Pacific Ocean

 

Give Up?

Good, you just came out in favor of the complete legalization of marijuana.

The Best Atheist on Television

 

The latest episode of Bones, The Priest in the Courtyard (aired March 28), was a remarkable thing to see on prime time television, much less on Fox. In a display of total disregard for her partner's religious beliefs, Emily Deschanel, playing forensic anthropologist Dr. Temperance Brennan, revealed her true colors during her investigation of a murder at a church cemetery. She casually referred to God as her partner's "invisible friend" and the church as "supernatural mythology." And Rupert Murdoch let this on the air? Here are some more actual quotes:

 

    "I'm supposed walk on eggshells because someone believes that a plot of earth has supernatural properties because somebody waved a wand over it?"

    "Funny, a man who believes in an invisible superbeing wants to run my personal life."

    "At one time most people were certain that the sun moved around the earth."

    "Can't you just be satisfied that if I'm wrong about God, I'll burn in hell?"

    "You know it was the Druids who first thought of the Yew tree as sacred. The Christians adopted the belief claiming it as their own."

    "Actually, organized belief systems which fail to adapt to changing morays are demoted from religions to acknowledged metaphoric myth systems. I mean no one worships Odin any more, or Zeus."

    "Can we take this with us or do we have to serve a warrant on God?"

    "I'm not attacking God, he doesn't exist so how can I?"

TV Show We'd Most Like to See

Caption Contest Results

Winners: james and katherine allard and Lynette Sheffield

Well I got on the computer, the walls began to drip
The keyboard melted in my hands, I wrote a movie script
10 days straight it was tastier than Jaws
It was wetter than Angelina Jolie, commercial as Santa Claus

 

Titled Tits and Money, was a potential smash
I flew to Hollywood, identity theft for cash
I'd tell my story, to anyone that would listen
And I crashed First Class next to Melanie Griffith

 

Who knew a producer, and we made a date
And we partied til morning, I was weaving at the gate
I entered the foyer, a party was ensuing
It was a Caligula orgy that was sucking and screwing
And I gave my pitch; I read it from the gut
To some producer buried in a starlet's butt

There, Ani, go ahead and use any part that makes sense and ignore the rest. And anyone else too. Rewrite the whole thing, what the heck, I'm feeling magnanimous, I give you free reign to say absolutely anything about anything and attribute it to me, I trust you that much. Thanks for the free CD which has given hours of amusement, send more, The Terrorism of Everyday Life looks cool, and you're pretty good too.

Blast from the Past

At the 1971 premiere of The Holy Mountain at Filmex in Hollywood

 

Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain is one of the most surreal, outrageous, and mind-boggling movies ever made, a vivid hallucinatory trip through the magic mushroom soaked synapses of a spiritual madman with total creative control. It turns out his previous film, El Topo, which featured an actor with no legs strapped to an actor with no arms playing a single character, was just practice for this one. I guarantee you've never seen anything like it, and nobody's seen it at all in 30 years. In an interview after the screening, Jodorowsky personally confessed to me that the whole crew lived together and he had sex with everyone in the film. It's coming out on DVD this month. Check it out, and if you can explain it, I'll print it.

Which Explains Why I Didn't Mention One of Last Week's Articles Was an April Fools Day Prank

 

"The first rule of being subversive is not letting anyone know you're being subversive."

- Bob Dylan: Theme Time Radio Hour #47 - Fools -

It doesn't happen very often, reading a book and finding it so amazing you immediately go out and read absolutely everything else by that author. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was my first but the list has grown, and he's now departed, leaving room for someone else. Skipping the more recently dead like Philip K. Dick and Truman Capote, and the REALLY dead like Dickens and Cervantes, my currently top twelve novelists would have to be Christopher Moore, Robert J. Parker, Tom Robbins, James Lee Burke, E.L. Doctorow, Tom Wolfe, Carl Hiaasen, Elmore Leonard, Dan Brown, John Irving, Neal Stephenson, and Stephen King. I've read every word, and that doesn't count skimming. (Anyone who's read Infinite Jest without skimming some parts is either a liar or David Foster Wallace.) In any case, there's nothing anyone can say to stop me from reading whatever any of them write next. Gotta keep my perfect record.

 

Not that I read them all to be influenced. I've never written a sentence anything like Stephen King, and one reason I read him is that I'm in awe of his ability to do something I could never do.

 

If I were Stephen King I wouldn't know where to start, but if I were Kurt Vonnegut, I'd write a book about Sam Hill, another war veteran who came back a pacifist, but instead of writing Slaughterhouse Five, he decided to completely rebuild a full-scale replica of Stonehenge in the Columbia River Gorge between the states of Washington and Oregon, not as an ancient relic but the way it might have originally looked, a re-imagining of Stonehenge much as Slaughterhouse Five was a re-imagining of the fire-bombing of Dresden.

 

One comes across Slaughterhouse Five in colleges and bookstores across the world, but one only comes across Sam Hill's Stonehenge if you're driving from Seattle to Los Angeles and you happen to take a left at the Oregon border, unless you're not me. It's important to reiterate the difference between finding out about Sam Hill's Stonehenge in a ridiculous newsletter and accidentally stumbling across the actual item in 1991 while driving home one day. I mean you're bopping along, marveling at the splendor of the gorge, debating the merits of the coastal vs. inland routes, snapping away, little knowing the shots would disappear in a mysterious fire years later, when suddenly, wham, there's Stonehenge. You don't remember crossing the Atlantic but maybe you did. Maybe you're just a figment of Rod Serling's imagination. The ghosts of future children in the car start crying "Dad, can we stop?" and I listen. Anybody who wouldn't stop the car to look at Stonehenge is the all time champion on "How Disinterested Can You Be?"

 

Turns out Sam Hill built Stonehenge in the middle of his hometown of Maryhill only for Maryhill to burn down one day - leaving nothing but his Stonehenge standing. He built it to remind us that "humanity is still being sacrificed to the god of war," mistakenly presuming that Stonehenge had anything whatsoever to do with sacrifice instead of predicting eclipses, therefore reinforcing the rumor that anyone who would do such a thing as rebuild Stonehenge is out of their goddam mind.

 

Let's say you're reminiscing about the present, looking back on your current situation. That's a good time to find yourself equally impressed by Kurt Vonnegut and Sam Hill, who built their own magnificent tributes to the victims of war by introducing random shots of beauty into our lives.

 

I once spoke to Kurt Vonnegut and it went something like this...

