You Dumb Bastard

If you ask me, the worst thing about this economic downfall is having to look at my son's stupid face every goddamn morning.

Chip crawled back home after he lost his job and after six months it doesn't look like he'll ever move out again, which chafes my ass plenty. Eighteen years of his mopey horseshit was enough, if you ask me.

But no one ever asks me. That's why I have to tell people what's on my mind, on account of never being asked what I think. And that ain't just my opinion either, it's a goddamn fact- just ask my wife if she cares what I think about anything. Goddamn cow will roll her eyes and sigh or maybe she'll laugh, but you'll know she doesn't give a shit about me either way. I mean, just look at this house. It's a mess, I tell you. I married a goddamn slob, is what. Look. I bought this house for her and does she give a fuck? Do I get any respect?

Hell no.

Respect is a funny thing. Some guys think that respect is just another word for fear, and that they can earn respect just by being a bad-ass or even flat-out mean. That is bullshit, if you ask me. What I'm sayin' is, I am afraid of my boss, but I don't respect the fat cocksucker one damn bit. My kid Chip is afraid of me, but he damn sure don't respect his old man, not one damn bit. No amount of me hitting him is gonna change that. But it can make me feel better.

So I walk over to the kitchen table where the kid always sits, his head always in his hands, his eyes always looking at the damn floor.

"You dumb bastard!", I tell him. I smack the top of his head, just to make sure he hears me.

"Did you hear me?" Another smack.

"Ow. Geez. Pop, you don't have to hit me."

"Hell I don't. And don't tell me what to do. I'm still your father and I'll kick your ass whenever I want."

"Fine. Kick my ass. I don't care," he mumbles.

His mumble-mouth bullshit pisses me off. The dumb kid has been mumbling his whole goddamn life; we spent a fortune on speech therapy when he was in grade school and it didn't do him a damn bit of good. The goddamn quack doctor told us he had "esteem" issues. She told me my son should go to a head-shrinker. A shrink! Goddamn quack was lucky she was a woman, otherwise I'd have knocked her on her ass and kicked the shit out of her. But I have too much self-respect to go around hitting broads, so I saved the ass-kicking for Chip. No son of mine is going to be a nut-case, not if I can help it.

"You stupid turd", I said to him one afternoon after his speech therapy session. "Your therapist thinks you have some kind of fucked-up esteem issues. Like you are crazy and need to see a shrink. You know that shit pisses me off, don't you? Crazy ain't cheap, boy. You planning on being crazy your whole life?"

He mumbled some crybaby shit that I mighta paid more attention to if I'd known he was gonna shut up and stay quiet for two years. The boy just flat quit talking , wouldn't say a goddamn word no matter how much I yelled at him. I even spanked him one night when I was drunk and he didn't say jackshit. Him not talking caused some trouble at school, so we pulled a few strings and moved him into a special school for dumb kids; 'dumb' as in they can't talk, not dumb like they are stupid. Chip is plenty stupid, but he ain't really dumb in the other sense, he was just acting that way because of his esteem issues.

Anyway, after a couple years away at the dumb school, Chip started talking again and his teachers thought it was a miracle or some kinda holy-angel-halliyooha horseshit. Seems we forgot to tell them about Chip being able to talk in the first place and hell, they were so happy with their new miracle that I didn't have the heart to tell them about Chip's esteem issues.

Plus, me and the wife made a few thousand bucks telling our "story" to fat suckers on crappy TV talk-shows, so I guess it was a miracle, since it paid for our trip to Las Vegas and I always figured it would take a miracle to afford that.

But I guess our story got boring to the TV people pretty quick 'cause the TV shows called less and less often, then stopped altogether . For a while, we tried to fatten Chip up so we could make him lose a huge amount of weight and go back on TV with a new story, but Chip wound up getting sick and all we got out of it was another bill to pay.

Goddamn insulin ain't cheap, either.

Look Ma, I'm An Investment Bank

In retrospect, I should have lied to Ms. Henderson when she asked me what was wrong. I mean, I'm a teenage girl and we, as a group, are supposed to be moody, right? It's what Ms. Henderson, who was my English teacher, would call a "stereotype", like saying that the Irish are drunks or that my classmates are stupid, privileged lazy white kids who have parents that hire stereotypes to trim their hedgerows. Anyway, I could have just bullshitted the poor woman and told her that I was curled up in tears on the bathroom floor because I had cramps, or that my appendix had ruptured or "some boy" had told lies about me on Myspace or something, anything other than the truth.

"I hate this place", I told her between sobs," I wish I was dead."

Ms. Henderson, whose first name was Nancy and graduated from this very school, Charles Fort High, less than ten years earlier, got kinda nervous-sounding and looked around to make sure no one else was in the room.

"You know," she half-whispered, " sometimes I hated this place when I was your age. A lot, sometimes. But you have to remember that you are much smarter than the kids who pick on you. One day you'll look back and none of this will matter because you'll be somewhere else, doing something that you care about, doing something you love with your life."

"Oh, yeah?", I sneered at her, "you are smart and you came back. You hate this job. I can tell. I see you crying in your car in the mornings."

That was true. Everyone knew Ms. Henderson was really sad. Some of the kids would make little "boo-hoo" noises and pretend to wipe their eyes when she walked by in the hall. I think it was those kids she meant when she said I got' picked on'. I don't get picked on, I get ignored, which I guess is better; I mean, like, it doesn't usually make me cry or anything. Except maybe sometimes. A lot, sometimes.

But I knew I'd made a mistake when I mouthed off to Ms. Henderson. I thought she was going to break down and get all sobby on me, but instead she gave me one of the clumsiest hugs I ever had from a woman and said something really weird.

"Cindy," she told me, "of all my students, you are the one that I wish I could see grow up."

What the fuck was that supposed to mean? I mean, I'm almost seventeen. How much more grown-up do you get?

What I didn't know was that Ms. Henderson had quit a really good job at some big-ass Ivy League college, had given up her career and moved back here to Columbia to take care of her mother,a widow who had some kind of old-person disease and needed a lot of help- I also didn't know that her husband had left her - they had been having arguments about putting Nancy's mom in a home and it came out that Mr. Henderson had been fucking Ms. Greentree, the science teacher, which was kinda creepy because Ms. Greentree is really old, like over forty or something, plus she always acted extra-special nice to Nancy, like they were Best Teacher Friends Forever, while the whole time she was boning Nancy's husband. Ms.Greentree is pretty gross, if you ask me.

I did know that Ms. Henderson's- Nancy's- mother had died a few months ago, right before school started, but I didn't know how just how sad Ms. Henderson-I mean Nancy- really was. Nobody really did. Later, we heard that she was taking four different kinds of pills just so she could get happy enough to drive to work and cry in the parking lot. But I didn't know that then.

The evening after Nancy caught me crying, she went home and found out her divorce had been finalized. She filled up her tub with bubble bath, popped a bottle of champagne and used it to wash down a celebrity-sized handful of pills. Her death might have been ruled an accidental overdose if she hadn't used her lipstick to write "I hate this place" on the bathroom mirror in giant red letters.

Anyway, when I found out what she had written on the mirror , I felt like I shouldn't have told Nancy what I did. I started crying a lot more than I used to, which meant that I stopped getting ignored as much as I would have liked. Instead, I got a lot of attention from doctor-types who asked me about my feelings and why I cried all the time.

I didn't tell them that Ms. Henderson had quoted me in her suicide note. It made me feel crazy when I thought about that and when you are talking to a psychiatrist, the last thing you want is to feel crazy.

