Dear Friends,

My assistant, that rancid and untrustworthy bastard snuck into my lab after hours. He mixed up my chemicals. Come swiftly, now, with the antidote, Nurse Ratchid!

Res Ipsa Loquitor,

S

Compulsive Writing?

Dear Friends,

I’ve been thinking a bit about my compulsive writing. If I didn’t write each day, I think I could not understand myself nor others. I might be diagnosed as somewhere on the autistic spectrum. Whatever.

My incessant writing is something like self-therapy. It puts into play feedback loops from my external world of experience and my internal world of desires and imagination. There are loops in loops in the process of writing; basic neurology. They strengthen and inform each other and drop their output into my mind and those of others at the end of the production line that vanishes yet continually reappears at the dawn.

It is also an escape from the external world. For some moments at a time I dwell only in my mind and some precious notions delivered by other writers. I find rhymes in my mind that syncopate with experience. My thoughts dance. I know something that I had not imagined before. Words bring those notions to form and my synapses and dendrites swirl with them.

Writing is also a meditation. I can go into the Sanctum Sanctorum within my skull.

Writing is a discipline that requires concentration; a commodity much undervalued in this world. Focus is a blessing and a curse, but there it is.

Writing is the Dragon in the Dark Cave. Head on in. That Dragon favors a writer not as a meal but a companion well equipped to tell a bed time story.

Hic Finis Est,

SCS

A Solemn & Reverent Look Back on The Mighty Grateful Dead…

Dear Friends,

It was June 23^rd, 1995. My Rider and I had just decamped from what would be our last run with the Mighty Grateful Dead, their last tour before dumb ol’ Jerry’s demise on August 9^th. I was exhausted after all the driving back and forth through the Berkshires to Albany from my little city by the Connecticut River. But, as dawn broke over my home, I had to write. The following is that explateration retrieved from the archives.

SS

Ho-ho-ho!!!

What you gotta understand with this Grateful Dead situation, you know, that musical outfit, is that it is weird. It’s just a weird situation. You got a posse of mainly homely guys, a couple of the gang now truly dead.

One of those dead guys was so ugly that he scared Satan himself when he showed up with a note from Saint Peter beggin’ the Lord of Darkness to please take the fellow off his kind hands in exchange for an unlimited supply of Ripple and Southern Comfort and all the charcoal briquets The Devil might wish for in an eternity of unspeakable cruelty and sodomizing dead people with hot pokers. Ol’ St. Pete even threw that Joplin girl into the deal. He was fond of Janis, and she could sing, but our Minister of The Pearly Gates was desperate to get that Pig Pen guy out of his house and figured that nasty-ass Lucifer deserved her bibulous attention, anyhow.

Whatever. The rest of the crew, except for that lovely and long legged lady was not so charming. She, of course, could bend your ears quite well with that wail from beyond the grave. Hoo-boy-howdy! But, look at the rest of those beasts. You got a kid with giant hands, digits like a gorilla’s, who makes a noise with a guitar that sounds like Quasimodo busting up the bells of Notre Dame with a jack hammer one minute, and the next it’s an ear shredding racket akin to a locomotive skidding off the rails into a gully full of roiling lava bubbling with titanium spikes and human skulls.

Then there is that freak, the nine fingered guitar player that doesn’t seem to know any discipline at all. Right when a song gets solid and almost surpasses his ability to fuck up the lyrics with that singing soundin’ like a teenager going through the voice change or finger nails on the chalk board, well… he takes the whole thing to pieces and ruins everything in all possible ways. This guy has destroyed more good songs than most folks could write in a lifetime. One after another just melts away into the next that melts away itself or gets blown up and on and on and on. That shaggy monster seems to never have met a tune to be content with. He treats notes like a cat worries a mouse.

Oh, speaking of tunes… what is that lyric writer going on about? Craziness! One minute he’s prattling on about something that I think might be from the bible, maybe not, and the next we got some bums on a locomotive yelling at some underwater green guy on their way to see a fellow who might be dying or not while a lady with ribbons in her hair is laying behind a broken window in a bed of clover with a cat from China. Yeah, and there are tigers and soldiers in a campfire with a sailor torn loose from the axle of a paper canoe full up with alligators and gypsies. Man, can you just write a simple story, or are we supposed to figure all this out ourselves?