 

CHAPTER 38

Vonnegut’s Complaint

 

    Hello?

    Yes?

    This is Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Am I speaking to the author of The Wrong Bus?

    Yes, and can I say what an honor and privilege it is to be speaking to you. You’re one of my heroes.

    Can the horseshit, dickwad, I just want to say that you absolutely do not have permission to use the Tralfamadorians from Slaughterhouse Five in your novel.

    What are you talking about? I haven’t used any Tralfamadorians.

    Yes you have. They appear in chapter 65.

    But this is chapter 38. I haven’t even written chapter 65 yet.

    Tralfamadorians are outside the time/space continuum, as you damn well know. They experience all time at once. They can see from this chapter that they appear in your book in the last chapter, and they told me all about it.

    How was I supposed to know that? I’m still writing chapter 38.

    It doesn’t take a chronosynclastic infindibulum to figure out that what you’re doing is plagiarism.

    Come on. There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.

    So what?

    Without the chronosynclastic infindibulum, everything’s got to be in the right order.

    And don’t use the chronosynclastic infindibulum either. That’s from Sirens of Titan.

    Hey, if it wasn’t for the chronosynclastic infindibulum, you’d have no way of knowing now what comes up later in the book.

    Don’t get smart with me, wise ass. Just cut my Tralfamadorians out of your last chapter.

    How can I cut them out when I haven’t put them in yet.

    And you won’t either.

    No Tralfamadorians in the last chapter?

    If you know what’s good for you.

    All right, I promise.

 

 

"I began writing because I found myself possessed. I looked at what I wrote and I said 'How the hell did I do that?'"

- Kurt Vonnegut -

 

I still don't know how he did that but I'm going to keep trying. I figure the best way to pay tribute to your favorite authors is to carry on in their tradition. So it goes. Thanks to Kurt Vonnegut every writer can safely ignore all constraints of time and space and convention as long as they're smart and funny about it. We should all be plagiarists as long as we're plagiarizing Kurt Vonnegut. The world doesn't have enough kindness or humor, so the next time you're driving from Seattle to L.A., take a left at Oregon.

Other People's Problems

To the extent that other people's problems help you forget your own, this has been a good week. I thought my problems were pretty bad until this week happened. Sometimes you need to be reminded, in the most drastic moments, when your own prospects look dim, that things could be worse, a lot worse, and you should be grateful for your pitiful problems. Bad news reminds you that things could be worse, good news reminds you that things could be better, and we need both to remain sane. Despite recent events on the world stage to the contrary, I continue to maintain sanity is a good thing.

 

How can anyone not want to kill once in a while? After all, who wouldn't want to lay waste to some innocents after finding out you're no smarter than a 5th grader and Howie Mandel won't shake your hand no matter what. I blame it all on emotional trading stamps.

 

They used to give away S&H Green Stamps with every purchase, one for every dollar spent. You'd fill savings books with the stamps and redeem them for items in a catalogue or at an S&H Redemption Center near you. A new lamp! A new toaster! A bike! All thanks to Green Stamps.

 

 

This concept has gone away every way but emotionally. Every time something pisses you off, you put another hate stamp in your emotional savings book. Fill up a book of hate and trade it in on a tantrum. You can take it out on anybody, and they'll think you're over-reacting to the last stamp in the book, little realizing you're simply redeeming a tantrum based on the completion of a whole page of emotion and not just the single stamp.

 

You can trade in a single page for a little shit fit or save up the pages, like tickets at a carnival arcade, to be traded in for something on the top shelf, a furious fist through a wall or face, or worse, much worse, depending upon how long you've been saving up the hate. Scrooge it up for a week emotionally, then throw down on someone just because they happened to fill in the last stamp, never knowing why you over-reacted. Save up your emotional hate trading stamps for a lifetime and look what happens.

 

Don't buy into the system. Throw away your emotional trading stamps, never even stick 'em in a book. After all, the glue tastes awful and you'll just redeem it for something stupid. Better to be a little irrational every day than really irrational once a year or totally irrational once a lifetime. Don't bottle up that hate for a rainy day. There is no tomorrow where a bottle of old hate will come in handy.

25 Years Ago in Disinfotainment Today

April 24, 1982, Disinfotainment Today infiltrated this meeting of the Bilderbergs

My Childhood

I'm the product of a government experiment called the public school system.

I suppose you should know this about me. It explains a lot. I've never told anyone because it's so ridiculous you'll assume I'm making it up. That's the price of satire - no one believes you when you're telling the truth.

 

I was born a rich kid, Beverly Hills, north of Santa Monica Blvd., big house, tennis court, Cadillac in the driveway, all needs met. One neighbor had an Oscar I played with (I.A.L. Diamond, for writing The Apartment), another had a lavish vomitorium for those really GOOD parties with endless courses of too much food. I'd go to a friend's house after school only to discover they actually had their own house behind their parent's house. When my dad died, we started a gradual descent, moving to a smaller house, then a smaller house, then to an apartment in the slums of Beverly Hills below Santa Monica Blvd., all to keep me in what was supposed to be the best school system in the world.

 

None of this stopped me from being a holy terror in class. I was thrown out of the fifth grade at Beverly Vista Elementary in BH, sent to military school as a "disciplinary problem," sent back to the sixth grade at Horace Mann Elementary in BH, thrown out, sent to another military school where I advanced to the rank of corporal, sent back to the seventh grade at El Rodeo Elementary in BH, and finally declared "emotionally disturbed" and thrown out of the entire Beverly Hills Unified School System.

 

How did this happen? In 1960 or thereabouts, the Beverly Hills Unified School District decided to be the very first to give every single one of their students one of them fancy new standardized IQ tests in order to scientifically analyze the entire student body. Officially they weren't supposed to tell me, but afterwards I found I got fourth highest in the entire district. All the other students with high IQs were the top straight A students except me. I had Cs and Ds and Fs so I became a case study. How could someone as bright as me be doing so poorly academically? They sent me to UCLA Psychiatric Institute where I was tested and observed for weeks, test after test, observation after observation, drawing, piling blocks, answering endless questions. They had to figure me out because if the problem wasn't me, it would have to be them.

 

I was actually surprised I did so well on the IQ test because I had such difficulty answering certain questions, particularly the ones showing a list of words saying "which one doesn't belong." The list would be something like...