Well, I must have passed some kinda test or something because I didn't get put in the looney bin or anything, I just got some pills to "try for awhile". The pills made me cry more than I already was, so they gave me some other pills, but those made me really tired all day, so then I got yet another prescription and that one made me feel pretty happy except that I couldn't sleep very well, so they gave me another pill for that and by the time I graduated from High School I hardly ever cried anymore and I was sleeping like a baby. Even when my father died of pancreatic cancer, I didn't cry- I mean I did, a little, but I talked to a doctor I barely knew and he gave me some new pills that made me stop crying long enough to get through the funeral.

But I had spent so much energy on not crying that my my grades had slipped- and I was kinda bored with school anyway- and my mom was sorta messed up after dad died- so I decided to postpone college and stay at home for a year or so to help out my mom with the house and dad's stuff and all that. I took some classes at Howard Community and got a part-time job as a substitute teacher. It turned out that I liked my job, so I made plans to go to a "real" college and finish school, but then my mom's diabetes got really bad and I decided to stay home for a little longer and keep helping her.

She died two weeks ago. I have started crying again and I am finding it harder to get up in the morning and go to work no matter how many pills I take- substitute teachers aren't supposed to call in sick as much as I do, so I guess I'll probably lose my job soon. I will miss my students, some more than others.

I hate this place.

Thanks For Getting Busted

Godzilla bless you, Daryl Hannah. We need more celebrities to step up and get busted for speaking out against the XL Keystone Pipeline. More people need to hear about it.

The Keystone XL is a proposed 1,700 mile pipeline that will carry Canadian crude oil across the middle of America, from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.

What could go wrong? It's just raw crude oil, and the Oil Industry hasn't spilled any oil since, like, forever. I mean, we can be pretty sure that the Big Oil's streak of bad luck is over and nothing bad will ever happen, anywhere along the entire length of the pipeline. No earthquakes, no tornadoes, no floods and...

...hey, did you notice this- the line runs very close to Oklahoma City, which , sadly is still remembered as the place where American terrorist Tim McVeigh blew up an office building. My guess is that he'd have picked the pipeline as his target instead, had that been an option.
The Keystone XL pipeline would be a tempting target for anyone with explosives and a serious grudge against America.

The objective is to reduce our dependence on 'foreign' oil, which I guess means America annexed Canada and it didn't make the news or something, because last time I checked, Canada was a foreign country.

I wonder if Saudi Arabia is worried about the competition from the XL line? It would be in their best interest if some wackjob did something horrific to the line. Not that anyone would.

Speaking of Saudi Arabia:

Did you know that they are building solar powerplants in Saudi Arabia? They would rather export the oil than burn it in their own air. Right now the plants are in their first stages, but it is only a matter of time and research until the technology is developed into an advanced enough state to be commercially viable. My totally non-scientific guess would be that it will take decades before 'Green' energy can be produced at massively commercial levels, so the sooner we get started the better.

If America won't lead the way in renewable energy, the Saudis will. Of course, they'll be building nuclear power plants as well, so it isn't as if they Saudis are 'Green', they are just smarter than we are. They'll be powering their luxury resorts with wind farms and solar arrays and exporting their smog to us.When the oil runs out, they'll sell us the technology we should be developing now.


Remember how we finally succeeded in our mission to spread Freedom on Iraq, at the cost of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars? Do you know what the newly-Freedomed Iraqis want to do?:

Many of the world's biggest energy companies may have to surrender most of the gas from Iraq's vast southern oilfields to a processing and export project led by Shell, a final draft contract between Baghdad and Europe's biggest company shows.

Under the $17bn gas deal to be ratified by the Iraqi cabinet, Baghdad has pledged to do what it takes to ensure these fields supply the Shell-led Basra Gas Company (BGC) joint venture with all the raw gas and natural gas liquids (LNG) it needs, including for an LNG export plant.

We spilled all that blood and treasure to set up a State that promises to give OUR oil to the damned Europeans. What a bunch of ingrates! Are we gonna have to invade them all over again?

Maybe we should invade Holland instead, Shell is a Dutch company, after all.

.

The E=MC5²

Do you remember the days when you could get 10 free record albums just by writing a fake name on a Columbia House Record Club coupon and dropping it in a mailbox?

The card gave a few choices of favorite musical styles. If I recall, I think the list was pretty limited, the choices being more or less : Rock, Soft Rock, Classical, Jazz, Country, Pop, R&B and maybe Disco, since this was the 1970's after all.

You pretty much had to go with plain-old 'Rock' back then. 'Soft Rock' would get you laughed at by your friends- they were way too cool to admit that they liked The Carpenters as much as you did.
Today is different. I'm a DJ and I'm almost terrified to discuss genre for fear of seeming completely clueless. There are more genres than there are bands- and there are a LOT of bands!

Me: What kind of music do you play?

Coolster: Oh, it is combination of emo, crust-core, mixtape, shoe-gaze, twee metal and new rock, but with lots of ambient darkwave 8-bit alt-folk elements, and of course, some spoken-word psyche-salsa beat breaks.

And then they'll play a song and it'll sound a lot like an old 1980's Casio playing the same beat over and over while a couple male voices yip and yap in the foreground and amplified guitars fall over and break in the background. And when I ask the Coolster how they got the neat guitar sound, he'll tell me it was sampled from some old record he stole from his Dad...he thinks it was called Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. Some old dude he'd heard about somewhere.

Aaargh. Don't kids today know anything about musical history?

I bet none of them remember prototypical Math-OCD band, The E=MC5².


Formed at MIT in the late 1960's The E=MC5² was comprised of a rotating cast of students and professors who understood that all music is somehow math-based, even if the math is sometimes a bit faulty. They also took a lot of acid and talked far too much while they were tripping, and before long, a now-unknown 'core' group found themselves undertaking the daunting task of converting the numerical value of pi to music.


The band spent their formative years in an abandoned schoolhouse, surrounded by chalkboards, cheap guitar amps, lava lamps and blacklight posters; members would drop in and out as academic arguments, exhaustion, intellectual misadventures and heavy drug use took their respective tolls, but according to legend they persevered through all obstacles: switching to acoustic instruments during blackouts, changing locales as as the authorities chased them from one condemned building to another, a haggard, bearded and discredited physics professor slapping a bongo in 3.14 time while zealous students chanted numerical litanies in order to keep the song going until a new venue could be found.

The descendents of the original members are still playing , currently doing the latest in a decades-long series of farewell tours. As of this writing, the The E=MC5² hold the unofficial World Record for the longest continuously performed musical composition of all time, with their trademark opus 'Pi-Eyed' clocking in at an amazing 38 years, 6 months, 10 days, 11 hours and 12 minutes. Thirteen minutes now, since they are still playing!

Today's show will be a tribute to the madness that is the The E=MC5²: We'll hear a carefully selected two-hour excerpt from the decade-spanning classic 'Pi-Eyed' , including a fabulous moment in 2008 when the late Captain Beefheart came out of his hermit-like retirement to sing a nine-hour duet with Amy Winehouse, who wasn't dead yet. Legend has it that Canadian rockers Rush are playing the background musical parts of this segment, but everyone present was either senile, wasted or currently dead, so no one will ever know for sure. A wayward guitar solo was once credited to Eric Clapton, but upon being asked, he quickly assigned the blame to George Harrison, who had been dead for years at the time.

With some luck, there might be time to play some other songs, but you'll have to tune in to find out, won't you?

WRIR 97.3 FM...the fun starts at 1PM 8/13/2011.

A Head Full of Quandry and a Mighty, Mighty Thirst

I love my radio friends

There are many ways to cope with the lingering spectre of depression. One way would to stay up all night listening to six billion songs in a single evening, imagining to oneself how the songs will fit together,for example: how will the end of this Bird York song fade into the beginning of this Joan Wasser tune?

