Roads, Mills, Laps

Wolf Parade, one of my favorite bands in the wholewideworld is in town in a month’s time.

I’m the distance between my index finger and my thumb away from a backstage pass and an exclusive interview. I’ve never had a backstage pass; I’ve never interviewed a band. I’ve never really gotten close to the stage of any concert. I mean I did try at this overpriced grand debacle of disillusionment, but that doesn’t count.

This is their side project: Handsome Furs. Husband, wife, elixir-looking bottle of Red Stripe, an old keyboard/drum machine thing, and a guitar climax: does life get any better than that?

——-
6/26 UPDATE: Editorial assignment/papal blessing secured; just need the label to get back to me now. Hot damn I love journalism!

Lots of f-bombs and other bad words ahead, but well worth it.

Writing about the USS Taylor tour, made me remember the Dog and Pony shows that I used to have to put on for the brass and the whitehaired, white-skinned Senators at Fort Bragg a long time ago.

It was so long ago, Senator Strom Thurmond was alive. In fact, when I had to give him the Dog and Pony show, he was walking: barely.

Well one day I drew the short straw; it was my platoon that got picked to demonstrate the capabilities of the XVIII Airborne Corps. We had to depict flawless urban warfare executed by America’s best warriors: MOUT. We were it; we were the belligerent actors in that grand play. Senator Thurmond: that old womanizing curmudgeon; that supreme racist KKK Dixiecrat centenarian, we had to make pretty for him of all people. He represented the people of South Car’lina; he was then chairman of the all-powerful Senate Armed Services Committee too. That diaper-wearing, oatmeal-dripping fool: he had his hands on the billion and fiddie dollar purse strings. He was supposedly democracy incarnate; the mass of okely-dokely people empowered this curmudgeon of a man to make the big appropriations. Yay!

We spent days (24/7 days) getting ready for this circ d’ grande. We had to pick the best looking Sergeants–a mishmash of 2/504’s square-jawed Adonises and bit-part Mr. Potato Heads; we had to polish our equipment–making it look like Hollywood props in the hands of John Wayne and Audie Murphy. We had to perform for the Brigade Commander; then the Division Commander; then the Corps Commander. Our men had to make crisp movements; they had to act like obsequious robots. They entered and cleared rooms with their AR-15s drawn. The enemy (then a bumbling ragtag collection of incompetent South American insurgents wearing battle-dress uniforms inside out) died instantly, making demise-of-bad-guy moans. At the end, a black helicopter–the XVIII Corps’ deus-ex-machina–descended and evacuated our poor casualties, proving to the taxpayers that, like the movie Blackhawk Down, we will never, ever, leave a brave man behind. We practiced; boy did we practice. We were fed lines and then learned them rote. We moved left, right, left. We said, “Room One Clear!” We fired two rounds-boom! boom!–when we kicked the door open using machismo and polished boots. We dispatched the drug dealing-bastards; left them writhing and dying. Then we radioed to HQ and gave meaty Officer Poncherello-esque thumbs ups.

We did it at night too.

Then we did it again during the day.

The Colonel called for a large, four-wheel generator: an eight-Kilowatt generator summoned from the bowels of the motorpool. It had to be hitched to a deuce and a half, driven by a jaded Haitian-American with a slight lisp.
It arrived so quickly, because it only took a phone call from the Colonel. The Colonel was an Old Testament God: He could get whatever He wanted using spite and spittle.

“You get me it now!” He barked.

“Roger, sir,” the fawning Bridage duty officer said like a modern day Amos n’ Moses.

Out in the middle of a scrub oak-strewn field we strung multicolored Xmas lights; we installed a 36-inch television and a VCR to tape our great shenanigans. The General arrived amidst wailing sirens and saluting sycophants; he called for bleachers and a juggling clown astride a patriotic unicycle: That all came an hour later. The Brigade’s official artist was summoned. He was ordered to make a sand table that resembled our multi-level stage. He followed orders, making things look really nice for that influential Senator from South Car’lina.

“Make it nice,” the General warned.

“Roger, sir,” the artist responded.

