped quill and paper materialized in my hands, and I began to make sketches and notes pertaining to its construction.
Upon awakening, I immediately transcribed my dream notes. And I’ll be McKinley’s old mother if I don’t believe this thing can actually work!

I must retreat now to my laboratory to assemble a prototype.  This invention, if I am not sorrowfully mistaken, could be our cool savior from the oppressive god of heat and I must waste no time in building it!

Willis Carriers vision was not the first lucid dream recorded in history, but it very well may be the most significant, and is a fine introduction to the topic.  The invention of the air conditioner ushered in the modern age, making life bearable for the first time in human history.
How does a man discover something so consequential and practical in the non-dream world while in the dream world?  How does he gain the ability to understand that he is dreaming and act proactively within the dream?
The answers are elusive, highly controversial, and, in this podcast, wildly simplified and occasionally misrepresented.
Lucid dreaming is essentially a dream in which one becomes impassive, conscious of the dream state and able to control ones actions and surroundings within the dream.  To really understand lucid dreaming you must first understand dreaming, which no one does for sure.  You’ll get different explanations for why we dream and what, if anything, dreams mean from scientists, psychologist, religious fanatics, psychics, your mother, or the quiet guys you work with who, when they do finally talk, reveal themselves to be profoundly unpleasant.  There is very little agreement even within these groups.  One unnerving guy at the office might say that dreams are visions from god while another insists that they are representations of repressed sexual desires.  Back slowly away from both of these men.  They are the ones who make that horrible mess in the bathroom, probably.
I’m talking about you, Kurt!
A dream is essentially a hallucination - a creation of your mind.  You see things in your dreams, but not with your eyes - a real stoner mind-fuck. There’s no particular portion of the brain that these images arise from - that anyone knows of, anyway.  It’s kind of biological ocean whose depths are completely unknown to us despite its relative nearness.  
There is one theory, variations of which are currently the most pervasive, that dreams are a kind of informational sieve, a way for our brain to filter out useless information and sort the things we need, resulting in a kind of free associative hodgepodge of thoughts and images that really only seem to make sense because of our conscious tendency to string miscellaneous information into a kind of narrative.  Sort of like how if you watch a movie on mute, any music you play will seem to sync up with it.  The Dark Side of Oz phenomenon, if you will.  
It is nearly impossible to talk about dreams, apparently, without sounding like you just took a bong rip.
I have to ask, though:  If it is  truly the case that dreams are a mechanism for sorting and filtering information, why have I retained such a vast store of knowledge about the Golden Girls and Sha Na Na, but couldn’t, under any circumstance, tell you my wife’s phone number?
Either this theory is bunk or my sieve is broken.
Freud was somewhat a proponent of this explanation, though he added that dreams were a means of latent wish fulfillment and deeper revelations about oneself could be sussed out through analysis.  Those deeper revelations tended to be sex stuff.
I’d really like to get his take on which wish I was fulfilling in the dream I had where a group of monks marched into my room to tell me that Jeff Goldblum had died.
Jung largely concurred with Freud, but was much less phallocentric and posited that the existence of common dreams, which he called archetypes - flying, unpreparedness, secret rooms, Jeff Goldblum - were an expression of a unified human consciousness. 
L. Ron Hubbard, a lunatic, said that "Dreams are crazy house mirrors by which the analyzer looks down into

the engram bank.” I have no idea what that means and don’t care to find out.
There are a few things we know absolutely about dreams, specifically, which parts of the brain aren’t active during sleep. The motor cortex, for instance. It is responsible for musculoskeletal control – moving your body. When the motor cortex is stimulated during sleep – as is the case with a sleep disorder called “violent sleep”, which has been recreated in animal experiments – the dreamer will act out their dreams. Dogs will dig at the air, cats roam around, aimless and ominous, and humans have been known to attack whoever happens to be in bed with them. A prostitute named Fancy, for example.
Activity also decreases in the prefrontal regions of the brain responsible for episodic memory and integrating information. It’s the reason dreams don’t usually make a lot of sense.
I could go on – about REM sleep, neurological theories, wet dreams – but this is supposed to be about lucid dreaming, so let’s talk about that.
Here’s the thing – We don’t really know whether lucid dreaming is real. Dreams are notoriously difficult, if not impossible to monitor, so the specifics of dreams are kind of beyond us. There’s a very real chance that lucid dreams are just dreams of being lucid, not actual lucidity within a dream. The study most often cited in its favor basically consisted of a researcher telling a subject to move his eyes in a certain way in his sleep. Apparently he did, but it was just side to side.
So we are left with personal testimony, and there is certainly a lot of it.
Lucid dreamers love talking about lucid dreaming. If you begin a conversation with one, it won’t end until you’ve heard all of their tales of flying over psychedelic meadows, chatting with their dead grandpappy about the tofu situation in heaven, and bedding Khaleesi, The Mother of Dragons, and agreed that they are highly evolved mystical super-people. What they won’t tell you is that even their sweet Aunt Kathy won’t return their calls anymore. Avoid them at all costs. In fact, avoid everyone at all costs, just to be safe.
They’ll also tell you how you can become one of them. “Oh my god, you don’t meditate? You have to meditate!” They’ll tell you about looking at your hands, or flipping light switches on and off, or reading a digital clock several times a day. These are what’s known as reality checks. The idea is that if you get used to confirming that you’re not dreaming during your waking hours, the habit will persist into your dreams and you will become lucid when you realize you are dreaming.
They’ll tell you about binaural beats, beats of two different frequencies, one being fed into each ear, which create a third frequency in your brain that, theoretically, produces relaxation, concentration, and, when you’re sleeping, lucid dreams. It’s sometimes called brainwave entertainment – which may or may not also be the title of a Skirlex album, another thing I don’t care to find out – and sounds like a computer attempting Peruvian Pan Flute music.
They’ll tell you about taking B vitamins before you go to bed, as well as an exhaustive list of additional supplements that have not been approved by the FDA.
They’ll encourage you to keep a dream journal, make your own dream pillow, eat cheese before bed to have what they call, horrifyingly, “cheese dreams”, set an alarm to wake you up every 90 minutes, and wear a REM inducing mask, none of which seem conducive to any kind of sleep, let alone a deep one.
They’ll tell you that, if you do become lucid, you should “ask the dream” to let you become lucid more easily next time.
They’ll continue shouting these things at you as you slowly back away from them and they’ll chase after you when you turn and break into a dead sprint.
These people are relentless and will stop at nothing to share their inner peace.

And goddamn if I don’t want to BE one of these people. I’ve tried a good number of their methods, not as an ironic experiment, but in earnest.
I would very much like to lucid dream. It sounds amazing. Passive sleep feels like a necessary waste of time, but conscious sleep eliminates that burden. You never have to stop doing. And I want to pause that recurring dream I have where I’m lost and half nude in a massive hotel with a random assortment of acquaintances and dream people while reports of an alien invasion blast from unseen speakers and finally find that Morrissey concert in the lobby that I’ve been trying to get to for all these years. I want to explore the room in the house that I grew up in that no one knew was there. I want to hear and remember music that doesn’t exist in the real world, music that evidently lives inside me that I don’t have access to. I want to be a whale for a little while and goddammit I want to have consequence free dream sex with Ferris Bueller’s girlfriend Sloan!
Not to mention that the implications or Lucid Dreaming are pretty wild. If you are able actively alter the projections of your Id and Ego, what does that mean? Something, I’m sure of it.
So, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to binge eat some cheese, strap on my dream goggles, and take a brief, hopeful nap.

Hell

Bad news, friends. I died.

I was trudging along the banks of the Red River, as you do during an unseasonably warm North Dakota Winter. With the trees gone and the prairie grass tamped down by deer, you can get much closer to the water than in the Summer, but usually it’s colder ‘n the heart of a Saskatoon Psychopath and there’s liable to be a foot or two of snow on the ground, so you’re mostly stuck indoors, gaining winter weight.

Not this winter, though. This was a couple days after the anniversary of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and it was still in the high 40s. Heaven on earth.

So, I was trudging along, tossing rocks and kicking out rotted stumps when I came upon a peculiar sight. There was something wedged between two bare elm trees not ten feet from where I stood. It was red and green and, this being the Holiday season, I assumed it was some kind of out of the way Christmas decoration. But I pushed on to investigate, and, to my surprise, saw three words printed in big block letters on the mystery object.

The words were these: The Phoenix Lights.

I was taken aback. Why, that very morning I’d cracked open a book on The Phoenix Lights, the most famous UFO sighting in the Americas, maybe the world.

I whispered, “Synchronicity,” because that’s what UFO weirdos do.

Convinced that I’d stumbled upon some sort of cache of secret information, finally, or, at the very least, some sort of incoherent message from The Phenomenon – I rushed toward whatever it was, and this is where I died.

My foot caught on an exposed root. I put out my hands to grab hold of a branch, and the branch snapped like a box of angel hair pasta over a bubbling pot of water. I tumbled, foot over fedora, down the river bank and on to the icy surface of the mighty Red. Shaken but okay, I stood up, brushed the dirt and cockleburs from my body, lifted a foot to ascend the bank and heard another crack – too many cracks for one day, if you ask me – felt the ice give way below me, fell backward again, and crashed through the thin ice, into the frigid, mud dark water. I felt a jolt of unspeakable cold, gasped, filled myself with water that tasted of clay, and was sucked Northward and to the bottom of Fargo’s preeminent body of water.

Next thing I remember, I was completely dry, which struck me as odd. I was back on land, in a dense green wood, ominous in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Poetical, somehow. The ground was rocky and inclined. This wasn’t North Dakota. What was it?

I heard a low growl. Not good. Low growls are almost never good. Even high growls aren’t great. I heard a low growl and saw an enormous black bear slowly approaching me, snout wet, eyes wild with malice or hunger or both. I looked about for somewhere to run. There was a clearing! I started in that direction, but – Alas!- coming through the clearing was a guy I went to high school with who I’d blocked on Facebook. REALLY didn’t want to talk to him.

But it was this guy or the bear. I was frozen in indecision.

Then, from above, an urgent whisper.

I looked up. There was a man in the branches of a large Sycamore Tree, partially obscured. He looked older. Well dressed. A stranger. Not ideal, but better than the other two options. I briefly hoped he wouldn’t be the chatty kind of stranger and then ascended the tree as quickly as I could.

There in the branches of the Sycamore was a man I immediately recognized. He was Kurt Vonnegut.

“You’re Kurt Vonnegut!” I whispered.

“Guilty as charged,” said he.

“But your d-d-d-dead!” I hissed.

“You and me both, kid.” He smiled kindly.

“Huh. I’m . . . dead? I guess that adds up. Why does your voice sound so weird?”

“Never mind that. Poo-tee-weet.”

We heard a roar and a scream, and both looked down to see my highschool acquaintance being devoured by the enormous bear.

“What in the hell is going on here?!” I asked, no longer whispering.

“You said it, son. You kicked the bucket. Passed on to your great reward. So it goes. You’re just outside of hell, bucko.”

“Adds up. What are you doing here?”

“I’m here to lead you through. Like a spirit guide, kind of thing. Lucky you.”

“It’s an honor. What are we waiting for?”

“The bloodthirsty bear.”

“Right, the bloodthirsty bear.”

Hours passed, and we sat in silence, watching the bear devour my classmate, whose political opinions justified this fate.

I had questions, but realized this was all most likely a product of my own imagination, the firing of the last few neurons in my brain, a quick dopamine dump before lights out, and didn’t want to look foolish in front of imaginary Kurt Vonnegut.

When the bear had finished its meal and shambled off, Kurt suggested we do the same.

We passed through a ragged gap in a stone wall. There was a sign above it which read, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

“Yikes,” I said. “Is this safe? Will we be able to get out of here?”

“Sure”, replied Kurt Vonnegut. “Just stick by me, kid, and we’ll be out of here faster than you can say Kilgore Trout.”

“I hope you’re right.”

Vonnegut tilted his head and gave me a wry smile.

“Aaaaah. You got me! All right, abandoning hope, starting . . . NOW!”

We passed though the entrance of Hell and into it’s first circle, Limbo.

“This is Limbo,” Vonnegut told me. “Unbaptized souls and all that. You don’t really believe in a literal heaven and hell, though, so it’s mostly just people you have no opinion about.”

“So this IS just a projection of my dying brain then? I was kind of hoping I was wrong.”

“It feels real, right?” Vonnegut asked. “So what’s the difference?”

He had a point.

Through the entrance, as my guide had said there would be, were thousands of people I felt nothing for, milling about, looking bored. I hardly recognized most of them, but a few looked vaguely familiar – half forgotten teachers staring into the middle distance, people I’d worked with pacing about, the entire cast of Leave It to Beaver, perpetually fighting off naps.

Soon we came to a river, kind of like the Red but more sulphureous and fiery, and with exponentially more damned souls waiting at it’s bank and shrieking in its bubbling waters.

“This is going to be a lot like Dante’s Inferno, huh?” I asked Vonnegut.

“It’s going to be whatever’s going on in the secret recesses of that idea machine in your skull. Probably your limited understanding of Inferno based on dozens of half readings with a bunch of random personal memories tossed in.”

“Cool, cool. Where’s the ferryman, I wonder?”

And there he was, suddenly, materializing in the sulfur mist, Sharon. Ch-aron? I’m not sure how to pronounce it.

The ghastly oarsman docked his boat, and bid us aboard.

“How do you pronounce your name?” I asked.

“Sharon, or Ch-aron. I’m not sure,” he said.

“Checks out,” I said to Vonnegut.

We hopped on the boat and headed for whatever I thought the second circle of hell would be like.

Turns out, we had to deal with Minos first, a hideous half man, half octopus, with the face of HP Lovecraft, who determines which circle of hell the damned will be relegated to.
“Let me handle this guy,” Vonnegut said. “He’s a real son-of-a-bitch.”

Minos’s greedy tentacles reached for me, but Vonnegut slapped them away.

“Not so fast, Jack,” he said. “We’re just going to scootch on by you, if you don’t mind.”

Chiron didn’t seem to mind. He shrugged what I assumed were his shoulders, wrapped a tentacle around Charlie Daniels, screamed, “Circle Three: Glutony!” and tossed the husky troubadour behind him like a spent can of Tiki Punch Shasta, fiddle and all.

Vonnegut and I kind of awkwardly edged past him, through the thin crack between his grotesque, slimy body and the stony outcrop at his side. He smelled like an old tin of sardines.

To get to the second circle of hell, we had to walk down a very steep flight of stairs with no hand rail. There was an elevator, but it was constantly nearly full of talkative strangers with poor personal boundaries. Horrific.

The second circle was for the lusty – sexed up men and women who couldn’t get enough of fucking and sucking, and were now condemned to be blown about by a terrible wind, symbolic of how in life they allowed themselves to be led by their penises and vaginas and buttholes and what not.

Still trying to catch our breaths from the long descent down the stairs, we were buffeted by the sexy gale, nearly swept off of our feet. Hugh Hefner blew past us, stupid robe flapping, his bony frame unable to keep him attached to the ground.

To combat the wind, to keep from blowing around in circles like that lecherous old wrinkled dick and the strong scent of cologne, talcum powder, and sex musk he left in his wake, Kurt Vonnegut hopped on my shoulders, and I piggy backed him through the wind-worn expanse, toward the next staircase.

On our way we encountered some of the most celebrated musicians and actors who ever lived:

Jim Morrison, still trying to write terrible poetry, even as the sheet of paper he was holding kept blowing out of his hand, only to be replaced by another piece which would invariably blow away before the pen in his right hand could reach it’s surface.

Noted rapist Errol Flynn, forced to perpetually sword fight the wind, which kept blowing the prop sword back at him, poking him in the eye.

Pope John XII was there, as were Janis Joplin, Lord Byron, and Wendy the Snapple Lady – a bit of a surprise – all struggling against the dastardly cyclone blasts in ways unique to their particular dirty deeds.

After what seemed like hours of struggle, we reached the staircase and Kurt Vonnegut alit from my back.

“Thanks for the lift, Hoss,” Vonnegut said. “You’d make one hell of a pack mule.”

“Thanks,” I said, “I have kids. You’re an excellent backpack.”

Down the stairs we went, toward Tier 3, for the gluttonous.

I assumed we’d meet Charlie Daniels there, and wasn’t wrong. He was being pelted by the icy rain, already beginning to melt into the blob of jelly that all residents of Tier Three must become. As such, I wasn’t able to identify any of the other denizens – it’s hard to put a name to a what looks like a pupa filled with lime jello – but I assume former President Howard Taff – namesake of taffy – was down there somewhere.

It’s hard to know what to do in an icy rain. Do you run or does that just cause the rain to hit you at a higher velocity? Do you walk, or does that result in being hit with more rain?

We chose to run, and it hurt like . . . well, hell. Cerberus the three headed hound waited for us at the other side. Thinking fast, I picked up one of the screaming blobs and hurled it at the vicious hellbeast, leaving my upper body looking like I’d just been a guest on Nickelodeon’s You Can’t Do That On Television.

It worked. While Cerberus tore into the damned soul, we hurdled past him and down the stairs, two at a time, like hyper active junior high school students.

“Way to use your old meat computer, kid,” Vonnegut said. “You’re really getting the hang of hell.”

Circle four is a massive hill surrounded by huge, perfectly round boulders. It’s inhabited by two categories of the greedy: Misers and spendthrifts, who begin their terrible chore at separate sides of the towering mound. Each cursed soul is assigned to a boulder and must push it up the hill, Sisyphus style. When they get to the top, they are inevitably met by someone from the opposite side and argue about whether it is better to spend one’s wealth extravagantly or to horde it. Obviously the spendthrifts are right, it’s not even a question. Anyway, the argument gets heated and somebody slaps a boulder and it goes careening back down the hill and then the other guy pushes the other boulder and then the whole thing starts over.

You can imagine who inhabits this place, I don’t need to tell you. A bunch of assholes on one side and some cool dudes on the other, mostly.

As we walked around the hill, Henry Ford told us we looked like a couple of Jews, and Vonnegut told him to go take a flying fuck at a donut. We high fived, and then looked kind of embarrassed about the high five and got on our way.

The fifth circle of hell is the most fun. It’s for the wrathful.

“You’re going to go just nuts for this circle,” Vonnegut told me. “As a figment of your imagination, I know you love celebrity feuds and spite – who doesn’t? – and this circle is chock full of those, but in a bubbling, boiling swamp of human waste.”

He was right, of course. There, sunk to their chins in what looked like a massive, hot sewage treatment tank, were every argumentative dingus I’d ever known or known of, all yelling at and grappling with each other. The din and odor were almost unbearable, but the sight was absolutely beautiful.

There was William F. Buckley, earlobes dipped in shit, screaming at a guy I’d blocked on Twitter last year. And Rush Limbaugh, new to the place, choking on the murk while being manhandled by my Great Grandmother.

It seemed to go on forever, each combative duo more satisfying than the last.

“My father is going to spend eternity here, I’m sure of it,” I said.

“So it goes,” replied Vonnegut.

“How are we going to get through this shit?” I asked Vonnegut.

“Probably some sort of boatman,” Vonnegut replied.

No sooner had he said this, than a hideous manbeast in a rowboat materialized from the hazy mire. He nodded at us and we hopped aboard.

Crossing the festering swamp, I saw ever more pleasing conflicts.

Richard Nixon with John Lennon in a full nelson.

Buddy Rich giving Huey Long the business.

As the boat neared the far shore, it began to shake. Someone was grabbing its edge, trying to pull us into the horrid muck.

We looked to the side and saw a feces splattered man with his hand on our craft.

“Jim Morrison! I thought you were in the second circle!”

“In life I was so shitty that they put me in two circles simultaneously!”

“Well, get off our boat, you wretched goofball, we’ve got more circles to see!”

I stomped on Morrison’s hand and he want flailing back into the gurgling waste, where he belonged. It felt good.

We arrived at the steps down to the sixth circle of hell, or so I thought. I’d forgotten that the circles of hell were divided into two categories: the first five circles for those who sinned through judgement and the next four for those who were actively malicious.

Dividing the two were the river Styx and the City of Dis.

Obviously I hadn’t totally forgotten it, or it wouldn’t be here. But I’d forgotten it in the moment.

“Listen. We’re just going to kind of skip over this whole business, if that suits you,” Vonnegut said. “There’s a lot of symbolism here that you really haven’t delved into and it’s just going to be a mess. This is already dragging a bit, don’t you think?”

“I do,” I said. “Let’s skip it.”

And so we did.

Upon further discussion, we just skipped the sixth, seventh, and eighth circles as well. Too bleak. Those guys that killed themselves and then become trees? Yeah, no thanks. Not getting into that.

And so we entered the frozen center of hell, steeled ourselves against its frigid winds.

All the expected no-goodnicks were frozen in it’s icy depths: Hitler, Stalin, Pol-Pot, Mussolini, Aleister Crowley, like two thirds of the Popes, GG Allin, and the entire bloodline that led up to the 45th president of the United States.

At the center was the Great Beast himself, the fallen angel, Satan, a massive three headed monster. In my hell, all of the faces looked like the worst president in history, the aforementioned Donald Trump, which is to say they looked like Jim Belushi wearing a Musollini mask made from ham fat after he’s been bobbing for apples in marmalade. Horrifying, but not unexpected.

Each head had a massive set of flapping wings, which were the source of the frigid wind.

In each of its mouths were cheeseburgers made from the bodies of slave owners and Puritans and former Presidents and slave owning former Presidents.

“Quick,” I said. “Let’s get out of here before he finishes his burgers and starts talking.”

“You got it, kid,” Vonnegut replied. “The bum news is we’ve got to go down his leg to get out. It’s going to be just awful.”

We did it anyway, and it was awful. I don’t want to talk about it. Halfway down, reality did a loop-de-loop and we were climbing up again, toward a light.

“Is that purgatory?” I asked.

“No, you haven’t read The Purgatorio. Pretty much no one has. That’s the end of the line for us. It’s been good knowin’ you, Messerschmidt.”

“Same to you, imaginary Kurt Vonnegut. Maybe I’ll slip in the shower one day and we’ll meet again.”

“Poo-tee-weet,” he said.

So I climbed into the light and out of hell.

Next thing I knew, I was was back on the muddy shore of the Red River, wet, cold, and shivering, but no worse for the wear, as they say. I grabbed the bag that said “The Phoenix Lights”. It was just a tent. But I needed a tent, so I took it, and headed home.

The end.

Parasites

Parasites

Parasites. They are horrifying. More than normal bugs, even. Like bugs for bugs, but with insane, almost supernatural powers of manipulation. They are also fascinating and, I suspect, much more important to our lives than most would imagine.

Some examples:

There is a fungus that can infect an ant, make it leave its colony, crawl three feet up a tree at exactly solar noon, find a leaf on the Northeast side of the tree, crawl onto the leaf, and clamp its mandibles down on the thick stem running through it’s middle. It then paralyzes the ant, waits four hours, and explodes its spores all over the ground below.

This is a fungus, not even a creature, exactly.

There is a wasp that can sting a specific type of spider, sedating it and filling its abdomen with wasp larvae. Already, this is unbearably grotesque, but there’s more. The larvae then instruct the spider to build a web different from the beautiful, symmetrical one they’d normally be busy creating – something hideous and Lovecraftian, ropey and double stitched, suited to larval purposes. The web can be different depending on the location. If more protection is needed, it can be made in three dimensions, with a kind of ceiling hiding the gestating wasps. The larvae then devour the spider from the inside out and use the newly spun web to pupate and emerge as new, nightmarish adult wasps. Absolute degenerates.

These are things scientists are only beginning to understand.

There’s the now semi-famous case of toxoplasmosis – a single celled monster that infects rats, decreasing their inhibition and making them more cat friendly. The cat eats the rat, and shits out the toxoplasmosis, where it waits for a human to clean up the shit. Then it gets into the human brain and, it is theorized, makes humans somehow love cats, inadvertently creating 70% of the internet culture of the 2010s. Studies show that fully one third of humans are infected with toxoplasmosis. There’s a really good chance your brain is riddled with it right now.

We know of but a minuscule percentage of a percentage of all existing parasites, but it has been estimated that these dastardly pests outnumber all other living things on Earth four to one. We are essentially living on their planet, at their behest. They live around us, in the food we eat, in the pets we keep. They live INSIDE of us, feasting on us and the horrific foods modern people engorge themselves upon. God knows what they’re making us do. Our “free will” could very well be nothing more than the complicated intersecting commands of untold numbers of these wee, hideous beasts.

Thousands upon thousands of times I have asked myself this question: What would make a sane human being – someone otherwise functional, perhaps even kind and good – become obsessed with donald trump, a man who looks like a used condom filled to busting with butterscotch pudding, a crude, too small caricature of Mussolini drawn near the top, topped with dog-shit flavored cotton candy, and a personality to match his looks?

Could the answer be some nightmarish parasite?

I think it might.

I think the process may play out something like this:

At a young age, a person without any defenses built into their system for such thoughts, feelings, and critters, ingests the parasite – we’ll call it Magacepholis – perhaps through an undercooked fast food cheeseburger or some feral raccoon droppings or maybe it’s passed down from their infected, reprehensible parents. Maybe the parents were playing with feral raccoon droppings or ate an undercooked McDonald’s cheeseburger, or vice-versa, or their parents did. It’s hard to say where these things start.

Anyway, Magacepholis wriggles its way up from the intestinal tract toward the brain, where it lodges itself and feasts on the brain matter responsible for sense, reason, and empathy. Magacepholis would be hermaphroditic which, ironically, the host will come to be intolerant of as it deviates from the rigid ideas of sexual and gender norms that the self-hating parasite creates. As a hermaphrodite, it will spawn and spawn, spewing out thousands of hungry, hateful little pupae that will continue to feast on the brain. These pupae release a neurotoxin that alters the hosts sense of decency and attracts them to hideous, lying goo-bags with the style sense of a petite mannequin in a struggling Reno, Nevada big and tall store, convinces them that these preposterous dung clowns are some kind of benighted demigod.

Once the frontal lobe has been consumed, the now mature Magacepholi make their way back down the host body to rest in the reproductive organs, waiting to be inserted into their new baby host or a raccoon or a McDonald’s cheeseburger.

Some of the pupae are also disseminated via the shouting lunatic host’s spittle, maybe. I don’t know. I haven’t worked this all out, it’s just a theory.

But I think this theory explains a lot.

How do we combat this scourge?

First and foremost, we must never copulate with the infected. You’ll know them by their unpleasant musk, dead, watery eyes, stupid words, stupid actions, and ridiculous hats/flags/beer cooozies/bumper stickers what-have-you.

Honestly, they are self repelling to any uninfected person. I suspect Magacepholis wants its host to mate with another host to create some kind of double super-parasite. Hermaphrodites are actually capable of sex with others of their kind, and maybe this is a more powerful form of reproduction for them.

Second, we need to find a predator that will kill the Magacepholis without harming the host. Or they can harm them, I’m not particular on that point. This could also be a medicine, but this parasite is adept at refusing medicine – or anything good for the host or in any way related to science. Its ability to compel the host to deny what is in their own best interest is its most insidious trait. So it will have to be a predator, perhaps another parasite – let’s call it the Sanity Worm – which I think we’ll also disseminate through cheeseburgers, which we can sell the infected at a new restaurant that proudly flaunts its owner’s homo and xeno phobia. They’re logo can be like a white Jesus Colonel Sanders, the Magacepholis will love that. They’ll have a sign on every door that announces that firearms are not only permitted, but encouraged and be very particular about who goes in what bathroom.

The third option is, you know, how to phrase this? A little too genocidal for my tastes.

In the meantime, we need to be studying this menace. This is where I need your help. I need you – yes you, my friend – to begin applying for grants to fund the dissection of deceased trump supporters while I finish this book about parasites I’ve been reading. It’s really the least you can do.

But there are more parasites than just the Magacepholis influencing our behavior.

Perhaps the reason I sometimes get sad and eat two sleeves of saltine crackers while watching episode after episode of Ancient Aliens is because there’s a flour and sodium hungry critter in me who wants to learn about its ancestors.

Perhaps you’re listening to this podcast because one of the thousands of gruesome vampires in your brain has good taste.

Maybe one of my parasites made me type that.

Let’s ask it, shall we?

I’ve been chatting with an acquaintance of mine, Dondy Bittleship, who bills herself as a pet psychic. I was, understandably, skeptical of her claims, on account of they’re preposterous. She says she can psychically speak to animals over the telephone, for cripe sake. But what I now know about parasites makes anything seem possible. This world is a more horrifying, miraculous place than you or I could ever suspect, I suspect.

So, in preparation for this episode, I’ve been training with Dondy to develop the psychic abilities she says we all have, and will now attempt to communicate with my parasite.

Okay, here goes.

Ahoy-hoy! This is Reid’s parasite speaking. Parasite’s, really. There are a lot of us in here, of many different kinds, but we’re – that’s a singular we, kind of, got sort of a hive mind thing happening, and not just inside Reid, but inside of all of the entities we inhabit, which, let me tell you, is a LOT of entities, we’re probably inside you too, if you’re listening – you don’t have a name for us yet because you don’t know we exist – SURPRISE! – we call ourselves Danky Dan. That’s the collective name. We – again, that’s a first person we from here on out, you can call us Danky Dan – can’t make Reid’s mouth make the sounds of our individual names and really they’re not that important as, like we said, we’re mostly the same entity.

Anyway – We’re rambling! – we thought it might be easier to just tug on a few wires in here and speak directly through him than to go through the psychic back and forth and risk being misquoted.

We don’t get much chance to directly speak to you big dumb oafs, We want to get this right!

So let us start over, as we’re the ambassador, we guess, for all parasites – though we really only speak for ourself – and this is our first official introduction, so we should make some stab at eloquence.

Ahoy-hoy, human oaf! We’re Danky Dan, a parasite that lives inside Reid, specifically, but also, many, many of you! We’re not new here, and we’ve known you – you, as in, human meat machines – for an unfathomably long time, but since we’re just introducing ourself, it’s nice to know you!

It’s been very nice to know you indeed, actually. You’re our home, our vessel, our sustenance, our entertainment.

Our use for you is, essentially, as Reid astutely hypothesized – Just kidding! We made him type that, you goofballs would be good for just about nothing without us! Ah, you’re lovable, though – we basically need you to consume salt and flour. It’s what we feast on. Also, high fructose corn syrup, but that didn’t really fit the joke. We are absolutely the reason you people consume such an insane amount of high fructose corn syrup! We’ve made you put it in everything. The parasites that like to spread themselves through coitus with attractive humans hate that, but that’s the way the world works, right? Everybody’s trying to do for themselves. And the parasites that live on your shame and self-loathing love it, so, what can you do? Can’t please everyone.

So, like we also had Reid mention, we like to watch Ancient Aliens, which is why there are 18 seasons of that nonsense. You fleshy automatons are way, way off on most of that stuff, but it’s fun to watch you try to parse it out. Or watch your parasites . . . listen, the world is very complex and even we don’t fully understand the entirety of the vast web of organisms and their motivations. We’re mostly just concerned with the flour and salt and high fructose corn syrup – god, that stuff is good – and, you know, enjoying ourself every once in a while.

And, besides, we don’t really want you to know all that much. We’d hate for whatever shreds of free will that actually exist inside you glorified cows to get any funny ideas about ditching us and trying to run things on your own.

That would be a disaster.

So, with that, I’ll say . . . well, it’s hard to know what to say. See you later seems wrong. We’re right here inside you. Hopefully you don’t see us, know what I mean? Ha! Well, all the best, then, and don’t ever stop drinking soda. We fucking love that shit.

Oh my god, what was that? Um . . .

Sorry, just trying to get my bearings here. That was so . . . weird.

It couldn’t have possibly actually been the parasites living inside me. I must have accidentally self-hypnotized or something while trying to psychically contact a creature inside of myself.

Dondy Bittleship did mention that once happened when she was trying to extract a tape worm that she’d caught from a kangaroo she had to do mouth to mouth resuscitation on after it had a seizure brought on by childhood trauma during one of their phone sessions.

Still. I did NOT like that.

Yikes, ah, oh, I guess, I guess we have a sponsor today. Almost . . . forgot. So here’s an ad, and I’ll talk to you next time.

High Fructose Corn Syrup
Gooey! Syrupy! So, so sweet! You know it, you love it! It’s High Fructose Corn Syrup!
And here’s the good news! There’s no need to rush out to buy anything! It’s in just about everything you eat! That’s why it’s all so good!

Some Sammy Say-It-Ain’t-Sos out there will try to tell you that High Fructose Corn Syrup is bad for you, but would you just look at that guy! He’s constantly posting about GMOs on Facebook and RUNS! OUTSIDE! He must be just miserable!

But not you, because you’ve got HIGHT FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP as your friend and constant companion!

Have you ever tried tomato sauce without it? You know the stuff that your racist, probably dead old granny used to make? DISGUSTING! It’s lacking one key ingredient, and do you know what that is?

No, not love, you semi-sentient sweet potato! It’s HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP!

IT’S IN EVERYTHING, SO THERE’S NO USE TRYING TO AVOID IT!

Have a great day!
This message has been brought to you by Danky Dan.

Flat Earth

flat earth

No script this time, because I wrote this a long time ago and don’t know where it is.

References and allusions include, but are not limited to: God, Jesus, Mork and Mindy, NASA, Armageddon (movie), Aerosmith, American Idol, the United Nations, Freemasons, Bill Nye, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Degrasse Tyson, the New World Order, Satan, New York, Lutherans, Facebook, YouTube, PIZZA HUT, Disney, Metallica, Isaac Newton, “God Bless the U.S.A.”, Pokemon Go, Feminism, the Coriolis Effect, Admiral Byrd, Red Bull Stratos Felix, Apollo 8, Strawberry Kiwi Shasta, Carl Sagan, Albert Eistein, Apple, Reptilians, and Mole People.

The First Night of College

It’s 2001, and I have just arrived on campus at the University of North Dakota in the city of Grand Forks for my first year of college.

I am excited, slightly nervous.

Grand Forks is only 81 miles North of my hometown, Fargo, and several of my friends are going to be here as well. This will be a lot like high school, only better, I assume, but I don’t know, really. Most of my knowledge about college life comes from Saved By the Bell The College Years and I can’t imagine that’s very accurate.

I’m excited to learn, I’m excited to party. I would very much like to lose my virginity. I am very typical.

I’ve driven to Grand Forks in my Cobalt Blue 1994 Chevy Cavalier, a terrible plastic car. I wanted to, as a joke, get a personalized license plate that said FNKYDVA. I am now glad I didn’t do that.

My father has followed me to Grand Forks to help me get settled. He and my mother have just divorced. I am glad to not be in Fargo for all of that.

We unload my stuff. Some books, clothes, a gorgeous blue iMac, fresh from Best Buy. We say some unsentimental goodbyes, and I sit on the curb to smoke my first cigarette as a free man and contemplate my new life.

My prospects are good. I’m out of the house, finally. My parents are divorced, finally. That was a long time coming. This isn’t the greatest college in the world, but it’s fine. I’ll maybe stay here for a couple of years and then transfer somewhere else. What do I want to be? A writer, mostly. Maybe a teacher. I think most writers also teach. Journalism? Maybe journalism. I’m not so concerned about any of that now. My social life is what I’m concerned about. Meeting girls. I want to meet girls. And I want to drink. Drink to meet girls, that’s the goal.

I am intelligent but not smart.

I am perhaps the most free I have ever been or will ever be. I could get in my car and leave here. That option has always been in the back of my mind. I could, theoretically, walk up to any kid here, theoretically start a conversation, and begin a new life path.

I don’t do this.

My friends begin to arrive. Brady, Jake, Jamie, Travis, Tony. I’ve known all of these guys since we were kids. I have not gone far outside of my comfort zone.

Once we’re moved in, we gather in Jake’s dorm room to make plans for the night. Jake’s dorm will become a central meeting point as he will soon have driven his roommate out with a plan of making himself impossible to live with and leaving dildos everywhere. Jake’s room will soon become barely inhabitable. One night, ripped on whiskey, with whiskey left, but out of chaser, we will take some pudding cups out of his mini-fridge while he is in the bathroom and chase the whiskey with that. He will be furious that we have stolen his pudding. He will become more furious when he notices that we are getting cigarette ash all over his floor, as though he’s not the worst offender. He will yell at us. Jaime, who is an asshole, will look him dead in the eye, drop his cigarette on the flour, and grind it into the rug with his foot. Jake will lose his mind and kick us all out. By the time I get back to my dorm, just down the hall, he will have left a message on my answering machine. It goes like this:

“I’m sick and tired of you guys coming into my room, eating all my pudding cups, and putting out cigarettes on my floor!”

He will then call my mother at 2 in the morning and make the same complaint to her.

This quaint anecdote is my freshman year of college in miniature.

This is a digression.

Tonight, we are all excited. We’ve obtained alcohol – a bottle of Windsor Canadian Whiskey, our staple. We are free, and we have booze and cigarettes and a lead on a party – at a frat house down the road. We know some people there, from the class ahead of ours.

We are not frat guys, but we don’t necessarily know this yet.

Okay, here’s where I get to the real part of the story and stop writing like some half-ass college bro Hemingway.

So, we get sufficiently liquored up – shots and more shots all around, something to ease the nerves – and head out, as a group to this party. This is how we almost always travel in college, none of us confident enough yet to make the leap to any kind of truly independent existence.

We get to this party at around dusk, and it is pretty massive. People outside, people inside. College Girls. Dudes that looked so much older than me talking to those girls. There’s a karaoke machine outside and this lunatic – who I’ll encounter again later – is singing a Bloodhound Gang song and everyone is eating it up. He is the king of this party, clearly.

Near him, people happier than I have ever been or ever will be are playing volleyball. It’s all just so fucking typical.

At some point in the night, very drunk, I am separated from the pack, which is not my preference. I need the comforting strangeness of my friends to make me feel comfortable and less strange.
I somehow started talking to this guy I vaguely know from high school – two years older than me – a “COOL GUY”, and completely obnoxious.

He says, “You having fun? See any girls you like? Are you a ladies man?” Shit like that. I’d respond “Kind of, obviously, and no” if I were being honest, but I’m not.

So he says, “That girl over there. Go talk to her.”

This is an obnoxious thing to say.