Pretty damn well, it turns out. If you don't believe me, download the podcast and hear for yourself. If you do believe me, download the podcast and enjoy it.

What I'm trying to say here is: download the podcast.

THE NEW BREAKFAST SNOB: AUG. 6th 2011

(Originally aired on WRIR 97.3 FM. )

The Kinks- Preservation (Single)

This is a nearly-unknown Kinks track...a very un-Kinks-like groove rocker with very Kinks-y timeless lyrics.

Booker T. Jones- Progress

You can get the awesome compilation CD that this soulful tune is taken from here, for FREE.

Joni Mitchell- Don't Interrupt The Sorrow

Ah, Joni. This song is nothing short of brilliant. The title of this post is taken from it.

Bird York- Bought A Gun

"By the time I'm eleven, I'll be a man"

Joan As Policewoman- Nervous

Had a couple callers on this one, they loved it and they should, it is awesome...I have been a huge Joan Wasser fan for years...why is she not totally fucking famous yet?

Sparks- I Can't Believe That You Would Fall For All The Crap In This Song

"And only you and only you, my love"

Of Montreal- An Eluadarian Instance

This band is better than a million circuses.

Kalliopi- Summer Is Over

She's from Greece. Things are tough in Greece right now, hopefully there's some solace in music.

Nouvelle Vague- Making Plans For Nigel

XTC cover.

Tom Waits- Make It Rain

"Sharpen my knives on my mistakes"

Amy Winehouse- Fuck-Me Pumps

Add Amy to my list of unattainable post-mortem crushes; Voltairine DeCleyre, Clara Bow, and Amy Winehouse.

Louis Armstrong & Ella Fitzgerald- Frim Fram Sauce

Oooo tasty.

Rare Earth- Is Your Teacher Cool?

Depends on the lesson.

The Stranglers- The Sweet Smell of Success

Funkadelic- Funky Dollar Bill

Jimi Hendrix- Message of Love

Miles Davis- Spanish Key (single edit)

Michelle Malone and Band du Soliel- Cortez the Killer

Awesome live cover of classic Neil Young song...Michelle Malone is the real rocking deal.

Jennings- Surrender

New album coming soon!

Manfred Mann's Earth Band- Cloudy Eyes

Atomic Rooster- Devil's Answer

Roxy Music- Three and Nine

John Cale- Taking It All Away

Brian Eno- The True Wheel

David Bowie- Blackout

Man, this song is about best thing that ever happened to my ears, ever.

Astronauts of Antiquity- Breakthrough

Misty Boyce- Be A Man

I like the way the title of this song doesn't say what you probably think it does...but if she was a man, she couldn't sing like she does. And that would be a bummer, 'cause she sings great.

A-Infos: A Listener's Quick Guide To Downloading

Like most other honest art forms, live radio is a dying one. Not that radio is necessarily an 'art form', but it should be. My own show is a semi-improvisational stream-of-consciousness musical journey of juxtaposticated schizixpression that doesn't claim to be fair or balanced, but I do tend to let you interpret things as you will. If I stopped to explain what I was doing, my show would consist of a lot more talking and a lot less music.And who wants to listen to that?

But sometimes some explaining is helpful...as in explaining how to get one of the consarned A-Infos podcasts to download so you can take The New Breakfast Snob with you on your nano-drive gadget and listen to it in the privacy of your own head.

Well, you could start at the Show Archive Page:

1) Click the tiny little Podcast button (circled in red w/arrow)

2) Something very much like the window below will appear. Choose a bookmark location of your preference (I used my toolbar for an example) and click 'Subscribe'.

You should see the new Podcast icon (circled in red) appear on the toolbar (or wherever you've saved it). Click the icon and a menu of all the available podcasts for the show will appear:

Click on the show that catches your eye. (Note that you can also do this from the main archive page on the left of the screenshot.). You will be taken to a page for that individual episode:

Scroll Down to the bottom. The target is circled and has a big red arrow pointing to it. Aim and click. Your file should start downloading after that.

If you think that the steps above are a lot of work, you should try putting together two hours of music each and every week, announcing it live on the radio, recording it, uploading the recording, writing out the playlist and compiling the technical manual that goes along with said podcast.

On second thought, don't try that. Just download and enjoy the tunes.

Podcast here...

THE NEW BREAKFAST SNOB JULY 30 2011

Sparks- Intro/I've Never Been High

Amy Winehouse- Amy, Amy, Amy

Edwinn Starr- Who Cares If You Are Happy Or Not? (I Do)

F&M- Another Closing Number

Jennings- Surrender

Gong- Digital Girl

Steve Hillage- Searching for the Spark

Goldfrapp- Strict Machine

Bird York- Prozac Day

Area 27- Human Alien

Hawkwind- To Love A Machine

Pink Floyd - Summer '68

Jimi Hendrix- Sunshine of Your Love

The Fierce and the Dead- 10'x 10'

Jeff Beck- Loose Cannon

Green Man- Cold Blows The Wind

Clannad- Battles

Rare Earth- When I Write

Funkadelic- Super Stupid

Hot Tuna- Extrication Love Song

Joan as Policewoman- Furious

The Whispering Tree- So Many Things

Stefanie Seskin- Your Own Road

Misty Boyce- Razor

Garbage- #1 Crush

John Cale- Heartbreak Hotel

HuDost- Salome

Work Related

Chris was getting really tired of listening to the Bear's complaints. He despised his latest office job and he hated all of his co-workers, but the Bear was the worst.

"Nobody cares", muttered Whiny the Boo-Hoo Bear. Chris ignored him.

"Nobody cares", repeated Boo, just a little louder.

One more time, louder still.

Boo looked over at where Christopher Sobbin pretended to be engrossed in an Excel spreadsheet. Chris was trying to make his picks for this week's football pool, but that goddamn fucking bear was distracting the shit out of him.

I never should have taken this job, thought Chris. This place is full of fucked-up people, more than I'm used to- and I'm used to a lot.

"Nobody CARES", went Boo-Hoo, managing to be both pitiful and loud.

"Jesus fucking nailholes!”, exclaimed Christopher, "what the fuck is wrong this time?"

"I forgot my password"

"Again? Dammit...hold on."

Chris wrote something on a post-it note and handed it to the bear.

"Here's your damn password. Don't lose it this time."

"It doesn't work anymore- nothing ever goes right for me”, sighed the insufferable ursine irritant. "Mr. Rabbid said he was gonna fix my computer real good before he left, but it hasn't worked right since he quit."

"Rabbid didn't quit. He got fired. Because you told Mr.Owl about his thing with Cutlet."

Chris wasn't sure what exactly happened between Mr. Rabbid, who was at least 40, and Cutlet, a chubby intern of indeterminate age and gender, but it was ugly enough to get Rabbid fired and Cutlet transferred to Marketing. Chris hoped that by mentioning it, Boo would spill the beans, but the annoying fucker was too wrapped up in his bearish self-pity to engage in gossip.

"Here, Bear. Let me take a look." Chris wheeled his chair over to Whiny's cube. He typed in 'Ctrl+Alt+Delete'. His fingers stuck to the keys as he typed.

"Goddamnit, you fucking chucklehead! There's honey all over your fuckin' keyboard!"

"That's it!", squealed the bear, clapping his sticky paws together. Chris noticed paperclips, cracker crumbs and pen caps stuck in the matted mess of Whiny's fur. The bear-smell was so sourly rotten that it made Sobbin wince.

Just because you shit in the woods doesn't mean that you don't have to wipe your ass, Chris mused.

"That's what?” Chris asked.

"My password! H-U-N-N-Y! Honey!"

Christopher went back to his spreadsheet picks. In his mind he was killing the Bear in a thousand horrible ways.

