The Sporadic Curmudgeon

I am the father of a preteen girl who has been on vacation all summer, and I telecommute from home. Therefore I have been bombarded with a nonstop television diet of the Disney Channel. Thank God school starts tomorrow and I get to reclaim what torn, wretched scraps of my sanity as remain.

While horrible and soul-crushing, the past two agonizing months have taught me something important. I used to think that Republicans, and neocons in particular, were the biggest threat to society.

Nope. It’s Auto-Tune. Especially when it allows prepubescent no-talents to star in TV shows where they “sing.”

Was that note a half-octave off? No problem! So what if the kid ends up sounding like someone slathered Peter Frampton’s guitar with a tub of Crisco?

It should come as no surprise that Auto-Tune was invented by an oil company engineer.

Prologue
(Cool! Finally, I get a legitimate excuse to write a prologue!)

Looking back across the gulf of three decades, even the most vivid memories get wobbly, like a stretch of distant highway on a hot summer day. We’re usually unaware of it because the other people involved long ago went their own way, or died, or have become successful and will not return your calls. And so we go on, completely oblivious to the fact that big chunks of what we remember aren’t reliable.

Facebook has changed all that.

You see, I started writing this story one year ago tonight. Through Facebook I had recently gotten back in touch with my few surviving friends from way back when, and was very excited about detailing the spectacular events of July 4th, 1979. Unfortunately, I made the fatal mistake of checking a few details with the old gang first.

It turns out that the girlfriend I thought had been with me on the expedition had not, in fact, been present at all. Worse, the confusion ran deeper: I am still unclear as to precisely which girlfriend that I imagined had been there had not really been there. If reading that sentence gives you a headache, just think how I feel. Detail after well-remembered detail were gunned down without mercy.

As a result, my faith in one of my most pleasant memories was utterly shattered, and I never finished the story. (Not finishing stories is something I’m very good at, by the way. I’ve developed it into something of an art form. A shameful, self-destructive art form.)

Over the past year, however, I’ve noticed a trend in my friends’ recollections on Facebook: theirs are as messed up as mine. Locations are misplaced, events conflated, and some really embarrassing stuff mysteriously never happened.

That’s when I realized that memory is just like Silly Putty: it’s malleable but more or less holds its shape, it picks up really clear impressions that you can stretch, and it will get stuck in your hair if you fall asleep on the couch while playing with it and you have to cut it out with a pair of scissors while your mother yells at you. Okay, it’s not one of those prissy one-to-one analogies, but you get what I’m driving at.

So I decided to go ahead and tell you my recollections of that Fourth of July anyway. Some of it probably didn’t happen exactly this way, but some of it did. If you can do better, please, be my guest. As always, the names have been changed to protect the miscreants. Also as always, the pseudonyms will be lame.

The Story Proper: July 4th, 1979

It had been an amazing, incredible summer already. I lived in the mythical land of Hollywood and had a nice girlfriend and a fun job lording it over a bunch of Rocky Horror Picture Show freaks. For the first time in my life I was, if not exactly popular, at least not universally loathed. I had more friends than I’d ever had before, and some of them were so cool I still can’t figure out why they stooped to my level. That’s actually a pretty good description of my love life, come to think of it…

Anyway, the summer of ‘79 just flat-out kicked ass. I was 22, and was in that magical period between discovering drugs and finding myself rocking back and forth in the corner of a skid-row hotel room muttering about beetles and the military-industrial complex. LSD was my substance of choice; I’d even dropped acid to meet Timothy Leary at a book signing. For real. I actually shook Tim Leary’s hand while tripping. That’s the stoner’s equivalent of climbing Everest.

We had assembled at the Center of the Universe, Mary and Gerald’s apartment. Mary was my boss at the theater, and Gerald was her brilliant writer boyfriend who had built a mechanical television as a boy. My girlfriend Linda had to work that day, but everyone else was there: Stoner Bill Jr., Nina, and the adorable punk couple Britt and Tamara. (I’m not being sarcastic; they were cute as bugs.)

