Not At Library To Say

By these shackles I wear around my pants, I say to you I SHALL BE FREE!

Sorry, I've been reading a lot of comic books lately. I think I might have also had a dream about Jack Kirby last night. Ah well.

Here are things I'm planning this weekend. I am planning on not getting stabbed. (That's ongoing.) I am planning to finish this week's Self Help Radio by the middle of the day tomorrow, before it gets stabbed. I'll be holding the teleprompter for the freaky Vance Chamberlain for his "The War On Sailing" radio show on KVRX on Sunday morning. I plan to stalk you on Facebook, so really, stop sharing everything. That photo of you with the puke in your hair? It's not cute.

Um. I plan to eat cheese fries with my nephew tonight, then to regret eating those cheese fries because of all the beer & jalapeños I washed the cheese fries down with. I plan to scold my dogs & praise my cats. I plan to read something I'm supposed to read although I probably won't. Somewhere in there, I plan to fall down a flight of stairs just to say I did. Or not, to say I didn't. I also plan at one point to get exasperated & say, "I've only got two hands!" Maybe during a card game? Who knows?

I'm not trying to impress. You got something better? What're you going to do that's so exciting?

Sheesh.

Whither Valleys?

Lee Majors hater step off!

My name is Gary & I spend a good deal of bad time every week working on a podcast which I call Self Help Radio. (Yes, you can listen to it at selfhelpradio.net.) Every week something is something that I something something somethinged. The show stays fresh & new by eating weird fruits & watching exercise shows on demand. One day, it must've been in my sophomore year of college, I realized that what I was most of the time was depressed. At that very moment, somewhere far away, Huey Lewis (of Huey Lewis & The News) took a great big shit that looked & sounded eerily like Billy Joel. On my desk at home, a Stephen R. Donaldson book began to decompose at thirty-three times its natural rate.

Which is not to say y'all can't hate Lee Majors. Y'all just better not be doin' it round here.

Two days after my apparent wedding I was visited by two federal agents designed as evangelicals. It was days before Christmas & I was about to go skeet shooting. The past week's Self Help Radio had had an uncommon theme, if I recall correctly & I don't, whereas the theme the previous week had been all commonalities. These communist Christians were completely unable to sense that my worldview sounded funky while their attempt to add the "personal touch" to proselytizing stank. We became fast friends & even faster enemies - when I grabbed my skeet rifle you should've seen them run! Har har har!

But I wasn't destined for the movies or for horseplay. When my resume came back unopened, I wondered - aloud, yes, but quietly, as if I were in a library or a mongoose cafe - why Barack Obama wouldn't want me in his cabinet, or at his table, or living in the storeroom above his garage. There are many reasons in life for a man to feel his masculinity wasn't manly enough, & time is literally the great emasculator, but at that moment I realized that not only was I destined to live alone for at least the times of my life that I was by myself, but also that a political viewpoint is no substitute for an articulated skeleton.

& as for dear, dear Mr Lee Majors. I'm no fool. I know there are major Lee Majors haters. I went through the same thing in my Caldecott-prize nominated children's stinker called "Having T with Mr T: Reforming Television's Hard-Core Bruiser for the Spongepants Generation." Mr. T haters die a suspicious death. Lee Majors haters live in no fear. That's how great is the kindness & sleepiness of the Lee Majors. Bless him.

& bless us all, everyone!

Preface To Valleys: Lee Majors

Here's what a fellow named Ed Stephan wrote (on the IMDb) was the "plot" of the television series "The Big Valley," which aired in the mid- to late-sixties, & starred one of childhood heroes, Lee Majors: "Victoria Barkley heads her adult brood on the Barkley Ranch in California's San Joaquin Valley, near Stockton, in the 1870s. Heath is the illegitimate son of Victoria's husband Tom (who is dead at the time of the series). Bank robbers, horse thieves, revolutionaries & land grabbers keep the Barkleys hopping." Revolutionaries! I need to see this series again.

