Slept Through Friday

Umm? Oh, hi. I spent the day preparing for my colleague Dick Dickenbock's sub show tomorrow morning on KVRX, 91.7 fm, kvrx.org, from 5am to 9am. So listen. I'm going back to sleep. I mean, work.

Facebook Reprint

I wrote this last night as a response to one of those lists that people make you do on Facebook. (Yes, I'm on Facebook. The wife pressured me. If you want to be my friend, you can find a Gary Dickerson & Austin & viola! You can learn all the lies that are my life.) I thought it was funny so I thought I'd reproduce it here. Please to enjoy.

5 Things You May, May Not, Or May Really Care To Know About Me

Rules no one agreed upon: Once you've been tagged, you are being purposely made to feel guilty if you don't write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, outright lies, especially shameful acts, or experiences other people had or that you read about in a book which you would desperately like to claim as your own. At the end, you must choose 25 people to be tagged, unless you don't know 25 people, which of course you don't, but luckily you've accepted a lot of friend requests, so fill that shit up. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I think you have nothing better to do. I certainly didn't. Observe:

1. I am not an amphibian.

2. In the movie of my life I will be played by someone who hasn't been born yet. Also, that actor will be a hologram.

3. I think it's perfectly natural for a grown man to play with a ball of string. Yes, on the bus. What are you looking at?

4. That uncomfortable queasiness you feel whenever I'm around? It's all me. Sorry.

5. In tender moments, I am unquestionably asleep.

6. More often than not, there's a song going on in my head that is much, much louder than whatever nonsense you're talking about.

7. I have masturbated to poetry. Poetry written by a woman, of course!

8. I have masturbated while writing poetry to a woman.

9. I can read in the dark. Just not words.

10. While I understand the devastating physical drawbacks associated with it, not to mention the societal implications of my actions, the ruined lives, the devastated families, the billions of dollars lost by lack of productivity & extensive hospital visits, I still advocate enforced glue-sniffing in America's middle schools.

11. My left hand hates my right hand. My right hand has no opinion either way about my left hand. That makes my left hand hate my right hand all the more.

12. I am deeply offended by excessive onomatopoeia. Oh, & it's excessive when I say it's excessive.

13. I firmly believe that there's no such thing as a free lunch. However, I think snacks should not only be free but compulsory. Also, I believe that if you're clever enough to save your snacks for lunch & can save lunch money that way, you're awesome.

14. It took many years (& some difficult & painful trials) to correct my misconception but I for the longest time labored under the misapprehension that it was the smell of kevlar & not its tensile strength that stopped bullets. My deepest appreciation to Officers Johnson, Livermore, Goodstone, Royce, Turington, their widows & their families for their extraordinary help with this matter.

15. Part of the reason I enjoy being on the radio is that I am very visual person.

16. Billboards are communicating to me & to a select few (you know who you are) how deeply disappointed Satan is in our continual inability to utterly & completely fuck shit up.

17. My wife is our marriage for the money.

18. My wife is not very good with money.

19. The Bible is the yummiest book I have ever fed to a goat.

20. No matter how hard I try, my wedding ring does not charge when I put it next to my Green Lantern brand Power Battery. No, not even when I say, "In brightest day, in darkest night, no evil shall escape my sight, let those who worship evil's might, beware my power, Green Lantern's Light!"

21. In regards to certain hurtful things I have said in my life about William Faulkner, I can with a heavy heart admit now it's really because he returns my correspondence to him unopened & unread. & that just hurts. I know he has a Nobel Prize & all, but, I mean, it's not like he's written anything for years. Okay. Okay. I'll let it go.

22. Fact # 22 about me is still sealed by the courts. You can try a subpoena, but I was a juvenile at the time & anyway there's no one else left to talk about it but me.

23. I will not be deterred from my incredibly solid belief that a presidential election was held in Ghana on December 7, 2008, at the same time as a parliamentary election. Nor can anyone sway me from my firm conviction that, since no candidate received more than 50% of the votes, a run-off election was held on December 28 between the two candidates who received the most votes, Nana Akufo-Addo & John Atta Mills. & though I run the risk of seeming like a fool to my friends & colleagues, I will maintain to my death that Atta Mills was certified as the victor in the run-off election on January 3, 2009, by a margin of less than one percent.

24. Call me a prude if you must, but anything you say to another person while you are urinating or defecating is not really worth saying.

25. I believe sarcasm is boring. Also, irony is dead.

Whither An Ordinary Show?