I’d managed to get hold of some el-cheapo LSD from a friend in San Diego. We called it “The Brown Bomb” for two excellent reasons. First, it came on brown paper that had obviously been cut out of grocery store bags. Second, it was not for the faint of heart. The first time I’d taken it I remember turning to Britt about an hour in, my face screwed up like I was trying to pull a fighter plane out of a death spiral, and chattering through clenched teeth, “I think this might have some speed in it.”

Britt, Tamara and I divied up the acid. Stoner Bill Jr. volunteered to be a designated driver. Nina, who always exuded an air of detached amusement/irritation at our antics, declined to partake. Gerald elected to stay home and write. Our plan was to go down to Santa Monica Beach to watch the ocean and people wearing skimpy swimsuits.

Piling into the cars, we headed west toward the Pacific.

It was insanely crowded. We had to park a good half-mile away and walk. The acid was starting to kick in, and things were getting very strange indeed. There was one storefront that made us stop and stare. It was a menswear place, and displayed shirts and jackets on headless gold-painted mannequins. Instead of the usual smooth edge, though, the mannequin manufacturers had chosen to end each neck stump with a ring of rounded surfaces surrounding a central bump. I guess it was supposed to resemble upholstery, but to us it looked more like someone had taken victims straight from the guillotine and gilded the corpses.

Santa Monica is on a cliff over the beach, and we began making our incapacitated way down the zigzagging walkway. Halfway down, we came across a group of Hell’s Angels lounging around in a rest area. Putting on our bravest faces, we walked past them, desperately hoping to avoid a confrontation. I brought up the rear, and just as I passed, one of them looked at me and said, “BOO!” Everyone cracked up laughing.

We crossed the pedestrian bridge to the beach itself. The beach was completely packed, and yet people were setting off fireworks everywhere. It was like trench warfare in World War I but with hot chicks in bikinis. We huddled together, jostled by the crowd, with firecrackers snapping at our feet and bottle rockets whistling just over our heads. A decision to bail was quickly arrived at. To our relief, the biker gang was gone when we made the trek back up the cliff.

I rode back with Stoner Bill, Jr. It was five o’clock as we pulled into a parking space on the hillside below Mary’s apartment. Deep Purple’s “Hush” came on the radio, and Bill turned it up loud. He grinned at me. “Classic psychedelia!” he said. I’d never heard it before. I never heard it that way again, either. If you’ve never heard “Hush” on LSD, let me tell you… oh, never mind. It’s like trying to explain an orgasm.

Back up in Mary’s place, a traditional Fourth of July party was in progress. In spite of the Brown Bomb’s jittery side effects, I managed to eat a hot dog. There were lots of laughs and more substance abuse.

Then Mary had an inspiration: we should all go to the concert at the Hollywood Bowl, because they were performing The 1812 Overture, complete with a real cannon! This, we all agreed, would be fantastic. The only problem was that we had no tickets, and the event sold out every year. And so a daring plan was hatched.

An hour later, I found myself with Mary and a couple of the more intrepid party-goers climbing the treacherous hills above the Hollywood Bowl in the dark. A few stars twinkled in the sky through the city’s warm glow. I sat down on a teeter-tottering slab of rock and, resting my elbows on my knees, put my chin in my hands. Below us lay the famous amphitheater, brightly lit, and the familiar strains of Tchaikovsky’s music drifted up. I have rarely known such contentment.

And then came the great crescendo: Da-da-da-da-da-dah DA da-dah! Ka-BOOOM!!!! The cannon went off, the sound caroming around the valley. Fireworks launched from behind the band shell, exploding in time with the cannon. Da-da-da-da-da-dah DA da-dah! Ka-BOOOM!!!! The heart-swelling music, the fireworks blossoming below and above us in fiery colors, the cannon belching flame and thunder… We were on our feet and cheering and whooping and generally acting like the happy idiots we were.

Sigh.

It’s all just fragments of memory now, after all these years. Those fragments are worth more to me than I can possibly say.

Da-da-da-da-da-dah DA da-dah! Ka-BOOOM!!!!

Yeah. That was a Fourth of July.

Love never dies, but loved ones do. I’m sorry you were in such pain. Goodbye.

Last night I was thinking about the first Earth Day. Well, specifically I was remembering an hour of it, and only vaguely. I don’t have any solid memories of what I did, but I know precisely where I was: in Mrs. R’s art class at Alamo Heights Junior High School in San Antonio, Texas.

