I Got Your Self-Help RIGHT HERE

Guilt has been around since God made Woman to tell Man that he was a worthless slob and should go rake the leaves around the Garden of Eden to improve the property value. Okay, maybe not, but it's at least been around since man harnessed enough brain-power to generate it. The self-help industry did not have the motivation to arrive very early in man's history simply because there was not a self-help industry to motivate it to arrive. The self-help industry finally arrived shortly after the arrival of Homo Erectus in the form of cumbersome stone tablets that were carved and sold by the precursors of H. Erectus, the Homo Habilis, who were angry at having their neighborhoods gentrified by the slightly less hairy and larger-brained H. Erectus. The fossil evidence garnered from these tablets reveals such classic auto-validation as:

1) Ugh
2) Urghhh
3) Grrrrphthgggle
4) Live every day to the fullest

Since language had not been invented yet (the last one seems to be a random assemblage of scratches that just happen to form a coherent sentence in perfect Jargonese English), the H. Erectus who purchased these stone tablets (using violence upon the H. Habilis as the most obvious and plentiful currency) glanced at the flint scribblings upon the stones and decided that they meant something along the lines of, "You need a change of scenery, so you should really migrate from Africa after the Pliestocene glacial period and get a good start on civilization; your future, less hirsute children will deny your existence in favor of a nebulous and unproveable God in gratitude for your meanderings."

The H. Erectus did just that, and the H. Habilis neighborhoods were safe. An unforeseen side-effect of all of this "help" that the H. Habilis supplied their unwanted H. Erectus neighbors is that H. Habilis died out for some reason that is theorized to be related to an au courant invention, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, that was caused by too much slab-shaping of gibberish. The unfortunate end result was that H. Habilis became unable to hold a spear for the required time to retrieve the archaic version of fast-food and died out en masse of starvation shortly after the departure of the H. Erectus. The lessons that this teaches us about the self-help industry are many-folded and smelly, like a fat-girl's vagina:

1) Ware the man who tells you he can help make you better, as he probably has his own motivations, none of which have anything to do with your actual well-being.
2) The moment that your well-being and his motivations no longer coincide, he will rid himself of your wearisome burden, thus helping himself.
3) Unless there's a lot of cash on the line, then he's still interested.
4) Really, he's got all the time in the world for you, as long as the moolah holds out. When do you get paid again?
5) No matter what sort of gibberish anyone spouts at you, you will take only what you want from it, and do what you probably already know you need to do.

I've been watching this crap wax and wane like filthy tide-water on the Jersey shore for far too long, and it's just the same shiny turds coming from a different anus. Religious cults, self-help seminars, political pods and other groups all use many of the same principals to get you to join (some taken from Lofland and Stark (1965) American Sociological Review 30:865-875, with further elaboration by yours falsely):

1) Tension: A discrepancy between how one finds oneself and how one wants to be. This could be the result of an actual problem or a perceived problem; the perceived problem could be the result of internal conflict brought about by external forces, such as upbringing, societal pressures, and peer-group pressures ("C'mon, Bob, you're not down with us unless you try the Fugu fish. Oops, fuck, you're dead. What a retard. Oops, fuck, I'm dead too.")
2) Seekership: Conventional changes of lifestyle from internal sources seem inadequate to the changes that one wants wrought, so the person may feel that the adjustment should come from an external source (bars, whore-houses and gambling establishments just aren't cutting it anymore).
3) Turning Point: The person feels themselves to be at a critical or pivotal stage in his/her life, thus enhancing the feeling that an important change is in order. (I've GOT to quit going to bars, whore-houses and gambling establishments.)
4) Cult Affective Bonds: A friendship or some type of bond with a current cult member must be established for con- version to take place. Cult members are usually first introduced to their cult by a friend or acquaintance in a group.
5) Extra-Cult Affective Bonds: affiliation with people who have negative opinions of the cult must be weak or at least weaker than the cult bond. This can also be accomplished when people don't know enough about the cult initially to form any kind of opinion on it. (Evil can flourish in secrecy; nobody knew how wack-job Scientology was until it had already sucked in about half of Hollywood and a few other people who'd never read an L. Ron Hubbard book and seen first-hand what a lousy author he was).
6) Intensive Interaction: this separates "verbal" converts from "total" converts. The interaction with "verbal" converts is generally to get them to become "total" converts through greater interaction with the "total" converts. (Thus begins the Dungeons & Dragons school of self-help: the higher your level, the more costly the next level is to obtain.)

I've got some self-help advice for all of you: buy a fucking Skee-Ball machine. It's just like an auto-validation seminar, only cheaper and more satisfying:

1) You have a set goal that you have to work daily at to meet (getting all 12 balls in that goddamn 100-point hole at the tippy-top on either side).
2) You get consistent and accurate feedback on how you're doing in achieving your goal (the amount of tickets the machine vomits onto your shoes).
3) You have to keep pumping money into it (ball-shine, red tickets, prizes, electricity, sheetrock for the holes in your walls), though not as much as a regular seminar.
4) It's good exercise (for =BD of your body, at least, so maybe add "become ambidextrous" to your goal).
5) You always get SOMETHING out of it (even if it's just a few tickets to buy a plastic whistle or bird-call).
6) You have something tangible (the Skee-Ball machine and a bunch of crappy prizes) that you can sell to someone, rather than just stuffy old self-knowledge that isn't worth anything to anyone except other seekers of external validation (hell, Tim Robbins and Deepak Chopra make a HELLUVA living doling out nonsense for cash-figures that would make Donald Trump blush like a virgin in a porn-theater (wasn't sure if everyone would know who the Sultan of Brunei or Alan Greenspan was, so I went with Donald Trump for that analogy)).
7) There's no misunderstanding your goal, unless you are an utter moron, which in itself is a good piece of information to have.
8) You get to throw things.

People, we don't need any seminars or books or audio CD's or the sounds of our own snoring during a self-help seminar played back to us in order to find out what's wrong with us. We have LSD for serious introspection, methamphetamine to give us focus, marijuana to make us (overly) sensitive, cocaine to make us chatty and gregarious, booze to make us take a swing at our friends when they won't share any of the above, and Ecstasy to make us feel better about taking drugs and trying to punch a friend in the face when we should be attending a self-help seminar.

If all else fails, HIRE ME. I will follow you around drunk for a week to see how you interact with people and your environment. You will get IMMEDIATE FEEDBACK every time I think you're doing something wrong or stupid and at all other times, in a brazenly loud, public and slurry spectacle so you will remember my verbal harangue whenever you go to do that thing that irritated me (and therefore made you a worse person in my eyes). The cost is minimal. I require a decent Scotch (Laphroaig 10-year or Glenlivit 15-year will do nicely), several changes of clean clothing during the evening, someone to scrub the intestinal malfunctions from my shoes before I awake each morning, bail for any unforeseen altercations with bystanders or local constabulary, and hospital insurance for when I attempt to subdue a pole-lamp that appears to be staring at me too much OR if I attempt to make out with a parking meter or any electrified appliance. All that should cost somewhat less than 1 or perhaps 2 seminars, and I'll even cut you a "friend" price, because, really, I'm here to help YOU as long as the moolah holds out. When do you get paid again?

Missouri: It's Just Like You Thought It Was

I understand that some of you have been notably disturbed by my seeming lack of attention to your needs. I have recently received annoying texts, peevish phone-calls, obscure and divorced-from-reality e-mails from many of you with regards to my electronic absence. Several death-threats have also been articulated to my person, though these are mostly relating to the women of questionable morals alluded to in the forthcoming paragraphs. I have also recently taken up the art of hepatomancy, which allows me to augur the future using the various lobes and foldings of the human liver (since I am currently in charge of part of a hepatitis B drug trial), and it has revealed some disturbing details of each of your private lives, which I shall not reveal here in consideration of some of my readers’ more delicate constitutions. You know who you are and you know what you’re doing, so just stop it; you won’t go blind from it, but others might if they catch you at it.

Right now I am sitting in the Denver airport, after having been bumped from yet another flight (I’m totally used to it by now), so I do have a number of hours to kill (five, to be exact) before the next available flight to Austin gets me home (barring any storm cancellations, of course). I flew up here yesterday to see Genesis (yes, THAT Genesis, and it was a fucking great show, especially from 15th row, center) and was hoping to make it home in time for the evening football game. Those hopes have since been dashed, and the only football game I got to see was on a 10-inch screen in the first class lounge of Continental; I caught the end of an EPIC beating of the Denver Broncos by the Chargers. The Chargers looked like the angry, drunken father, and the Broncos got whipped like mixed-race step-children with cleft palates.

