Countdown To 200!

First a quick note to the kind person who called my show today concerned about the amount of glue I seemed to be sniffing on the air: it's totally okay. I sniffed so much glue when I was in college (it certainly made my "The English Novel In The 19th Century" class much more interesting - I remember Lawrence Sterne tasted like strawberries!) that one of my nostrils no longer can smell. It also is virtually hairless &, when I have a cold, doesn't so much get runny as emit a vapor which could only be described as bits of my soul bubbling away. So, of course, in the interests of being as real as possible with the theme of my show, which today was glue, I was forced by the show's owners (which require I take a more active role in my themes) to actually sniff glue, but I did it through that nostril, which can only now be affected by a drug if I inject it with a large bore hypodermic needle. Which of course I didn't do. My radio station does not allow us to bring drug paraphrenalia in the deejay booth. Only in the bathroom.

The reason I am writing this blog early on a Saturday morning in the back of an Austin Police vehicle (don't ask) is that I just noticed - I am about to write my 200th entry to the Self Help Radio blog! How could I have known, when I began this blog back in September of last year, that I'd have two hundred posts in me? I wrote a lot of bad poetry in my teens & twenties, & found that that well had run quite dry when I accidentally attended a Poetry-A-Thon ten years ago in Salado, Texas, when my car broke down & I was looking for some hookers. (Note: Salado hookers do not hang out with slam poets.) I couldn't bring myself to try to rhyme in front of a bunch of central Texas literates. I couldn't even manage free verse. After croaking out the world's lamest limerick, I left the stage in shame. Then I was mercilessly taunted by three middle school kids who had combined their love for gangsta rap & Star Wars into a Spenserian sonnet & took home the door prize.

Naturally, I thought my days of being creative with "words" was behind me. But not so! This is number 198, & surely I can manage two more before I am forced to sleep this off in the drunk tank! The question is: what should I do to celebrate post number 200? Should I invite the folks? Might I offer you cake & ice cream? Should I sell stock in Self Help Radio? I have no clue, & the friendly police woman is asking me to give back her laptop & blow into what has got to be the world's lamest party favor. So I'll be thinking about it... You think about it, too.

& if the video of me weeping into this nice police officer's bosom ever makes You Tube, remember: I knew they were filming it. The whole time. So it's not embarrassing.

When Apologies Attack!

Wow, yesterday's attempt at being funny slash profound was a load of horse pooper, wasn't it? I don't know what the fuck I was sniffing at that time. I think I wrote a word every half hour. While little bits of asbestos drifted from the unsafe ceiling above. I'm serious, who the fuck was I trying to impress? Ezra Pound? Wallace Stevens? Betsy Mae in Accounting? My department doesn't even have an Accounting section! I don't know what part of my department Betsy Mae works for!

Like most people, I blog in the nude. This makes writing in my blog at work very uncomfortable, since, like most American & Canadian businesses, my work requires that I be at least partially clothed for the entire work day. ("Fig Leaf Fridays" being a relatively new development. Usually that's most popular in the Swimsuit Section of the Department.) Add to all of this the fact that I am not supposed to blog at work (except when I ghost-write my boss's blog), & you can imagine the looks I get from my co-workers when I begin to disrobe in my cubicle! One of these days I'll either get in a lot of trouble or I'll catch cold. Damn they keep these offices frosty!

What I really need to do, though, is just apologize. No one should have to trudge through the treacly, tragic stabs of ha ha that I attempt on a more or less daily basis here. Luckily, nearly no one does. Most likely, if you're reading this, you're my mother wondering what I am saying behind her back, or you're a spider crawling the web looking for poor bastards to sell viagra to make their newly-extended penises work. Which reminds me. I need to answer an email from a cute Russian girl who found my name in a chat room...

While blogging has become a serious pasttime in this United Snakes, it's more & more the less & less affluent who spend oodles & oodles of time downloading porn & music from Russian Federation websites that somehow slip right past expensive corporate firewalls with tacky corporate firewallpaper. I know that my (very) hypothetical audience is essentially finding their way here looking for Amazon Dot Com promotional codes & the lastest nipple slip from the latest nymphette. I have only those illusions that enable me to walk out the door every morning with my handgun on safety - the rest of the time, I look quizzically at graphs & make sure that the court-mandated pills I take to keep my dogs loving me are safely down the gullet. So, too, the blog is not so much required to be adventurous, but simply moded: an arm of the radio show, as the music is the radio show's heart.

Gah! I can't stop it! What the fuck am I writing! How long can this go on! Did you ever see such a fat, bloated tick of crapola stuck suckily to the side of a computer screen? Ye gods, I am a douche.

Also, self-pity & self-deprecation, while admirable in a much-lauded public servant or celebrity, is essentially the face of acceptable well-rehearsed modesty, while in a virtually unknown blogger, it's BOOOOOOOOORRRRINGGGGG.