Alamo Heights was a wealthy neighborhood, and while I didn’t quite live on the wrong side of the tracks, I was only a block or two away. It wasn’t a fun place to be. I got bullied a lot, although I have to admit I gave them lots of fodder: I was poor, socially inept, had crossed eyes, loved to read, and had yet to learn the simple fact that the things I find most fascinating irritate the hell out of muscular, slow-witted classmates.

The teachers there were pretty stodgy. San Antonio didn’t cotton to most of the shenanigans the rest of the country had been engaged in, and this was Alamo Heights, after all. Most of them were nice enough, although one was utterly horrifying. (The social studies teacher was a middle-aged man with some kind of skin condition, and once in a while when we were supposed to be reading we’d catch him chewing on the back of his hand. I believe that class is where I first heard the immortal phrase, “Ewwwwwww! Gross!”)

But there were two wonderful teachers there: Coach Ploetz, about whom I intend to write about in detail later, and Mrs. R. (I’m giving Coach Ploetz’s real name because he has since passed away. A wonderful man who may have saved my life.)

Mrs. R was young, and she wasn’t at all like the other teachers. She wore bright modern clothes, and laughed a lot, and treated you like a human being instead of an unpleasant duty. She did gorgeous psychedelic ink and watercolor drawings in class. She drove a really cool car, too, an old Rolls-Royce. She may have even gone barefoot in class once in a while. She was, dare I say it, almost a… a Hippie!!! We all had huge crushes on her, of course.

I’ve been in schools where the kids complained about having to go to art class. Not there, though. Everybody loved her classes. She was, therefore, in frequent trouble with the school authorities.

That first Earth Day was one of her biggest transgressions. I can’t remember any specifics across the gulf of forty years, but Mrs. R. led us on a march for Earth Day. Keep in mind that at this time environmentalists were considered roughly on par with a crazy uncle that suddenly starts barking at the milkman. The principal was not amused, and it took weeks for the hubbub to die down.

So last night I was thinking about Earth Day and Mrs. R, and I decided to see if I could find out what happened to her. I started googling her last name (I don’t think I ever knew her first name), but all that kept coming up was a famous author who wrote a series of fantasy novels that are my daughter’s favorite books of all time. One of them has been made into a very popular movie. I kept scrolling through, trying to find Mrs. R, when I ran across a reference to this author having been born in 1964 and graduated from a San Antonio high school.

Hmm, I thought. Nah, it couldn’t be. Still, it was just possible. I started googling for this author’s mother. I found her name, which did not begin with R, and googled her. She is a respected educator in Texas, with art being one of her many subjects. Okay, I thought, this is looking more and more likely. I found her Facebook page, and left a message asking if she was a teacher at Alamo Heights Junior Hgh in 1970 or 1971. This was at 2:30 in the morning.

When I woke up this morning and checked my email before beginning a massive debug (computer, not vermin), there was a reply. It was her! I had actually found Mrs. R! We caught up a bit, and now we’re friends on Facebook. Oh, and it turns out the car was an old Jaguar Mark X, not a Rolls. I’ll be asking about the march. Memory is a funny thing.

The best part of all this? Telling the story to my daughter and watching her eyes get very big and bright.

I’m not accustomed to recommending commercial services, and this may be the first time I’ve done so on this site. That said, the Newspaper Archive is an online service I’ve been waiting for since I first logged onto a BBS in 1986.

I’m an amateur historian, and have spent a ridiculous amount of time in public libraries perched on uncomfortable plastic chairs in front of circa 1975 microfilm readers, poring over old newspapers. REALLY old newspapers.

Now the same company that recorded many of those microfilms have finally made them available on the internet, accessible for a fee. Speaking for myself, I consider that fee to be more than reasonable, especially when you consider that a library Xerox of a newspaper story usually costs a minimum of ten cents a page.

Most people do not realize just how much information is contained in any given issue of a newspaper. There are the big front-page stories, of course, but further back, in the advertisements and classifieds, the society columns and sports pages and local stories, you find a real picture of the society. Addresses, names, dates, weather, crimes, desires, fears, needs and dreams; they are all there.