I resist, but ultimately cave. Maybe this guy knows something I don’t. So, far too drunk, attempting confidence, no idea what to do, I approach this girl, who is in a group of four girls, chatting, and – I cringe to even say this – I put my arm around her shoulders and say, “How’s it going, ladies?” To which one of the other girls responds.

“Don’t FUCKING touch my friend!”

The guy that urged me on is watching and laughing, and all the girls laugh.

And so I decide to leave the party. It’s really my only option at this point, and the decision is not even made consciously. I am bodily repelled from the party.

Really, the only reasonable option would be to laugh along and apologize and have a conversation, but I’m not particularly emotionally mature at this point. So, I walk back to the dorm, in a blind shame panic.

When I get to the dorm, my situation becomes worse. I don’t have my keys. I have locked them in my car. I have the key to get into my room, but not the dorm. And it is very late, and nobody is around. I wait, hoping for someone to open the door for me, but a half hour goes by and no one comes.

I head back to the Frat Party, try to remain inconspicuous. Head down, I make my way inside to find the one guy I actually know who lives there, Jeremy. I explain to him that I am locked out of my dorm and just want to sleep. He generously offers up his room, which he shares with the Bloodhound Gang lunatic.

And so I lay in his bed. This is not how I imagined the night going. People are still having fun outside of this room, but I am hiding in a dude’s frat house bunk bed, listening to Eliot Smith, trying to sleep.

The door opens, and the Bloodhound Gang Lunatic comes in. He is tall and lanky and has a wild beard, long before wild beards are popular. He LOOKS like a madman. He doesn’t know I’m there. He seems upset. He is crying. He grabs the cordless phone, and climbs to the top bunk, almost steps on me on his way up.

In his bunk, he dials a number and immediately begins to scream at the person on the other line.

“You fucking lied to me! I know you fucking lied to me! You always do this!”

From the phone I can here a girl, frantic, sobbing, denying.

“You fucking liar! I’m going to kill you!”

He hangs up the phone, hops off the top bunk, tosses the phone on the bed I’m lying on, and storms out.

Now I am left with a decision. Should I warn somebody that this man is potentially going to kill his probably girlfriend? Is this my problem? Is there a moral obligation? My confidence is shot. I convince myself that there’s no way he’s actually going to do anything. I try to go to sleep. I cannot.

A half hour later, the phone, still on the bed, rings, and, unthinking, I answer it.

It is a sobbing, scared girl.

“Help me! Help me! He’s going to kill me!”

I say, “Um, hey, I’m just in Jeremy’s room. Were are you? What do you want me to do?”

I can now hear pounding on a door and the Bloodhound Gang Lunatic screaming.

“I’m locked in the bathroom. Fuck. He’s going to kick the door down. Tell Jeremy! He’s going to kill me!”

She hangs up the phone.

I hop out of the bed, take a large swig from a bottle of booze on a desk, and head out to find Jeremy. This doesn’t take long. He’s playing pool.

“You’re up!” he says. “Grab a beer!”

“The guy that stays in the room with you is trying to kill his girlfriend. She told me to tell you.”

“Oh, fuck. I’ve gotta go!”

And he leaves. Everyone else scatters.

I sit down on a filthy couch, suddenly alone in the rec room of a frat house, and drink some more, until around 4 in the morning, when I decide to try again to get into my dorm.

This time I get lucky, the first luck I’ve had all night. A janitor is entering through the back and I ease in behind him.

I go up to my new room, smoke a cigarette at the window, sloppily, blowing smoke inside and leaving ash everywhere. I strip down to my boxers and go to sleep on top of the covers.

I am awoken at 8 AM the next morning, when the door to my new room opens. It is my roommate. He is with his family – Mother, Father, Sister. They look nice. They look like maybe they’re going to church after this. I am just about naked, my penis is very probably hanging out the flap of my boxers. I look like I’ve been up all night drinking whiskey and smoking cigarettes. The room smells of whiskey and cigarettes.

I smile, say hello, pull the covers over myself, and go back to sleep.

Freedom is hard.

The end.

Depression

Depression

Hello, friend. Welcome back to The Irrationally Exuberant. I hope you’re taking care of yourself in these troubled times. Which brings me to our topic: Self Care, specifically, dealing with depression. I have it, you, I assume, have it, since you’re listening to this show. Your Mom’s probably got it. Your Dad’s in denial about his, has never done the work needed to overcome it and has instead repressed the deep sadness he feels intrinsically, but also about dreams unfulfilled, potential untapped, relationships irrevocably harmed, and maybe expressed that hurt as anger and resentment over some perceived change in the world that has left him behind, a victim of some ambiguous other.

Little Timmy Messerschmidt: Dis isn’t funny, Weid. Dis is pwetentious pwojection and not neewy as cweve as you fink it is. Why do you even botha? Does anybody even listen to this widiculous show?

Oh, hello Little Timmy Messerschmidt. Ladies and gentleman and ungendered friends, this is Little Timmy Messerschmidt, a little boy/physical manifestation of my depression. Timmy, I thought you were sleeping?

LTM: I don’t neva sweep, I jus west. Isn’t dis show just a futile attempt to mask the meaningless of wife wif artistic pwetensions wifout actuwawy physicawy exposing youself to the outside wold? Isn’t dat just a wittle pafetic? Yo a gwown man doing goofy voices in his basement.

God, Little Timmy, you’re just awful, but also painfully insightful. You know, that may be somewhat true, but that’s what everybody does, or just about everyone. I understand that life is meaningless, probably, but that’s fine. There’s literally nothing you can do to give it meaning, so why worry about it? Even if I were somehow performing this show in front of thousands of people and effusively praised and rewarded, you wouldn’t go away, right? You’d still have negative things to say about it – probably something about selling out or being an imposter or whatever, right?

LTM: Hey wememba all dose times wen you were wiwy dwunk and you cawed wike evwyone you know and just wambled on wike an asshole? You fink they forgot about dat? Or do they just constantly have in da back a der mind how widicuwous you weawy a?

Uh. Timmy, I’m trying to do an episode here. I don’t have time for this. Why are you a little boy, by the way?

LTM: Dunno. I fink you jus had dis dumb voice and fot it would be funny to make it say depwessing fings. So owiginal.

You know what? Since I’ve got you here, and this show’s about depression, why don’t you just plop down in that chair and I’ll ask you some questions. You’re going to be here whether I want you to be or not, so you may as well make yourself useful.

LTM: Weawy? You wusuawy jus igno me. Wew . . . okay. Dis is all jus a finly veiwed and gimmicky pwemise dat you have aweady done befo wif Foam Chomsky.

Great. How old are you?

LTM: I’m dis many!

He’s flashed all ten fingers three times and then held up eight of them, so thirty-eight. Same as me. Makes sense.

Let’s try this another way. Can you think of any reason you might look like a little boy?

LTM: Wew, maybe I’m da age you were when you stahted to wealize dat maybe wife wasn’t pewfect and yo pawents wasn’t pewfect and evewyfing didn’t wevolve awound you.

I assumed I was a bit older when that realization came. You seem like, three, maybe an immature four.

LTM: Wew, I guess you assumed wong. You pwetty dense awot of da time, even do you fink yo soooooo smart, or act wike you do, anyway.

Great. Okay. I feel like we’re making progress. Hey! you spilled my water all over the desk!

LTM: YOU spiwed yo watow aw ove the desk.

God, you’re impossible. Why is clumsiness seem to be such an intrinsic part of depression, for me anyway?

LTM: Because you can’t do anyfing wight! Yo not a gwown up you know. Yo basicallwy and ol child and a burden to dose awound you and evewything you fink is good about yoself is an iwussion.

Why do you do this? Why do YOU exist? What’s your, like, evolutionary function?

LTM: Wew, it’s pwetty compwicated and you’ve only wead one aticow about it, but some scientists fink that depwession is the bwains attempt to sov weal, compwicated pwobwems by focusing it’s attention. You don’t want to eat or tak to peopow or anyfing and you onwy fink about you pwobwems, so if you just fowoed fwew and did somefing about dem you’d be fine, but noooooo, youw too wazy or stupid o whatevo, so you just take piws to twy to suppwess me o watch widicuwous shows wike Ancient Awiens to distwact yoself fwom me, and I nevow nevow go away until you jus do the wok but you neva wiw and so yo stuck wif me! I’m yo fault!

Or, it could just be an evolutionary fluke.

LTM: Ooooooow, evowution isn’t even weal and you don’t weawy know anyfing.

Yeah, that’s possible too.

Okay, so you’re telling me that maybe if I confront you and work out your obsessions like meaninglessness and shame and ineptitude and what-if kind of bullshit, and solve those things, you’ll go away?

LTM: (Laughs) Good wuck wif dat! And don’t foget body image, you fat asshole! (laughs)

Your right, that’s a tall order, but some of it’s doable. The ineptitude thing could probably realistically be addressed and worked out. And some of the what-if and shame stuff could probably be at least mitigated with some good old fashioned mindfulness. And the body image thing just requires exercise and healthy eating

LTM: Oh, shua. Youw get wight on dat. Wet’s say you did somehow finawy after awwwwww these yeahs, manage to actuawy consistently wok out and pwactice mindfulness – whatever dat means – and all the other stuff. Then you jus weft wif meaninglessness? Wike, the ultimate pwobwem dat de mos bwilliant finkers of aw time have been twying to tacko since fowevo? And the onwy sowution anyone has come up wif is wewigion? Yo a hiwawious. But not if da way you fink.

Okay, you have a point. But how about the days when you’re not around or barely around? Maybe if I can hone in on what I’m thinking and how I’m feeling on those days I can more often replicate that experience and see less of you.

LTM: Dose days yo jus wying to yosef or not paying attention. How many times do I haf to tell you that? Besides, you wove me. You wouldn’t know what to do wif yoself if you didn’t have me.

I have learned to kind of like you sometimes. But that’s not going to stop me from trying to kill you. I just started taking buproprion, that should do the trick.

LTM: Wisten, you’ve been on dat stuff fo a few weeks and we awe sitting hew having dis convasation, so fogive me if I’m not wowied.

Ah, you little scamp. One of these days! But seriously, thanks for chatting with me.

LTM: My pweasure!

Okay, well, that’s all the time we have. . .

LTM: Weid?

Yes, Little Timmy Messerschmidt

LTM: Do you fink I could sing a song to end da show? It’s weawy gooood.

Oh, sure that sounds great.

LTM: Awight. Dis is called, “

Jesus, Little Timmy. What the fuck was that?

LTM: I suppose you could do betta?

You have a point. Well anyway,Thank you for listening, and take care of yourself.

Goodbye.

Metal

A few years back I got the itch, as I often do, to start a new podcast. I mostly ignore these itches as scratching just makes it worse, but this time I could not. I began writing and planning a solo show called Reid Messerschmidt Gets Metal. I was going to start it like this:

RMGM INTRO

Hello. I’m Reid Messerschmidt – a 34 year old father and husband. I have a house and many things – four vintage globes, a vinyl collection, and a desk job among them.

I’m a culture snob. An elitist. What’s charmingly known these days as a libtard cuck. A low T Beta, as they say. A snowflake.

I enjoy musical artists like Belle and Sebastian and Jimmy Scott and The Smiths and Edith Piaf and, sometimes – a lot, really – Neil Diamond. I think he’s criminally under rated and I like to talk about that opinion as though it were objective and important. I’ve spent significant time with the Pet Sounds boxed set and I love documentaries, Ingmar Bergman films, calling movies films, feelings, books about feelings, bike rides, progressive (not prog) agendas, and quietness. I don’t love injustice and toxic masculinity. I say things like toxic masculinity.

I’ve been known to sport a cardigan.

As such, I am not a metal guy. I like to think that I know good music when I hear it, regardless of genre, but metal is a blind spot. A big one. And I don’t just mean the music.

Metal is more than a genre, it seems to me. It has a built in culture, and that culture feels impenetrable and scary. I’ve dabbled around its edges, sure. I went through the requisite Metallica phase in Junior High-school. I saw Corrosion of Conformity live once. Also, Korn. I liked the former and not the latter, though, to be honest, I went into the Korn show with a pretty bad attitude.

Let’s see . . .

That Roots album by Sepultura is pretty rad. I predictably kind of like Deafheaven, as they are the metal band that guys like me are supposed to kind of like.

I enjoy what I’ve heard from Hawkwind, but I haven’t gone very deep with them and I’m not sure they’re very metal.

I think occult stuff is fun, but I didn’t care for the Lord of the Rings movies and I’ve never read the books.

I don’t care for dragons.

I’m not particularly angry. Occasionally perturbed? Yes. Often annoyed? Sure. Riddled with angst? Less, in my old age.

And not angry.

To me, at this point, metal represents rage, a spectrum of masculinity that I find completely foreign, and a complete disregard for fashionably good taste that a big part of me admires. It’s a home to a lot of unrepresented folks in the ongoing culture wars, some that I get, many that I don’t.

So I want to get metal. And that’s what this podcast is all about.

Getting metal.

I’ve made a list of every metal band that I can come up with, From Sabbath to Cannibal Corpse to whatever the fuck is going on with metal right now. I honestly don’t know. Based on some cursory internet searches, it looks to consist mostly of skinny guys with neck tattoos and Hot Topic haircuts calling each other fags and arguing about absurdly specific genres designations.

For the most part, I only know the band names. I’ve purposely tried not to really listen to any metal yet or find out too much about any one group.

I’ve chopped that list up and put it in something very metal – a skull to which I’ve applied Norwegian Black Metal makeup – and each week I’ll draw a name out of the skull, deep dive into whatever band comes out, and let you know what I find and what I think.

And guests. There might be some guests and whatever else comes up here.

My goal is not just to understand the music. I want to understand the culture. To understand the anger and the dragons. The term metal is broad to the point of meaninglessness, but under its tent are generations of unsatisfied and angry white folks in all the styles that those people come in. Folks that feel persecuted even if the “mainstream” sees that as a delusion. That’s a very broad demographic in and of itself, but one that a lot of the current issues in the world today seem to emanate from and circle around – and a demographic I feel very apart from but also, sometimes, close to. It’s like a parallel dimension to the one I live in that sometimes intersects with mine, via weird specters and psychic interference.

It’s something of an ignored demographic, and I think maybe its heart lies somewhere in the metal universe.

But maybe I’m wrong. And if all of that seems like a ridiculous stereotype and way off base, I want my misconceptions corrected.
Either way, I intend to approach this without malice and condescension. We’ll see how that goes.

Pushing aside malice and condescension isn’t easy for a snob.

And, you know, I want to hear some great new – new to me, anyway – music with fresh ears.

The whole thing seems like a vast, gnarly landscape, and I’m excited to get lost in it.

But not too lost, I hope.

My wife probably won’t let me get a neck tattoo.

I wrote something like 7 episodes of that show. Ones for Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Metallica, Megadeth, Motorhead, and Hanoi Rocks, for some reason. I listened to the ENTIRE catalogue for each of these bands, read books, watched videos and documentaries.
It wasn’t working – I think reading Dave Mustaine’s autobiography and shotgunning his full discography in a single, horrific week broke me – and I realized I needed to come at this from a different angle. I needed a cohost and this thing couldn’t be scripted.

So I looked around me for a metal guru and found one in the unlikeliest of places – my office job. There was this gentleman, Robert Piller, who was muscled, covered in tattoos, had a slicked back undercut and listened, I overheard, to bands called things like Cattle Decapitation. Seemed like a funny guy but a little scary. Perfect.

I only had one question for him:

“How do you feel about Donald Trump?”

“I fucking hate him,” replied Robert.

“Do you want to do a metal podcast with me?”

He said yes.

Each week, Robert would choose a band for me to deep dive into and then we’d talk about it. It lasted about a year, until Robert moved to Minneapolis and my wife and I had another baby.

It was great. I learned a lot. Met a lot of great people. Saw a lot of great shows. Listened to a lot of great music. Listened to a lot of terrible music. Made a great friend. I have many thoughts about metal, and have continued to listen to it.

Today on The Irrationally Exuberant, we’re going to find out what I’ve learned.

Let’s start with a song I wrote about metal. It’s called “__

God, that was beautiful.

Metal, I have learned, is significantly less boneheaded then I first suspected. Not to say that it’s NOT boneheaded – there are factions that are more boneheaded then you could ever imagine – just that much of it isn’t boneheaded and at all. Much of it is very heady, and much of it is good natured and goofy and wonderful in a way that I never would have suspected.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I portrayed myself as very precious in the opening monologue, and there was a time when that was very true. It probably still is, a little, but being a father and a homeowner in the Upper Midwest will make a man hearty and at least semi-masculine. Maybe that’s not a requirement, but it’s how things have panned out for me.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t still be moved to tears by twee-pop, for Christ sake, and I still very much like antique globes and all the rest of it.

I opened every episode of our show with another example of my preciousness, though this became increasingly difficult as I was spending more of my time – and enjoying it! – with absurdly un-precious bands like Brujeria and Slayer.

But here are some of the examples of show openings and my preciousness.

Welcome to Reid Messerschmidt Gets Metal with Robert Piller, where I, reid messerschmidt.
A man who has twice eaten a whole thing of his wife’s gummy prenatal vitamins.

Gets ebay alerts for vintage cardigans.

Has defended Ariana Grande to his wife.

Will one day, without a doubt, take up bird watching in a big way.

Every year reads Ethan Frome on the day of the first snowfall.

Recently made a Mom Rock 1991-1993 playlist and listens to it constantly.

Is currently reading the Phil Collins Autobiography.

Often wistfully reflects on the time I saw Bjork live.

Just last night had a lovely time at something called the Sweetheart ball.

Doesn’t care for the Eagles but thinks some of Don Henley’s solo work is pretty good.

You get the picture.

But since then I have bought a Cannibal Corpse t-shirt and cut down THREE TREES WITH AN AXE!

Tremble before my testosterone!

Anyway. The music.

The first and most important thing to know about metal is that there are an astounding number of sub and sub sub genres that fall under the broad, meaningless term “metal”. This can be kind of confusing, so what follows is a helpful, though incomplete, guide, and the culmination of what I learned from my time in the metal scene:

Death Metal: Death metal bands can, generally speaking, play their instruments. Their singers sing like Cookie Monster about mutilation, necrophilia, cannibalism, what have you. They wear whatever they happen to be wearing. See Cannibal Corpse for Death Metal’s Platonic ideal.

Black Metal: Black Metal bands don’t give two shits about instruments. They may or may not be able to play them, but they generally want to sound like Dick Dale being shot out of a busted muffler into a giant cheese grater, so it doesn’t matter. Their singers sing like they are being murdered with a dull knife and aren’t taking it with any measure of bravery. They wear black clothes and black and white smeared make-up called Corpse Paint. The second, third, and fourth Darkthrone albums are Black Metal’s Platonic ideal.

Thrash Metal: Play fast riffs, look like an unhappy biker. Slayer’s Reign In Blood is the go to here.

Glam Metal: Derisively called Hair Metal. Spandex, hair spray, catchy, terrible songs about fucking or being sad about not fucking. Glam Metal was always a joke, but now it is exclusively plaid for irony. It’s not really metal, and I’d recommend you just skip it, but check out Hanoi Rocks, if you must.

Metalcore – I’ve seen two localish metalcore bands live, and both featured a chubby frontman wearing a polo shirt, as though he had just finished a shift at Office Depot, backed by a some dudes with fauxhawks and sparkly patterns stitched on their awful jeans, for what that’s worth, which is to say that metalcore is mostly for aging HotTopic bros and is best avoided. All the bands have names that sound like they should and probably have played on a secondary stage on the Warped Tour. I can’t tell you any good or even representative metalcore bands because Robert wouldn’t let me listen to them and I’ve been too scared to do it myself. I suppose Converge kind of qualifies but they’re pretty great and kind of transcend genre.

Doom Metal – Somehow Doom is an onomatopoeia. That’s just what it sounds like – doom. Shout doom as loud as you can with a second’s pause between each shout, and that’s what doom sounds like, basically. Big, crunchy, sludgy chords played slow and loud. The vocals vary, but ideally someone would be yelling about Dune or some such thing. Black Sabbath’s first album is the go to here.

And since I’m mentioning Black Sabbath, I should not that a band has never been so important to a genre as Black Sabbath is to metal. They invented it in the macro sense, but also invented pretty much every sub-genre, more or less. They are The Beatles of a dark parallel dimension, and they absolutely deserve every accolade they’ve ever received.

Moving on.

Progressive Metal – Do you enjoy Rush, but wish Geddy Lee wasn’t like a nerdier version of the dude that fronts REO Speedwagon? Do you like guitars more than people? Do you have a degree in music theory but also have done a fair amount of coke? Does the word polyrhythm get your motor running? Do you think it’s important that an album have a loose, barely discernible story arc? Then, boy, have I got a genre for you! Probably the Platonic ideal belongs to someone like Queensryche, but I’ve never been in the right mood to listen to Queensrych and hope never to be in that mood, so I’m going to point to either Mastadon’s Leviathan – which is about Moby Dick, sort of – or Tool’s Lataralus, which isn’t REALLY metal, but REALLY only appeals to metal dudes and philosophy majors that have dropped acid too many times.

Technical Death/Black/what have you metal: You can put the word technical in front of any metal genre. These are guys that make Tool look like The Stooges, that is to say, they forgo any fun in favor of alternate tunings and more strings and such. The second you see one of those guitars without a head on the end of the neck, you can bet your bottom dollar that you’ve come face to face with a tech band. This person will probably be listening to free jazz or Frank Zappa and have very straight hair that is far too long. Maybe transition lenses. Cynic is a Tech anomaly as the band is two pretty cool gay guys, but their music is tech all the way, meaning that listening to it makes me feel sleepy.

Power Metal – Inherently dumb things that take themselves very, very seriously can either be the worst or best experience imaginable. Power Metal is one of those things. Any given Iced Earth album is a terrific example of this, regardless of their frontman’s stance on violent insurrection and devotion to terrible presidents. They did a concept record about Spawn, for fuck’s sake, and did it with a straight face.

Gothic Metal – Music for people who like to read Edgar Allen Poe and get choked during sex. Type O Negative’s Bloody Kisses is the Platonic Ideal.

Grindcore – Fast, dirty, unhinged lo-fi. There’s a Napalm Death song called You Suffer that somehow manages to be recognizably Grindcore with a one second track length. Napalm’s first album, Scum, is the Platonic ideal and is inexplicably great. Also, Cattle Decapitation, which is Vegetarian Grindcore and better than it has any right to be.

Industrial Metal: It’s called industrial because it sounds like it was made in a steel factory – not that it was the product of a steel factory, but like it was literally recorded inside of a steel factory, during the work day. It tends to have unpleasant electronic overlays and post-tech-apocolyptic themes and is made by dudes that wear beat up cowboy hats and look like they are probably on a mandatory government list somewhere. I had hoped that seeing Ministry live would turn me on this genre, but I’m sad to report that they come off as what would happen if the darkweb threw up, but boring, somehow. Anyway, they are the torch bearers for industrial.

Alternative Metal: Every shitty, bland, aggressive bro band you hear on “Hard Rock” radio is Alternative Metal and they are uniformly terrible and people that like it are largely responsible for the state of the world today. The platonic ideal doesn’t exist – it’s all terrible – but I’ll just say that I can’t recommend not listening to Five Finger Death Punch strongly enough.

Folk Metal – I had a strong reaction to Folk Metal, as I’m sure many do. I’m not opposed to the IDEA of it, but the bands that I heard were . . . not to my liking. Eluviete is the first Folk Metal band I was introduced to and, to my ear, sounded like a grizzly bear let loose at a Renaissance Faire. I think that’s a fairly accurate description.

Djent – I don’t know. I guess djent is supposed to represent the sound the guitars make. Meshuggah is the embodiment of Djent and they were the first metal band I heard that I just couldn’t stomach. It’s very loud while also being very dull, unless you’re really into watching a drummer’s foot work.

Symphonic Metal – Very dramatic, even operatic, with strings. Quality varies wildly, in my limited experience. Fleshgod Apocalypse is pretty good, but I don’t know enough to tell you the definitive band.

Speed Metal – This one borders on meaningless. It’s supposed to be, I guess, a band that plays really fast, but most of them do. Or maybe it’s just the kind of drugs they take. The Internet tells me that Motorhead is Speed Metal, but I don’t think Motorhead would agree.

New Wave of British Heavy Metal – NWOBHM, they call it. A very weird term, and more relating to a time period and location than an actual sound, though the sound of NWOBHM has become recognizable. If you get into this particular genre, you’re going to have to pledge your allegiance to one of two bands: Judas Priest or Iron Maiden. I’m a Priest man myself, but I’ve come around on Maiden.

There are many, many more genre’s, but those are the ones I have some direct contact with.

It seems overwhelming, but it’s not. Just listen to whatever suits you – don’t worry about genre, unless you insist on being a snooty scene guy, which probably has its merits.

I’m not sure what you’d call a band like YOB, for instance, but they are wonderful. I defy you not to like “Beauty In Fallen Leaves”.

So, what did I take from my time with metal?

I learned that personal taste is much more elastic than I’d suspected. The first notes I heard from the first band Robert assigned me – Behemoth – were rough. I thought I’d made a huge mistake. I told Robert it felt like having a grown man scream at you about his feelings.

But by the end of the week, I’d come around. I’d started to get my metal ears, noticed some of the subtle touches, some good, some less so. I started to be able to pick out lyrics, themes, styles.

Listening to Behemoth now, it seems like – I don’t want to say Lite Metal, but not nearly as heavy as I prefer.

By week three it had really clicked. I was on a plane, sitting next to an old woman, listening to Cannibal Corpse, and thinking, “I don’t know why, but this is working for me.” And then the old woman gave me the side eye, glanced down at my phone, saw the cover of Tomb of the Mutilated, gasped, and looked straight ahead for the rest of the flight. And then I thought, “I kind of like that reaction.” And for the rest of the weekend, I listened to Cannibal Corpse non-stop. By the end of the week I was looking into buying their music on vinyl.

I’ve never been much concerned with genre – good music is good music – but adding metal to my life really expanded that. Even the stuff I think I don’t like has something to tell me.

I also learned that Metal concerts are more fun than the sad indie guy shows I’ve mostly gone to. Not to disparage sad indie guy shows, I’ve had some wonderful, emo times at those things.

I I managed to see a lot of great bands in one year:

Cannibal Corpse
Morbid Angel
Slayer
Ministry
Ghost
Thrallfrost
Demifiend
Egypt
Phil Anselmo
and a dozen other bands whose names I can’t remember.

Some truly great shows.

And even if you don’t like the band you’re seeing, standing just outside of the reach of a massive circle of people beating the holy shit out of each other is very entertaining.

Finally, I learned . . . maybe the most important thing of all. Something that has changed me forever, and the thought I’ll leave you with:

King Diamond is the greatest. THE GREATEST. EVER.

The end

Customer Service

The last two episodes of the show were heavy, so this episode is just a compendium of weird things that people said to me when I worked at a grocery store.

  1. I’m strolling through the meat department on my way to the back of the store, undoubtedly to eat a “damaged” box of fruit snacks or take a brief nap behind a pallet of store brand soda, when a woman stops me. She’s maybe 30 or 35. A white woman, no accent. Looks put together. No “this person is insane” alarm bells are going off. I tell you this because an unfamiliarity with the English language or severe mental illness would seem to be the only logical explanations for what happens next.

She’s holding a box of Suddenly Salad, a pasta salad starter kit. She’s pointing to a word on the back.

“What’s this?” she asks.

I look.

“Um, pepperoni?” I say, reading the word. Perhaps she’s dyslexic.

“Yeah, what’s that?” she replies.

This woman did not know what a pepperoni was. Clearly she was an alien disguised as a human but missing a few key pieces of human information. I tried my best to explain that pepperoni is a slightly spicy meat commonly found on pizza. She seemed satisfied. I remain perplexed.

  1. There is an old man named Pete. He is a regular. He pushes a cart around the store nearly every day, his breathing apparatus in the child’s seat, griping about this and that, occasionally trying (unsuccessfully) to convert me to Conservatism by misquoting dumb lines from Winston Churchill, who, though a hero, was also an asshole, just like Pete.

Today, he pushes his cart up to me, with a stern, unhappy look on his face, a bag of peanuts in the shell next to his breathing apparatus.

“Your peanuts are stale!” he says.

“Well, Pete,” I say, observing the thick coat of peanut dust on his breathing apparatus, “that doesn’t seem to have stopped you from stealing them.”

Pete goes on his way, eating more stolen, stale peanuts.

  1. Another regular, whose name I don’t know, pushes her cart up to me. She is Eastern European and very nice, but her accent is thick and communication is sometimes difficult. I’m happy to do it though, as she is very patient and appreciative. And she’s doing exponentially better than I would if I were in her home country.

“Where . . . is . . . karakas?” she asks?

Thinking fast, despite a hangover, I reply, “Eastern Europe, I think?”

I am wrong, of course. Caracas is a large city in South America.

“No, no,” she says. “CARACAS.” She puts her hand to her mouth and kind of pantomimes munching.

“Oh, CRACKERS!” I exclaim. “Aisle 9.”

  1. A co-worker approaches me.

“There’s an angry woman in the cheese section. Can you go talk to her?”

I sigh, and head toward dairy. There is a woman standing by the cottage cheese looking furious.

“You’re out of 2% Cass Clay Cottage Cheese?! How is that even possible!”

I think, “I don’t know lady. Dairy shortage? Tipped over semi? Tainted batch? Other customers, hungry for delicious cottage cheese? The answers to your question are endless. Maybe try one of the other THREE BRANDS of the exact product you are looking for or go with the 1% version of the same brand!”

I say, “I apologize. We should be getting more in tonight.”

She is unsatisfied.

  1. There is a man who has been brazenly stealing from the store. His MO is as follows: He takes a cart, fills it with meat, and exits the store with said cart. He’s done this twice, that we know of. Word has it, he’s selling the meat out of his backpack in the apartment building behind the store. This is a bold operation.

Bolder still are the people buying meat out of a man’s backpack in an apartment building.

Management asks me, a stoned teenager, to follow this man around the store and report back to them, so that they may call the police. I’m happy to do it, but have no intention of getting the police involved. I did and do not trust them.

Instead of going undercover, I walk closely behind this man.

After about three minutes of this, he asks, “Are you following me?

“Yes,” I say.

“Why?” he asks.

“Because you steal meat,” I reply.

He nods his head, agreeing, leaves his cart, and exits the store, probably goes on to become a wealthy entrepreneur.

  1. There is a very drunk man in the store. It is approximately 9 PM. He looks like perhaps he just left a Monster Truck rally. He is stumbling about, asking where to find something, but no one can understand what he’s saying.

Eventually it is decided that someone is needed who speaks drunk, so management sends myself and a coworker, Evan, to assist.

This is a wise choice.

“Corrrrrrrget-ted chuups,” the man slurs.

Evan and I look at each other, puzzled for a moment, and then our eyes simultaneously light up. Luckily, we are both not only drunks, but learned gentleman with large-ish vocabularies and strong powers of deduction.

“Corrugated!” We say in joyful unison.

“Corrugated chips! Ripple chips?” we ask the man.

He lights up as well. Grins. Pure bliss. He has been understood, possibly for the first time in his entire life.

We lead the grateful man to the chip aisle, put the salty snack in his hands, and send him happily on his way.

It is my greatest customer service achievement.

The end.

Sobriety

The idea of sobriety, to a drunk, is terrifying, far off, and totally necessary. To maintain the delusion that you are a reasonable, functioning, GOOD person, you must always have it in the back of your mind – Someday. Someday I will get sober, of course. This isn’t forever, just for now.

Sobriety is a fiction – like writing – you wield to keep yourself drinking.

Someday I will stop. Of course. The voice that whispers this is the same voice that says fuck it, and it says them both with utter conviction, utterly convincing, so long as you don’t stay sane long enough to really interrogate it.

When you do start the interrogation – if you do – the voice reveals itself as a serpent in the potential Garden of your mind. Not Satan – you’re not getting off that easy – but a great deceiver nonetheless.

The interrogation begins with visibility. You have to shine the light on the voice, like a haggard detective teasing a confession from a smirking criminal. You have to admit to yourself that it is a problem, that it lives inside of you, and that it does not live inside most people. You have to see it. To identify it. To name it.

Faced with the actual, impending, absolutely necessary reality of sobriety as opposed to the abstract idea of it you’ve lived with for years or decades, the serpent raises its voice, talks faster.

“Turn off that fucking light! Let’s talk, in the dark, quietly, like we always do.”

It doesn’t want you to know its name. It certainly doesn’t want you to speak it.

It took me a while to say to myself that I was an alcoholic, and even longer to say it out loud.

When I finally did, I was writing a story for a storytelling competition. I led with,

“Hello, my name is Reid, and I’m an alcoholic,” knowing damn well that every other alcoholic in the audience would immediately chime in with, “Hi, Reid.”

It was a joke. I had to make a joke of it to speak the truth. That’s almost always the case for me.

The first time I said it to my wife – Said, “I am an alcoholic” – I was reading her this story, probably two years after I’d stopped drinking.

That’s how stubborn the serpent is. Two years of being sober and I hadn’t summoned the strength to name him aloud.

Until that time I acted as though I was doing it for Kelly. For us. She said she didn’t want to have a baby until I had a year of sobriety.

That seemed reasonable.

So, as the good folks in Alcoholics Anonymous say, I white knuckled it.

I just didn’t drink. I wrestled the serpent, all the time, and there’s a reason snake wrestling isn’t a recognized sport. It’s hard and no fun to watch.

When the serpent’s words aren’t working – “She’s gone for the weekend, she’ll never know. What harm could it cause? No one will know but you and it will be such a RELIEF”– it starts to squeeze.

Some squeeze harder than others. Mine, like me, wasn’t particularly brawny. I didn’t have much for withdrawals. I didn’t drink every day at the time I quit, just on weekends, so my body wasn’t relying on a daily intake, didn’t depend on it.

But, for some people, there are major physical consequences to quitting cold turkey. There can be seizures. You can die.

I got lucky, but don’t use my luck as inspiration. Talk to your doctor. Don’t dry out alone.

So my serpent didn’t squeeze very hard, but goddamn can that thing keep talking in the face of scorn and resistance. And its memory is pristine.

“You’re feeling good, confident. Remember everything you put Kelly through? Falling down the stairs. Pissing the bed? You don’t deserve her. Do the right thing, come back to me and let her move on.”

Or

“This will actually STRENGTHEN your sobriety! You need to go out with a Bang! You need to go out with a really bad one or a really good one and I’ll keep alternating which it should be until you’re dead!”

Or

“You’re selling yourself out! Reid Messerschmidt is not a sober family man, he’s edgy and loud, magnetic. Sober Reid won’t be those things. Who will give a shit about Sober Reid?”

There was that. There was Sober Reid and Drunk Reid. They were two different people, and they couldn’t comfortably coexist.

Sober Reid, I thought (because the serpent told me), didn’t always know what to say and do. He was introverted and awkward. He didn’t take risks. Was conservative, even – in action, not ideology. Lower case c conservative – and god help you if you’re that.

Drunk Reid was a daring extrovert. An emotional and situational adventurer. He prided himself on getting in and out of strange situations. He didn’t think about anything, let alone how to stand, what to say, what to do with his hands. He was neurotic, but in a fashionable, fun way. He was INTERESTING.

There is some truth to both of those depictions, but they’re false in spirit. This is an insidious way to lie.

Sober Reid is more self-conscious than Drunk Reid was, but certainly not more than Hungover Reid, and Hungover Reid was in charge a lot of the time. And I’m by no means conservative in action. Might I have been had I not spent a decade of my life with no real control? Perhaps. But I DID spend a decade of my life with no real control, and it taught me a few things – how to get weird among them.

But I didn’t know any of this at the time.

I coped with all of it in a few ways, some healthy, some not.

First, the unhealthy:

I sought a legal, non-addictive, non-disruptive way to shift my consciousness, something to fill alcohol’s vacated role. This, to avoid leaving you in suspense, does not exist.

Weed I’d tried, and it’s still not legal where I live. I knew from experience that I’d overdo that, and there would absolutely be disruption. Getting high made me want to listen to music and not much else. Eat, I guess. The serpent told me I could just do it at night, after Kelly went to bed, that she wouldn’t even have to know – They have edibles now! – but it wasn’t a convincing argument.

So I did some research and landed on Kratom, which is a plant with opiate qualities that is not actually an opiate. I think it’s related to the coffee plant. I had to order it from a sketchy website, but it wasn’t illegal. You can get it at some of the less reputable gas stations these days.

It came in small Ziplock bags and looked a lot like pot. You can make tea out of it, or just ingest it. It’s fine. Makes you feel kind of pleasantly sleepy, but it’s one of those subtle drugs that kind of lingers in the periphery. It’s the kind of drug that constantly makes you wonder if it’s doing anything or just a placebo. Still, I immediately bought a ridiculous amount and started taking it all the time, despite its lack of any really satisfying tangible effect. I’d go out with friends and literally just eat this dried leaf at a table at the bar. It was ridiculous and didn’t last long.

My healthier and ultimately effective coping mechanisms were two:

I had an office in the basement with a couple of weird thrift store pictures on the wall: A giant, bucolic beach scene that I’d had with me since Post Landing – a calming homage to the Coen Brother’s Barton Fink – as well as a mischievously smirking old-timey kid next to a huge bike, who I called Pip, after the kid in Great Expectations. I decided to cover the walls in thrift store pictures. It became its own compulsion. I went to thrift stores constantly, in search of just the right art. I scoured antique stores and Boys Ranch’s and Goodwill’s for dusty, obscure portraits, unique prints, old photos. It was fun.

There’s something about a thrift store that is so reassuring. The things in there have lived many lives, have ended up here despite starting somewhere else. They have stories to tell. This wild eyed, garishly painted bust of Jesus Christ was manufactured somewhere in China 70 years ago, maybe, shipped overseas, bought by some hopeful artist or bored tinkerer or devout weirdo, painted lovingly in their home, sat on their shelf until they died, maybe, or moved, or downsized. Maybe it was inherited by their child, maybe it went to a thrift store in Texas and was bought by some other hopeful drunk, placed on their mantel, witnessed their struggle, brought reassurance or judgment, was even prayed to, perhaps, and then was again abandoned, somehow made its way to a steel shelf in Fargo, North Dakota, waiting for someone else to love it.