Now, the sound guy of many years, prior to his incarceration for violating every law of G-d and Man, was a mad chemist who excelled at unraveling his own DNA. Yes, there are ugly rumors that drugs may have been involved this Grateful Dead Enterprise®.

Anyhow, there’s also that guy on the bass. He plays it like it’s either a trombone or the detonation of an atom bomb. The drummer is an eight-armed dragon that eats its own tail and never seems content to rest in that endeavor. The guys on keyboards, the ones without the sense to flee before their hides are aflame, reliably self-combust after a few years in that seat. It’s a hideous sight, but the fans keep paying to see the conflagrations.

Yes. It is a weird situation. Unaccountable, really. There is no satisfactory explanation for its duration nor the satisfaction that their growling, howling, moaning, often confusing, oddly inspiring even while lilting and off-angle tilting, bone jiggling, giggling, skull eating, mind melting, soul mending, back breaking and healing strangeness imbues upon children of all ages over so many years. Yes. Although the band has left and gone, nobody has noticed, not at all.

Res Ipsa Loquitor,

SS

The recent signing of the National Defense Authorization Act by President Obama was an act of shameless cowardice by a man sworn to defend the constitution. Yet he is approving a law that affords the state the right to indefinitely detain without trial any citizen accused of pretty well anything. The ongoing dark comedy and menace of the Republican race for their party’s presidential nomination, the evil lies, distortions, and outright contempt for simple human decency displayed by self-proclaimed patriots who would sell their mother’s, sister’s and brother’s rights in exchange for the consideration of multi-billionaire profiteers have together caused me to fall into desperation and gloom.

Still, I cannot give up all hope. We are a great nation that has, in its darkest hours, redeemed itself. We are a resourceful people. We are a nation born of deep exasperation with the cunning soul of a stowaway rat fleeing a sinking ship and the agitation of an electrified key riding the tail of Ben Franklin’s kite in the midst of a railing storm on a gloom benighted dusk… or was it a dawn? Truly, we are a nation of improvisers and clowns. Who better to turn to but Nobody’s Fool, Wavy Gravy!

Some years ago, my friend Wavy proposed Nobody for President. The campaign, of course, went nowhere. Yet, today we must again take up the gauntlet. Let’s start with a few apt bumper stickers that can be multi-purposed in this go-go-go age of the Internet as campaign slogans and tag lines for ads in the upcoming come-from-behind ride to the top of the steaming, fetid heap of rancid poop that is the present field of candidates for sale. With a tip of the banged up old bowler hat, a squeeze of the big, red schnoz, and in the proud tradition of hack comedians stealing their jokes, here we go!

• Nobody Cares About You!
• Nobody’s Going to Raise Your Taxes!
• Nobody Will Fight for Your Rights!
• Nobody Loves You!
• Nobody Has Your Back!
• Nobody Has Your Interests in Mind!
• Nobody Has a Real Plan!
• Nobody Will Keep a Promise!
• Nobody is on Your Side!
• Nobody Will Keep Our Environment Safe!
• Nobody Will Protect Your Secrets!
• Nobody’s Business is Our Business!
• Nobody Knows the Trouble You Seen!
• Nobody Wins, Nobody Loses!
• Nobody Looks to the Future!
• Nobody Tells It Like It Is!

Okay, you get the gist. Feel free to comment and add your own suggestions. Nobody is counting on you to get this campaign rolling. Get on the bandwagon! Lend your weird shoulder to the wheel. Send money, cash only. Cup cakes and other goods for the bake sale are welcomed. The staff at Nobody’s HQ also enjoy kielbasa boiled in beer for those all night telethons. Of course, just plain beer would be fine, also.

Send donations and foodstuffs to Nobody for President HQ, 2001 Miracle Mile, Whoopsulanti, MI, 01140, CO/Porgy Tirebiter, Esq.