It has been quite some time since I’ve built up enough semi-interesting material (and angst) to feel it worth my while to annoy the rest of you with it, but some recent events have finally withered my determination to discontinue writing as an alternate mode of therapy as compared with booze and the companionship of women whose morals have been described as “lax”, “severely truncated”, or “so miniscule as to be immeasurable through anything with a resolution above that of x-ray crystallography.” I have needed immense amounts of the aforementioned tonsil-polish and ethically-flexible female comfort, as I have recently lost several of my dearest friends in the Austin area.

The first to pass was the conglomerate known as Merrickoya (Merrick and Toyacoya), who were enveloped by a large lava flow in the caldera of a formerly inactive volcano located somewhere in the Pacific ring of fire as they were attempting to sample the sounds of the Earth for their upcoming musical magnum opus, which we will now never hear or even know the title of. There are also rumors that they moved to Chicago, but this hearsay must be discounted as obvious falsehood because of their specious origins; these blatant innuendos have been bruited about by members of their former inner circle, and must be discounted without rancor as the tangible verbal manifestations of denial that only grief-stricken friends can fabricate from the rum-soaked recesses of their vaguely insectile minds. They were said to have moved to Chicago with Cecily-Jean and Alec, which proves the Chicago story false in an instant, as that couple was crushed in their home as they slept by a piece of blue ice from the lavatory of a passing American Airlines jet on its way to Oklahoma City; the case is still in court pending a monetary settlement with which their parents can purchase several annoying Chihuahuas to replace their lost progeny.

The next to pass onward was Casey Charvet, formerly of Blastro, and as close a friend as a reptile can be to anyone. He has moved to Galveston to make a stab at grad-school as some kind of Toxicologist, which essentially equates to committing social suicide in anyone’s book. I presume that UTMB has no requirements for ethics; his are in such shoddy disrepair from dealing with the usual gamut of hustlers, pimps, and money-whores whom associate themselves with the Internet that it might warrant a jail-sentence before any actual crimes or even scientific-seeming work has been committed. In any case, he has shuffled off his social coil and the withered husk that used to house his firewater and dirty thoughts now lies in repose in a nicely-painted Mausoleum in Galveston (this I know because I helped paint the fucker, and the tile-work and hot-tub scrubbing are next). Checks can be made out to me, as they are a much more tangible token of remorse than actual sorrow, and I assure everyone receiving this (in the most trustworthy of internet voices) that Casey’s ambulatory remains will receive the finest care (in the form of Scotch) that your hopefully generous outpourings of wallet-stuffer can buy.

The final and possibly most heart-rending to leave this world was Jill Marie Kleibur. She boarded the frigate Syphilitic Show Pony as a bilge-stirrer and cesspool replacement technician in an effort to save towards her lifelong dream of doing jack-shit (but only on a part-time basis). The ship was caught between the thrashings of two leviathans and was last seen in the terrible grip of an immense sea-gigolo, heading towards the depths of the Cayman Trench. There have been recent, shocking reports of a ghost-ship resembling the Syphilitic Show Pony seen plying the choppy and frozen seas around Newfoundland, and a willowy shape that can only be the soulless apparition of Jill (redundant phrasing, that) seen at the top of the stacks screeching like a foghorn-voiced harpy for Bombay gin, the souls of men, someone or something named Ella, and a dry pair of panties, all in no particular order. In this I feel some vague stirrings of what I once might have called guilt (but now commonly refer to as indigestion), as I urged her to board the ship to expand her horizons. I myself have recently experienced aural manifestations of sorrow at her passing, in the form of long and mournful messages on my cell-phone, plaintively bemoaning her less-than-glamorous fate as well as her own personal shortcomings and the inadequate social indulgences available in her afterlife.

There was also a guy named Shaun who used to live down here who died of a brain tumor after having moved to New York several years ago. He did too much meth and pissed off almost everyone he knew in this town, but he was always civil to me, so I will raise a glass to him in memoriam and say no more of the matter.

You think this would be enough to break any man, but there was far more in store. The stories I am about to reveal to you caused me to spend several days in Galveston at the Charvet Sanitorium for the Brainy and Slightly Twitchy, convalescing and rallying my depleted mental and physical resources for the writings that I knew would surely possess my hands to scrawl them, much as the Ancient Mariner must have once been forced by a geas of fate to tell his tale of woe to strangers (as an historical note, he was known as a bit of a long-winded and depressing gab at parties, and the dead albatross hanging ‘round his neck made him less-than-popular with those having two X-chromosomes; this also explained the failure of his cologne Eau de Albatross Extincte, which failed to sell even one bottle in the London market).

Our first destination: Pineville, Missouri. Just the thought of it causes my hands to become palsied and itch for the trigger of something that throws large amounts of lead down-range in a rapid and barely-controlled manner.

I won’t go into the details, as they are far too disgraceful for the delicate constitutions of you, my gentle readers, but the reasons I ended up in Missouri were many-folded, like the steel of a Japanese katana, and just as likely to kill, maim, or generally result in an unfortunate mentally and physically injurious experience. The causes of myself having to migrate to a town with a population of 870 and a resident-to-sex-offender ratio of 96-to-1 had to do with reports that a house my parents rented out in the town had come to be infested by a group of methamphetamine addicts, or “White Rabbits” as they had come to be called, and the local constabulary was powerless to do anything either through disinterest or sheer sloth (or they declined participation because the “Hot Light” was on at the local Krispy Crème).

My parents, having never dealt with such scurrilous personages, were going to go up there and tell them to vacate immediately. Myself, having dealt with many such denizens of depravity, decided it would be best if someone having knowledge of violence and access to firearms accompanied them (that person being yours truly). There’s a line from Hunter S. Thompson’s book Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas that I like to quote, and it goes thus: “You can turn your back on a man, but never turn your back on a drug.” Now, I have not always been a scientist; I have dealt with a lot of unsavory characters, both professionally and in everyday life, and I have to say that the entire situation struck me as a recipe for paternal and maternal injury. I therefore decided that I could spare the time to deal with this particular state of affairs.

I am licensed to carry a handgun in the state of Texas, and since Missouri has a reciprocity agreement with Texas, I am also licensed to carry there as well. You are allowed to check firearms at the airport, as long as they are declared and “cleared” in front of some nervous-looking TSA agents and police, whom I noticed were sporting roaring erections at the mere thought of being able to draw their police-issue Perp-JerkyTM electricity-throwers and watch me twitch like a Parkinsonian Michael Flatley in a tumble-dryer, so I was sure not to make any sudden moves. Dealing with the po-lice is like dealing with heavily-armed newborn deer; they startle easily, only if newborn deer are startled they usually won’t shoot you about a hundred times, plant a knife on you, and say they thought you looked like you might be black (though I can’t say just how the deer in New Jersey might react).

Well, I made it onto the plane and reached my destination of North Arkansas Regional Airport; it says something about the size of Pineville, MO. that I had to fly into Arkansas and then drive the rest of the way. Incidentally, the North Arkansas airport is the one that services Fayetteville, AR. where the headquarters of that most American of corporations, Wal-Mart, is based; reason enough to build a large rocket and shoot Arkansas and the surrounding states into the sun, if you ask me.

In any case, my parents picked me up at the airport (as they had driven from Dallas) and we made it to the hotel, a place called the Boonslick Lodge. It had plastic laminated fake log-cabin plastic laminate (it was doubly faked and laminated and guaranteed not to biodegrade even at ground-zero of a direct nuclear strike with the most powerful nukes devised so far by man). There was, Shiva preserve us, both a large black injection-molded plastic Grizzly out front AND, as a special bonus, a thoroughly ridiculous truck and trailer containing (you guessed it) a NASCAR car. (Is that right, a NASCAR car, or would it just be a NASCAR? I don’t know these things, though I fear that as the literacy rate goes down the popularity of NASCAR will go up). There was also a combination tanning salon and video rental place called 2 Chick’s Flicks. This insipid combination brought to mind oily DVDs being manipulated by hail-damaged, flabby, and fishbelly-pallid country-folk trying to get a tan and beautiful appearance like Brittney Spears (even the current Brittney Spears, which would definitely be an improvement over the women I saw; I’m surprised the birthrate is so high with so much obvious ambulatory human sex-repellant lurking about. Luckily there’s a lot of night in the country as well, so you don’t notice the ugly quite as much).