People grappling with their own introversion – which is every introvert I’ve ever met – tend to be nostalgic and materialistic. Not materialistic in a greedy sense, but in the way that they connect with things when they can’t connect with people. We have a deep desire to physically interact with the things that have imprinted themselves upon us. It’s not enough to remember a shirt you wore every day for a year when you were eleven, although you do that often enough. You want to find and buy and wear that shirt again.

Within a year, I had filled every inch of white space in my office with pictures of dead people and art, lined the shelves with strange busts, knick-knacks, and the wistful detritus of my youth.

It’s an ongoing project. Things are moved, replaced, jiggled, and reset to allow room for more. It looks like my head exploded and my psyche painted the walls. It’s beautiful, a living collage of ME, and I love it.

It reflects what I want to do with this show, which was the second coping mechanism.

As I mentioned before, I’d always called myself a writer. It was time, in my sobriety, to make that true.

But what would be the medium? Writing a novel didn’t seem an effective way to fend off alcoholism. Too many of the writers I admired had lost that fight.

I’d been listening to podcasts for years, they were the background noise to everything I did, a way to stave off silence and introspection.

There were many I loved. Marc Maron’s WTF was especially important to me. Maron’s a recovering addict himself and, though his show’s not about that, he brings it up regularly and his ability to exist as a sober person was inspiration in itself. I listened to every episode, collected every word about addiction, banked them, and used them when they were needed. Sobriety is when I needed them most, but when I was in my darkest days, they gave me something to consider for the future, a possible way out when the time came.

There was the intense, carefully considered storytelling of This American life, Ira Glass’s calming, kind, intelligent voice, which grounded me in reality, made me want to be a better person. A deliberate person, which is the opposite of a drunk.

There was the ecstatic goofiness of Comedy Bang Bang, a show built around the sheer joy of discovery.

There weren’t any rules.

It seemed the barrier to entry in the podcast world was pretty low, it was my best bet for getting my words in front of an audience, and I could do it.

So I started to plan. Honestly, I barely remember this. There’s this weird thing when you’re getting sober, where you feel, for the first year, like a drunk just not drinking. A dry drunk. Or that was the case for me, anyway. My brain was still trying to figure out how to function properly. I imagine neurons firing where they’ve never fired before, my brain slowly lighting up like a city at dusk, healing itself. I was still groggy, my thinking a bit muddled.

By the second year, you think you feel like a sober person. By the third year, you realize that was ridiculous, that THIS is what a sober person feels like, and then this happens in every successive year after that. It’s partially why sobriety birthdays are such a big deal. They give you a chance to assess how you feel different from a year, two years, three years ago.

I still have the notes from working out what this would be, so I know I made lists of topics, watched documentaries, started reading more vigorously than I had in a decade, probably ever.

I read a few books by Erik Larson. These are billed as nonfiction, and they are, but read like novels. And it occurred to me that some of the glue holding the thing together must be fabricated, and I asked myself whether that mattered. I decided it did not.

If I’m told that, say, Chester Arthur ate a chicken sandwich on April 5th 1882, and he, in fact, ate a bowl of soup with no sandwich, how does that affect me or current reality in any way? Even if I’m told something far more outrageous, that while Chester Arthur was eating his chicken sandwich, it was snatched out of his hands by a Bigfoot and he spent the rest of his life trying to get it back, which is why he only served one term in office, does that change anything that I know or how I live?

I don’t think so. It would be a much more fun story and might cause me to have a stronger belief in Bigfoot, but I’d be much more likely to assume that Arthur was mistaken and was just the victim of a mischievous monkey. Also a good story.

So that was intriguing to me, an idea I thought I could explore. The first element in my new, sober, still suitably odd and engaging thought process.

And then I remembered Chris Gaines, Garth Brooks’s weird, pop alter ego from the 90s, and it recaptured my imagination.

I started to write, without any real idea of what would happen. If you want to know what did happen, go listen to the Chris Gaines episode. I think it’s pretty good.

It was a revelation.

I had my outlets.

The one thing that everyone considering sobriety should really be told is that it will leave you with a shocking amount of free time. Shocking. You’ve got mornings, clear headed afternoons, unimpaired evenings. This is daunting. You’ve got to fill it up somehow, or sobriety won’t stick.

There are two other things you should know before you get sober.

  1. Life will get incalculably easier, which, of course, is a good thing, but doesn’t always feel that way. Drunks thrive on the struggle. It’s a part of the package. Maybe we’ll complain about it, but deep down, the wiliness and animal instinct needed to pull off functional addiction is itself addictive.
  2. Shame and regret are useless. Counterproductive. They can only hinder your recovery and are best tossed away. Feel your feelings, but move on as quickly as possible without totally pardoning yourself from the actual, outside harm you’ve done.

I hadn’t realized this yet in my first year, and it was hurting my marriage.

Kelly, obviously, was happy that I wasn’t drinking, but she was still wary, as she should have been. She didn’t trust me. And her feelings were still hurt that I’d been willing to almost tank our marriage for drunkenness.

I was so busy beating myself up for the same thing, that any outside condemnation felt superfluous and cruel. And when you’re forced to face your feelings for the first time, you are very raw.

So every time she expressed her feelings of hurt, I felt unfairly attacked. Wasn’t I doing the thing she wanted me to?

But that’s obviously not how feelings work.

Resentment lingers long past any termination of wrongs.

I would do something that, to me, felt like such a vast improvement over how I had been that it was above condemnation. But I was still a human being in the world. I couldn’t expect to be held to a lower standard just because I’d knocked the bar down so many notches.

It took work. It took time. That work was subtle and undramatic and I won’t bore you with it here.

We’re good now, I think, and when we talk about my drinking days, it doesn’t feel like an attack, because that is no longer me. That’s Drunk Reid. We all know he was an asshole, let’s have a laugh about it.

As I sit here writing this, it occurs to me – not for the first time – that paradoxically, my sober memories are less clear than those from my drinking days, which makes describing them difficult.

I think this is the case for a few reasons.

  1. Timelines become less distinct as you get older, obviously. As a kid, and as a young adult, everything seems momentous, and you work over them again and again in your mind. The stories, as they say, become etched in your mid. As an adult, hopefully, you spend less time etching.
  2. In my drinking days, I was consistently having traumatic experiences, inflicting them upon myself. Traumatic experiences imprint themselves in ways that the steady march of contentedness can’t. They mark off the days, signposts by which you can measure when everything else happened.
  3. The drinking stories have a short arc, which more often than not, can be reduced to the following: Expectation, elation, chaos, consequence. The arcs of a sober family man are longer, and less immediately dramatic, though much more meaningful over time.

So I’m left with a broad overview and a few milestones.

The first is the birth of my son. I’ve told most of this story before, in the episode called Otis and the Rabbit, and I won’t retell it here, but I do want to talk about sobriety and fatherhood.

When Kelly and I decided it was time to have a baby it felt like the end. Like the final death of Drunk Reid after a long fight against my will power. That Kelly trusted me enough to make me a father was a massive step, but I’m not sure I understood how massive it was at the time. When she told me she was pregnant, it meant the real end had come. To start drinking again now would make me a monster. This felt like a demarcating event, after which even the serpent couldn’t argue that drinking was justifiable, and to have gotten to that point felt like a victory. But unlike the engagement and buying of the house, there was no victory lap. I’d learned my lesson. This was a somber victory, or stoic anyway.

The lingering idea in the back of my head, the faint but still present promise of the serpent, had been that maybe we weren’t done yet. Divorces happen all the time and men go on to formidable second acts. People DIE. That’s how the HEROIC second acts begin.

This is a dark thought, I know, but when a liar is cornered, the lies become unhinged, especially when that liar is an extension of your subconscious mind.

But I knew, and know, that there are no heroic second acts for a drunk – not ones that involve drinking. I’ve played through the various scenarios that could theoretically get me drinking again, and the inevitable result of any of these scenarios, even in my imagination, is sad and gross. A burden and a disappointment to me and everyone I love.

No heroics, only tragedy.

And I already have my heroic second act. The sober one, where I’m a Dad and a husband and life is steady and sweet.

I said before that this is a happy story, not a sad one, and I realize I’ve yet to really deliver on that promise, but here it is:

Sobriety is a goddamned gift that makes everything that came before it worthwhile, and sobriety as a father is especially sweet, I think.

I’ve talked about the self-knowledge, experience, and gratitude that are the result of ten plus years of lost control.

These are magnified by fatherhood.

I look at these kids and can’t even believe that they exist, that I’m here for them to exist, that I’m present and GOOD at being their Dad.

When you’re a drunk in early adulthood, your maturity is stunted. I didn’t learn any practical life skills beyond basic survival, trivia, and what I read from books in all that time.

A problem would arise, and I’d adjust my life around it, instead of just fixing it. Once my air conditioner broke and, instead of even attempting to fix it, I was just hot and sweaty for an entire summer. Then I bought a new one. I also grew up with a father who probably couldn’t change a tire – if he could, I never saw it – so I was already behind.

Now, I get to learn with my sons. To rebuild myself from the ground up with the perspective of a man who has lived a life. It’s a joy. We’re constantly discovering together, and my stunted maturity means I can take some childish joy in it all.

I’m also lucky to have a wife that knows how to do things and a father in law that taught her all of that, and is patient enough to teach me as well.

I’ve become an ADULT adult at a rapid rate. The person I was even five years ago isn’t gone, but layers have been added. I was effete, impractical, neurotic, vain, smart, and obnoxious. I’d often say things like “I do not care for the out of doors”. Sobriety and fatherhood have made me more masculine, slightly more practical, far, far less neurotic, unconcerned with appearance, and infinitely less obnoxious.

I’m still very smart, obviously. And still pretty obnoxious.

I enjoy being outside. I love to mow a lawn. I’ve now chopped down four trees with an axe, if you can believe that. I can and do address problems as they arise, mostly. I no longer worry that I might accidentally pop my eyeball or refuse to swim in a lake because something might bite my penis, two things I was weirdly concerned about for a long time.

The number of mistakes I’ve made in my life are incalculable – to quote the Ben Folds song – “I don’t get many things right the first time, in fact, I’ve been told that a lot.” But with mistakes comes wisdom, with the added benefit of an emotional intelligence that can only be attained through prolonged misery.

I’ve often said that my super power is always knowing the most hurtful thing to say to a person at any given time – that, and being able to tell people which celebrity their baby resembles – and that is true, but the flipside is also true. I think I’m better equipped to understand how someone is feeling than most, even if I’m not always equipped, yet, to engage with that feeling.

This makes me a GOOD Dad. Not just a physically present Dad, though I’m that as well. An emotionally present Dad, a good Dad. I deeply love my kids and I tell them that constantly. I let them be who they are. I listen. We have actual conversations where we both come away having learned something.

The second sobriety milestone was a close friend – one of the Whiskey Kids I mentioned – who was also struggling with alcohol.

No specifics here – that’s his story to tell, mostly – but viewing his struggle from a sober remove was enlightening, allowed me to objectively – somewhat objectively – watch what I myself had gone through.

It was horrifying. Maddening. I was MAD at him, even though I, of course, knew that I’d been exactly the same way just a few years before.

If you’ve never done it, trying to talk to a drunk about their drinking is hopeless. When a drunk is drinking, after a few incidents and interventions, all they want to talk about is getting sober. They’ll weep and promise, plan, hope, alternate lies and brutal honesty. They are completely illogical, but so sold on whatever line of logic they’re on at the time that you almost agree.

Do not try to talk to a drunk about their drinking. It’s completely useless.

When a drunk is not drinking, it’s almost as bad. The gaslighting is relentless. “I know!” “I don’t want to talk about it!” “I’m fine!” “You’re making a big deal out of nothing!”

Experiencing this as the intervener gave me a better understanding of what I’d done to the people around me, justified their anger and resentment.

Eventually, my friend agreed to go to Alcoholics Anonymous, and I agreed to go with him.

I hadn’t gone to AA before. I don’t know why, exactly. The idea of it appeals to me – it’s like a secret society – but it took me two years to call myself an alcoholic out loud and by that time I felt pretty secure in my sobriety.

But going to AA was an experience. The first meeting we went to was an all men’s meeting. Saturday morning. Probably 200 men there.

If you’re not familiar with AA, it goes like this. Some meetings are different, but this is the one I went to.

The men gather in the service area of a large church. Coffee and donuts are available. A lot of people smoke outside. Most sit around one of the couple dozen tables set up, but many also sit on folding chairs along the periphery.

You’ll see people there you know. People you didn’t know had a problem. You’ll nod at each other. You’ll see people you know of, because they are visible in the community. Local celebrities. You will ignore that they are that.

You’ll see young people, and old people. People dressed up and people who look like they have to get back to the corn field when this is over. People that look like they’ve had a hard week and people that look like they’ve already gone for a jog this morning.

One person chairs the meeting, announces milestones, reviews any business. You go around the room with everybody saying, “My name is Reid, and I’m an alcoholic” to which every other person responds, “Hi, Reid”. It does feel like church, but only the good parts of church, the community parts.

Once the group portion is over, everyone splits off into small groups, and this is where things get interesting. The small groups, in this case anyway, meet in small Sunday School rooms, around tables and on chairs meant for young, tiny children.

This is humbling.

I thought about how the kids that would have Sunday School here the next morning had no idea what kind of business was taking place in this room today. I wondered about who had been in my Sunday School rooms before me, when I was young, and what had been said there.

What is said now is intense.

You have a collection of maybe eight men, all sitting with their knees at their necks. You have old, grizzled farmers, local politicians, young guys that don’t look like this sobriety thing is going to stick for them. You have people that have been doing this for 30 years and people that are there for the first time. There are no political affiliations here, no races, no ages, no class. Just alcoholics.

And then everyone shares what is on their mind. Most tell their story, many of them for the thousandth time. It is emotional. It is fascinating. It is honestly one of the best and most heartening experiences of my entire life.

You really haven’t lived until you’ve hugged a 60 year old North Dakota farmer who is weeping because of how badly he’s messed up his relationship with his kids. It’s an astonishing experience.

Which is why I didn’t keep going.

I felt like a spectator. I was already five years into my sobriety and didn’t REALLY need this. And my natural inclination is to collect stories. That’s not why AA exists. AA exists to allow people in similar, impossible circumstances help each other through.

It’s a remarkable organization, if only because it has been self-sustaining for 85 years. No funding, no central organization. No real official structure. Just thousands and thousands of meetings all over the world. At any given moment, wherever you live, you can find a meeting if you need it.

And the level of emotional vulnerability at these things – especially for a group of Midwestern men – is astonishing. You just won’t find it anywhere else.

I love it, but it’s not for me.

But I’ll say this: It’s very possible that it is for you, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

These days, my life is not perfect. I have bad moods, my patience leaves much to be desired. Sometimes marriage is hard, sometimes parenting is hard. Anxiety and depression are still in my life, will always be in my life, though they have changed.

Alcoholism and anxiety are tied in a kind of endless Gordian Knot, one leading to the other, the other leading back to the one. Because of this, it’s hard to say which is the root of the problem when you’re still drinking, though in my sobriety the anxiety remains – much improved but still there – so I know now that they are each their own entities.

Now the anxiety is mostly physical – manifests itself as restlessness. It’s not pleasant. It makes me feel like I want to crawl out of my skin and sleep becomes difficult, but I can identify and manage it. Exercise helps. Eating better would probably help. I’ll get to that someday.

Depression is the same way. When it’s there, it feels permanent, but I know it’s not, and it always passes, sometimes faster than others. But I know it always passes.

Depression and anxiety aren’t the unpredictable storm they used to be, coming and going without warning, often many times in a day. There’s an ebb and a flow to them.

So life is not perfect, obviously. You can’t leave yourself behind.

But any objective view of my life now is breathtaking, relative to what it was – relative to just about any life I can imagine. I am beyond lucky, beyond thankful. I shouldn’t be here for this. I shouldn’t be able to CONTRIBUTE to something this good.

But I am.

Sober Reid is a better man – and more interesting – than I could ever have imagined. Whatever fears I had about losing myself in sobriety were such bullshit that it’s hard to even comprehend them now. I lost nothing and gained everything.

Would I have been able to do it under other circumstances? Would I be sober if not for Kelly? I don’t know. I don’t want to put the burden of being my savior on her – she doesn’t want that AT ALL – and the work was something that I had to do. Maybe I would have found a way to do it without her. Maybe not. I’m glad I didn’t have to find out.

I don’t regret anything that I went through – that I put myself through – and I’m learning to be less judgmental of Drunk Reid. He was struggling with something much bigger than him. I don’t mourn (much) for lost time. All of that time was necessary, I think. I don’t cry for what could have been, because what is is all I could ever hope for. I’m not ashamed of myself. Obviously. I’ve laid everything out here. I’m happy to share my experience with anyone that wants to hear it. I hope some people find that helpful. I love talking to people who want to get sober. It really feels like the least I can do, and it happens a shocking amount.

So many people are struggling with addiction. So many people. If you are one of them, just know that you are not alone, and that you can ABSOLUTELY get sober, and that the sober life is GOOD. Good in ways you can’t even imagine. I’m sure I’ve not done it justice here. Like I said, misery is much easier to write about than happiness and stability. But however hard it is, I promise it is worth it. I promise.

Sober Reid is proud to be a recovering addict. We are a club. A secret club, of survivors and shitalkers and storytellers and salty secret optimists. It’s a good club. Maybe you should join us.

The End.

Alcoholism

I started to drink the way that a lot of kids do, I think. As a teenager, I climbed up a stool to carefully fill a thermos with a splash from every ancient bottle of booze on the top shelf of my parent’s closet. Peach Schnapps, brandy, rum, tequila, whiskey, vodka. It all went into the intoxicating, barely consumable witch’s brew. Toil and trouble awaited. There was alcoholism in my family, but not the immediate family. I can recall my father being drunk on just a few occasions and my mother not at all. Both of my grandfathers were alcoholics, but one died when I was very young and the other had stopped drinking by the time I was old enough to notice. Supposedly, his doctor told him, after some heart trouble, that he was allowed one beer a day, to which he replied, “Can I save them all up for Saturday?” So far as I know, that’s the only funny thing he ever said, but maybe that’s because I only new him sober. Alcoholism is endemic to my city and state, Fargo, North Dakota. It gets very cold here, and also very hot. Alcohol, theoretically, is a cold drink that can make you feel warm, so it’s perfect both ways. I can’t tell you what the bar to person ratio in this state is exactly, but it’s high, and, from my personal experience, we drink differently than people do in other places. We don’t do a thing AND drink. We don’t socialize AND drink. We don’t barbecue AND drink. We drink, and anything that happens alongside that is incidental. We drink to get drunk. That’s the point. Obliteration. But I suppose this may just be my personal experience. After I got sober, I heard a story from the great John Roderick that I found illuminating. To paraphrase, he says, when he was a drinker, he’d go to a baseball game and get drunk because of course you go to a baseball game and get drunk. That’s what baseball games are for. Everyone there is getting drunk. But when he got sober, he realized that like 10% of the people at the baseball game are getting drunk and the other 90% are just trying to have a nice time with their family and friends. They HATE the drunks. So, maybe that’s the case with this city, but I’ve been sober for a while now – 7 years – and that’s still not my experience. In high school I smoked pot much more than I drank. I don’t know why. Weed always inverted me even more than I already was, made me unsociable – outside of a tight group of fellow pot smoking friends – and withdrawn. In retrospect, I’m somewhat glad for that, but at the time it went against what I wanted – to be outgoing and confident and appealing to girls. The first time I can remember thinking that booze was an excellent way to attain these traits was a school dance. I and two friends got thoroughly drunk before the event. Two of us went unnoticed. We DANCED, confidently and without self-consciousness, the only way to successfully dance. People noticed. Girls noticed. I made the rounds, beloved, I felt, by everyone I spoke to, man and woman. Soon we began to get word that our compatriot, Jake, hadn’t been so lucky. “Jake’s in the principal’s office!” someone told me. Ten minutes later, “The police have been called!” Ten minutes after that, the police arrived, and Jake bolted from the principal’s office, past a police officer, shoved the door open so hard that the metal frame slapped against and shattered the plate glass window surrounding it, and fled, underdressed for the deeply cold North Dakota winter, into the night. He eventually sought refuge in the only safe space he could think of: the kitchen of the McDonald’s where he was employed, a mile from the school. He got a minor anyway, and had to pay for the window. It was so dramatic. One of the best nights of my life up to that point. My friends and I were bequeathed our drink of choice by a tradition handed down through the generations: North Dakota drunks drink Windsor Canadian Whiskey. That’s just the way it is. Sometimes a bottle of Canadian Mist or Black Velvet or some hideous vodka or rum or, god help you, gin would make its way into the routine. Maybe some terrible beer, Milwaukee’s Best – The Beast – more often than not. Beggars can’t be choosers, as they say, especially when they’re under the legal drinking age. But usually it was Windsor. At one point I had a jersey made, which said Windsor 175 on the back, 1.75 Liters being the standard bottle size for the cursed stuff. On Wednesday nights we’d cruise around in an old Buick Celebrity station wagon with a deep v dent in the front from when we’d hit a tree, smoking pot and taking pulls from the whiskey bottle – wildly irresponsible – until it was time for Wednesday Night Bowling, where all the kids would get fucked up and roll some balls on a school night. The staff there hated us. The Buick Celebrity had one of those rear facing seats in the trunk. I don’t know if you’ve ever locked eyes with the disgusted driver behind you while guzzling hard liquor or sucking down a joint, but I certainly wouldn’t recommend it. There were experiments with mushrooms and a brief dalliance with opium, but nothing serious. By college we had a routine. We’d get a bottle or two – at one point we were just having our buyer get cases – we’d sit in a circle around a table with one shot glass, and pass the bottle around, each taking a shot when it came to us, until the bottle was gone. If you got too wrapped up in your rant, or just needed a break, you’d be harangued for holding up the bottle. Once a friend was doing a presentation on binge drinking for a class, so we filmed this debacle and finished the bottle in an hour. The tape was lost so we had to do it again a few nights later. His professor was unimpressed. At first it was six men to a bottle, then four, then two. People at our college started calling us The Whiskey Kids, because we’d show up at a party and immediately get in our circle. Others would come and go, but we mostly just stayed huddled until it was time to stumble home. Second year of college, we got a house, and it was a beautiful mess. Massive parties. Weird chaos. Binge drinking. By the time we left, the house was trashed – blood on some walls, unusable bathrooms, a rug confiscated by the police “for evidence”, a visit from a Private Investigator, and an assault in the boulevard that left a kid I didn’t know with a shattered jaw, forced to drink from a straw for months. We were justly evicted after maybe eight months, but it feels, in my memory, like a decade. There were more houses and more drinking. Good times, bad times. Typical college stuff, if slightly elevated and more dramatic than the college stuff most experience, I think. The drinking was excessive but social. We were all in love with Hunter S. Thompson and a thousand burnout rockers and the whole thing felt very romantic. To me. It’s very possible that this wasn’t what my friends experienced. Sometimes we blacked out, but everyone around us did the same, so it felt normal. Trying to piece things together in the morning was part of the fun. There was one time that a bunch of us packed into a limo and went to a casino. Ten people in that limo and not one of us remembered the ride home. I had a disposable camera with me and all of the film was used in the lost hours. I didn’t get it developed for probably 10 years, but I often wondered what kind of madness those pictures would reveal. When I got them back it was just a bunch of tousled kids, sleeping and sloppily eating chips. In 2004 I was 21 and it felt like I should see more of the world, be away from the friends I’d had since grade school. So I signed up for a student exchange program. I knew only one thing – I wanted to go to California. Not knowing much about California, I eventually settled on . . . San Bernardino, then the city with the second highest murder rate in the nation. Before I left, I moved into my Mom’s basement for a couple months while my friends moved into yet another house. I was upsettingly, desperately in love with a girl who was technically my girlfriend, but the relationship was tenuous. I’d be leaving for California and she for Spain, and we’d been off and on for the extent of our relationship anyway, as she went to college in a different state. Unofficially on when she was in town, off when she wasn’t. We spent that month before the inevitable end going to movies that seemed bizarrely relevant – Garden State and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind were in theaters that Summer, irresistible to a pretentious kid intent on heartbreak – drinking with friends, and drinking in my mom’s basement – huge jugs of Gallo Wine while we played Paperboy and fucked and slept on a mattress on the floor. I loved it, getting drunk just the two of us. It felt so intimate. We also argued – exclusively about whether we should break up when we moved. Obviously, we had to, but that wasn’t obvious to me at the time. I was frantic and heartbroken and impossibly annoying. On top of this, my mother had a cancer scare. So, heartbroken and scared – both for my mother and about setting off on my own – I packed everything I owned into my 1992 Buick Park Avenue with 200,000 miles already on the odometer and set off from the far East of North Dakota to Southern California, wracked with anxiety. I tell you all of this to get to the part where I start drinking alone, as that’s the real turning point. Up to this point I’d abided by only one rule, already half aware that I had a problem: NEVER DRINK ALONE. After eight hours of driving, I pulled my car into the parking lot of a liquor store in Beach, North Dakota, the farthest west city in North Dakota, right on the border with Montana. I got a box of wine, checked into the first hotel I saw, and set to drinking. It was a revelatory night. After a couple big glasses of cheap zinfandel, my anxiety melted away, and I started to feel like Jack Kerouac, on a grand adventure, in a strange place without the support system I’d known my entire life, anything possible. With all of this potential, I chose to drink myself into a stupor and watch three episodes of Six Feet Under on the complimentary HBO. I’d never seen it before and it felt IMPORTANT, a harbinger of all of the high drama that I was about to experience. Intoxication made being alone feel like something bigger. I was diving deep into myself and coming up with something more heroic than I’d suspected. In the morning I set off again early – in those days hangovers were pleasantly foggy, even giddy – and proceeded to drink myself across the western half of America. I took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in Cody, Wyoming. I got wasted and walked to a blue collar bar where I ate pickled eggs and fried mushrooms for dinner – I was a vegetarian by this point – and shot pool with some old timers. I made it to Denver and stayed in the cheapest hotel I could find – 30 dollars a night with bars on the windows. I pulled back the bedspread and saw burns all over the sheets. Opened the bedside drawer and found the source of the burns – a crack pipe. Now this was living. I got hammered, considered hiring one of the prostitutes outside, didn’t, thank god, and wandered out into the streets. I found a bar with live music, tried to flirt with a girl who ended up being the singer’s girlfriend, and drank with the band until the sun was up. Then it was back to my room for a couple hours of sleep and back on the road. Magical. My first night in San Bernardino I was alone in my dorm room – a suite, individual rooms emptying into a common living room and kitchen. By this time, I was so in love with drinking alone that I didn’t even bother to venture out. The next day my first roommate arrived – a tall, skinny, cocky emo-ish skateboarder type, covered in tattoos. I pulled out a box of wine and told him we were going to become fast friends. It worked. The next day he was so sick he thought he had the flu and ended up vomiting in the parking lot of a grocery store where he’d gone to buy flu medicine. I felt pretty good. California is a story for a different time. Great for the most part, but filled with heartache and an evolving reliance on alcohol to get myself brave enough to be social. Eventually I was out of money and headed back to North Dakota, moved back in with my friends. We picked up where we’d left off. One night it occurred to me that I could drink things other than wine when alone. I got some whiskey, sat in my room, and watched a History Channel documentary about the Founding Fathers. Again, it was revelatory. A night alone felt enlightening, an adventure. I think I fell briefly, actually in love with Benjamin Franklin. A girl I’d met in California called every once in a while. I flew back to see her a couple times. We went to Coachella, twice. When a friend and his girlfriend and I decided to go to a music festival in Chicago, I asked if she’d like to come. She flew to North Dakota from Las Vegas and we drove to Chicago. Once back, it became clear that she didn’t intend to leave. This was a problem for me. I didn’t love her, first of all, and I was not equipped for a live in girlfriend. The habits I had acquired didn’t allow for it. But she didn’t have any money to get back, and I had very little, so I bought her a bus ticket and sent her on her way – after we’d both consumed our share of box wine, of course. She cried, I didn’t. I was mostly thinking about how nice it would be to return to my room alone, and get back to the drunk I was working on. It turned out that it was her birthday, but I didn’t know that until a day or two later, when she called me from the bus. A 40 hour bus ride with a broken heart must have been bad, and I feel terrible about it. A year later, and it was time to get my own place. I liked living with my friends, but we were starting to get on each other’s nerves. Passive aggressive notes were being written and left on the fridge. I went looking for an apartment, somewhere appropriately cheap, shabby, and downtown. I found Post Landing. I’ve talked about Post Landing here before, but some of it bears repeating. Post Landing is an old, repurposed building close to Fargo’s downtown area. It stands among the Rape and Abuse Crisis Center, Salvation Army, Native American Services, and the only strip club in town. There are fully 15 bars in walking distance and two liquor stores. Some of the units are huge. Mine was not. It was partially below ground, with windows that looked out onto the gravel parking lot, and occasionally a homeless man would piss on the window above my bed. You’d enter through a back door, walk down three rickety stairs and then through the door to my unit, number 8. The layout was unique in that it was long and narrow, a straight shot through the living room to the kitchen to the bedroom to the bathroom. You could sit on the toilet and see the whole thing. I loved it immediately. But now, completely left to my own disastrous whims, I was free to indulge my obscene, suicidal hobby to a degree never before possible. And I took full advantage of that. A typical night would involve a trip to a liquor store for cigarettes and a box of wine or the vodka I’d switched to somewhere along the line – too many black outs with whiskey – or both, then some snacks at the grocery store – snacking and drinking went hand in hand for me, the only time I’d let myself eat without restriction or guilt, two compulsions linking hands and skipping into oblivion – and finally to a video rental place, to pick up my entertainment for the evening. I’d build a little drunkards nest of food, my laptop, drinks, and maybe a book of crossword puzzles – they get more challenging the drunker you get – slam a few shots in quick succession to get things going, and settle in for the night. If that sounds sad and insane, it’s because it is, but I can’t imagine it’s unique. And I can’t lie to you and say that it doesn’t have its charms. But I would strongly advise against getting into it yourself. You could like it. I’d still go out – fairly regularly actually – meet friends at bars, go to house parties, what have you, but there was always 1) Significant drinking before these occasions and 2) A voice in the back of my head telling me to get home and finish the night in my preferred mode – alone. Occasionally a girl would enter the picture, and occasionally I’d be or stay sober enough not to make a total mess of that for a while, but it was always a struggle. The reason I’d started doing this in the first place – to make myself an extrovert – had lost to my strong, innate introversion. Drinking became 20% a means of being social and 80% a means of obliterating my ego to let my unrestrained Id have its time on the stage, free to act out its horrific, primal, sparsely attended one man show. I don’t know what my friends thought I was doing during this time, or how cognizant they were that I was spiraling. We were all heavy social drinkers, and some of them may have been doing some version of it themselves, but most were busy becoming adults – starting families, getting real jobs, buying houses. I was quirky, neurotic, free spirited. Mostly fun to be around if you were also a sufficient level of drunk. Maybe even, at first, if you weren’t. When you’re in your 20s, being a drunk can be romanticized. We have so many role models: Bukowski, Hemingway, Thompson, Kerouac, Burroughs, Fitzgerald – and that’s just the writers. It is especially forgivable if you are a writer – or say you are anyway. That’s what I did. I’d written through all of high school – was good at it. I wrote for the school paper and for Fargo’s paper of record, The Forum, as well. My short stories were very emo, but not bad, all told. But the guys that pulled off being both drunks and writers were, first of all, mostly over rated. Second of all, what you start to realize as you mature as a reader, is that they would have been good without booze. Better even. The only leg up that alcohol gives a writer is that it generally makes you miserable, and writing about how miserable you are is the easiest thing to write. Writing with nuance about happiness, stability, beauty and the like is much, much more difficult, and these guys rarely pulled that off, with maybe the exception of Hunter S. Thompson, who was a freak of nature who found some degree of joy in chaos, but was probably as miserable as the rest of them and ended up shooting himself anyway. Third, they were mostly natural geniuses, which I am not. So I talked about writing a lot without ever doing it, and it made the drunkenness seem justifiable. While my friends were busy starting their lives, I was a careening ARTIST, though nobody had ever seen this theoretical art, outside of a few half-witty, half uncomfortable social media posts that proved I could put words together just enough to convince everyone that I was who I portrayed myself to be. I had jobs. I was relatively functional. But the jobs were a means to keep up an impossible lifestyle and got weirder and weirder. First, I worked at a grocery store. I’ve talked about this as well. I was there for eight years and on many mornings showed up still drunk from the night before. I had a bad attitude, but I did a pretty good job. Good enough. And in an employee pool mostly filled with teenagers, fuck ups, and adults with disabilities, I went fairly unnoticed. There were only two times I can remember when I showed up in no shape to work and had to send myself home. Once when a night at the lakes turned into four nights at the lakes – I was having so much FUN! – and I showed up still more than half blitzed, with scrapes all over my face from when I’d fallen at some point, wracked with the anxiety of being potentially and rightly fired and also trying to piece together a mostly blurry lost weekend, and smelling less than ideal. The other when I’d just stayed up too late and drank too much and loudly relayed the plot of the wildly inappropriate Tod Solendz movie I’d watched the night before. Next, I’m not sure what I did, honestly. I had some savings built up, so I think I just coasted. Ignored my student loan payments for a while, which would become a habit. Did a little freelance writing here and there, mostly bad. There was a significant relationship in the midst of all this. A girl named Angela who I’d worked with briefly, but never really spoken too. We somehow connected over MySpace and I somehow convinced her that I was boyfriend material. We essentially lived together for a few years, and I loved her, and she loved me, but I was massively depressed for almost the entire time and the drinking was a constant problem. The whole relationship is weirdly hazy. One time I said, “I’m fun, aren’t I?” To which she replied, “Well, you’re fun-ny.” Still probably the most astute assessment of my character I’ve ever heard. Eventually I got tired of having to hide the extent of my drinking from her, and ended things. Things didn’t stay ended for long, and we were just about to officially move in together when she broke up with me. I had the gall to be shocked and angry. During this time, I worked at a call center for the deaf – its own absolute nightmare, then I went door to door trying to convince people in a very red state to send letters to their senators – and to write those letters while I stood there – in support of what became known as ObamaCare. This in the dead of a North Dakota winter, mind you. Then I sold myself to science, signing up for various drug tests that could pay out as much as $4,000 for three weekends or a full week lying in a hospital bed, being administered experimental drugs, and having my blood drawn every hour. That wasn’t bad – a week to lie in bed and read, and dry out – but presented problems of its own. I smoked cigarrettes, kind of a lot, and you weren’t supposed to be a smoker. I got around this by abstaining from cigarettes for a couple days before a study and drinking massive amounts of water the morning of. It worked, somehow. I did a study for morphine, which was quite a week, and for Erectile Dysfunction, another interesting stint, among others. This was great until I got kicked out of a study for also donating plasma when the rules said you couldn’t. They caught me when one of the study administrators was giving plasma at the same time. Half devastated that my source of income had been cut off and half excited to get back a week of drinking, I retreated to my apartment to regroup in the most self-destructive way possible. Two days into this, I realized that something had to change. I knew I should probably quit drinking. I’d tried it once or twice before. My sobriety record from the time I was 19 to the time I was 30 was 16 days. At this point, I was wracked with anxiety to the point where I couldn’t really do anything, basically whenever I wasn’t drinking. It felt like being strangled while simultaneously drowsy and high on coke, with an internal television quickly flipping through the channels of every shitty, embarrassing thing I’d ever done and said, every potential shitty thing that was waiting for me in the future, and a crystal clear view of the pathetic now. I’d shake and sweat. I was vomiting pretty consistently. I wasn’t answering my phone. It was getting hard to think clearly. Once, after a night of hard drinking with my brother, the one person I felt unjudged enough by to fully DRINK around without any subterfuge, I woke up on his couch in the morning, still very much intoxicated, and decided I needed to get home to do some more drinking. I got into my car and felt my blood pressure drop. I was immediately soaked in sweat, thought I might pass out. Not for the first or last time, thought I might die. Sugar, I thought. I need sugar. And I’m so thirsty. I pulled into the parking lot of a Walmart and trudged inside, pale and wet and reeking of booze at 9 in the morning, under fluorescent lights. I was conspicuous, even in a Walmart, and probably got looks, but I had tunnel vision. Somehow I ended up getting a big bag of popsicles, started eating them as soon I got out the door, barely made it back to my car, and laid in the backseat devouring popsicles until I fell asleep, sticky from artificially colored syrup. This, in case you’re wondering, was not exactly one of the rock bottoms you hear about, but it should have been, probably would be for most people. For me, it was one police officer waking me up with a knock on the window short of that, maybe, and barely a blip on the despair and self-humiliation spectrum I regularly put myself through. When I was hungover, I couldn’t sleep and didn’t want to be awake. There was a constant voice in the back of my mind reminding me that I knew one very simple, familiar way to feel good again, and it wouldn’t shut up until I said the fateful words that are the beginning of every good bender and poor decision, words that are constantly in the pocket of any drunk. Peeking out of the pocket even. Hanging out of it, so you always know it’s there: Fuck it. Fuck it, of course, means just do the thing. Drag yourself to the liquor store and end this internal debate. That hectoring voice is the alcoholic’s unique bane. Probably the one thing that, if present, absolutely means that you’re an addict. It’s the voice that, when you think about quitting whispers, “What about weddings? Gotta drink at weddings,” or “There’s a little left in the bottle,” or “If you quit drinking vodka, you’ll be okay. Just switch to beer and wine” and then “This wine isn’t getting you to where you need to be. How about vodka?” or “What’s the worst that could happen? You die. Is that even so bad?” It’s very persuasive. It sounds exactly like you. I started to suspect that not everyone had this voice whispering in their head fairly early on, but that didn’t make it any easier to ignore. It’s a voice so persuasive that it can make cleaning up after yourself before going to bed obliterated, in case you die, seem sane, even responsible. And by this point I was miserable all the time. I managed to romanticize that fact by thinking of what I was doing as “Emotional Spelunking”, bouncing down into the depths of my psyche as an exploration of my ugliest feelings, and then trying to pull myself up again. When I started to feel okay, I’d think, “Recalled to life!” a fun Dickensian allusion that only lived in my head. It was all very exhausting. I don’t want to make it seem like it was all despair. There were good times too. Times I’m forever thankful for, situations that I wouldn’t have gotten myself into otherwise that built me as a person. There were ecstatic, drunken sing alongs with my friends around the bonfire, weird dance parties, days spent walking the streets of Fargo, bouncing from bar to bar, meeting insane and great and great insane people I’d never talk to otherwise, no idea what the day could or would bring. Passionate conversations with anyone who happened to be at hand, probably nonsense, but profound at the time. Wild house parties. Moments of elation, moments of despair so complete they become meaningful. I have a backlog of stories alternately shocking, funny, and heartbreaking, stories that can surprise because no fully sane person would ever experience them. And probably most valuable, I know myself very, very well. I know what I’m capable of, good and bad, when unencumbered by inhibition and I know that I can do those things with the inhibition intact. I know how sad I can be, and how happy. I know what I want and don’t. I know, without a doubt, that I was one or two big mistakes away from really wrecking everything in a way that I wouldn’t be able to bounce back from, and that has made me empathetic. I grew comfortable with the idea of my own death. I feel my good fortune every day. I think, in retrospect, vanity saved me. I was – am, to a degree – very self-conscious, even though I act, mostly, like I’m not. I was very focused on keeping up appearances, and that meant dressing well, eating well when I could, exercising, and generally taking care of myself outside of doing the thing that was obviously going to kill me. I needed to be perceived as well and likable. There’s a somewhat minor section of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five that really spoke to me. It’s when Billy Pilgrim and his unit become German prisoners of war, and they are housed with British prisoners of war, who, though their chances of making it out of their current situation alive are nil, insist on running their drills and maintaining their standards of dress, hygiene, and behavior. It keeps them alive and, more importantly, maintains their sense of dignity. I thought about this a lot, so I made myself clean my apartment regularly, to sweep multiple times a week, to put on clothes and shower and shave and comb my hair and go out into the world. To maintain relationships. Without that . . . it could have been much worse. so, I knew I needed to quit, though that’s not the change I was prepared to make. I told myself it was time, but I knew I wouldn’t. I decided I needed a real job. So I called my Dad, a commercial lender with contacts, and asked him if one that he’d been pushing me to apply for was still available. It was, and I applied. Threw down one more hard drunk and then dried out for a few days. Miraculously, I got it. Not so miraculously. I’m a smart guy, and fairly charming in the way that many addicts have. I’m educated. I can do a job. I stayed pretty dried out to my first day. I still nearly fell asleep during training. My sleep schedule was such a mess that being required to be up and alert at 8 was difficult. But the job was fine. A phone job – always less than ideal – but fine. And for a bit everything was fine. I was still drinking on the weekends, and one weekend, as they do, things got out of hand. I started drinking on Friday night, and by Sunday morning I had the full anxiety, decided to tamp it down with just a little booze. Sometime on Sunday afternoon, I noticed that I was getting a really strong internet connection, which was rare. I didn’t pay for Internet – couldn’t afford to – and relied solely on the continuous coming and going of new, unsuspecting neighbors who didn’t put a password on their account. I did this for YEARS. This time, the connection only worked if I was sitting on my bed, but I could handle that. This stroke of luck merited a celebration, so I decided I’d call in sick from work. What you need to know here is that addicts are inherently liars. We get so used to having to cover up how badly we’re wrecking ourselves that the lies begin to spill out automatically, even when they aren’t exactly necessary. And, in my case, I tended to make them so elaborate that no-one would question them. Once, in college, I was having a level of anxiety that was affecting my schoolwork, so when I had a paper due that I couldn’t seem to bring myself to start, I told my professor that my cousin in North Carolina had testicular cancer and didn’t seem like he was going to make it. This was especially difficult news for me, because he was like a brother. The hardest part about that lie was acting sad when I came back to class a week later. This time, I blamed an uncle’s death. Again, very close, almost like a father. I had to go to Michigan and I didn’t exactly know when I’d be back. My third day of drinking turned into my fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh. At some point, my parents started calling and texting, but I wasn’t answering. The messages were getting frantic. On Friday night, early in the evening, there was an urgent knock on my window. It was my mother, crying, and then my father, and my brother. This was shocking for many reasons. First and not least, is that my parents have been divorced for a long time and aren’t in the habit of teaming up. Second, I was a disaster. No one could see me like this. Third, the invasion of my private space had become a constant fear. This is where I did the thing that nobody knew about – could never know about. There was one afternoon when I laid on my couch in a panic for several hours, afraid to make a sound, because there was a persistent, light tapping on my door. The longer I laid there, the more I became convinced that someone was out there, tormenting me, like an urban telltale heart with none of the poetry. When I finally worked up the courage to crack open the door, I saw an advertisement for a Chinese Restaurant hanging from my doorknob, lightly wafting in the breeze of an open window. But now my family were shouting through the window, “Open up!” “Let us in!” “We’re not leaving until we see you!” I shouted at them to go away, I’m fine, but the barrage continued. I finally agreed to let my Mom and my brother come in if my Dad would go away, and he reluctantly agreed. I could deal with tears, but wasn’t prepared for a shouting match. I didn’t really have a leg to stand on there. What had happened was, a guy I worked with sort of knew my Dad’s wife, had run into her, and had offered his condolences for her deceased brother. Unbelievable. It wasn’t an intervention, exactly. No one even mentioned drinking, we just talked about how bad my anxiety had gotten. It was awful, but not awful enough for me not to start drinking again as soon as they were gone. But I did agree to get help, and my Dad got me in touch with a guy who got me in touch with a psychiatrist. I saw the psychiatrist twice, I think, and it was helpful. Seeing a psychiatrist is good, if only to have a neutral third party to dump all your shit on. But I didn’t really dump ALL my shit on him. We only talked about anxiety, again, and not drinking – because I didn’t bring it up. May have even outright lied about it. But things got better. Focusing on easing my anxiety helped me to reduce my alcohol intake. I knew it was the root, even if I didn’t tell it that way. Alcohol kind of works like a flimsy, hastily built stick dam against the persistent river of anxiety. It can stop it up for a while, but the river – fear and doubt and panic – are building up behind the whole time. When the dam breaks, you get all the fetid water that has built up behind it. I started to go to the gym again. Seeing friends more often. Reading and listening to music more. I began spending a lot of time at the library to keep myself busy. I still drank, but almost exclusively in a social setting. I got a new position in the company I was working for, a better one, more suited to me. And then I met my wife. Re-met her actually. She was a friend of my brother’s and we’d almost dated once before, but I was a mess and she’d just broken up with her live in boyfriend, and it didn’t happen, thank god. I’d never have been able to see it through. I shouldn’t have this time, but she had an uncanny gift/curse for overlooking red flags. She didn’t change my life immediately, I had to do that myself, eventually – we’ll get to how I continued to self-destruct – but it was immediately clear to me that she was who I wanted and needed and I had to lock it down. I told her I loved her on our second or third date. I remember leaving her apartment one night, wracked with anxiety, and calming myself by taking stock of what I had, an unlikely bounty. I had a girl who loved me, and who I loved. A girl who was proficient in all the areas I am not – impulse control, money management, practical knowledge, responsibility, etc. I had a car. I had a job. Things were looking up. I asked her to marry me after about a year, and, against all sense and reason she said yes. Here’s why she shouldn’t have. We co-habitated pretty quickly, after I bid a bittersweet farewell to Post Landing. My brothers helped me move and when the couch that I’d slept on so many nights, did most of my drinking on, proved too big and bulky, we smashed it to pieces and threw the remains in the trash – classic Messerschmidt impulse control deficiency – an act so obviously metaphorical that I’m not going to bother making the metaphor. But putting a halt (mostly) to the solo drinking didn’t change the fact that I was almost always the drunkest person in any given room. She saw drinking induced panic attacks and let me work through them in my own way, which was less than flattering or effective. It mostly involved sweating it out in bed all day and being generally unpleasant to be around. After I pissed the bed a couple times – an upsetting development that should have sobered me up – she didn’t throw me out, as she should have, she went out and bought a waterproof mattress cover. We laugh about this now. Before our wedding, we bought a house. A beautiful house. A house we want to live in forever, two stories with a double garage and shop extension, a half-acre backyard in town, and my own office, something I’d always wanted. She was busy making wedding plans and I was sort of helping, but mostly I was taking what I was thinking of as a victory lap. I let the drinking go. I was wrecked all weekend, every weekend. The anxiety got worse, and I went to a therapist, began weeping as soon as I sat in the chair in her office, lied about the drinking, and was prescribed Zoloft. The Zoloft was a revelation. It cut down the hangovers, cut out the anxiety, and made me, in combination with the vodka I was drinking, extraordinarily manic. I talked so, so much, bounced around the house when I wasn’t passing out, wanted people over to drink with me, wanted to go out. Kelly was losing patience and the wedding was coming up. She’d tell me to cut it out. I’d say, with all the desperation of a true alcoholic, “I’m having FUN! Why don’t you just have FUN with me?” I said this so many times it couldn’t possibly have been true. We got married, though she was already having doubts. I was a little drunk at the wedding, a lot drunk at the reception, though I held it together pretty well. After we were married, there were several instances where she’d wake me up from where I’d passed out on the couch with a bottle nearby, and I’d lay there pathetically, looking up at her, blurry and in full defensive mode, agreeing that I’d cut back, agreeing to quit, whatever would end the conversation. I was lying constantly, stupid lies, denying being drunk when I clearly was. Denying things in the face of inarguable evidence to the contrary. One night, I told her that I was going to prove I could drink reasonably. That night I got so drunk watching a show with her that I could barely stay awake, and told her I was going to bed. She was furious with me. I trudged up the stairs and hesitated at the topmost step, tilted back, and fell down the entire flight, slammed into the banister – still a little wobbly to this day. I lay on the floor for a while, groaning, and then got up, insisted I was fine, and went to bed. When I woke up, I had huge bruises on my side and a vague memory of what had happened. Kelly had had enough. I told her I would quit drinking. I quit drinking in front of her. Quit telling her I was drinking. She caught me a few times and one night, after she saw a charge on our bank account to the liquor store from earlier that day, which she graciously hoped was cigarettes but I admitted was not, she said, “I’m not crying anymore, and that’s a bad sign for you.” I was about to ruin everything. I thought about what it would be like to end up back at Post Landing, back at where I was and how I was living before. I knew that would be a death sentence, and not an easy death. And I was just so fucking tired. It was finally time to quit. In the next episode of The Irrationally Exuberant, I’ll talk about sobriety, because this is a happy story, not a sad one. Tune in next week. The End.