 

a) banana

b) potato

c) petunia

d) candle

 

One might think the obvious answer was d) since it's the only one that isn't a form of vegetation, but I'd be able to come up with a rational reason why every single word didn't belong. Each word has an "a" but banana is the only one with three. Potato is the only word with an "o." Petunia is the only word that isn't six letters. I'd sit there not trying to figure out which was the right answer, they all were right, but trying to figure out which right answer the jerks who came up with the test were expecting.

 

The same problem crept into my studies. Teachers didn't know how to handle me. I figured if they had the right to test me, I had the right to test them. I noticed they used a template for grading tests. I'd reorganize my answers so they couldn't use it. For my answer to question 1, I'd write "see answer #6," where the correct answer would be found. I got Fs on tests where I got every answer right, just not in the expected order. I used this technique from the first grade, elementary school arithmetic, if the question was "What's 3 + 8," I'd answer "5 + 6." Correct, but not the answer they were looking for. When did Columbus discover America? 320 years before the War of 1812.

 

It never occurred to anyone that the reason I was acting like this was because I was bored out of my skull. Anything to pass the time. I managed to learn absolutely everything they were teaching, just as reliably as their finest students. I just wasn't mirroring it back to them properly, thus, Cs and Ds and Fs.

 

 

Teachers were warned about me before I ever met them. They kept their eye on me from the first day so I couldn't get away with anything. I was the first to be blamed if anything happened, and half my time was spent exiled to the hallway for insubordination.

 

When I got my first history book, I drew a little B-52 bomber in the lower left margin of the first page, along with a little city on the far right. On the next page, I drew the bomber a little bit to the right, closer to the city, continuing on each page until eventually, if you flipped through the book, the bomber would fly across the page till it dropped a big one on the city, causing a mushroom cloud to go up the right margin.

 

When my teacher saw this, were they impressed by the fact a seven-year-old had seemingly invented animation? Animation wasn't the day's lesson. Did they simply ask me to erase it? Did they encourage my creativity by handing me a pad of blank paper and asking me use it for my animations instead of the textbook? Nope, they suspended me for defacing school property.

 

How do you get thrown out of the 5th grade? I was bored with what they were having me read. One day during a PE period where I was excused for some medical problem, I had nothing to do, so I started reading a paperback I saw at the student library, Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, the first book I ever read so it was the best book I'd ever read, way better than Dick and Jane. I couldn't stop reading so I took it with me to class. Nobody had ever explained that school books had to be checked out. I left school on my bike and got chased by two bigger kids who threw me to the ground, searched my backpack, found the book, and dragged me back to the school office for stealing school property.

 

Upon finding a fifth grader caught trying to read a tenth grade book, did they advance me to another grade? Nope, it was the final straw, they threw me out of the whole system.

 

Despite this particular moment of idiocy, it turned out the BH school system really was better then the rest, which caused a very strange problem. They'd get rid of me, I'd end up in a school in the LA system that was teaching what I'd learned the year before, I'd get straight As, they'd say to Beverly Hills "what's the matter with you, this is a fine student," BH would take me back, I'd be a year behind, learn everything but fail, they'd throw me out, send me to another LA school where they were teaching everything I'd just learned, I'd get straight As again, and end up right back in BH.

 

 

Finally I found myself at Beverly High for four years, class of '69, WAY before Beverly Hills 90210, with a magnificent theater department and a separate parking lot just for students, full of much better cars than those in the faculty lot. I took swim lessons in the "swim gym," the pool under the slide-away basketball court made famous in the film It's a Wonderful Life. Hung with Patricia Cummings - daughter of Bob (You don't know who Bob Cummings is?), Cathie Amsterdam - daughter of Morry (C'mon, Morry Amsterdam, from The Dick Van Dyke Show. Who's Dick Van Dyke? Jesus!), and Phil Ritz, son of Harry of the Ritz Brothers (they replaced The Three Stooges in Blazing Stewardesses when Moe died before filming, but you knew that). 

 

When Ella Fitzgerald moved to Beverly Hills, her son Ray Brown became the very first black in the school system. We went out of our way to treat him as an equal. For many of us, he was the first black we'd ever met. I directed him in the school production of Marty.

 

One day I was called to the office where Dr. Morgenstern, an official with the school system, now the school psychologist, told me he'd read my file and wanted to talk. He told me I was still one of the smartest students in the system, that they were proud to have someone so brilliant at the school. He sincerely apologized for the way I had been treated so far. He couldn't understand why they didn't realize the problem wasn't me, it was their inability to cope with anybody challenging the status quo. Dr. Morgenstern followed my career as a journalist and wrote me decades later with pride at how I had turned out.

 

 

Though I went through the ceremony with my classmates, I was given a blank sheet of paper instead of a diploma. I never actually graduated BHHS because I was lacking 2 grade points. I learned absolutely everything they were teaching without having to bother with crap like homework, which I never handed in, or daily quizzes, which I inevitably failed. I aced my finals, proving all the other stuff was unnecessary, but not to one teacher who flunked me anyway. I'd already been accepted to LACC so who cared.

 

Time went on and the story continued. It was a gradual descent from uptrodden to downtrodden, from all needs met to most needs met to some needs met to few needs met to no needs met, from Paris Hilton to Motel 6, from hobnobbing with the got-alls to scrounging with the rest, but the gravity of life can tend to run downhill.

 

 

I always intended to move back to Beverly Hills to see how my own kids would fare in the same system that had such problems with me, but that ship has either sailed or never docked. Now my kids are the products of completely different bad school systems.

 

Dr. Morgenstern's apology was nice but I really hope they learned their lesson and they're not still creating people so fucked up.

 

Maybe telling me my IQ wasn't such a hot idea, but how else could they explain what they were doing? I never bragged about it and fifty years later, this is first time I've ever mentioned it. It was too traumatic for me to consider it a plus. I can't think of any circumstances in my childhood where knowing I was supposed to be so smart did me any good. On the contrary, the guys watching me with clipboards only instilled the belief there was something wrong with me, a belief I apparently still hold to this day.

 

Thanks for reading this. Now I don't have to pay for a therapist.

 

MD

 

"The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it."

- Wendell Berry -

Letters about My Childhood

 

Amazing story. 

- Jeff Crook

 

My Childhood is a fabulous read. Life is a trip. Thanks. Do more of this.

- Frank Cavestani

 

If you were a stand-up, I'd stand in the back and watch you. 

- Larry Hankin

 

Mr. Dare,

    I don't know what are your plans for an autobiography, if you have written the full scale of it or intend to promote your writings as such, but I was completely captivated. Surely, this is the premise of a memorable screenplay, at the very least.