At this point it was decided that time was money (or could at least be measured in construction costs due to meth-addict misbehaviour), and our interests would be better served if we were to ask the junkies in the house to fuck off as quickly as possible. I feel it necessary to inform you that my parents had no idea that I was packing heat; no sense in distressing them, eh? My mother, ever the firm businesswoman, wanted to march up to the door and demand that everyone (including the rodents, roaches, and other country vermin) except the renter leave the premises; I convinced her that a well-dressed woman with all of her teeth driving a Mercedes SUV up onto their property and beating on the door with demands that the house be turned over to her forthwith was more likely to get jacked than obeyed. I also think yelling and waving my arms at her like a palsied orangutan helped somewhat, as my obvious distress caused her to think, for once, that I might be correct.

A knock, a pause, a firmer knock, a pause, then a pounding and an extra long, tense pause produced nothing more than a set of slightly-reddened knuckles and the whistle of the Missouri wind as it playfully filled my ears with the sound of the absence of response. There were a few cars in the general vicinity of the house, so I knew that someone was there. I made a polite smile at my parents sitting in their car, along with the extended index finger on a closed fist that is internationally recognized as the sign for “hang on just a moment while I commit a felony”. Without waiting for an answer or acknowledgement, I quickly made a round of the house to check for a possible entrance.

The rear door was closed, but I found a window towards the back that was unlocked after I threw a brick through it. After a quick reconnoiter, ensuring there were no noises emanating from the area or people lurking in the shadows, I prised open the window and made my somewhat less-than-stealthy entrance; I say less-than-stealthy because there was a transient breaking of the silence as the act of crawling through the high window caused me to flatulate briefly. I tried, with some success, not to giggle. I say this in order not to appear loutish and vulgar, but merely to point out that laughter is rather more likely to occur in a situation requiring a stolid mein than seriousness is likely to occur during a situation requiring a fit of giggles. This is why I was stifling my guffaws in the crook of my elbow during the commission of a felony B&E with a weapon, and could not recall ever having glowered in anger during inebriated lovemaking or a viewing of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. If I’d known I would be committing a felony breaking & entering when I was slurping raisinated (my word) oatmeal that morning in the depressing lobby of the Boonslick Lodge, I might have been a bit more eager to get the day started; slightly criminal activity always makes you feel a little more alive than normal, a little less numb and fuzzy around the edges. It really brings things into focus, at least for me.

Let’s begin at the den area, where I’d made my unconventional but necessary entry. The extraordinary smell that had assailed my nostrils was not that of my own sphinctoric (my word) exudations, but rather the fetid miasma that, I found later, permeated every nook, cranny, and manufactured hidey-hole of this near-new domicile. I say the smell was extraordinary, though avant-garde might be a better word for it, since it set a trend for stench in my nostrils that had until then only been achieved by the concerted effort of many people acting together to produce such miracles of olfactory odium as cesspools, hippie jam-fests, and New Jersey.

As I cast my stink-stung eyes south of my sneakers (lovely bit of alliteration, that), I was somewhat dismayed to discover that I was standing ankle-deep in the redolent filth produced by several drug-addicts living together in a house that none of them paid for. There were the pizza boxes, dirty clothes, empty beer-bottles, and piled dishes that one would expect to see in the common dorm-room, but this floor-obscuring mess ran the depth and breadth of the entire den and kitchen area. The detritus of this was complicated by distinctly Southern meth-addict touches, such as soiled diapers, discarded food-stamps, empty baggies, and even a glass dick or two, which crunched underfoot nicely as I made my way towards the bedrooms where I suspected the soon-to-be-erstwhile tenants were sleeping and dreaming their simple dreams of lottery winnings smoked up in record-setting fashion. The entire place looked like Al-Quaeda had failed to acquire WMDs and just decided to make living in the house as unpleasant as possible by detonating a squalor-bomb.

I crept upstairs to find two men, boys really, sitting and facing each other on two beds near a window. These two reeking human scarecrows were dressed in tattered jeans and the usual upper-torso-nakedness that comes with being purebred poor white trash in the deep South, and nothing else. Their skin was the unhealthy pallor of a cave-ghost that had been living in a barrel of bleach, with the usual pock marks, skin lesions, and scars that decorate the outer coverings of many meth-monkeys like pet-stains on the upholstery of a castoff Goodwill couch. One of them had a zit on his face that was so large it had worshipers gathered at the base, ready to throw a virgin into the top of it. It was the Mt. Vesuvius of pimples, and I feared that its rupture would cover Earth’s atmosphere and cause nuclear winter. The both of them looked skinny and run-down, like a tenement in the worst part of Hell’s Kitchen, and the both of them combined probably weighed only slightly more than the chicken-fried steak that I’d had for lunch the day before. They looked used up and bloody, like a tampon, and they couldn’t have been more than 25. The room they were in contained the robust miasma of cigarettes that only the poverty-stricken would care to afford, and the unadulterated and mephitic haze that comes only from the smoking of vast amounts of acrid methamphetamine over a long period of time; for fuck’s sake, the windows had a sheen of yellow nicotine/meth-mist grime on them.

These “people” were having a conversation. I say “having a conversation” in the loosest possible terms, because their main means of communication had descended from “barely-passable-as-a-language-Missouri-public-school-English” to the “I’ve-been-up-for-four-days-and-the-furniture-is-starting-to-argue” janky stage. In the two minutes that I stood there staring at them, completely in the open, there were a few brief bursts of intelligible words strung together that would have required an Ultra-High Frequency decoder to interpret; the rest consisted of uncomfortable silences, awkward pauses, grunts, and “huh?”.

I resisted the urge to kick both of them out of the window, and let me tell you, it was a STRONG urge; there’s nothing like some fucking hillbilly WT taking advantage of your family to make you want to start knocking heads. It was almost enough to make me turn Republican, but not quite.

My abrupt yet polite cough caught them unawares, and they both started like meth-addicted squatters, which is what they were. For a moment there was a Zen-like silence as we stared at each other, they with startled eyes and crack-lipped open mouths, my own face unclouded as deep summer in Alaska and as expressionless as Easter Island statuary. The stoppage of time in the universe was so brief that most of you probably didn’t notice it, and for the rest who did I apologize whole-heartedly, but I really doubt it was a terrible inconvenience, as it happened to everyone at once.

Truthfully, they didn’t seem a bit surprised when I said, “I assume that XXXXX told you that you would have to leave soon, so now’s the time.” There was no trouble, just a brief gathering of their meager belonging, quickly stuffed into a laundry sack, and an even more accelerated exit. I saw them make their way to a house on the next block, which I later learned was actually the house that they rented; apparently, they’d so polluted their own nest with the scuzzy and repellent excretions that they’d decided to go squat with some friends.

And I still had two bedrooms to check. Bonus.

I don’t really want to go into the details of the second bedroom I checked. Suffice to say that it contained smells, sights, and debris similar to that I’d found upstairs. Also contained therein was a “couple” of junkie-squatters, one male and one female, as well as their two squalling newborns, which explained both the perpetuation of this particular species of Homo homunculus and the grotesque diapers full of fuck-trophy feces I’d found scattered all over the house. Just the thought of those two rutting away for hours on king-hell crank while their children squalled in the same room was almost enough to make me repaint the domicile with the contents of my stomach; the couple was so skinny that I feared they would start a fire if they ever rubbed together. I was thankful that these two and their cracker spawn also decided it best not to give me any trouble. I’m not a particularly menacing person, but I have a feeling that they were getting a distinct “I’m REALLY not in the mood” vibe that poured off me in waves, like stink from their own bodies, and it seemed to work in my favor.

Before their skittering exeunt, I quizzed them as to the location of the “renter” who had formerly occupied the space. They mentioned that he was at a construction job, trying to get money to pay for a lawyer to get his DWI dismissed, pay for his divorce, and get his kids back from child protective services; it was quite a lot of stereotypic information in one or two brief sentences, and I tried with some success not to laugh in their faces. I figured that, if there was a God, then He’d already done enough to these poor buggers and there was no use adding to it; the omnipotent and omniscient are much better at ruining someone’s life than I am. The lesson I took away from this particular encounter can best be summed up thus: stereotypes are a useful shortcut.

The third room was by far the most stunning of the three. It was locked, but due to shoddy construction, my previous criminal history, and American Express, it didn’t take much for me to jimmy the door with my credit card. What I found inside was…

…exactly the kind of place that someone with too much time, unlimited quantities of pharmaceutical-grade ice, world-class obsessive-compulsive disorder, and a toothbrush, would choose to spend their time. The house-mung stopped dead at the threshold, as if hesitant to despoil such an obviously large amount of work. It was as if the rule that “everything gravitates towards chaos” had utterly failed within a small area of the planet. The floor, the base-boards, the A/C vents, and storage cabinets were completely devoid of any trace of grime. If I’d been asked to lick the floor for free, I would have tried to wheedle $100 out of the person who asked, at least until they pulled a gun on me; then I would have done it for free, but I wouldn’t really have minded. Really, it was that tidy.