Beyond the sheer flood of data, for the perceptive reader there are also the intangibles: the sense of humor, the attitudes toward race, the genuine feel of the times. It’s something you simply cannot get from a history book.

And now I’ve got access to tens of thousands of papers. This calls for a maniacal laugh: Bwahahahahahaaaaaaaa!!!!

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. I’m not going to editorialize. Just read it and then read between the lines. It’s the entire contents of the “Personal” column of the Saturday morning edition of the San Antonio Daily Express from September 16, 1899. (Many papers had morning and evening editions, a custom that lasted well into the 20th century.) Some of the punctuation and small bits of text are speculative because of the poor quality of the reproduction. The monetary amount in the text is correct.

Personal

---

THE treatment by a woman who best understands a woman’s ills, (especially one who has been there herself, Mme. Guillaume of Paris, France,) guarantees to successfully treat ladies suffering from suppressed menstruations with her French Regulating Pills. No matter how obstinate or delayed. Have never failed once in [10?] years. They succeed when others fail without injuring constitution or interfering with duties or money refunded. Price $2.50 sent sealed. Correspondence confidential. Write for advice, testimonials. P.O. Box 117, Galveston.

HOME for ladies during confinement. Good doctor and nurse. Infants adopted. Confidential. Address [126?] this office.

---

Special Monetary Note: Determining the relative value of currency across time is difficult, and depends on many socioeconomic factors. A buck is not the same for a bank president as it is for a street vendor, which is why the only people arguing for a flat tax are rich assholes and deluded morons.

Assuming that a woman of moderate means suffering “suppressed menstruations” would have some sort of access to a sympathetic physician, and that the target audience of the advertisement would therefore have been members of the lower-middle class and below, $2.50 is equivalent to $313.00 in 2009 dollars for someone earning unskilled wages.

If anyone needs any more evidence that the entire world is headed straight down the crapper, order a burrito.

About ten years ago some evil puppy-killing hellspawn realized that it’s less expensive to fill a burrito with rice instead of filling it with actual burrito ingredients, and then everybody else started doing it. I hope that guy died horribly, and Satan is now using his mouth for a spitoon while he’s being ass-raped by a vengeful three-foot sea urchin.

Let me be absolutely clear about this: RICE DOES NOT BELONG IN A BURRITO!!!! RICE IS A FUCKING SIDE DISH!!!!

This is not a matter of opinion, nor is it open to discussion. I lived in Texas most of my life, and if there’s one thing we know besides jaw-dropping political corruption, it’s burritos. Rice belongs in a burrito like mayo belongs on a hot pastrami sandwich. And if you don’t turn in revulsion from that last sentence, then I pity you. You plainly have no soul.

Here is a list of acceptable burrito ingredients. I’ve broken them down into the two main burrito families.

Breakfast Burrito

• Flour tortilla
• Potato
• Egg
• Chorizo
• Cilantro
• Bacon
• Hot sauce
• Yellow cheese

Regular Burrito

• Flour tortilla
• Refritos
• Beef
• White cheese
• Green chilis
• Chicken
• Salsa Verde
• Hot sauce
• Sour cream (although that’s awfully close to the line)

Please note that there is no rice, lettuce, tomato, or crunchy little fried corn tortilla bits. (I’m looking at YOU, Volcano Burrito!)

A burrito with rice is a burrito made for pussies by pussies. It is one of the few things you can eat that is actually improved by a slow boat ride down the alimentary canal. It is a vile corruption of one of the finest culinary treats on the planet.

Dammit, isn’t there one single joy in life that’s not being shit all over these days?

I tried. Lord knows, I tried. But I’m only human.

At one time this site was notorious for gleeful posts about people putting various body parts where they plainly didn’t belong. And as it happens, for reasons known only to the Almighty and a handful of mental health professionals, some of these posts inspired me to create some rather unsavory artwork.

After a number of complaints chiding me for my apparent fixation on genitalia, I decided to take the tender sensitivities of my readership into account and tone it down. Well, that and the sinking feeling that I was making myself less employable than a 1930s hobo. See old-timey illustration at right. No, that is not Al Franken. I know it looks like Al Franken, but it’s not. Just shut up, okay? Jeez.