And they all lived happily ever after.

One Possible Solution

Sorry guys. Even the tube worms must go.

=================================================

The alert reader may have noticed that the world is in a terrible state. Even a cursory review of the daily news is enough to trigger any number of latent emotional disorders- these are interesting times indeed.

Not good, just interesting.

Fascinating , disturbing and depressing.

Interesting.

I think that we should wait until the next giant meteor or Gamma Ray Burst wipes out all the life on Earth;but until that happens we should try not to destroy the planet , ourselves and each other- but noo....it's all war, bombs, disaster, human-on-human boomin', all the damn time. Mindless incomprehension would be fighting words, except no one understands the big words anymore , just the fighting caused by tiny minds using small words

So, if the powers that be must destroy the world, please let them make it as quick and painless as possible, because the idea of a long, drawn-out East-West WWIII followed by Apocalypse- ( natural, man-made or divine) - depresses the hell out of me.

I have a better plan.

Instead of an East vs. West conflict based on religious insanity, why not just shift the war to North vs. South and base it in on some other sort of insanity- one not involving religion- let's base our doomsday on equatorial physics. Thermonuclear equatorial physics, to be precise. That can be plenty insane in the right hands.

I'm sure you have heard how water in a swirling drain will circle in one direction in the Northern Hemisphere and in the opposite direction in the Southern- this makes everyone who lives South of the equator different from everyone who lives to the North of said dividing line.

Clockwise or counter-clockwise flushing? Well?

Certainly that is an irreconcilable difference worth dying for.

Why not fight about it? It makes as much sense as killing in the name of god who ostensibly endorses peace.

To really hasten the Eschaton, we can take all the nuclear weapons on the planet and divide them between North and South.

The bombs will then be moved to their respective owner's Pole , buried in the ice caps and detonated.

This should cover the planet with a roiling cloud of radioactive steam- and generate two enormous waves- one heading North and one heading South. If timed precisely, these waves can meet at the equator and finish WWIII forever.

The only witnesses might be a handful of astronauts.

Imagine watching the world go BOOM! from outer space.

You'd probably be too busy fighting with the guy from the Other Side over the last oxygen tank to notice that nobody won the last war.

Clockwise or counter-clockwise. You decide, we'll homicide.

.

(satire!)

Misunderstanding Art and the People Who Make It

Have you ever had a blogbuddy that you've read for months or even years , when suddenly in the course of a email or comment exchange, they will say something like: "I wish I was a writer"?

Perhaps you have a friend that occasionally gifts you with a painting- or a poem -or hand-made ornament of some sort, and then tells you that they wish they were an artist. You look around your home and see your friend's work adorning your walls, after all you've collected a number of their works over the years. In fact, the place wouldn't be quite the same without them.

So you look at your friend, who is sweet, kind and humble to a fault , and they look at you with their big, vulnerable, approval-seeking eyes as you struggle to find the words needed to comfort them.

What the fuck is wrong with you? is the proper way to console your friend.

Well, maybe not precisely those words, perhaps something like: I guess somebody who is an artist is signing your name on their art then, because I have a print hanging on my wall with your name on it and it is awesome.

They will inevitably shuffle their feet and mumble something about never really selling anything or making much money at it. This is when you have to watch your temper. Your poor friend was picked on enough in school and being mean won't help them much. There is something about a talented person who says things like "I suck at [art-form], I am a failure, waaaah" that makes you ( me) want to slap some self-esteem into them- but that isn't the instinct to follow. It'll backfire and make things worse.

What you try to do is explain that they shouldn't hold themselves to some impossible and contradictory double-standard based on money or acclaim. I mean, I think most readers of this blog would agree that 99% percent of popular art/music/media is utterly insipid drivel that is mass-produced and marketed at the pod-people demographic. Yet the people responsible for perpetrating this nonsense on us are held up as artists- or even worse-as critics with opinions that count. Plus they make oodles of money. But do you actually think what they do has more artistic value than what you do?

You produce maybe one painting every six months or so and when you are done, you usually give it to someone who you care about. That person cherishes it. When they have company at home, they like to show it off to their visitors. It will remain valuable to your friend as long as they live, and maybe longer. Can you say that about Susan Boyle CDs?

Personally, I'm not going hang an ugly piece of shit on my wall just to make you feel better about yourself. I might stop inviting you over instead. If I display it, it is because I like it and if you tell me that you suck, then you are insulting my taste.

And writers. Do you blog? Look at your sidebar. Do you have more than zero readers?

My take on writing is based on the famous Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment.

Simple version: In the experiment, a cat is placed in a sealed box that contains a radioactive pellet with 50/50 chance of decaying over a certain period of time. Should the decay occur, it will kill the cat. Schrodinger proposed that until an observer interacted with the cat- opened the box- the cat was neither alive nor dead but existed smeared and super-positioned in both states simultaneously, and that the 'real' status was determined at the moment of observation.

Your story is that cat. You place it on-line and wait. After a while you get a comment, someone likes it. You repeat the experiment over time and eventually 10 or 15 people start saying they like it and read most, if not all, of what you write.

The cat is alive. You have readers.

Congratulations! That makes you a writer. Hopefully it isn't posthumously like the fellow who wrote Confederacy of Dunces.

You have 10 or 15 people who actually care what you say and think and that is 10 or 15 more than most people get. My poor departed granny would have sacrificed her grandkids to Baphomet if she could have had half that many people pay attention to her stories.

Being a financially successful artist doesn't necessarily mean you are a good one and being a good one doesn't necessarily guarantee an income. Crazy, innit?

And then there is the whole "suffering artist" thing. That is some black-cloud dreary-ass shit, man. Get the hell over it.

If you really must insist on suffering for your art, get a soul-killing 9-5 office job, wait tables, work retail or some other marginal job. That way you'll have at least have money for food and to help pay for your art of choice. And if you can afford an amp, a guitar, a place to live and a rehearsal space, then you aren't suffering. You have it made. Everyone hates their shitty job, that doesn't make you special. What makes you special is that you can express and release that emotion through your art...oh, right, except you'd have to be an artist to do that.

And if you are fortunate enough to be spared the necessity of a crappy job and have lots of free time to do your art-o-choice, then shut the fuck up with the suffering gabble already. If I could stay home and play guitar all day on a trust fund or lotto winnings, I would choose that and I wouldn't bitch about how nobody understands or appreciates me or my art.

Well, not much, that is.

The Temporary Song

My secret girlfriend Ellen buys her wine by the case. I think that's pretty cool, because technically it will be six weeks until I am old enough to buy it myself. Not that I'd buy wine, I will be buying beer on my 21st birthday, not some stupid foreign wine that comes in a box packed full of straw and hay. Do they make wine in barns or something? I should Google it sometime.

Anyway, she buys it from this fancy wine 'shoppe' in her neighborhood, which is like a regular shop except smaller, spelled different and everything is more expensive than in regular shops. They don't sell anything in most shoppes that I've ever heard of, so it would be really boring for me to go there with Ellen if the shoppe weren't so close to the local Guitar MegaBucket. A Guitar MegaBucket is like the exact opposite of a 'shoppe' - plus it's full of guitars, so that makes it cool.

I play guitar in a band called The Sickening Thud, I know a little bit about guitars and wanted to take a look at some, so I told Ellen I would meet her at the GuitarMegaBucket after she got her wine. She yelled at me a little for that , but I know not to take it personal- she is just that way, yelling a lot when talking will do or when shutting up might be best. I think maybe she is getting crazy like old people get, I mean she's a lot older than me, which is why she is my secret girlfriend and not just a regular girlfriend like my regular girl Gloria. Ellen is like a shoppe and Gloria is more like a shop. But I'll talk about that later, maybe after I'm done with my guitar story.

