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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!

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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!

Posted on

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.
 

Posted on

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.

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Esperanto

Late 19th century Poland was a place of division and turmoil. The population was incredibly diverse, but not in a happy, elementary school math book illustration way. Yiddish, Russian, German, and Polish were all spoken – mostly used to hurl slurs and insults at opposing ethnicities. At any given moment you could look out of your window to see a craven German strong-arming a miserly Jew, while a drunken Russian looked on in disgust, and a dumb Pole tried in vain to tie his shoes. One group’s success was perceived to be at the cost of another’s. The police force was prejudiced against people they viewed as interlopers. Street signs were growing problematically jumbled. Tensions ran high and violence ran rampant. A breaking point was at hand.

Sound familiar? It shouldn’t. That was a very long time ago. There’s no way you were around to see it. Unless you are a Crow, Lizard Person, or Dracula, of course. In that case – Welcome to the Podcast! Caw! Hissss! or Blah! to you! Don’t forget to check out the web page at theirrationallyexuberant.com for past podcasts, pictures, videos, and the transcript of this episode!

So, enter L.L. Zamenhof, a sensitive young Jewish lad with a penchant for peace and a yearning for learning. He also had, it is said, a yen for Zen, a lust for language, a dictate to abate hate, and a total boner for unity. He was, by all accounts, a great guy, worthy of respect, so shame on you for assuming that I was going to make some inane joke about LLs Cool J or Bean. Dismayed by his surroundings, he came to attribute the fractiousness of his homeland to what he later called “the heavy sadness of the diversity of languages”. He himself spoke Yiddish, Russian, German, French, Hebrew, Polish, Latin, Greek, Aramaic, Lithuanian, Italian, English, and something called Volapuk, which I assumed was old-timey nerd language along the lines of Klingon, but was actually something of a precursor to what we are discussing today.
What are we discussing today? Esperanto. It’s in the title. Pay attention, Champ. Zamenhof’s solution to the problems he observed was a an easy to learn universal language, with a simple grammar and a vocabulary of root words that would be modified by standardized prefixes and suffixes, free from the irregularities that make a language like English so difficult to master. It was based on a combination of several European languages, as well as Latin, but, to this monolingual English speaker, anyway, sounds a lot like Spanish. He worked on the language for years while attending medical school and then practicing Ophthalmology, and finally introduced it in a book, the Unua Libro, in 1887, under the pseudonym Doktoro Esperanto (meaning Doctor Hopeful). He called the language Lingvo Internacia, but no one liked that, so they called it Esperanto, which has a nice ring to it.
Now, constructed languages – languages created for an express purpose by a specific individual or individuals, as opposed to evolving naturally over time – have an estensive history that begins long before Esperanto and continues through modern times. They are rarely successful, as evidenced by the fact that the aforementioned Klingon is the second most successful of all time, behind Esperanto. The first known instance is the Lingua Ignota, created in the year 1200 by Hildegard of Bingen for “mystical purposes”. She didn’t bother to teach it to anyone else, presumably because she didn’t have any friends. In the 16th century, the alchemists and Kabbalists also constructed mystical languages of sorts. I’m sure they would have gotten on swimmingly with ol’ Hilde. Many others came and went after that, typically constructed by idealistic philosophers and would be magicians or wizards or witches or whatever. In 1982, author Suzette Haden Elgin created Ladaan, a feminine-centric language to test the effects of gender normative language. Today, most constructed languages are for artistic purposes. Even as we speak, someone is probably sitting alone in a sad little apartment, laboring away at teaching themself Dothraki. It is a strange world we live in, though apparently not strange enough for some people.
These examples are all, to varying degrees, selfish. Esperanto was a different kind of constructed language, one which has popped up from time to time, created not as an intellectual exercise or to bring some imagined power, but to unite the world and bring about peace. It was an objective failure in that regard, but, like Macaulay Culkin, showed some real promise at times and has stubbornly refused to die.
The response to Zamenhof’s book was surprisingly enthusiastic, though his first attempt at marketing didn’t catch on. In the back of the pamphlet which first presented his new language, he included coupons to be filled out and mailed to him as a pledge to learn the language, provided 10 million others did the same. Only 1,000 were returned. Esperanto, from the very beginning, was an unpredictable entity, and, much like the giant baby in Honey I Blew Up the Kids, refused to conform to its creator’s or adherent’s intentions.
Zamenhof’s dream was that the world would recognize Esperanto’s potential to solve all of its problems and the language would be taken up everywhere. This didn’t happen of course, as it was widely ignored by national governments, but small pockets of Esperanto speakers developed across the world, first throughout the Russian Empire and Eastern Europe, then in Argentina, Canada – of course, then Algeria, Chile, Japan, Mexico, and Peru, on to Tunisia, and finally Australia, the United States, Guinea, Indochina, New Zealand, Tonkin, and Uruguay, all between its introduction in 1887 and 1905, which is extraordinary in an age of limited communication. Adherents corresponded by mail and via the 27 magazines that existed by 1905, and have met for a World Congress in various countries every year, with the exceptions of the years during both World Wars, since 1905. There were some serious movements to place Esperanto on a bigger stage. Prior to World War I, it was proposed that it would be named the official language of the territory of Neutral Moresnet, between modern day Belgium and Germany, though the war brought an end to that. The League of Nations proposed making Esperanto their official language. A French delegate vetoed the proposal, but the League did recommend that its members add it to their educational curricula.
Esperanto exists in much the same way today. It’s Wikipedia page estimates the number of fluent speakers at anywhere from one-hundred thousand to two million, which is preposterously unhelpful and imprecise, like telling a friend you’ll meet them for tacos between 6:30 and 2042. That taco date’s never gonna happen, bro. Its online presence suggests the higher side of the estimate. There are countless websites and organizations devoted to Esperanto speakers – many featuring lively speaker interactions, books written in and translated to the language, and a shocking number of Esperantist albums to be purchased on iTunes, most of which are predictably terrible. Some are featured in this very podcast. Movies have been made entirely in Esperanto, most notably the 1962 B-horror flic, Incubus, starring William Shatner. It’s not bad, actually – certainly better than the band of the same name. </code></pre>
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<pre class=”wp-block-code”><code>Esperanto has often been used as a neutral stand in for a foreign language in film – see The Great Dictator and Gattaca, amongst many others – and the United States Military has used it as a language for enemy forces in war games.
There are a few notable speakers and proponents of Esperanto. Billionaire George Soros is one of very few native Esperanto speakers in the world – anywhere from 350 to 2,000. Jules Verne and J.R.R. Tolkien spoke the language. Leo Tolstoy claimed to have learned it in two hours. Pope John Paul II gave several speeches in Esperanto and both Einstein and Fidel Castro were vocal in their support. Morrissey strikes me as an Esperanto guy, but if he knows it, he’s not telling anyone.
It hasn’t all been a slightly disappointing walk in the park for Esperanto, though. It’s had some heavyweight detractors. Hitler for instance. As with most things, he believed it to be a vast Jewish conspiracy and condemned Esperantists to concentration camps. In an incredibly sad twist, Zamenhof’s children all met this fate. There are stories of concentration camp prisoners teaching each other Esperanto. They told the Nazi guards that it was Italian, and the Nazi guards were too busy with hatred and murder to fact check them. Stalin initially studied and supported the language, but changed his mind so that Hitler would like him and had Esperantists killed, as he was wont to do. Noted academic and old crank Noam Chomsky has called Esperanto, quote, “not a real language.”
In all likelihood, Esperanto will continue to exist as it has for the last 128 years – as an idealistic fringe movement and curiosity. It doesn’t seem like there’s any threat of Esperanto becoming a unifying international language, but who knows? I don’t think anyone would have guessed in 1976 that Olympic Gold Medalist Bruce Jenner would become a reality star and wilted husk of a human potentially transitioning into a vibrant woman, but here we are. Like I said, the world’s a strange place.</code></pre>
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The Astronaut Has to Poop

Tuesday, June 15th, 2026. Zero hour, 9 am EST.

The world population holds its collective breath. Some of the world’s population. Most of the world’s population is indifferent, truth be told. These are hard times, and this mission is a naked attempt to inspire the increasingly un-inspirable. Humanity has, after all, thoroughly explored Mars via robot – years ago, now – and, of course, there’s nothing up there of any note. Nothing of any material consequence to anyone down here, anyway, and what matters besides material consequence?

