MIDNIGHT PSA: Soda Pop and Whiskey, Hold the Whiskey!

Remember, kids: DON'T drink and write!

Just because Hunter Thompson, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, John Steinbeck, Jack London, Truman Capote, O. Henry, Tennessee Williams, Dylan Thomas, Dorothy Parker, Edgar Allan Poe, Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, William Faulkner, Charles Bukowski, Eugene O'Neill, Sinclair Lewis, James Baldwin, James Thurber, Fred Exley, Pat Hamilton, Jean Stafford, Ken Kesey, W.B. Yeats, Aldous Huxley, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Charles Dickens were raging alcoholics crippled by the unbearable darkness of their every conscious thought doesn't mean you have to be one, too!

Instead, try a more writer-friendly hobby, such as weaving place-mats or building tiny cottages out of peanut butter and crackers. You can even deliver them as Christmas presents to the very same neighbors who manually removed your unconscious body from their front yard after you set it on fire last Christmas. 

When all else fails, remember that the guy asking for money for his daughter's tattoo removal at the corner gas station is also an alcoholic, and that's not a Pulitzer Prize-shaped lump underneath his army jacket. If that doesn't kill your buzz, Vladimir Nabokov - arguably the greatest writer of the 20th century - wouldn't even drink wine with his Kraft singles. The only thing old Vladdy was addicted to was too much butterfly-hunting!

The lesson here is it's better to collect bugs than to chase invisible ones away from the insides of your eyelids when you're going through alcohol-withdrawal-induced hallucinatory seizures. I can't stress this enough.

MIDNIGHT PSA: John Travolta Will Destroy Your Soul

Like most people, I was just a young child when John Travolta ruined my life for the first time. I watched a movie with my parents called "Phenomenon." For those uninitiated, it stars John Travolta and it's about aliens who impregnate him with celestial genius as he stumbles home drunk and happens to glance at a particularly twinkly star. As the movie progresses, he gets smarter and smarter. He reads Russian novels in one sitting. He calculates impossibly huge sums in his head in milliseconds while Robert Duvall looks on in bald-headed awe.* He moves a pair of sunglasses with his mind. At the end, John Travolta dies from being too smart.

Now, it seemed to me a perfectly natural logical leap to assume that if one could move objects with one's mind via the invisible energy gushing from one's fingers, one would inevitably die from being too smart. This line of foolproof reasoning led me to sleep with my fingers and toes curled into tight fists to avoid accidentally opening doors or summoning objects from across the room with my massive brain, and then, when my fingers and toes grew tired of clenching themselves, to simply curl them a certain number of times, and then to assign good and bad values to certain numbers, and then to live the majority of my childhood as a slave to numbers, living in paralyzing fear of accidentally discovering I had telepathic powers.

Now, some say that Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is bound to happen in a person who carries the gene for Batshit Crazy - that all it takes is a trigger, and that there will always be a trigger of some kind, at some point. But you have to admit I got screwed. My trigger was John Travolta. This was America. This was the 90s. There was no hope.

The lesson here is tri-fold:

1. Don't read too many books or you'll die from being too smart.
2. Don't leave your sunglasses unattended around a person wearing a suit.
3. Never let your child see a John Travolta movie before they're old enough to fight it.





*Editor's Note: Robert Duvall looks exactly like my grandpa Glenn, and all the men on my dad's side of the family resemble Robert Duvall to varying degrees, including my dad, who looks like a cross between Robert Duvall and Shirley Maclaine. Heavy on the Maclaine.

F***** Up Chimpanzee Stories: The 5 Types of Fiction That Wouldn't Exist If I Were President

#1: The Breakup Story

In this story, the author uses fiction as a free psychotherapy session in which he or she humps his or her own relationship history to death against the cold leather seat of a Toyota truck parked outside of a permanently closed Denny’s on a rainy day in the author's distant past. Often made worse by the incorporation of erratic line breaks that appear to have been made at random by a lonely, drunken MS-DOS computer.


#2: The Post-Apocalyptic Cops-In-Space Cop Drama

This particular genre is the most overworked horse in the race against things that make any sense at all, and has broken its leg, and needs to be taken out and shot. Stock characters include an aging alcoholic veteran cop, a rookie cop who still has a thing or two to learn about a thing or two, and a wily She-Cop with outrageous curves and the emotional intelligence of a turkey sandwich.

The only way I can accept the existence of this genre in a college-level writing workshop is to believe that beneath every printing lab there is a dungeon full of 12-year old boys who think up this shit and dictate it to a few dozen chimpanzees in suspenders who chain-smoke Lucky Strikes and type it up on old-fashioned IBM Selectric typewriters, and somehow these fucked up chimpanzee stories keep getting mixed in with the real stories and taken to workshops by mistake. It's the only way. It's just...it's the only way.