Kludge Ergo Foo,

S

Plan C: Paisley Jello

Dear Friends,

My lawyer has advised me that he will not represent me in what he judges to be the certain repercussions, the stout fist of The Law falling upon my head and his fragile reputation as an officer of the court, upon my following through on either Plan A or Plan B for the local Occupy movement. The Commonwealth will not abide by dead pigs, dead horses, baloney cannons nor a spew of stinky mortadella juice showing up in the lobby of a prestigious bank; one globally owned tho currently leasing a small patch of property for a tiny office next to the Mayor’s office and up the street from the police station.

Thus, I have come up with Plan C. It’s a good plan, I think.

Ya’see, I have an associate. His name, his code-name, is Wladimir. He is late of Minsk. He has an advanced degree in, um, engineering, from a Soviet-era university where the education was as broad as it was deep and included a minor in “social engineering”. He knows some people who know some people. He also owes me a favor. One of the peoples that Wladimir knows who know some peoples is a fellow that I cannot presently name.

That fellah has access to a Redi-Mix cement truck. It’s a Teamster Union-thing. Anyhow, that fellah that Wladimir knows knows the guy with the cement truck who knows a guy who found about a ton of Jello® brand jello that just sort’a happened to fall off the back of a semi down by the river. The Staties have yet to find the driver, but the accident had been ruled an accident, so it’s all okay. Okay. Well, the missing driver’s wife will have to wait until the corpse is recovered until she gets her insurance check, but it’s all okay. Okay?

Now, Wladimir is a bit of a tinkerer, a serious hobbyist. He’s got this microwave dish in his garage. He made it himself. It’s a lot like the little flying-saucer things that you see on cable or cell phone company towers, but has enough power to roast an elephant with radio waves in about ten-seconds. That is not our purpose in its first “real world” deployment of his device.

No. We will soon fill the Redi-Mix truck with 200 or so gallons of water, dump in a ton of yellow jello powder. Then we will add the secret ingredient! That is the paisley in the pudding. Yes! I’ve got it all figured out.

Down the hall from my tenement apartment is Mad Ray, The Insane Poet. He is brilliant but does not write well. His dyskinetic scrawls are indecipherable, but this apparent affliction makes him the perfect man for the task at hand. You see, his jittery squiggling of a pair of scissors, while a potential risk to his trembling digits, is ideally suited to cutting the colorful swirls and giggling ameboid lines from the lovely drapes we will rip from his beautifully adorned windows.The wobbly serrations will perfectly complement the generous folly of the pattern, as well as the iridescent goop in which the fabric will be embedded. Even better, Mad Ray will do this garment work at no cost, in the name of ART! All he requires are some real scissors (not his little plastic ones) and plenty of beer and cigarettes.

Once the millinery effort is complete, we are off in the cement truck to the side of the river, just out of site of the highway and the marina. There is a fire hydrant right up the hill. I’ll take my trusty Moon Wrench and attach the fire hose borrowed from the apartment building. As the giant, rotating cylinder gyres and fills with water, we’ll dump the heady compost of paisley and approximately one hundred pounds of jello mix into the beast. Once mixed, it is time to fire up the portable generator that somehow disappeared from the hardware store up the road and light up that microwave to boil the water.

Now, this might be the only dangerous part of the enterprise. Microwaves do not like metal. Great bolts of lethal electrical energy and howling tongues of plasma may erupt about the vehicle. There is diesel fuel in its tanks. Thus, as a precaution, I will be at a safe remove as Wladimir hits the switch. If things should go horribly awry at least his boiling, exploding flesh will be contained in the rubber suit obtained from the local exterminator’s shop.

I am, however, an optimist by nature. I believe that Plan C is a good plan. Wladimir will pilot the commandeered cement beast laden with a then well congealed load of paisley jello from the river’s edge and into town. In front of the bank, an “accident” will occur. About a ton of yellow gunk laced with the ephemeral proceeds of a crazy person’s two days and nights with a dangerous tool and the supremely coordinated efforts of several criminals and a right-thinking citizen will be disgorged during a slight parking mishap on Main Street. A terrified driver, mysteriously clad in a rubber suit and lugging a fire extinguisher will be seen fleeing the scene as pedestrians recoil in horror and confusion. I will be nowhere nearby.