We had to press our uniforms with heavy irons and shave twice using Gillette XTREME razors. Our cap bills were folded into perfect parabolas using water and a small drinking glass. Our Kevlar helmet liners were ironed. Dust and wayward hairs were lifted off our battle dress uniforms using Scotch tape. Our company commander had to practice his walk–a rooster-like strut yes, the cock of the walk. Our company commander loved his strut; he also loved hunting deer and listening to Garth Brooks. “I will sail my vessel till my river runs dry,” he used to sing nostalgically, humming as if he was in the first row at the concert at Branson.

And oh what a play it was: All our equipment had to be shined and made black using edge dressing that was purchased in the PX. The token casualty had to lay still–no moans were allowed in our dog n’ pony world. Any visible hands had to be knife-edge straight. The water in the hanging lister bag had to be free of the taste of rubber. The latrine’s seat looked like the polished treasure of the Sierra Madre; the walkway to the theater was free of all weeds and rocks greater than 3/4 of an inch in diameter; no living thing crawled or grew in the path of the Armed Service Chairman.

Someone accidentally called it a circus: he was silenced–frogmarched, actually, into a one way-heading Humvee, back to the stockade. No sarcasm: sycophants only, please. Rebellion was impossible; this demonstration thrived on obedience and good manners.

When Senator Thurmond eventually arrived, he was escorted by his puppet masters: dyspeptic aides with comb-overs who wielded cell phones and one-word dictates: the guys who made the real decisions. Thurmond had a palsy; he shook like a epileptic prop in a snakeoil Evangelist’s revival tent. Though he could walk, he wasn’t allowed to; the aides pushed him down. He was put on a Rascal-esque motorized wheelchair. (We had to clean it well in advance with a bottle brush and a concotion of Simple Green and Windex.)

When he got to his observation post, my Company Commander radioed me. I radioed the Adonis-looking Sergeant who then radioed the square-jawed S.S. Corporal who kicked off the whole affair. Robots moved robotic-like. Casualties kept quiet. South American insurgents with dastardly-looking, Rollie Fingers mustaches were killed. Helicopters hovered and descended. All was good; all was made safe in the end. Both Disneyworld and the mass of taxpayers need a happy ending.

Senator Thurmond clapped.

“The boys look good,” he said, approvingly. A long trail of white spit formed between his mandibles.

“Yes sir, they do,” said the XVIII Corps Commander. (To become a Corps Commander, one has to take a class called “Glad Handing.”)

“Yes sir,” said the Brigade Commander. (Any Brigade Commander worth his salt glad hands better than the instructor of “Glad Handing.”)

“Yes sir. Private Jones, the M-60 gunner is from South Carolina, sir,” my company commander offered. This line hadn’t been rehearsed. My company commander decided, on the fly, to extemporize a bit. It worked.

“Where in South Car’lina,” Strom Thurmond said.

“Florence, sir”

“What’d he say?” Senator Thurmond asked, his hand cupped to his hairy ear.

Senator Thurmond’s aid jumped in to help the withered man. “Florence. Florence he said, Senator.”

“Florence?”

“Florence, yes sir, Florence.”

“Good. Good. It’s good to see South Car’lina boys here-ah.”

My Company Commander nodded. “Yes sir,” he said, pushing his chest forward hubristically. [This was warranted since the dog and pony show was a success.]

The Brigade Commander winked at the Division Commander. The Corps Commander saw that and smiled. Though it wasn’t in the script, it was well received. The XVIII Corps was sure to get it’s next request for fiddiemillion dollars.

Senator Thurmond was wheeled back to his Humvee and whisked away. He waved at us as he departed–his shriveled hand stuck out the window looking like the Pope John Paul II’s circa March 2005.

“Good job,” the Brigade commander said, turning to my Company Commander.

“Yes sir.”

My Company Commander turned to me. “Cut the generator,” he ordered.

“Yes sir.”

We turned it off; the Xmas lights went out; flashlight arcs appeared;my men shouted as they started cleaning up the range.

We were done about 12 hours later and then we went home to our saltbox base houses. We ate our warm cookies and drank cold milk.