I love Lee Majors in the same way I love Mr. T & Evel Knievel, simply for his role in "The Six Million Dollar Man," which left an indelible imprint on me as a kid. Add to it that he played "The Fall Guy," a show that I never understood was supposed to be a comedy (that's how awful it was) & then of course he was married to Farrah Fawcett, who was supposed to be pretty so as a kid I thought she was pretty, well, there you are: a cool hero to my pantheon.

Not only that: his characters always had cool names. On "The Big Valley," he was Heath. (Also, he was a bastard, which I maybe didn't know exactly what that meant, but what the hell, it was fun to say.) On "The Six Million Dollar Man" he was "Colonel Steve Austin." Even on "The Fall Guy," he was "Colt Seavers."

Each of his three major television series - one for the 60's, one for the 70's, one for the 80's - lasted at least one hundred episodes. For "The Six Million Dollar Man" he also did three TV movies. Besides William Shatner (who of course became an icon by playing Captain Kirk & also made Star Trek movies, so he's kinda in a class by himself), is there any other cheesy television action show actor who was as long-lived with three television projects? I can't think of one...

Hooray for Lee Majors! Wow, he's about to turn seventy years old! It was fun to see him on "Weeds" this last season. Maybe someone should tell David Kelley to get him on "Boston Legal." I'll go write a letter now.

Like A Ton Of Tricks

This is my not-clever day. Nothing I do today will be clever. I won't write anything clever, nor will I, should you by chance run into me on the street on in the late-night drinking bars, say anything clever. The most clever thing I did today was wake up in time to feed the animals. That's as clever as I got. Not very clever, I know. I mean, Jesus! Look at the title of this post. That's not only not clever, it's a stupid pun that doesn't make any sense.

Do you want to know WHY I'm not clever today. It's easy. I out-clevered myself doing last week's Self Help Radio. It's well-known that I do the show only because of some incriminating evidence my corporate warlords have about my sinful past - & it's also well-known that I am mainly a tax write-off for them, although recently I've been touted as a community service project as well - "See how well the mentally challenged can do radio?" Knowing all that, there's virtually no reason for me to ever be clever for Self Help Radio.

But it sometimes happens. Don't believe me? Go listen to Self Help Radio for last week. Just do it. Then you decide. It's up to you.

This offer not valid with folks who've never found anything I've done to be clever.

The Ungainly Return Of "Self Help Radio Extra"

Yes, yes, I missed it in December, but in my defense, I got married, divorced, married to a bigamist, divorced from reality, married someone who wasn't divorced on a reality show, & fell asleep at the wheel. But now! At the ass end of an historic month in a year that is not a prime number, here's this month's Self Help Radio Extra, featuring stuff by the Guild League, The Secret History, Cruiser, Indurain, & other music that see-saws between indie pop & indie rock in a slightly lopsided manner which indicates I get very little sleep & don't help myself when I don't close my eyes. Go listen to the mix now! It's like Self Help Radio but without all my dull airbreaks.

Speaking of closing my eyes, that's the next Self Help Radio, available all over the place tomorrow afternoon at you-know-where. See you there & have a nice weekend!

Whither Close Your Eyes?

I don't like that subject line. It doesn't, as they say, parse. Not even in the mouth of a nonsense-king.

Incidentally, I once knew a nonsense-king, long before one of them was chosen to be President of the United States by a group of old people in robes. He always had egg on his face - literally. I never once saw him eating eggs, but there was always some part of an egg - a flake of scrambled, some gooey yolk, even bits of shell - somewhere on his face. Maybe it was his thing. Also, he didn't smell bad. You'd think someone dressed in a crazy outfit acting like a ridiculous monarch might be too insane to indulge in personal hygiene, especially since he had food particles on his face, but he always smelled like a freshly-washed dog from one of those doggy-day-care places. Maybe it was the flea shampoo.

Anyway, the nonsense-king never said things correctly. Not like double negatives, you know, stuff like, "I ain't got nothing." I don't mind that. Nor did he split infinitives or other arbitrary silliness that makes grammarians unhappy. No, he just would construct sentences, simple sentences, that didn't sound right. "I want to isn't it home," he said. Or "This basket is rifening with put it ins." Or "Cross my crackers, I haven't looked since eyes to eyes!" Things that were kind of nonsensical, but you knew what he was getting at. Still. They just didn't parse.

