That Apocalyptic Feeling

This is the last column I wrote for the Stanford Daily:

“When the earth gapes my body to entomb,
I justly may complain of such a doom.”—Voltaire, “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster”

“And I can’t fight this feeling anymore. I’ve forgotten what I started fighting for. It’s time to bring this ship into shore. And throw away the oars, forever.” –REO Speedwagon, “Can’t Fight this Feeling Anymore”

My Sunday sing-along with the village delinquents had just reached the coda when I heard a pounding at the door.

The sound startled the young ne’er-do-wells and sent our five-part harmony into a pitchy mess. Everyone stayed on key, but they lost their balance and fell from the risers into the inflatable pool of hot pitch below. I have found, in working with degenerate youth, that sometimes all it takes to bring out the golden voices slumbering inside their criminal bodies is a little tough love.

Take the Three Tenors, for example: all products of the musical pedagogy of European fascism. “Lucky” Luciano Pavarotti was a cracker thief in Mussolini’s Italy until the authoritarian youth outreach program fed him the castor oil that brought his sweet tenor gurgling up to the surface. Placido “Sleepy Sunday” Domingo was bastinadoed sixteen times by the Spanish Falange before he could sing a melody instead of jimmy a lock. And Jose “Career Loiterer” Carreras would still be standing on a street corner in the Barceloneta if Franco’s Guardia Civil had not tended to his musical ‘reeducation’.

But back to my story: peeved that I would now have to refill the tub with freshly heated tar, I marched to the door to rage at the intruder whose knocking had interrupted my stern commitment to community service.

“Don’t you realize that I am trying to rehabilitate the malformed souls of our nation’s youth through the formidable spirit of music?” I shouted. “Account for yourself, villain!”

I concluded my greeting with a swift flick between the man’s eyes delivered by my callused bludgeon of a fingernail.

Only when his eyes failed to come uncrossed did I realize this villain was my twin brother, G.P. (Gross Product).

“G.P., you rogue! My apologies, but I didn’t recognize you dressed in your clown suit. What gives?”

G.P. was a real biz-casual kind of guy. He talked a lot about synergy, diversifying stuff, stimulating investment incentives in things, and all the legendary nights out he had with his boys in Palo Alto. He was the kind of guy who praised the recent Supreme Court ruling allowing corporate donations to political campaigns as a victory for free speech. So you can imagine my shock when I saw him swaddled in pink robes, his hair tied in a knot, and a skull tattooed across his face.

“The end is nigh, P.G.! Death has come to swallow our world, to gnash our guts betwixt his jaws.”

“That doesn’t sound like you, G.P. You’re usually so upbeat and of limited diction. What happened?”

“My real estate investments fell through, so I’ve joined an apocalyptic cult.”

“Well, I’m sure you’ll get another investment opportunity,” I told him.

“You don’t understand. My penthouse vacation condos in Port-au-Prince fell through all fifteen floors below them.”

“Oh,” I said. But as soon as tried to say something comforting, something remotely optimistic, a little serving of a vomit would surge into my mouth. My mind desperately searched beyond the earthquake in Haiti for a current realm of human activity that didn’t make me gag in despair. Politics, War, Healthcare, Education, Economy, Jobs, Media, Hollywood, Environment—these banal terms, fired into my brain hundreds of times a day, took on a ghoulish appearance that sent me cowering in the warm vat of hot pitch. Not even art—the cherubic voices of my village hoodlum choir singing “Waltzing Matilda” in the round—could draw me from the bilious depths of my black liquid sanctuary.

My brother’s return had sapped my resolve to live among men. In the days following his visit, I tried to carry on with my volunteer work as choirmaster for incorrigible derelicts. But I didn’t possess the strength of will to cane the sole of even a single foot. As a result, the group’s singing failed to improve and recidivism quickly replaced rehabilitation. Petty larceny and gambling returned to the choir room. By month’s end, my Sunday sing-alongs had become wanton orgies of disorder. There would be no great Pavarottis or Domingos made by me—only tone-deaf cracker thieves and donkey-voiced loiterers.

In a final attempt to fight that apocalyptic feeling, I decided to volunteer my living body for scientific testing. Surely, in a world mired in disaster, science is still our one stalwart hope. So I stumbled into my neighborhood medical testing office and shouted at the receptionist, “In the name of progress, hit me with the radiation!” But the supervising physician rejected me, citing some jargony bureaucratic term called “raving lunacy.”

But, really, I’m happier here. I’m with my twin brother Gross Product, who now goes by Death Knell, and all his apocalyptic cult friends. We have a lovely little stretch of hovel in the trans-Bay tube midway between SF and Oakland. I hear the view three hundred feet above us is simply stunning. We have an ample supply of nettles and pass the time telling each other stories of the pending apocalypse and watching the BART passengers zoom by merrily on their crash course to inevitable disaster.

One thing, though. I can’t write these columns for the Stanford Daily anymore. Internet connection is too spotty down here. Besides, ever since I’ve stopped fighting this apocalyptic feeling, I’ve forgotten what I started writing for.