#3: The Midlife Crisis Story, As Predicted By A 22-Year Old White American Male

The main character is a middle-aged, mild-mannered, slightly tubby American man with a once-hot-and-exciting wife who seems to have soured with age and some spoiled kids he doesn’t really know what to do with and a boring job, all of which makes getting a boner impossible. Then comes the classic epiphany and the zany scheme that will bring his boners back, be it an office robbery, a computer scam, or an affair with the neighborhood strumpet. It is always painfully clear in these stories that the author's worst nightmare involves being stuck in a four-bedroom house in suburban America, having somehow found himself trapped in a perpetual state of almost unthinkable comfort and luxury, trying in vain to gain an erection from watching the drive-through scene in 'American Beauty' in a continuous loop and wishing that he, too, could have the gay hugged out of him by Kevin Spacey.


#4: The Sixth Sense Story

This clever bait-and-switch technique didn't even exist until the classic M. Night Shyamalan movie 'The Sixth Sense' came out in 1999, and Haley Joel Osmond turned out to be merely the cooler, sexier side of Bruce Willis's split personality. Any story that ends with the revelation that one or more characters were actually dead or figments of another character's imagination the entire time is automatically awesome, no matter what, forever. It's a law of physics. Newton figured it out when he noticed an apple fall from a tree, and then an hour and forty minutes later it was a flank steak.


#5: The Truly Just Fucking Terrible Fantasy Masturbation Hour

The people who write these kinds of stories are not entirely to blame for their sins. After all, much of a writer’s skill is honed by what the writer reads, and these kids have never read a book with human main characters, and so have spent their long, lonely adolescences molding their imaginations into magical fuck dens and enchanted fuck forests in which they can shape-shift into a talking rat, lure Robert Jordan into a nearby field of daisies and then furiously finger-bang him with their magical little rat fingers. However, I have written several strongly worded letters to the President asserting my conviction that any citizen who engages in magical rodent erotica fan-fiction on a regular basis should not be legally allowed to come within 50 feet of a printing device, no matter how brilliant the chimpanzee typist behind it. Perhaps on their birthdays we can give them some crayons and a napkin to draw on or something, but that's it. We cannot afford to let another Robert Jordan, Talking-Rat, Magic-Meadow Spaghetti Festival go walking out into the world in broad daylight and fuck everything up for the rest of us. We just can't.

Jesus in Space: A Transcript

The following conversation took place between myself and a coworker of mine at roughly eleven p.m. this evening behind the Wilson Library circulation desk. It is extremely lewd. I advise the sophisticated, the soft, and the generally sissy to skip this particular post, or else go at it with full gusto in an effort to toughen yourself up in the event that you become homeless and have to hear conversations like this one on a regular basis.




Me: I have so much admiration for astronauts. I think you have to be brilliant and you have to be insane to even want to be an astronaut, let alone become one.

Cary: Yeah.

Me: I mean, you have to want to leave the fucking Earth.

Cary: Yeah.

Me: You have to want to be in fucking outer space. There isn’t even air in space! You’re completely and totally fucked if you so much as step outside.

Cary: I always thought it’d be cool to be the guy up on the space station.

Me: That would be pretty cool. You could do whatever you wanted. You could jerk off on a picture of Jesus. Nobody would ever know.

Cary: Couldn’t you also jerk off to a picture of Jesus on Earth?

Me: Yeah, but it wouldn’t have the same thrill.

Cary: Do you jerk off to pictures of Jesus?

Me: No, but I’m just saying, you could if you wanted to if you were in a space station, and I totally would if I were in a space station.

Cary: Do you think the semen would just sort of float around you afterwards?

Me: They must have some kind of special hose for that purpose. You can’t go a whole mission without jerking off.

Cary: It’s probably the same one you go pee into.

Me: Probably. Fucking NASA, too cheap to even buy their astronauts a separate hose for jerking off.

Cary: I think NASA would know if you jerked off on a picture of Jesus.

Me: How?

Cary: Don’t they have cameras on like every part of the space station?

Me: Not in my Jerking-Off-To-Jesus Jerk-Off Room, they don’t. I jerked off on those cameras. They can’t see shit.