No wonder he was deposed!

What was I going on about? Oh crap! I have to go to the bank. Save a space for me, will you? I don't want to miss this next part.

Preface To Close Your Eyes: Tic Tic Tic

According to OmDict, the "human-edited, online medical dictionary," a fasciculation is "a local & fine involuntary muscle contraction." They are distinguished from "tics" by being "typically visible underneath the skin" but "not strong enough to move a limb." They're also known as "muscle twitches."

A tic is a whole other banana. A tic is (according to Wikipedia) "a sudden, repetitive, nonrhythmic, stereotyped motor movement or vocalization involving discrete muscle group." Tics can move a limb - they can be hardcore. Oh, & there's also a wonderful section on the Tourette's page which talks about "some confusion in media portrayals of tics."

Anyway, back to fasciculations. If you have them, it may be because you don't get enough magnesium. You also may be drinking too much caffeine, or you may be dehydrated, or it may be plain old stress. Don't drink so much coffee! Drink some more water! Close your eyes & relax!

Except when I have twitches, I can't close my eyes. It makes me notice them more. It's a vicious circle.

By the way, does anyone know how to search that OmDict thing? I can't figure it out.

Several Circumstances Later

So I'm sitting outside in the rain with only a dollar to my name looking to hitchhike from Des Moines to any place but Des Moines & I end up in Iowa City drunk, dressed like Gabor Szabo, constructing car bombs with a veteran of one Iraqi incursion or another who's convinced I can help him meet Martin Lawrence if only we can blow up the Royal Gorge Bridge. Some uncomfortable moments of silence occur until he realizes he's got at least half a carton of DayQuil left, & soon enough we're watching some Ben Affleck movie on a portable DVD player in the back of a Madison, Wisconsin, pedi-cab being furiously pedaled by the young hippie on whom my companion has his gun trained. Convinced through imperfect evidence that the world will end if we don't destroy the twin lakes, I drag a carload of C4 into Lake Monona, & he straps two hundred sticks of dynamite onto his chest & descends into Lake Mendota, but curious fate intervenes & I am bludgeoned by two male strippers dressed as cops but with real nightsticks who wanted to skinny dip but didn't want me to watch.

I wake up for reasons best explained by the dearth of cheap pharmaceuticals in a Kenora, Ontario, hospital while a trained monkey lies about my citizenship as I can't fill out the forms with the ink damage to my hands. During a consult which quickly devolves into a heated discussion about Hockey Night In Canada, I hide in a candy-striper's drink-cart & hand-paddle it the 126 miles to Winnepeg, where I am quickly given the keys to the city & a grant to continue my performance art. I blow through the grant double-time because it's Canadian money & am found later in Hollywood sleeping in John Carpenter's office apparently after a failed movie pitch which sounded an awful lot like "They Live" because I was reading the script off his coffee table.

Arrested for vagrancy, I plead nolo contendere & ask if they'd fly Alan Shore from Boston to defend me. I am given an embarrassing psychological exam in front of the tainted potential jury pool for no other reason than to humiliate me, & the judge grants a mistrial then, in an unprecedented move, finds me guilty of "Existence With Malice Aforethought." A brief tour of celebrity chat shows follows, in which I am often mistaken for the guy that brings the weird birds & insects, & Tyra Banks beats the living hell out of me. One residual check after another appears in my mother's mailbox & I discover I am the star of a hit television sitcom in which I have never appeared. John Ashcroft is reportedly a fan.

Stumbling home for a well-earned rest I instead work feverishly to make the week's Self Help Radio, which, for all intents & purposes, is about gum. I finished it on Saturday. It's available at selfhelpradio.net. It still smells a little sweaty. You might want to run it through the washer a couple of times. It's a hard life on the road. I don't apologize for it.

Now ANYONE Can Do It!