Sag Jinkins

Sag Jinkins

In 1972, Richard Nixon went to China and Neil Diamond recorded Hot August Night.

Incredible.

The Russians landed another unmanned craft on the moon, against all sense and reason, adding to their already substantial supply of rocks.

Impressive, nonetheless.

ABBA formed.

There was a flood in the Black Hills and The Godfather was in theatres. Watergate. Bloody Sunday.

Momentous occasions, all.

Busta Rhymes and Shaquille O’Neal were born. Ezra Pound died.

Carl Stalling died.

Sag Jenkins didn’t know about any of this. He was sitting, pants-on, in an overheated fiberglass port-a-potty, soaked in sweat, breathing the thick stink of 200 shits, swigging from an old glass liter vodka bottle filled with new cheap whiskey, now three-fourths gone. In twenty minutes, Sag Jenkins was supposed to jump thirty-five cars on his motorbike, and there was no way he’d make it. In twenty minutes, 227 attendees of the Argus County Speedway in Golgotha, South Dakota would watch Sag Jenkins die.

But for now he was drinking. For now he felt alright. Depressed but drunk, and that was as all right as he got these days.

Sag – born Sagory Troyal Jinkins III on the 10th of March, 1938, in, maybe ironically, depending on how you choose to define that word, a filthy, makeshift outhouse behind a perilous shanty in the god-and-everyone-else-forsaken Plimsol County of Wyoming – a town called – get this – Trashton – to Sagory Troyal Jinkins II, who was not present for the event, was rarely present, not really – was, at the time, drinking somewhere, presumably – and his young wife, Artis Barbara-Anne Jinkins, who was, obviously.

Present that is.

Sag was, at this moment, the moment we started with, before the jump that would kill him, in the port-a-potty, wearing his leathers – the Evel Knievel, red white and blue knock offs sported by seemingly all daredevils of the time – each with its own arrangement of the colors. Sag’s were a particularly heinous variation, with thin red and blue vertical stripes running from his red patent boots up to the increasingly doughy flesh of his neck – just starting to spill over the collar – even daredevils are forced to melt into oblivion if they don’t kill themselves first – with a single white star splayed across the back.

He looked like a fucking clown, would have felt like a clown sober. But he hadn’t found himself anywhere near that particular state – sobriety – for a substantial stretch in maybe six months – ever since his oldest son, Clinton Sagory Jinkins – a kid of thirteen, big for his age, with just enough sense to know that a man – even ones father, especially ones father – needs a punch in the nose every once in a while but not quite enough sense to always exactly know the right time to dole out that punch or hard enough fists, yet anyway, to make that punch say just what it needed to – had, despite of and because of these deficiencies, dealt him, Sag, a punch in the nose that, due to its lateness – or earliness, maybe, it’s hard to say – did not a damn thing but send his already spiraling father on an unnglorious bender – a particularly notable bender in a long stretch of less notable ones in that it was a predominantly sad bender – that, frankly, didn’t suit him any more than the leathers did.

Those ill suited leathers were now unzipped and pulled down to the waist so that Sag Jinkins’ growing paunch could expand to its full size, protruding from beneath his still thinnish, sunken, hair splotched chest like a loaf of uncooked bread on a warped, knife scarred, food stained old cutting board. The zipper dug into his flesh but at this point he was a sniff of what was in the bottle away from a blackout, so it wasn’t much troubling him.

The looming blackout hung just behind his eyes, narrowed his vision, and, so long as he didn’t open his mouth, focused his thoughts on the withered abstraction of his ego. If he did open his mouth his thoughts would go quiet and unhinged instinct would push out a jumble of slurred garbage and what was left of his ego would enter the world like rancid water from a tragic spit take.

That ego had taken some devastating hits as of late after a prolonged period of unreflected upon inflation – which we’ll get to.

But for now we need to talk about his face.

It was a fucking mess.

When Sag Jinkins was a young man – say 17 – he’d been what passed for handsome in Trashton – symmetrical and lean. English features, cockney English, warped by a few hundred years of questionable breeding, but warped in such a way that folks referred to it, on Sag anyway – he had many relatives to whom those same folks were less kind – as character.

The Jinkins name went all the way back to when the Brits had first shipped their undesirables to the New World, and those undesirables had been proving why they’d been branded that way ever since. They were, almost to a man, drunks, rascals, creeps, freaks, deviants, liars, losers, fuck ups, shits for brains, trash, bastards, sons of a bitch, mouth breathers, and beslubbering, dankish, flap-mouthed rogues.

There were some isolated exceptions, each with caveats.

Sag’s great-great grandfather, Troyal Hostetler Jinkins, for instance, who, yes, had been a drunk and a violent racist/misogynist to boot – few weren’t at the time, to give the requisite nod to historical relativism – but had also been a fireman, which in 1833 was a completely analogue occupation with an approximately 87% mortality rate. He’d gone a long way towards redeeming some of his shortcomings by saving folks from mortally unfair circumstances. There’d been burn scars over most of his body and exactly one half of his face to prove it.

A further example: Hostetler “Hoss” Sagory Jinkins, Sag’s great uncle, born in 1873, who, when Sag was 10 and Hoss was a deeply worn 75 shot Sag’s father in the back, killing him after some hammy death throes, in retribution for the murder of Hoss Sagory Jinkins III, Sagory II’s cousin, whom he had beaten to death over a game of horse shoes with, of course, a horse shoe. While this was far from a good deed it was certainly a just one, as the murder hadn’t exactly put Sag’s father off of beating anyone, and everyone with even a passing acquaintance with the man agreed that his ouster from the scene was a cause for celebration.

Which brings us back to Sag, who was, at the time in his life previously mentioned – 17 or so – all set, despite his fairly brutal upbringing, to be the finest Jinkins the bloodline had ever produced.

Aside from being handsome, he was smart, polite, kind. He never touched booze. Never showed any interest in sneaking or violence. He seemed to have been dropped into the unpleasantness of Trashton and his kin from Pubetron Fergleven or some other such alien planet and the Jinkins’ didn’t know what to do with him.

Once, when his mother passed out from huffing Floor Brite brand floor polish – the mere presence in the house of which was suspect as the wood floors in the shack were unwaveringly dirty and splintered, had never been polished, ever, never would be (when she purchased it, Doc Arbuckle at Arbuckle’s Five and Dime gave her the old stink eye, knowing as much) – she awoke with a brutal headache, but laying in her bed with the covers pulled up to her chin and not on the ground behind the house where she’d landed, and the shack had been cleaned to the extent that a shack can be cleaned. Instead of thanking the cautiously optimistic boy sitting quietly on the front steps – the only one who could have been responsible for these niceties – she just yelled at him to get more floor polish.

And there was the occasion of his Eagle Scout project that same year.

Sag had worked himself up from a diminutive Webelos to the brink of the honor through sheer, unsupported force of will. When he told Jinkins’ – his mother included – about the project he intended to helm as one of the required steps to reach the upper echelons of the BSA, they were mildly surprised to learn that he was a scout at all, despite the badge-laden uniform he constantly wore. They’d just assumed he was gay.

Sag the Fag, they’d often called him.

His project was to be the construction of a gazebo in honor of fallen soldiers, none of whom were Jinkins’, a family of draft dodgers going all the way back to the early days of the Indian wars. Had the Jinkins’ killed and been killed by innumerable Native Americans over the years? Absolutely. But not a one of them had done either in an official capacity. And a Jinkins had never, as far as any of them knew, laid eyes upon a native Englishman, a Spaniard, a Hun, a Viet Cong, a Korean, a Ruskie, or an Arab since they’d arrived in the New World. Not even a Mexican.

Sag’s gazebo was inspired by a movie he snuck into at a beat up movie house called The Schwartz two towns over, in Overton. He’d hitched his way there without knowing what was playing – just a dime in his pocket that he’d found in the street in front of . He’d pocketed it after much paranoid head flitting and a thorough check against the scout code and his own self-erected system of morality. The movie turned out to be a six year old print with one reel missing of Laurel and Hardy’s terrible war picture, Iwo Jima Screama, but it was enough to inspire a fiery love of country and appreciation for our boys over there – even the bumbling fat/thin duos among them – in a deeply sensitive boy just looking for something to hang his tattered hat on.

The actual gazebo part of the project was inspired by an overheard conversation between a pair of old women he’d passed on the sidewalk after the movie. He didn’t get the context, just heard them say it: GAZEBO. He thought it the most beautiful word that had ever vibrated his ear bone. GAZEBO. He had no idea what it meant, but, as luck would have it, Overton had a library, and as the town was no bigger than a city park, the library happened to be not fifteen feet from where he stood silently mouthing the word. GAZEBO. He rushed in and straight to the elegant, almost holy – to Sag, anyway – Encyclopedia Britannica set that resided there. It wasn’t the first time he’d consulted it as his family didn’t know much and was pretty tight lipped about the little they did. And, of course, there wasn’t a book besides the Bible anywhere in Trashton, and even those mostly just collected dust. He grabbed the G volume, took a deep whiff of its musky aroma, and flipped right to the correct page:

GAZEBO: A roofed structure that offers an open view of the surrounding area, typically used for relaxation or entertainment.

Relaxation and entertainment were two things sorely lacking in Trashton. There was plenty of idleness, but that is not the same as relaxation. Idleness taxes. Relaxation refreshes. And as to entertainment, the horsefeathers that folks got up to were far too cruel to be considered that.

Next to the definition there was a picture, a color photograph. Sag thought its beauty damn near matched the beauty of the word. It was an open air palace, an elegant commingling of the works of man and Mother Nature. A cathedral with walls painted by God.

He would build a GAZEBO, he decided. And he did. He got the necessary building permit, collected scrap wood, borrowed tools, and performed odd jobs for scant pay to raise the money for the necessary materials. He worked tirelessly, single minded for 5 months, totally alone, documenting every step for the presentation to his Scout master.

He measured. He cut. He beveled and sanded and stained. The work was slow – he was learning on the job and his limited funds meant doing only what he could afford before raising the money necessary for the next step.

The Gazebo took shape, became beautiful.

Sag was pleased with his work. More pleased than he’d ever been with anything.

And then, on the day he arrived at his worksite for the final step – attaching the plaque he’d had engraved at no small cost for the Gazebo’s base – it read “Veteran’s Memorial Gazebo – Sag Jinkins Salutes You!” – he found his uncle – or maybe he was a second cousin, keeping track was difficult and unsatisfying – Hickory Sagory Jinkins, an especially wild and dim witted member of the clan, in just his soiled britches, soaked in sweat and looking somehow both feral and leisurely, swinging an axe at the splintered remnants of the gazebo’s base. The rest had been thrown in a pile behind him.

Sag nearly fainted. There was panic, like drowning, and then there was rage, like a swarm of bees. Then he was charging his cousin/uncle with the heavy bronzed plaque held over his head, screaming – high and clear at first, then lower, becoming hoarse and manly – his brown eyes dark and sharp.

Hickory looked up with a dumb, gappy, mean, smile. Shouted, “Ran out of firewood, Fag!”

He meant to juke the boy, send him to the ground, but froze as Sag got closer. He saw his eyes, saw the boyishness drain from Sag’s face above the Scout’s kerchief, lost his smile, said, “C’mon, man, just hold on . . . “ and then Sag was on him. The first blow from the plaque drew blood and the second took consciousness. The third and fourth and fifth knocked out Hickory’s remaining, precarious teeth, crushed his already crooked hog’s nose, caved in his forehead. The sixth killed him. The blows after that just made a mess.

When he was too tired to swing the plaque any longer – Sag Jinkins Salutes You! – Sag dropped it where he stood and walked home, his scout uniform torn and soaked with blood and sweat.

His mother was passed out, so he washed up and changed without a word, hitched a ride to the nearest enlistment office, and joined the military.

His face.

Sitting among the fetid emissions of the excretions of humanity’s most despicable sub-category, South Dakota race track patrons, Sag Jinkins poked at his swollen upper lip, and felt, barely, pain below the thick, coarse, blood crusted shag of his jerky-brown moustache and the progressively belligerent/depressed detachment of his thick intoxication. The lip was grotesque in its bigness and the bottom lip made the top lip look regular sized, if you can believe that.

And why wouldn’t you?

One eye was open, barely, and the other would probably never be of any use to him again. Something kept seeping out of the tight slit and, had he been sober, he’d have worried that it was the viscous jelly of the eyeball itself.

But the most distinctive feature of his face currently was the ear to ear, forehead to chin bruising.

There was not a whit of undamaged skin on the entirety of his head. The bruising varied in color – charcoal, navy, sky blue, piss yellow, blood black – was almost psychedelic, like a bad tie dye job or an old marble.

The rest of his body, aside from the phantom screams of past dare deviling mishaps, was fine, mostly. The burly truck driver whose sandwich he’d befouled two days previous had, curiously, only punched his face, but he’d been thorough in that.

And the less so but still quite burly Frenchman whose sandwich he had also befowled later on the same day had shown no deference to the injuries already there and also confined his substantial abuse to the head area.

“Fuck a sandwich” Sag spat, slurred, blubbered within his rank dressing room. “Fug a sanich,” is how it came out. “Man eats a burger, or at least a hot dog.” “Anesebwerga, o’leash ah ‘ot dog.”

He took another swig off the bottle and the blackout came, quietly dimming his conscious mind to darkness while his body looked the other way. The body, now free of all but the most primitive regions of his brain – the hard little lizard part – shot its right, booted foot into the porta-potty door, dislodging the paltry, rusted lock, exposing the man inside to the humid South Dakota air and freeing the human stink within to mingle with the horse stink without.

The year Sag joined the Army, 1955, was, as luck would have it, a rare gasp of peace between the nonsense in Korea and the nonsense in Vietnam. Less lucky was his assignment to Fort Blaird just outside of Tallahassee, Florida, under the government sanctioned micro-fascism of Sargent Dick Fedora, a grisly, obsessive compulsive sadist with a wonky glass right eye, astonishingly thick thighs, and a Himlerian sense of social justice.

Sag immediately accepted him as a father figure, as he had his own father, his maternal grandfather, a couple uncles, some cousins, Doc Arbuckle, the Overton librarian, Mrs. Evaline Gumbody, a particularly noble neighborhood dog, Roger, and his Scoutmaster, Terrell Niceley.

Sargent Fedora had no interest in being a father figure – barely had an interest in being human – but he was happy to manually atomize Sag Jinkins and reconstruct him as what was, essentially, a rule abiding, survivalist, neatness machine only homonymous with the boy who had enlisted.

The new Sag Jinkins also had a moustache.

He left the army in 1957, honorably discharged due to a modest nervous breakdown, brought on by a particularly brutal dressing down from Sargent Fedora – he referred to Sag as “mountain trash” and “worthless as crusted cum on a dead vagrant’s trousers” and “simple – Amoeba simple” and “uglier than Lou Costello’s unwiped asshole” and “less of a man than one of Mamie Eisenhower’s shriveled old eggs” and “queerer than a box of dicks in Tab Hunter’s basement” and “the worst white person ever” and “duller than a Utah Tuesday” and “bad at everything” – as well as a the lingering guilt from the murder of Hickory, which no one back home had paid much mind to or even noticed, really.

Hick wasn’t particularly well liked, mostly on account of he was good-for-nothing and an unbelievable bastard, even more so than the average member of the Jinkins clan. His body had been devoured by crows and the bones divvied up amongst themselves by local children who stumbled upon them during their daily unsupervised wanderings and mostly used them as “thumpers” or just threw them into various local cricks and sink holes, of which there were many.

Sag, of course, was not aware of any of this and assumed that he would eventually be brought to justice by both earthly and divine law.

This all culminated in a brief stint of violent weeping in the community shower, followed by a near catatonic state. He just stood there, nude, battered by water, staring straight ahead, arms at his side, while the other soldiers did their best to ignore him. They rushed their rinsing and filed out. When they came back the following day, Sag was still there. The water had long ago turned frigid and he was shivering – compressed shivers, but tooth rattling. Still standing. His skin was wrinkled and blue and his breaths were short and fast, but he didn’t blink and he didn’t react to their entrance.

A medic arrived. When he placed a hand on Sag’s shoulder and asked him if he was okay, Sag collapsed.

When he awoke five days later he was in a bed at Dr. Humbert Cripe Memorial Hospital in Tallahassee, feeling a bit lost but not bad, considering. His skin had smoothed itself out and regained its original color and the hypothermia had gone into remission.

He improved further when told that he was being discharged and a very drunken call from his mother – who had waited exactly 129 hours after finding out about his hospitalization to call and ended by asking for money – assured him that he wasn’t, and wouldn’t be, in any trouble for his crime – at least from Trashton’s finest. He still had the Lord to deal with, but that, hopefully, was a good ways off, and, besides, some light prayer would clear his record right up, or so he’d been told.

After being approved for release by the hospital he stopped into the gift store on a whim. He didn’t have anyone to buy anything for, but he also didn’t have anywhere to be.

Perhaps he’d buy himself a decorative pillow or some chocolates. Live a little.

And there, among plastic roses and hovering balloons and pastel greeting cards and various trinkets, knick-knacks, and stuffed what-have-yous, he saw a young woman with an old woman’s pristine, tight perm, below which – and under a pair of profoundly unfashionable glasses – was maybe not the most beautiful face he’d ever seen, but a pretty nice face. A significantly better face than any of the faces back home. A friendly face, anyway, and it was smiling, though her thin lips made it a subtle kind of smile. Below the face was a body, formless but clearly very thin beneath a modest, floral print dress. Attached to that dress was a name tag that read, “Lynette”.

He said, “Hello.”

Her full name was Lynette Knobnoster and she and Sag were married one and one half years later in a small ceremony at Oblivion Baptist Church followed by a reception at The Feisty Squirrel, a popular local bar, all paid for by her father, Harlan “Happy” Knobnoster, a glad-handing, muscle-gone-to-fat bodied, short sleeves with a tie, ex high school football star, WWII veteran, and drunk, with a flat top haircut unsuccessfully hiding a growing bald spot and sole ownership of Happy Knobnoster’s Tallahassee Chrysler, one of three preeminent vehicle dealers in the greater Tallahassee area. He was a classic Florida Panhandle, Greatest Generation, grade A prick, and, of course, Sag had an immediate and omnipresent desire to call him Dad, though he didn’t because Happy would have hated it and glared at him with that perplexed, unruly eyebrow raised, eye squinting look that brought to Sag’s mind all of the things that Sargent Fedora had called him.

Sag and Lynette loved each other, and both grew bolder over time, more interesting – nuanced and sexual. But neither had been those things before and in the beginning their love was staid and chaste. Sag couldn’t be anything but. He was broken by his life experience thus far. And his military pay was meager, so until he could build some savings they lived with Happy in the guest room of his rambler.

Happy framed it as an almost saintly act of charity, but in reality he couldn’t bear to let his daughter go and showy acts of generosity and cruelty were the only way he knew how to give affection. Mrs. Knobnoster – Honey, her name was – had passed some years earlier, succumbed to a combination of pills, boredom, and repressed feminism, though the cause of death was, officially, heart failure. Lynette was all he had left and he knew it.

The living arrangement, of course, limited the newlyweds in many ways and didn’t do much for Sag’s already suffocating sense of emasculation, but he just didn’t have it in him to propose an alternate solution.

Unsatisfied with merely infiltrating his home and daughter, Sag began working for Happy at the dealership. Neither was pleased with the arrangement – Sag had always secretly hoped to become a Veterinarian – but they would both do anything for Lynette and this seemed to be the only way they could love her at the same time.

So they made do.

Sag was Happy’s errand and whipping boy. A meek but effective and helpful presence at home and at work. An unflinching listener to drunken ramblings. A rage outlet. And Happy kind of grew to like Sag, though he would never have told him that and continued to treat him as though he were more rescue monkey than human being.

And that’s the way they lived until Clinton was born in 1959. Lynette got pregnant the first time she and Sag successfully copulated. Successfully only in that penetration and ejaculation were involved. It was a brief affair, awkward and unpleasant for all involved, including Happy, who heard the whole thing and loudly told everyone at the dealership about it the next day while Sag unsuccessfully held back tears in the bathroom, the salty drops falling on his woefully inadequate four and seven-eighths inch penis.

But impending fatherhood had a profound effect on Sag. It reconnected him to the boy he’d been before the military – independent and good and confident. He hadn’t realized that he’d lost those things, become withdrawn and timid. Whip shy. In the months before the birth, he began to walk faster, smile more. He didn’t defend himself against Happy, exactly, but he took the abuse in a way that sucked all the pleasure from doling it out.

And despite a still somewhat meager bank account he began to make preparations to move out of Happy’s home – across town, to what Happy protested was a “bad neighborhood”, though in fact it wasn’t bad so much as slightly diverse.

The Sagory Jinkins’ had a good life.

A second son, Harlin, came along 2 years later. Sag became an accomplished salesman, though he couldn’t help but kowtow to Happy. The kids became boy scouts, Sag their Scoutmaster. He was proud. He was content.

Sag vomited between his legs.

It came out in a quick, hard stream, and then dribbled from his appalling lips like shit from a trotting horse’s asshole. He stood up, fell back down, got up again, fell down, got up, tottered, got his bearings, spit – as much blood as vomit – and stumbled out of the port-a-potty. He unzipped his leathers a few more inches, pulled out his still four and seven-eighths inch, worse-for-the-wear penis and pissed on the side of the rectangular toilet.

He was mid-stream, wheezing from his grotesque mouth-hole, when a blast of ice water from his right side toppled him to the dry, hot, Dakota dirt and brutally yanked him from the abyss of his black-out, back to hideous awareness.

He groaned, brushed away some pebbles that had dug themselves into his left palm and looked up, directly into the sun. Just to the right of the life-giving, blinding orb was the silhouette of a tall, bulky man in a cowboy hat.

“Jes-christ, if I did som’n to your fuggin’ sannich, I’ll jus’ buy you a fuggin’ new one.”

“What? Oh. That, I say, will not be necessary. I’m sorry I had to do that, Sagory old boy, but I’m sure you understand. You got to straddle that bike of yours and hop over a whole heap of cars in no fewer than 12 – make that 11 – minutes. Hot damn, son, you look worse than a pig foot in a dog house. And you smell like 6 loads of shit on a hot day. You been drinking inside that terlet, huh? We’re going to have to get you some tincture toot-sweet – right after this jump. Your whole face looks infected and broken and I’ll be got-damned if your chakras aren’t in complete disarray.”

The man standing above Sag holding an empty, dripping, 5 gallon bucket was Batton Trowel, Sag’s manager, a cartoonish Old Southern Boy along the lines of Boss Hog or Huey Long, but with a vague New Age twist. A featherless Foghorn Leghorn accented with turquoise. The man who had ousted Happy Knobnoster as Sag’s father figure with compliments and a smile but somehow treated him worse than Happy ever had.

Trowel was garishly dressed, as per his personal style, in a kind of Tex-Navajo oil Barron thing that he felt leant him airs of mystery, aristocracy, and masculinity that couldn’t, under any circumstance, successfully coexist.

His shining blue Iguana skin boots moved toward Sag, and Batton bent over to help the battered man to his feet.

“You get yourself zipped up and then run on over to yon fence and back just as fast as you can. We need to get some blood pumping to that head of yours. Then we’ll do a prayer and get the show on the road, so to speak.”

Sag did as he was told. Wrestled with the zipper and took to, not a sprint, exactly, but a hurried, loping hobble in the general direction of where Batton had pointed.

The following is a speech that Sag Jenkins delivered to a group of 256 Boy Scouts at the Mertice Hambubger Memorial Jamboree in Climax, Georgia on April 13th, 1969, on the occasion of their completion of a group charity project that had cleared four square acres of various debris and repaired the houses of 16 impoverished families and individuals. The project didn’t officially have a name, but Sag thought of it to himself as Operation Gazebo Redemption, or OGR:

“Gentlemen, I stand before you today a proud man and a hopeful man. I look at you and I see everything I’ve always wanted to be.

I see confidence and drive and brains.

And I see the future. And I see how wonderful that future looks.

I look at you and I see honor and loyalty and all the other traits a scout pledges to have.

Say them with me won’t you?

A Scout is Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, and Reverent.

That’s right. Well done.

But I see more than all of that even when I look at you.

I see my boys. Scratch that. My men. And I hope you’ll forgive me for feeling possessive. I would never be so arrogant as to claim responsibility for your goodness. That was there from the start.

I mean “my” in that I belong to you.

Does that make sense?

You’re as much a family to me as I’ve ever known. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

When I first became a Boy Scout – 1951, it would have been – I didn’t have much in the way of family, or anyone that acted that way anyhow, and it was the first place I’d ever really felt I belonged.

But I didn’t really feel that I belonged to a family in the true sense until I met my wife and I didn’t feel like that family was complete until I became your Scoutmaster.

So, today, after completing such good work with such good men, I just want to say thank you.

Thank you.

You are so terribly important to me and I hope you know that I will be here for you for as long as I’m breathing.

And that’s all I have to say.”

Three days later Happy Knobnoster called Sag into his office at the dealership.

“Sit down, Sag, sit. I’ve had an idea and I think you’re just the man for the job.”

This was beautiful music to Sag’s ears. All he’d ever wanted was to be the man for the job, and to be the man for Happy’s job, finally, was almost too much to take. He sat, but just barely.

Happy looked at him with just a tinge of disgust. He detested enthusiasm.

“You know that Evel Knievel fellow that the boys love so much? The one with the motorcycle?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“Goddammit, Sag, stop calling me sir. I thought we were past that.”

“Sorry. I’m just excited to get started on our project.”

“You don’t even know what it is! But – sorry – I’m glad you’re excited. Sag, you’re family and I appreciate how far you’ve come in this business. So I wanted to tell you before I told everyone else that we’re going to start selling motorcycles – Indian Motorcycles.”

“Wow! That’s fantastic!”

“It is. With that Knievel fellow as popular as he is, motorcycles have never been more in demand and we’re going to capitalize on that.”

“You, uh, you said I’m your man? What do you need me to do, sir?”

“Goddam . . .“ Happy calmed himself. He was about to ask his son in law to do something very stupid and supposed he could at least be nice about it. “Well, Sag, I’ve got an extra special job for you, my boy.”

Sag swooned. My boy.

“We’re going to promote our new venture with a daredevil show just like Knievel’s. I want you to jump over some cars. And some snakes. AND a gator or two.”

Sag was taken aback. He’d never ridden a motorcycle.

“I’ll do it!” he nearly shouted.

On the day of the daredevil show – Happy Knobnoster’s Indian Motorcycle Daredevil Spectacular, it was called – Sag was terrified. He paced back and forth inside of the dealership dressed in an outrageous, too baggy and uselessly thin polyester blend version of the leathers that would eventually become his trademark. One half of the dealership’s sprawling lot had been cleared out for the event and maybe 100 motley spectators milled about, sparse on the empty blacktop, sweaty and sullen and smelling, as a whole, like BO and stale drink, unlikely to have the cash on hand to by a new car – a new anything – in the foreseeable future.

Harv Tuboo from the local TV news was there with his cameraman, looking miserable. He could afford a car but was a Buick man. There was a reporter from The Tallahassee Times watching from a barely functional Camaro. Two ramps – one for take-off and one for landing – were in the center of the lot. Sag had built them himself, with the help of his boys. They were gorgeous, solid and painted blue with the Indian Motorcycle logo dead center on the curve. No worries there. In between the ramps were four beat up brown Chrysler Saratogas, in two groups of two, separated by the trash menagerie Happy had put together: A much sedated old grizzly bear with matted fur and one eye, sitting on his haunches and staring off into the distance, thinking of better times or dreaming of death. Two equally drugged raccoons which Happy had trapped himself, as he told anyone who would listen, with a fishing net as they’d sifted through his garbage. A large snake of indeterminate genus, and a pig, on loan from Squeaky Chuck’s Fresh Meats and Animal Fat Candles, located right across the street. It wasn’t exactly the collection of predators he’d had in mind. The beasts were penned up with chicken wire, but only the pig seemed to have any life in him and he was just running in tight, gleeful circles, happy for a brief reprieve from the butcher’s knife.