The bank will closed for quite a spell as police and haz-mat men in bunny suits from the Department of Homeland Security argue with the good folks from the EPA and the local DPW as to what this mess actually is and what might be done about the radiant excrescence that is slowly melting into confetti as its liquid corpulence flows into the city’s sewage system.

Yes. I think that Plan C is a good plan. It's much better than Plans A and B. Nobody gets killed… well, probably. Are you with me, my fellow patriots?


Kludge Ergo Foo,

S

Plan B

Dear Friends,

I’ve been getting a bit of feedback on my previous post. Most of the local Occupy folks no longer talk to me. They regard me with glowering stares and sullen silence. My girlfriend, a strict vegetarian, has moved out of the apartment. She regards the killing of farm raised animals as a heathen practice and will have no more to do with me following my modest proposal that would involve their gun-shot demise at the hands of a thuggish idiot startled into a panic by their mere presence in the small lobby of a bank on Main Street.

Thus, here I am in a now unfurnished apartment. She did leave Sophie, the cat, and tins of cat food. It smells very poorly, but Sophie and I enjoy it at our meals together. It is nutritious, I think, and with enough cinnamon and sugar, it does go down without provoking a gag reflex. Sophie has shown me how to eat right from the can, as my girlfriend took all of her fine silverware before slamming the door behind her.

So, tummy full of nasty gravy soaked meal and unspecified meats and gristle, I am rethinking my approach to making a statement at the bank. There is a possible solution, an alternative to sending pre-deceased critters into a confrontation with an armed maniac. See, there’s a fire hydrant in front of that bank and an invention called Baloney (Bologna, if you prefer).

Now, for forty-seven dollars and fifteen cents (plus shipping) I can get my hands on a Grainger Adjustable Moon Wrench, suitable for opening any hydrant. A trip to the hardware store will provide me with the PVC pipe and fittings to affix it to the fire hose procured down the hall from my apartment. A fat tube of baloney will only cost about ten dollars. But, at minimal cost, there you have a baloney cannon!

Of course, firing the baloney through the window of the bank will require some legal risk to myself, along with the theft of public property, damages to private property, and perhaps the damage to a customer’s skull should that skull be in the trajectory of the hurling meat. That would be regrettable and, thus, I have a Plan B. Let’s say we commandeer a book binder’s press. I know where to get my hands on an old rig that is no longer in use. It’s in the basement of a neighborhood bar that long ago housed a printing shop. Let’s make some baloney juice!

With proper squeezing, a fulsom tube of commercial baloney will yield quite a bit of juice. Baloney is mainly made of water, salt, and spices; there’s really not much else but fur, bones, gristle, insect parts and fat in it. So, we got about a gallon of baloney juice from the enterprise. Yet, it occurs to me that baloney juice is not sufficiently stinky to do the job intended. Let’s try salami or, better yet, mortadella! Mortadella has the right water and fat content. It’s a fine Italian cold cut from which to ring a truly horrible herb saturated goo from. I’m surprised that our military has yet to exploit the properties of mortadella sludge in the field of modern warfare.

Anyhow, all you have to do is fill a very large plastic container with the proceeds of the Italian cold cut squeezing and load it in the back of a van. I know where to steal a forklift to do the job. That container will be fitted with couplings to attach Fire Hose-A to the hydrant, and Fire Hose-B. The nozzle of Fire Hose-B will be placed in the mail slot by the front door of the bank from whence it will gush the foul excrescence at force into the lobby. Nobody will be hurt. The creep with the gun will be running from his post to alert the pudgy little manager to the horrible situation. Customers will flee whilst gagging on the aromatic fumes and rising, soupy tide of shattered animal parts. I and my unnamed confederate will hasten to abscond as panic and confusion take the day!

Yeah. That’s the plan. What do you think?

Res Ipsa Loquitor,

S

Sometimes a Great Notion…

Dear Friends,

Remember the Future. Your life is a movie… your movie. This little, flaky film documents The Band of Merry Pranksters in their search of a cool place in 1964.

I Remain Yours in The Quest,

S