They couldn't before, but they can now! What was stopping everyone previously has subsequently been removed! The obstacles placed in the way have been cleared! The road is open & therefore it's smooth sailing from now on! Nothing stands in their way! Nothing can stop them now! They have cleared a path! Straight on, through the horizon! Hooray for them!

Of course, the only thing truly stopping them was their own fears & doubts, as they could have done it at any time. Yet they didn't, & there are many reasons for it, but all reasons led back to their own perceived failures & insecurities. A sense of failed strength led to a sense of failed desire, which accounted for the blocks & hurdles which seemed to bar all action.

But no more! No more excuses! No more lies! No more hesitation! No more prevarication! No more obfuscation! No more lack of imagination! No more recrimination, remonstration, commiseration! This is the time! This is the place! This is the moment! This is the hour! This is the day! This is the point in time when the realization hits: anyone can do it!

Sometimes, though, such self-assurance burns itself out like a cheap firework. But not today! Now that self-evaluation is justified. Goodness gracious, anyone can do it! From the lowest high to the loftiest filth! It is within everyone's reach & grasp. I swear. I promise. I dare. I admonish. Better than hopes, cheaper than dreams - anyone can do it!

Now if I could only figure out WHAT. Oh well. It's enough that I've assured everyone they do it. Stay tuned to Self Help Radio for developments.

The Curse Of The Invisible Tent

GARY, Texas – Inebriated Dairy Queen workers hurled rancid milkshakes & aspersions at random livestock & their owners here during increasingly baffling demonstrations this week over bumper stickers & their incorrect placement on parts of the car/truck/SUV/motorcycle besides the bumper.

The Gary, Texas, Sheriff's Assistant Department refused to open its doors Wednesday & old Mr. Johnson's recently repainted barn was mocked in his neighbor's blog.

Demonstrators are calling for "sanity" & "more sugar," but stopped to watch television Wednesday night, since someone Tivoed last week's episode of "CSI" which was the last featuring William Peterson as Gil Grissom. But the crowd, an hour drunker than when the show started, seemed unimpressed with Peterson's replacement, Laurence Fishburne, most famous from the "Matrix" movies.

As the Gary Monthly Informer is reporting on its website today, protesters have been gathering irregularly – and, until recently, not-falling-down drunk – following a heated discussion in a bar about bumper stickers in October. Demonstrators say the crisis could have been prevented if Gail Worth had simply placed her "My Child Is An Honor Student" on her "god-damned" bumper instead of leaving it taped inside the rear window.

The protests subsided during the Christmas season, in part because it cut into the town's drinking time, but other local Avon saleswomen decided to follow Worth's lead. During the bi-monthly Mary Kay/Avon summit at the local Grandy's, demonstrators happened by. Johnny "Boy" Gleason, a local meth entrepreneur, thought everyone was celebrating the inauguration of President Barack Obama & decided to join in.

"I know, it's stupid, it's the middle of nowhere Texas, man," Gleason said. "Everyone here thinks he's a Muslim."

But it was discovered that the event in Washington, D.C., “had absolutely nothing to do with the situation here,” Gleason said Wednesday night, as he urinated on the burned-out husk of Mrs. Worth's SUV. “I have no idea what the hell happened.”

Protesters eventually passed out on some scrub land neared the intersection of 2260 & Sante Fe Street, but not before a group of high-school drop-outs managed to consume (& sometimes toss at passing cars) wine coolers, leftover egg nog, &, very surprisingly, skyr (an Icelandic dairy product). A group of truckers who were sick & tired responded with pepper spray & those little green bibles that just contain the New Testament.

Between 20 and 30 protesters were allowed to sleep it off in a nearby pasture, according to eye witnesses. At least six were thought to be more high than drunk. Two were described by a passing dermatologist as "seriously wasted."

Although many here claim to be expressing anger and sadness over automobile decorations, some townsfolk have noted an unexpected benefit of the protests: They’ve helped pull the town together. According to a letter in the Informer, “It is the first time in Gary's history that an over-medicated high school student can well expect to meet his under-medicated teacher in the crowd fucking shit up at the same time, even while grading standardized tests. Our society is surely hanging by a thin thread and might collapse at any moment.”