But a few are still tortured by optimism and child-like wonder and it’s those few this is for. They are the ones projecting this scene in 3 dimensions from their iCubes, nervously changing the angles to catch every last detail.

What they see now is this: Lester Manly and his three crew mates, not important to this particular story, strapped to their seats, preparing to touch down on the red planet in t-minus five minutes.

What they can’t see is this: Lester Manly desperately has to take a shit.


Manly realized this was the case about 30 minutes ago. The euphoria of a dream fulfilled and anticipation of pioneering steps was interrupted suddenly by a profound rush of cramping and a wave of heat. He clenched his stomach muscles, put his hand to his gut, bent forward, and grunted slightly before remembering the cameras capturing him from every angle and straitening back up, hopefully cool and composed.

“It will pass,” he thought.

“I have trained for this,” he thought.

“I am a finely tuned machine,” he thought.

It did pass for a few minutes and he slipped back into euphoria.

He is 36 years old, a veteran of 3 vague and humiliating wars – wars with no names – an athlete and a scientist. He is trim and handsome. His wife is watching. His kids are watching. They are filled with pride and this makes him proud in a way he’s never imagined possible.

He made up his mind to become an astronaut when he was eight years old, in 1998, after watching Armageddon with his father and everything since has pointed in that general direction.

He is thinking of that movie – of how much he’d wanted to be Ben Afleck and now he kind of WAS and of that Aerosmith song, which still makes him tear up for all that it represents to him – when the second pang hits, harder than the first.

“Goddammit, not now,” he thought.

But it is now.

He could just shit, of course, he’s equipped for that, technically speaking. But is he really going to fulfill his dream wearing a diaper full of excrement? Is he really going to defecate in front of 120 ultra-def 3D cameras?

No, that is not an option.

So he tries to ignore the pain, the internal heat, the sweat beading on his forehead, the implications of his own foul humanity in this moment of godlike mastery over space and time – less godlike, now that he really thinks about it, now that his thoughts are tainted by physical need.

Why are they doing this? For what end? Hurtling through space in this clumsy vessel, held together by screws that were likely made on a conveyor belt overseen by sick, sad, underpaid, brown skinned kids?

And now he feels claustrophobic in his space suit and aware of the cameras and of course his kids are going to notice that something’s wrong – his wife definitely will – and when he gets home they’ll celebrate this for a day and then he’ll say something wrong and she’ll be mad at him like he wasn’t just on fucking Mars and this will all be behind him like it never happened and the world will go on like this never happened and then . . .

And then they’re making the final decent. He’s been doing his small part without conscious effort. The ship does most of the work.

And now he’s a little desperate, feels nauseous.
Feels like he might just stay in the ship if they’d let him, but of course that’s not possible.

He turns to the camera over his shoulder and forces a smile.

“Here we go,” he says.

He’s the first to go. The leader of this mission. He’s to say – he didn’t even get to choose, was told to parrot words from 60 years ago – “That’s one small step” and all that.

And he thinks, let’s get this over and done with, and that thought breaks his heart and he steps onto the vast deadness of Mars.

The End.

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Christmas Special: The Caganer

It’s a classic episode of The Irrationally Exuberant! This beloved Christmas episode is about The Caganer, a pooping man the Catalonians hide in their Nativity Scenes, for some reason. It’s fascinating, hilarious, features the first appearance of Foam Chomsky, and . . . there’s a beloved Christmas song, “Oh, Caganer”!

Listen, if you can watch the same five Christmas movies every year, you can damn well revisit this old chestnut.

Enjoy! And may god bless us everyone, everywhere!

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The Book of Platypus

In the beginning were only Steve the Infinite Tortoise and Karen the Infinite Chinchilla, and they were one, and they were everything, but they were only friends – Karen’s choice, not Steve’s.

But ye, after countless eons, Karen relented to Steve’s passive aggressive moping, and the Universe was born of his violent shudder.  And the Universe was infinite, and Steve the Infinite Tortoise was infinite, and Karen the Infinite Chinchilla was infinite, and they were one. And in the infinite area between the second and third toes on Steve’s front left foot was the Milky Way, and inside of it, Earth.  And Earth’s surface was a fiery ocean, teeming with goo.  And the goo did roil for many eons. And lo the goo, tired of roiling, began to fornicate – a real free for all – and the goo begat the fish as the fiery oceans ebbed of their own volition, and land emerged. And some of the fish were curious about the land, and grew legs and feet and crawled upon it.  And the largest of the pedal fish, whose name was Becky, spoke unto her brother, Dutch:  “If only we were bigger, we could further satisfy our curiosity.” And so, each unto himself, they all wished really hard and became huge, and they were dinosaurs. But some were slothful in their wishing and didn’t grow so much.  And lo, the winter came and it was cold, and the small, slothful wishers grew fur to protect themselves from the snow, and they were mammals.  And there were birds, somehow, and among the birds, ducks. All of the creatures lived happily upon the Earth and did multiply and change through dalliances and wishes. All around them – all around everything – Steve the Infinite Tortoise and Karen the Infinite Chinchilla lived too.  They were unhappy.  Karen, after much contemplation, made up her mind that their relationship was a mistake.  And many tears did fall from Steve’s infinite eyes, and they rained down over the universe and hardened in the cold of endlessness and crashed down upon the planets and the stars. And one of the tears made its way to Earth and crashed upon the surface, and from its iciness a wave of energy spread across the land. Multitudes were destroyed – the larger animals, unable to find cover, really got it good – and still more were changed by the wave.  All lost the power to wish themselves different and henceforth were slaves to the march of time. A great distance from the impact, a tribe of beaver-like mammals was engaged in a friendly mixer with a tribe of ducks.  And the wave did wash over them and the two became one, and the one was the platypus, and the platypus was confused. Now, the tear’s impact tore the land, which had been one, asunder, and formed the continents.  And the platypus found itself on a small section of the land which came to be known as Australia. And the platypuses agreed that they were hard to look at, and each ventured into the wilderness.  They grew noble in their solitude. It came to pass that a platypus was born to a mother with a pristine tail.  And she named him Gene.  And he was good.  And word of Gene the Good Platypus spread throughout the land and the others congregated once more to hear what it was he spoke. And Gene said unto them, “Why hast thou come to me?  Go back to minding your own business, for it is good.  But be sure to schtupp each other every once in a while, lest our kind perish.” And they left him and did of which he spoke, as they do to this day. And Steve the Infinite Tortoise and Karen the Infinite Chinchilla did mind their own business as well, unknowing and indifferent.  

And so they remain.

Amen.

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Jim Krokowski’s PLATYPUS EXPERIENCE!

Are you tired of brushing your teeth eeeeevery morning?
Sore from walking around on only two legs?
Sick of incubating your young inside of your body?
Had it up to here with having nipples?

If you said yes to any of these questions, then, boy, have I got an opportunity for you!

Hi! I’m Jim Krokowski. Teacher, inventor, spokesperson, erotic author, and, now, Lifestyle Camp director!

If you need a break from being human, why not come join me at Jim Krakowski’s Platypus Experience! The only camp for people of all ages who want to be a platypus for awhile!

At Jim Krokowski’s Platypus Experience we’ll give you everything you need to make all of your duckbilled dreams come true.
At our sprawling 2 acre campground on the outskirts of beautiful Detroit, Michigan, you’ll find all the accouterments that a platypus enjoys in its native habitat. Like a small, algae rich body of water, filled with bugs and shellfish, and surrounded by dense vegetation and nature’s other various detritus! And – well, that’s about it! You’ll basically be a platypus – what else could you need!
“But Jim. Won’t I just be sitting around like a giant human asshole?”
Absolutely not! We’ll make you feel like a real platypus with our state of the art platypus simulation outfits. They come equipped with a a hard plastic bill, fur suit, scuba fins for your hands and feet, and a big ol’ rubbery tail! If you’d like to be a male platypus, we’ll even strap a detailed replica of a platypuses spike on your back right foot and fill it with real live poison! And if you’d prefer to be a lady platypus, we’ll give you some eggs to bury in natures detritus!
It’ll be exactly like being a platypus!
But don’t take my word for it. Let’s here from some of my satisfied customers!