Now, this is where the OCD and the creepy break from reality become evident (not my own, just the tenant’s). This guy had been spending all of his available cash on what appeared to be baseball cards, toy Hot Wheels cars, cleaning products, and high-quality crank; the storage cabinets were chock-full to bursting with the cards and un-played-with cars. I couldn’t make this one up; it was really a strange moment that my head struggled to wrap around. I thought to myself here lies madness, though it seemed to me that the madness was not lying around being shifty and no-count, like a lazy Catahoula hound; madness was in fact capering around with cleaning implements and a pipe-full of the purest king-hell Work Ethic that could be put in a baggie, sold, and smoked by someone with nothing else to do. Truthfully, the only thing I knew to do was to shut the door before the mounds of squalor from the other rooms decided that they’d bum-rush the room like a bunch of Arab states trying to beat up on Israel.

Once the house was evacuated, it was a simple matter to call in my parents for an inspection of the damage. Watching my dad damn near blow a gasket and my mom pacing around with a legal pad, jotting notes and working her way up to the same venous pressure as my father, was a real treat, let me tell you.

Around this time, a couple of construction fellows that my parents had hired to clean up the house and finish the construction that was supposed to have been completed by the “renter” showed up, and I went out to talk with them and get some air that wouldn’t make me feel like my lungs had taken a dip in syrup made from syphilitic maple trees. One of them, I learned, was an ex-Special-Forces from Vietnam; a genuinely laid-back individual who’d probably killed any number of other humans and had them try to kill him, and was never going to sweat anything else ever again. The other was his brother, who’d been in the Navy on a hospital ship and had actually carted his Special Forces brother in on a stretcher after he was wounded during some offensive or other. We chatted and jawed like old hands, and they seemed interested in what I did for a living, as they were getting near the age where the big C could possibly rear its ugly head, especially since both of them were heavy smokers. They were also very interested in the rarified conditions tuned to junkie biology that were to be found inside, and could only shake their heads in amazement. I was fascinated by their ability to do something called “construction” with their own hands, and plied them with many questions (and learned more about concrete in 10 minutes than I’d known in a lifetime), as the most interesting thing I’d ever been able to build by myself was a layer of shower mold, and that was strictly unintentional.

About that time, dumb-ass showed up. I can prove he’s a dumb-ass because he still drove up after seeing my mom and dad in the yard, as well as their Mercedes SUV, myself, and two construction workers standing in “his” yard. If he’d had any brains at all, he would have turned his truck around and never come back.

The word “golem” appears in the bible and refers to an embryonic or incomplete substance, and has its place in Jewish folklore as “an animated being created entirely from inanimate matter”, and for some reason when I saw this worthless fucker, that’s the word I though of; I also though of “homunculus”, “mud-puppy”, and “future fertilizer” (because I had SERIOUSLY murderous thoughts regarding the disposition of his corporeal self). He was a squatty, thin, slope-headed, uni-browed, scummy, disreputable-looking piece of human filth, and I vowed that if he so much as made a hostile move they would be picking up chunks of him from the trees for the next week, and never mind the handgun; I would rip his own arm off and beat him to death with it, then tell the police it was a masturbation accident.

I decided to stay some distance away from the discussion that ensued between my parents and this miserable, chemical-smoking junkie, lest I become further unhinged and do something, if not regrettable, at least not wise. There was one instance of raised voices that caused me to start forward, but I was grabbed in a surprisingly strong grip around my arm by the ex-Special Forces guy, who didn’t say anything, but held on for a moment until the volume of the “discussion” had subsided and I returned to my position of Sentinel rather than Avenging Shiva.

To make this long story short(er), the ambulatory pile of poo that was the renter decided to move his shit out, though he seemed to believe that my parents were taking advantage of him; I’m really glad they told me that last part AFTER we’d returned to the hotel room. What the FUCK is it with some people and their sense of endless entitlement, their rancid logic that says that the people who work owe them a living?

Ahhh, these scum. We’ve all been there…the feeling that there are some people who are better off as Soylent Green or tinder for camp-fires. You talk to them or have to deal with them, and in your head there’s the thought of “what the fuck is this person thinking/on/doing?” and you want to simply turn and run away so that you don’t have to interact with them any further. Kind of what many of you think whenever you find one of my e-mails straining the digital load-capacity of your “in” boxes.

Well, looky-there, I’m tired of writing. Goody for you. I have to go unpack and pack for more trips. I’ll write more when the burden of the mundane becomes less.

Adult Swim Is A Terrorist Organization, Halleluja!

“Austin 911, what’s your emergency?”
“Someone has broken into my house and planted a suspicious device in my living room.”
“What sort of suspicious device?”
“Well, it’s a large box about forty inches in diameter, and there’s a box attached to it by some wires, and some of the wires have black and red leads. There’s another attachment that is a dreadful and forbidding black in hue, and it leads into a hole in the wall. It’s frightening me and I want it to go away.”
“Does it have any buttons on it?”
“Yes, it does, one big one right at the front and it’s surrounded by a glowing blue ring.”
“It sounds like you’re describing a television, sir.”
“Well, yes, I think it might be, but it is definitely a Box of Terror, because it’s made me so fucking paranoid that I am starting to think that local bits of art and colorful advertisements are terrorist devices. I need you to send the bomb squad out here to detonate it and then strut around telling everyone what Big Nuts they have for blowing up something that any 12-year-old could tell them was harmless.”
“I don’t think that’s wise use of tax monies, sir.”
“I don’t fucking care WHAT you think is a “wise use of tax money”. The police drive brand-new cruisers and have the latest equipment and gear and guns and a fucking armored car, so they may as well get some use out of them. You’re a goddamn public servant, and by the Testes of Odin I want some fucking SERVICE! I pay my taxes, and since I don’t have any children, don’t set fire to my place, and don’t commit any public mayhem (much) then I can’t get the benefit of public schools, the fire department, or the local constabulary (except when I’m speeding up the road that I paid for and one of those worthless assholes pulls me over for driving 5mph above the speed-limit and tries to give me a retarded lecture about being careful of children; hell, they should learn to be careful of ME because I’M the one driving the 3000-lb. vehicle). I either want the police department down here PRONTO with something that will make a big bang out of my little TV, or I want you to personally bring your unreasonable lips down here and put them to some better use.”
“I don’t think that’s very polite, sir.”
“Well, I’ve still got this wretched Television of Trepidation sitting like a big black toad in my den, and the only thing it ever does is spew mental anguish and war images; I can’t even see a nipple on the thing, but they can show people getting their limbs blown higher than Timothy Leary and that’s just hunky-dory. Have you experienced Hannity & Combes in High Def? Talk about anxiety via the airwaves. This thing has to GO. There is not a goddamn thing on the television worth a squirt of squirrel piss, and I am TIRED OF IT.”
“I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do, sir.”
“Well then, the hell with you. I’m going to watch some Adult Swim on Cartoon Network and pray to nonexistent gods that our educational system gets better and everyone on the Fox News Network gets re-incarnated as lamprey speculums in a marine necropsy lab.”

You Screwed Me Again, American Airlines

June 23, 2006

To Whom It May Concern:

I am writing you a letter of complaint, just to let you know up front. This is the second of two complaint letters I’ve ever written, both of which have been to your company. In the past week I have experienced what can only be called the most abysmal service from your airline that it has ever been my misfortune to receive, and this is on top of your normally less-than-stellar on-time performance.

To this day I still have no idea why it was necessary that I fly two different airlines, as it seems your two airlines are in close collusion, and I booked through my company travel agent. I work for a company which has some kind of discount arrangement with your airline, because that seems to be almost all I can book through our office travel agent; you get what you pay for seems to be the lesson here.

I was booked on a flight from Austin to Chicago via your airline, which went just fine (aside from the normal hour or so that it was late). I then caught a United flight into Peoria, IL. which also went fine. On my return leg, we boarded the United plane, and were then told we had to deplane because of software issues; I presume that you must have gotten a hell of a deal on the Windows 95 that seems to be controlling your flights.

There were no more flights out that day, so I had to spend the night in Peoria, which caused me to pray for death every time I became consciously aware of where I had been stranded. I was booked on a 1:00pm United flight into Chicago, and then from there I was due to arrive via American Airlines into Austin at 6:15pm. This had me somewhat worried, because I’d paid $150 for two concert tickets for myself and a friend to go see Beck and Jamie Lidell at The Backyard (the tickets were bought for that exorbitant fee because the concert was sold out months ago). The concert was supposed to begin at 9pm, plenty of time, I felt, if American kept up its end of the bargain.