A Short Guide to the People Who Still Use the Library, Part 2

Exhibit A: The John Wayne Busey (May Or May Not Wear a Clown Suit)

This terrifying library patron draws teddy bears on the little pieces of scratch paper at the circulation desk and puts hand sanitizer on his face. At some point in your brief but disturbing relationship with him you will find yourself revising his Fairhaven College application essay, in which the full extent of his manifold psychosis is described, denied, and then decorated with teddy bears. Which wouldn't be so bad, except that according to my Encyclopedia of Little Things Lonely People Mistake For Big Things, the casual revision of a personal essay is an instigating factor in 89% of all cases of murder-suicide. A full scale editing job with stylistic suggestions, depending on the color of pen used, can escalate a bipolar schizophrenic from a 'Gary Busey' to a 'John Wayne Gacy,' something known in psychology journals as the Busey-Gacy Vowel Shift. The condition is widely considered irreversible, although it is rumored that Gary Busey himself shifts between the Busey and Gacy phases several times a month, in accordance with the fullness of the moon. Eventually, of course, the John Wayne Busey terrifies one too many students and has to be escorted out of the library by campus police.



Exhibit B: The Traveling Salesman

Sporting a wrinkled trench coat and clinging to a tattered briefcase like a wet rat to a heap of garbage, this library patron calls to mind the hungry-eyed businessmen of the Great Depression. Some say he speaks five languages; some say he once rode a camel bareback through the Mongolian dessert for three elective credits and a bag of potatoes. He comes in on the heels of an autumn wind and departs with the first spring lightning storm, leaving trails of legal size paper and food crumbs in his wake. What's in the briefcase? Monopoly money? Bread? Heroin? Whatever the case, the contents of his briefcase are mere chump change in comparison to the solid Mongolian gold of his soul.



Exhibit C: The Hand Sanitizer Enthusiast

A comic miracle occurs every time this library patron approaches the desk and, unable to resist the bottle of hand sanitizer at the counter, sics himself upon it like a spring pig on a pile of truffles. He gets elbows-deep in the sweet, cool burn of alcoholic soap and seems to say with his eyes, 'If you're just going to do a couple of pumps, you might as well take a bath in your own shit. A real man needs at least ten pumps. If chickens did ten pumps, we wouldn't have bird flue. If we had dipped the 80's in ten pumps, Reagan would still be president.'



In the library, as in life, such tragedies are commonplace.

Personality Profile: Mr. Fancy Socks

"I got up one morning and couldn't find my socks, so I called Information. She said, 'Hello, Information.' I said, 'I can't find my socks.' She said, 'They're behind the couch.' And they were!" - Stephen Wright



It is a widely held notion in academic circles that the psychological prototype for Mr. Fancy Socks developed as a way to assert and maintain social status among rival males, much like the antler-clashes of elk, or the knife-fights of New England lobsters.* In every university library, for instance, there is one male staff member who is taller, better-dressed, and more learned in the fields of pop music and Greek food than any other staff member. He wears his heart on his sleeve, his sleeves unbuttoned, and his glasses on a cloth chain hand-braided by the women of a small Tibetan village. Many of the female university population harbor secret and fantastic crushes on him, and many men jealously believe him to be a homosexual. Clearly, there is only room for one Mr. Fancy Socks in this Library Town; and yet, there is always a corresponding Double in the university faculty, an English or Philosophy professor who is similarly tall and coiffed, an expert on pitas and Proust. Who is the better man? That depends.

Who wears fancier socks?

It begins with harmless show-boating: a pose struck with legs crossed, a second too long spent tying his shoes. If he is feeling saucy, which Mr. Fancy Socks almost always is, he'll click his heels together to let you know about it. He is a cashmere coyote in a pair of road runners. On warm days he wears tennis anklets that whisper passages from 'Lolita' to no one in particular. But what begins as leisure and light soon escalates into full-blown war, until eventually Mr. Fancy Socks is resting a leg on some poor unsuspecting librarian's card catalog and rolling up a pant cuff so that the full length of the sock is revealed ad infinitum, at which point the rival will 9 times out of 10 suffer devastating and irreversible heartbreak. The alpha male will make his victory known by smacking the reference librarian square on her fanny. "Bought 'em off a hobo in Prague for a bottle of mescaline," he'll say, and chuckle to himself. And you won't even bat an eye, because you just know - you just know, just looking at him - that Mr. Fancy Socks did inconceivable amounts of mescaline in Prague. His status assured, the rest of the semester will sail by like a dream inside of another dream, or like a barrel full of mescaline floating down the Vltava river in Prague. For a while, he is King.