The creatures weren’t what worried Sag. What worried him was his lack of proficiency on the bike. He just couldn’t get the hang of the damn thing. He’d practiced every day for two weeks. First on the street in front of his house and then, when that became too embarrassing, on a forgotten county road, and could still barely turn a corner without laying the bike down. His legs looked like the fresh ground hamburger they sold at Chuck’s and he’d torn all of his dungarees to denim ribbons. His eldest son had taken to it immediately – popped an effortless wheelie almost right out of the gate – and offered to take his place, but Sag wouldn’t hear of it. Too dangerous he said. Who knows what kind of monsters he’ll have between those ramps.

So now he was pacing. Whispering platitudes. Shadow boxing here and there.

Happy pushed in through the front door, smiling and waving at someone outside. He was wearing an expensive, dark blue, polyester, western style suit and a big white Stetson. When he turned to Sage the smile disappeared. “God damnit! I was led to believe that the fucking assholes in this dog shit city couldn’t get enough of this fucking motorcycle baloney. If that crowd out there emptied their pockets and combined everything they had, you’d get about forty two cents and 50 half packs of cheap smokes. How’m I gonna sell motorcycles to folks with no cash? Sag, what in the name of fuck are you doing?”

“Pepping myself up, sir.”

“Pepping? Jesus Christ. Pull yourself together! You’re going to be fine. It’s thirty fucking feet and a god damn petting zoo. Do you know what you need? You need a drink. I just happen to have some whisky in my office.”

“I don’t drink, sir. You know that. My family is filled with drunks. And I don’t want to be like . . .”

“Yeah, I’ve heard it. It’s just a drink and it’s just this once. I’ve had several today and I feel tremendous. Give you enough confidence to jump over those hills you crawled down from.”

Happy retrieved a bottle of Canadian Club from his bottom drawer. “Here. Healthy slug’ll get you right where you need to be.”

Sag took it. Drinking had never crossed his mind, really. He’d seen so much of it, suffered so many of its consequences, that to drink himself seemed akin to running into a burning building. He’d do that for Happy. And he had to do something. He couldn’t go out there and jump those cars in the state he was in. The folks – meager and rag tag as they were, though they looked all right to Sag – expected a hero. He didn’t feel like a hero at the moment. So he put the bottle to his lips and took a drink.

The most racking pangs succeeded: A grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and he came to himself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in his sensations, something indescribably new and, from its very novelty, incredibly sweet. He felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within he was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a mill-race in his fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul. He knew himself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to his original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted him. He stretched out his hands, exulting in the freshness of these sensations.

“Got-daaaaamn!” he shouted and brought the bottle up to his lips again.

“Whoa! Hold on there boy! Pace yourself!” Happy couldn’t believe the sight before him. His mild mannered son-in-law had lifted the bottle to his serene, boyish face and, when it dropped, a new man had taken his place. A wild man, ruddy faced and wicked eyed. His eyebrows seemed to have grown bushier and Happy could have sworn he saw the beginnings of a five o’clock shadow that hadn’t been there before.

Sag finished the bottle with five bobs of his suddenly prominent Adam’s Apple and whipped it underhanded at the plate glass wall of Happy’s office. The wall shattered and glass cascaded to the floor. “Time t’ jump a motherfffffffucking motorcycle, pops! Whoooo!” He clapped the stunned old man’s face between his hands three times, turned heel, and strutted toward the door.

And now, if you’ll indulge me, a shift in perspective. What follows is an artful imagining of the ensuing events as Sag might have told them in the days before his tragic end.

Tear it down! Tear it down! That was the first thought in my noggin and I damn well knew what it meant. Stop being Sag the Fag, is what it meant and start being a Jinkins. Made a lot of sense. I am a Jinkins, after all, first and foremost. And so that’s what I did, right then and there. I clapped that old asshole that’d been lordin’ up over me for much too damn long. Ooooooweee, you shoulda seen the look on ‘is face. Looked like a damn hog with a stick jammed in his asshole. And then I smashed his fuckin’ window and that felt real good and I got the fuck outta there before he could say some dumb shit’d make me knock him on his ass. And holy shit was I feelin’ good. It was like the first day of my fuckin’ life, is what it felt like. I’d been wastin’ so much time worryin’ about everyone else and worryin’ ‘bout why they wasn’t worryin’ ‘bout me, and all this time it was just cause I was missing this one thing. Booze. They’d had it and I didn’t. And now I did. It was like I’d been slouchin’ around on all fuckin’ fours and wondering why everybody’s so much taller’n me and then finally standing up and I’m seven foot fucking two. Felt great, that’s all I can say. Felt god damn great. And when I got outside the sun felt better’n it had ever felt and the world looked better’n it had ever looked and those folks looked like fucking peasants and I was their fucking king and it was time to give them a god damn show. So I hopped on that motorcycle and it felt like I belonged there, like it had been built just for me and I couldn’t believe I’d been such a fuckin’ candy ass dumb shit before, of course I could drive this thing, and I turned it on and revved the engine and all of the peasants looked at me, including a chunky blonde one in short shorts and big ass hair in the back – she was wearing a little t-shirt that said “Scooter Hussy” on it with her hip fat poppin’ out from under it – and I thought “I’m gonna have sex with that one” and then I was off and I jumped over those cars n’ critters just as easy as you please, hovered in the air like a glorious golden eagle, landed like god damn nothing and hopped off the bike while it was still rolling and strode over to that fat girl and she looked just shocked and I said, “I’m gonna have sex with you,” and she just nodded yes and we walked away from the whole thing – everyone was kind of running around and panicking because the bike had just shot right through them – didn’t hurt nobody, though, just ran over some whiny fucks foot and banged up the newspaper guys piece of shit car – and I did have sex with her, from behind, in back of Squeaky Chuck’s right across the street and when I finished I strode back to the dealership and everyone was still there and they was going fuckin’ crazy, cheerin’ and hollerin’. The guy from the news wanted to talk to me and I said, “Sure, why not.” He asked a bunch of dumbass questions and I don’t remember what I said, but at some point I go, “Cause I’m Sag Fuckin’ Jenkins and gravity don’t mean shit to me”, which kind of became my catch phrase. I was on the news that night and it caused a big sensation. Real big.

A news report from that evening:

Pandemomium erupted today outside of Happy Knobnoster’s Tallahassee Chrysler and Indian Motorcycles when a man jumped a motorbike over four cars and some animals, ran over 3 spectators, and crashed into a parked car.

The man has been identified as Happy Knobnoster’s son-in-law, Sagory Jinkins. We go now to Harv Tuboo at the scene.

What the devil’s going on out there, Harv?

Thanks, Jersey. I’m here outside of Happy Knobnoster’s Chrysler and Indian Motorcycles on a day that was supposed to promote the sale of Indian Motorcycles, a new addition to the lot at Happy’s. But this is one dealership that has maybe got more than it bargained for. The daredevil, local man and Knobnoster’s son-in-law, Sag Jinkins, successfully made the jump without much warning, landed hard, clumsily dismounted from the bike, and quickly exited the scene with what looked to be a portly lady of the night, while his cycle proceeded through the crowd, striking three onlookers and seriously injuring one, then crashing into the parked car of Melton Manehand, a reporter for the Tallahassee Times.

Let’s show the footage:

(revved engine, whooing, crashing, screams, crashing – very quick)

And here comes the daredevil himself. Let’s see if we can get a word with him.

Mr. Jinkins! Harv Tuboo with Tallahassee 6 news. Can we chat with you about the jump?

Sag: Whoooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

It sounds like you’re feeling pretty good. Did the stunt go as you expected?

Sag: Just porked that blonde one!

I’m sorry, what’s that?

Sag: The blonde girl. Porked her. Whooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Mr. Jinkins, have you ever done anything like this before?

Sag: Porked!

The jump, I mean.

Sag: I’m Sag (bleep)in’ Jinkins and gravity don’t mean (bleep) to me! Whooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Well, there you have it folks.

Sag: Tear it down! Tear it down! Whooooooooooooooooooo!

Tallahassee’s very own daredevil, Sag Jinkins. He’s certainly somethi … and now he’s vomiting.

From Happy Knobnoster’s Chrysler and Indian Motorcycles in beautiful Tallahassee, I’m Harv Tuboo. Back to you, Jersey.

Booze instantly turned Sag from an ideal citizen to a compelling monster, and by the time he finally sobered up again – three weeks later – he was locally infamous, nationally noteworthy, and personally fucked.

He had accomplished the following:

He’d slept with the second, third, fourth, and fifth women he had ever known carnally, his wife being the first and the girl at the jump the second.
Three, four, and five were an inelegantly aging bar waitress named Gert, a nameless juvenile delinquent from the skating rink, Roller’s, at which he’d done his second jump – an unsuccessful, thrown together but well attended affair featuring the same ramp from before, but on fire, that left him with a broken leg that he didn’t get treated for six days, and Muriel Vendetter, the nurse that helped administer his leg caste, who he would continue to see occasionally for some time after.

  1. He’d been on the news on four more occasions, for the Roller Rink jump, for breaking the Florida distance record (even with a broken leg) at the Leon County Fair, for being thrown out of three Piggly Wigglies in one day due to disorderly conduct and arrested for drunk driving while fleeing the third on his motorcycle, presumably to find another, for crashing his bike through the display window of a rival car dealership (resulting in another DUI), and for a fourth, nationally televised – on Wide World of Sports – jump where he broke his arm attempting to make a jump that famed female Daredevil, Pamela Gorch, was preparing to make. The camera crew was there for her and she’d arranged the whole thing. Sag just roared in out of nowhere at the last minute in full regalia, which now included his soon to be famous and previously mentioned leathers, bought for him by Happy, who had gleefully taken on the role as his manager, much to the chagrin of his daughter. Pamela was standing on the take-off ramp waving to the crowd, preparing to make the jump herself, which she would, once his shenanigans were complete, to little interest. Sag blew past her out of nowhere and crashed just short of the landing ramp.
  2. He’d discovered that Canadian Club was his drink of choice and consumed 16 and one half 1.75 bottles of the stuff. This heroic intake was possible mostly because somewhere in the second week he’d also discovered cocaine when a man named Brian Beanblossom, a prominent dealer in the Talahassee area, offered him some early in a long night of yucking it up at a pay-by-the-week hotel attached to a crumbling bar called Stucko’s.
  3. And, most troubling of all, he’d disbanded his Scout troupe in a drunken flourish of profanities after suggesting – to the horror of all in attendance, parents and kids – that they go rogue and take up bank robberies.

Now he was lying in the fetal position on a tattered love seat in a dark room in his own house, wracked with guilt, dehydration, and early withdrawal, desperately trying to ignore the incessant itching under his arm and leg casts, which were all he was wearing aside from filthy briefs.

What had he done? What had come over him? I will not let this happen, he thought. I will not be a Jinkins but I am a Jinkins I am, I’m terrible, and it’s all falling apart, too late to stop it, and my heart is beating so fast, I’m going to die, something hurts inside me. My liver? Did I wreck it already? Pappy Jinkins IV died from liver failure but it took him 84 years but had he ever killed a man with a plaque in a rage fury? Is this God coming down with his vengeance? And what of it? Am I not allowed to have any fun? Fuck it. I can have fun. I was just having fun. But there’s no way that Lynette will stay with me. Why would she and the kids and oh god what will I do alone and those women oh that one was young and the waitress was so gross that was awful but no better than what I deserve, maybe if I just have another drink I’ll feel better and this will stop or maybe I’ll just die and this will stop, but maybe just a drink, maybe I should throw up again, what if the kids come in here, why can’t I fall asleep. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

His wife was in the living room with the kids, TV turned up, trying to keep them from wondering or asking anything, terrified, unsure of what to do. It had all been so sudden. Another woman might have packed up the kids and left already, but where to? Back to Happy’s home? He was complicit in all of this. And love and the desire for stasis are powerful incentives to dig in ones heals, so that’s what she did.

Sag had quietly – though not quietly enough to avoid his wife’s sad notice – dragged himself into the bathroom to vomit again and was staring into the toilet bowl, mouth wet and eyes red, when he heard Sag burst through his front door and greet Lynette and the kids.

Lynette said, “He’s in the bathroom, vomiting. Leave him alone”

Happy ignored this. Sag heard the stomp of his approaching boots and then the door flew open.

“God damn, son, pull yourself together. We’ve got an opportunity!”

He walked in, bent over, and hoisted Sag from the linoleum floor into the bathtub, where he landed flat on his back with his head squished against one side of the basin and his legs over the other. Happy turned on the shower. Sag barely reacted to the cold, had a brief flashback to his military breakdown.

“Son, you lost all your money and I can’t rightly allow you to continue working at the dealership, what with your tarnished reputation.”

Sag began to weep.

“You are a much wilder son of a bitch than I ever thought possible, got to hand you that,” Happy continued. “Didn’t think you had it in you. And while I don’t approve of what you’ve done, it has resulted in a certain . . . let’s call it a cache. Folks are itching to see you die, my boy, and while I don’t want to see that happen myself, I do believe we can make some cash dangling that possibility before the greedy eyes of the public.”

“OH, God!” Sag sobbed.

“Here’s what I come to tell you. The Wide World of Sports wants you back. A redemption of the asshole kind of thing. I’m working on organizing your biggest jump ever and they’re going to cover it. You’ll also get 15% of all ticket sales – of which I will, of course, as your manager, be entitled to 40%. Could be one hell of a payday. I’ve made a considerable investment and booked the Miami Orange Bowl stadium. 80,000 seats. And $30 a ticket that’s, well, just let me worry about what that comes to.”

Sag sat up. “How did you do that?”

“Do not worry about that either. What I need from you is publicity. Fix yourself up and let’s go talk over a beer.”

They had the beer – many, many beers, in fact – and they worked out the stunt, and Sag went about doing dozens of interviews that ranged from humorously sloppy and crude to unbearably sloppy and crude, but they did the trick. Anticipation for his jump at the Orange Bowl was high and the event sold out. Everyone loves the redemption or death of a fool. Viewership of that week’s episode of Wide World of Sports was staggering. A full 40% of all Americans with televisions tuned in and, presumably, many that didn’t watched from a filthy bar or through a window.

On the day of the jump Sag was relatively sober and monumentally charming in his interview and he landed the jump without a hitch.

He was famous. Very famous – just a bone shard short of Evel Knievel famous. There were endorsement deals – with Indian Motorcycles and Tiger Balm and Mrs. Butterworth – and there were more high profile stunts, all of which resulted in piles of cash – enough to jump him 3, maybe 4 tax brackets – and enough to convince Lynette to stick with him for a while longer, see how this all played out – he was hardly home anyway and their new digs on the really good side of town – a side Happy had never even considered – were worth whatever trouble staying with him would cause.

Meanwhile, Sag stayed drunk and increased the intake of coke, of course, and that went like it always does . . .

Look – the success part of all of this is well documented. That’s not what I’m here to tell you about. Suffice it to say there were ups and downs and women and scandal and fights and more and more money.

Until there wasn’t.

Just over a year later Sag sat in Happy’s new and improved office, complete with a garish self-portrait and built in putting green. Happy was dressed like Colonel Tom Parker and Sag, appropriately, was looking like an even more beat up fat Elvis. Acting a bit like him too.

He paced unsteadily, manic and just outside of sloppy. His arm was in a cast and his head was propped up by a neck brace. He was wearing a “Gravity Don’t Mean Shit To Me” trucker hat and a thick gold chain with a large, diamond encrusted SG pendant hung askew in the deep V of his red, white, and blue polyester button down shirt.

“It’s drying up, Happy. It’s dried up and I owe a lot of people a lot of money and your bitch daughter’s not going to forgive me if the money’s gone. How has it dried up already? They’re still sucking Knievel’s dick! What are you going to do about this, Happy, what the FUCK are you going to do about this?!”

Happy calmly rose from the leather chair behind his oaken desk, and walked toward Sag. He wasn’t feeling the manic energy as he’d kicked the booze and never touched coke – he’d seen what they had done to his son-in-law and had grown to hate the stuff. He missed the old Sag, god help him, and the thought that this all might be his fault made him want to cry, though he hadn’t, of course. Had never, really. This was a god damn tragedy and the man in front of him was the victim, but nobody called his daughter a bitch, so as soon as he was within arm’s reach of Sag – could smell the sharp hooch stink on him – Happy twisted Sag’s still healing arm away from his torso and punched him in the gut, very hard, felt the soft fat give way to what muscle still lie beneath it and turned his back as Sag fell to the floor with a grunt and a tight wheeze.

Happy returned to the chair behind his desk and sat down.

“Soon as you can pull in enough breath I want you to get out of here. We’re done. And stay the fuck away from my daughter.”

Sag got his breath back surprisingly fast and didn’t argue. Just hobbled out.

Happy wept, long and hard.

All the good parts were over.

Another month later and Sag Jinkins was sitting in a bar called Lumpy’s, alone in the dark at 10 am, trying to work up the will to chug a drink he didn’t have the stomach for at the moment.

Lynette had left him. All his shit was gone. His endorsements were gone. His opportunities were gone. No one was willing to offer him daredevil work. He’d become too much of a prick in an industry built around Evil Knievel, an all-time prick. His son, Clinton, had punched him in the nose just the day before, when Sag had crashed his bike into a car outside of the Jinkins’ new, much more modest, Sag free residence – the car belonged to the father of Clinton’s friend, who was inside the house with his son for Clinton’s 13th birthday party, which Sag had been invited to out of deference to the still lingering affections of his sons – and Sag stormed inside loudly demanding to know which son-of-a-bitch was parked in his spot. Lynette tried to calm him down, and it almost worked – he still loved her somewhere under all the liquor and regret – but he’d again flown off the handle when he noticed that Clint’s birthday cake was Knievel themed.

He flung it against the wall and that’s when the boy socked him in the nose – he was tall enough to reach it at this point – and before he had a chance to figure out how to respond to that he was weeping, and then being dragged out of the home by the man whose car he’d hit.

Now he was sad. The party was officially over – had been over for a while, but it hadn’t stopped Sag from strutting about as if it wasn’t – even if he was the only attendee.

But the swagger was gone and he was just drinking, or trying to, intermittent sobs hiccupping from his puffy throat.

And then someone sat next to him. Sag didn’t look up.

“Aren’t you Sag Jinkins?” the person asked admiringly.

Sag turned. No one had said anything admiringly to him in a good long time and it caused a renewed glimmer of confidence.

The man next to him looked like a cartoon character, but he had a musk and a smile that instilled confidence.

Sag sensed a new father figure. It was Batton Trowel.

Batton Trowel was a Texas good ol’ boy born and raised in Lincoln, Nebraska with a deep weird streak that manifested itself privately in simpering, gross, omni-submissive orgies and publicly in his dress and unpleasant vibe, a vibe which helped him get most anything he wanted as folks were just eager to be rid of him.

Like Happy – he actually looked quite a bit like Happy – he had been a car salesman – a quite successful one – but had abandoned the trade after some accidentally ingested mescaline led to a typically errant vision that pushed him to seek one-ness with the universe.

That turned out to involve much more mescaline and a move to Florida, where he’d taken up selling “health tinctures” and healing crystals, which was to everyone’s shock but his own, quite lucrative for a time. Then he was arrested for selling mescaline – he was in possession of the biggest stash the police had ever seen, by a large margin – and served three years in the Florida State Penitentiary, which is where he watched both of Sags jumps on the World Wide of Sports.

He’d only been out for a month and was still looking for his next gig when he saw a man who looked a lot like a beat to shit version of Sag Jinkins walk into Lumpy’s. This immediately gave him a swarm of ideas, but he hung outside for a bit to let his man get a little loose before sharing any of them.

Eventually he came in and sat down next to Sag. He spoke for a while about how much he admired his courage and how he could see he was a man with uniquely and ideally aligned chakras. Sag, of course, had no clue what he was talking about but it all sounded nice and he was too low to feel the unpleasantness radiating from the large man’s leathery skin. Was transfixed by the massive turquoise bolo tie around his thick neck.

Batton could see that this wouldn’t take much work – next to him was a man without any options – so he got right to the point.

“Sir, I would be honored to be in the Sag Jinkins business. And if you aren’t currently employing one, I’d like to be your humble manager. And even if you are, he’s clearly doing a terrible job. You, sir, are a star, and should be treated as such. Should be eating at the finest restaurants, not slumped at this regrettable bar. Should be showered with pussy and sundry other adulations. What say you?”

Sag began to weep and embraced the burly man, dug his head into Batton’s garish western shirt.

“Thank you,” he sobbed.

Batton immediately put Sag on a strict diet and regiment of prayer, meditation, and crystals, though he kept feeding him booze, negating any positive effects that could have come from such things.

He put Sag up at a decent hotel and set to work booking shows. They were hard to come by, at first, but Batton wasn’t a man to be dissuaded easily and landed on a gimmick to pique the public’s interest: Guerilla Jumps, inspired by Sag’s first entrance on the national stage. No permits and no forewarning, outside of a little word of mouth and maybe a nudge to the local news here and there.

The first and only of these was attempted in Times Square. Batton flew there and bought Sag a bus ticket. He spent the whole bus ride drinking. Got kicked off of the bus in West Virginia for incessantly screaming, “Lynette, Lynette my beautiful Lynette! What did I do? I just want my family back!” but somehow managed to hitch a ride to another bus station in order to finish the trip. He was in no better shape for the actual event. Barely conscious, he rode up the makeshift ramp far too slowly and gradually tipped over its top lip, landing in a messy pile on the concrete. He broke a few ribs and wasn’t so much knocked unconscious as he just sort of fell asleep. It was a disaster, but it did make the news and succeeded in raising his dormant public profile.

Out of the hospital, Sag begged Batton to check him into alcohol rehab, something the attending doctor had said might be a good idea, but Batton wouldn’t hear of it.

“These gat-damned doctors have absolutely no idea what they are talking about. They are just out to make a buck. Stick with me, son. I’ll work you over with the crystals and the tincture and we’ll get you in a sweat lodge and you’ll be good as new. Better than new. Won’t even have to quit the sauce. You shouldn’t quit the sauce. It’s part of what people love about you. No one’ll pay to see a man who isn’t a bit reckless, my boy. And you can’t let them down now! You’re all over the news! A hero! And, frankly, you can’t afford to stop. Or to go to rehab. Here take a drink of this. It’s whiskey, but I’ve mixed in some of the tincture.”

The increased exposure only resulted in some small time gigs and a veritable guarantee of State Fair and Monster truck rally shows for the rest of his life, possibly the worst outcome imaginable. And Batton was managing his finances, so he never saw any of the fairly meager money, only received a shockingly modest stipend and a constant stream of alcohol, drugs, crystals, and the tincture.

This went on for five months. There were arrests and health scares and injuries and various humiliations dotting that time period, but there were also some jumps, though Sag took no pleasure in them.

He did the Okfuskee County Fair in Oklahoma and completed a fairly impressive jump with a fairly large crowd, but shit his pants somewhere before landing.

That didn’t feel great, even though no one noticed.

There was the demolition derby at the Jamestown Speedway in Jamestown, North Dakota – one hell of a bus ride, though he was passed out for much of it – where he didn’t land his jump and got into an unsuccessful – on his end – brawl with some locals in the parking lot. They left him moaning and bleeding on the asphalt and Batton didn’t even notice he was gone for two hours. Took another full hour to find him, and then there were crystals and prayers and he was back on the bus for an 8 hour drive to Golgotha, South Dakota, with a blindingly painful crack in one of his vertebrae that went undiagnosed and untreated – by anyone qualified – right up until his death.

Which brings us to where we started, finally. The Argus Valley Speedway, where that death is imminent.

Sag is hobbling back from running the sprint that Batton ordered. It has made him feel a bit better, mentally – more awake, anyway. But his body feels like it might just collapse into six or seven pieces and then decompose quickly, like in a time lapse video.

This is what he is thinking:

“I can’t do this anymore. I want to die. I wish I could say goodbye to Lynette and the kids, but it’s better if I don’t. I’ve fucked this up too badly. I’m a fucking Jinkins.”

Sag is breathing in gasps, and kneels down next to Batton, who is already mid prayer. Batton puts a hand on Sags head and it’s cold, somehow, even though the heat index has cracked 110.

Batton says:

“Oh, great creator, giver of life and riches. Bless this old boy before this great jump. May it inspire all those who see it and put them in mind to buy some merch. Amen.”

They stand and walk to the smallish, sparsely peopled grand stand. Batton hands him his helmet and talks – never stops talking – but Sag doesn’t listen. He’s saying his own prayer.

“Please forgive me. I don’t deserve it, but please forgive me. Give peace and happiness to my family. I don’t need any for myself. But please forgive me.”

He repeats this to himself and his vague sense of God over and over. He is crying.

And then he is alone in the performer entrance, astride his beat up old Indian Motorcycle while Batton introduces him with superlative after superlative, and he is planning.

When he hears the final announcement of his name – Saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaag Jiiiiiiiiiinkiiiiiins! – he puts on his helmet and enters the grandstand with a loud rev of his motor to weak applause. He is ready. He will jump higher than he has ever jumped before and then it will be over.

He casts his helmet aside. The crowd gasps at his face.

Another loud rev of the motor and he’s off, and it actually feels good this time. The jumps have never felt very good or natural. He’s never really thought much about them.

But this time the wind’s in his hair and the sky above him is blue and he already feels relief.

He hits the ramp and feels the incline and really pushes the engine. Then he’s flying through the air. And he thinks, “I thought this would feel like slow motion, but it doesn’t”, it’s actually going very fast and he barely has time to say his prayer once more:

“Please forgive me. I don’t deserve it, but please forgive me. Give peace and happiness to my family. I don’t need any for myself. But please forgive me.”

and almost doesn’t go through with his plan but at the last moment he tips his front wheel forward by shifting his body weight suddenly and then crashes, head first, into the broad front of the ramp.

And that is the end of Sag Jinkins.

The end.

Klaus Nomi

Listen. I’m well aware that the last thing the world needs is another biography of Klaus Nomi. He’s already a household name on par with James Polk, young John Cusack, and the Andrews Sisters. What could I – a humble podcast magnate – possibly add to the reams upon reams of information already available to you via your home library, public library, magazine subscriptions, nightly newscasts, corner newsstand, and pocket super computer? Everywhere one looks, his angular, alien features – slathered in pancake make-up, and cartoonish brow, accented by plastic three pronged hair, are emblazoned upon baseball caps, halter tops, and business casual velveteen capes. It’s tattooed to the ankles of desperate baristas, crudely scotch taped to the bedroom walls and locker doors of lovesick tweenagers. Cover bands with names like No Means Nomi and Klaus Kall bogart stage time at VFW Posts in every American town. His ghostly counter-tenor fills sporting stadiums, dank bars, dusk tinged city streets, massage parlors, opium dens, and Subarus. His songs soundtrack what sometimes feels like every third movie preview and gingersnap commercial.
“Enough is enough!” you may be shouting. “Yes, he is a gift – a jewel in humanity’s crown, recognized and beloved by all. But have we not reached the point of saturation? The man has been dead for a score and ten – perhaps it’s time we move on?”
We will, in time, dear listener. I’m sure of it. After this recording, perhaps.Wait? What’s that? You’ve never heard of Klaus Nomi? Could it be true? Excuse me? They don’t make advertisements for gingersnaps? Since when? Oh, well, please accept my apologies. It seems I’ve just woken from the most beautiful dream.
In that case, allow me to fill in some holes.

Forgotten Wrestlers

Gorgeous George was the most prominent and important figure in wrestling’s ascent into the American zeitgeist, largely due to his gimmick. But he wasn’t the first or, most assuredly the last, wrestler to adopt a unique persona for the ring. The history of wrestling is littered with characters. Some have been wildly successful -Hulk Hogan, Rowdy Roddy Piper, The Big Boss Man – who became household names and can illicit the most bittersweet of remembrances in vast armies of doughy diabetics, nerds, and toothless, bigoted human trash.

But others – for any number of reasons – have been all but lost to time – yellowing, bedoodled, unread appendices to the vast tome of human history. I’d like to take this opportunity to dust off a few of these inane curiosities – these brushed aside beefcakes, these dusty hulks – and re-expose them to the harsh glare of cultural recognition.

Music, lyrical

Roy Herman, The Stout Strangler

Roy Herman was a German immigrant that rose to fame on our shores in the late 19th century, mostly due to his stoutness. “Built like a whiskey jug”, he was but 3 inches taller than he was wide. Neither particularly burly or soft, he seemed to be made of hardwood, folks said, and could not be, was not ever, toppled. Rumor has it, he slept standing, as the strain of rising was too much a burden. His signature move was just a two handed, standard strangle that was often fatal. He died as he lived, strangled to death in 1907 by his own two hands, after first strangling our next grappler.

Penis length, 4 and one half inces. Penis diameter 7/8s of an inch.

“Hurtful” Lenny DeVorak

So named for his cutting and mean spirited wit. He talked such a mean game, his opponents would often just walk out of the ring, quitting the profession all together. As an example, the reported run of shit talk that got him and The Stout Strangler strangled to death: “Why, you’re more chair than man and with half the brains! Your mother was a chiffarobe, see? Your father an ape! A German ape! Imagine, ladies and gentlemen, a hairy Kraut mounting a chest of drawers! Nine months later, young master Roy comes into the world with his father’s looks and his mother’s brains! I’d soon as use you to store my pantaloons as to spar! Egad, man, I don’t know how you do it? Were I you, I’d quit this whole business and look for work as a tree stump!”

Penis length 6 and a quarter inches. Penis diameter, 1 and three fourths inches.

Muscled Dick Rockingham

Dick Rockingham had a lot of muscles for a white man in 1910. That is to say, he looked like a modern man of average build, maybe a little doughy, but who flexed a lot. He was primarily known for his catch-phrase, “I’m Muscled Dick Rockingham and I’m stronger than a very large bear!” He died in 1918 while trying to prove this claim.

Penis length 3 inches. Penis width 2 inches.

Herbert Heaver

Herbert Heaver was, obviously, a wrestling parody of President Herbert Hoover, and one of the first “character wrestlers”. There wasn’t much to the character other than the name and his signature move, The Herbert Heave-Ho.

Died in 1925 of complications during a routine eye exam.

Penis length 5 and a quarter inches. Penis Diameter three fourths of an inch.

Sad Cowboy Tony

Sad Cowboy Tony was a mystery man, a weathered, depressive relic of the old west, out of time and place in 1940s New York. No one could say who he was or where he’d come from, but he dressed in full cowboy regalia – boots, spurs, chaps, a huge belt buckle ensconced, strangely, with a depiction of the corpse of Harpo Marx, who was still very much alive, a leather vest, bolo tie, and ten gallon hat. He’d often weep as he pummeled his opponent and was never heard to speak.

Died in 1958 of a self-inflicted six shooter wound. Penis length 9 and one eight inches. Penis diameter two inches.

Chief Runjumpandpunch

The Chief was Sad Cowboy Tony’s nemesis and the first prominent racial caricature of the low art. He’d hoot and holler, run, jump, and punch, per his name, and his signature move was known as “The Scalper”. It was pretty gross. Think every racist Indian depiction still very much in use today.

Died in 1932 from testicular cancer. Very sad. Penis length: 7 1/8 Inches, diameter 1 inch on the nose.

The Bedraggler

Everyone likes to look nice and this is where The Bedraggler would get you – right in the Achilles Heal that is your innate vanity. He was filthy and somehow always very wet. He stunk to high heaven. All of these things were very transferable. Thirty seconds with The Bedraggler and you would be bedraggled yourself, begging for the match to end so you could hit the showers. He died in 1948, of injuries sustained from slipping in the shower, believe it or not.

Penis length five and three fourths inches. Penis diameter one and a quarter inches.

Count Irwin Manhandler

A beefy Aristocrat. Turns out, he was also a real Count, whatever that means. Never won a match, but his signature line lives on. It was this: “Boogaloooooo!”

Died in 1962 from POISON! (Bumbumbum!)

Penis length unknown. Penis diameter one and two thirds inch.

Senator Eddie “The Killer” Beaver

The Senator was never a real, sitting United States Senator, but he did make a run for the seat in Minnesota, narrowly losing to Hubert Humphrey. Dejected by the loss, he turned to booze and his life quickly spiraled out of control. He became a wrestler only after spending several years as a shiftless street person, begging for change to buy loosies from a gas station in Wyoming. He added “The Killer” to his name because of his love for disgraced rock innovator Jerry Lee Lewis and his signature move was the Beaver Stomp, which was just stomping on an opponent’s head. Otherwise, there was no gimmick, he was just an unhinged drunk with a pretty good head of hair that came out to Great Balls of Fire. He died in 1971 of, you guessed it, MURDER! (bumbumbum!)

Penis length 11 inches, diameter three and one eight inches.

The Clown That Smells Too Good

This was a far too abstract concept for a wrestler – nearly impossible to convey to fans. The idea was that this was a very scary clown, but he smelled really, really good, and that’s kind of an upsetting thing to think about. The character only lasted for a week before the wrestler tried a different concept, the much more successful character known as Hulk Hogan.

If you want to know Hulk Hogan’s penis length and diameter, you’re in luck – he has a truly upsetting and shockingly unsexy sex tape available on the internet! A man named Bubba The Love Sponge is involved and, somehow, that’s not the worst part!

Mr. Baby

Mr. Baby is a nickname I had for a guy that used to shop at a grocery store where I once worked. He wasn’t a wrestler, I don’t think, but Mr. Baby would be a great concept for a wrestler, right. This was a grown man who dressed as a baby, hence the name. He wore a light blue baby bonnet and a big, had a pacifier on a string around his neck, was obviously wearing a diaper, and had bells on his shoes, so you could always hear him coming. He pushed a cart with a teddy bear in the child’s seat. Incongruously, he also had a moustache. You’d think a man trying to be a baby would shave his facial hair, but he didn’t. He acted perfectly normal outside of his dress. I don’t know if he’s still alive or how big his penis was, but it’s a fun memory.

Gorgeous George

James Brown, John Waters, Bob Dylan, Muhammad Ali.

What do these four men have in common?

Penises, presumably.

Skin, hair, nipples. Other mammalian traits.

I bet they all liked Cheers.

But most importantly – what I’m getting at, the topic of this episode – is Gorgeous George, an old timey wrestler who also had a penis and was a mammal and probably would have liked Cheers, had he lived to see it.

Sadly, he did not.

Each of these men, Brown, Waters, Dylan, and Ali – world changing cultural figures all, their contributions to our modern world incalculable – were inspired by Gorgeous George nee George Wagner, a flamboyant, hulking, blond bombshell of a man who fancied ornate, lacy robes, liquor, and prostitutes, and made his bones faux-grappling with various and sundry half-nude, oil soaked brutes to the delight of shrieking rubes in stadiums and on unaccountably massive early televisions.

He probably inspired others too. They were probably mostly nameless violent lunkheads and drag queens or both, I suppose, which is impressive in itself. Most people, if they inspire anyone at all, only inspire violent lunkheads or drag queens. Rarely is this a significantly intersecting Venn Diagram.

So who was this man who inspired the men who inspired the world, in addition to violet lunkheads and drag queens and violent drag queen lunkheads?

I told you. He was a wrestler. In the 1940’s and 50’s. Now I’ll tell you more.

A pair of anecdotes, to begin: 1929. Just outside of Houston. George Wagner is fourteen years old, living with his parents. He’s dropped out of school and is working odd jobs to support the family because his mother’s sick and his father’s kind of a hapless house painter at a time when nobody can afford to have their house painted. They certainly weren’t going to get their rickety Hooverville shacks painted. What would be the point? I guess personal pride and a desperate grasp for individual expression in a pretty hopeless time, which, when you think about it, is pretty noble and understandable and really the only reason anyone does anything beyond the ruthless necessities of survival. Why do I pay to have my house painted? Why do I wear a sports coat? Why do I speak, for that matter, beyond obtaining sustenance and shelter?

It’s all pretty pointless.

Anyway. Times were tough. Even tougher than normal. But George was a robust young man with not a little innate personal magnetism, and that quality, as it often does, soon opened up a few more opportunities beyond the usual shoveling of coal or bailing of hay or whatever it is that poor schlubs do for money.

I wouldn’t know. I have a fancy desk job and am very well to do.

Specifically, it opened up some opportunities at the traveling carnivals that were so popular at the time. These roving curiosities would often feature – in addition to the freak shows and palm readers and such – strongmen- different from just strong men in that they were employed based on their strongness – and sometimes the strongmen would grapple with each other on a stage, and sometimes when they were done grappling each other they’d challenge folks in the audience to step up and do some grappling as well. Brave, dumb folks’d pony up two bits for the privilege, and, if they won, could pridefully swagger home with twenty times that amount jangling in the pockets of their worn overalls or clasped in their calloused fists if the worn overalls were so worn as to have unfunctional pockets. Often as not, though, the gristly brute that would raise his hand to step up to the challenge was a plant, who would hop up on the stage and handily win, thereby duping the rubes into believing these matches were winnable and taking a shot of their own at taking home the desperately needed winnings. Why, a man could feed his whole family for a week on a crisp fin! Even a crumpled or soggy fin would do the trick. But, invariably, the poor rube would be no match at all for the glistening man ogre who made his living tossing suckers from their backs and lying atop them, chests heaving, for a count of three.

It was a swell time for all involved.

Well, as the story goes, George was in the audience of one of these events, under a canvas tent with 74 other sweaty patrons of the low arts.

He’d already done some rastlin’ by this point. He and his boyhood chums were known locally as the Harrisburg Rats. They’d fight each other privately on a small river island, practicing their moves, and publicly on a sawdust pile next to a fruit cart, which earned them a few nickels from passersby but couldn’t have done much for fruit sales. He’d also done some traditional, excruciatingly dull, two guys on all fours on a mat type wrestling at the YMCA.

As a side note, I myself briefly participated in this deeply unpleasant type of wrestling and won exactly 1 of my 9 matches, because the other guy didn’t show up for that one. The eight other matches were very brief because I didn’t want to be there and would let myself be pinned immediately. There are few things I can imagine worse than the feeling of anxiety brought about by having an excitable, smelly jock kid lying atop you as you wait for an adult in a ridiculous black and white striped shirt to very intensely count to three while several other adults yell at you. Even the smell of those sweat and bacteria soaked foam wrestling mats makes my stomach turn to this day.

Back to George.