If Gary, Texas, succumbs to anarchy, it will be just another failure in what some are calling the "crisis in Texas' smallest towns." Gary has long been the poster child for places it's better to drive through than hang around, but now discussion of surrounding the town with a moat (full of crocodiles) & a barbed-wire fence are gaining more credence from nearby communities, who are understandably dismayed & frightened by this weird turn of events.

Whither Gum?

Los Angeles, 2002. A city under siege. A city under water. The great floods of 2002 submerged the entire Western Seaboard. Movie stars grow gills to continue filming - but mainly in Vancouver. Hollywood is lost forever.

In Atlántico, Columbia, a door slams. A man with guaranteed no relation to but looking an awful lot like Fyvush Finkel reads his local newspaper worriedly. An itinerant soap-box repairman & bastard son to the best friend of the prostitute who serviced the the disgruntled employees fired during the well-publicized Company Snit in 1915 which resulted in the consolidation of power of William Wrigley, Jr. of the world's chewing gum resources, this sensitive & melancholy soul naturally had gum on his mind. He wondered, "Can gum save America's entertainment industry?"

West Virginia, 2013. A state ignored by the country in which it dwells. Years of isolation & self-abuse worry the leaders of the state, who have been starting fires & collapsing mines to get media attention. A door slams.

Whether it's chicle, or whether it's plastic, the ingredients speak to the hearts &/or the minds of the afflicted. Gum! Gum! Can you save us, O Gum? By gum, gum can save us! Three cheers for gum! Just don't get any on your shoes. Spit it into the wrapper & throw the wrapper away. Just like that. Sure. Oh, gross. Just. Just throw it away. God.

This future could be our future. This future might just be your future. But for the grace of gum go we. So have some gum. Have some. Gum. In case you're allergic, try hypoallergenic gum. I just invented it. Tastes like ass, but it's gum. So have some. Gum. Gum. Gum.

Also, gum cures all ills. There. I've said it. Although not all dental ills. I'm not going on record with that one. Gum.

Preface To Gum: What's That On Your Shoe?

An Ode To Gum
by N. Awful Poet

Oh gum! Oh gum!
From whence do you come?
Give me some.
Bubble gum, chewing gum,
Xanthan gum, spirit gum...
Some for eating, with your chum;
Some for adhering, rule of thumb -
I bang the drum for gum gum gum!

Look, I don't want to sound dumb
But for a reasonable sum
Don't be sad! Don't be glum!
I can buy you lots of gum.

I hear you hum -
In the slum with all the scum -
You can't stay mum!
You must succumb!
I will let gum your heartstrings strum!
You can't be numb to the wiles of gum!

No? I can't even give you a crumb
of gum?
You'd say "Yum!"
Oh well, I could say, "How come?"
But I can see you're just a bum
Drinking plum rum.

Can I have some?

Long Weekend, Short Story

I am a sleepy man as I have been in meetings all day & also went to bed late all night. Woke up early, too, & generally did not sleep well. Dreamt of covering my hands in plaster. Or getting my hands covered in plaster. Because of touching a fellow who was covered in plaster. Who kinda reminded me of Daniel Johnston. Without the menthol cigarettes.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. I'll be waking up early again tomorrow to help my friend & ex-lawyer Dick Dickenbock do another four hour shift on KVRX tomorrow. From five to nine am. You can listen online or on radio at 91.7fm. Why does he need my help? I dunno. He can't seem to do them by himself. I think he gets paid by the American Disabilities Act to do radio or something. His disability? Born without irony. It's a sadness.

Then I'll run home (on my sore ankle) & work on tomorrow's Self Help Radio, which should be on the website sometime in the early evening. I've been sleepy, you see, & sleepiness is not conducive to timeliness. Ask Rip Van Winkle! If he's awake.

Have a happy long weekend! I'll write again when we have a new president!

Whither 1973?

Please note: this article was supposed to appear yesterday, but, due to unforeseen laziness (well, we would have seen it coming if we had been paying attention), it appears today. Our apologies if it still smells a little Wednesdayish.