Then we got up and did it again.
——–

Earlier today About three weeks ago, I found myself down here. I browsed the booths. Squids are all the rage these days; squid pictures drawn on thin, witty tee shirts with sarcastic sayings. Birds are cool too (silhouettes of birds); so too are owls as well as black and white drawings of leafless birch trees. Oh, and rebellious dolls–ugly dolls with one tooth and one eye–they are ‘in’ as well.

I was only good for about 30 minutes of that and ended up on the outskirts of the grand Independent festival of Capitalism–out looking at the wide expanse that is the Delaware River on some sort of promenade where a bearded drunken man with red fingers and dried cuticles swatted at invisible flies in the sky. I stared at the river and caught sight of a little rubber dinghy; it was making circles about 40 yards out. Three men wearing blue dungarees were in it; they looked like kids. I shielded my eyes from the sun. What were they carrying? Machine guns?

Indeed.

The drunk man swatted his way closer to me, but I paid no attention to him.

The boat circled out of my field of vision. I walked closer to the river to see where it was going. It zoomed up alongside a hulk of a ship: a naval vessel, painted Battleship gray with large chains spewing out of it. It resembled a marionette. The kids in the dinghy waved to another kid who was up on the ship’s forecastle. That kid was sitting behind twin .50 caliber machine guns, manning them diligently like Doris “Dorie” Miller did on December 7th, 1941.

“Hi Chuck!”

“Heya Mike!”

They yelled that kind of stuff.

Turns out, the ship, a frigate, the USS Taylor, was docked in Philadelphia for the weekend. The crew was giving free tours. I decided to become independent of the Independent Craft Bazaar and so I decided to check it out. A disinterested Jamaican-American Seaman stood outside a hastily constructed metal detector. He played with a confiscated Buck knife in his hands while he leaned against a card table with a delaminated top.

“Ya can’t pass thru here till, um, till, an escort shows up; we only got three escorts today.”

A crowd of tourists formed behind the Jamaican-American Seaman.

We were in the front. The Seaman tried to make small talk with me about the Phillies and the Marlins; about Utley and McGonigle and Shrebek and Gerney and the save and the out at third and the extra inning where the bases were loaded and Coach Halston walked to the mound and can you believe that? Me being a bit out of the loop when it comes to following franchise sports teams, I agreed: “Um, I can’t!”

One of the tourists behind me wore a red and gold Semper Fi Marines hat. He had a Bluetooth stuck in his ear and was talking to someone while he waited. It looked as if he was talking to himself.

A few sailors returning from their leave with pressed laundry slung over their shoulders walked past us and up, onto their ship. They slapped a baseball cap on a little kid as they walked by. The cap was a USS Taylor cap with scrambled eggs on the bill and an embroidered picture of the very ship in front of me.

“Here ya go, kid.” one of the sailors said, sounding John Wayne-esque.

“I don’t want one!”

The sailor walked off surprised at the kid’s reaction. The kid’s mother insisted that the kid wear the hat for patriotic purposes.

“I don’t want one!” it repeated, pulling at the hat.

After about 30 minutes, an officer arrived. Compared to the lowly Jamaican-American seaman, he was royalty. He was a dandy; he was the bourgeoise of the ship. He wore all white; even his shoes were white. He reminded me of Richard Crenna’s character in that epic film The Sand Pebbles

“I’m Ensign Johnson,” he said crisply. It was Sunday; I was amazed how happy he seemed–giving us civilians tours on his day off.

He led us up onto the ship. He started the tour by telling us that the keel for the USS Taylor was laid at the Bath Iron Works in 1983: during the Reagan years, when we flexed our muscle and fought the red tide; sending whence it came–all the way back to the dollar store, into the outstretched arms of the Russian mafia and the Gazprom oil speculators.

“This way, sir,” Ensign Johnson said to me. For some reason, I was in the lead of the group. We went out to the Taylor’s bow first. The frigate’s missile system had been disabled; its cap was welded shut.

“Why?” I asked.