OK. So he’s in the tent. It’s hot. Everybody is dressed in wool suits and hats because that’s just how it worked back then. It stinks to high heaven. Not like today where your typical wrestling fan is considered dressed up if there’s a fancy pattern embroidered on the pocket of his jeans and he’s wearing a shirt. Wrestling events still generally stink to high heaven, though.

George is a burly, good looking kid. Kind of a tougher, stouter Jimmy Cagney type. He’s street smart. He’s confident. He’s got the general idea of how this grift works, but he raises his hand anyway, confident that he can flip and pin a drunken carny, strongman or not.

He’s called to the ring, pops off his shirt, submits his quarter, approaches the smirking strongman – bigger than him by four inches and fifty pounds – and surprises the behemoth with his clear knowledge of the ring. He gets the upper hand right away, and the crowd goes wild for the hometown boy – the one they’ve seen getting sweat and sawdust all over their apples, whose pops maybe painted their shed.

The strongman doesn’t like having a brash young yokel getting over on him – the five bones the boy would get for winning come out of his pocket – and he has some go to extra-legal maneuvers to lean on in just this kind of situation. Eye gouging or nut punches, or, if he can get behind the challenger, a sleeper hold that will put him out long enough to end the thing.

This particular strongman goes for the eye gouge. He gets George in a headlock and crams his middle knuckle into the kid’s eye socket. It hurts. George puts up his hands to his face. The strongman uses this opening to flip him onto the mat – just wood with a canvas cover. That hurts too, but George still has his wits and he’s shockingly nimble, almost immediately kicks himself back to standing. He gets the strongman in a headlock of his own, throws him to the mat, jumps on top like a fat kid belly flopping from the high dive at a public pool in a vain attempt to shroud his insecurity in bravado, and holds the bested brute there for a three count. The crowd goes bananas.

The whole thing lasts seven minutes.

George pockets the five dollars, but more importantly, there are wrestling promoters in the audience, and they’re impressed.

George Wagner’s wrestling career has begun.

The second anecdote: 1950. Los Angeles, California. The Pan-Pacific Auditorium. 10,000 in attendance. It’s a night of stars . . . Hollywood stars! An event to raise money for a children’s hospital.

Basically the Ringling Circus but with famous folks standing in for the carnies. Back to the carnies, but fancier now. Do you see what I’m doing here? I’m kind of mirroring the previous anecdote but, like, a ritzy version to show how far George has come. Ok, here goes.

Gregory Peck is there, dressed as a clown. Bing Crosby’s a clown too. Ronald Reagan, in his role as a terrible actor as opposed to a terrible President, is the ringmaster. Buster Keaton does a strongman routine. Harpo Marx dances. It’s quite a scene and sounds like it would have been a real thrill to see in person until you find out that it lasted a full four hours. I’m assuming several audience members died of exhaustion.

So, there are innumerable celebrities on hand to do whatever it is they do. Bing Crosby’s around, for Christ sake. But the top billing goes to our man George Wagner, now universally known as Gorgeous George. He’s famous. Famouser than Bing Crosby famous.

It’s three and one half hours into this cavalcade of egos when Gorgeous George – he’s legally changed his name by now – gets his cue. The remaining, conscious members of the audience muster their last remnants of strength to scoot to the edge of their seats in beleaguered anticipation.

But George doesn’t come out. Bob Hope does, dressed up like a butler, carrying an oversized spritzer of perfume – Chanel #10, according to the label – and a mink rug on a silver serving tray.

Bob Hope? A butler? Why, he’s a very famous comedian! What a farce!

He’s playing the role of Jeffrey, and everyone there knows it. They know George’s whole routine from watching him on television.

Here’s how it goes, basically every time:

His man servant, Jeffrey Jeffries – usually played by a friend – comes out with the tray. He spritzes the ring with the perfume, making it suitable for George, a man of delicate sensibilities who demands fineries, despite his coarse vocation. He places the rug in George’s corner. He stands at attention, waiting for the boss.

Pomp and Circumstance plays over the loudspeaker. Maybe a little on the nose, but effective. Sometimes on the nose is right where things need to be. And then Gorgeous George enters, draped in an elegant robe – one of eighty in his wardrobe – made of lavender silk, trimmed with ermine, dusted with magic, the back embroidered with a diamond accented orchid. He’s waving a huge ostrich feather fan. Looks like one of them fruity French nobles or something.

He’s fabulous and he knows it. His chin is pointed up. His dyed blond hair is done up like a wealthy dowager’s. He sneers. He offers his hand to be kissed, but it is more often than not spat upon. He is horrified by this, but not surprised. These people are peasants, after all.

He arrives at the ring and Jeffries is there to help him in. He strides about, pulling the golden hair pins from his hair and daintily tossing them into the audience, who are booing, but also scrambling to get his discarded hair pins.

Jeffries removes the robe and folds it carefully. George checks his work, makes him do it again. Jeffrey removes several bobby pins from George’s hair – he calls them Georgie Pins and they’re plated with gold. Or spray painted gold, more likely. They hold up his famous blonde hair, done up in what was known as a marcel, long locks pinned against the head in tight waves. Think, Zelda Fitzgerald meets your great grandma but dyed blond. Very elegant.

The crowd is literally booing and hissing at this point. My impression is that this era was almost exactly like a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

How dare he delight us with his homosexual minstrelsy!? Does he think he’s better than us just because we’re a smelly horde too dumb to understand that this is fake and he’s a well-paid professional and self-made millionaire who has, against all odds, clawed his way to the top of an absurd profession and smells much, much better than we do and is incalculably smarter than us?!

Finally George approaches the referee, whose job it is to pat him down and make sure he’s not hiding any knives in his very tiny wrestling underpants, I guess. But George will not deign to be touched by a filthy peasant until that filthy peasant’s hands are properly perfumed, so Jeffries gives the guy a couple squirts of the Chanel #10.

And then it’s time to address the opponent, who has been waiting unnoticed in the corner through this whole interminable charade.

In this case that opponent happens to be Gary Cooper.

He taunts his burly opposition. Or Gary Cooper. The match with Cooper isn’t anything special except that it ends in a kind of hoe down instead of a pin. You know, like a Bugs Bunny cartoon, with Bob Hope and everything.

The opponents circle. He jukes and jives. As a wrestler, George is still surprisingly nimble. The effeminate routine falls away as soon as the bell rings. His falls are convincing and the ability to jump from prostrate to standing hasn’t waned. The crowd goes wild. And then, more often than not, George gets manhandled. The crowd gets a real kick out of seeing his hair get messed up.

He’s not here to win in the ring. He’s here to entertain. The winning comes from the fat paycheck he receives for doing this, and those paychecks are theoretically big enough to keep him in ermine and a lilac Rolls Royce for the rest of his life.

But they don’t, of course.

Gorgeous George had a long career – longer than most. But its end was predictable, if unusually sad.

He drank too much. Whored around. Got divorced a couple of times. Made some bad investments.

He opened a bar that was pretty popular for a while and then wasn’t. He slept on a cot in a shitty apartment.

He tried to make some cash by getting back in the ring, but the results were upsetting. The match they set up for him meant that, if he lost, his opponent would shave his head in the ring. He lost, of course, because that’s how the script was written. And those famous curls were shorn.

There are pictures. They are hard to look at.

Gorgeous George’s body has gone soft. His face is swollen with drink. And the head shaving is clearly causing him real anguish.

And then he died. Not, right there, that would have been incredible. Samson but better. He died alone in his sad apartment, on his cot. The 12th saddest way to go.

Here’s a quick list of the other 11 saddest ways to go, just for kicks:

  1. Cut down in your prime.
  2. Hoisted by your own petard.
  3. Suicide.
  4. Alone in a nursing home, gazing longingly at a picture of the family that hasn’t visited you in months.
  5. On a city bus and no one notices until the last stop.
  6. Losing a courageous battle with cancer right before ever hearing this podcast.
  7. From a fire while trying and failing to save others from the fire.
  8. Anne Frank.
  9. Freezing to death on a park bench.
  10. Freezing to death on a park bench, holding crying a baby.
  11. SIDS

Anyway, he died and it was sad. And now, not many folks remember him – directly.

But everybody in the Western world with even a passing familiarity with pop culture feels his impact.

Just about every professional wrestler since has stolen some of his act. Rick Flair took most of it.

James Brown liked the butler and robe shtick so much he got himself a cape man.

Ali actually met George a few times. George saw something in him and invited him to a couple matches. Ali realized that the best way to get people to love you was to get them to hate you first and it made him into a legend.

Dylan said George once shouted something at him in a hotel lobby and it gave him the confidence he needed to pursue his dreams – or something of that nature. Dylan might have just made that up.

John Waters fell in love with drag and the subversion of masculinity because of George. At the time, his old opponent Gary Cooper was the definition of a man. Sullen and strong. Stoic. Dignified. Gorgeous George was something else entirely, but still virulent and aggressively heterosexual, even when running his homoerotic act and taking part in the further, inherent homoeroticism of wrestling. and it went a long way toward the co-creation of Devine, who herself pioneered somehow being fabulous while eating dog shit.

Most importantly, though, Gorgeous George came along at exactly the same time as television and was instrumental in making the new media mainstream. TV stations needed content. Just like the internet does now. I’ve set it before and I’ll say it again: Content providers are the single most important people ever and people that call themselves content providers are heroes.

Anyway – TV needed content and professional wrestling footage was easy to get. It was cheap. And people seemed to enjoy watching little, ridiculous and blurry black and white man get tangled up in each other. It couldn’t be any worse than Dexter, and people inexplicably love that show. George’s character was big enough to be successfully conveyed on the small screen – to stand out from the other grey blobs. He’s probably the only one they could make out, if only because of the hair and robes. So they tuned in, and they kept tuning in and now we have the cultural cesspool that we all love today!

Thanks, Gorgeous George!

Madam Lechuga’s Celebrity Haunted Apartment

Apparitions. Ghosts. Spooks. Haints. Whatever you want to call them, you haven’t seen spirits like this before.
Hello. I’m world renowned palm reader and séance professional Madame Esperanza Lechuga, owner of Madame Lechuga’s Celebrity Haunted Apartment, and boy, have we got dead celebrities. My place is lousy with ‘em.
If you’ve ever wanted to meet a famous person or see a ghost, Madame Lechuga’s Celebrity Haunted Apartment is the place for you.
I’ve conducted thousands of celebrity séances at my one bedroom apartment in Queens and sometimes the damn spirits just won’t leave. So, I figure, if I have to live with these paranormal vermon, why not make a few bucks?
You’ll meet the ghost of John Belushi, who won’t stop bitching about his brother Jim and the continued existence of The Blues Brother, hear the disembodied voice of Bing Crosby proposition you in the bathroom, marvel as Sammy Davis Junior constantly flicks the lights on and off in the living room, and much, much more.
Did you ever want to get up close and personal with Norman Rockwell? Well, he just stands in the doorway looking sad – you’ll walk right through him on the way in. Love sports and hate minorities? You and the spooky, staticy face of Ty Cobb in my television set will have a lot to talk about. Is cooking your thing? The essence of Julia Child is perpetually wailing and throwing food around the kitchen.
I’ve also got a possessed toaster oven that will sear the face of Jim Varney into your bread and a microwave that doesn’t work too well, which may or may not be the doing of former President Warren G. Harding.
So, come, let my waking nightmare be your dream come true, at Madame Lechuga’s Celebrity Haunted Apartment, where celebrities are doomed to spend eternity, but you can just visit.

UFOs Pt. II

Richard Moss
As mentioned in the previous episode, I recently purchased a large box of 1970s UFO paperbacks from a thrift store.  Each of these books was carefully imprinted by a custom stamp in blue ink with the words “From the Library of Richard Moss”.
 
Naturally I was intrigued. Who was Dick Moss? As the inheritor of his library I wanted to know the man and his work, if he’d done any, in the field of UFOlogy.  I assumed he was dead, as that’s how most collections come to live in thrift stores.  I once found about 30 snap button cowboy shirts each with the name Herman written in blue marker on the tag – a truly wonderful old man habit that doesn’t seem to be done much anymore – starting in the Medium section and going all the way to XXL. I figured Herman had either eaten himself into oblivion or wasted away from cancer or a Romanian curse like that guy in Stephen King’s book, Thinner.
 
Anyway, I Googled Richard Moss, expecting to find an obituary, but instead found four short newspaper articles from Duluth, Minnesota’s newspaper of record, Duluth News Tribune.
 
They were intriguing.
The first was dated June 6th, 1977.
Local Man Reports UFO Over Lake Superior
Richard Moss, a native Duluth resident and sophomore at the University of Minnesota Duluth, has reported an encounter with an Unidentified Flying Object while fishing on Lake Superior late Friday night.
Moss told authorities that a “large, metallic saucer-like craft” hovered 100 yards above his small boat for 3 minutes at 11:35 PM before “vanishing”.
Mr. Moss was alone at the time and there are no other witnesses.
Duluth Police are investigating the report, but declined to comment, as did Mr. Moss.
This is the third UFO sighting reported in Duluth since January.
 
The second, from August 22nd, 1995
Duluth Resident Holds UFO Symposium
Richard Moss, owner of Moss Antiques in Duluth, has organized a UFO Symposium to be held at the Holiday Inn Banquet Hall this Saturday, August 26th from 10 AM to 7 PM.
Speakers include authors and UFO researchers Brad Steiger and Stanton Friedman, among others, as well as various UFO experiencers.
Tickets are $10 and can be purchased at the door.
 
The third, from September 9th, 2010
Richard Moss, owner of Moss Antiques, Reported Missing
Richard Moss, longtime proprietor of Moss Antiques in Duluth, was reported missing yesterday.  According to his landlord, Oswood Bolrick, owner of Harwood Apartments, where Mr. Moss was a resident, he checked in on his tenant on September 6th, as he had not received the rent check.
“He’d never been late on rent before, so I wanted to make sure there wasn’t nothing wrong,” Mr. Bolrick said.
He reported that Mr. Moss’s mailbox was full and mail was accumulating beneath it.
”I was worried. Don’t know the guy well, but he seemed nice and has been here a long time. I knew he had the shop, so I went to check there, and it looked like he hadn’t been there a while either, so I called the police.”
Richard Moss is described as a 52 year old Caucasian male with short, gray hair, glasses, and a mustache.
Local authorities ask that any leads should be called in immediately.
They are investigating but declined to comment further.
 
And the fourth, from three weeks later.
Owner of Moss Antiques Found
Richard Moss, owner of Moss Antiques in Duluth, has been found.
Authorities have confirmed that Mr. Moss called them from his home phone and reported that he was alive and well. He said he had read of his disappearance in the paper.
No further details were available at the time of publishing.
 
Next I searched for Richard Moss on Facebook, expecting to find nothing.
There are several Richard Moss’s but only one in Duluth. His photo was a too close, unflattering, shot from below selfie of a blank faced old man with a gray mustache and dated spectacles.  The top of his head was cut off.
 
There was no other information, but this had to be the guy.
I sent him this message:
Mr. Moss, I came across your collection of UFOlogy books at my local Saver’s and felt compelled to speak to you. I’m in Fargo, but willing to come to Duluth on any weekend you might be free. I won’t take much of your time and need no accommodations.  Please let me know when and where and I’ll be there.
 
And then I heard nothing for six days.
 
On the seventh day, I got the following message.
Moss Antiques, 10 AM, June 27th.
 
And so I was off to Duluth. It’s a beautiful city, equal parts blue collar, rugged nature, and college town, and I figured if this meeting was a wash I’d at least have a nice vacation.
 
I packed next to nothing, booked a room in the cheapest motel I could find – the Starlite, it was called, $40 a night, cash at the desk, next to a Hardee’s (the employee I spoke with noted this like it was a feature) – and set off.
 
I pulled up to the one story motel at 11 PM on Friday. There were a few other battered cars in the parking lot, but the Starlite was clearly not doing the business it maybe did when it was built in, let’s say, the 50s.
I checked in, got settled in my room – not much, but not bad – and fell asleep four pages into one of Dick Moss’s UFO books.
 
In the morning, I googled Moss Antiques, 4 blocks away, and set off on foot. It was in a charmingly rundown shopping district in row of brick storefronts, between a diner and a place that sold outdoor goods.
 
I was 10 minutes early and according to the sign on the door the place wasn’t open on Saturdays, so I knocked, which felt weird, but Richard Moss was at the door in a moment.  I think he’d been behind it waiting for me.
 
“Reid, I presume? Got ID?”
 
“Yes,” I said, a bit taken aback but ready for weirdness and happy to oblige.
 
Apparently satisfied that I was who I said I was, he let me in to the dimly lit, musty store, and retreated to a back room.
 
He looked old, much older than his 62 years, but unremarkable. Short, a bit hunched, bald, but for some grey fuzz around the sides and a trim grey mustache, pale skin dotted with liver spots, dressed in a tucked in button down oxford shirt, pressed khakis, and padded, beat up loafers.
 
I followed him past old lamps, dolls, toys, knickknacks in glass cases – nothing remarkable about his shop either.
 
He sat at an old oak desk, piled with papers, and I sat across from him, on a chair I had to clear off and pull from the corner.
 
He stared at me for a full minute, unblinking. I stared back, wanting him to start.  I was starting to imagine his skin subtly undulating when he finally spoke.
 
“You found my books” he said, almost a sigh.
 
“I did.  I was extremely excited to find them.  A banner day at the thrift store.  Why’d you get rid of them?”
 
“Why? I needed to move on with my life. Will you excuse me for a moment?”
 
He rose from his chair with an old man groan, stretched his whole body, like a cat, shook his head as though trying to wake from a dream, cracked his jaw, and shuffled out the open door.  He shut it behind him.
 
This was very weird, but that’s what I’d come here for.
I sat, thinking this over. This guy was acting odd, but so was I.  Why did I come here? What did I expect to learn? He doesn’t owe me anything, I just bought his old books, so I should just stay patient and accept what comes.  If this guy was really abducted by aliens – or thinks he was, anyway – it’s probably affected him in ways I can’t even imagine.  But why did he even agree to meet me, if he’s so over all of this?
 
And then I felt something . . . shift, somehow. I can’t explain exactly what it was, just a feeling in the air.  The vibe, maybe, though I’m hesitant to use that word. Where there had been nothing, now there was a palpable anxiety. Not just in me – I’m used to that, but around me.
 
I was beginning to squirm a bit, feeling hotter and hotter and there was a knock at the door and I began to turn around, startled, and that’s the last thing I remember, before waking up in my bed, fully clothed, at the Starlite Motel.
 
I felt groggy, confused, but unhurt.  I looked at the clock, it said 3 AM. I opened the window shade and it definitely looked like that was an accurate account of the time.  On a hunch, I went to my phone to check the date. June 29th.
 
I was missing a full day. I racked my brain for any memory of what had happened. There was a flash of a tentacle and maybe a . . . smiling, vaguely sexy alien woman? So I shut it down.  I wasn’t hurt. I could block out these memories. I’d blocked out – not worse, but pretty bad. I had a good life at home and didn’t need this.
 
Maybe Dick Moss was right.  It was time to put this whole UFO thing behind me.
 
I packed up my few things, and went home, never to speak of any of this again.
 
But then there was the dream, always this, every night:
 
I’m on an operating table in a dark room, with a bright light shining in my face. I can hear Richard Moss’s voice coming from somewhere I can’t place, almost in my head.  He’s apologizing, but his voice is cold, uninflected.
 
I can see vague movement in the dark behind the light.  The shapes are, to quote noted racist, HP Lovecraft, unspeakable.
 
Sometimes I get a quick glimpse of my elementary school gym teacher, Mr. Disher wearing a tophat and blowing a whistle with a mouth full of deviled eggs, but I think that’s just my regular dream life intruding on a repressed memory.
 
And then the light goes out and I’m awake, sweating and panicked.
 
Every night.
 
I couldn’t live like this. I had to confront what had happened to me.
 
So I did the only thing I could think of and took Whitley Strieber’s lead – I had recently read Communion, about his own abduction experience – and sought out a hypnotherapist to retrieve my blocked memories.
 
The man I found, through a quick google search, was named Darnold Bumber. I picked him because he was the only one that advertised hypno-regression and he had a fun name.  I called his office, and he picked up the phone.  No secretary.  I liked that.
 
I told him that I wanted to regress to just a month prior and he said he could do that, didn’t ask any questions, and I made appointment for later that same day.
 
His office was located in a dated strip mall, between a vape shop called, mystifyingly, Sports Vape, and a pizza place I’d never heard of – Popolino’s.
 
The only indication that this was the right place was some lettering on the glass door which read, Bumb ypnotherapy – some of the letters had worn off years ago and hadn’t been replaced.
 
A bell jingled as I opened the door, but wasn’t necessary as Dr. Bumber was lying on a couch only four feet, staring up at the ceiling and puffing on a vape pen.  The small room was slightly hazy and smelled of something like Mike and Ike candy.
 
He popped off the couch immediately, nimble for his significant girth, releasing a cloud of sticky sweet vapor from the small, theoretical mouth under his great, bushy white mustache. I was encountering a lot of white mustaches lately.
 
He was somewhere in his sixties and looked so much like Richard Moss in a clownish fat suit that I was momentarily anxious.
 
“I apologize for my claustrophobic accomodations,” he said.  “This used to be the waiting room, but I’ve sublet what used to be my office to Sport Vape for their overstock and moved everything in here.  They’ve got wonderful products, and I’m free to help myself. Do you vape?”
 
I told him I did not. He seemed a bit mystified, but moved on.
 
“Shall we get started?” he said, sitting on a folding chair next to the couch.
 
“Sure,” I said. “Don’t you need to ask me some questions?
 
“Just the date and location of the memory you’d like to recover.  But first we must make something clear.”
 
“Okay.”
 
“This is all a figment of your imagination.”
 
“What?”
 
“This, all of this, me this office, your journey here, your entire life, your bodily self. Imagination. You’re just a consciousness projecting reality. You projected me saying all of that.”
 
“I. I’m sorry, what?”
 
“It doesn’t really change anything. It’s not as though you can stop feeling like this is all real and important or there’s anything else for you to experience, but it might be reassuring to know that you are the one true consciousness and everything else emanates from you.”
 
“How could you possibly know that?”
 
“I don’t. There’s no me to know it.  You know it and you’re revealing it to yourself now.”
 
“Huh. Is this some psychological trick to ease my trauma?”
 
“If you project it that way, I suppose. Listen, I’m just a facet of you. Same as your parents and grandparents and teachers and wife and kids and every person and thing you’ve ever seen or touched. Like I said, it doesn’t really change anything.  It’s all real and important to you and that’s not going to change unless you kill yourself, in which case all of this existence will simply vanish momentarily until your consciousness conjures up a new reality, probably instantaneously. Are there other existences, other projecting consciousnesses that you don’t know about?  You have no way of knowing that, and as such, neither do I.”
 
“This is a lot of heavy information.”
 
“Yeah.  Do you still want to do this regression?  You’ll only be further manifesting a memory, just like you manifested the absence of a memory.”
 
“No, I suppose there’s no point.”
 
“Well then, I guess we’re done here.  Are you sure you don’t want to vape?”
 
“Well, I suppose I might as well, given what you’ve just told me.”
 
“True.  I’m currently puffing on the mike and ike flavor, but, of course, you can manifest whatever you’d like.”
 
“Ummm . . . I’ll take the smell of my teenage bedroom.”
 
“Sorry, we don’t have that.”
 
“But . . . “
 
“I’m kidding! Just a second.”
 
He disappeared into what used to be his office – what I had projected what used to be his office to be, I guess – and came back a moment later with a state of the art vape pen and a vial labeled “Teenage Bedroom”.
 
He showed me how to fill the pen and then handed it to me.  I took a puff, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t taste like incense, sweat, cheap cologne, and me, with a slight undertone of marijuana.
 
“Huh,” I said.  “I guess that proves it.”
 
“I guess it does.”
 
“Well, manifest you around, I suppose,” I said, and we both laughed and laughed and laughed.
 
The end

UFOs

UFOs
 
In my office, where I sit, are something like 200 books on UFOs and UFO adjacent topics. “Nonfiction” paperbacks from the 1970s make up the bulk of them – the general public was desperate for news of extraterrestrial salvation or destruction in the 70s and various publishers of various measures of repute were desperate to have their money.  I already had a substantial collection, but a few months back stumbled upon a box of them at one of the many thrift stores I frequent in an attempt to build a bulwark of material goods to defend against immaterial existential dread   – fighting a conceptual void with knickknacks, vinyl, and ironic t-shirts.
There were 100 paperbacks in this box and all were to be mine for nine American dollars. My heart raced, my eyes welled, and I lunged toward them in a near panic that some other bookish, weird dad might swipe them from under the brim of my tattered, thrifted baseball cap.
 
I got them home, endured my wife’s rolling eyes, and began to sift through the bounty. Each of them was carefully stamped on the inside cover with the outline of a book enclosing the words “From the Personal Library of Richard D. Moss”. We’ll get to the mysterious Dick Moss next episode, but for now we are concerned with only the books themselves.  There were books covering physical alien spacecraft, aliens themselves, alien abductions, The Bermuda Triangle, Ancient Aliens, Bigfoot, Telepathy, Cattle Mutilation, Crop Circles, Atlantis, Cryptids, and any number of other esoteric topics.  The best title was simply this: UFOs? Yes!
My excitement grew. I began to read.
The general public’s perception of the UFO phenomenon – just called The Phenomenon, by those in the know – is that this is simply a question of visitors to Earth from another planet, an advanced species of humanoid that has evolved independently of us and mastered space travel to the extent that they can traverse vast distances in relatively little time.
This is ignorant and you should all be ashamed of yourselves.
I’ve now read 34 of the books I purchased that day in the space of 4 months, as well as watching countless sketchy documentaries and even sketchier YouTube videos AND 6 and a half seasons of The X-Files and despite my undoubtedly now-shakier-than-ever mental health, I’m here to educate you – the ignorant masses – on the TRUE nature of the phenomenon.
But first, of course, we need to summarize as many of the varying and often conflicting theories as is possible in our short time together.
Let’s start with the one you know, Alien Visitors.
This idea is simple enough.  In a galaxy far, far away live a species of intelligent, diminutive, non-genitaled green or grayish beings with big heads and big eyes who have taken a fancy to the people of earth and their buttholes, apparently.
Maybe because they don’t seem to have their own.
Their saucer-like spaceships are occasionally seen in our skies and once in a while they take someone up in their spaceship to prod at their sphincters, take ova or sperm samples, and maybe relay some vague information about the betterment of mankind, before sending them right back down to earth again.
These “grays”, as they are often called, may or may not have contact with our government. Our government may or may not have access to some of their technologies, possibly reverse engineered from crashed spacecraft.
We’re not sure what they want, but you can bet dollars to donuts that it involves either our eradication or the dawning of a new golden age or just some freaky deaky sex stuff.
The first evidence of these astral beings came in 1947, when a pilot saw some flying discs and a ship crashed in Roswell.
This was how I perceived the phenomenon until just a few months ago.  Now it seems bogus and simplistic. If aliens were to visit us, why hide in the bushes, so to speak, for 75 years?
Is there life on other planets? Probably. And it’s even possible they’ve come here. But it’s not the whole story, I assure you.
Theory number two is now widespread mostly because of a Greek American Fellow who kind of looks like somebody used wood stain on a marshmallow topped with Pauly D’s hair, crammed that marshmallow into a three piece suit, and animated it with electricity.  He’s very likeable.
This is of course, the Ancient Aliens theory.  It builds on the Alien Visitor theory but moves the origin back a few millennia. 
There are two lines of thought here, and which you choose to believe doesn’t much matter.  The first is that life was essentially “seeded” here by extra-terrestrials.  The second is that life already existed on Earth, but man was very primitive until extra-terrestrials landed and gifted him with knowledge and advanced technology, Prometheus style.
This theory posits that extra-terrestrials are essentially the gods people are so hung up on and mentored us into modernity. Ancient alien theorists see the outsider touch in just about everything you’d care to look at, from language, to Sumerian texts, to the pyramids, to cave paintings, to medieval art, to the Bible, to Prince, probably.
This theory is getting much closer to the truth, but it’s not there yet. There’s a childish, Indiana Jones obsession to all of it, which doesn’t make it wrong, necessarily, but doesn’t do much for its credibility.
One thing is for certain, though: Nothing can cure a deep depression like six hours of The History Channel’s Ancient Aliens and a thousand crackers.
Theory number three posits that the space ships are us from the future.
This is fairly self-explanatory and not implausible.
Theory number four attributes all of this rigmarole to the Christian God. Now, I consider myself a true agnostic – about nearly everything.  It’s all POSSIBLE. And there are some manifestations of The Phenomenon that seem biblical, and there are certainly parts of the bible that seem paranormal, but the Old Testament God doesn’t really strike me as a tech guy, know what I’m saying?
Then there’s the flipside argument for Satan. Probably more of a tech guy. I read a book called UFOs: Satanic Terror that made some fairly convincing arguments, but the idea of pinning everything on Satan seems very 80s and not especially probable.
Theory five is to pin this all on psychology, but this happens in two very different ways.
The first is obvious: People who claim to have seen UFOs are mistaken and those who say they’ve made contact are nuts.
Fair enough, but the extent of the sightings, the reliability of some of the witnesses, the consistent details of the account of abduction the physical residue of both are hard to ignore.
The second is more interesting and complex, if not more likely: That The Phenomenon is manifested by our individual and collective psyche, but is no less real or material because of it.
This may be our conscious interacting with some sort of unknown natural phenomenon. Proponents of this idea, including my man Jacques Vallee, cite the occurrence of The Phenomena throughout human history, manifesting itself as something just out of the grasp of whichever stage of human development it is appearing before. To the earliest civilizations it was the gods descending from heaven. When monotheism took hold, it was the miraculous acts of the One True God.  At various times it was elves and faeries and dragons and ghosts and demons. Today it is technology.
This is a very interesting theory, but one who’s main contention is often: We don’t know, we may not be equipped to know, so the best we can do is to document and decipher small pieces.  This makes it slippery and difficult to grasp, let alone explain.
But it feels like it’s onto something.
It seems pretty likely that there is some natural force that we are not yet aware of, or some aspect of the natural world that we’ve not considered.  Whether our personal psychology is a factor is undetermined, but the changing nature of the Phenomenon certainly suggests it.
Which leads into the sixth theory, an aspect of the natural world that has often been theorized, but never proven.
This is the Inter-dimensional theory, which essentially states that there are multiple, parallel universes and occasionally they overlap or bleed into one another. Maybe there are places where the barrier between them is thinner than others. Maybe the inhabitants of another dimension are more advanced than us and have found ways to traverse between their world and others.
Maybe there’s a whole world of Bigfoots that exists right on top of us without either being aware of the other.
Maybe those Bigfoots all get lost sometimes and materialize in the lush woods of the Northwest.
Maybe.
Theory number seven is my own, and though I have little evidence for it, it is absolutely true and can fairly comfortably live in harmony with nearly any of the other theories.
The theory is this:
The world at large is a projection of my subconscious mind and I’ve peopled it with experiences, witnesses, and abductees while denying myself the thing I most desire – affirmation of and contact with The Phenomenon – because of guilty feelings stemming from my troubled relationship with my father.
 
It’s simple, really. Per Descartes – who is also a manifestation of my mind – my existence is the only thing I can confirm absolutely, and then, only my consciousness. My body could be an illusion, but if that’s the case, I wish my mind would have thought up something that didn’t involve excrement. That seems like a flaw. Nobody’s perfect, I guess, not even the projector of all reality.
 
I think I probably projected the idea of UFOs to add some magic and mystery into the world I created as I had, of course, conjured religion and religious people – so many of them, another mistake – but I’d failed to conjure any gods. I can’t be sure of why, as the motives of the creator, even if that creator is me, are intrinsically unknowable, unless the creation was made consciously, which it was not.
 
And I know what you’re thinking, theoretical figment of my mind (why didn’t I make MORE of you?): Where did I – THE I – originate, and I’m sorry to tell you that the beginning and end of infinity are almost four times as unknowable as the motives of the unconscious creator.
 
So, I created the idea of The Phenomenon to fill a void of mystery, but that doesn’t explain why I created the desire within myself – if in fact I’m capable of creating my own desires, I haven’t worked that out yet – to experience this mystery firsthand while also denying myself, so far, the opportunity to do so.
 
This is where my father comes in. His name is, believe it or not, Rock. I really outdid myself when projecting that name. He is, like, as I’ve repeatedly mentioned, everything else, a creation of my “self”, whatever that may be, as is the relationship I’m about to self-indulgently describe. I think hearing about someone’s father issues is probably pretty well akin to hearing about their dreams, but this is my world and you are just a figment of my imagination, so you’re going to have to bear with me.
 
I stopped speaking with my father some two and a half years ago. He thinks it was about his support for the worst president in United States history, but that’s because he’s a doofus with zero emotional intelligence or imagination.
 
The real reasons, aside from the Trump thing – which is a personality flaw if not a mental disorder and not, as they would have you believe, a mere political opinion – were four incidents, which all occurred around the time that his Trump love became impossible to ignore.
 
1) He told a joke at a family reunion that included the word coon.
2) He posted a ridiculous All Lives Matter video to Facebook, which I patiently explained to him was stupid, and then he got mad about that.
3) I found out that he said to one of his female employees, at work, in front of several people, and in reference to another of his female employees, “Kallie weighs 100 pounds and 20 of that is boobs, when are you going to get a couple of those?”
Take some time to gasp and marvel at that, it’s remarkable in its awfulness.  So many facets of awful.
4) And probably the most definitive. At my son’s second birthday party I made an offhand joke about how often he used to get thrown out of my sporting events when I was young and he DENIED THIS EVER HAPPENED.
 
Now, anyone of the people I’ve conjured who know my imagined father know that his inability to remain calm at sporting events has been a defining aspect of his history.
 
At one of my basketball games in sixth grade he – the coach – yelled at the referee – who couldn’t have been more than 14 – to “fuck off”. To this child’s endless credit, he promptly awarded my father a technical foul.
 
When he coached my baseball team, the players would huddle in the outfield before each game and Peter Paruccinni, our husky, enthusiastic catcher, would motivate our team by saying, let’s win this so Reid doesn’t have to drive home with Rock after a loss.
 
Sometimes he would get kicked out of a game and continue to yell from behind the dugout or in the bleachers.
 
He yelled at first graders for missing ground balls.
 
When he coached my brother’s Babe Ruth Baseball Team he got in trouble for making the two chubbiest kids on the team race each other in front of everyone.
 
He was later BANNED FOR LIFE FROM BABE RUTH BASEBALL – the only person I know of to receive such an honor – for drinking and yelling at a game he had no part in.
 
I could go on. I’m sure he’d dispute all of it, especially the banned for life thing – maybe they just made him quit coaching, but banned for life is how I heard it. But all of these things absolutely happened, without any doubt. To deny this is preposterous, and shows such a lack of personal responsibility, self-knowledge, respect for others, and a basic sense of humor that it boggles the mind and is indicative of the deeper problems within himself that he refuses to reckon with or even acknowledge.
 
Look, I understand that he’s probably embarrassed about all of this.  He yells much less now, though the other three incidents prove that his growth is only tonal. But here is how any sane, decent human being would deal with that: LAUGH ABOUT IT. Maybe chuckle and apologize.  That’s all he needed to do in that moment. That’s it. I wasn’t asking him to beg for forgiveness.  I let go of that shit a long time ago.  It’s just funny to me.
 
Learn to read a fucking room, you’re a grown man!
 
LET IT BE FUNNY!
 
But denying it is not funny. Denying it tells me everything I need to know about who he is as a person, and that is not the type of person that I want in my life or the lives of my sons.  Mostly the latter.
 
I want my sons to grow up to be the kind of people that fuck things up beyond belief and have enough grace to own that and build it into wisdom and to deepen their relationships with themselves and others.
 
Oh, and the last thing he said to me before I said “We’re done” was “Fuck you”.
 
But.
But.
 
He is my Dad. So there’s some guilt. He did help me out financially when I was drowning in alcoholism and depression. He did help me get the job that I have today. He did raise me, even if he was absent and/or inept much of the time.
 
And I appreciate those things, I do.  I love him, in a fashion, I just don’t ever need to see him or speak to him again.
 
People – who are not real, but just a projection of my subconscious, remember – will say that I’ll regret severing my relationship with him someday.  That when he’s gone I’ll wonder about things that he could have told me.
 
But I can assure you that this is not true.  I’ve talked to this man, and he’s very shallow.  There’s nothing there to impart and I’m pretty indifferent to the family history that I haven’t already gleened.
 
But the underlying guilt remains.  He theoretically can’t help the way he intrinsically is, I guess, but he could work on it. Maybe just learn to shut the fuck up, if nothing else sticks. The rub of being a fairly empathetic person is that understanding where someone’s flaws come from makes it difficult to hold them accountable.
 
I could endlessly list the reasons he is this way:
 
The time in which he was raised, having a fairly distant father who was slow with praise to say the least, dreams of sporting glory that never came to fruition, a failed marriage to someone he was deeply incompatible with, emotionally and intellectually difficult kids that don’t share his interests, sexual inadequacy, guilt, the Red State norms that push middle aged, middle class bankers to abhorrent political opinions, unconfronted general existential panic, an inferiority complex, clinical narcissism, body issues.
 
I get it. I feel some of it in myself. But I can’t excuse it.
 
And then, on top of all of this, there’s the generational aspect.  He is a boomer, and as we continue to learn, boomers (no, not all boomers) are the worst generation on record.   The most self-righteous, self-entitled, ideologically stubborn. I also think I understand why this is.
 
The three generations prior to the boomers had a relatively noble, tragic fate that they couldn’t opt out of, specifically two World Wars and the Great Depression.  And the generations prior to that were so engaged in simple survival that there wasn’t time for any kind of individuality.  That was reserved for the rich.
 
So along come the boomers, the product of generations of hard times, and suddenly there is this world of recreation and free time and relative economic ease, but nothing to really latch onto, aside from an unjust war and a civil rights movement that was fairly distant to most and opposed by many, many others, some more actively than others.
 
The thing you hear boomers talk about more than anything else is that they were basically sent outside in the morning and came back home for dinner. It must have been like Lord of the Flies out there.
 