That didn’t happen.

We sat on the tarmac while further software issues were worked out. Then we sat on the tarmac some more while our route was re-plotted to Chicago. My flight didn’t leave Peoria until 4pm, and I missed my connection. I was supposed to catch the later flight, which was also delayed, and I ended up back in Austin at around 11pm. When I got back, my luggage had somehow miraculously managed to get left behind, even with the 2+ hours of delay between the arrival of my flight in Chicago and the connection to Austin. The concert tickets are still sitting on my counter, a source of deep anger every time I look at them and think about what a sack of disorganized bastards American Airlines is.

Right now I’m sitting in the Dallas airport. My flight from Oklahoma city was delayed for something called “flow control”, which I have come to figure means “we booked too many flights and now we have to delay everything while we get organized”, because the weather in Dallas is JUST FINE. Now it’s Friday, June 23, 2006, and the flight from Dallas to Austin, which was supposed to depart at 8:50pm, is now departing at 10:00pm; I will be LUCKY to get back to the airport and receive my luggage by 11:30pm. Another weekend blown. Thanks American.

I have HAD IT with your airline. Your on-time record is by far the WORST of any airline I’ve ever flown, and don’t try and quote me statistics based on when your plane leaves the gate or touches down; the stats I know are how much time I waste waiting for your planes to take off, how much time I spend sitting on my ass in the airport, and when I’m actually home and thankful that I don’t have to get on another one of your flights for at least a day.

I am going to do my UTMOST to book flights on other carriers, and I don’t care if it costs my company a few extra dollars; I can easily justify my choice as measured in delays and stress for them to let me switch. I have already had more-than-satisfactory service on Delta, Continental and Jet Blue, and I’m sure they’d welcome my custom. I don’t need bogus “Gold/Platinum/Super-Titanium” plans to feel appreciated, or some surly blue-suited matron waking me up from an exhausted slumber to see if I want any damn pretzels. What I need is a carrier that is worried about the quality of the service it provides, rather than trying to squeeze maximum revenue from its customer base by overbooking its flights both in the number of patrons it carries and the number of planes it can jam into Chicago (which is a NIGHTMARE, by the way).

With utmost sincerity and no rancor towards whichever poor bastard reads this,

XXXXXXXXX
Clinical Research Associate

Almost Dead (Again)

Summation for Casey, who doesn’t like to read:
I drove my car from Houston to Dallas and it blew up. Now I have a new one.

For the rest of you:
I skidded into Corsicana sideways at 80 mph…
Preamble (if you are of short attention span, you may skip to the Crux, far, far below)
Let me back up a minute and explain to you how I came to be in this situation. I am, or was, the semi-proud owner of a 2000 VW Jetta VR6. I’ve had it for about 3 years, and I’ve pretty much driven the hell out of it. Not in a bad or abusive way, I just happen to be a control freak when it comes to driving, so I drive myself everywhere. This works out well for the vast majority of my lazy friends who like to drink, or those who are “under-employed” and don’t like to spend money on gas.
About a month ago I took it in for what can only be described as an automotive “spa day”. I washed and waxed it myself, crawling naked over the car, utilizing my copious and extremely masculine Charlton Heston/Burt Reynolds-style chest hair as a gentle loofah. I used only the finest Aveda scented soaps, with lit candles to set a relaxing mood, though they kept blowing out in the wind, forcing me to re-light them with a can of Off! mosquito repellant and a Bic lighter. The people at the car wash stared at me oddly, but this was a day to make my car feel special, so I paid them no heed until they threatened to call the police. After this I checked the tires, made sure all of the fluids were filled, and took it to get the oil changed.
I have no proof that the furthest descendents of homo habilis who staff the Jiffy Lube on Manchaca and Hwy. 71 are not in possession of opposable thumbs (as they were wearing gloves); neither can I exhibit any evidence that said tree-dwellers haven’t the faintest idea which end of the car is used to run over members of Austin’s indigent population and which end has the pipe that they should wrap their gibberish-spouting lips around and inhale deeply the exudations thereof. Still, the tangy reek of suspicion fills my nostrils that at some point they decided to start my car without first having placed the engine lubricant actually within the engine, perhaps feeling that just the oil’s proximity to the cylinders would be enough to frighten the adjacent metal surfaces into lubricating themselves. I imagine that once they found this to be untrue (perhaps due to the grinding sound of metal-on-metal and the shower of sparks that I posit erupted from the area of the lifters), they then placed the lubricant in the correct space, feeling that I would be none the wiser, and perhaps more at peace for not knowing.
In any case, the result was that mere days after having treated my car to what I thought was a Valentine’s Day for my conveyance of choice, a nervous ticking began to make itself heard above the actual sound of the engine. My efforts at repairing the noise, which consisted of checking to make sure there was sufficient oil in the car, then turning the radio up until I couldn’t hear it anymore, only seemed to make it worse. I then ran some engine cleaner through the cylinders to break up any debris, and perhaps remove some of the Jiffy-Lube employee-drool that might have been contaminating the area. This did not help in the slightest.
My next thought was that I had far too much money in my bank account, wherefore I hied myself hence to the VW dealership, where professional mechanics made sure that I would not be lacking in poverty before I left their shop. They charged me almost $100 to tell me that my oil pressure was low, and that a further diagnostic would cost me upwards of $500, just to tell me what was wrong. I thanked them in the language of my native land of Richardson, Texas by extending to them the Middle Finger of Grateful Appreciation of Effort (which seemed to excite them somewhat). I decided to see if I could find a shop that was perhaps not as generous with its account depletion skills, as a reduction to total penury would interfere with my acquisition of fine Scotch (which is necessary for my particular physiology to function at peak performance).
In the meantime, I had a business trip to Houston.
I didn’t feel like spending the time in airports, awaiting a late flight full of ungrateful robots in dark blue uniforms who would torture me with their long and nonsensical screeds about safety exits, water landings, and the finer details of securing ones self by means of a complicated and advanced anchoring strap to a peanut-fart-filled floatation device (presumably so that there would be at least a chunk of torso intact should the plane decide to pull an aerial Titanic). Nor did I care to receive a lecture on how my MP3 player would somehow magically interfere with the advanced navigation systems onboard my 50’s-era prop plane and send the entire thing crashing into the sun or on a search for Atlantis or into an alternate (and imaginary) dimension where logical people ruled the earth and didn’t give lectures about MP3 players on planes.
I decided to take my still-ticking car to Houston; with a little hindsight prescience, I might have thought that this might not have been the wisest choice. Still, I decided that the leather buttock-cupper of mi coche was a far, far better place to be than flying the unfriendly skies with a bunch of strangers. I’d much rather be on the road with a bunch of weaving teenagers, confused old people in hats, speed-addled truckers, fuckwit SUV drivers, and cruising ghetto-sled jockeys; at least I could bang into someone and send them careening off into an embankment to splatter like a paint balloon, perhaps making a colorful (if somewhat sticky and lumpy) Rorshach pattern on one of our over-priced public edifices. I could have my own soundtrack when I finally went berserk and enacted the above. I wouldn’t have to flee the work site, scramble back to the airport in a mad dash to return the rental car, and try to make it through the amoeba-level “intelligence” of the Homeland Security forces before my flight fucked off without me. Also, I would arrive rested and ready for whatever lameness would be laid upon me that day, and could perhaps visit my friends for a light repast of Vietnamese Pho and 12-15 good drinks right before I got on the road. With the powerful disconnecting influence of potent liquors bathing my cerebellum (and its associated motor-functions) in a nimbus of isolated solace, I wouldn’t notice how badly everyone else was driving; I also wouldn’t be angry at the way the road kept moving around to where I could never quite get in the middle, no matter how hard I cut the wheel to the left or right, prayed to Odin, text-messaged the highway to cease its skittish and insubordinate shifting, or sobbed quietly to myself in frustration like George Bush confronted with an educated and eloquent debate opponent.
The drive from the relatively tranquil and serene former hippy town of Austin to the compressed anxiety and hustling traffic of Houston was uneventful. There was the usual parade of imbeciles and highway buffoons, blocking the fast lane, weaving while talking on the phone, trying to change the DVD for their rotten children, and generally just making themselves obstacles to people whose single-minded occupation consisted of driving from point A to shit-hole B. I had many fine discs of music, the evening was sunny, and the car seemed to run as it always had, except for the addition of the loud ticking, as if I was driving a bomb; somehow, this became a comfort to me, the ticking my companion of the road, an unknown quality in my journey that I accepted with the Zen-like equanimity and blank resignation that most believers of Fox news possess; I had acquired this quality through many harrowing (in a somnolent way) interactions with corporate bureaucrats (which is another series of stories and lessons in itself).
I arrived at my destination, a slightly shabby Hampton Inn by the medical center, late in the evening. The droopy-jowled, rheumy-eyed geriatric behind the counter checked me in with the efficiency of a malfunctioning steam-engine, except quieter. His movements resembled those of a patient Tai-Chi master, with every breath and subtle shift of his gnarled hands conserved, as if he did not know which one would be his last. Eventually I dropped my baggage off in the room and scuttled off to meet some friends at a local Slurp-and-Burp for some dinner and drinks.
Here I pause in the recitation of my ordeal to say that I should definitely visit my friends more often. They are less of a burden than the rest of society, occasionally even causing a grin to crease a façade that has become all too used to frowns or strict neutrality in the presence of doctors, surgeons, researchers and money-pimps. It had been so long since I’d seen them that we constantly stumbled over each others’ words in an effort to impart as much information in the limited time allotted to us before I was forced to return to the hotel. There were a number of times that the stories would pile up in a line outside of my ears like fat people at a free buffet table, and I felt that I would need some kind of UHF decoder to slow them down and make them orderly; perhaps a toll booth would do the trick? In any case, I was soon forced to depart in a dutiful manner, sleep being a necessity for my brain to function in my chosen profession on the morrow.
The visit itself was uneventful, even boring, as jobs occasionally are. I managed to break free from the surgeon’s penetrating gaze long enough to grab my gear and flee the building. I actually WELCOME rush-hour traffic at the end of a day of dealing with people who are probably much, much smarter than I am and are more-than-likely just humoring me in certain areas of molecular biology with which I am conversant.
In any case, the leathery and music-filled confines of my jittery conveyance (now sounding like a drunk lobster with Parkinson’s trying to wave “Hello” with all of its feet) was the mental equivalent of a relaxing mud-bath with several high-priced hookers feeding me exotic and unnamable fruits with their toes.
I managed to crawl along on I45N for about an hour-and-a-half before I reached Conroe, where there was a Gold’s Gym (of which I am a member in good standing); here I intended to wait out the remaining traffic by attempting to form myself into a shape other than round and also eyeing scantily clad females of all shapes and sizes (more on this in a later prolix screed). The workout ended up being far more intellectually and physically stimulating than the females, many of whom seemed in the later stages of a terminal bloating illness that also affected their fashion judgment (small towns are NOTORIOUSLY lacking in gay men to heal this terrible malady). I backed towards the door of Gold’s, fearing to be trampled in a stampede by the Sows of Conroe, and scurried next door for some of that land-locked local sushi I’d heard about from the Center for Disease Control bulletins out of Atlanta. It was quite delicious, though the monster turd that wrestled free of my aching sphincter the next day almost required an epidural and a C-section to deliver (crude, I know, but it’s how I felt at the time, and far be it from me to hide such a common uniting factor as a stink-pickle from you, my dearest friends and almost acquaintances).
My car was still percussive, beginning to sound like Tito Puente on a crank-bender, but I felt that I had no choice but to continue onwards towards Dallas. Truly, I figured that I could probably make Big D before the car finally threw up its hands and expired. My supposition was that, whatever happened, it was in the hands of the fates (though hopefully not those of Atropos, the cutter of the life-thread; I was hoping that she was on vacation or at least very inattentive during my particular sojourn) and would probably be highly entertaining, no matter what the outcome. Since I am never wrong, this time I was also of course RIGHT, and the results were…ah…absorbing of my full attention for a very brief period, to say the least.