The late, not-so-great philosopher/accountant Marmaduke Garfield once wrote, "We shall be happier in our employment & our daily lives should we endeavour to exist as though in extra-ordinary times." I have never really agreed with anything less. Let me be clear - you may be extraordinary, & your pets are probably extraordinary (compared to humans, not necessarily to other pets) (& certainly not compared to my pets), & you may have extraordinary experiences all the time - but most of us don't. For many people, my mother included, the most extraordinary thing in their lives is Self Help Radio. I mean, why can't all radio shows be that good?

It has made me sad, as steward of this show, which doesn't "believe the hype" about itself. (It also doesn't "play against type.") (Nor does it "Put that in its pipe & smoke it.") So when the show was approached by the local peasantry eager for a respite from its unrelenting quality, it balked. Then it stalked out. It walked the walked & talked the talk. It chalked up the criticism to vicious rumors. It was, in short, in denial.

Listen, I said to my radio show, which was emitting a slow, soft hum, like a television with its clothes off. Listen, I said. Let's just have, for once, an ordinary show. (It ignored me.) Just an ordinary show. (No response.) A simple, plain, ordinary show. (Not even a nod in my direction. I had to break out the thesaurus.) A commonplace, conventional, familiar, garden variety, generic, modest, no great shakes, normal, pedestrian, plain, prosaic, quotidian, routine, run-of-the-mill, undistinguished, uneventful, unexceptional, unremarkable, usual, white-bread, workaday show. Can we do it just once?

Well, as you know, Self Help Radio loves synonyms. It said, "Oh all right!" Then it confided in me: "You had me at quotidian."

Let's hope the show doesn't change its mind before Saturday.

Preface To An Ordinary Show: Meetings Are So 2008

In the meeting, this afternoon, the Most Important Boss said: "Celery sales are down! Who shall be the one to sell the shares?"

No one dared raise their bloody marys. Yet the most ordinary of salespeople, Milton Bardley, coughed ever so slightly, in a non-offensive way, into the uncufflinked shirt which his mother had failed to wash for a fortnight.

The room gasped. One spousal hire even choked on her canape. The Most Important Boss said, "Who is it? Who wants the high salary gained by high celery sales?" He thumped a fist on the desk, which was made of something a lot like oak, only artificial.

Milton was queasy, but he feebly responded. "It is I," he sort of peeped, "Milton Bardley, quality control assistant for Accounts Backup & Mutual Department, sir. And," he added, "a big fan of celery."

"You can't sell celery short, Breadloom!" thundered the Most Important Boss. "Nor slowly! Celery must be sold with celerity! Accelerate the celery sales son!"

Milton had had four little strokes in any many little minutes, but he said, "Certainly sir the celery shall sell itself."

"Cover me in cheese spread & call me a cracker," said the Most Important Boss. "You've gotten something on your soiled trousers, Bartleby! Celery selling itself! Cut out the middleman! Bypass the farmer's market! Door-to-door celery sales!"

To the moment he died, which was about fourteen minutes later, Milton Bardley considered this the most wonderful moment in his life. He couldn't begin to think of the comic books he'd be able to buy on his new salary. Alas, his ordinary heart gave out under the extraordinary pressure, & he might have been saved, except the Most Important Boss also experienced an explosion inside, when his brain exploded from a violent tumor, & as he collapsed to the floor, the still Most Important Boss took Milton's idea with him into death.

The end.

A cautionary loop brought to you by Self Help Radio.

Halloo Noo Year!

In the fiery grape-leaf fields of Corsica, several uneducated philanthropists this past week burned an effigy in effigy, thus setting the pace for the groundless & baseless foundation of what most people (though not all persons) have taken to calling "2009." A small but wearisome minority have not yet succeeded in their campaign to call the new year 1492 2.0, but an unsuccessful attempt to lobby the so-called political parties of Sweden pretends to have made some headway.

Self Help Radio wishes nothing but goodwill to the scrappy but lame 2009 & reminds it that its library books were due, like, last year. In the absence of abstention, 2009 will be with us for a few more months, a sorry testament to how truly anemic years that are not prime numbers can be. (Hello 2011! When will you shave us?) Never you mind. The storehouse of environmental poisons will keep us on our toes. As long as we have toes. QED.

In this spirit, the not-quite-as-wealthy-as-they-were-this-time-last-year corporate masters who sanction with some embarrassment Self Help Radio reluctantly announce that it has been renewed for another twelve months. You can witness (in audio form) their shame at selfhelpradio.net. You are encouraged to do so. Be not afraid! It can be cleared up with a little ointment.

Happy new year!