So I took the high road. (There was going to be a Loch Lomond joke here but I decided against it for the same reason I don’t do jokes about mythology or quantum physics anymore.)

If I saw a newswire story about some guy that got caught by a stoplight camera travelling fifty miles an hour with his putz in one hand and a porn magazine in the other, my first impulse was to pillory the miscreant on the internet. But then I would stop, think about my readers’ delicate constitutions, and slowly back away from the keyboard. Far be it from me to cause a case of the vapors.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I became… mature.

My traffic numbers fell faster than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.

Actually, once I made the decision to write only things that wouldn’t get me fired, I found that I had very little to say. It turns out that my thoughts on pretty much any subject whatsoever are so juvenile and libelous that the whole “not getting fired” thing filters out all but one or two posts a month. Regardless, I was trying to be a grown-up even though I still think whoopee cushions are the best invention ever including fire.

Today all that flew right out the damned window. I simply could not resist. What, I ask you, am I to do when a story like the following comes along? I’m not made of stone, after all.

A New Jersey police officer is in trouble for forcing calves to perform oral sex on him and videotaping it. Five times.

Here’s the ugly meat of the matter:

Judge Morely said it was questionable that Melia’s acts, though “disgusting,” constituted animal cruelty.

“I’m not saying it’s OK,” Morely said. “This is a legal question for me. It’s not a questions of morals. It’s not a question of hygiene. It’s not a question of how people should conduct themselves.”

The dismissal reportedly irked the prosecution.

“I think any reasonable juror could infer that a man’s penis in the mouth of a calf is torment,” a Burlington County assistant prosecutor, Kevin Morgan, said. “It’s a crime against nature.”

I guess this means I’m back to being immature. C’est la vie. Hey, am I the only one that thinks the quote from the assistant prosecutor would make a killer ringtone?

Oh, yes. I almost forgot. The unsavory artwork:

It was about 10:30 on a sweltering June Friday night in 1988, and I was in the back seat of a crowded car mid-way between Los Angeles and San Diego. One of the strangers in the front seat turned on the radio, and The Plugz’ Hombre Secreto, their inspired cover of the Johnny Rivers classic Secret Agent Man, came blaring out of the speakers. I cheered. It was perfect, for that night we were headed into Mexico.

Had I been completely sober and had a firmer grasp of social niceties, I would not have been on this trip at all. My long-suffering girlfriend at the time, let’s call her Sonya, had been invited to spend the weekend with some of her college friends at a rented villa in Ensenada, a few hours south of Tijuana on the Pacific Coast of the Baja Peninsula.

I was politely asked if I wanted to come along, the safe assumption being that I would refuse. This was because I a.) had just spent a week in the VA hospital vainly trying to fix my crippling back pain, b.) had an abscessed tooth that was driving me mad, and c.) was a notorious stick-in-the-mud that never wanted to do anything but sit home and drink. They figured I would say “No, thanks,” and Sonya would get to spend a guilt-free weekend with her vaguely shady friends whom she’d been spending an awful lot of time with while I was in the hospital. She would be off in a foreign country, and several hundred miles away from her drunken boyfriend.

For some reason known only to Satan himself, I said, “Sure! Why the hell not?” Luckily I was too wasted to be aware of the resentment this caused, a condition that would not change until the following Monday while Sonya was angrily chewing me out for my atrocious behavior.

It wasn’t all my fault, of course. If they’d thought about it a little harder they would have simply come up with a plausible lie instead of being polite. They rolled the dice and they lost. It’s like asking a co-worker how he’s doing and he spends the next thirty minutes vividly describing his impacted colon, complete with arm gestures and sound effects.

We crossed the border and made our way through the sleazy maze of Tijuana. I had never been further into Mexico than that wretched hive of scum and villiany, and once we were past the city limits and headed south on the divided roadway the change was startling.

There were no streetlights. It was unbelievably dark, and quickly became eerie. No one spoke for long periods. After half an hour we drove slowly past a car burning beside the road. There was no one around, and the only illumination came from the guttering abandoned automobile.

A few miles later we passed another one just like it on its side in the ditch between the lanes. We were getting seriously spooked.

I don’t know if it was a planned stop or a desperate attempt to save us, but soon we pulled into a little roadside shrine to the Virgin Mary. There were candles around, and people praying, and even though I’m not very religious I felt quite a bit better about our situation. The mood lightened.