The Crux of the Biscuit (ADD people, begin reading here)
Approximately 30 miles south of Dallas is the city of Corsicana. I am very familiar with this town because I went to jail there once. I was driving back from Galveston with my girlfriend at the time (an enrapturing creature named Shawn who I came to find out later was actually a logic-supressing, heart-devouring fiend from the darkest and most fetid regions of The Pit) and got pulled over for speeding. I was taken to the lovely Corsicana jail for ANOTHER speeding ticket that I had not remembered to pay (Frisco, TX., $75), and the rum-drunk knuckle-dragging member of the local constabulary wrote me ANOTHER speeding ticket, in addition to treating to an overnight stay in the Cement Hilton. Shawn was forced to drive the remaining distance to my parents’ house in Dallas while I went to rot overnight with the other scoundrels and social rejects.
When I called my parents, hours later after being “processed” (which consisted of fingerprinting, an orange jumpsuit, yellowed-rubber flip-flops and two pictures (one frontal and one profile) for some government employee to whack off to), my dad answered the phone. When he heard my voice on the other end of the line, he started laughing and asking me how the food was. I could hear the laughter of Shawn and my mother (may just her big toe rot it Hell) coming from the background, and the sound of a bottle of wine being opened to celebrate my incarceration; they were having a FINE ol’ hootenanny while I was doing hard time (okay, maybe slightly spongy time) in the Corsicana Gulag. My father mentioned that he MIGHT show up on the morrow to retrieve my sorry carcass once I had served my seventy-five dollars worth of penance.
There I go, digressing again. The above paragraph was not germane to the tale, I just thought I’d scribble it down for your edification to show I’d been around a bit.
In any case, I45 runs through Corsicana, along with a bunch of other little Podunk, no-name, one-horse towns that derive their primary income from setting speed traps on the 3-mile section of revenue-producing highway that has been allotted them. Also along this highway is a drive-in movie theater, and this IS an important part of our story, but not until the end, the very end…
So anyway, I found myself traveling at the apotheotic (is that a word?) speed of 80mph on this particular highway, approaching the drive-in theater that I didn’t know was there yet. I had just emerged from the shoulderless cement confines of a construction area with concrete barriers scant inches from the driver’s side of my Jetta that had run for many, many annoying and grey miles. It was late evening, having just gotten full dark, but still having a faint hint of cornflower blue at the Western edge of the sky where Sol had just laid itself down for the night (or perhaps there was a club in which it had ensconced itself to boogie the hours away while Night did its thing). Distantly I could see flickering images, which I thought might have been the random firing of my neurons that had escaped into the ocular region of my brain, or perhaps an acid flashback of some sort come back to haunt me like some evil golem from my partying past.
As I got nearer and the images resolved themselves into those of Tom Hanks in what I now know is The DaVinci Code, I realized that it was an outdoor venue in which you could park you car, buy some popcorn, view a talkie, and have a make-out session with a homeless girl you’d picked up on the highway (using the overpoweringly buttery stench of the popcorn to disguise the reek of her body-odor and Patchouli stink that flowed like a river of undead trout from her poo-dreads).
Alas, I had no fragrant double-X-chromosome indigent with which to go wenching, so I contented myself with calling a friend to leave a message that there was a drive-in just south of Dallas that might be worth investigating someday.
Forever onward from this fateful day I would wonder if it was the signal from the phone, or a certain frequency of vibration in my voice, or a road vibration, or the way the incandescent rays from the sodium highway lights, that caused things to go awry the minute I had terminated the conversation and replaced the phone in its customary cubbyhole in my dashboard.
A great many things happened in a very short span of time, though it seems to me now as if events had slowed immensely, like time had been left outside in a Swiss winter and now poured slowly, treacle-like, from whatever font or vessel contained it. I will try to describe for you how it went…
It seems that my engine and transmission had, for quite some time, merely been living in the same space and tolerating each other for my sake, much as a couple who should have long ago divorced will stay together (with immense bitterness) for the sake of their children. Like said should-have-split couple, when the end finally came, it was in an immense and passionate explosion. The engine and transmission had a HUGE fight and decided to quit talking to each other. (Here, I must simply end the Bad Marriage analogy unfinished, because here is where the similarity ends).
There was a grinding and screeching as the engine quit working and the wheels that had formerly driven the car forward in style now attempted to halt it in mid-rotation. I jerked the transmission out of 5th gear and into neutral to keep the wheels moving and the car under control. An immense “PAF!” was heard, along with the sounds of pinging metal reflecting at speed from the underside of my car and the road. Someone threw a wool coverlet from Bed, Bath, and Beyond over my windscreen; this was actually no fuzzy blanket, but a layer of black and heated oil thrown from the shredded seals of my engine that had reflected from the inside of the hood and been blown backwards by the wind of my passage.
When I had pulled the car out of gear, I must have jerked the wheel slightly sideways, and this must have occurred when I still had some iota of power steering; now that steering had gone the way of the Dodo (no engine power = no steering power) and the car’s nose had begun to slew to the right, as if the back of the car had realized that it had been neighbors with the front of the car for many years and decided to come over for a visit, or at least to see what all of the noise was all about.
This would not do, and did not bode well for my future plans of remaining whole and intact.
Luckily, I had not yet reached the next construction zone, which I saw later was hemmed in by those aluminum railings that you often see on the edges of large precipices or cliffs, punctured with car-shaped holes and bearing little crosses around the metallic tears. I was in an area of median that had no curbs and consisted of nothing more than nicely wild green grass and black Texas loam, which is what I began to slide sideways into at this time.
I hazarded a glance from the driver’s side window, which had now become more of the windscreen along my vector than a side window. This distressed me somewhat, and the stream of invective that I had begun during the rain of oil redoubled in intensity; I felt it best at this time to look elsewhere for solace.
As it turns out, the passenger-side window offered a different if equally lamentable vista. At first I thought that oil had made its way around the side to cover the passenger window; however, I was soon disabused of this notion when I noticed that it flow appeared to be moving rapidly, and I could see flashes of the streetlights peeking through. I figured out rather quickly that it was just an immense rooster-tail of grass and dirt thrown up from the wheels and undercarriage of the car, scrawling the tale of my passing in a wrathful series of scars upon the gentle slopes of the formerly untrammeled median.
I did NOT feel well about this.
I must say, truthfully, that this was the most terrified I’d been in quite a while; there was absolutely nothing I could do about the situation except to try not to wet myself and die with unsightly underwear when the coroner came to vacuum up the bloody chunks from the length and breadth of the highway, and perhaps the tops of the street-lamps if the final impact and explosion were sufficiently spectacular. My sphincter had a death-grip on the leather of my seat-cushion, and had pulled 10 lbs. of stuffing from the seams of the seat; pucker-factor of 9.7 (the only higher I’d ever experienced was having a gun point-blank at my face, an event that has occurred more than once, unfortunately). I began scrambling around the inside of a car like a panicked squirrel inside a 55-gallon oil-drum, squeaking and throwing what small dignity remained to me out the window and towards the side of the road, where hopefully it would not shatter; perhaps the ambulance personnel would take pity at the obvious disarray and terror in which I had expired and place it in a cooler with my head, where people would remark at my fueral, “At least he died with his dignity intact.”
Then the car…
…just…
…STOPPED.
It just stopped dead (pun intended).
I was, of course, flabbergasted. I actually comprehended what that word meant; “struck dumb with astonishment or surprise”, or “overcome with amazement.” I was still extant. After extracting the cotton, leather, and seat-springs from my butt, I crawled out of the car. There was a deafening silence, except for the sounds of metal pinging and cooling, the gasping last breaths of my vehicle as it expired and went towards the light.
I walked around towards the front of my car; the front of the car was slightly more towards the road than the rear of the car, but the whole thing was axle-deep in mud and grass, the empty and soulless husk a terrible reminder of my years of abuse. I placed my hands on my head and ran them through my hair, the universal sign of “Holy Fucking Shit and his brother Fuck Me, that was close.”
I looked towards the road and the median that lay behind my now-defunct Jetta. There was a wide swath of destruction, with grass and dirt clods lying in the road, along with what appeared to be a freshly-dead possum. Poor bastard. Imagine your possum-self rooting along the road for tasty insects, thinking, “As long as I stay away from the big shiny things on the hard cold stuff, I’m safe.” Then, suddenly you see this large black object come skittering at your cranium and POW! Non-existence for you, my chum…helluva way to go out, if you ask me, which you didn’t…
Suddenly sounds penetrated my hearing in a bolus, as if I’d come up out of a dive into a swimming pool in the middle of a riot at the circus. I could hear honking and yells in the distance. I turned around, hands still on my head, perhaps attempting to keep it from blowing off in the gentle breeze of the Texas plains.
Apparently I had come to a halt directly in front of the drive-in movie theater, whose patrons had received rather more than an eyeful of a bonus show they hadn’t paid for, which consisted of me losing the road like a drunk dropping his keys in the toilet of his favorite bar and spinning out of control like Halley’s fucking comet. This and my subsequent miraculous survival had thrilled them so much that, in an immense eructation of joy and amusement, they were showing their appreciation by honking their horns, flashing their lights, and yelling for all they were worth.
This had taken several seconds for me to figure out, as the brain-lightening of the adrenaline began to wear off and my thought-processes began to function again. When I finally came to this conclusion, I myself took satisfaction in my remaining corporeal and animated and raised both my hands triumphantly above my head, jumping and shouting like the fool that I am and will hopefully always will be…”Whoooooooo!”…”Yeah! Alriiiiiiiight!”…”Yowza!” (maybe not that last one)…
A Corsicana policeman, who had apparently seen the whole thing from the safe distance of the Galaxy (the name of the drive-in theater), pulled out of the drive-in and around the back of my car. He heaved the bulk of his gut out of the Caprice first, grunting with the effort. He was grinning ear-to-ear when he finally managed to emerge, and after assuring that his gut was symmetrically placed over his gun-belt (perhaps gut-belt is more appropriate), he sad, “It looks like you blew your seals.”
A logical conclusion, and one that I had already come to even as my car did its level best to imitated a break-dancer in a full head-spin. My reply was succinct:
“You wouldn’t happen to have some clean underwear and a drink in your car, would you?”
He laughed, as I knew he would, and shook his head no, but he offered to call me a tow-truck. I took him up on the offer, and finished the ride back to Dallas in the reeking confines of a greasy truck, with the even more reeking and greasy tow-truck driver talking about NASCAR and spitting tobacco into a battered and obviously well-utilized Pepsi cup.
The car itself, except for the blown engine, was fine. A hose removed the dirt and grime from the underside and the wheel-wells. My dad voiced his concern in the only way I’ve ever heard him voice it, when I’d obviously done something that could have resulted in my messy and untimely death:
“How in the HELL did you to THAT?!?”
Still, he did take the time to loan me his car so I could get on with my business for a few days, while he found me a loaded 2006 Jetta at auction for less than wholesale. He’s having my car fixed and will sell it, removing the difference between the sale-price and the cost of the engine. I ended up with a new car with 40,000 miles of warranty on it for around $13,000, which is far nicer than the one I had. It will take me a while to pay it off, but things turned out just fine, in the end.
Oh, and it has side-impact airbags, just in case I decide to do a draedle impression on the highway again…