I was five years old, officially, in 1973. My family, which had been fatherless since '72, was living in some poverty in an apartment complex on Kingsley Avenue in Garland, Texas, a growing suburb of Dallas, then numbering about 80,000 souls. My two oldest siblings were able to fend for themselves, being out of school & stuff like that, but that left my mother & me & three brothers & a sister. To this day I can't imagine how my mother managed it, although I do know the older two brothers still at home worked some.

I have no specific memories of being five. I do remember, in hazy contours like a screen-shot of a movie fade-out, the design of the apartment complex, although those memories mingle with others from my early teens when I had a paper route that brought me back there. I wish I could remember playmates, smells, actual events, but I only have stories I've been told over & over, mostly embarrassing, some outright awful.

I think you're supposed to start kindergarten at five, & if so, I definitely did not. One of the stories that I don't remember much about is that I was taken to kindergarten every day for a week & I screamed until I was taken out. It was decided (ah, the innocence of the school system before No Child Left Behind) that I could skip kindergarten if I couldn't handle it. This kind of pissed off my little brother, who had to go to kindergarten the next year when I, despite some hesitation, made it through the first day of first grade. He has never forgiven me. I think it was another in an endless supply of proof that I was valued more than him.

As noted above, these days have a kind of sepia tinge, & I do wish I could go back there & have a look around, see what things did in fact smell like & feel like & look like. I wonder if I'd be reminded of certain sensations, or if it would all seem strange & new.

Whatever else was going on the world in 1973, the five-year-old me paid absolutely no attention to.

Preface To 1973: A Year That Is Also A Prime Number Is A Wonder To Behold

You know what prime numbers are, yeah? They're natural numbers which have only two divisors, themselves & one. (A number like 12 has six: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 12. A number like 2 has two: 1, 2. So 2 is a prime number.) Human beings have been fascinated by prime numbers since they had a little leisure time to while away with mathematics. I like them for no apparent reason, which is all right by me.

In a week, my age becomes a prime number, too. I'd like to attach (for the hell of it) some numerological significance to being that age, but as I look over my life I realize that prime number years weren't necessarily the best years of my life. This last year, for example, for all of its changes & weirdnesses & what-not, was a pretty good year. & it wasn't prime, not hardly. So the "prime is primo" theory doesn't hold water.

Prime numbers get more & more rare as we count up. But there are twenty-five of them in the first hundred natural numbers. One in four is a prime number! That's awesome. Here they are:

2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89, 97

1973 was a pretty good year for music, something I'll explore this weekend. But it was even cooler for being the 297th prime number. (297, by the way, is not a prime number. Its divisors are 1, 3, 9, 11, 27, 33, 99 & 297.) It's really hard, by the way, to count a list of numbers. My brain now aches.

Hooray for prime number 1973! Hooray for math geekiness!

Clipped Nibbles

I woke up this morning with the Buzzcocks in my head. Wait. That came out weird. Let me rephrase that. I woke up this morning & Steve Diggle & Pete Shelley were sticking their tongues in my ear.

That's an example of a common bit of humorology that professional & unprofessional funny folk often employ when trying to make people laugh. The "punchline" (as the philosophers call it) comes from the person expecting the talker (in the above case, me myself) to weasel out of an embarrassing slip of the tongue by quickly denying the possible naughty connotations thereof. Instead - & what makes it funny - the talker (still in this case, me) confirms the more disreputable meaning & therefore thwarts expectations, creating what in many circles is called hilarity.

Unfortunately, as the boy who cried wolf will tell you, this bit of humoristics should be used with moderation. Otherwise people will spit on you. Or rip your head off & take a shit down your neck. I've seen it happen. On an open-mic night. It wasn't pretty, & it smelled awful.

I did employ this humoroid (as the Baptist ministers call it) in last week's Self Help Radio. Some time during the show. I don't have an exact time. You can use your checklist & redeem the finished sheet at any S&H Green Stamps Depot. Should you be so lucky. By all accounts one of us must. Why not you?

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.