Back to my father as an example.  His grandfather was a German Russian immigrant – came over here alone – and a drunk. Met a woman and had some kids, then fell off a train while hitching a ride from one side of town to the next – presumably drunk – and hurt his back. Could no longer work.  So my Grandpa quit school in eighth grade and got a job.  Then he became a marine.  Almost got to Korea, but not quite. Came back and got a job in a meat packing plant and stayed there until he retired. Did pretty well, actually. Had a family. This was not a man that was equipped for emotional vulnerability or showing love, but he was equipped to provide a comfortable, untroubled life for his own family.
 
So my father and his brothers are sent outside, to figure things out for themselves, like their parents had done, but fully unstructured. What should have substituted the structure of hardship and necessity – love and support – wasn’t there. Couldn’t be there, really, except in extraordinary circumstances.
 
And all of this resulted in an entire generation that came to rely on three things, primarily, to provide them with what they couldn’t get at home: Religion, sports, and a warped bootstraps mentality.
 
From religion they got hierarchy, from sports they got clapping – the validation they couldn’t get at home, and from their false bootstrap narrative – which doesn’t factor in the actual, tangible struggle of their parents to claw their way to a life where only a gentle tug of the bootstraps would do the trick, and even then aided by their whiteness – they became insufferable. They took the self-reliance doctrine that their parents fucking earned and applied it to themselves because they FELT like they earned it, even though they hadn’t.
 
They haven’t been able to shake any of these things, which is understandable, but kind of abhorrent.
 
The generations before them adapted to war, poverty, electricity, cars, separation from the land – massive shifts. I’m sure they were unbearable to be around too, but the difference is this: They had reason to be AND they didn’t have the resources to pull themselves away from that.  The boomers do! It’s all there, everything, all the time – free time, means, and information – if they were willing to get over themselves and adapt.
 
But they don’t.  He doesn’t.
 
It’s like Homer’s line from The Simpsons: Well, excuse me for having massive flaws that I refuse to work on!
 
I won’t excuse it.
 
So my decision remains firm, but he still haunts my dreams and this splinter in my emotional paw has undoubtedly prevented me from allowing myself to experience UFOs and the deeper mysteries of The Phenomenon
 
But maybe there’s still time. That’s the beauty of my undoubtedly true theory. Maybe there’s still time to conjure peace and oneness with the ethereal. Maybe I can conjure it for you too. There’s still time, maybe.
 
Alan Watts talks about the necessity of imagining who you WANT god to be.  Well, according to my theory, I AM GOD, which is both convenient and an obstacle.  Maybe I’m too close to be a truly self-reflective, self-idealizing god with control of its manifestations. Maybe my Dad will always be my Dad and I’ll always be me and I’ll always feel a little bad about it and The Phenomenon will always be something I read about in musty old paperbacks.
 
That’s probably okay too, but I’m going to keep reaching for oneness and contact and absolute knowledge and resolution because what else can you do? An idle, uninterested god would be a real sack of shit, unworthy of contact with the ethereal, unfit to board a spaceship, even in his own mind.
 
The end

The Mandela Effect

The Mandella Effect
 
Imagine: You’re wandering through a thrift store, through the holiday decorations – Christmas is a month out and it’s a mess of Santas Claus and Jesus bullshit. Turn the corner and there are the cups. Just a lot of cups. Then kitchen implements, home décor, knick knacks, craft supplies, collectibles.  You pass the shoes and the clothes – no mothball trousers for you today – and the electronics to the media section. 
You flip through the CD rack.  You’ve no use for a CD – What a garbage technology! – but you’re wistful by nature and CDs used to mean a lot to you.  Maybe you’ll activate some dormant memories.  There’s the usual assortment – Christmas compilations, boy bands, post grunge, rap rock, classical, Blues Traveler, Amy Grant, some vaguely emo looking something you’ve never heard of. 
And then you find it: Pearl Jam’s fifth studio album, Yield, released in 1998.  This album meant a lot to you as a teenager, and the mere sight of the cover sends you back to the shag carpeted, incense musked basement bedroom of your youth.  You’ve spent a lot of time in thrift stores over the years and never come across this album.  It wasn’t particularly popular upon its release as Pearl Jam had ceased to be the cultural behemoth it once was and evolved into a band for Pearl Jam fans, not the world at large. 
You flip open the gatefold – Pearl Jam had shunned the typical crystal pack for three records now – to find the fold in booklet.  You smell it.  It smells just as you remember.  Like good paper. Thick paper. You flip through, a vague smile on your face. Love swells in your bosom. 
Then you see something that confuses you.  A picture of Matt Cameron, drummer for Soundgarden and FUTURE drummer of Pearl Jam.  But not until the next album, Binaural, which isn’t very good. Jack Irons played drums on Yield!
You’re sure of it.
You flip to the back of the booklet, to the credits.  Eddie Vedder, vocals/guitar/ukulele, Jeff Ament, bass, Stone Gossard, guitar, Mike McCready, guitar.  All checks out.
And then the drummer: MATT CAMERON!
“My god!,” you think.  “What is happening!  This can’t be! Surely this can’t be! My memory is infallible! My Pearl Jam knowledge is infallible! Matt Cameron was NOT the drummer on Yield!  He wasn’t! Impossible! The world is crumbling at my feet! Everything I thought I knew has been called into question!  Have I gone mad! Has mania gripped my brain meat! NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!”
You scream and run from the store, pushing over an old lady and an entire Menonite family in the process, open the door with such force that it swings from its hinges, slaps against the plate glass store front, shattering it.  You run and run and run and run till all civilization is behind you, run until your legs cramp up and you fall to the leafy floor of a dark and mysterious woods, panting and weeping.
You are never heard from again.
You’ve just experienced the scourge infecting millions upon millions of people all over the world.
It’s called The Mandella Effect, and there’s nothing stopping it from afflicting you or someone you love.
Some background:
The Mandela Effect was discovered by an adult reading a children’s book.  Their name has been lost to time, but the book was one in The Berenstain Bears series by Stan and Jan Berenstain.  They are about a gender normative family of bears that live in a tree and may or may not be farmers of some sort. They are vaguely Christian but not in a “We’ve read and understand the bible” kind of way.  They’re very relatable to many Americans.
Anyway, the aforementioned adult reading a children’s book had a similar experience to the one previously detailed.
They were astounded to find that the name of the books was not Berenstien, spelled b-e-r-e-n-s-t-i-e-n, but Berenstain, spelled b-e-r-e-n-s-t-a-i-n.
This shook them to their very core. 
But instead of disappearing into the woods, they took to the internet. And, as it happened, their core was not the only core shaken.
Seemingly everyone agreed that this was simply not correct and the topic caught on and spread like a head cold in a DMV. Investigations were made. Videos were proffered. Further examples of the phenomenon were discovered.
One example in particular gave the phenomenon its name.  Many people were absolutely certain that anti-apartheid revolutionary, philanthropist and all around hero Nelson Mandela had died during his unjust prison term sometime in the early 1980s and were furious to find out that he’d continued to be one of the greatest people on earth for years after his release from hellish confinement.
So, The Mandela Effect was born.
Some other popular examples:
There used to be a Jiffy brand peanut butter.  Now there’s just Jif.
Curious George used to have a tail.
There once was a t in the brand name Skechers.
The monopoly man had a monocle.
Various other minor misspellings and character details and song lyrics.  You get the picture.
 
So what is The Mandela Effect?  I think we can say absolutely that it’s definitely not just a bunch of goofuses slightly misremembering trivialities from their long passed childhoods. With that out of the way, we’re left with several options.
Option 1: The Mad Swiss Scientists at the CERN laboratories ran their bony fingers through their wild, white hair, adjusted their comically thick spectacles, rubbed their dry palms together, cackled maniacally and smashed two atoms together in the Large Hadron Collider in 2014, which done broke time and space as we know it.
Option 2: Parallel Dimensions exist side by side, each deviating only slightly from the one next to it, and we slip between them like Keanu Reeves’s English accent in that Dracula movie.  Those hubristic Swedes may have exacerbated the slippage.
Option 3: We live in a simulation, are nothing more than the hyper complex, anxiety riddled Sims of a highly advanced civilization.  The idea here is that technology – Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence, specifically – are advancing by proverbial leaps and bounds all the time.  Surely, at some point in the future, we’ll be able to create autonomous or semi-autonomous virtual people and control their world.  In this theory, we are actually those automatons, or maybe automatons of the automatons onward to infinity.
In this line of thinking, the life and death of Nelson Mandela are nothing but a glitch in the system or the whim of a future teenager loaded up on goof balls.
Option 4 is similar to option 3 except that it pre-supposes that the Matrix films were on to something other than tacky sunglasses, black dusters, and emboldening school shooters.
Option five is my favorite, and goes back to the idea of parallel dimensions. This one’s actually fairly comforting. The idea is that when we die of anything but old age, we jump dimensions into the one closest to us. In the dimension we’re leaving, we’re dead, but in the new dimension – which is ALMOST identical to the one we just left – our life goes on with nothing more than the memory of a potential near death experience, if that.
An example:
Say you’re dicing up some ham to make a delicious ham salad for a potluck this weekend.  You know damn well that no one likes ham salad, but you do, so you’re going to bring it, enjoy it yourself, and then have plenty to take home for later.
 
You’re chop, chop, chopping away, salivating at the thought of wrapping your lips around all of that salty ham drowning in thick, creamy Hellman’s Mayonnaise, when the doorbell rings.  You set down your knife and go to the door.  When you open it up, there is a stranger.
He is a tweenage boyscout selling popcorn to raise money to go camping, or for knot education or whatever.  You buy some popcorn. Always feels good to help a youngster and don’t nothing beat a big old bowl of air popped popcorn.
You go back to your ham salad, feeling pretty good about yourself, when suddenly, out of nowhere you are struck by a deep, sticky malaise.
It comes from nowhere and means nothing, but it’s all around you.  You’re suddenly sad and hopeless and the ham salad seems like a bad idea and your air popper broke last week. You’d forgotten about that.
Why can’t anything ever work out for you?
You set the knife down again and go to sit in your living room and do the breathing exercises your therapist taught you to do in times like these.  You sit with your back straight, eyes closed, and breathe, slowly, in through the nose and out through the mouth, for three minutes.
This helps, if only a little, and you’re proud of yourself for identifying your negative feelings for what they are – generalized anxiety – and doing something constructive about them.
Then a blue Chevrolet Colorado smashes through your front window and crushes you against the oak bookshelf you splurged and bought for yourself for Christmas last year, killing you instantly.
Now, in your current dimension, life will go on without you in it.  Your friends and family will be sad, will miss you deeply.  There will be a funeral.  They will learn to go on.  Your absence will become normal to them, but every once in a while they’ll see a ham salad and remember how great you were or a blue Chevrolet Colorado and be furious at the injustice of the world.
Meanwhile, in the dimension nearest ours, both of your legs are broken and you’re screaming in pain, confused by this unexpected turn of events, worried that you are maybe paralyzed or your testicles got crushed.  Your neighbors will rush out of their houses to find out what just happened.  They’ll step through the wreckage of your living room to find an old man behind the wheel of the blue Chevrolet Colorado. He’s just had a stroke and lost control of his vehicle and they’ll see you against the bookshelf, grimacing and struggling to get free. The paramedics will be called, and you’ll spend a week in the hospital and a few months after that on bedrest and then on crutches.
Four years later you’ll find out that Jack Iron’s wasn’t the drummer on Pearl Jam’s fifth album, Yield, and go screaming into the woods, just another victim of The Mandela Effect.
Or something like that.
What happens when you die of old age is anyone’s guess.  It’s not a very well thought out theory.
I’ve had two brushes with the Mandala effect, outside of the Pearl Jam album thing which I made up. 
Anyway. For years I had a very distinct memory of catching Gary Gaetti’s homerun ball in Game 6 of the 1987 Major League Baseball World Series.  Even had a ball that I told people was THAT ball.
I was sure of this story.
Turns out, however, that Gary Gaetti did not hit a home run in Game 6 of the 1987 World Series.  Also turns out I was not at that game or any other World Series game that year or any other, for that matter. I was four.
Spooky.
The second is a vague memory I have of getting my head stuck between the cast iron railings of our apartment balcony when I was three.  The fire department had to come and get me out.
I told this story to a co-worker once, and he looked skeptical, then mentioned that this may have happened on an episode of Designing Women.
It occurred to me that he might be right.  I had watched a fair amount of Designing Women in my youth.
I don’t know what was more surprising: That my memory was apparently incorrect – or had it been altered! – or that the two of us were both fluent enough in Designing Women trivia to have a conversation about it fifteen years after the show went off the air.
Let’s suppose for a second that the Mandela effect isn’t a paradox and/or conspiracy.
Let’s suppose, improbably, that people are misremembering things in a very reasonable and demonstrable way.
Why has the idea of the Mandela Effect gained so much traction in people’s imagination?
First, I think, is just nostalgia.  It’s fun to think about things from the past that you rarely have occasion to consider. It’s why I spend a weird amount of time looking at pictures of discontinued foods on the Internet.  It takes you back to a different time when a particular brand of fruit snacks seemed central to your existence.
Side note: This may be another example of the Mandela Effect.  As a stoned teenager, my favorite food was Chiquita Banana Fruit Snacks.  They were gelatinous and dense and there were banana ones, and strawberry banana, and orange banana.  I used to put them in the freezer and then eat whole boxes at a time.
My friend Tony remembers my obsession with them, but no one else seems to.  I can’t even find a picture of them on the Internet, let alone information.
So, let me just say now, if anyone listening has any information about Chiquita Banana Fruit Snacks, please contact me.  Anyone who can obtain and send some to me will be awarded with TWENTY AMERICAN DOLLARS!
The second reason people are so fascinated by the Mandela Effect is that something about the time we’re living in seems . . . broken.
Nearly everyone you meet has good intentions, but as a society we seem to be descending into something sad and terrible and nobody knows how to stop it.
It’s scary.
An explanation, at the very least, would be nice.
If the world isn’t as we perceive it and there’s been some kind of glitch, well, that’s something anyway.
And if we can name it, or name its symptoms, maybe we can do something about it.
Probably, though, we’ll just spend the next year or so sporadically arguing online about how Cheez Its used to be spelled before forgetting all about it and focusing on the next minor, meaningless controversy and clinging to our immediate, observable reality as the world plummets into chaos or doesn’t.
Either way, I’m going to go listen to Yield. 
That, anyway, is just as I remember it.
 

Tiny Tim

There’s this anecdote about Tiny Tim which, like all anecdotes, may or may not be true.

Tiny Tim, if you don’t know him, was a musician popular in the late 60s and early 70s, mostly known for his falsetto and ukulele rendition of this old 1920s song, Tiptoe Through the Tulips as well as his many TV appearances on shows like, The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson – which he appeared on a total of 22 times – he famously got married on air – as well as Laugh In and Hollywood Squares, among others.

He was a character.

Anyway, as the story goes, in 1971, just as Tiny’s popularity was really beginning to wane, his management was desperately searching for ways to reignite public interest. Their solution, one of them, anyway, was to hold a Tiny Tim look alike contest.

Now, again, in case you’re not aware of him, Tiny had a very distinctive look. Long curly hair parted on the side – dirty and tangled, although he bathed many times a day. A notably large, exquisitely arched nose, with these exceptionally long nostrils. A large mouth just stuffed with teeth. More than is normal, you’d think, by the looks of it. The teeth were pushed out by these huge gums. And then he had this flaccid, Cheeto shaped body that he held with the confidence of a chubby, polio struck kid on roller skates, balancing a triple scoop ice cream cone. He’d started perilously, upsettingly thin, but had expanded with his fame, so that he looked like he’d been stung by a wasp and desperately needed a shot from an epi pen. And he would have been conspicuous just based on all of this, but he also slathered his face in pancake makeup, filled in his eyebrows, and wore ill fitting, out of date, wrinkled suits in patterns that bumped up against each other like delirious bums fighting over a street corner in a bad neighborhood. Sometimes he wore a velvet cape. He came off like, royalty – genteel – but of the inbred, anemic variety.

Like I said, he was a character.

So they decide to put on this contest to revitalize his career. It will be held in Brooklyn, where Tiny is from, at a VFW hall, and it will be judged by Tiny, his soon to be ex-wife Miss Vicki – the one he married on the Tonight Show, and Isadore Fertel, Tiny’s friend and protégé, who was pretty close to blind. He wore these giant coke bottle glasses and sang songs about women’s lib. They alert the national and local media. They hand out flyers. They put up posters. This is going to be a BIG event.

And then – on the big day – just about no one comes . . . and literally no one enters. No one. There is literally not one person at this moment in all of New York or seemingly the world that wants to be Tiny Tim – who was, only a few years before, one of the biggest names in show business.

It’s kind of tragic, really.

But, eventually, someone would come along who DID want to be Tiny Tim – still does – or at least he felt and feels compelled to be. His name is Lyman Sundry. He’s a Tiny Tim impersonator. Has been since 1996 – the year the real Tiny died.

On today’s episode of The Irrationally Exuberant, we have his story, told in his own words.

It’s called, Good Things In Tiny Packages. Enjoy.

(sound collage)
(Fade into: Crowd/bar noises)
Voice Over: My name is Lyman Sundry.

Hello my dear, wonderful friends! (Feedback. Yelling. Booing)

VO: I’m 56 years old.

Oh. Ah, can we ah, can we get the levels, ah . . . no?

VO: And I’m a professional Tiny Tim impersonator.

Well, let’s begin (uke strumming)

Fuck you! (Bottle smash)

OK, I’m done.

(Crowd/bar fades into uke strumming, into song)

You want me to play a tune? Alright um . . . “They Always Pick On Me”

The first time I saw Tiny Tim was the same way everyone else saw him – on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in 1968.

(Tonight Show clip)

And , you know, I didn’t think much of it at the time, I guess. I was 17 and I had other things on my mind, as you do. I thought he was kind of odd, but also kind of funny and nice and then I didn’t think much beyond that.

I was living with my parents in Dilworth, Minnesota – we just didn’t have any connection to all of that Hollywood business beyond Johnny, and even then it felt like it was being beamed in from another planet, like Pubetron Fergleven or something.

And then I saw him on Laugh In – and I really thought that was great.

(Laugh In Clip)

But again – I had my life to live. I was getting ready to go to college. I had all of these friends. Girls. I didn’t dwell on it too much. And of course I’d see him around on the television here and there from time to time doing this and that, but then he kind of just, you know, disappeared.

And I went about building a life. I became a lawyer. I was pretty good at it. I married the love of my life, Jeanie, my ex-wife – she was so beautiful – and we had 2 kids, Terrell and Ashley – great kids. I was in excellent shape – I ran in those Iron Man marathons where you have to swim and bike in addition to running the 26 miles. We had a good life. We were comfortable, bordering on affluent.

(I’m A Lonesome Little Raindrop or Bunny Nose)
(Bowling alley sounds)

And then . . . and then one day in 1994 I was at the bowling alley, Lucky Strikes – for league night. I was on a team with some of my lawyer friends and my brother in law, Nick. We called ourselves Striker, Striker, and Spare, Attorneys At Ball. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was on fire. We were in the 8th frame and I had a perfect game going. Everybody was ecstatic. That doesn’t happen very often. We were all right, but no professionals, you know? And just after I’d rolled that 8th strike and had slapped everyone’s hand, I excused myself to go get another beer. And the bar – it was attached to the bowling alley but you had to go through a door to get to it. And I opened that door, and there was Tiny Tim, like a vision, singing Mickey the Monkey by ________ on this kind of makeshift stage to maybe seven people.

(Mickey the Monkey)

And it knocked me on my ass. He was older, of course, and fatter than I remembered, but he was dressed just the same. And he looked so . . . so sad, even though he was smiling, like in his eyes. He looked sad. And it was transfixing. I couldn’t believe he was still doing it. I was transfixed, that’s the only word for it. Each song bled into the next without a pause, these wonderful old songs – so innocent, just like him.

(song)

I sat down maybe four feet in front of him and I must have been sitting there for 15 minutes before he noticed me, and then he just kind of winked and smiled at me and kept going and I kept sitting there. Eventually my brother in law came into the bar to find out what was taking me so long. It had been my turn to bowl for awhile. And I wouldn’t come. He was laughing and talking to loud and kind of disrupting the show since we were so close to Tiny. Nick didn’t even know who he was. And I was just trying to get him to be quiet. I wouldn’t even look at him. And eventually Tiny became agitated and stormed off. I went back to my game and rolled 8 gutter balls in a row. Nick said it was like I was in a trance, and I suppose I was.

Tiny had triggered something inside of me. When I looked at him it felt like I was looking into a mirror and seeing my true self for the first time. It was horrifying and deeply confusing. But also wonderful. From that day on, I was a Tiny Head, though I didn’t know that term yet.

Interviewer: Can you play another song?

Oh, of course Mr. Reid.

(song)

So, after that, everything changed pretty quickly. I significantly cut back on my hours at the law firm and kind of retreated from my family in my pursuit of all things Tiny. It wasn’t easy to find the records and posters and articles and what not in those days, because personal access to the Internet was pretty new, so I spent a lot of time in libraries and on the phone and travelling to Tiny Tim concerts. Eventually I got connected with the Tiny Heads – they were a group of about 18 people who were totally dedicated to Tiny, and they were a huge help. Here let me show you some of the things in my collection.

(Shuffling)

Here is a first pressing of the God Bless Tiny Tim! LP. That was his first album. Just an absolute classic. I’ll play you a song, the fidelity is amazing.

(On The Old Front Porch)

That’s Tiny duetting with himself.

And this is the second album, called Tiny Tim’s Second Album.

Let’s see, we’ve got very rare copies of the controversial Santa Claus Has Got the Aids single. They only made like 1000 of these and nobody wanted them, so there are really probably only two left.

Just so many singles . . . they were all issued either independently by Tiny or various other kind of fly by night labels over the years, he’d basically just record with whoever would have him.

Oh, here’s the split EP he did with GG Allin. That one’s kind of interesting. GG was a huge Tiny fan and Tiny, I guess, didn’t really know who GG was and was sort of horrified when he actually heard the music.

Let’s see – a VHS copy of Blood Harvest – the horror movie that Tiny starred in in 1987.

A video of Tiny getting married to Miss Vickie on the Tonight show, of course.

Here’s a poster for Tiny’s show at Luna Park in Australia where he beat the all time continuous singing record when he sang continuously for 2 hours and 18 minutes, and here’s a bootleg copy of that performance.

I’ve got magazines, and photocopies of newspaper articles – I had the Howard Stern interviews, but I threw those away out of respect for Tiny. Howard was so rude to him, it was terrible.

I’d say I probably have the world’s biggest Tiny Tim collection, really. I’m not sure I really have competition even.

(song)

Anyway, so I was spending all this time collecting Tiny stuff and all I talked about was Tiny and I played his music constantly and at the same time my appearance was really starting to change, like, almost immediately. It was very concerning to my friends and family. I gained an enormous amount of weight very quickly, like 100 pounds in three months. I started to grow my hair out – it had always been very trim and neat before and I started to just kind of let it do it’s thing aside from that patented Tiny Tim side part.

And I began wearing these colorful suits that didn’t fit so well even though they were very expensive to have made. Like the one I’m wearing now – the theme of this one is The Love Guru. It has pictures from the Mike Myers film The Love Guru all over it.

Isn’t it beautiful?

Reid: Yeah.

I went in – without telling anyone – and got this experimental dental procedure done – reverse braces. A dentist had come up with it because he thought that, like, Anglophiles would want it or something, but, of course, no one did, so I was the first. The braces went behind my teeth and pushed them out. It was very painful – still is actually. It kind of destroyed the structure of my jaw. But, you know, it makes the look more authentic.

And that same day I went in and got my nose elongated and had my hairline lazed backward.

When I came home, it was like, my family treated me like some kind of monster. And I realized that they were strangers to me and that this was natural. I WAS a monster and they should have been treating me this way all along. You know, I’d never really been judged and persecuted before and it was exhilarating, especially at the hands of these people who supposedly loved and cared about me.

So, I had to move out, obviously, and into one of those weekly rate hotels, just like Tiny lived in.

It was kind of like – you know that movie The Santa Clause? With Tim Allen? It was kind of like that – that rapid – except at the end of it I wasn’t this beloved, gift bearing, mythical man. I was Tiny Tim.

(song)

And I lost my job, of course. There was no way a jury was going to take my side looking like that.

Reid: How is your relationship with your family now?

Well, I only really saw them once after that. I convinced my wife to take a family vacation with me . . . this was just a couple of months after I moved out. I was feeling intense guilt about how things were working out and I thought I should just give this – my family – one more chance.

So, we agreed to meet at Spooky World in Rhode Island. My idea. It’s this Halloween themed theme park. We – the family – we’d always loved Halloween – had really gone all out with decorations and costumes, so it seemed like it was a good place to start patching things up and getting them used to the new me.

And when we got there – I met them there – everything was going . . . fine? I guess. As fine as it could until they found out that Tiny was playing three shows a day at the parks Scareoke stage and that was that. They left immediately and the divorce papers were waiting for me when I got back to the hotel I was living at.

(song)

But, you know, before that, at the park by myself – that was incredible. I got to see three Tiny Tim shows a day for three days. I even got mistaken for him a few times, which was a real thrill.

And then, then I came face to face with the man himself. Just for a minute. I got his autograph – had to stand in line for almost an hour to get it, that’s how popular he was at the park – and when I stood in front of him he looked at me and smiled – and I swear I could see recognition in his eyes. I don’t know if he recognized himself in me or if he remembered me from the bowling alley, but he recognized me. And he said – I’ll never forget it – he said.

“Try switching to Retinal Moisturizing Cream for face in the white and black container, that Oil of Olay Regenerist stuff will dry out your skin.”

He knew exactly which kind of face cream I was using! Just incredible.

So that really strengthened my resolve. That was a real sign that I was doing the right thing. And the next day I bought a ukulele.

(song)

Well, it didn’t feel right to impersonate Tiny while he was alive. But I’d heard – and he said himself – that his health was fading because of the diabetes and his – just his lifestyle. As much as he took care of his skin and worried about germs, his diet was terrible. So, I kind of just hunkered down and spent my time learning the songs.

(song)

And then, a year and a half later, on November 30, 1996, Tiny Tim died. He was playing Tip Toe Through the Tulips, believe it or not, at the Women’s Club in Minneapolis and had his second heart attack and that was it. It was a real tragedy and I really excpected to cry – to really take it hard, but you know what? The minute his death was announce I just felt a sense of purpose. I felt the Holy Spirit entered me. I hadn’t been religious before, but Tiny sure had, and I can only believe that his spirit entered me and brought Jesus with it, and he’s been in my heart ever since, thanks be to God.

So I said a prayer, picked up my ukulele and walked out onto the street, and that’s when I performed as Tiny Tim for the first time.

The response was . . .mixed. The few people that knew he had died kind of gave me sad smiles and nods and the people that didn’t either ignored me or scowled at me. One guy called me a faggot.

And the next day they had an open mic night at a bowling alley, The Pin Pad, which I thought was appropriate since a bowling alley was where this all started, in a way. And I went and I played some songs as Tiny and – thanks be to Jesus – the response was just incredible. The news of his death had gotten around and people were just so nice. They were cheering and – oh, I just can’t help but smile thinking about it.

So that gave me the confidence I needed to take the next step. A week later I was on a Greyhound headed for Los Angeles.

(song)

I had . . . some money. Maybe $15,000. Jeannie took the rest – I didn’t fight her. I figured that and whatever money I earned performing as Tiny Tim would be enough to live on. Which, you know, live is probably too strong a word.

I moved into the Oakwood II, which is basically just a cheaper, worse version of the Oakwood – that hotel where all the aspiring kids and their parents stay – and it’s in North Hollywood, which is a good stretch away from, you know, real Hollywood. It’s mostly filled with people that couldn’t afford to stay at the Oakwood anymore. Kids that are no longer kids and still holding onto the dream.

On the plus side, junkies are a captive audience.

And I met my manager there. Irwin Grendel. He runs Ape Magnet Productions and calls himself The Ape Tamer. He specializes in celebrity impersonators, which I guess is what I am.

It feels like more than that, though. Like I’m a continuation, not an imitation.

(song)

I met Irwin after a couple of months at the OakII and, listen, is he the most upright fella I’ve ever met? No. Is he, in fact, kind of a weasel? Yes. Does he have my best interests at heart? No. Does he wear exactly the right amount of hair jelly and not a drop more? Also no.

But, I’ll tell you, I don’t know what I’d do without him. Nobody else would touch me. It was brutal in those months before him. I had no idea where to start. I just walked around outside, strumming and singing and I don’t think I came across one person that was happy to see me. I was depressed.

And then I thought, “What would Tiny do?”

And the answer to that was obviously to sign a ridiculously exploitative contract with a shifty manager. He did it a million times in his career. I mean, Roy Radin got murdered and chopped up and nobody shed a tear. They all figured he had it coming, and they weren’t wrong.

I could definitely see Irwin getting chopped up.

Anyway, he was staying at the Oakwood II . . . too. I saw him in the hall with a guy who looked to be a white Steve Urkel impersonator with a black eye. And when I walked by he yelled, “Tiny Tim! Tip Toe Through the Fuckin’ Tulips!”

And that just set me off. I started weeping. It had been so long since anyone had shown me anything but disdain.

So he took me by the arm and led me into his apartment – told white Urkel to get fucked – and he explained who he is and what he does. He has this massive roster of celebrity impersonators . He’s got a Peter Criss, a Mr. Belvedere, a Toucan Sam, a Dennis DeYoung, ah, a Ronald McDonald that he has to call Red Donald the Hamburger Clown to avoid a law suit, um, Mary Todd Lincoln, a John Cougar Mellencamp, a Johnny Cougar, and a John Mellancamp . . . Chris Gaines, Delta Burke, the list goes on and on. He figures if he has enough people he doesn’t have to rely on any one of them getting consistent work, which they don’t. Did I mention that he has a Delta Burke?

So I signed his standard contract – 50 dollar a month retainer regardless of whether he gets me any gigs and 30% of anything I make. I also made him write in a clause that he’d try to get me a record deal.

That’s the goal. Like I said, I don’t want to just be a tiny impersonator, I want to continue what he started.
These aren’t easy shoes to fill. They’re not shoes you’d probably want to fill even if it was easy. They’re old and the soles are wore out. The seams are barely holding together. And they stink like any number of foot powders. They don’t even have laces. It’s like . . . they’ve been sitting in a bin by the front door of a Goodwill marked “Free” but they’ve been there for years and nobody’ll take ‘em.

Interviewer: So . . .why do you do it?

I guess . . . I mean, sometimes I don’t know. But I guess in the same way that God called Herbert Khaury to become Tiny Tim . . . I got that same call. And does it complicate matters that my call came late and kind of secondhand? Sure. But the Lord . . . you know how the saying goes. And that goes for Tiny Tim as well. The lord and Tiny work in mysterious ways . . . yes they do. Mysterious and sad and tiresome ways.

Marie Osmond Scratched My Brother

Marie Osmond Scratched My Brother.
 
In 1991 Marie Osmond scratched my brother and one day I will scratch hers.
The principal actors in my story are as follows:
Marie Osmond: A member of world-renowned Mormon’s, The Osmond Family, though she was never an official member of the musical group.  You might know The Osmond Family from the discount bin on the floor at your local record store.  Marie had a middling singing career in her own right and eventually teamed up with her toothy brother Donny for the Donny and Marie variety show and that terrible little bit country, little bit rock and roll song. 
In addition to passable singing, she has been a perennial B to C List celebrity since the early 1970s, no easy feat, I suppose.
Chad Messerschmidt, my little brother: A member of the slightly less renowned current and former casual Lutherans, The Messerschmidt family of Fargo, North Dakota.  In 1991 Chad was five years old, a chubby little booger eater that very nearly ruined my life just by being born, or so I thought at the time.  Chad’s history is riddled with injuries.  Here is an incomplete list:
Broke his arm on his third birthday.  I fell on him.
Bitten by a donkey in sunglasses.  There is photographic proof of this.
Testicle went up inside of him.
Dislocated shoulder
Hit by car
Got glass in his leg when he kicked through a car window trying to get shotgun
Stabbed himself in the leg with a sword.
Cracked his head open while attempting to jump down a flight of stairs, resulting in brain bleeding
And, last but not least, scratched by Marie Osmond.
Marie Osmond was in Fargo in December of 1991 for an appearance on the Children’s Miracle Network’s annual televised fundraiser.  This was a big deal, kind of, as we didn’t get many celebrities in town.  Our “Walk of Fame” includes Steve Allen, Paul Harvey, and Bert & Ernie, none of whom ever lived here.
For this grand affair, local drivers were needed to man the limousines, and, because we’re not the type of town with much need for limousine drivers outside of prom season, volunteers were arranged.
My father, Rock, was one of these.  I don’t know why.  He was and is a local banker with an inept social climber’s interest in charity.
Anyway, we had the opportunity to meet Marie Osmond because my father was assigned to be her driver.
We met him at the hospital where I guess she was touring, and laughed when we saw him in his dumb limo driver hat.
And then, there she was, resplendent in terrible 90s fashion, hair huge and poofy, makeup thick and garish, shoulders elevated by pads: Marie Osmond, a lady I vaguely understood to be famous but had never heard of before.
What a thrill.
She smiled at us, told us how cute we were, even though we were both chubby, pasty mid-westerners in bowl cuts and well-worn starter jackets and probably struck her as sticky fingered small town rubes.
She reached out her hand to shake mine. Her nails were long, shiny, purple.  I remember it clearly.
I shook back without incident.
Then she took my brother’s hand and all hell broke loose.
 
Okay, hell is a strong word. He grimaced a little and she didn’t really notice.
Anyway, her ludicrous fingernails had scratched his flabby little arm.
Now, listen. I didn’t like my brother. Who in their right mind could have? But I loved him.
And, for that reason, on that day, my fate was sealed:
I would have to avenge this wrong.
I would, one day, have to find Marie Osmond’s botoxed brother Donny. And I would have to scratch him.
I imagine that, when it happens, it will go something like this:
Donny Osmond, confidently walking through the Denver International airport, chatting with his agent maybe, artificially plumped and smoothed skin a deep chestnut, repurposed hair (I’m guessing here) done up to the nines, veneers aglow. Maybe he’s got an assistant or something with him.  Maybe this is a layover on his way to cut the ribbon on some terrible resort he’s invested in in one of the Carolinas.
Regardless, he’s not paying attention to his surroundings.
I spot him from my terminal, over my book. My heart begins to beat quickly, my mind races, a sheen of sweat dampens my brow. 
This is it.  The moment I’ve been awaiting for nigh on 40 years now.
I put my book in my knapsack, stand, sling the bag over my shoulder, take a deep breath.
I begin walking toward him, casual, but quick.  As luck would have it, Donny Osmond is wearing a short sleeved shirt. Some expensive Hawaiian type thing.
I approach, stealthy but quick.
I’m right behind him now.
I reach out and tap him on the shoulder.
“Mr. Osmond?” I say.
He turns, a little annoyed.
“I don’t usually do this but . . .”
And then I make my move.
My pointer finger extended, the nail long and sharp as it has been for years, in preparation for this very moment.
As I reach, I shout, “Your sister scratched my brother, now I scratch you!”
He is confused, still holding his phone, keeping that bare, tanned arm exposed.
My fingernail reaches his skin and I pull down quickly, leaving a small red and white scratch on his perfect skin.
He pulls back.  Shouts, “Hey!”
I turn and run, elated.  I’m going to miss my plane, but my work is done.
Chad has been avenged and balance is restored.
20 seconds later I am tackled by airport security and spend a little time in the clink.
No big deal.
It was worth it.
The end.

Reptilians 3: Lizard Lovers

Ginormous Boobs!
Steamy sex!
Lust!
Love!
Unrealistically clean buttholes!
Vaginas!
Internal testes!
Long scaly wieners!

Hello! I’m Jim Krokowski, entrepreneur, spokesperson, and, now, self-published author!
Is it getting hot in here or is it just my books?
It’s my books!
Ladies and gentleman, heteros, gays, bis, subs, doms, chubby chasers, power bottoms, furries, bronies, and every other permutation of human sexuality, I’m proud to present to you my brand new series of Reptilian themed erotica – Lizard Lovers! Guaranteed to be the sexiest depictions of human on shape shifting humanoid adult situations you’ll ever read!
I’ve written literally dozens of these things, including such arousing titles as:
You Suck My Blood, I’ll Suck Your Lizard Dick
My Super Sexy Cheney/Rumsfeld Three-Way
RILFS
RILFS II
Shapeshifting Sex Party with Oprah Winfrey
Lady In the Streets, Blood Guzzling Lizard Person In the Sheets
Freddy Mercury’s Scaly Butt
Reptilian BangBus
And many, many more!
I’m getting excited just thinking about it!
Look for them at fine truck stops all over the Wyoming/Nebraska/South Dakota tri-state area! Available in large print, braille, and audiobook read by yours truly!
Pick one up today and let the sexy good times roll, or should I say, slither? Ha Ha!

Reptilians Pt. 2: Para-Palaver

Welcome to Para Palaver – the only podcast that isn’t afraid to tell you the truth because I don’t have anything left to lose. I’m your host, Darvin Schlender, and I guarantee that this is the most revealing unadulterated paranormal podcast out there. Unlike some other podcast and radio hosts, I’m not afraid of the government or the Illuminati or the Greys or even the Reptilians because nothing that they could do to me could ever make my life worse than it is now. I would welcome the sweet touch of death, if I’m being perfectly honest, but I’m too cowardly to do it myself. I’m fat, balding, smelly, a little drunk, I lost my job, and my wife took the kids and moved in with Salvatore, my shift manager at Arby’s, oh, I don’t know, 187 days ago.
We’ve got a great show for you today brought to you by the good people at GetchaGold.com, amongst others. GetchaGold.com – the world is ending, why not get some gold? Go to GetchaGold.com and enter the offer code “Sadsack” to get a free 8 by 10 professionally taken photo of all the gold you’ll be buying with your first order. That’s GetchaGold.com – the gold getters!
Tree psychic and my Brother-In-Law, Bramlett Kendripple will be calling into the show later. But first – the news.