“I attended Jim Krokowski’s Platypus Experience and I guess it felt pretty much like being a platypus. I mean, I can’t really imagine anything else they could have done, besides letting us actually mate in the suits, which I guess they didn’t specifically say we couldn’t do, but it would have been cool if it would have been, I don’t know, encouraged.”

“Jim Krokowski’s Platypus experience was a living (DREAM!).”

There you have it! Jim Krokowski’s Platypus Experience is a hit!

Make your reservations today by calling 1-800-PUS-LOVR. That 1-800-P-U-S-L-O-V-R, or log on to www.puslover.com, to join me, Jim Krokowski, at Jim Krokowski’s Platypus experience – where dreams come true!

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Platypuses

Script

Australia, 1799. White people, as they so often do, discover something that has existed for tens of thousands of years and been known of and tended to by the natives to the point that it’s been common place for as long as the natives can remember. The white people are astounded by their brilliance and bravery, celebrate their great fortune – a blessing from god – and waste no time in changing its name and pushing it to the brink of extinction before “saving” it – which they pat themselves on the back heartily for – and making it a totem of their own culture, erasing its considerable history.
In this particular case, the white person is Captain Hueling Q. Winbiggler and the thing is a strange Australian creature with a bill, thick fur, a large flat tail, and webbed feat, known to the aboriginals as mallangong or tambreet or dulaiwarrung, depending on which aboriginal you ask.
Captain Winbiggler was exploring the Northern coast of Australia, then known to Europeans as New Holland, at the behest of King George III. He hoped to find gold and magical fountains and spices and people to sell spices to. People were crazy for spices back then.
Instead he found the platypus.
Winbiggler, like some of our best middle aged actors, was a renowned prankster. Six months earlier he had reported back home that he’d discovered a race of gigantic, hairy, pig people. All of Britain was abuzz with the report, but when Dr. Rundell Framebridge, a timid, proper intellectual and Winbiggler’s point man in the motherland, received the supposed proof of this discovery, it was just a crude drawing of his mother.
So Dr. Framebridge was understandably skeptical upon hearing of a creature that was a cross between a duck and a beaver. It sounded like it could very well be another joke about his Mom.
It wasn’t, though the creature he found before him still seemed like a hoax. It had, as Winbiggler had described, fur, webbed feet, and a beaver-esque tail. Framebridge assumed that this was just some clever taxidermy – not uncommon at the time. Monkey tops sewn to fish tails were a popular variation, passed off as mermaids, a far cry from the disturbingly sexualized mer-people of today.
He cut into it’s fur to find the stitching. There was none. This bizarre creature was real. What in God’s name had god been thinking when he created this horrid beast? He opened its mouth to inspect the teeth. He didn’t find teeth – adult platypuses don’t have any – but he did find a graphic rendering of the woman that had birthed him being double teamed by rhinoceros scribbled on some paper.
Captain Winbiggler had struck again.

The platypus got it’s name from the Greek words “platus” which, loosely translated to English, means “freaky-deaky” and “pous”, meaning beaver. As with most things, its existence was fairly inconsequential to Europeans, but folks were eager to wear and consume its parts. The pelt – which looks and feels like a beaver’s but smells of pineapple and your first significant girlfriend’s morning breath – became a popular source for stoles and, because of its water repellant properties, swim wear across Europe in the years following the discovery. The bill was either ground down and used to produce healthifying tinctures and the first known fake dog shit – the kind used to pull hilarious pranks, much to Captain Winbiggler’s delight – or strung from a chain and worn around the neck, where it could hold a beverage or perfumes, anything really, or be brought up to the face to be worn over the nose and mouth to scare children and ward off disease. Their flesh was never widely eaten as it tastes like bologna, which most people had not yet become glutenous enough to deem edible. (Editor’s note: It also had yet to be invented.)
As the human population of Australia grew, the platypus population dwindled and the cost of their parts increased. But by 1815 the craze had died down considerably due to the explosive popularity amongst the very rich of clothes made from human hair, typically harvested from orphans.
And so the platypus population made a comeback, and the animals lived peacefully, as they do today, in the parts of Australia left undisturbed by man as well as the countries zoos and the homes of various eccentrics and hipster scofflaws.
In 1898 it was confirmed that the platypus laid eggs – no one had even thought to find out if they did before then, why would they? – and, upon the discovery and removal of those eggs, that the male platypus is equipped with a poisonous claw on its rear right foot that can kill an animal the size of a dog, cause an adult human severe pain for months, and probably kind of sting a blue whale, though this has never been attempted, as far as I know.
In 1901, when Australia declared independence, the platypus was named the countries official animal after defeating a kangaroo and a wallaby in a fight to the death.
In 1905 the worlds largest platypus was erected in Shelley, Idaho, for some reason. It was carried away by a tornado in 1942, killing 34 people at a Woolworths two towns over when it dropped. The headline the next day read, “Platypus Plummets, People Perish.”
Throughout the 1920s and 30s, a gentleman named Manvil Werts became know as The Platypus Man, and was a popular attraction in the Shamblin Family Traveling Freak Show, which made it’s way all over the United States. Werts stood only four feet tall, was covered in hair from head to toe, and had a massive nose. He really did look like a platypus, with the exception of the tale, which had to be pinned on for the show, but still managed to marry a quite classically beautiful woman of average height and fathered 16 children, none of which looked like a platypus. One did look like a potato, though, and went on to have his own successful career as a freak, as well as inspiring the popular Mr. Potato Head toy.
An infamous 1982 episode of Mork and Mindy featured the arrival of Mork’s beloved childhood pet, Zoldar, a 6 foot long talking platypus, who arrived from Ork in, you guessed it, an egg. The animal is sent to Earth by Orson, a disembodied voice and Mork’s manager or something – to remind Mork of his roots and prevent him from becoming too human. Zoldar, terrified by his new surroundings, runs roughshod over Boulder, reducing the city to ashes, all the while screaming, “I didn’t ask for this! I didn’t ask for this!” The episode ends with the beast dead by Mork’s own hand – he hacks and hacks and hacks at it with a shard of its own egg, weeping madly while Mindy, her blood rich with the platypuses poison, lies near death only feet away. The episode never aired and Mork and Mindy would be cancelled within the year.
In 1994, a homeless woman named Bilomina Shivers gained national attention in the United States when a keen eyed movie critic noticed her and her pet platypus, Gordy Shivers, in the background of several notable films shot over the previous decade. Look closely at the scene early in The Neverending Story, when Bastion is running from bullies to seek shelter in a book store. As he turns a corner, you’ll get a brief glimpse of Bilomina staring straight into the camera, holding Gordy’s leash. She similarly appears in Purple Rain, Sixteen Candles, Fletch, Re-Animator, Brazil, Blue Velvet, Howard the Duck, Flight of the Navigator, La Bamba, The Last Temptation of Christ, Gorillas In the Mist, Do the Right Thing, Tremors, and Aladdin, just to name a few. The directors of the various films have denied casting her and were unaware that she appeared in their movies at all. Asked how she had found herself in so many films, she replied, simply, “I goes where I goes and Gordy comes with me.”
In the years since then, the platypus has laid pretty low. Scientists have discovered a few new, barely believable facts – it stores fat in its tail so it can go long stretches of time without eating and its bill is covered in tiny electroreceptors that it uses to sense prey and predators when it is underwater, for instance. It’s been the subject of a ludicrous number of children’s songs, and the title of an equally ludicrous number of instrumental jazz, house, and speed metal songs. But, despite its extraordinary features, the platypus is a humble creature, really, solitary and stoic, intending no harm to anyone and usually able to avoid inflicting it.
We could all stand to take a lesson or two from this magnificent, ludicrous beast.

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OK Soda pt. 1

Script

I was 11 for all but two days of 1994.  It was a momentous personal era – formative – and youth time is approximately 42 times longer than adult time.  The things I remember from that year – events, movies, tv, products, friends, the basic minutiae of life – seem to be more than 365 days could possibly contain.

I can think of a few explanations for this.