    One of life's insults that perplexes me most is how truly brilliant minds of creative genius so often seem to be perpetually at odds with realizing their full potential and the ability to lay claim to greatness, primarily in the form of significant recognition and cold hard cash.

    I, for one, would pay the price of a hardcover to read it - a new hardcover from one of those expensive hotel book shops with organic bagels and espresso served in porcelain demi tasse. In other words, surely the story of your life would sell well.

    I have been in that position a few times at school, seen the kid who is obviously gifted on a level far beyond his peers and instructors, stuck in the corner, struggling with the strictures of cookie-cutter education, doodling ideas that speak of talents the rest of us can only marvel. And I have seen what just a few words of encouragement and understanding can do to help them see that those years coming of age are such a small part of the great expanse of destiny. It staggers the imagination what those kids could accomplish if only more of their educators had the wisdom and resources to cultivate their abilities.

    Thank you for sharing your personal struggles. Few biographies, in my opinion, prove more interesting than a life lived in full pursuit of breaking free from the status quo.

- Kristen Twedt

 

Michael,

This is a wonderful piece you've written and should be a chapter in a book of your life. You don't need a therapist, you just need to continue to believe in how smart you are, how well you write, and how someday, someone is going to realize this and do something for you.

- Larry Grobel

 

Top Ten Myths I Can't Dismiss

 

From theory to reality to myth can be a bumpy road. Along with the rest of rational mankind, I've dismissed all kinds of crap; from magicians sawing women in half to Thor throwing thunderbolts, everyone seems to be constantly trying to put one over on us, as though we were all gullible idiots desperate to believe anything flung our way. Just as there was no evidence Dubya could have possibly been shown that would have stopped his march to war, so there is no evidence I could possibly be shown that would cause me to dismiss the following theories which, despite their improbability, just might be true.

 

THE EXPANDING UNIVERSE

 

There is no such thing as gravity. Everything is constantly expanding at the same rate so you don't notice, literally doubling in size every second, which keeps us pressed back into the earth expanding beneath us. This is a theory that contradicts Sir Isaac Newton. Some people can expand faster than others, gaining a perspective on the past. Some people can expand slower than others, gaining a perspective on the future. Socks don't disappear, they just stop expanding till you can't see them. In this expansion, everything inevitably falls back towards thataway and there's nothing you can do about it except expand your own reality faster than reality is expanding itself.

 

ANTITHESIS: Nothing's doing anything.

 

EVERYTHING THAT HAS HAPPENED TO ME SINCE CENTRAL PARK, 1970, IS AN ACID FLASH-FORWARD, AND SOMEDAY I'LL WAKE UP FROM THIS MADNESS TO FIND MYSELF NINETEEN, IN NEW YORK AT THE VERY FIRST EARTH DAY CELEBRATION, IN PERFECT HEALTH, SKINNY, LYING IN THE GRASS, LOOKING AT THE CLOUDS AND SEEING THINGS

 

Only you can disprove this theory by proving your own existence, but since I can only verify your existence through my own senses, and since one of my overactive senses is imagination, who's to say I'm not making you up as I go along, or that you're not making me up as you go along. If you are, stop, I can take over from here.

 

ANTITHESIS: This is reality.

 

FIGHT CHAOS

 

Entropy is how you tell time is running forward. Since entropy is the tendency for reality to dissipate, if you saw a film showing dispersal, from order into chaos, you'd know it was running forward. If you saw a film in which all the blue in a glass of water coalesced into a pill that flew out of the glass into someone's hand, you'd know the film was running backwards because chaos doesn't naturally turn into order.

 

Members of mankind must spend their lives fighting entropy because if we don't do it, who will? Can't depend on any other species on earth to get the job done. Have any chimpanzees or kangaroos ever turned chaos into order? I don't think so. The pyramids were mankind's first great monument to anti-entropy. It's up to us to stem the tide of order into chaos, to create order and more order, order in the diner, order in the court, there's no such thing as too much order because that's what differentiates humans from everything else. Fight the chaos. Vote.

 

ANTITHESIS: Chaos is a good thing. Species need chaos to grow into something new and improved. The more chaos the better if improvement's the game. Fuck order. Celebrate the random. Let it flow naturally. Trust the entropy to carry you to a distant shore of peace and enlightenment, where everyone's in love and sentences write themselves.

 

OIL ISN'T A FOSSIL FUEL

 

Let us celebrate the impossibility of proving a negative. When diving into the ginormous task of proving a negative, one finds one can only cast doubt. Proving you did something is a snap. Proving you didn't can't be done. Everything we do leaves residue. Proving you didn't do something demands searching for lack of residue. Been there. Done that. Your search will never end if what you're looking for is lack of anything.

 

So let's stop being so negative and imagine a science fiction world in which oil was not rare at all, just hard to get to. Let's say oil was a plentiful and naturally occurring substance bubbling up from the center of the earth like magma, in constant and infinite supply.

 

The only alternative is that oil is made from old organic matter, every plant and animal that ever lived that somehow got buried and squished millions of years ago, turning into sticky black goo that we all need for transportation. Who came up with THAT story?

 

Might I point out that no DNA has ever turned up in a barrel of oil?

 

Might I also point out that I made that up?

 

We get most of our oil from deposits above the fossil layer, but lately deep drilling has found deposits below the fossil layer. Geologically, below means before. If oil bubbles up, the fossils found in oil got there when the oil worked its way through the fossil layer.

 

Doesn't prove anything, but what better way to drive the price up on ANYTHING than promote a story that nature is stingy instead of bountiful.

 

ANTITHESIS: Who gives a fuck? We'll always need oil. Gasoline isn't the only thing it's good for. I'm typing on oil right now. Oil companies have cornered the market in plastic, making them successful beyond imagination. Why do they need the transportation market too? Gasoline should be considered an unfortunate byproduct in the production of plastic, something you sell off cheap while getting on with the serious task of putting paper bags out of business.

 

THE OIL STANDARD

 

The United States made a deal with OPEC that they would always announce the global worth of a barrel of oil in American dollars, thus creating the petrodollar to replace the gold standard. When they say the global price of a barrel of oil is going up, what they're really saying is the worth of the American dollar is going down.

 

ANTITHESIS: What will the dollar be worth when the oil's all gone? Nothing. Why did they make this deal? Because they know there's plenty of oil. The same people who tell you oil's scarce told you Saddam had a nuke aimed at your head.