“We are on a purely defensive mission now–no Red Navy to fight these days. No: we only search ships and interdict drugs.”

Then we passed through the crew’s cabins. A few sailors were sitting on a bench outside their cabins. One chunky man read an anime magazine; another looked over his shoulder. It was tight in there; I felt like I was intruding on their space–a tourist where I didn’t belong.

“This way, sir.”

We jumped through portholes.

We then went up a welded ladder onto the bridge. A sailor was watching the radar scope. The little dinghy patrolling in front of the frigate made a small green blip on it; an even smaller blip was the pack of jet skis that appeared suddenly. The dinghy made a beeline to the jetskis, intercepting them immediately. The kids holding AR-14s flexed their muscles. We could see the drama unfold up there on the bridge. I could see the kids mouthing to the drunk guys on the jetskis to back off–that these waters were off limits. The jetskis obliged and zoomed off, making angry rooster tails behind them.

Ensign Johnson led us next to the aft part of the ship. “These ladies and gentlemen are twin mounted .50 caliber machine guns,” he said slapping his hands on them possessively.

“Ma deuce,” I said.

“Ma deuce,” Ensign Johnson echoed.

“That round will rip a man’s arm clean off,” the man with the Semper Fi hat and bluetooth said slapping his hands together as if he’d squashed a bug.

“Right sir. The Geneva Convention prohibits us from firing these at a human body,” said the Ensign.

‘Right,’ I thought.

“This ladies and gentlemen is the Phalanx,” Ensign Johnson said pointing up at a large, conical weapon.

“Wow,” a stary-eyed kid; a boy scout; an idealist mumbled under his breath.

“It’s essentially a 20mm M61 Vulcan Gatling Gun; it fires 4500 rounds a minute.”

“Wow”

“That thing will rip a man in two”

“In two? It’ll shred a man”

“We don’t fire it at people, sir,” the Ensign assured us again. “It’s purely a defensive weapon; we have removed all offensive weapons off this vessel; we only search and do drug interdictions. Our mission has changed, you see.”

“What do you search for on the ships?”

Ensign Johnson: “We don’t really search outright; we just board the vessels and then ask if we can search; we err on the side of being friendly; it helps to be friendly when you are boarding ships–especially in the Persian Gulf.”

“I see.”

“This way, folks.”

He led us to the aft of the aft. A helicopter bay was there; it had been turned into a gym. A large black sailor held a 45-pound plate in his hands and squatted–grasping and lifting it over his head as if he were Hercules strangling Hera’s two snakes.

“This bay can hold one SH-60, but we’ve turned it into a gym.”

“What about the other bay? What do you use that for?”

“It’s vacant.”

“Can it hold an SH-60?”

“Yes, but we don’t get them that often.”

“What happens if two SH-60s have to land at the same time?”

“We move the gym.”

“Where?”

“This way, folks.”

The black sailor grunted and placed the heavy plate down. Another sailor did jumping jacks; a third did crunches.

Ensign Johnson looked at his watch. “That folks concludes the tour of the USS Taylor,” he said, motioning us off the ship by extending a rigid, knife blade-like hand in front of us.

We followed orders and promptly disembarked, thanking him for his service.

We passed the disinterested Jamaican Seaman at the metal detector (He waved lazily at us using that confiscated Buck knife.) and reentered the Indie craft festival with the squids and the birds and the like-minded people with the earlobe spacers and the tribal tattoos.

I think I spent the rest of the afternoon bellied up at this really cool place.
————–

I was in the dollar store yesterday a long time ago.

I bought a lock for my bike and a book light (LED). The latter pops open when you push a plastic button–pretty nifty.

I checked out the book section. You can get the former Attorney General’s book Never Again: Securing America and Restoring Justice.

$1; it’s all yours.
——————
This past weekend, I was in Jim Thorpe, PA for a bachelor party (not mine). It was all about whitewater rafting, drinking, and other simian behavior exhibited by a flange of males away from feminine influence. I stayed at a place called Jim Thorpe Camping Resort. A resort camp: that place was hardly either. No, it was pretty much a giant mess. We were there during the Pocono 500, so you can imagine what the hell awaited us when we turned left off the divided highway.