  1. That’s just the way memory works.  Certain years imprint on you more than others.  11 years old seems to be a common time for that to happen.
  2. My family moved.  Just a few blocks away, but when you are young, your neighborhood is your world.  Friends are based on proximity more than anything, so moving means new friends, more often than not, and new friends can mean a wholly new lifestyle.  This was the case for me.  The move from 27th Avenue North to Woodcrest Drive marked the change from the Courtney Shattuck years to the Jeff Edlund years.
  1. In early 1994 I was in sixth grade at Longfellow Elementary School, the “good” public elementary school.  We were very wholesome.  Kids. The biggest scandal that year involved Scott Winjum being suspended for igniting a single match in the boy’s bathroom.  Then there was summer and the move.  By the end of the year I was in Junior High School, and the so called “kids” from Horace Mann Elementary were finger banging each other and smoking cigarettes. It was a real shock.
  2. My tastes were changing.  I was shifting away from consuming whatever, culturally, appeared in front of me to seeking out particular things, developing taste.  I went from Richard Marx singing about waiting for his beloved over synths to, mostly, guitar heavy songs about being sad. I’m still not sure that was an improvement.

So the beginning of 1994 and the end of it really seem like two different lifetimes.  Lifetimes which carved many lasting wrinkles in my juvenile brain meat.

Here’s an incomplete list of things I remember, which I’m setting to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start” the fire, even though that’s a little on the nose and a total cliché.  That song was a big part of my life in 1994 – Billy Joel was so omnipresent at this point, he seemed like a neighbor – so I think it fits.

All right.  Here we go.

“We Didn’t Start the Fire”

Bill Clinton, Special K, hot pockets microwaved
Courtney Shattuck, Jeff Edlund, Longfellow.

Rock and Cindy Messerschmidt, mini van, television
Chad and Ryan, mom’s cryin’, Super Nintendo

Michael Jordan, Scotty Pippen, Mugsy Bogues, Cal Ripkin
Forrest Gump, Goldeneye, Airheads, True Lies.

Elementary’s ending, Junior high, I’m a tween,
Lite Rock 105, family moved to Woodcrest Drive

I didn’t start the fire
I was only eleven
just a passive observer
I didn’t start the fire
All in all
94 was a good year

Full House, Family Matters, Step by Step, TGIF
Hulk Hogan, Bryan Adams, not a good Woodstock

Quiz Show and the Crow, I gave jerking off a go,

Green Day, Offspring, alternative rock

Simpsons, Frasier Crane, Sister Sister, Major Payne
Sleep Overs, Duckman, Ace Ventura, Kerrigan

Harding, Gingrich, Ross Perot, Make a Wish
Mountain Dew, Big League Chew, I got my own room

I didn’t start the fire
I was only eleven
just a passive observer
I didn’t start the fire
All in all
94 was a good year

Peter Paruccinni was my friend, so were Erik Vosseteig,

Paul, Cody, Josh, and Tony, Jake Schaan and Ben

West Acres, Hornbachers, moldy fruit in my locker

Kurt Cobain, suicide, Jeff Edlund bought Insesticide

Buddy Holly, Weezer, baseball with Peter
Juji Fruits, husky jeans, swimming in a white t

U2, Wisconsin Dells, Stephen King, Dad yells
Watched scrambled porno, read Crichton’s Congo

I didn’t start the fire
I was only eleven
just a passive observer
I didn’t start the fire
All in all
94 was a good year

Grisham, REM, Mr. Discher teaches gym
SNL, Lutherans, Wings in the basement

Computers, Castlevania, Jim Carrey Mania
Ben Franklin Junior High, I was still pretty shy

More kids, school dance, some kids say they’re having sex,
Sixth grade, I got all a’s, I also did in seveth grade!

I didn’t start the fire
I was only eleven
just a passive observer
I didn’t start the fire
All in all
94 was a good year

This song has too many verses
I bought Pearl Jam’s versus,
Farley, Spade, Myers, Saturday Night Live
Cute girls take a pass, Wes Staton’s in my class

“Wheel of Fortune”, Billy Joel, Metallica, Tootsie Roll
Lego sets, homeless vets, AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz
Hypodermics on the shores, China’s under martial law
Rock and roller cola wars, I can’t take it anymore

I didn’t start the fire
I was only eleven
just a passive observer
I didn’t start the fire
The year is gone,

But it still lives on thanks to this song

I didn’t start the fire
I was only eleven
just a passive observer
I didn’t start the fire
All in all
94 was a good year

I didn’t start the fire
I was only eleven
just a passive observer
I didn’t start the fire
All in all
94 was a good year

Anyway, I tell you all of that to get to this.  Somehow, OK Soda is a kind of synecdochye, a part of a thing that wholly represents all of it, for 1994 and my experience within it.

Even typing the words OK Soda fills me with oceans of sticky sweet nostalgia.

Ok Soda was a soda.  A pop, as most folks call it up here – it’s shameful what we’ve done with language – made by the good folks at the Coca Cola Corporation, dreamed up by the same ad wizards that created New Coke, the Coke that tasted like a Pepsi. Full caloried sodas were all the rage back then, as the boomers hadn’t yet caught the health food bug.  It was wreaking havoc on everyone as has pretty much everything the boomers did and didn’t do. Also many things they kind of did. As a result, everybody in 1994 was hideous – bloated and pallid, capped by fluffy hair, wearing either long sleeve, white collared polos with pleated khakis or Big Johnson t-shirts and jeans so grotesque you wouldn’t believe me if I described them to you.

Ok Soda was created for one purpose – to obtain the spending money of the cynical slackers known a Generation X. These plaid clad sneering lay-abouts were hip to the wiles of the advertisers thanks to such rabble rousers as John Cusack, Howard Zinn, Chester Cheetah, and their droll, aged but fearless leader, Kurt Loder, so a new tact was needed.

The tact was this: go meta.  Gen X loved meta.  They wore shirts that said loser and zero, for cripes sake.

So, meta the Coca Cola Corporation went, as far as a massive multi-national corporation can go, anyway, which is to say, they designed some interesting packaging and pushed out a few droll commercials.  Also, there was a phone number, which we’ll get to.

The advertising campaign went something like this: It took the form of a fifties commercial – a cheery male voice and some upbeat Tijuana Brass style background music. But, instead of doing you the tremendous solid of informing you of the many health benefits of Lucky Strike cigarettes – and they’re so Smooooooth! – the voice was, gasp!, telling you that nothing matters and everything is artifice, but not even that matters and things are going to be OK.  Irony, I believe it’s called, though, you know, let’s not get into the definition of irony.

Here’s a clip of one of those commercials:

(commercial)

God, don’t you just want to drink whatever soda it is they’re selling?  To hold a cold or even room temperature can of that unremarked upon beverage in your prepubescent fist and be a part of that blissful indifference and hip cynicism? I do.

And the packaging!  My god, it was and is something to behold.  I have an empty can sitting on my shelf and I still get lost in its studied, market tested, expensive lo-fi coolness.  There’s a Daniel Clowse drawing on it!  Daniel Clowse!  He’s a guy from the underground that people know! It’s silver with black print and a few red highlights, so Coke basically, but cool Coke.  The Clowse drawing is of a dazed looking young man staring right at you with blank, hypnotized eyes. Another can has a bored looking man with, blank, unhypnotized eyes.  Yet another can has a dazed looking woman with blank, gypsy eyes.  Yet another has a sort of Picasso type face and yet another has a weird red man in a bowler hat. Collect ‘em all!

On the back there’s a UPC code over a guy’s face as if to say, “We’re all just products in corporate America.” Whoa. And then on the top it says “Ok Soda says, “Don’t be fooled into thinking there has to be a reason for everything,” with just a few more quotation marks than you might expect. Sooooo, subversive. 

There are also a couple of comics panels – the bland, vaguely sad hip graphic novel type that maybe make people think, not the fun kind that make people happy. Very thought provoking. Very deep. As if that weren’t enough there’s a numbered coincidence, to make you feel like you should probably find a way to hear about the other coincidences.  Mine says:

(coincidence)

And if you look really closely there are all kinds of wry nods at anti-commercialism on there!  Easter eggs, I guess they’d be called today. I adore anti-commercialism and will pay any amount of money, buy any product, to make that known!  I’m such a 90s kid!

I’d love nothing more than to kick back on a Friday night and crack open a sixer of OK Sodas with my pals Eddie Vedder and Pam from the Real World San Francisco and talk in low tones about how much we hate corporations while seated in a tucked away corner of a party we’re too cool for! And I realize that this probably comes off as sarcastic, but I promise you that this sounds like heaven on earth to this old Dad’s ears. As a 90s kid, I simply cannot help but sound sarcastic at all times. It’s a real burden.