Mayday in May

You think I would have learned by now.

I have been living with myself for a great deal of time, and after many years experience at various parties, shin-digs, get-togethers, hoe-downs, soirees, and blowouts you would posit that I would know my potential limits as well as I know my limited potential.

Of course not; stupidity knows no age limits.

I had been preparing for this Labor Day weekend for the past number of weeks, being social and gregarious, re-establishing long-defunct relationships that had atrophied over the preceding months, insinuating myself amongst new people and harvesting the resultant invitations to celebrations, ramping up my alcohol intake, and conditioning my liver to peak enzymatic performance (until last night, my liver could remove and expel from my bloodstream the toxic equivalent to Chernobyl or the Love Canal disaster in under an hour, leaving me as hale and robust as your average top-level Olympic tri-athlete).

I had even “taken it easy” on the preceding nights, merely dancing until 2am (with a bottle of Scotch in hand the whole night, passing out pulls to whomever asked) to the Waxploitation DJ’s at Red Scoot Inn on Friday night, then carting around a Jetta-full of drunken lesbians to various restaurants and clubs on until 2am on Saturday night.

Unfortunately, all of these preparations and organ-training came to naught because, in my hasty preparation for the evening (including the purchase of a massive cooler full of booze and associated accoutrements), I neglected to eat anything except a peanut-butter sandwich at 11am that morning, before I began the process of testing my liver to 110% of its processing capacity.

After a mere 3 drinks which combined the best of caffeine, fine chocolate liquors, vodka, milk, and ice (and a little bit of some other stuff courtesy of Kenji and Diana, both of whom I am going to strangle with extreme prejudice when I next see them), I was thoroughly blotto.

This is, of course, when our little party showed up to the big party in the park, and I began trying to destroy everyone’s retinas with flash photography. I thought I only had a dozen or so pictures left in the camera, but at some point I must have refilled the bugger with a new roll of 24. I now have in my possession 2 rolls of film that I am afraid to develop for fear of what they might contain. Strangers? People trying to chase me down and remove the camera forcibly from my twitchy, dipsomaniacal hands? Perhaps some of the imaginary creatures I kept seeing out of the corner of my eye during the night? Who knows. Maybe I’ll give the digital pictures to Merrick so he can tweak every sub-pixel and make something interesting out of them.