There was an old bearded guy behind the counter at the guitar shop, he was talking to some normal-looking old dude:

...so I told him to follow along in E and he was fine, but when I said G or A or anything, really, he was lost, he had no idea what to do. It was like he just couldn't understand the symmetry of it at all. It was bizarre.

Did you try using barre chords to demonstrate how the position is really the same? I find that helps.

Yeah, but not with this one.

For a minute there, I thought they might be talking about guitar because letters E, G and A are like music notes on the guitar and a bar chord is this heavy cool thing that Chalice, the Sickening Thud's bassist, showed me how to play, except I can't quite press down hard enough on the strings to do it yet. It is called a 'bar chord' because you need to be able to play one if you want to get gigs in bars and me not being able to play one might explain why we haven't got many bar gigs yet, which would explain why we haven't been picked up by a record label.

When I turn twenty-one, I'll be able to go into the clubs and get chummy with the promoters and after that, the sky's the limit for the Thud.

But the dudes started talking about 'symmetry' - whatever that is-so I figured they must be keyboard players or something. The dude with the beard asked me if I needed help , so I asked to check out the 1959 Les Paul Custom re-issue, which at $9,000 was the most expensive guitar I saw on the wall. You wouldn't believe the attitude that Beard Dude gave me! I mean he was trying to sound all polite:

...no offense, but I think you'd be better off with an Epiphone...

An Epiphone! Did he think I was made out of money or something? Those can cost three or four hundred bucks! No way was I spending that kind of money! I just wanted to see what it felt like to play a fancy guitar and Mr. Beard had to go and be a total d!ck about it. Some people.

Anyway, the Beard set me up with an Epiphone (which I gotta say was not-so-bad, it was way better than my Hondo), plugged me into a miniature Vox amp and walked away. I was almost nailing some Tool riffs when Ellen walked in. She looked mad. I got nervous and flubbed my bar chord but she smiled a little and said I had great natural rhythm. Then she asked me if I wanted that guitar. I said sure, but if I'm dreaming I might as well dream about the 1959 Gibson over there.

But the next thing I knew, she was talking to Beard Guy and he was acting all nicey-nice all of a sudden. Ellen is a big-shot lawyer at the office I temp at. I have heard her use her lawyer-voice and she is one scary lady when she does. She used it on Beard Guy and you won't believe what she did next.

"Son", she told me," this gentleman has agreed to a reasonable price and if you want this guitar, I will buy it for you." She always calls me 'son' when we were out in public, which I think is weird because my name is Ben and I'm not her son.

"Uh, OK", was about all I could say and the next thing I knew we were driving away in her recently-repaired Jaguar with a case of wine and the world's best guitar in the backseat. If Ellen hadn't been so old and such a secret, I'd have been on Cloud Nine.

When we got back to her house she gave me a big kiss and asked me how I liked my new guitar and would I play a song for her?

I told her that I sure did like the guitar but I was worried because I didn't know how I was gonna explain it to Gloria. Gloria knew I didn't make enough money to buy something high-dollar like a Gibson guitar.

"You are worried about what that little slut thinks?", screamed Ellen, "I told you to dump her!"

"No you didn't", I said because it was true. "You said it was OK to see her as long as she didn't give me 'any little presents to give you'. I don't think you two would get along, so I don't think she would be giving you much in the way of pres.."

"SHUT UP! HERE IS WHAT YOU ARE GOING TO TELL HER!"

Ellen picked up the nine-thousand dollar guitar by the neck and swung it in a sweeping arc, crashing into the floor. Her house has nice carpeting and it took three swings before it broke, the neck breaking in two places and the strings whipping the headstock around like a crazy puppet.

I would have cried, but I was mad and maybe a little bit scared too, so I started yelling at Ellen.

I called her all the dirty words that she likes me to use when we do our private stuff and I figured that calling her all those things would calm her down and get her to do that special thing she does ...you know, what you see people on the internet do. Some people think that girls Gloria's age are really into that sort of thing, but really I think it is ladies like Ellen who invented it, if you get my meaning.

I sure was wrong about the calming down part.

Ellen hit me in the head with my broken guitar and threw me out of her house, making me walk all the way back to my folk's place. I know she'll stop being mad before long and will text me, but in the meantime maybe I'll learn my bar chord and work on my name-calling skills.

It could be a song.

.

Train In Vain

I should have known better than to accept Ellen's invitation. I was working as a temporary clerk at a law firm where Ellen was a senior partner. Part of my job was tracking down old court records and case files for her and she wound up being so impressed with my alphanumeric derring-do that she sent me an email inviting me to lunch. I guess she must have won the case or something, because her email had smiley-face emoticons all over it, which was kinda weird to see coming from an old lady.

And Ellen was really old, like maybe forty or even forty-five, at least twenty years older than me. It was like being invited to lunch by one of my mother's friends, a neighbor that Mom always half-jokingly warned me not to take candy from. I always wondered what she meant by that. Or I used to, anyway.

Don't get me wrong. I mean, I sure was glad to be getting a free lunch and all, but I was afraid that my girlfriend Gloria or one of her friends from school would see me out with Ellen and think that I was dating some old chick. Plus,at work they make me wear khakis and long-sleeves that cover up my tattoos, so it would be a double-whammy of uncool if some hot art-major chicks saw me.

I considered the risk of being spotted, trying to do that 'look before you leap' thing that Dad always yells about, except he says it like 'look before you fucking leap, you stupid piece of shit' - and we aren't allowed to cuss at work so I tried to keep my thinking clean.

After some pre-leap looking, I decided I'd be safe as long as we didn't go to Starbucks, since half my class seems to work there, including Gloria's best friend Dan. Dan is a big, good-looking guy, but he's gay, so I don't get upset when she kisses him or stays at his house for a week or two. They have never come out and told me, but I'm pretty sure that Gloria just pretends to date Dan so people don't know he's gay. It works too, because I think I am the only one who has figured it out.

Like, Gloria isn't really my official girlfriend right quite yet, I just know that she really digs me and that one day we'll hook up for sure.

See, the last time my band, The Sickening Thud, played out, Gloria was the only person in the whole town that came out to see us play- she was the only person in the whole club except the manager and the soundman- that's how much she digs me and my band. She even came out from behind the bar so that she could listen to us play while she stacked the chairs on top of the tables and I bet anything that she woulda listened to our whole set if the the douche-bag soundman hadn't come up to the stage and told us that he was closing early because there was no audience and that we owed him fifty bucks and that it would be an extra hundred bucks if we wanted to finish our set.

We were so busy packing up our gear that Gloria didn't have a chance to make her move on me, so she left before we did, which kinda sucked. Plus it cost me 25 bucks because me and our singer Matt are the only dudes in the band with jobs so we wind up paying for everything.

Anyway, fate would have it that me and Gloria had about a zillion mutual friends on Facebook, so I sent her a request and she friended me right back the next week! So now all I needed to do was let nature take its course. Unless I got busted being seen with Ellen. Not that there was anything dirty going on, but it would look funny, ya know what I mean?

Well, I didn't have to worry, because Ellen took me to The Open Flue, which I think sounds like a cool band name but is actually an expensive high-class restaurant. I had applied for a job there during my freshman year, but they wouldn't hire me because of my tattoos unless I wanted a job as valet. But then they turned me down for that, too. They said it was because of my driving record, but I think it was really discrimination on account of my tats.

I gotta admit, the food was top-notch excellent stuff. I asked for a hamburger but Ellen ordered a steak for me instead. I told the waiter that I would like french fries and he told me that they did not normally serve french fries, but that he could get the cook to prepare some for me. Pretty classy, eh? And it was yummy too. I had a coke, but Ellen had at least three glasses of wine. She really was reminding of Mom's friend by then.