There was also a phone number, as I mentioned, 1-800-IFEELOK.  You could call and leave a message about some wild coincidence that occurred while you were guzzling OK Soda or just listen to the messages of other dedicated consumers, in case you were feeling alone in your fandom or just in general, I guess.

Anyway, for all of my life, right up until just moments ago, I assumed this was a national campaign. But I was wrong.  Turns out, Fargo, where I live and lived, was a test market for OK Soda, which might be why it imprinted so strongly, not just on me, but everyone my age give or take from around here.  We’re not a test market for a lot of things, as far as I know.  We had OK vending machines and the grocery stores were fully stocked with cleverish OK displays.  There were radio ads.  Television ads.  Newspaper ads.

The target marketing was so effective because it was pointed right at me, like a diabetes gun or a childhood obesity crossbow or a cavity axe.

Well, maybe not right at me.  I think I fell a bit short age-wise of their target market, but I also don’t think the target market fell for their campaign.  I didn’t have quite as many defenses up.  Just about no defenses, actually, outside of a lack of funds.

Now, it’s entirely possible I only drank OK Soda a handful of times.  It wasn’t around for long, I never purchased anything on my own, and I can’t imagine my parents were keeping it stocked.

But it feels like I drank it all the time.

And somehow it felt like a revelation.  A soda is a strange place to first experience counter culturalism in a meaningful way, but combined with everything else that was happening around that time, this was how I met the resistance.

Wry and disillusioned felt right to me.

The drink itself was completely beside the point of course, although I liked it.  Tasted like Suicide, where you pour all of the options in a fountain machine into one cup, which I was already doing regularly.  They hardly mentioned the actual product in the ad except to call it fruity and curious, whatever that means.

But the ad campaign spoke to new possibilities that I’d yet to consider.  I called the phone number constantly, mostly from the payphone at El Zagel golf course, where I’d often play a sloppy 9 holes with friends.

I’d also attempt to call phone sex numbers, specifically one called 1-800-WET-BUTTS, which we all found hilarious because it is hilarious.

I was so enthralled with OK Soda that I set out to co-opt it to fund a boat I hoped to make, for some reason.  Jeff Edlund and I had decided we should have a boat to sail down the Red River, a raft, to be more precise, which would be powered by a motor I’d make without any knowledge of motors from a toy motor kit I’d received for my birthday.  It would never work, but no one told us this.

Jeff’s mom Patty bought us all the OK Soda you could fit in a Sam’s Club cart and we set up a soda stand – kind of like a lemonade stand but with soda and helmed by two homely tween boys far too old to be doing such a thing – and went about raising the funds for lumber.

We made a surprising amount of money, but I’m not sure what happened to it.  There was never a boat, which is probably why I’m still alive to tell you all of this.  The strong currents of the mighty Red surely would have sent us to our great reward.

Like my attempt to build a boat, OK SODA was a non-starter and was discontinued in 1995.  Apparently the gen-xers were too busy smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap beer to go in on a dubiously flavored soda.

I think they made a terrible mistake, but they also gave us Pavement, so I’ll let it slide.

Anyway, I’m not sure I’ve successfully explained why OK Soda is so ingrained in my very being.  A foundational text, laser printed on aluminum.  But we’ll get there, I hope, in the thrilling prologue to all of this, next time on The Irrationally Exuberant.

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Bees

Script

Insects – they’re across the board disgusting, everybody knows it. From aphids to beetles, cockroaches to dragonflies, earwigs to fleas, green stink bugs (green stink bugs!) to horseflies (horseflies!), Io Moths to June bugs, Katydids to lacewings, maggots to nits to owl flies to pea weevils to quiblets to roaches to stink bugs to tsetse flies to unlined giant chafers to vine borers to water bugs to xylodromus to Yucatan Boll Weevils to Zorapterans. They are a menace, earth aliens and poo disseminators matched in awfulness only by underwater creature, many of which, not coincidentally, resemble insects. And at least with the underwater creatures you can avoid them by not infringing on their territory. Not so with the insect. They’re everywhere we are. So, why do we, as slightly less gross and more evolved creatures, not eradicate these wee freaks completely? What is protecting these mini-monsters of land and sky from the bitter sting of our noxious chemical wrath?

The answer? The Honey Bee – Mother Nature’s least disgusting anthropoidal daughter.

Fact (FACT! (deep voice)): The honey bee is beautiful. Its fuzzy black and gold stripes are a pleasure to behold, like a bespoke sweater on a lithe young Gordon Sumner.

Fact: The honey bee is clean. It does not, under any circumstance, eat or crawl on shit, be it human or dog or antelope or whatever. In fact, there are honeybees in the hive whose sole job is to tidy up, like a horde of tiny, lady Mr. Belvederes.

Fact: The honey bee is peace loving. It doesn’t want to sting you and will not unless you bumble into its dwelling like a massive, unannounced house guest, you buffoon! When you are stung by a bee – you can bet dollars to donuts it wasn’t of the honey variety and I would bet those same dollars to those same donuts that it was in fact a wasp. Perhaps you should learn some science before hurling wild accusations, buffoon!

Fact: A Honey bee society is overwhelmingly matriarchal, despite what the lazy writing of current day, too rich for his own good Jerry Seinfeld would have you believe. That is to say, run entirely by the ladies, that is to say, almost inherently better than what we’ve got going, though to be honest, I think we’ve got a low key matriarchy percolating ourselves.

Fact: Honey bees make honey. This is astounding. It’s like a cow making cheese. Sweet golden cheese.

Fact: The honey bee likes the same things we do. Bold colors, beautiful flowers, fruits, vegetables, honey, and the music of Neil Diamond, presumably. 

 We see elegantly simple eye to staggeringly complex multiple eye, us and honey bees, so it’s no surprise that our histories are so inextricably interwoven.

 Allow me to start with an ancient anecdote; a series of cave drawings, actually.  No more than a couple of crude doodles, when it comes right down to it, but they tell quite a story.  They were discovered on the wall of the Altamira Cave in Spain and have been dated as far back as 25,000 years, to the Upper Paleolithic era. 

 The story, depicted as I said, in some haphazard, but fairly impressive for the time, scribbles, goes like this:

 The year was 22,984 BCE.  Homo sapiens were king, having successfully completed history’s first genocide by wiping out those poor Neanderthal folks, whose only crime had been missing a couple of evolutionary adaptations.  Survival and tool making were all the rage, and everyone was looking forward to the upcoming Solutrian period – just 984 years away - having grown bored to tears with their Chatelperronian tools.

Like a recently divorced dad in his first solo apartment, these early-ish homo sapiens had a lot of time and space on their hands. There were only 30,000 people in Europe, after all. That comes to about 1,113.3 square feet per capita, which means that an Upper Paleolithic loner, like the previously mentioned recently divorced dad in his first solo apartment, could get up to a lot of horse feathers.

That’s why marriage is so swell. Aside from the love and companionship and building a life together – all great – you also get someone around to shame you into acting like a decent homo sapien.

Anyway, this particular Upper Paleolithic loner, Plorg the Lonely of 14th Hilltop was the moniker he answered to, was sitting on his haunches, having a good think. After general puttering about, sitting on ones haunches and having a good think was the most popular form of entertainment among folks at the time, especially loners.

So he was thinking. About survival, at first, which was very important to and difficult for these early people on account of they hadn’t invented many of the amenities we so take for granted today. Like the Zune, for instance, or HAM radios or really anything else outside of some vaguely tool shaped rocks and a pair of pants or a shirt here and there, though clothes hadn’t really caught on yet since these early people had yet to identify the shame lurking within themselves.