 

THE OPIUM STANDARD

 

In its own little version of OPEC, for more than 500 years the drug world has universally decreed that one ounce of gold is worth one kilo of unprocessed poppies, forever tying the global price of street heroin to the price of gold. When they say the worth of gold is going up, what they're really saying is the worth of opiates is going down. When there's a glut, like now, gold goes up.

 

ANTITHESIS: The CIA doesn't control the black market.

 

THE OIL AND PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANIES ARE SATAN

 

The oil magnates know the day is coming and they're preparing for the revolution when the oil's all gone and who needs them. They're building concentration camps masquerading as FEMA relocation centers as we speak. They're trying to take our guns away because they know the revolution's coming, so they're spraying us from the skies with contrails full of new chemicals that are supposed to turn us docile. The minions of Satan have got the technology to do anything, houses heated by the sun and cars that run on farts, but they've got to squeeze every last penny out of the oil that may or may not be running out.

 

The American drug companies don't want to cut into profits, which would seriously be the case if people could get the same effects from simply growing a flower and smoking it. Whether it's from a hemp or poppy, gardening cuts out the middleman. You can medicate yourself and who needs a pharmaceutical company. The best pot requires no processing other than horticultural. You just pick the flowers, dry them, and smoke them. The best opium requires no processing other than horticultural. You just pick the flowering bulbs of the California Poppy (The state flower!), dry them, and smoke them. The minions of Satan want to sell you their chemical services but no one needs Vicodin or even morphine if they can just grow a flower, which also includes the byproduct of ending international drug smuggling. Given a choice between going downtown and trying to score some heroin or growing a flower, what would most people do, especially those simply seeking a painkiller. Pot and the poppy are the primary plants for the pharmaceutically self-regulating, and all people have to know is to garden.

 

ANTITHESIS: Big corporations are only there to help.

 

MICHAEL BAY IS SATAN

 

All right, I'm not saying he's not a minion, but Satan himself? C'mon now.

 

ANTITHESIS: Oprah is Satan.

 

WE CREATE OUR OWN REALITY

 

Anybody who thinks we create our own reality isn't me. There's no way I would have created this reality. I'm not that creative. The reality I would have created involves a house in the Hollywood Hills with a swimming pool, Jacuzzi, and lots of bikinis, you know, standard stuff, not a vacant house in the middle of the desert with no running water. I understand why the rich and successful need to blame it on themselves, they have to convince themselves they deserve it, but that doesn't mean the rest of us have to blame our poverty on ourselves. Not that there aren't people who deserve exactly what they've got. Mazel Tov to all who got what they deserve. But nobody deserves the random bad things that constantly happen. We didn't create this reality, thank you very much, it was all imposed from outside sources.

 

ANTITHESIS: Nobody knows anything.

 

EVERYTHING IS GOOD FOR YOU IN MODERATION AND EVERYTHING IS BAD FOR YOU IN EXCESS

 

Go ahead, smoke, but not two packs a day, two cigarettes a day. Go ahead drink, but not two quarts a day, two glasses a day. Go ahead, eat a pie, but not every day, just once in a while. McDonald's double cheeseburger? Go ahead. One a month. The internet? Aw, what the hell, every day. Some things are good for you because they're bad for you.

 

ANTITHESIS: Gorge yourself till you die. Being called down to this earthly plane is all about sensual pleasure, experiencing things only humans can experience, like physical ecstasy and Spiderman 3.

 

"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
- Carl Sagan -

100 Years Ago in Disinfotainment Today

On this day in 1907,

Martha Disin married George Fotainment

    I am 14 years old when I watch them carry out Stacy. It doesn't make any sense. Hours ago he'd been sitting there in class just like the rest of us, but now he is babbling incoherently, twisting and squirming in a straight jacket, being none too gently guided outside by two strong men in white coats. He looks at me for one brief second but there is no recognition. He is 12. I never see him again. 

    I hold the hard boiled egg towards Edgar and he cringes. "Please don't," he says, "I'm not kidding. I'm really quite scared of all fruit and eggs because of something that happened to me when I was a child." Somebody throws Edgar an apple and he screams and ducks under the table, muttering "I'm gonna get him, I'll get them all."

    Cary steals a car, smashes it into a tree, and dies the day I leave the boarding school. I blame myself a little, though the only thing I am guilty of is getting released before him. I know how to act normal.

    David and I go to his house one day after high school and find his mother wandering the streets naked and making weird popping noises. We guide her inside and cover her up but she won't talk and won't quit grinding her teeth and sucking and popping. They come and take her away in an ambulance, and my mom lets David sleep over at our place.

    Tom is convinced that his body is infested with spy germs. We know that it has something to do with his obsession for James Bond movies, since I go to his house once and see the walls of his room covered with movie posters. If anybody ever touches Tom or accidentally brushes up against him, he will have to touch you to get his spy germs back. He will touch his hand to the spot on your body that touched him, then brush his mouth with his hand and suck back in the germs. Once, I touch his shoulder and blow the germs off my hand onto the ass of a women's choir teacher who is bending over. He runs up to her, swats her behind, and runs from the room sucking his hand. Later, he tells the principal that he had to do it to get his spy germs back.

    David and I skip school and go downtown to County General Mental Ward to look for his mother. We see hundreds of crazy people on each floor as we ride up the elevator, and as we walk down steel corridors, the sound of clanging doors and the sight of vacant stares overwhelms us, but we find his mom. She is in a paper gown and she can't talk, she just sits there and smiles till we go away.

    Pink Floyd has just stopped playing Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun when he jumps out of his seat in the back of the theater screaming "It's God, it's God!" He runs towards the stage and almost falls off the balcony but is grabbed by guards instead and dragged from the Santa Monica Civic. Pink Floyd then plays Astronomy Domine.

 

    I'm at the beach watching a free concert when a couple guys in Hawaiian shirts and Bermuda shorts pass me a bottle of hideous Boones Farm Wine. I say no thanks but one of them is insistent. To placate him, I grab the wine, put my thumb over the mouth, and pretend to take a swig. They laugh as they pull out their badges and arrest me for drinking in public, having a jolly time as they throw me in a paddy wagon full of dozens of other people who were just enjoying the free music at the beach.