Ellen told me that she had won the case- it was something to do with a railroad- and the client had given her a train-set as a gift and that I looked really strong and healthy and would I mind coming over to her house to help her put her choo-choo back on track? I didn't know how strong you had to be to put together a toy train, but I guess I musta looked like Superman or something to her on account of her being old and maybe drunk too.

I also figured she meant for me to help her after work or something, but it turned out she meant right then, so after she paid for the meal, we took her Jaguar - that same one- way over to the Belle View part of town, which is big-time rich people territory. She had a giant house with a circle driveway that had a dancing bird statue in a fountain inside the circle, which was cool even if the water in it looked a little green and mossy and wasn't really a fountain, since it wasn't moving.

Inside her house was like the inside of a house you would see in one of those boring dental waiting-room kind of magazines, except it isn't boring in real life, it is more like scary- like what if I accidentally broke something or got something dirty or something like that happened ? I'd be broke forever paying for it.

Ellen said the train set was in her dressing room, which had open floor space to set it up on. I figured a table would have been better, but she is my boss and technically I was still at work, so I said ok.

Sure enough, there was a really super-deluxe train set still in the box. It was sitting on top of a dresser drawer. Most dudes probably don't even know what a model train set is, much less how to set one up, but Dad had one and I sorta knew how they worked. I placed the box on the floor, knelt down and looked at the contents. The track was a simple oval loop, it would be easy to snap together.

"Think you can you handle it?" , she asked. I told her sure I could , no problem.

" Great. I need to change clothes, so don't turn around."

No problem, the train would keep me busy.

But she must've forgot that there was a double-sized wall mirror directly opposite me and that I could see her in the reflection as she undressed. I noticed how slow and careful-like she was taking her clothes off and wondered if she was afraid of wrinkling them and that my mom had some tricks for getting wrinkles out of clothes, but the train distracted me and I didn't pass on mom's wrinkle advice or look at the mirror for a few minutes even when Ellen told me that I had a nice ass.

How could she tell through my khakis? I guess she was just being nice.

"You can look now", she said. I looked.

Ellen didn't look like a lawyer anymore. She was wearing a black shiny outfit that looked like something Catwoman would wear, except a lot less so. I'm embarrassed to admit that it gave me a boner just looking her. I stayed kneeling down on the rug, facing away from her so he wouldn't see me like that.

Not to be to gross or anything, but khakis are lightweight fabric and don't hide boners very well so I didn't want to stand up right then, except she asked me to help light her cigarette for her and took a look right at my privates. Then she put here hand down there and I'm not really gonna say much more because I feel like I really let Gloria down over what happened.

The next time I see Gloria, I will have to confess about what happened and ask her forgiveness and hope that she still might want to go on a date or something even though I'd cheated on her before we were a couple. Love is funny like that.

But Ellen kept making me do stuff and I kinda couldn't stop even though I kinda felt embarrassed about it. Eventually she fell asleep and I noticed that she'd finished two whole bottles of wine since we got there, so I figured she'd be asleep for a long time and I could finally finish setting up the train. That is when I looked at the clock.

It was nine o'clock and I had to have Dad's car back home by ten and Dad's car was still parked at work. I tried waking Ellen up, but she just mumbled some dirty words and went back to sleep.

I should have looked before I leapt, but instead I wound up fishing the keys to her Jag out of her purse. I was going to drive it to work, get dad's car, drive dad's car home and then walk back to work and get Ellen's car.

Hopefully she would still be asleep and I could finish putting her train together. The big problem was that instead of driving from work back to Ellen's house, I wound up hitting a mailbox about a half-mile down the road from there, which is where you found me.

If you let me make another phone call, I'm sure Ellen will be awake by now and she will clear this whole thing up.

.

A Confederate Sea of Dunces

The Confederate flag was proudly flying above the drunken rabble in the NASCAR parking lot this morning . Here was the Budweiser-for-Breakfast Club, massed and ready for action; Made In America, Drunk In Public and Proud Of It.

I heard Molly Hatchet playing. From more than one truck.


The tribe pictured above seems to worship canned meat products. There's an inflatable canopic jar tethered to the top- I think that at the end of the ongoing ceremony the wienier idol will be released from it's moorings and Ascend Heavenward , taking the devout with it. Good riddance.



Did you know that there is a flavor of Vienna Sausage called "Bilingual Chicken"? There is.
It wasn't mentioned at this Armour tent...I doubt that the company's decision to print labels in Spanish would have been a hit with this crowd. I saw more than a few "America is Full" t-shirts - at first, I thought that it was merely an incomplete sentence but I quickly caught on that it was an anti-immigrant statement.


I didn't see any Mexican NASCAR fans, nor did I see any Cinco De Mayo festivities.
I did see the U.S. Border Patrol. They are hiring.



Here we see a NASCAR version of inter-racial harmony. Off-key, it was.
There was a tent that urged onlookers to sign up for credit cards, enlist in the Armed Forces and embarrass themselves at karaoke - all under one roof!
Public drunkenness was not only allowed, it was encouraged and exploited.
This is a dangerous place.


More wiener worship. These (above) are marinated in 30-weight motor oil , rolled in sawdust and cornmeal and then deep-fried in boiling Crisco. One will cost you five dollars.
Two might kill you.



The only fresh food I saw was what was in my cooler. I didn't see any apples, oranges or bananas on the grounds, other than this. No fruit juice either. I tried to blend in by quaffing an energy soda that I scored from the trailer next to mine, but my banana gave me away, marked me as Other; on my breaks I hid under a trailer and ate stealthily.

I didn't know this, but if you are crew , you are supposed to eat the Corn Dogs and drink the Kool-Aid.
Literally.
There was Kool-Aid available to those who could afford it but juice, as noted, was conspicuously absent.
Notice the Navy recruiter in the background,above...military recruiters were ubiquitous at the track. The end begins here for some, I imagine.

I drank as little fluid as possible, as dehydration was preferable to urination- the toilets were straight out of Trainspotting. Bad scene in there. Very, very bad.

One thing that fascinated me was the amount of Nationalistic jingoism I overheard... over and over...only American Cars were acceptable...everyone hated foreign cars, Jap cars in 'tickular. I started fearing for my Volvo's safety, it being parked alone in a sea of Amurrican Trucks and all, but then I noticed that a great many of the diesel rigs were Volvo.
Maybe Volvo is OK ? They are made by Aryans.

I really wanted to point out that nothing for sale in my booth was Made In America; that all the toys, shirts, gimcracks and geegaws were manufactured overseas, mostly in China. I wonder how much gasoline was consumed during this event- attendees, vendors, the race itself- how much of that money gets used to pay for ski resorts in Dubai?

From an economic standpoint, NASCAR seems to move an awful lot of American money and jobs overseas.
It's not exactly a green sport either.

I kept these thoughts to myself.

One of my crewmates told me that this race was smaller than last year's, which was smaller than the year before... I heard many tales of woe about the costs of operating diesel rigs for ten months out of every year- bitching about how the "global warming assholes" were going to ruin the country- how Cheerios suck the big one- it was an overload of cognitive dissonance.


Apparently, each driver's company releases a 'collectible car' for every racing season. This year's 'collectible' was actually a pretty cool toy -but it came with a $70 price tag! Parents would admonish their kids, telling them that they could have that car, but they wouldn't be allowed to play with it, otherwise it "wouldn't be worth anything".
Then they would by a left-over toy car from the previous year for use as a 'play' toy.
These older toys were available for 10%-25% of the original price.
I saw a pattern here... this year's $70 'collectible' will be next year's $12 'play toy'...hmmm.