So he was thinking about survival, according to these barely legible chicken scratches on the walls of this cave, and his mind began to wander, as minds do, to food – and here’s where this early man becomes notable – his mind begins to stir with the beginnings of the concept of sweetness, which was not a taste sensation yet known to humans, but he imagined the idea of it, and he thought of his favorite color which was the color of the sun through the dust of the planes when a heard of _ passes hill 14, which is a kind of pale gold, and he conflates that with the idea of sweetness and then his mind, as minds also often do, drifts vaguely to sex, and he thinks of come and incorporates that into his previous idea and the whole of the idea becomes what we now know as honey. And then, since man is naturally a masochist, he imagines the difficulty of obtaining such a substance, unnecessarily, of course, since this is all in his own mind – he could just as easily imagine that it is bountiful and a pleasure to obtain – imagines that it would be protected by women – women who could hurt him – and he’s angry at the women because he’s dumb and not very self reflective and believes that anything that can hurt him is evil and doesn’t deserve nice things and he wants to take the sweet, sun colored come away from the evil women, and he stands up angrily and storms off to avenge this injustice, even though it only exists in his mind, and he stomps around for days like a lunatic, and, what do you know, on the fourth day he unthinkingly swats a honey bee hive, unaware of what it is, not with curiosity but with unthinking rage, and his arm is covered in bees and also the sweet, sun colored come of his imaginings, and they sting and he swats and it’s unclear to him or us if his imaginings were just a lucky guess or if he actually manifested this thing, and eventually all the bees have died and he is close to death from stings but also ecstatic from the rush of the honey that now drips down his chin, and another human happens to come along and is appalled by the swollen, lumpy man who is licking golden come from all over his own body but also writhing around in pain but the new human, who happens to be an artist, stops long enough to hear the man’s final words – this story, more or less – and to, hesitantly, at first, of course, but then with greater and greater gusto, eat the honey, and he goes back and records the tale via the previously mentioned barely decipherable cave scribblings.

And that’s how humans first encountered the honey bee, so far as we know. It is, of course, entirely possible and even likely that someone else encountered them before this and it just didn’t get written down.

When it comes to history, we’re like Ray Charles in B. Dalton’s Bookseller – the ghost of a blind man in a store that no longer exists.

There are, of course, tales of bees going back to the beginning of time from history’s schizophrenic aunt, religion. Religious kooks have a wacky story for just about everything.

The Kalahari’s San people, for instance, who are not, to my surprise, characters from Star Wars, believed that humans were sprung from the body of a mantis after a bee planted a seed inside of it.

But our next real world documentation of humanity’s interaction with bees comes from Georgia, the country. Some archeologists found some honey there.

Our next interesting real world documentation of this is ancient Egypt. Ancient Egyptians had a total boner for honey and honey bees. They used it for everything. They ate it by the fistful, used it to do gross sex stuff, rubbed it on rashes and bunions and sores they got from the gross sex stuff. You name it. It was, as far as they were concerned, a gift from the gods – a show of appreciation for all of the cool shit they were building.

 King Tut was buried with the stuff so he would have a kind of house warming gift for all of the gods in wherever they lived – the location of the Egyptian gods was not conveniently specific, it didn’t have a fun name like heaven, which is probably why it died out – people crave specificity - when he got there.  Fat load of good it did him, as we just it up and put it in a museum.

 The Egyptians harvested their honey in much the same way as we do today, except that they used baskets because they were too dumb to think of wooden hives with removable slats.

 On to Israel, where, according to the Bible, people were pretty sweet on honey as well. It’s mentioned 26 times in the good book.  That’s 26 times more than they bothered to mention ----, for reference. Just get a load of this sexy Bible verse:

Your lips, my bride, drip honey; Honey and milk are under your tongue, And the fragrance of your garments is like the fragrance of Lebanon.

Scandalous, sexy stuff.

Anyway, you get the idea. Folks love honey. Have always loved honey and by extension honey bees.

Most folks, anyway. Native Americans referred to bees as white man’s flies. Perhaps if they hadn’t been so hurtful about our bugs we’d’ve treated them better.

So, let’s take a look at honey – its creation and many uses – as everyone knows that a thing is only as good as a commercial output and bees are no exception.

Honey is a byproduct of bee bulimia – that is to say, bees collect delicious pollen and nectar come back to the hive, and vomit it up. Then they use bee magic to turn it into delicious golden sugar goop, which feeds their young. It’s a beautiful, disgusting, delicious process.

But let’s get to the important question – how does honey benefit us human beings? God didn’t create these gorgeous creatures to live autonomous lives for their own health and as an integral cog in the machinery of Earth’s finely tuned through evolution ecosystem, after all. He created them to keep us – their manic depressive overlords – flush with that gooey, sucratic elixir.

Honey or, as I like to call it, God’s Come, has many, many uses. You can eat it, of course, on toast or regular style bread, drizzled on fruit, as a sugar substitute, with your paws, over ice cream, in cereal, in graham crackers, in mustard, on buffalo wings or ham if you’re into the whole slaughter of innocent animals thing, in tea, or just by the spoonful, shameful and sticky, alone in your basement.

Why you could slather Apian Snack Food on just about anything.

But let’s talk about some of the lesser known, more practical and medicinal uses of honey.

First and most importantly, of course, you can just slap that goop right in your hair to create whichever beautiful hairstyle pops into your mind grapes. Image is everything, as Andre Agassi was once fond of saying and my father was fond of quoting to the detriment of just about everybody. And as an added bonus for the entomologists in the audience, it’s going to attract a lot of fascinating bugs to your head, which can be studied at your leisure.

Moving down to below your hair is, as everybody knows, your skin. The ol’ epidermis. Biggest organ in your body, they say, so you’re going to want to take care of it. And ain’t no better way to take care of it than to just absolutely drown that shit in bee batter. Rub it on pour it on, I don’t care, just stop what you’re doing and get some of that heavenly hive juice all over your hide.

Next up, your eyes. There is simply nothing more soothing to the persistent itch in your peepers caused by seasonal allergies – ironically the result of our friend the bee’s prodigious pollination – than a fat dollop of Nature’s Visine. Just let it slowwwwwly drip onto the offending eyeball and bask in the eventual relief. UUUUUUUUUUH, that’s goooooooood.

Onto your nose. Huff up a line of apian nose beers and you’ll be ready to get on the scene like a sex machine, a la sweaty, borderline nonsensical 80s era Mr. Entertainment himself, James Brown. And unlike the devil’s Red Bull powder, Comb Coke can be purchased in any supermarket! Just look for it on the shelf above the Peanut Butter.

Hows abouts them ears? Headed to a screamo or metal core concert? Of course you are. Well, those things get pretty loud and you’re not getting any younger – it must take you forever to squeeze into those skinny jeans, ya goof – so why don’t you protect the old earballs by jam packing them with buzz butter?

Mouth! There is simply no end to the number of beneficial ways to get that sweet sweet bee tea into your craw and no end to the positive outcomes when you do. You eat enough of that delicious comb sap and you’ll be happier, smarter, better smelling, healthy as Mr. Ed on a juice cleanse, and up to 54% more resplendent.

Listen, I could go on and on. Stretch marks, cancer, toe fungus, spousal distrust, penis itching, penal distrust, spousal itching, AIDS, feline aids, death, the dizzies, racism, alcoholism, gigantism, dementia, the heebie-jeebies, butter face, depression, sleepiness, nervousness, nightmares, daymares, Adult SIDS, menstrual cramps, charley horses, hiccups, psychopathy, sociopathy, Republicanism – honey can cure all of those things and more.

Thanks, Bees! You’ve truly earned the moniker “Nature’s Holistic Medicine Practitioners and Friend to Humans Everywhere”!

Posted on

Roy Orbison

Script

What do you think of when you hear the name Roy Orbison? Black glasses? A bad haircut? A soaring, operatic voice? A partially shaved bear in a Dracula costume? Pretty Woman? The Travelling Willburys? Maybe even David Lynch movies?

Perhaps nothing at all. Certainly not pimping or writing books about pimping or inventing rap music.

Of all of the founding fathers of Rock ‘N Roll – Elvis, Johnny Cash, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis – Roy Orbison is the most anonymous – a figure that most know, but few know much about.

We know his music. He had 22 songs in the Billboard Top 40 between 1960 and 1964, many of which remain firmly entrenched in the cultural zeitgeist. Only the Lonely. Crying. Blue Bayou. It’s Over. Pretty Woman. You Got It.

The music can be ethereal, enchanting. Other-worldly. Heartbreaking. Many other adjectives. The songs often defy the rules of the craft, ignore traditional structure. Typical early rock filtered through a unique mind, tweaked with strings and an emo sensibility – endearing innocence and vulnerability.

And that voice. Equal parts Pavarotti, Dean Martin, and hysterical grandmother, it soars above everything else, twists and turns and crescendos. It holds you in its grip.

There’s a suspense to it all. How does this work? Will it keep working? Every song seems like it’s on the verge falling apart, every note on the verge of breaking.

But it doesn’t. They don’t.

He’s no James Brown, though. Man, can you imagine that episode. Anyway . . .

We also know the look. Two looks really – the early years and the later years.