    The acting teacher got me working on an affective memory, the specifics of some time or space in the past when I was emotional, getting me to feel the cool grass, the bark of the tree, the morning breeze, the clothes I was wearing, how they looked, how they felt, until suddenly I remembered that she was in there, in there right now with another man, and I started getting angry. I mean what the hell is she doing in there? Don't I mean anything to her anymore? The wind is blowing, the sun is rising, the coat is brown, and I'm crying, crying on a stage and the teacher yells "Say your lines" and I remember that I was supposed to be doing something and somehow the lines from Spoon River Anthology come pouring out but I don't even hear them because I'm still so furious at her and what she did. When it's over, everyone tells me that was the best I've ever been, but I don't even know what I did except get pissed off at something I was trying to forget.

 

    It's 2AM and I hear someone pounding on my front door. I don't answer. I hear the window in the living room open. They're breaking into my apartment. I cower under the covers. There are two of them. I hear them talking. They come into the bedroom and demand I show myself. I peek out. They're cops. They ask me to show some ID. Naked, I get out of bed and search for my wallet. They look at my driver's license, then tell me they found a foot tall pot plant growing on a balcony of my apartment complex. They ask if it's mine. I say no. One of them clearly thinks this is a waste of time and is embarrassed at questioning this naked man who did nothing, but the other is a hard-ass who decides to arrest me. I guess I should be grateful they let me get dressed before putting on the handcuffs.

    Ken, a Broadway producer, invites me to his apartment on Fifth Avenue where he talks to me about a play he is producing. He has me read for some of the parts, and asks me to come by the theater the next morning to meet the director. If he doesn't cast me, I can definitely hang out and watch, maybe get work as some sort of assistant.
    Just as I am leaving he says "Oh, by the way, I'm a pervert."
    "Excuse me?"
    "Yeah, in high school I sucked off the entire football team. You ever been sucked off by a guy, Michael?"
    "Uh, no."
    "We do it better than girls, we know what feels good. Wanna try me?"
    "No thank you, I'm straight."
    "That's too bad. Let me explain something to you." He goes on to tell me that his parents own a major toy company, and their top lines of dolls are named after him and his sister. When he got married, his parents came out with a doll named after his wife, and when their daughter was born, a doll came out named after her.
    "Millions of children play with miniature replicas of me and my sister's bodies," he screams. "They take the teeny clothes off the dolls, maybe they put them in bed together. Me! In bed with my sister!"
    "Gee, that's too bad."
    "Have you ever seen my doll with it's clothes off?"
    "Not that I can recall."
    "It looks just like my sister's doll with its clothes off. It doesn't have any genitals. Well I've got genitals. Look at this!" he savagely declares before flopping out his wanger and casually pumping it up.
    I search for the nearest exit while he mysteriously tries to continue carrying on a normal conversation. "Have you seen any shows?" he remarks without missing a beat, as I dash out the door. And I still shiver in fear whenever I pass a toy store.

    I come home to find two Federal agents in my living room. They both wear the same gray suit and tie. They tell me that my brother-in-law has turned me in to the FBI for not registering for the draft. They explain that not registering is an accumulative crime - that every day I didn't register, since the day I turned 18, I was actually committing another felony. They tell me they can put me away for a long time, but they'll give me one more chance. They will call the local draft board the next day at noon, and if I haven't registered, they will come back to get me. They smile at each other.

    The acting teacher makes us sit in a circle and look at the person we are the most physically attracted to and honestly tell them why. Then we have to look at the person we are the least physically attracted to and honestly tell them why. To no one's surprise, the beautiful blonde is on the top of every guy's list, and the sweetest young girl, the one who is talented and funny but a little bit plump, is everyone's least attractive. We drive her from the room in tears.

    We're on the freeway when Albert tells me that he loves me and threatens to jump out of the car if I don't make love to him. I tell him I am very pleased that he is finally able to admit his homosexuality. I also explain that I have no such deep dark secret to admit, and therefore I have no intention of ever making love to him. He throws open the car door and is halfway out when Jim grabs him and pulls him back in. He sits there quietly the rest of the way home.

    Her name is Sarah, and it is a hot date. We meet in acting class, acting together for months before ever going out, then Bingo, a fine dinner at a classy place and we're on our way back to her house. Her dress is short, my waist is thin, it feels right, I know she's going to invite me in.
    When we get to the door, she quickly looks through her purse, then realizes her dilemma and stops.
    "Can't find your keys?" I ask.
    "No, I've got my keys, but there's a slight problem." Turns out that she got her period in the middle of our date. Turns out the lady's room in the restaurant only had Tampax pads, and since she wasn't wearing any underwear, she had no way to keep it on. Then she remembered that she kept her keys on a long leather thong, which she tied around her waist to use as a belt to hold the Tampax on. Now her keys are tied around her waist under her dress.
    She politely asks me to turn around so that she can quickly lift her skirt, get her keys, and open the door. This is the most difficult request I have ever been asked, but I comply and face the other direction. I hear a couple of grunts but the door doesn't open.
    "It's too high," she says. "I can't reach it. I've got to stand on something." We search for a box but no go. I politely offer myself. I get down on my hands and knees on her front doorstep and say "stand on my back."
    She steps up, puts her waist to the door, and goes for the key. It works. I hear the tumblers click.
    Then I look the other way and see a woman, standing on the sidewalk, watching us. She is going out of her mind. What she sees just does not fit into any of her preconceptions of reality. If life were a cartoon, steam would be coming out of her ears. She is completely mystified and overwhelmed with horror. She doesn't know about the door key. She doesn't know about the Tampax or the leather thong. She doesn't know that there is a perfectly rational explanation for our behavior. She sees what she sees, which seems to be a young man helping a woman fuck a doorknob.
    I don't blame her for being upset. I don't try to explain. The door opens and Sarah and I duck inside, leaving the woman out there to puzzle it through. Should she call the police? Should she tell anyone? What would she say? Does it give her ideas? Does she tell her husband about it? Do they try it themselves, discretely at home, thinking it's the latest craze? Most likely she merely carries it around with her forever, never telling a soul, keeping it tucked away in memory, filed under "The Most Depraved Thing I've Ever Seen!"

    "Everything is silly putty, you know, man? You know? Do you hear me? Everything is SILLY PUTTY, man. It's true. Can you dig it? Are you listening? I mean when you press silly putty against a newspaper, the ink comes off on the putty and you can stretch it around. Well everything is like that, everything. Whatever you touch, anything that comes in contact with your body, a bit of it comes off on you and a bit of you comes off on it. It's not much, just a few molecules maybe, but it happens, man, it happens. It's not as though there are strict boundaries between things. There's no such thing as a solid object, man. Can you name me one thing that's solid? Of course not. There's no exact place where I start and you begin, there are just a bunch of different qualities of density that are constantly moving around and exchanging minute particles, like a big square dance, man, on the sub-atomic level, man, that's where it's at. It's all true. We're already the same person. There are parts of me that are actually part of you just because we shook hands a minute ago, man. I am part of you and you are part of me. It's already happening. The universe is a great place, man, it's great. Everything is everything."