When I ran a comics shop, kids would ask me: "how much will [this comic] be worth in ten years?"
My stock reply was : "That book won't even be worth reading."
Then they'd tell me that "they don't read " the comics, the books are investments.
They'd often buy two copies after these exchanges, thinking that I was trying to talk them out of buying the book in question so that I could retain ownership of it , hoard it for ten years, sell it and retire.

Free advice: If something leaves the factory with the phrase "Collector's Item" printed on it, the odds are very,very good that it will never increase in value. Ever.


I had to wear a NASCAR shirt while I fed lead-based Chinese toys to hungry Americans. It felt weird.

I wonder what would have happened if I'd worn an Obama '08 T-shirt? I saw a great deal of anti-Hillary ephemera but no openly anti-Obama statements.
I guess the Confederate flag speaks for itself.

The Rocket

Alec Long missed his mother. On the summer between the fifth and sixth grade of school, Alec had traveled from his grandparent's home in Maryland to visit her for the first time since she had moved away.

Alec's parents had divorced when he was still a baby and after the split, his mother Gina had moved Out West to live with an older man named Carol. Apparently his mom had married Carol years ago, but that marriage had been short-lived and the only thing Gina had to show for it was the rather old and battered Mercedes sedan that Alec was currently sitting in.

The car itself was parked on a desolate stretch of private dirt road somewhere on the sprawling Wyoming ranch of Mr. Simm, a cattleman who owned the bar where Alec's mom served drinks. Mr. Simm's bar was called the Jolly Roger and sported a faux 'pirate' theme. There was a fake pirate ship in the parking lot which Alec thought was funny because the nearest ocean seemed to be at least ten million miles away from the tedious desert landscape surrounding Evanston, the little oilfield town where his mother had settled after her second divorce.

That is stupid, he had laughed to himself, there aren't any pirate ships in the desert.

Alec didn't like boats.

Most of Alec's young life had been spent with his father's parents, as his father Jeff had taken a job as a steward on a cruise ship two days before Alec's premature birth and was, as his grandfather was fond of saying, lost at sea, although he wasn't truly lost like a Robinson Crusoe shipwreck; Jeff just didn't come home very often and when he did , he tended to show up drunk and stay that way until he left. Which was usually sooner than later.

Last Christmas Jeff had given his son a small bag of brightly-colored toy plastic dinosaurs and claimed that he had brought them special all the way from China, see, it says so right on the bag. Alec knew better but he had been so glad to see his father that he didn't mention seeing those same dinosaurs last week, pegged to the wall at the local 7-11, right next to the store's comic-book rack.

Those same dinosaurs were keeping Alec company as he waited for his mother to return. She had followed Mr. Simm's pickup truck as it drove over the half-graveled road, the Mercedes lurching crazily as it bounced on the uneven surface, headlights casting frenzied searchlight beams into the plume of dust left in Mr. Simm's wake. Mr. Simm is always in a hurry, Gina had told her son, but this car can't go that fast on this road.

After a few miles of turbulent driving, they saw the headlights of Mr. Simm' s Ford. He had turned around a few hundred feet ahead of them and stopped. His headlights flashed twice and then went dark. Gina stopped her car, turned off the engine and opened her door.

Wait here, honey. I need to talk to Mr. Simm for a little bit. I brought your comic-books with us- they are in the backseat, so sit tight until I get back, OK?

Alec wanted to tell her that it wasn't OK. He wanted to tell her that he was scared, that it was dark outside and he couldn't see anything and that if she left now he knew that she would never come back for him. He wanted to tell her that he knew dinosaurs didn't really come special from China just for him. He wanted to scream.

OK, Mom, he said.

Alec clambered into the back and rummaged around in the small red cooler Gina always traveled with, pushing aside the ghastly yellow cans of Coors beer until he finally came up with a chilly can of Coke. He opened it and carefully placed the curled metal tab in the car's ashtray. One of his schoolteachers had told Alec that baby squirrels often strangled on metal pull-tabs that careless people threw out of their car windows. Alec didn't want any part of that.

He had already read the comics at least a dozen times but there wasn't much else to do, so he flicked on the dim overhead lamp and started reading The Amazing Spider-Man again. It was the issue where Peter Parker discovers that the evil Green Goblin is actually his best friend's father. In it, the Green Goblin accidentally gets killed while fighting Spider-Man and now everyone-including Peter's best friend Harry, the New York police and Peter's sickly Aunt May- blames Spider-Man. Peter has to listen to his friends and family talk about how rotten Spider-Man is, when the whole time Peter is Spider-Man. Alec sometimes felt as if his own family secretly hated him. When he thought about his parents, he always wanted to cry, although he also wanted to be strong, even if it was the secret kind of strength like what Peter Parker had, the kind of strength that no one else could ever know about. So most of the time he didn't cry, even when he felt like it.

The comic story made Alec sad so he turned to his favorite part of the book, which was an advertisement for Estes model rockets. One of Alec's classmates owned a model rocket and had taken Alec out on a launch not long ago and ever since then, Alec had been asking his grandparents for a rocket of his own. He wanted a Saturn model, it was excitingly complicated-looking, with multiple engines that would ignite in stages, just like real thing. In his imagination, he painted the rocket in red and blue patches with black webs , just like Spider-Man's costume, and named it AF-15, after the first-ever Spidey book, Amazing Fantasy #15.

Maybe you can get one for Christmas, Granpa had said. But not sooner, we don't have money for trifles. Ask your mother when you get Out West. Maybe she has triflin' money.

After Alec arrived in Wyoming, Gina asked him if there was anything special he wanted. He showed her his tattered mail-order rocket catalog with the Saturn model circled in red magic marker. Gina whistled.

That is a lot of money. How about ice cream? Do you like ice cream?

He was ashamed of it, but he started to cry when Gina asked him if he liked ice cream. He really wanted that rocket and he hadn't seen his mom in forever and she couldn't even give him the rocket he had been dreaming of for so long. And suddenly Gina was crying too and Alec didn't know why , only that the grown-ups he knew seemed to cry a lot more than he did , and he was just a kid. She hugged him and said I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry in a whisper he could barely hear.

I am like Spidey, I am sad and everybody I love hates the real me, but I am strong and I don't cry. But he did cry.

Later, Gina told him that she had talked to Mr. Simm and that he was going to help her buy the rocket for him, the best rocket in the whole catalog, with extra engines, parachutes and decals and a deluxe electronic ignition kit that used a large battery to light the missile, not the cheap and unreliable fuses like Alec's friend had used.

Alec didn't know why Mr. Simm wanted them to drive all the way out to nowhere to talk about rockets, but the grownups in Alec's life were always going off to talk to each other in secret places, usually right before they dumped him off with a relative or family friend for a while. Alec didn't want to live with Mr. Simm, rocket or no rocket. He waited in the car, wondering where he might be tomorrow.

For a while, Alec's dinosaurs had an imaginary argument over which toy would be the first one to ride the rocket into space. That lasted for a few minutes and then he looked again at the rocket advertisement while he finished his Coke. Time passed until he had to step out of the car to pee.

After he was done he stared through the moonless night toward the low shadowy bulk of Mr. Simm's Ford. Without thinking, he crouched and started creeping slowly towards it, walking just off to the side of the road. As he neared it, he could hear faint strains of country-music coming from the cab He couldn't see inside from where he stood, so he snuck closer and stood on his tip-toes, peering diagonally across the truck bed and through the rear cabin window. He remained there for a few minutes.