Just outside Ensenada the road joined again, and what had been two lanes per side became two lanes, period. We turned a bend and a carload of kids headed back to the US was in our lane. Our driver, who had been on his toes since we passed the wrecks, was able to avoid a headon collision by running off the road.

We got out. It was cool and windy. We were all pretty shaken. There was no moon, and we still could not see anything. It felt like we were inside a cave. We climbed back in and headed into town.

We found the villa quickly enough. It was a timeshare on the slope of a valley north of town; there were dozens of them. We turned on all the lights, had a few drinks, laughed about our narrow escape, and went to bed.

The next morning we drove out to where we had gone off the road. It was a couple of yards from the edge of a fifty-foot cliff, and there was no guardrail.

Sonya and two of her friends and I explored town. It was a lot like Tijuana without the pickpockets and donkey acts. I liked it. We found a little resaurant and went in for breakfast. I was badly hungover, and decided that I could probably use some heavy-duty food to replenish my system. I ordered steak and eggs.

When it arrived it did not look particularly appetizing, the steak being an odd grey color. I cut off a piece and put it in my mouth. It was tough, and full of gristle. After ten minutes of chewing, I was still unable to determine its species, and was only willing to make the roughest guess as to its phylum. Soon my face was greyer than the meat.

After our repast, we began searching for our real objective: legal prescription painkillers. Sure, I could have taken Tylenol and it would have worked fine, but I had heard that percodan could be purchased over-the-counter in Mexico. After dragging my companions fruitlessly all over town from pharmacy to pharmacy, we finally gave up.

We did, however, find a fireworks store. A regular shop right there in the middle of town. We went inside and looked around. Hundreds of different firecrackers and roman candles and skyrockets lined the shelves. The smell of gunpowder was intoxicating. And then I saw it.

It was on a shelf all by itself. I can still picture it in my mind’s eye, laying on its silken pillow, surrounded by a sparkling golden aura while heavenly choruses filled the air and cherubs fluttered above. It looked like… No, it couldn’t be. Could it? It was red, and was the right diameter. It had the fuse coming out of the middle. It had the paper endcaps. Yes!! It was!!!

I was looking at a genuine M-80. It was for sale. And I had enough money in my pocket to buy it.

Percodan, schmercodan. This was a goddamned M-80!

For those of you who have led an overly sheltered life, the M-80 is a, no, let me rephrase that, THE firecracker. It was developed by the US military for wargame simulations. It had been illegal in the United States for decades, and with good reason. A significant chunk of the generation preceding mine were missing fingers and hands because of it. It has, no joke, about sixty times more powder than the biggest firecracker you can legally buy in the US. The M-80 is the H-bomb of firecrackers.

Be honest with yourself. Would YOU have been able to resist? I bought it with trembling fingers. Which I am damned lucky to still possess, as you shall see.

We went home. It was one o’clock. A barbecue was planned for later that evening. I figured it was time for happy hour.

I’m still not entirely sure what happened that afternoon; there was a polaroid I took of Sonya flashing her tits, but she’s got a sour look on her face and definitely didn’t think it was sexy. I must have gone back into the villa and passed out. I woke up in a bedroom at seven-thirty, after the barbecue was long finished. There was none left for me, and I was upset that no one had woken me up to eat.

Later some locals showed up for a poker party. They brought some visiting friends from El Salvador and Guatemala. I played like shit, and they loved me. We were drinking Mescal, and I didn’t just swallow the worm, I chewed on it. I was hungry, after all, and it tasted way better than the donkey/monkey steak I’d had for breakfast. Sonya and the others went to bed.

We had a great time bitching about Ronald Reagan. I drank too much too fast, and went to the bathroom to be sick. When I came back they had another shot and a fresh hand waiting for me. Either they really liked me, or they were trying to kill me by alcohol poisoning.

At three in the morning I had The Idea. I explained blearily to my new Central American friends that I had an insane, gigantic monster firecracker in my actual possession. One of my amigos pointed out that he did, in fact, have a lighter on him. I got the firecracker of which dreams are made out of my bags and we staggered out through the sliding glass doors to the patio.