The early years, starting from the top: Thick, goth black hair, drowning in mousse and wrangled into a helmet tight pompadour perched above a pale, southern, weak chinned, nerd face; Small, close set, wonky eyes barely visible under thick lensed, black framed, prescription sunglasses, over a small-mouthed, dopey, slightly down-turned smile, all coming together and looking better than it had any right to – greater than the sum of its parts and sitting atop a thin, normal style body in a classic black and white suit.

In the later years, the pompadour had fallen, long and still stiff, outlining the contours of an increasingly doughy face, like a black candle melted over a peeled potato. He grew chubby and favored the least flattering outfit possible for this development – a polyester jumpsuit or, alternately, a more flattering suit, bolo tie combo.

Roy Orbison was a dark, homely, beardless wizard. A conjurer of sadness. A fascinating, important, weird figure in the birth of rock and in the decades after, and it’s time he got his due: the white guilt replacement topic of a solitary, three-fourths episode of a little loved, little listened to, brilliant podcast.

An anecdote, to begin, told by Tom Waits to Charlie Rose. For reference, the concert referred to is the Black And White Night, a kind of victory lap show, where Roy Orbison was backed by some of the artists that count him as an influence, including Bruce Springsteen, Bonnie Raitt, KD Lang, Elvis Costello, Jackson Brown, T-Bone Burnett, and Waits:

“This is an odd story. It was after the concert, The Black and White Thing, it was a few hours after that and some of us were still hanging out back at Roy’s hotel room, drinking and, you know, um, imbibing in some other, uh, potent potables, if you will – only a few men left standing. Me, Roy, and Jackson, but I think Jackson was kind of teetering on the edge of the abyss at that point, so I suppose he probably doesn’t remember. Anyway, Roy’s perched on his bed and I’m there and Jackson’s slumped in a chair and Roy says in that quiet voice of his, he says, uh, kind of out of nowhere, “If you play all of the songs I’ve written backwards and at half speed, in the order I wrote them in, it’s an incantion from the Egyptian book of the dead in the original Egyptian.” And I laughed, you know, because I thought it was a joke, but Roy wasn’t laughing and, he’s got those glasses, right, so it’s hard to see his eyes, but from what I could see he was staring right at me and I just, uh, you know, I stopped. Stopped laughing. And then he started singing, kind of, intoning lower and slower than his usual thing, and it sounds like language but it’s not any language I know, right, but it sure as hell could have been Egyptian, and he goes on for, must have been an hour. I swear it, an hour. Jackson fell asleep but Roy was staring into my eyes, man, the whole time and I didn’t dare blink. And then he finished and he said time for bed, and he nodded to the door, and I, uh, I hit the bricks,man, and that’s the last time I ever saw Roy Orbison. He died about a year later.”

Roy Orbison, aka The Big O, aka The Caruso of Rock, aka The Spookiest Man In Showbiz, was born on April 23rd, 1936 to Orbie Lee Orbison, a disgraced magician, known professionally as The Black Orb and ousted from the magic union for dabbling too deeply into the black arts and his refusal to grow a moustache, a requirement for the magic union at the time, and Nadine Vesta Shults, Orbie’s gloomy assistant, who he had lured from a band of American Gypsies when she was but 12 years old.

The small family lived in relative isolation in Vernon, Texas, hunkered down through the Great Depression doing god-knows-what, but moved to Wink, Texas when Roy was seven after Orbie inherited his great uncle’s estate – a grim, dark, supposedly haunted mansion, looming over desolate oil fields.

It has since been razed and the hill it sat upon leveled to make way for a strip mall housing a Papa John’s Pizza, J. Appleseed’s Family Restaurant and Cider Brewery that used to be a Benigan’s, and the lonely remains of an abandoned Blockbuster Video, still unoccupied due to purported paranormal activity. A mute, albino boy strumming an invisible guitar has been spotted on multiple occasions, wandering the video racks, hopelessly searching, perhaps, for a VHS copy of The Fastest Guitar In the World, the ill-fated 1967 comedic western starring none other than Roy Orbison.

This is most of what we know of Orbison’s childhood, as he refused to speak of those days or much of anything really – he was renowned for his mute gloominess – but there is one additional item of interest. Until his seventeenth year Roy’s hair was bone white, not the deep black that would later become such a prominent aspect of his signature, unsettling style. The black hue came from hot tar, which he would run through his mane each morning with a steal comb and also accounted for the acrid, eye watering smell which filled any room he entered.

And we know that a young Roy Orbison played music, of course. From the day he was born he was singing. Legend has it that instead of crying, an infant Roy would wail a soul rending Bolero melody in perfect pitch. His father gave him his first guitar at six years old – conjured the instrument from another realm, if you believe the rumors, but it’s also possible he just bought it from a store. Either way, Roy took to it immediately, with no training, and would wander the oil fields below his family’s estate, strumming Spanish rhythms and crooning – always crooning – a tiny, pale boy leaving a swath of weeping roughnecks in his wake.

Which begs the question – is the ghost of a young Roy Orbison haunting an abandoned Blockbuster Video on the grounds of his family’s former estate? I’m not sure that’s how ghosts work, but it can’t just be a coincidence.

By the time he was a teenager, Roy Orbison was known and feared across West Texas, as a powerful musician and maybe more. His solo performances, mostly held in dirty, rowdy honky-tonks, were more séance than concert. The gloomy, nearly translucent kid would get on the stage with his guitar and the whole place would go quiet. Where there had been western swing and fights and whooping and hollering just a moment before, there was now only silence, occasionally interrupted by weeping, while he played his haunting tunes, songs which haven’t survived to this day, but were, according to the few accounts we have, closer to funeral dirges than country songs.

There was plenty of work for a while – there are innumerable dives in West Texas and at the time they’d let just about anybody play – but eventually Roy’s reputation for hypnotizing an audience became a detriment. The owners of the establishments couldn’t sell booze if their customers were in a weepy trance. They stopped hiring him.

So he retreated back to his family’s mansion.

And then he saw Elvis perform on Ed Sullivan and everything clicked into place. If he was going to be a musician, he’d have to channel whatever it was inside him into something more commercial.

So he changed his look – used the tar in his hair because it was close at hand and he liked the way it burned – put a band together, The Wink Westerners (later changed to the Teen Kings) names so ambiguous as to rouse no possible feelings of discomfort in potential booking agents or audience members, a plan of deceptive ambiguity that he would stick to his entire career.

They played covers, mostly – country tunes by Lefty Frizell and Bob Wills as well as rock stuff from Elvis and Johnny Cash. They were a sensation, packing them in from to _______ with their unique blend of standard youth music as filtered through the other-worldly voice of their front man.

And then Roy wrote the first song of his career. What, if Tom Waits is to be trusted, and he is, would, when played backwards, make up the final lines of the Egyptian incantation. The song was ominously titled, “Ooby Dooby”.

And, shockingly, it took off.

Everybody in America was doing the Ooby Dooby, wiggling to both the left and the right, shaking like a big rattle snack, unaware that they had fallen under the spell of devious mesmerist, whose ultimate goal we can only guess at, but was probably the legalization of . . . something, and, thus, uh, the ushering in of the end times.

Stop the podcast. This is going nowhere. Roy Orbison wasn’t a dark wizard. That was all lies. I admit it. He was a pretty nice, kind of boring guy with a killer voice and some great tunes.

Let me try this again. A show about bees, maybe? Okay, let’s try a show about bees.

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Iceberg Slim

Reid discusses Iceberg Slim and whether a white person can portray the black experience with his guest co-host, Foam Chomsky, a puppet.

Script:

Welcome to The Irrationally Exuberant. On today’s episode we’ll be looking at the life of Iceberg Slim – and for you white people in the audience, no, that’s not some kind of lettuce based diet.

FC: Jesus. What are you doing?

Ladies and gentlemen, that disapproving voice you’re hearing is my guest co-host for the first portion of this episode – Foam Chomsky, the skeptical puppet.

FC: Full disclosure. I’m not really a puppet. There’s no puppet here. I’m just Reid doing a dumb voice to represent his own doubts and insecurities. It’s not a very original gimmick.

Oh, wow, Foam Chomsky, I didn’t think we were going to reveal that to the listeners.

FC: You wrote it into the script, champ.

Right. Now, you were asking what I’m doing. I’m introducing the topic of the show. Iceberg Slim, real name Robert Beck, a notorious pimp from the 1930s and through the 50s who eventually became a prolific author and activist.