    Dino flips out when he walks in the room and sees Nile giving his sister Carol a hit of freebase. He simply springs across the room screaming "I'll kill you! I'll kill you!" until he has Nile by the throat. Carol is so stunned by her first hit of freebase and the sight of her brothers trying to kill each other that she just stands there and screams while I unsuccessfully try to separate them. Finally she helps me pry off Dino. Nile escapes into the corner, breathing heavily but still alive. Finally, Dino leaves with his sister.

    The book falls out of his knapsack onto the floor of the bus, so I pick it up and hand it to him. He is grateful beyond comprehension, and immediately starts reading it. I see the cover. It is Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce. Odd enough to find someone on a bus who reads, much less someone who is so absorbed in such a deep text. "I'll never read another book," he explains to me. "This is my tenth time. Have you ever read it?" 
    I can't believe that anybody has actually finished Finnegan's Wake, much less ten times. I've read enough of it to know that it's brilliant and totally unreadable, and I tell him so. Then he explains his dilemma.
    "Finnegan's Wake begins in the middle of a sentence." He puts in a quick bookmark and flips to the front of the book. "See?" he says. "'riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.' Only if you make it all the way through do you find out that it ends with the beginning of that sentence." He flips to the back of the book and shows me the last sentence. "A way a lone a last a loved a long the..." and he quickly flips back to the first page "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."
    "The first time I read it I got to the end, then flipped back to the beginning to finish the sentence. I kept reading. Now I can't stop. I don't know where to stop. The book is circular. There is no end. Joyce didn't give me an out. I can never stop reading."

    And goes to his bookmark starts reading, ignoring the world, missing his stop, sucking in the words, finding new meaning in the inter-lingual jargon, agreeably glued to the pages, trapped for the rest of his life in Finnegan's Wake.

    Aurora is convinced that she is the product of a genetic experiment, but she is talented, seems to love me, and can't get enough of me sexually, which seems like a good thing. I let her move in. One night she comes into my bed and starts writhing in agony, claiming she often has these spasms and that it is part of the experiment that didn't quite work out. She tells me that though she is worth millions of dollars, they don't know where she is, and I should hope they never figure it out. Finally she calms down and we start making love. She has this posture she goes into that she says is African, and it allows her to slap her entire body against mine at astonishing speeds. We are the sound of no hands clapping, who knows how long it goes on, our metronome flying, Aurora in total control when she suddenly sits up with me still inside her, showing her whole body to me, panting, almost screaming, grabbing my hands and making me pinch her nipples, reaching under the pillow and handing me a knife, closing my fingers around it, holding the tip to her breast and screaming "kill me, oh God just kill me, please", then freezing, an alabaster statue wrapped around me, the handle of the knife still in my hands, the tip just above her navel and Aurora crying "Push it in, just push it in" which I do, but not the knife. "You coward" she screams, grabbing the knife and running from the room.

    Aaron comes by with a friend who keeps his hand in a little bathroom vanity case. He asks me for the rest of his money. I give him all I have, about $600, and tell him it was a slow week. He says "You don't understand. I want my money now!" I tell Aaron not to worry, to come back in a few hours.
    "Have you seen the movie Deerhunter?"
    "Yeah, why?"
    "Because we're gonna play Deerhunter."
    His friend takes his hand out of the vanity case holding a.357 magnum. He opens up the gun, takes out all the bullets, and puts them in a neat little row on my dresser.
    "Where's my money?"
    "I just gave you all I had. It's Sunday, I can't even go to the bank, and I had a slow day."
    He puts one of the bullets back in the gun, spins the chamber, points the gun at me and pulls the trigger. It just clicks.
    "What the fuck are you doing? I haven't got any more money. Why would I lie about that? I didn't even know you were coming by so I wasn't prepared. I'll have it all for you tomorrow when the banks open."
    He puts a second bullet in the gun, spins the chamber, and pulls the trigger. It just clicks. 
    "Jesus Christ, you'll never get a penny of your money back if I'm dead. Why are you doing this? I HAVEN'T GOT ANY MORE MONEY!"
    He is putting the third bullet in the gun when one of my roommates walks into the room, looks around, and says "oops." They point the gun away from me, at him, and tell him to sit down. They ask him if he has any money, and he gives them all he has. One hood keeps his gun on us while the other searches the house, finding nothing.
    Finally, we are marched down Hollywood Blvd. at gunpoint by a man with his weapon in his coat pocket. They rip my photo studio apart and find nothing but photo equipment, which they take. They drive back to my place, take all my musical instruments and my cameras, and tell me that if I don't pay them back on Monday, I won't get any of my stuff back and they'll shoot me.

    Albert's dad calls me up and tells me that Albert has slashed his wrists but he didn't die. Albert is now in Camarillo. He also admits that Albert isn't his son but his lover, and that since they couldn't get married, he has adopted him. Albert gets better, joins AA, and is now a film producer.

    I am in the living room with several guests when Aurora stumbles down the stairs in a torn nightgown with blood dripping from the corner of her mouth crying "My pills, where are my pills?" I ask her what pills and she laughs and runs to the kitchen. We all just sit there, silent and nervous, while she noisily searches. Finally she harumphs past us back to bed and we continue our conversation.

    Nile looks at his brother Dino lying there in the coffin and he starts sobbing. He tries to climb into the casket. He kisses his brother and tries to wipe off the Forest Lawn make-up. He takes out a freebase pipe and torch, takes one long massive hit, exhales, puts another enormous rock on the pipe and gives it to his brother. "I leave Dino my last hit of freebase," he says while closing the coffin. "From now on whenever I get the urge to smoke again, I will remember my last pipe and how it lies with my dead brother." Later he admits that after I left he opened the coffin back up and smoked the last rock.

    Aurora starts screaming and she won't stop. She sets my bed on fire and starts laughing hysterically. Suddenly she produces a gun and I run outside. Using a trashcan lid for protection against gunfire, I grab a hose and run upstairs to put out my bedroom. The police are convinced that it is just another domestic squabble. I tell them that she is crazy but they don't believe me. They politely ask her to leave and she does.