I placed it on a low stone wall about thirty feet from the house. We stood in front of it, reverently bowing our heads. Some people have their shrines, and I have mine. I was handed the lighter while my accomplices prudently retreated. “Do Not Hold In Hands” was printed in stern letters on the casing. I thought to myself, “No shit,” and lit the fuse.

I ran as fast as I could back toward the villa. As the fuse quickly burned away toward Armageddon, I suddenly realized what I had just done. We were standing in front of a big sheet of glass and were only slightly more than the length of a city bus away from an explosive device the US Army had designed to teach soldiers what being under a mortar attack feels like. I brought my arm up to my face just microseconds before it went off.

The blast was far bigger than I had imagined. The glass behind us rattled, but thankfully did not shatter. A chunk of rock hit my forearm, the same one I had thrown over my eyes. It drew blood. We felt the shock and heat of it, and a massive boom rolled across the landscape.

Our ears were ringing. Lights were going on all over the the neighborhood. From far across the vally we could just hear an American voice screaming “ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MINDS!?!” We looked at each other, and busted up in helpless laughter.

We walked over to look at the wall. There was a shallow crater the size of a dinner plate blown out of it. I knew I was going to remember this trip for the rest of my life.

I was awakened the next morning by a bunch of obnoxious frat boys from USC who had rented the place next. I was face-down on the couch, and just beginning to feel the leading edge of the worst hangover I’d ever had. My mouth seemed to be filled with dust and dead spiders.

One of the frat boys was standing about three feet from my head, wearing fluorescent lime-green swimming trunks. I snarled that if he didn’t get those fucking green shorts out of my face I was going to rip his face off and stuff it down his throat with his own foot. He moved away.

I remember nothing of the trip back other than nobody making eye contact with me. That’s probably all for the best. Sonya didn’t ever completely forgive me, and we broke up not too long afterwards.

The weekend had been full of sullen companions, agonizing pain, unforgivable drunken misbehavior, multiple cases of almost-getting-killed, and what could very well qualify as an international incident.

But good God, it was glorious.

I hereby claim four neologisms, all related to the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics (of which I am an adherent; screw Bohr et al):

Everywhat

Describes something that exists in all possible universes.

Otherwhat

Describes something that may have happened in another universe, but did not happen in ours. (Synonymous with “alternate history”.)

Neverwhat

Describes something that cannot exist in any possible universe.

Anywhat

Describes something that could exist in any possible universe.

I breathlessly await the Nobel Committee’s call.

I don’t know if I’m going to keep writing this blog much longer; my initial purposes were to make people laugh, and tell the truth about the Bush abominations while the rest of you seemed to be looking the other direction, whistling nonchalantly.

Well, Bush is gone, although, unfortunately, Cheney, Limbaugh, and Rove continue to lurch around hideously until someone finally puts a stake through their undead, shriveled hearts.

And I don’t feel like I’m able to make people laugh anymore, mainly because I don’t do much laughing myself. Essentially, real life just got too goddamned nasty for me to find much humor in it. A story about some idiot jerking off while driving through Starbuck’s just doesn’t seem funny in a world where Bush played guitar at a party while doctors were euthanizing terminal patients in New Orleans hospitals because the US Government was doing nothing and it was more merciful than letting them simply die of thirst. (And then were prosecuted for sparing the patients that agony.)

Plus, my health is failing, I cannot afford the medications to keep my wife and I functioning (the fact that I’m currently taking 1/6 my normal antidepressants probably has a lot to do with this post), my job pays roughly half what we need to get by, I’m too old to change careers, I’m nowhere near as talented as I used to be, and the only thing keeping me going at all is an adamant refusal to expose my daughter to the horrors of suicide that I myself had to face as a child. A yuck-fest this ain’t, folks.

And frankly, my inability to write lately has made the site an ever-present reproach.

So, whither Atomic Deathray? My intention is to write up the entire story of my life, without prettying it up, if I’ve got the guts to do it. I’ll keep it online as long as I can afford to. Maybe somebody sometime can make sense of the damned thing. God knows I can’t.

This may all change if things get better, but for now, this is what’s on the table. The show’s canceled, and there’s only a few episodes left to go. Come to think of it, we’re all in that boat, aren’t we?