It's true, actually. Bah.

Whither Glue?

So glad you asked. I answer with a question: how glue are you?

We often think of glue as a noun, but not so Self Help Radio! Self Help Radio uses glue to describe itself - & so should you. For it's glue that we are missing in our nonstick world of counters & tabletops. Glue is how we should answer questions like "How are you?" ("Glue!") or "How do you feel?" (Glue!"). I am convinced much work would be accomplished if we simply be more glue than we currently are. Heck, I even think we could invent a new genre of music & call it "the glues."

But maybe you don't entirely get it, or, in the new jargon, you don't glue. I glue. Totally, I do. It sometimes helps understanding if we turn what was formerly a noun into not just an adjective, but also a verb. To allow oneself to feel glue, one must simply glue. Glueing is how glue describes itself. Maybe unfortunately, there's already a verb, "to glue," which means something like, "to apply glue." That may be a hurdle. But just like the verb "to eat" once meant "to not eat" (back in the 13th century or something - I read it online I think - or maybe I dreamt it in one of my etymological dreams), so too can we change the meaning of the verb "to glue." One way to do this is to eliminate glue as a noun.

& that means eliminating glue as a substance. You've discovered this week's Self Help Radio's most nefarious scheme: the elimination of glue as a substance. It's unnatural to stick things together when they don't want to be! It's unnatural to force adherence in regards to adhering! In elimintating glue as a substance, we are left with only memory - & metaphor.

We shall then become the metaphor. We shall be glue. & we'll reclaim the noun, at last. As the world falls apart, we, the glue, will express ourselves as glue, & we shall glue.

I ask again: how glue are you?

Preface To Glue: What Is That Delicious Smell?

One day, in 1982, when a certain insensitive American Literature teacher made a certain sensitive schoolboy run out of class in tears, the history of the Trinidad, Texas, Independent School District was changed forever. That crying schoolboy fled to the boy's restroom, where he found a small group of young toughs sniffing airplane glue. Though slight of build & smart, the weeping schoolboy fell in with that crowd, & a series of personal disasters & run-ins with the law surely followed. There was death, disease, unhappiness, hospital visits, & a lot of sex for some reason, & with some rather attractive young women, including one who I swear looked exactly like Phoebe Cates in Fast Times At Ridgemont High. There were fights with parents, clergy, the mean man at the cigar store, even with his closest friends. By the time everyone had given up on that sensitive schoolboy, he was alone in the world, with only one functioning nostril & one last drop in that tube of glue.

But he let that drop go to waste. Determine, still a little fucked up, he pulled himself together that lonely night & turned his life around. It wasn't easy, but since he was a white kid whose parents had been saving money for him for college, it wasn't really all that difficult, either. In any event, his addiction cured, he went to school, determined to make school safe for everyone, but especially sensitive schoolboys with addicitive personalities.

& that sensitive schoolboy turned out to be none other than Dr. Jack Scrawfelter, Superintendent to the TISD! & his first duty: he fired the teacher who had hurt him so!

Interestingly, that teacher, Elmyra Crabtree, was only a few weeks from retiring, but due to a trumped-up charge against her by the superintendent, she was denied a large portion of her retirement, & spent her savings in court challenging the ruling. The judge was a good friend of the Scrawfelter family & also had two kids in the school district, so she basically lost everything when he ruled against her. She now works in the bean section of a school lunchroom in Corsicana.

Let that be a lesson to you, glue sniffers & mean teachers alike! I can make up a story about both, & have the weight of my trumped-up moral make you feel weird! It's true! It's not true! What do you know?

In Which Our Hero Forgets His ATM Card & Gets Arrested

This will mean nothing to anyone who isn't a Texan who's had to drive on the I-35 corridor from Austin to Dallas (or vice versa) in the month of August ever in the last twenty years, but I just want to say: FREAKY. It's rained more on this part of the world this summer than it would have if we'd been forced to live One Hundred Years Of Solitude, so all of central Texas is green, gReEn, GREEN! Usually around this time of year, there are warnings of fires. People put cigarettes out in their hands if there's nothing else around. Grills are subject to background checks. Kids with magnifying glasses get roughed up by the Highway Patrol & sent to reeducation camps. But this summer: it's so green it hurts.

It's too weird. I blame the Bible.

This has nothing to do with what I was going to tell you, which is this: if you missed last week's show about "bathing" (which has already been compared to "a delightful interview with Charlie Rose" by my mother, who also missed last week's show, but who thinks I'm a lot like Charlie Rose don't ask me why), you can go over to selfhelpradio.net & listen to the whole thing as if it were happening now. Which is isn't. Because I'm right here.

Fungi love this moistness. I blame the Bible.