FC: Yeah. What are you doing?

A comedy podcast about Iceberg Slim.

FC: You, a middle class white 35 year old male living in Fargo, North Dakota are going to do a COMEDY podcast about an African American PIMP. You, Reid Messerschmidt, are going to make COMEDY about sexual violence against women, human trafficking, and racial stereotypes – in 2018 – without any black folks or women contributing? Just you and me, a dumb gimmick that is also just you.

That was my intention, I guess. I’m the only one that ever contributes to the show. It’s my show. And I just read Slim’s book, Pimp, and thought it was really interesting and bizarre and funny in its own horrifying way, so I wanted to talk about it. Sure I’m all of those things you said, but I recently read A Fire Next Time by James Baldwin and The Autobiography of Malcolm X and The Murder of Joe Louis and Whoreson by Donald Goines and Sing Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward and I watched What Happened Miss Simone about Nina Simone and Dutchman by Amiri Baraka. I tried to cram in a lot of black culture and I think I’m pretty sensitive to the plight of women in an ostensibly patriarchal society – I consider myself a Feminist. So I think I’m . . . I think I’m good.

FC: You think you’re good, huh? Was that list meant to impress everyone?

Kind of, I suppose. But I did . . .

FC: You think that reading a bunch of books is somehow going to give you an inside track on the black experience?

I’ve watched The Wire twice.

FC: EVERYONE HAS WATCHED THE WIRE TWICE! Let me ask you this: How many black friends do you have? REAL friends.

There’s Torie at work, I like her a lot, and Robert that I used to work with, and I’m always happy to run into Peterson. I dated a black girl once. There are several I really enjoy on Facebook.

FC: REAL FRIENDS, REID!

None. But I live in Fargo! The options are limited! And I don’t make new friends easily.

FC: Right. But no black friends. So what gives you the right to make comedy about any facet of the black experience?

Well, I like to think that it’s the human experience.

FC: But sometimes you are very, very dumb. Remember when you thought that Michael J. Fox sang “For the Longest Time”?

I was just a kid! But I suppose that the fact that I had any opinion or thought about “Longest Time” proves how white I am.

FC: Wrong! Your opinions of or response to Billy Joel have nothing to do with race. Everyone knows about Billy Joel. You think black people don’t know about Billy Joel? I guess an argument could be made that Billy Joel is white culture, but you don’t think that black people know about white culture? How could they possibly avoid it? They’re drowning in it!

Well . . . did you notice that I watched Dutchman? Not even for the first time! That’s, like, advanced studies. And I really think I get it! It’s about how white culture – liberal, liberated white culture – sexualizes and gaslights black folks, drawing them in and pushing them away, criticizing them for being both not white enough and not black enough. And then punishing them when they act out in a way the way that we’d been goading them into the whole time. I see myself in it, see my own flaws. I’m culpable. It’s chilling stuff, Foam Chomsky.

FC: But you’re still making this COMEDY podcast about Iceberg Slim, and you’re going to dwell on the parts that adhere to atrocious racial stereotypes because that is what he’s primarily known for. Oh, sure, maybe you’ll have a few seconds where the music maybe gets a little slower and you’ll talk about how he changed his ways and became something of a force for civil rights and a good guy. Why not do the show about Amiri Baraka, if you’re so taken with him, or, better yet, James Baldwin?

Well, I don’t find them very funny. It’s hard to make comedy out of people you hold up on a pedestal.

FC: Well, why don’t you do one on Roy Orbison? He’s hilarious and right in your wheelhouse.

I’m working on an episode about Roy Orbison. But I don’t want this just to be a parade of white guys. It’s a double edged sword, if I may use a cliché. May I use a cliché, Foam?

FC: I’ll allow it.

Either this show is 100% white people, which seems wrong, or I, as a white man, am representing a group that I don’t have the right to speak for, which is wrong.

FC: Are you aware that there’s no law on the books stating that every white guy that finds himself amusing has to have a podcast or “be heard” by the broader public?

I am. But . . . I’m really funny. And I like doing this. And people seem to like hearing it. What if, say, Philip Roth had never put pen to paper just because he was a white male?

FC: Oh, lord. First, Philip Roth was a Jew. Second, Philip Roth was a genius. You’re no genius. Third, the answer to your question is nothing. What if Philip Roth had never put pen to paper? Nothing, probably. The world would go on almost exactly like it is now.

That’s fucking depressing.

FC: That’s nothing. If we never heard from one of you ever again, I’m pretty sure we’ve got enough to last a lifetime. Between Roth and Updike and a thousand Jonathan’s and literally almost every popular artist of all time, I’m pretty sure we’ve got our understanding of the white, male, middle class experience wrapped up.

But that’s why I want to do Iceberg Slim! It’s outside of that experience!

FC: Fair enough, but reading a couple black authors is not the same as understanding something, and I think we’re seeing what reacting to a thing without a full understanding of it will get you in this day and age. And we’ve barely touched on the glorification of sexual violence and human trafficking implicit in this story. That’s a whole other bag of potatoes.

But I read all the books and watched the things!

FC: And you enjoyed them, right?

Hmmmm. (whining) Yes. Very much so. The black community has truly given the world most of its greatest art. There seems to be an almost biblical sense of peril and magic running through Ellison, Baldwin, Baraka, and Simone. (sigh) You’re very wise, Foam Chomsky. Alright, I guess I’m going to do an episode about Roy Orbison – right after a commercial break!

Stay with me!

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Gravity House

References and allusions include, but are not limited to: Swing, hobos, Jim Crow, Herbert Hoover, The Great Depression, Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, Rose of Sharon, Prince, Okies, scurvy, Washington, California, Gold Hill, Oregon, The Vortex, Zune, tuberculosis, Sherlock Holmes, John Litster, Scotland, Pubetron Fergleven, San Quentin Penitentiary, Barstow, Emil Jannings, Tillamook Indians, Clarence Birdseye, Forteans, Edward Fort, Gravity Houses, Peter Venkman, Draculas, H.L. Menkin, Theodore Dryser, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Booth Tarkington, ectoplasm, the scientific method, cocaine, opium, syphilis, steampunk, the Victorian Era, Hoot Gibson, Bluto, Popeye, The Nobel Prize, Albert E. Page, Atlantis, plums, feta cheese, Post-grunge, Bird Flu, Duncan Sheik, mini vans, John Popper, Dharma and Greg, Ross Perot, Pearl Jam, The Wisconsin Dells, The Wonder Spot, Soul Asylum, Mt. Rushmore, geodes, Hutterites, Saver’s, Subway, Michael Jordan, Superman, and Chocolate Twizzlers.

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Chris Gaines

References and allusions include, but are not limited to:  Bono, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Paul McCartney, Steve Erkel, Screech, Jim Morrison, Patrick Ewing, Buzz Aldrin, Verne Troyer,  Chris Gaines, Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, Bilbo Baggins, Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson, Scottie Pippen, Oprah Winfrey, Janet Reno, Emeril Lagasse, Steven Spielberg, coyotes, Garth Brooks, Saturday Night Live,  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Clark Kent, Tony Clifton, Mrs. Doubtfire, Sasha Fierce, Lady Bugs Bunny, Stephan Erkel, Big Mama, Hannah Montana, Richard Bachman, Larry “Grandmama” Johnson, Larry the Cable Guy, Barak Obama, the New York Mets, the San Diego Padres, Kent Hrbek, the Philadelphia Phillies, the Kansas City Royals, VH1, Behind the Music, NBC, YouTube, the Billboard Top 200 Album Chart, Trisha Yearwood, Don Was, Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, Matchbox 20, Eagle Eye Cherry, Tom Robbins, Bryan Adams, Richard Marx, Don Henley, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Lite Rock 105, Ryan Adams, Stevie Wonder, Fleetwood Mac, The Beatles, “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel, “Get Together” by The Youngbloods, Kenny Chesney, Pornograffitti by Extreme,  Chris Angel, Pubetron Fergleven, Kentucky, Donald T***p, the KFC Yum! Center, AC/DC, Prince, “Friends In Low Places” by Garth Brooks, Rolling Stone, The Rolling Stones, Kanye West, Green Day, Michael Bolton, Western style shirts, Halloween, bolo ties, Randy Travis, cocaine, and Scrooge McDuck.