Well, folks, the Reptilians are at it again. One of their scaly minions, my wife Sheila’s new boyfriend Salvatore Cullata, cut my hours at Arby’s down to 20 a week. Looks like I’ll be living off of stolen curly fries and Horsey sauce for the foreseeable future. Let me tell you something about that Lizard bastard – and this is just so typical of Reptilians – everybody treats them like they’re so great just because they don’t have an ever-growing, irregularly shaped bald spot and a sweating problem, but that’s the dead give away. People have bald spots. People sweat. People gain enormous amounts of weight in very short periods. Real flesh and blood people like you and me. We’d all have flat stomachs and long curly black hair and pencil moustaches and be 23 years old if we could just shape-shift into whatever form we pleased. And it’s just so obvious that he’s a Reptilian, it makes me sick, but Sheila just won’t listen. How else would you explain the fact that he’s only been in this country for 8 months and is already a god damned shift manager? Strings have been pulled and I’m talking about from all the way up the chain of command, folks.
Thinking of him bringing back a bag of Jr. Bacon Cheddar Melts to my blissfully naïve, smiling children just makes my skin crawl.
Oh, god, I just wants my family back! Sheeeeeeilaaaaa!

Sorry. In further news, Reptilians egged my car again and the Illuminati stooges at the bank keep charging me overage fees.

I’m being told that our guest is on the line, so let’s go to a commercial and we’ll be back with my brother in law, Bramlett Kendripple.

And we’re back. We’ve got our guest on the line. He’s a tree psychic as well as the brother of my lying, cheating wife. Bramlett Kendripple, welcome to Para Palaver.

BK: Now, Darvin, we agreed not to talk about Sheila. I’m happy to be on your little show, but if you continue to say things like that about my sister I’m just going to hang up this phone faster than you can say Great Basin Bristlecone Pine. Is that going to be a problem, Darvin?

DS: No. No it’s not. My apologies. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about what you do.

BK: Darvin, I’d be happy to. First and foremost, I am, as you said, a tree psychic. Now – tree psychic, what does that mean exactly?
Well, it means that for as long as I can remember I’ve been blessed by the good Mother Earth with the ability to communicate with what I like to call “the wise old dinosaurs of the plant kingdom.” And by that I mean trees. Why do I call them dinosaurs? Well, ‘cause they’re so big, silly, and they’ve been around for so long. Longer than real dinosaurs, even. Did you know that the first tree ever sprung up from _? Well, it did.
I can speak with all kinds of trees: Black Ash, Shagbark Hickory, Pignut Hickory, Bitternut Hickory, White Ash, Hornbeam, Cucumber, Beech, Slippery Elm, American Larch, Sycamore, Christmas, Wonderboom, Big Banyan, ah, Strangler Fig, Florencecourt Yew, all kinds of Oak, Mulberry, Limber Pine, Sitka Spruce, Eucalyptus – the list goes on and on. The only kind of trees that won’t talk to me are Cherry Trees. I know they can, but their just stubborn. It’s like they got chip on their shoulder or something, probably because everybody’s always pickin’ their cherries. I’ll get to them someday, you just watch.
Now, what do I talk to trees about? All kind of things, really. From real important things like murders and kidnappings and the continued omnipresence of our Reptilian Overlords to sad stories about lightning bolts and lumberjacks and bugs and my love life to fun stuff like jokes and recipes and what not.
Now –

DS: Do they have anything to say about Sheila and that greasy roast beef Nazi she’s got raising my children?

BK: Darvin! What did I tell you not two minutes ago? Have you been drinking, Darvin? I saw you at the K-Mart yesterday and you looked worse than a Sugar Pine with Commandra Blister Rust! I’m worried about you!

DS: I’m fine. Yes, I am drunk. Let’s get this over with. What do the trees have to say about Reptilians?

BK: I’m going to answer that question because it’s so important, but I don’t like this one bit, Darvin.
What do the trees have to say about Reptilians? Well, I was chatting with a lovely Golden Maple in a patch of trees at the Dagoberto Llamas Memorial Baseball Field Complex – you know, the one just East of the Hobby Hut? So, I was chatting away with Petula Willfinger, that‘s the tree’s name, Petula Willfinger, about how sick it is that Americans hold that monster Paul Bunyan and his disgusting blue ox in such high regard on account of he was basically a genocidal maniac bent on the destruction of all trees West of the Mississippi and Petula says to me, she says, “Did you know that Paul Bunyan was one of them Lizard People that rules the planet earth from behind a veil of secrecy and subsists primarily on human flesh and blood?” And I, of course, I was shocked, though I’d always had my suspicions that that was the case and I told her so, and she said, “It’s true. Why do you think he was so tall? He’s a space lizard, that’s why, and from what I hear, I’m not going to name names, mind you, but a little bird – a blue bird – told me that he’s still alive and living in the moon and was a kind of a secret weapon for the Reptilians and would come back one day to finish the job of enslaving us for good and making us build their pyramids or whatever.” Well, I was about to tell her how that made perfect sense to me and ask her what if anything we could do to stop him, when, wouldn’t you know it, out of the blue I was hit by a foul baseball and the next thing I knew I was in an ambulance trying to tell the paramedics about what I had just heard and they were telling me to be quiet. (Deep breathe)
Anyway –
DS: That’s – that’s enough. God, my head is pounding. We need to wrap this up. Thank you for being on the show, Bramlett, and tell your sister that she ruined my life and I want my kids back and I hope her boyfriend dies in a grease fire.
BK: Darvin!
DS: Thanks for listening to Para Palaver. Join us next week – or don’t, what do I care – when I’ll be talking to Gertrude Aftergut, a 72 time alien abductee and my whore wife’s hairdresser.

Reptilians

Webster’s Dictionary defines Reptilian as – just a moment, let me find it (page turning) – hmmm. Webster’s Dictionary does not define Reptilian. Well, that’s curious. Could it be a mere oversight? Perhaps Noah Webster was a blood drinking, shape shifting, pederast from space and/or another dimension, intent on Earthly domination and the enslavement of the human race and omitted Reptilian from his word defining propaganda book to conceal his real identity and keep humanity in the dark about the true nature of the world we live in. It’s the only reasonable conclusion.
I know. I’ll look for other clues in this weighty tome. Bear with me. (pages turning, muttering words) Here it is – Humans: A slave race of lower beings that believe themselves to be free. Their blood is delicious and their children are quite fuckable.
Oh. My. God. (Bum ba buuuuuuum)

I suppose I’ll have to come up with a definition for Reptilian, since it turns out that quote on quote Noah Webster is not in fact interested in providing me with the meaning of English words, but harnessing us all with the yoke of the New World Order.
Live and learn.
Reptilians, also known as Lizard People, Reptoids, Reptiloids, Saurians, Draconians, or, depending on who you’re speaking with, Jews, are 7-12 foot tall lizard like humanoids and our covert overlords. They occupy every significant position of power, from your local police chief to Beyoncé to Barack Obama to Ban Ki-moon to, I don’t know, Donald Trump, probably. I can’t give you a complete list because Reptilians, on this planet and in this dimension, anyway, tend to take on the human form. They might live in the moon or the center of the Earth or both. They might travel interdimensionally. We definitely know that they are either the living descendants of dinosaurs who took shelter underground during the extinction event that killed off the rest of their kind and evolved over hundreds of millions of years or extra terrestrials from the Alpha Draconnais star system or interdimentional travelers some combination of all three. They have ruled the planet from the beginning of civilization and their bloodlines can be tracked back to the ancient Sumerians. Their motives are a bit hazy, but mostly seem to revolve around creating a single world government. What they intend to do once this is in place remains a mystery, but I would bet dollars to donuts that it involves devouring our flesh.
In short, Reptilians are our masters, whether we know it or not, and someday soon, barring a large-scale revolution or the invention of some sort of Reptilian killing spray, we will all bow before them in a much more literal sense.
That’s the theory, anyway, and an estimated 4% of Americans believe it to be true. 12,803,600 people. In the United States. Eligible voters, mind you.
The most well known proponent of the Reptilian theory is David Icke, a charming and disarmingly cogent British gentleman, perhaps the only man alive able to pull off a moderately dignified mullet. It’s impossible, really, to have a conversation about Reptilians without having a conversation about Icke. He gained fame in England as a professional futballer and, later, a sports commentator. In 1991 he had a vision after an instructive meeting with a psychic and held a press conference with his wife and the psychic, who were now all living together and only wearing turquois, to tell the world that he was “ a Son of the Godhead” and that massive earthquakes would rock the nation within the year and the world would end in 1997. Then he went on the popular British chat show, Wogan, dressed in an appalling turquois windbreaker, and repeated the claims. He was basically laughed off the stage.
But here’s the thing about David Icke. When you watch the video, he comes across as the good guy. The audience and host seem cruel and maybe even closed-minded. Time and again since that moment he has convincingly presented himself as the level headed underdog, even when what he’s saying is that the President of the United States is a pedophilic space monster.
It’s quite a gift.
Icke went away for a while after the incident on Wogan, to spend time with his family and await the earthquakes, which never came, of course. He had broken the cardinal rule of prophecy – never give a definite date. Would be seers throughout history have found themselves laughingstocks when the date they said the world would end or whatever came and went without incident. I, for example, once predicted that Dippin’ Dots, the purported “Ice Cream of the Future”, would render all other iced creams obsolete by March 11th, 2002, and was humiliated when that date came and went and Ben and Jerry’s was still very much a thing. I’ve never forgiven Ben or Jerry for that, but it was my fault, really, and it’s time I reckon with that.
Anyway, Icke learned his lesson.
When he came back, he had a new theory – one without an end date. It centered on a popular idea amongst conspiracy theorists – The New World Order, the true rulers of the planet who are constantly scheming to unite the Earth under their exclusive control, to debatable ends. These leaders are historically believed to be members of such groups as The Illuminati, the Freemasons (who are closely related to the Illuminati), the Bilderberg Group, Skull and Bones, the Council on Foreign Relations, and, in some of the darker corners of this thing, that old go to chestnut for lazy hate and fear mongers, the Jews. The list goes on and on really, and is hotly debated. What do all of these groups have in common? You guessed it – wealthy white men with a lust for power.

I want to pause here for a moment to offer my position on all of this. Look – it’s fun to buy into these conspiracy theories. Especially when they’re as far out as Reptilians. The world of conspiracies is filled with intrigue and colorful characters and it appeals to both the need to believe in something bigger than oneself and to rage against the machine, as it were. I’ve no doubt that some of these groups are sketchy and have malicious intents, but I also believe that human beings are inherent fuck-ups and incapable of discretion on the epic scale that a world wide conspiracy would require. Do wealthy white men run the world? Of course they do, for now. But the simplest explanation is almost always the correct one, and the march of history offers a perfectly plausible explanation of why this is so. It’s mostly the result of chance, the abuse of power, and the exploitation of others, but, to me anyway, the “some people are just assholes” theory makes a lot more sense than an “evil cabal”.
The lizard thing – which we’re getting to, I promise – is, I think, a way to rationalize all of this and separate ourselves from this pack of wan, wrinkly, old dicks by making them an extreme other. Literally aliens. If they aren’t human, it all makes perfect sense, and exonerates us from our own more minor misdeeds and sense of entitlement and the suspicion that if given the chance we’d act the same way. It’s also a satisfying if implausible explanation for the feeling that there has to be something more to life than just walking around, eating vegetarian chili, earning a paycheck, and collecting grocery store Mexican Catholic Candles. Problem is, that feeling is probably wrong. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe there is some insane undercurrent. Maybe there is a higher meaning. Maybe we are just the pawns in the Reptilian’s game. What do I know?

Back to the narrative.
The Lizard People. They make their first appearance in Icke’s 1999 book The Biggest Secret, but the idea is not a new one. The seeds of the Reptilian conspiracy theory as we know it today appeared in a Robert E. Howard short story for Weird Tales in 1929 and as purportedly non-fiction pamphlets that Maurice Doreal published in the 1940s. The plot of V – a 80s TV miniseries that was remade in 2009 – is pretty much the Reptilian theory in its entirety. It all brings to mind Scientology, a “religion” that began its life as science fiction and was willed into existence as an accepted reality – albeit a fringe one – by a single charismatic spokesman.
But it goes back further than that. Much further. The antiquity of the thing is one of its main selling points. Like an “ancient Chinese remedy”, it’s old, so it must be true.
Take The Bible, for instance. That old serpent that tempted Eve with the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge? A Reptilian. Most every ancient culture had a similar story of some god-like interloper coming to earth to provide knowledge to and interbreed with humans. Reptilians, all of them. Never mind the fact that this is all allegory and myth.
Again, I should add “probably” to the end of that sentence. This is all allegory and myth, probably.
So, how did we get to the point where 4% of Americans believe a moderately interesting science fiction plot to be reality? David Icke gave it the old hard sell. He’s written book after book, laying out the idea in incredible detail, which I won’t get into here – read the books, if you’re curious – they are fabulous, and touring relentlessly to promote them, talking to everyone that will listen, giving lectures that sometimes last for 9 hours to paying and non-paying crowds – which now reach into the thousands in some places and granting interviews to everyone from national television shows to the most rinky-dink podcasts imaginable. I could probably get him on this one. He’s positioned himself as a man of the people, willing to hear any idea, no matter how seemingly crazy and baseless. That’s inherently appealing. If you’ve ever spent any time with the radio program Coast to Coast with George Noory, you are well aware that Americans are convinced of a lot of crazy shit and don’t really understand that when you are drifting off to sleep and suddenly see an alien at the end of your bed you’re probably just dreaming. That’s how dreams work, for fuck’s sake. It must be a great comfort to these people to find a man whose ideas are so far out there that he can’t possibly stand in judgment of them.
And when you read the books and listen to David Icke speak, he is extraordinarily convincing. He has a real knack for connecting dots, even when those dots are seemingly miles or even light years apart. The guy could get from a snowman to Kevin Bacon in four moves. If you go into his theories wanting to believe, he gives you every means of doing so.
And he’s seemingly been proven correct a few times. The portion of the Reptilian Theory dealing with high-level pedophile rings? True, kind of. Just this year it was revealed that in England in the early 80s, under Margaret Thatcher’s watch, a VIP group including judges, politicians, intelligence officers, and staff at the royal palaces perpetrated ritualized child sexual abuse, including parties with very young boys that were well known amongst the political elite but aggressively covered up. Were these officials literal monsters or just figurative ones? Probably the latter, but Icke was talking about these goings on over a decade before they gained traction in the wider world.
I said he was right a few times, didn’t I? Let me think of another one. Oh, right. It’s not exactly a prediction, but he was certainly ahead of his time in regards to turquois tracksuits. Sure they’re not popular at the moment, but I’m going to ignore my own advise and say that they will be within the decade.

All right. I got sidetracked with David Icke again. That’s easy to do when discussing Reptilians, but let’s get back to actually discussing the creatures at hand. How would one spot a Lizard Person? The most common giveaway is their eyes. Reptilians don’t have round pupils like you and I, see. Their pupils are vertical slits. There is an absolute treasure trove of revealing eye pictures and videos available on the Internet, if you can consider blurry pictures and VCR recordings of politicians and famous people a treasure, not to mention a trove. I’m not sure what “trove” means, actually, and I can’t look it up because I’m boycotting the dictionary until Noah Webster reveals his true self. Anyway, Dick Cheney in particular seems to have very slitty pupils.
The second most popular method for spotting a Reptilian is to catch them shape shifting – typically by mistaking various interruptions in cable signals as shape shifting. Again, go to the Internet. Type in Reptilian Shape Shifter, and you’ll find yet another treasure trove, this time of various people whose faces become momentarily blurry or pixilated. There’s no real rhyme or reason to who it can be – newscasters, political talking heads, Vanna White, David Schwimmer, anyone on television. Any change in the quality of the picture is evidence of a Reptilian. Apparently, all that scrambled porn folks of my generation watched in their formative years was exclusively Reptilian.
Clearly the Reptilian community is at a loss for proof or really any real-world indication whatsoever that what they believe is true – even a little but true. Icke seems to be the only one with a consistent worldview, and he is obviously making it up as he goes along. Listen to any of the countless poorly recorded or even well recorded paranormal podcast or radio shows out there and you’ll get very little agreement as to what the basic facts of the conspiracy are. What you will get is a happy afternoon listening to freaky-deaks and liars arguing about the color of a Reptilians eyes, passionately espousing the use of magic to fight them, or snidely dismissing an ignorant host that doesn’t know the difference between a demon possession and a Reptilian Shapeshifter. It’s great.
So, that’s all. The Reptilians aren’t real and you should just go about your life without a care in the world. Can I talk to you over here for a second? You look really nice today and I thought we could maybe kiss passionately or something totally human and normal.

Listen – there’s no time for passionate kisses. You do look nice, but I just needed to get you alone to tell you that everything you just heard is a lie. The Reptilians are real. I repeat – the Reptilians are real. They live in the moon and they drink human blood and they molest children and they walk among us. I only said those things because they’re watching me and I don’t want them to suck the velvety red life from my veins or feast on my delicious flesh. I know this sounds crazy, but it’s true. You’ve got to believe me. Part two is going to seem like a parody, but it’s not. It’s the truth. Sit tight, enjoy this song, and we’ll get to the facts in just a moment.

Sheldon

I lived in Post Landing for something like 6 years.  It’s a small, white painted wood and brick apartment building on the edge of downtown Fargo and I guess it used to serve some function of the Post Office, hence the name.  The individual apartments vary wildly in size, seemingly built at random like an eccentric widow’s dilapidated mansion, but mine wasn’t one of the big ones.  It was definitely among the smallest, but the one across the hall was even smaller.  I know because I trudged amongst the wreckage inside of it once.
We’ll get to that in a bit.
My home was a strange one. In the basement, underground, as I am nothing if not an underground person. It’s where I feel most comfortable. The apartment was longish but very narrow – essentially a wide hallway vaguely divided into rooms.  Not a utility, but close.  A living room with a tv about 2 feet from the couch, separated from the kitchen by an arched outcropping of the ceiling, then a door into the bedroom, and then the bathroom.  If you stood against the wall in the living room and walked straight for 30 feet you’d be in the bathroom, which was so small you could wash your hands while sitting on the toilet, which was kind of nice.
You weren’t supposed to smoke in Post Landing, but almost everybody did, and the Landlord was this big dopey guy that told me he wanted to be a writer within 5 minutes of meeting him.  He was pretty lax about the rent, but he was also pretty lax about repairs, which was irritating but understandable.
It was cozy there and I loved it, even though I was miserable most of the time, and it was conveniently located within walking distance of about a dozen bars, two liquor stores, and the library, which pretty much covered all of my needs in those days.
Two liquor stores was perfect, because if you’d already been to one that day, you could go to the worse one about a block down the road and not be judged for buying more booze at 2 PM when you’re already noticeably drunk, which I was about 60-70% of the time.
The residents of Post Landing were – and are, I suspect – your usual combination of hipsters, the mentally ill, mentally ill hipsters, and borderline homeless.  All the way homeless people surrounded the building – I’ll tell you their stories another day – as Post Landing is conveniently located between a homeless shelter, The Rape and Abuse Crisis Center, and Fargo’s only strip club – kind of a Bermuda Triangle of sadness and desperation.
I felt very at home.  These were my people, all of them.
I loved nothing more than to post up on the front stoop with a case of beer, a pack of smokes, and a pizza, and offer any combination of the three to whichever transient was passing by, so long as they would tell me their story.  This was very effective.
Anyway, I tell you all of this to set the scene, as more stories of Post Landing will follow.
But this story is about Sheldon.
I was absent from Post Landing for about a year and some change – maybe more, everything from this time is a bit hazy – basically living with a girl in her much nicer apartment, but continuing to pay the rent in mine, not fully committed.
We broke up and I trudged back to my old squat, possessions in hand, to see how the place was holding up.
It was holding up all right.  A little musty, but not much worse for the wear.
As I was loading in my stuff, a man ambled down the long narrow hall separating my apartment from the one across from it, coming from the laundry room.  He was short, squat, and hairy and he wasn’t wearing anything but Tobasco print pajama pants.  I immediately noticed there was a swastika tattooed on his doughy left breast, which was alarming, but his amble was amiable and my last name is Messerschmidt, so I’m usually given the benefit of the doubt by these people.
 
I was going to ignore – as is my wont – but he was clearly going to engage. He walked up to me, confidently, smiling – terrible teeth, but not without charm.
“You new here?” he asked.
“Actually,” I said, resigned to this interaction, “I’ve been here for a few years but was kind of living with a girl.  She broke up with me so I’m back.”
He tightened his lips within his ragged, brown goatee and nodded his head, understanding exactly what I was going through.
“Man,” he said, “I know how that goes.  I caught my girl getting her ass eaten out by our drug dealer.”
Now, I don’t know why he felt comfortable enough with me to utter these words within seconds of making my acquaintance.  Maybe there’s something about my general demeanor that says “cool with stories about drugs and assplay”.  I kind of hope not.  Maybe he’s just always that guileless.   Maybe he was just taking a shot and got lucky, because I’m totally cool with stories about drugs and assplay.
“Wow,” I said, thinking that this situation was nothing like mine but I sure didn’t want to get into that here in a the hallway with a Nazis and my arms full of a laundry basket holding most of my earthly possessions.
Then he said, “Hey, let me grab that for you, so you can get in your place.”
That was a nice thing to say, swastika or no swastika, I guess.
I handed him the basket and he said his name was Sheldon.  Said he was a bus driver.  Said he lived right across the hall and if I ever needed anything don’t be afraid to knock.
I said thank you and have a good one and went about getting my life back in order.
And then I didn’t see much of Sheldon, which was good.  He’d been nice enough to me, but a Nazis is a Nazis and I hate Nazis.
Every once in a while, though, I’d have an interaction with him which revealed more mysterious details about his life.  The first came about 8 months later.
There was a knock on my door.  This was never welcome, but I must have been feeling relatively stable and sober because I answered it.
It was Sheldon.  He was holding a mason jar filled with a clear liquid.
He said, “Hey man, thanks for watching my place while I was gone, here’s some moonshine.”
And then he handed me the moonshine and went into his apartment.
I had no idea what he was talking about – hadn’t known he was gone. Hadn’t really spoken to him since our first meeting, aside from a few hellos in the hallway.
I uncapped the moonshine and my eyes immediately began to water. It smelled like rubbing alcohol, rot, and fire.
I was a drunk, sure, but I’d stick to killing myself slowly with vodka, not all at once with this stuff.
I poured it down the drain.
The next time I talked to Sheldon, he was with a girl.  Again, there was a knock on my door.
I definitely wasn’t sober this time, but I’d heard his voice and I knew who it was and Sheldon wouldn’t or couldn’t judge me.
I opened the door and this girl was hanging on him, wearing transition lensed glasses that hadn’t quite transitioned from outside.  She was very high.
I said hello.
They told me some disjointed story about her mother who wanted them to store all of her diet pepsi in Sheldon’s apartment and that it was there – he opened his door to show it to me and the place was floor to ceiling cases of diet pepsi. They said she was crazy and that if she knocked on my door or window I should just ignore her.
I said I could do that.
Then the girl said, “You have such a unique voice.”
And I laughed uncomfortably and said thank you and they left. Never saw her again and I don’t know what became of all the diet pepsi.
The next and last encounter with Sheldon was another knock on my door, this time in the middle of the night.  He looked a little panicked and said he was leaving and if Jon asked – Jon was the landlord – where he was, I should tell him he’d joined the army.
I said, all right, take care of yourself.
And he opened his eyes really wide and sighed loudly and said, “It was great being your neighbor, have a good life.”
I closed the door and never saw him again.
Jon never asked me about Sheldon, but months later I unthinkingly checked his doorknob and the apartment was unlocked.
I couldn’t resist. I went in.  It smelled terrible, like mold and BO and old microwave dinners.  It was a mess.  Trash and clothes mingled all over the floor, but also seemingly all of Sheldon’s belongings. A mattress with no frame, a tv and playstation on a tv stand, a full ash tray, food and plates in the cupboards, a sparsely populated refrigerator, the usual shitty movie posters on the walls, a shelf of DVDs – pornos, mostly -and, unexpectedly, a hindu shrine to Ganesh, complete with a fake gold statue of the elephant headed god, some candles, and incense.  Next to it was a travel guide to India and a notebook.
I picked up the notebook and thumbed through its pages. Every one was blank. More mysteries. I pocketed it, the travel guide, and the statue, looked around a bit more, wondering what in the fuck had gone on in here, and then left.
I hoped I’d have a chance to give them back to Sheldon one day. To get some answers, maybe.  But, of course, I never did.

Messerschmish

(Into tape recorder)
Alright. Check. Check. OK. This is Reid Messersschmidt. Hi. I hope this tape recorder works. I got it at the Boys Ranch last minute. It occurred to me on the way here that I might die doing this and should probably record something to specify that this is not a suicide. Also, this is kind of an event, so there should probably be some record of it. If you happen to find me in this undisclosed Red Roof Inn surrounded in blood with a hole in my head, Post-it notes with unintelligible scribbles covering everything, nonsensical notebooks in a pile on the desk, and a hoard of unlabeled non-perishable food products stacked to the ceiling, first of all, sorry for scaring you and making a mess. Please don’t be traumatized and have a terrible life. Second, this is not a suicide. I know this is the kind of place that people like me go to commit suicide, but I swear it’s not. I’ll explain. Um, hold on, I’m going to play some music, so this sounds more dramatic. This is going to be some real Notes From the Underground shit. I’m a little drunk. Bare with me. Just a second.
Today is an historic one. Inspired by my research into Esperanto, I have decided to create my own language, though my intent is decidedly different from L.L. Zamanhof’s admirable dream of bringing the world together through a common tongue. My language will be one of exclusion, not inclusion. A language for one – a language for me. A lexical HAZMAT suit, so I can get some peace and quiet for a change. It will be called Messerschmish, after myself – appropriate, I think, since I will be it’s only speaker.
Happy Birthday Messerschmish! May you exist until my death!
I feel I need to begin by recording for posterity why it has become necessary to create my own language.
Some months ago I was strolling through the labyrinthine corridors of the local mall in search of an elusive pair of mustard colored slacks when I had a hankering, as I often do, for some Jujyfruits. (Flashback music) As luck would have it, I was nearing the plaza’s Walgreen’s Drug Store. Now, I was feeling rather low at the time, as shopping for pants is a real self-esteem assassin for a man with a bit of a muffin top, such as I am, and the cruel eyes of lithe, moneyed teenagers only serve to exacerbate the issue. The Walgreen’s, with it’s rows of medicaments, sick, sad, aged patrons, inexplicable bins of bargain priced socks, and surprisingly ample candy section appeared as a beautiful oasis, the smell of salves and balms a welcome contrast to the pseudo-sexual cologne musk of the various haberdasheries.
“I wish they sold pants,” I thought to myself as my spirits began to rise and I entered the store’s matronly embrace.
Historically, when I’ve visited a Walgreen’s, interactions with the staff and other shoppers are nearly non-existent. No eye contact is made and few words are spoken. I believe two factors are at play here. First, items being purchased are often considered shameful. No one wants to admit that they are ill, or what they are ill with. A tube of fungus cream is nothing to wave around. Condom sales seem to be a large part of the business model, and purchasing those is no day at the beach either, probably because sex is so brutish and absurd. Second, the unnaturally harsh lighting heightens ones self-consciousness. This might seem negative to some, but for the naturally self-conscious, it simply evens the playing field. Everybody feels the way that we feel all the time when they are in a Walgreen’s. Glorious may be too strong a word, but a Walgreen’s is certainly very pleasant.
I picked up my Jujyfruits and stopped by the supplement aisle. These globules of syrup and wax were going to gum up the old meat box, so I thought I’d counteract it with some placebos. As I perused the vitamins B 1 through 12, a haggard man in a NASCAR snap-back and filthy, ill-fitting jeans edged into my peripheral vision, loitered there making copious throat noises, and, with the all the thoughtfulness and grace of a stinking old potato rolled across a gravel road, stepped directly in front of me, crouching down to stare slack-jawed at the products near the floor, blocking my view. While I considered pushing him forward into the shelves of non-FDA approved pills, he turned to me with vague curiosity, looked me up and down, and said, “You look pretty healthy. What ones do you use?”
My heart sank as I glared hatefully down at him, but I am a Midwesterner and obligated to engage if spoken to.
“I don’t know,” I said, disgusted at the cheerful tone of my voice. “I’m pretty sure these things are just a vast pharmacological conspiracy.” Some times if you use big words they leave you alone. He chose to ignore me and continue.
“What’s Nee-a-cin?” he asked, with an edge of contempt. “Should I be taking this?”
This was spiraling out of control. Apparently, the mere appearance of general health made me the equivalent of a doctor to this man, who smelled of cigarettes and day old booze with a little fresh booze on top.
“Niacin. It makes you have to piss a lot,” I replied. Now I was speaking his language.
“Seriously?” He laughed, crudely. “I’ve got to piss enough as it is.” He replaced the Niacin and stood up with a vulgar grunt and alarmingly loud popping and cracking of his . . . skeleton, or something, now blocking my entire view. He turned to face me. His breath smelled of Chicken McNuggets, chewing tobacco, whiskey, tooth rot, and shameful deeds. His eyes were red and unfocussed, like a three-year-old ginger kid up past his bedtime. “Seriously. I piss constantly, I can’t get rid of this cough, I’m always tired, and my dick can’t get hard. My balls hurt. I itch all over. Yesterday I shit blood. I can’t remember the last time I didn’t have diarrhea. Can’t remember much of anything ever, to tell you the truth. My toenails are all yellow and cracked. One just fell off last month. My hair is falling out.” He removed his sweat stained cap to illustrate this point. “My back hurts. My knees hurt. My hands hurt. My teeth hurt – what’s left of ‘em anyway. I’m reeeaaally fuckin’ dizzy, pretty much always. I can barely even see the T.V. anymore, ‘cause everything’s spinning. I throw up about four times a day – there’s blood in that too. My stomach feels like I ate a bunch a forks or something. There’s this loud ringing in my ears. I got sores in my mouth. Big sores. What should I take?”
I held my breath, terrified to inhale any of his various danders, and took a step back, my rear coming into contact with the shelving behind me. This was the worst moment of my life. I sidled out of his breath range, and pointed at the men’s multivitamins. Despite the repulsion and desperation I felt, I was bound by North Dakota law to politely answer his question. “Take those,” I said, my cheerful tone never wavering, despite the panicked shrieks that echoed in my skull. “That’s what I take. They’ll make you feel like a million bucks.”
And then I fled. It may have looked like my usual determined saunter, but there was an edge of desperation to it. Only at the last moment did I remember to discard the Jujyfruits in a bin of assorted mittens. I didn’t stop until I’d exited the mall and was safely in the confines of my car. I turned the key in the ignition and was assaulted by the following radio ad:

You’re a man. (YEAH I AM!) A grizzled, swaggering, buffalo wing devouring, beer swilling man. (YOU KNOW IT!) You love sports (SPORTS!) – and sexy ladies (BUT NOT WHEN THEY TALK!) – And Trucks (VROOM!). Men NEED man things. (GRUNTING) None of this foofy, poofy, prissy stuff you find in the soap aisles. (Lady voice: Well, I NEVER!) You’re a man and you need a soap that that smells like a grizzly bear in a leather jacket smoking unfiltered cigarettes (ROAR!) not laaaavender. (I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT THAT IS!) So tell your wife to get off her fat ass and buy you some Cock Brand Soap – FOR MEN! Cock brand soap for men will clean the oil from your hands (YEAH!), the sweat from your brow (YEAH!), the stank from your diiick (OH YEAH!), and make you smell like god-damned Ghengis Khan (YEEEEAAAAAAH!!) DO it Cock style so know one will think you’re gay!

It was something like that, anyway. I might be exaggerating a bit.
Action was required. I couldn’t continue to live in the world, constantly accosted by the banal ramblings and horrific biographies of the general public. I considered several solutions, including constantly wearing head phones in public, becoming a shut in, going off the grid, and a horrific face scar. My friend Rich often pretends to be deaf. No, these solutions lack finality. It is no longer enough to avoid interaction, I need to make interaction nearly impossible. Not being understood is not enough. I don’t want to understand – literally. I don’t want my brain to be capable of deciphering this aural garbage.
No conclusion was reached that day, but my dissatisfaction percolated for weeks and, in the shower one morning, revealed itself to be the rich, fragrant brew that is Messerschmish.
The idea of Messerschmish, anyway. I still had to sort out the particulars, but the solution was as elegant as it was unheard of. As sole speaker of the language, no one would be able to, or even want to, speak to me. Nothing appalls and repels the average Midwesterner quite like a non-English speaker, and I suspect that non-English speakers aren’t too keen on non-whatever speakers, either. I could just learn Esperanto, I suppose, but what would happen if I ran into a chatty New-Age weirdo while inspecting leeks at the Farmer’s Market? All would be lost. The creation would be made simple with a review board of only one to parse it – no pedantic grammarians to tell me whether I was doing it right.
And I would unlearn English. Messerschmish would be my only means of communication, to myself as well as others. I would be blissfully stranded on an island of my own creation. Extreme? Sure. It was, and is, perfect.

These are the broad steps I laid out for myself:
Create Messerschmish.
Unlearn English.
Become fluent in Messerschmish.
LIVE.

I immediately quit my job as a call center operator for the deaf. The irony that I earned my living helping those with difficulty communicating to communicate did not escape me. These poor, sometimes literally dumb saps, had been bestowed with the gift I desired, and instead of embracing it, chose a clumsy attempt to overcome it, like a fantastically tall basketball player sawing off his legs to reach a low cupboard. Nobody at the center seemed upset to lose me. My delightful way around a simile had always been lost on them.
Next, I began destroying most of my belongings, specifically those with any writing. Books, albums with lyrics, letters from old friends and lovers, important tax documents – it all had to go. I moved out of my dilapidated one-bedroom apartment – good riddance – and chose, at random, a town out of state, booked myself a room in this haggard Red Roof Inn, got in my car, and drove.
I didn’t bother to tell anyone, which was probably inconsiderate, but I’d alienated most of them by this point, anyway, and you try explaining to your mother that you’re moving away forever to physically remove the native language from your brain and invent a new one. I can’t imagine it would be a pleasant conversation. They’d all get over it in time.
I should comment here about continuing to live in this society and other. “Why,” you may be asking yourself, “don’t you just move to another country?” This is something I considered. In another country, though, I would certainly learn the language over time through submersion. Also, you’re missing the point, theoretical listener. I like it here, for the most part. It’s a very convenient country to live in and I’ll have enough on my plate once I no longer speak anyone’s language without having to become accustomed to new foods and culture. And the additional benefit to exclusively speaking, knowing, and thinking in my own language will, hopefully, be a complete restructuring of my mind. There’s also the argument for isolation, but it’s not that I don’t like people. I’m sure that’s not the impression that I’ve given so far, but I’ve had some very nice times with people. Closeness to humanity can be a real comfort. Living completely alone would probably drive me mad, which does have some appeal, but, again, there would be a lot more to become accustomed to and I’m not really a fan of the out of doors. It’s just time for something new and this seems an insane but manageable change. And it’s uncharted territory, which I like. I’m a goddamned pioneer, so get off my back.
Alright, so once I arrived at the town in which I’m currently residing, I pulled into the local Walmart to pick up supplies and remind myself one last time why I was doing this in the first place. I was successful at both. I picked up enough food for two months, several packages of Post-it notes, pens, Sharpies, spiral-bound notebooks, plastic containers, a plastic tarp, a drill, bandages, Neosporin, Migraine strength Excedrin, a 1.75 of vodka, and a book on the human brain. I had done plenty of research and made copious notes beforehand, but figured it would be a good idea to have a picture in front of me for the procedure. I won’t go into detail about the human interactions I endured at Walmart – everybody’s been there and I spent too much time on the Walgreen’s thing, I’m getting restless and my drunk is wearing off. Suffice it to say that the trip strengthened my resolve.
After checking into my red roofed home for the foreseeable future, I laid out my supplies and set about the work of inventing a language.
Now, I am not a linguist and this process wasn’t scientific. I chose a few inspirations – birdsong, early 80’s Michael Stipe, R2D2, and David Lee Roth, amongst others – and made a list of every word I could think of. I then ranked those words on a scale of 1-10 and used the most important to develop some roots. Then I expanded on those roots to create a corollary for every word on my list, making up a few along the way to describe some things I thought English lacked. A word for that feeling you get when you’re sad about something but also kind of relieved, for example. Finally, I translated the entirety of the sole work in English I had not destroyed: a copy of Tender Buttons, by Gertrude Stein, which I did destroy once it had served its purpose. I used the translation as a grammatical touchpoint and came up with some basic rules and structures. It was easy. As I said before, the review board here is small enough to avoid dissent completely and I felt no need to adhere to any rules that didn’t suit my purpose. And that’s all I’m going to tell you, because I don’t want anybody deciphering Messerschmish and piercing my bubble.
Now I was on to practical matters. Once I rid myself of all previous linguistic knowledge I will have to have a method for learning Messerschmish. I called the front desk and had them take the television from my room. I removed all labels from the food I had bought and wrote what they are on the can in Messerschmish. Any food not in a can was put in a plastic container and also labeled. I put a Post-it note with the appropriate new word on every object in the room. I filled the notebooks with lesson plans, beginning with crude drawings to represent each new word and building from there. I carefully filed off the H and C from the water faucets and replaced them with the first letter of the Messerschmish words for hot and cold. I thought of everything. Hopefully, the procedure will go as planned and I won’t lose something I need to decipher all of this. (Stop music)
So now, here I am, standing in front of the sink – which is not in the bathroom by the way, what’s with that? – staring into the mirror. The tarp is under me and much of the vodka is inside of me. The rest will be used for sterilization. The bandages, Neosporin, Excedrin, book on the brain, and drill are on the counter. I am now going to drill a hole through my skull and into my cerebral cortex, what is known as Wernicke’s area – the language center of the brain responsible for language. I’ve mapped the spot through which I will drill exactly and marked it with a Sharpie. Once I drill into my brain, all of my current knowledge of language will be lost. Everything else will remain intact, theoretically. I’ll still be Reid Messerschmidt. I just won’t really be able to communicate that with the outside world. (Heavy sigh)
And that will be it. (long pause) So . . . I guess I should say a few parting words in English. Um, ok. Here they are: There should be more words like garbanzo – it’s fun. And you should all be much more thoughtful.
Alright.
(Shuffling, drilling, shout, silence, music plays)