When he got back to the Mercedes, his mouth was parched dry and he felt like he might choke on the spongy mass of his own tongue. He reached into the cooler for another Coke, but there weren't any, just a half-dozen Coors lazing in the dirty, icy water. Alec had tasted beer before, of course, and found it disgusting, but there was nothing else, so he popped the top of the nearest can. Out of habit, he placed the ring in the ashtray, then he steeled himself and took a small sip, then another, larger one.

It tasted very good to him.

.

One Chapter

It was a terrible plan, I thought to myself as I thunked ketchup out of the glass bottle and onto my mother's old wig. This ketchup wouldn't fool anyone and the only people who might actually stop would be the police, and what would I do with a stolen police car anyway? They probably had some secret cop trick to keep their cars from getting stolen and I'd just get caught again. That wouldn't suit me anymore than it would suit the court, which would be of the adult variety the next time I saw one, me having just turned eighteen a few weeks ago.

I was pretty sure I had some more trips to court in my future, but right now I had bigger problems, mainly getting out of town before one of Dobbie's thugs found me. About the only way I could afford to travel would be the bus and Dobbie knew that; someone would be watching the bus station, so that was out. Hitchhiking always makes me feel vulnerable and I hate feeling vulnerable, so I decided that stealing a car for my getaway would be a lot safer and easier than relying on the roadside kindness of strangers.

Like most of my plans, it didn't start off being terrible, it just wound up that way. I mean, stealing a car is a pretty sensible thing to do if you don't have one and you need one, but a lot of how sensible it is depends on how you steal it. Mostly it's easier if you steal a car that doesn't have anyone else in it, but I wanted a car that was already on the highway and that is where the canvas rucksack came in. In it , I had the wig, a bottle of ketchup, a couple packs of matches, a large Mason jar full of kerosene and about twenty pounds of bloody pork bones that I stole from the renderer's barrel in the alley behind the butcher's shop. The mannequin wouldn't fit in the bag, so I had to un-peg the legs and arms from the fake plastic torso and put them in a cardboard box that wasn't so much heavy as it was awkward and difficult to walk through the woods with. So you can see how my plan was heading towards terrible by this point.

Usually I did OK without a plan. Like how I got the mannequin.

I was killing time, feeling old and lost after my birthday, walking around town for the first time in years when I stumbled across one of those new 'shopping malls' , which is like a fenceless prison compound with a cluster of large single-story flat-topped buildings that are surrounded by parking lots and divided into lots of cells, only they aren't really cells, they are stores and shops, with a big two-story Montgomery Ward department store looming over them all like a lopsided guard tower, except instead of guards it was full of girls my age who were there voluntarily.

I imagined those loser girls in their matching frocks, getting paid a fifty cents an hour to sell lipstick and skin balms to saggy old ladies who couldn't look young again even if they had a time machine. It made me want to shoplift but I wasn't wearing shoplifting clothes, just jeans and light blue t-shirt. I had no large pockets and no purse.

I hate purses. If you ever see me with a purse, it's probably full of stolen clothes or stolen drugs. Or both. And I probably stole the purse too, which, if you think about it, is a hell of a lot better than buying one because the ones you buy don't come with all the neat stuff that the stolen ones have inside- one time I found a loaded .22 in a bag I snatched from an old lady in downtown Cincinnati. I guess she thought the gun would make her safer from people like me. But I hate guns so I traded it for mescaline. I hate mescaline too, but I didn't know that then.

So I walked around behind the Montgomery Wards store where a large loading dock faced a patch of woods. There weren't any people on the dock, but I saw a green-painted metal door standing open on the far end of the platform , so I hopped up and peeked in. There was a large stockroom area on one side and on the other side a small hallway led to what looked like a set of offices. I heard voices coming from the office area but saw no one. Right inside the door was a folding metal chair which some counter-girl had dropped her blue sales smock across the back of. I took the garment and put it on. The red plastic name tag pinned to the front said 'Norma' in white stenciled letters, which I thought was funny since my name is Jean and people always told me I looked like Marilyn Monroe, which is nice thing if a woman tells you but not always so nice when a boy does. Mostly, boys say that to me because they want to make me sticky. And I hate that, so I wear my hair plain and never touch makeup except when I'm stealing it or trying to look like someone that isn't me.

I was tying the little string on the back of the ugly blue apron when two men in white shirts and thin black ties came out of one of the offices and walked right past me without seeming to notice I was there. After they passed, one of them- a flabby, pear-shaped man who was sweating just from walking- turned around and looked at me.

"Break time is only five minutes, sweetheart. We don't pay you to stand around. Now get your pretty little behind out there and finish clearing section five. We need the old dolls off the floor. And no more wearing dungarees to work", he finished.

Old dolls? I was curious so I followed the rude fat man through the stockroom doors as he gestured towards a cluster of stripped-down female mannequins in the nearby corner. Old dolls.

They weren't nearly as heavy as a real person, so I picked one up and carried it back into the stockroom, out through the open door, across the loading dock and into the woods behind the store, where I hid it until it got dark outside and we came to pick it up in Dobbie's car. That was back when Dobbie and I were still friends, like maybe two weeks ago. So that's how I got the store dummy.

The ketchup was an unnaturally bright red against the blond wig and the whole mess didn't look very convincing on the mannequin. Fake blood on fake hair on fake body. I guessed maybe that it would work for my purposes, although I chickened out when it came to dumping the red sauce on my own blonde hair, which I had tried to grow long but was now hacked off , messily and unevenly just above my shoulders. I had done it myself earlier that morning and I'd been in a hurry at the time so it looked pretty bad, even compared to what we got at Watertown Home for Girls.

I wish I'd thought to bring the scissors with me. I wasn't really in the mood for cutting myself but what I was planning on doing was pretty crazy and cutting someone else would make things even more exciting. A lot better than this ketchup could ever hope to be, that's for sure.

When I was in the Watertown Home I had to spend some of my afternoons talking to adults who asked a lot of questions, most of which weren't really about what I had done and why I was there. Except they were about that, it was just that the questions were in disguise, sorta.

Like, sometimes the questions would really be pictures instead of questions and at first it seemed like all the answers I gave were the wrong ones. I don't think it was fair, it isn't my fault that they kept showing me ink-blobs that looked like my parents burning and screaming in a pool of bloody fire. I don't know where they found those pictures but it kinda shows that even though I was the inmate, the so-called doctors were really the sick ones. After what I'd done and been through, you'd think they'd show me pictures of flowers and butterflies, not horrible blobs like the ones they had put on the table in front of me. No wonder I have nightmares.

I don't really remember deciding to do it, or even doing it really, but one day the docs came to my ward and they asked me how long I planned on staying quiet. It seemed like a familiar question, I think maybe they asked me the same thing every day but I wasn't really paying attention so I'm not sure.

"Long enough", I answered. I don't know why I said that, but they seemed pleased and told me it was a breakthrough because I hadn't spoken for six months. I hadn't? That surprised me.

Like I said, I don't really recall being quiet for so long but after my breakthrough I decided to tell the doctors that their pictures looked like butterflies and flowers and they called that a breakthrough too.

Before long, one of them confided to me that I'd been recommended for EST- which is like being electrocuted to make you stop being crazy- but since I was having so many breakthroughs, they'd decided to postpone that indefinitely. There were a lot of people on the outside, she told me, who thought EST was a bad idea and that it messed up people's brains and if I was lucky, it would be banned before my turn came and the postponement wouldn't matter anyway. The way she said it made me feel like she was one of those people on the outside, and that I should be relieved that she thought EST was a bad idea. It turned out that she was right and by the time I turned 18, the docs had pretty much stopped using it, although the table they used was still there, waiting threateningly in the scary basement room that no one I knew could ever quite remember being in, no matter how many times they were taken there.