We had lots of sleeveless tee-shirted men with their flabby arm fat and their American eagle tattoos; we had their dirty, mumbling offspring, out wandering around at all hours of the day and night, wielding whittled sticks and spitting green lugies that hung from the branches of innocent birch trees. We had rowdy campfires; we heard tall tales about fast cars–babes n’ big boobs; American beer and meat. Bin Laden was hung in effigy. After a suckling a five cases of piss beer, the barbarians channeled the spirit of Dale Earnhardt; he appeared above their fires–walking hand-in-hand with Jesus who happened to be wearing red and white striped pants and an Uncle Sam top hat. That’s right: Jesus is an American, damnit.

Toby Keith serenaded us from the stereos of big trucks. He crooned about our great land of plenty–reminding us that we must never forget; telling us about the American soldiers over there; telling us what it means to sacrifice things in the name of freedom; making us dream about large supermarket aisles, green grass, and sit down mowers.

The two shitters were overflowing: there was enough excreted Walmart in those paint-peeled cubicles of death to trowel every brick in the Great Wall of China.

The showers were nothing but repositories for pubic hair and hastily blown, meteor-sized clumps of nasal material. The water was cold on Saturday and lukewarm on Sunday. Shower shoes were a must. The physical act of showering meant closing one’s eyes and plugging one’s nose–keeping hands off the walls. Nothing was to touch anything without protective covering (which I’ve since burned upon my return to Bohemia).

Burgers and venison sizzled; smoke billowed over the campground; big laughs bellowed, echoing across the campsite until the chipmunks rose from their nests at dawn and began their Jim Thorpe morning ritual of scavenging the littered forest for half-digested, Planters-brand wasabi peanuts.

Beer bottles (Coors, Bud, Miller) were scattered everywhere. Little yellow bees flew into tipped over 40-ouncers and got drunk on the proud men’s backwash; sinister crows descended from tall pine trees and gorged on their vomit.

There were some video games in the camp HQ. You could shoot baskets for 30 seconds or drive a pixelated race car through a virtual Las Vegas. After that, you could pick up an advertisement for a Bible show in Strasburg (a double feature: Noah’s Ark and the Creation story!) or take part in a paintball war at Skirmish, USA. Chips and jerky were for sale in the general store–so too were American flag bandannas, NASCAR flasks, and 10-packs of tightie whities.

The cabins turned out to be hastily-erected shed kits–the kind you see for sale on the sides of the road throughout central PA. One window looked through a few unfortunate trees into the unzipped opening of a domed tent chock full of hairy asscrack. (Can you imagine being a tree and having the misfortune of being planted in THAT place–one sad mile away from tens of thousands of acres of pristine national forest?)

But the town of Jim Thorpe is another thing: a refreshing sight.

I ran through it on Sunday morning: about 10-11 miles. Let me clarify something though: You don’t run through Jim Thorpe; you either run up it or down it. The entire town sits on a steep slant. It’s a neat town; it’s an old town that’s been left alone, pretty much. Its inhabitants spend their life smoking while seated on plastic lawn chairs that stand on 3′ x 3′ faded Astroturf porches; they sit there and watch the tourists from Philadelphia or New Jersey walk by and spend their disposable income on old porcelain dolls and musty barn relics.

I turned left and ran along the Lehigh River for a bit and then turned around, because the dew point was approaching Mombasian levels. It was a pleasant and peaceful run; good for the soul–reminding me that all isn’t Jesus billboards* and burgers. The amount of trash on the sides of the the road in Jim Thorpe–the old Bob Seger cds; the discarded wrappers; the pillow cushions–wasn’t much to catalog here. No one honked at me from behind (to watch me jump); no one thumped their manhood from their car like a Congolese silverback; no one called me a ‘faggot’.

No.

The road was pretty much made up of leathery bikers, GenXYZ ecotourists, and old people hunched over the steering wheels of their Bismarck-sized RVs. The rednecks left me alone out there, so I left them alone when I got back to the Jim Thorpe Camping Resort. I packed up my stuff and got out of there as soon as I could.