    John is obviously tired. He is sitting at the back of the ZeroZero, watching people dance, listening to very loud music, aware that his presence in the room is known by all. He is on the cover of Rolling Stone and TV Guide that very week, so he is royalty. Somebody dancing spills a beer on him. John does nothing, just sits there, neither indignant nor angry, no reaction at all. The dancer laughs and spills more of his beer on John, obviously hoping for some sort of response. He gets none. A bunch of others join in, and pretty soon it turns into "Let's Spill our Beer on John Night." John becomes soaking wet but he takes it like a Buddha. He simply reaches out, puts his hand on my shoulder, and I lead him through the rain of beers and out of the club.

    I am not amused that Janet has brought a pet rat along. She has come to visit me in a hotel in Seattle and I know that the maid will not appreciate the presence of a rodent. The management isn't amused when Janet starts throwing all the furniture out the window while screaming at the top of her lungs, "You don't love me!" The police threaten to take her away unless I take her away, but I have no money or credit cards. We stay up all night at a psychiatric clinic where I try to convince them that she is crazy and she tries to convince them that I am crazy.

    I am second in line when a large man wearing a baseball cap walks into the health food store and shoots the cashier in the back. The man in line ahead of me looks at his cashier, a young man lying bleeding on the floor, and he surreptitiously walks out of the store without paying for his kefir.

    Janet has her sister call to tell me she has been killed in a bus wreck. She wants to hear my reaction, to see if I really care, but her sister is so clumsy at the impersonation of an official that I know right away what is happening.

    "So what have you done lately for the PLANET, man? Don't you realize that we're all about to blow ourselves UP and that all that matters is your personal relationship with the goddam INFINITE? It's happening, man, right in front of you only you don't see it. Nobody sees it.
    "Which is why you've got to hear this song I wrote, man. This is the song that can change everything, man, I mean it, but only if everyone on earth hears it at exactly the same time. You'll see what I mean when I play you the song because like the video is gonna have them on their knees, man. Of course my record company hasn't exactly approved of the video yet, man, because it's got the world's biggest tracking shot, man. Can you dig a steady-cam flying across the whole fucking universe until it stops right in the center of my brain, man? Won't that be far out? I'm gonna blow this label off if they don't let me make my video, man.
    "I've read your stuff and I think you're cool, man, not like those other assholes, so could you just listen to this song so you can say somewhere in the L.A. WEEKLY that it would make a great video that could possibly save the whole fucking PLANET from DESTROYING ITSELF!? Then my record company will read it and they'll actually make the video and the world won't explode and it will be all thanks to you, man, all thanks to you.
    "I haven't recorded the song yet since I don't want them to rip me off, so you're going to have to come over to my place in Topanga Canyon so I can play it for you. You'll really dig it, man, cause it's really quiet out here since like there's no one around for miles. I'll call you tomorrow sixteen times because it's IMPORTANT!"

    Amanda comes over and steals a contraceptive sponge from my medicine cabinet in order to fuck someone else. When I find out, I run to her house and demand that she return it to me immediately, wherever it is. She runs into the bedroom. I know he is there and that she is scared. She eventually comes back out with it. It is unused. She refuses to open the front door screen to return it to me, so she tears it from its wrapper and starts rubbing it all over the floor till it is very dirty. "There", she screams, "I'm definitely not going to put that in my body, okay?" I don't know what I wanted but that wasn't it.

    Inga calls to tell me that they have taken away David. Like his mom, he has been found wandering the streets naked and babbling incoherently. Unlike his mom, he has smashed his apartment to bits and we have to go clean up. He has been handcuffed and taken to County General where we're told he's in for a mandatory 14 days since he needs restraints. On his bed are our high school yearbooks. The goldfish tank has broken all over his files, and everything is wet and scattered across the living room. While we sweep, I wonder if it is genetic or if he was just imitating what he saw his mother do 20 years previously. We load all his electronic equipment into Inga's car. He is released three days later. He tells me they called it a drug induced psychotic episode. He looks fine. Now he's gotten a fine job as a publicist.

    I tell David dozens of my ideas and he hires me to write for his upcoming TV variety special. It will be his very first chance to direct a major movie star, Chevy Chase, and a meeting is arranged. There are four of us: Chevy, Harold Ramis, David, and me. We are supposed to figure out what the show is going to be, but one by one, David tells them his ideas, and one by one Chevy and Harold shoot them down. They then come up with their own ideas, which David doesn't like.
    We are at an impasse. None of them like each other's ideas, but the contracts are signed and it is getting late. Finally, Chevy says "Why don't we satirize Michael Jackson's new MTV video?" 
    David looks at me. Just that morning, I had told him the exact same thing, and had come up with a way to do it. I am about to open my mouth and save the day when David gives me an intense stare, opening his coat so that only I can see a gun tucked into his belt. The message is clear - Don't tell them your idea. This is my show and it's going to be full of nothing but my ideas, so don't even think about shooting your mouth off.
    I keep my mouth shut. Chevy doesn't get to do anything he wants to do, and he eventually quits the show after he is beaten up by an audience member who jumps on stage during the actual shooting of the opening monologue.

    My cat has disappeared for more than a week when a strange smell appears in my bathroom, a cross between rotten meat and very ripe cheese. Apparently, my cat has crawled under the building and up through the wall, where she got stuck, and died.
    I have absolutely no idea how to get her out, and the scent is becoming overpowering. I call every exterminator in the phone book, and they all say they don't do such jobs. Finally, one exterminator explains that, though they won't do it themselves, they know someone who will. Apparently, there are these two guys who hang around the exterminator's office just waiting for jobs like this.
    One is short, the other is tall. They look like they never see the sun. They are dressed in black. "Where's the dead cat?" they say, smiling. I lead them to the bathroom and leave the house. They do the job, and they seem to enjoy it.

    Janet is not pleased that the pediatrician has brought the staff psychiatrist into the examination room. She paces the small chamber clutching her baby, as though she can tell from the looks in their eyes what they are going to do next. She keeps yelling that she wants to kill me, that they are all ganging up on her, that she knows what they are up to, oh yes, and they aren't going to get away with it, she will never let anyone fuck her over again, certainly not bitches like them who don't know what they are TALKING about, goddam it, so leave me alone, just don't touch me, just LEAVE me alone and don't touch my baby, you understand, he's MINE, you people are all alike, oh Gee, you don't understand, how COULD you, oh Gosh, I'm gonna get you, I'm gonna get you all.

 

MD

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