These men, though they appear as infallible lions in a savanna of social perfection, are inwardly the most vulnerable of meerkats. According to my Almanac of Statistics on the Use of Fancy Socks as a Psychological Defense, 87% of them have had their sexuality questioned in public, 90% of them have undergone a tempestuous love affair with pesto-flavored mayonnaise, and a whopping 96% of them have had their taste in foreign films and/or ethnic foods insulted at a dinner party.**

So next time you see one of these gentle bohemian beasts lounging book-side, remember the silent language of fancy socks: argyle spells anxious, paisley means divorce, and silk blends spell unresolved sibling rivalry issues, possibly brought about by early childhood trauma. Have compassion. Be kind. Say, "Hey, Mr. Fancy Socks. I see you. I dig your digs. I'm picking up what you're putting down, and I know you're a good man."





*Not true.

**For more on this subject, I suggest 'Barefoot In The Snow: The Souls of the Sockless, Shoeless, and Otherwise Spiritually Fried.'(Vikingman Press, 1998.)


Editor's Note: For information regarding the other type of Sock War, wherein prepubescent boys roll up their socks into balls and hurl them at each other until they physically exhaust themselves, please see "Blood, Bleach, and Masturbation: The Suburban Sock Wars of the 1990s." (Everyman Press, 2002.)

A Petition to Hate the Black Widow Spider Even More Than We Already Do, with notes from the Encyclopedia of Lies Science Told Us

Editor's Note: I wrote this for a friend who asked me to write a short piece on the Black Widow, assuming he meant the terrible, terrible spider. Later he clarified that he was referring to the Bellingham transvestite who goes by the same name - but it was too late.







Ah, the Black Widow! It is difficult to conceive of a thing more instinctively terrifying and repulsive than a Black Widow spider, barring certain names which may leap to mind in the arena of political radio. The spider's name alone is enough to inspire a shiver of disgust in the spine and a compulsive desire to be fed ice cream. It has been turned into legend at Fourth-of-July barbecues for millennia. Its picture is drawn in hieroglyphs. There are sculptures in Rome of fathers re-enacting the time a Black Widow was hiding in the toe of one of his slippers, and sculptures of their wives and children listening in gape-jawed rapture, potato chips tumbling from their mouths. The Black Widow is universally feared and hated, and this is the way it should be.


But we need to step it up.


The Black Widow has not been "misunderstood." She is not "just as afraid of you" as you of her. There is nothing going on inside her staggeringly tiny brain that deserves the misty-eyed adoration of the weird ladies who guard the Arthropod exhibits at zoos like grandmothers drifting through cat emporiums, bestowing upon tarantulas and flesh-eating beetles names like "Sir Laurence" and "Maude." In fact, there is nothing inside the Black Widow at all except a jumble of nerves, a system of glands, and a perfect replica of all the reoccurring nightmares of the entire human race.


Do you know how a black widow eats? I'll tell you how a black widow eats.


The Black Widow eats by thrusting its Nosferatu fangs into the live body of its victim, tightly bound in a straight jacket made of silk, paralyzing and saturating the body in what science magazines politely call "digestive enzymes," but which my Encyclopedia of Lies Science Told Us informs me is actually called Death Acid. The Death Acid partially dissolves the victim, and what can't be liquefied, the spider grinds into meat pudding with its enormous, H.P. Lovecraftian teeth. All of which, mind you, happens while the victim is still alive. That's how a Black Widow eats. She wraps you in cellophane, turns you into a smoothie and drinks you. The only creature that eats in a more horrific way than a Black Widow spider is a starfish - but starfish are redeemed by clinging to rocks in tide pools, being available in pastel colors, and possessing the ability to regrow their own limbs. None of which can be said for the Black Widow!


And do you know what else? The Black Widow doesn't even deserve to be called a widow. The word widow evokes a certain sympathy, a certain painful understanding of the tragedy of outliving a loved one. But how many widows do you know who are widows because they murdered and ate their own husbands after sex? According to my Almanac of Statistics On The Frequency of Post-Coital Homicide, you know almost none. There are only two such widows living in the United States, and both of them are very famous. And you, reader, probably don't know anybody famous at all. You want a widow? Jackie Kennedy. You want a black widow? Coretta Scott King. Those are real widows. And neither of them ate their husbands. Actually, both of their husbands were assassinated, and I wouldn't be surprised if Black Widow spiders were involved.


Perhaps we ought to call it what it really is: a Nazi spider. Because like the Nazis, it tortures and kills its own kind. Like the Nazis, the females are larger and more frightening than the males, and they lay eggs. And like Nazism, it's one of the worst things in history, poisoning whoever it touches and permitted only in the complete absence of a just and loving God. And so what if it kills flies. Who cares? We all kill more flies in our sleep than spiders do in a year - a year which, for humans, is filled with beautiful human things like eating takeout and shopping for sheets, but for a spider is filled with terrible, disgusting, unacceptable spider things, like murdering and eating your sex partners.