I don’t think I’m ever going camping there again.

But I might go back to Jim Thorpe; it’s a cool town.
—————
*Well I did see one: Exposed stigmatized hands were visible; “Have you nailed down your date yet?” it read.

Last night I drove down to Atlantic City by myself. I mingled with a crowd of hoodlums (who had arrived at the Trump Plaza to see some fight between a Puerto Rican and a Cuban: both had no body fat); I elbowed my way up to a $15 craps table and tossed my chips on the hardways. I threw the dice twice and failed miserably; a few numbers, no hardways, seven came soon. The hoodlums snapped their fingers and cursed. The stickman passed the dice clockwise–nearly as fast as the seconds hand of the clock itself. It was a bad night. The casino’s special, rip-off dice were out. The mafia men wanted to milk us suckas for our shirts.

Other things were out–other variegated creatures. The flanges of bride baboons traipsed about wearing their uniforms: tight-fitting miniskirts and fuck-me boots. They text-messaged and giggled while they sipped expensive martinis while they dreamed about coveys of jockos circling them like remorra. Of course the hoodlums were out too. And other specimens: I saw a man with a shag-carpet toupee. His wife, a Jerseyite with large gold glasses and a aquiline nose held his elbow while he summoned Jesus and patted his fat hands on the table before throwing the red cubes. His dice went wild–up and over the table. The hoodlums snapped; the rest of us cursed and bent down to reach for our free plastic Heinekens and our gratis rum n’ Cokes. New dice were offered to him in a wooden bowl that looked as if it came from the palace of none other than Pontius Pilate. The man with the shag toupee reached for the dice and mumbled words of prayer.

“Jesus give me a six!”

The dice went wild again–banging against the foam padding at the end of the table where me and a quiet white man who had lost all his money stood–arms crossed; silent as cold ducks on a pond.

“Seven out–line away,” called out the stickman. The money was scooped over to the boxman (a tired-looking woman with crows feet and nicotine-stained hands) who caught the red chips that rolled like wayward tires with her open palms.

The dealers slapped their hands and shook their heads. One of them asked another what she was doing after their shift got over.

“Dunno,” she said shrugging her atrophied shoulders.

We all cursed and pounded at the table. Our chips were mixed and piled up into towers.

Dunno was the word for the night. Dunno so perfectly characterized it all. It was a big, lost, empty night spent, sadly, with a group of ‘merica’s scum. I was in and out of that oceanic shithole in less than an hour.

The best part of the night was the drive home. Miraculously, I caught David Dye’s interview on the World Cafe with Trent Reznor.

The reason that I am writing this and writing more here I owe to the motivation that I got from hearing Mr. Reznor speak at 14:53 onward..

“Cathartic means….not fitting in….was my journal….power to it….authenticity…isn’t to be famous…isn’t to be successful…try to outdo..try to compete…shouldn’t be the focus.”

That was at the end of the night: That’s why I keep writing–expression first and foremost. Damn the rest of it all.

Somehow tonight (the road hitherto, too complex, too boring, too manipulated to detail here), I ended up in the top section of some movieplex’s stadium seating in the middle of suburbia. I got to sit there and stew–watching pairs of moms and daughters (their hands full of $15.00 tubs of popcorn and $6.00 cylinders of fountain drinks) file in two-by-two, Ark-like and plop themselves down to see the latest Walmart-sponsored piece of cinematic shit to hit the theaters: Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour.

The majority of moms–good Catholics to the core–had ashes sprinkled on their heads; for it was time to go from one church to the other. It was time for, SAY IT AGAIN, worshippppuh!

There was an electric density in the air–the ozone-heavy feeling you get before a thunderstorm that causes the calcified fissures of your broken bones to tingle (or the feeling you are artificially given as you see the drama unfold in the old World War 1 movie when the protagonist predicts his demise the day before the major push; bullet between the eyes and all that)

We were given glasses to don; the lights faded, the Disney logo appeared, and then everything became 3 dimensional–an eclectic world of mass consumerism.

Wait!