Suddenly it was over. I was out of film, the concert was ending, and I was trying to wrest from my fully-electrified brain a decent excuse why I couldn’t drive that wouldn’t sound lame. Fortunately, Casey is familiar with the signs of extreme drunkenness in me that others may fail to perceive, and with an, “Alright, give ‘em up” Casey was in possession of my Jetta, and we were all speeding towards his house.

Casey could have robbed a convenience store and I wouldn’t have noticed; I was content to lean my whirling skull against the cool glass of my luxurious back seat (pretty much any place is luxurious if you’re potted, even a cement jail-house floor) and to allow drool to accumulate on my shirt. We arrived at Casey’s house, everyone made their goodbyes (I was told the next day by several people that they had no idea why I hadn’t driven, as I seemed fine). I smiled and waved as they all drove off, and Casey went into his house, expecting me to follow.

I made it as far as the first landing at the top of his stairs before I was doing the Big Spit onto his shrubs like a bulimic prom queen trying to fit into her dress. I could hear him emerge, giggle like the evil little fruit-bag that he is, then hand me a glass of water while I continued to induce reverse-peristalsis over his railing. I must say that I was impressed with the neatness that I displayed; that’s what experience gives you, I guess.

I somehow managed to make it to his couch, where he placed a trash-can with the remnants of some kind of coumin/onion concoction he’d been cooking earlier in the day, causing me another out-of-stomach experience. Basically, by 10:30pm, I was down and out, with all flights cancelled. Unfortunately, I was not given the small mercy of being able to pass out, as the large amounts of caffeine in the drinks I had imbibed combined with the alcohol aches kept me hyper-alert throughout my ordeal. I think my last goodnight words to Casey were, "My teeth are gritty, I'm going to lie down."

I finally peeled myself off of the couch at 7:30am the next morning, threw out the trash, and drove in the mercifully-cloudy dawn to my home. It must have been quite an interesting site to see me trying to make two pairs of sunglasses fit on my head at the same time.

Apologies are owed to:
-Every person whose retinas I crisp-fried with photography.
-Anyone I tripped over, fell on or mashed during the concert.
-Anyone who had the misfortune to be in my “talking perimeter”, which extended that night from myself to a circumference of approximately 100 meters.
-Casey’s dog, who has a soft and irresistible coat.
-Casey’s fern, which has soft and irresistible leaves.
-Casey’s couch, which has soft and irresistible upholstery.

I spent most of that day nursing a Defcon 1 hangover, in which the missiles had already been launched and landed somewhere just behind my throbbing eyeballs.

Still, a significant blame can be leveled at society, which came over to my house on Thursday with a six-pack and encouraged me to embrace a serious drinking habit. Some blame may also be laid at your calloused feet, my friends, and never mind what for; I’ll forgive all of you if you will just buy me a few drinks at your earliest convenience…

The Austin Smoking Ban

A genuinely free society operates on what is called the Harm Principle, wherein you are allowed to do whatever you want to do unless it harms me or infringes upon my freedoms. You are more than welcome to snort coke, shoot heroin, imbibe alcohol or enema (is that a verb? it is now) whatever you feel will send you to the highest peaks of the lowest depths in the least/best amount of time; however, you are also responsible for the consequences, and if it harms me directly (indirectly is a completely different discussion) you are not allowed to do it.

Smoking is a direct cause of many cancers and people smelling like a burning tire-dump in New Jersey, and an indirect (but closely correlated) route to heart disease, emphysema and not getting laid because you're gross, hacking, oyster-chucking coughs are distressing to others. Your smoke harms you (which is no big deal), me (which is a HUGE deal) and others (this deal lies somewhere in between, but I don’t care nearly as much about them as about myself). End of story. I’ve done immunology research on just this very subject and NONE OF IT IS GOOD.

Bringing up regulation of food and fat people is a separate issue; again, it’s something you do to yourself, and if you want to turn into a giant, sweaty fat-ass then more power to your cellulite-laden butt (though it argues against my contributing to a national health policy if you can’t be bothered to care). If you were eating some Lays chips at a bar and the Olestra drifted over and gave me horrible anal-leakage (a known side-effect of Olestra), I’d expect it to be banned as well, but it doesn’t, so it isn’t.

Some of you argue that people have a choice whether to subject themselves to the smoke. Sure, if you don’t mind not hearing live music. The bands don’t play the “Non-Smoking” venues because…wait for it…that’s right, clever boys and girls…THERE AREN’T ANY! That argument swings the other way also; if the smoking ban takes effect; you smokers have a choice not to frequent those venues. You can just sit in your Nova with the tinted windows, crank up the tunes and coat the inside of your car with a fine, yellowish layer of nicotine to your heart’s content; it’ll be just like you’re there except CHEAPER if you buy your liquor beforehand. You’ll end up whacking off in the sleeve of your favorite coat just like normal…

The argument that “people have a choice where they work” is also spurious. When you’re young you want the excitement of working at a club and don’t have a sense of your own mortality, and many people have the choice of either taking a crappy job at a bar/club or not paying the bills; so I guess you might be right in that there IS a choice, even if it is one doused in feces.

Non-smoking being “bad for business”?!? So basically your argument is that, even though the smoking is harmful to everyone, we should let it slide because it would be so economically harmful to the bars/clubs/restaurants involved. I guess all those chemical companies and strip-mining operations that were formerly dumping massive amounts of toxins into our skies and rivers so we could have cheap fuel could use that same argument, eh? Not a good idea, methinks…

I saw a sign in a window saying, “Save live music, vote against the smoking ban.” Everyone seems to be talking about this issue as if every band was just going to quit performing, as their audience is going to stay at home because they can’t smoke. Do you go to a music venue to smoke or listen to music? If you can’t go somewhere without being able to smoke, then that’s a sign of…what’s that word…oh, yeah, ADDICTION.

There are certain issues that cannot be left to “personal choice” because they affect so many people. If we’d left the issue of slavery up to “personal choice” then a lot of rap artists and jazz musicians would be picking cotton in Tennessee right now. Segregation would still be a large part of life in the South. We’d probably still have smallpox, diphtheria and polio lurking around because people “didn’t trust” their immunizations. The ideal of government is to only get involved when the issue affects enough people that it is a boat-anchor to the whole society, and the illness that smoking brings is definitely in that category.

I’ve been in Boston, New York and San Francisco both before and after their respective smoking bans, and things are JUST FINE. People still go to bars, and they may step outside to have a cigarette, but they still go out and spend money on booze, cheap drinks and hookers to behead and leave in their car-trunks to rot and stink. Initially, there will be a bunch of people who refuse to go out because of their principles, and there will probably be a dip in bar-revenue. A hue and cry of protest will arise, similar to that of former slave-owners bitching because their profits were lower after having to HIRE people to work their plantations. I think bars with patios will go over big and make a little more of a killing because of the access to a smoking area with liquor, but I don’t see much of a change after a few months time.

My girlfriend smokes. She’s outside smoking right now because my place is a non-smoking venue. She knows this and still comes around for the cheap booze, the slammin’ tunes, and amazing, urban-renewal style wall-shaking sex (sorry for the TMI…wait, no I’m not, I rule). Funny how, if the entertainment is good enough people still come around. Maybe a smoking ban will result in lower drink prices and better quality attractions as a draw…horrible to think that some benefit besides personal health might come out of this. Those government SONS OF BITCHES.

I go out whether or not there’s smoke, and I assume all of the smokers are the same. I’ll see you all, smokers and non-smokers alike, out at a club sometime and you can stub your butts out on the back of my neck then. I’ll bring Bactine.

Warm, fuzzy regards, you sack of butt-holes,
Scott

P.S. (a quick lesson in science):
Cells are most vulnerable to DNA damage-causing agents (such as Chromium, Cadmium, and other pollutants found in cigarettes) when they are dividing. Alcohol is toxic to cells, so it kills them. To replace them (such as in the throat and nasal passages, since that is where it has most undiluted contact with cells) the cells that aren’t dead divide, giving the smoke easier access to the dividing DNA and increasing the damage that smoking does. A US study revealed that among consumers of both products the risk of these cancers was increased more than 35-fold among those who smoked forty or more cigarettes a day and took more than four alcoholic drinks a day. It has been estimated that tobacco smoking and alcohol drinking account for about three quarters of all oral and pharyngeal cancers. (Blot, WJ. et al. Smoking and drinking in relation to oral and laryngeal cancer. Cancer Research 1988; 48: 3282‑3287). This data is supported by every study I’ve seen, dated and recent. I’ve seen what cancer looks like, from the molecular level on up, and I don’t particularly want to increase my chances of getting it with other people’s behavior. It doesn’t mean I’ll live forever or avoid cancer, but it definitely decreases the chances.