We got a Walmart commercial first

Wait again!

We got previews: 3-dimensional ones!

Wait! Did I catch that? A preview for the spirit of the marathon movie.

Wait! Was that a split screen shot of Deena Kastor running in Chicago! Wait, wait, wait!

Who are those Kenyans?

What are those Penguins?

Is it over? It is!

Then it came: the shitball movie. We sat for 80 minutes–stuck in our sticky seats–watching vapid song after dopey vapid song unfold; all too close; all oozing out of the screen like the contents of a dyspeptic, bulbous blister lanced precisely at the time when its noxious contents had fermented like the finest of Falernian wines.

There she is coming up from the stage; there she is descending down from the heavens!

Hail Hosanna Montana in the highest!

Her fawning parents, (the rube, Queer-Eye-for-the-Straight-Guy made over father with a pubic-esque soul patch; the high cheekboned ueber controlling mother who reminds Hannah about cheerleading camp when she’s scared to fall into the arms of an emaciated, Justin Timberlake look-alike), they make cameos unfortunately.

Worse, some band called the Jonas Brothers wedge their pubescent elbows in at about the movie’s, slowly-reached mid point. We get to watch them strut around in skin-tight Levis that are reminsicent of Johnny Rotten; one little boy has sideburns that would make General Burnside jealous; the other little boy sings so hard, so out of tune, he takes on a Tiny Tim appearance (cheeks rosy; eyes little pencil dots; entire expression seeking maximum sympathy like that of an organ grinder monkey); the third brother hammers away on a Baldwin piano (his hands never visible)–his curly mophead shaking to his incessant yammering.

Near the end, we get a bit of comedic relief. Ah, the zany fathers of all those screaming girls! Ah, see what they will do to get Hosanna Montana tickets–oh look at the lows they will go; they don their sackcloth and ashes: ladies clothes. They humble themselves for the prize; they cast away their nets and go fishing for the prize.

The run.

They run?

Yes: There’s a scene where the dads race (in high heels) for backstage passes.

A race?

My interest was peaked; I pushed the plastic Walmart-supplied glasses closer to my once worm-ridden temples.

A race?

Indeed a race!

Sadly, it was an instant gratification race: a Marion Jones-on-steroids race; a race reserved for the large audiences on the various high school tracks around the fruited (gimmie-gimmie-now!) plain: a 100-meter sprint.

Yuck.

‘Not a race,’ I thought: a flash in the pan. It was a million heats. In the final, some ripped man wins the prize.

Where’s the marathon?

Too boring–too much tape required for that.

The movie ended rather abruptly. Hosanna Montana first sings on stage with a guitar: her supposedly self-written magnum
opus insipidly entitled, “I Miss You,”; then a racy bit dedicated to the women’s liberation movement (called G.N.O: Girls Night Out); then the Grand Finale, the peroratorical: Best of Both Worlds

No.

The lights came on and we left; the women’s ashes had been wiped off; lardball popcorn boxes were empty; profligate soda pop cylinders rolled across the theater’s cement floor; retarded cleaning men hired at $6.25 an hour (drooling and mumbling in the dark corners with wrists shaking and bent at 90-degree angles) waited for us to leave.

The last of the credits flickered by; the lights came on.

Cars (enormous SUVs) rolled out of the parking lot; all the little spoiled girls fell asleep with visions of blond sugardumbs in their dreams.

Good news!

No razor!

Finnish YMCA! (Is this George A. Custer’s karmic next life?)

The past two days, I’ve been playing Command and Colors: Ancients using the Vassal game engine against my brother.

I got the game, spent several days affixing stickers, 40-Year-Old-Virgin-like on little wooden blocks, and now am fighting the battle of Akragas taking on the heavy mantle of the Carthaginian general Himilco (who is hopelessly outnumbered) against his opponent, that conniving Syracusan Daphnaeus.

I’ve launched two heavy chariot charges against the Syracusan light infantry and calvary on the outer flanks; I’ve dispatched bowmen upon bowmen in the center: all with no success.

And I’ve done little running.

But I give you this!

Good News!

A free razor!