But, please, I encourage you to come visit.

The Everyman Machine

“I go to Washington as the representative of no faction or interest, answering only to my conscience and to the people. I’ve got a lot to learn in the Senate, but I know who I am and I know who I serve. I’m Scott Brown. I’m from Wrentham. I drive a truck, and I am nobody’s senator but yours.”–Massachusetts Senator-elect Scott Brown

“Every man is as Heaven made him, and sometimes a great deal worse.”–Cervantes, “Don Quixote”

Of course you can smell my truck. I don’t mind. Yeah, it still has that new truck scent. But I assure you that’s because I’m tidy, not elitist. No pretentious liberal phony-scent trees dangling from this mirror. No, sir. Just an American flag, my Helen Gurly Brown commemorative fuzzy dice (a gift from Cosmo) and a tea bag still dripping with earl gray patriotism. Oh, that other smell, you ask? That’s the smell of victory--the people’s victory! Now, with all due respect, please back away from the truck. You’re leaving grease stains on my populist decal.

I know what you’re thinking. How in the heck did a regular patriotic pro-life guy like me take on the juggernaut of the liberal establishment? Well, to tell the truth, I never thought I would end up in politics. It always seemed like a sordid scene run by backroom deals and shadowy interest groups. Capitol Hill brought to mind a cocktail hour intrigue of smug corporate lawyers, spineless party hacks and lobbyists from whose double-breasted suits flowed endless free steaks and Coogi sweaters. What’s more, it was worm-ridden with political philosophies, ideologies, party platforms, all sorts of things that, to a normal liberty-loving dude, sounded pretty suspect.

And, if my car hadn’t broken down that one fateful day, I surely would have carried on being a sedan-driving, golf-playing, nude-modeling drone of the liberal establishment. But when I showed up at Hertz for a replacement rental, my loafers in tatters, all they had left were pick-up trucks. After upbraiding the sales assistant, I resigned myself to the truck and drove home feeling awkward. But something strange happened on that drive home.

At first, the changes were small. I started hanging my arm out the window. I tuned in to AM radio. I started whistling the national anthem. But more perceptible transformations soon followed in their wake. A paranoid fear of illegal immigrants crept over me. I felt the sacred institution of marriage crumbling beneath my feet. My love of unborn fetuses became so overwhelming that I had to pull over and buy a pro-life bumper sticker.

At the highway rest stop, I noticed, much to my amazement, that I was trading banter and sharing laments with the other huddled masses piling out of their pickups and into the urinals. Despite wanting to liquidate their homes and send them to prison, I felt a genuine affection for their folksy desperation and lack of opportunity. I then realized what had just happened to me: I had become an everyman.

Back on the road, my new everyman aroma spewed forth from the exhaust pipe of my everyman machine, sweetening the air with a new hope for democracy.

The minutemen militias of delusional hockey moms and other dangerous ignoramuses crawled out from their bunkers and followed my fumes. They immediately recognized this scent as their own, with its stench of raw civic discontent not masked with any artificial rational fragrances, and proclaimed me their king.

So, here I am, just another small town beauty queen taking on the political machine. As an everyman, I like my democracy old-fashioned (circa 2004): without health care, steeped in war and favoring the rich.

But don’t you go thinking we’re the same as the everymen of yore. Sure, Harry Truman may have made a big fuss about being a small potatoes yokel from Independence, Mo. But then he had to go and ruin his everyman image with a palpable sense of history and an intellectual commitment to governance.

You know what that reeks of? Expertise! Elitism! Now, how are you supposed to serve the people if the people can’t relate to you? And how are the people supposed to relate to you if you know more than they do? That’s bad reality TV and bad democracy. Instead, the everyman politician of the 21st century must be a convincing avatar. When the American people look into the political mirror of democratic government (or Cosmopolitan), they want to see themselves, only with killer abs.

Also, it doesn’t hurt to have a sweet truck.

History Lives in San Diego

Oh, prosaic San Diego! Sing me your secrets. A French-fried potato stuffed in a burrito? A kidnapped Tijuana club owner stashed in a safe house? A syphilis sore blossoming in a sailor’s breeches? A thousand historians holed up in a Hyatt? What other sordid surprises do you keep in your canyons shadowed from the bleach of the blistering sun?

Destiny found me in our southern city of St. James last weekend. I had been invited to give a paper at the annual meeting of American historians: “Rethinking Fingernail Hygiene in Late Victorian Wales, 1891-1895: A Transnational Perspective.” Going into the conference, I had worried my topic was too broad. After all, pre-1891 Welsh fingernail hygiene was a world apart from the 1895 scene. It’s nearly impossible to account for all the transformations wrought by the great Belgian cuticologist Emil Rjinsdorf and his introduction of the scrub brush into the mining cultures of blackened Welshmen.

But my fears of trying to cover too much ground were soon assuaged by a look at the list of other conference panels. I knew I would have no difficulty discussing the broad currents of fin-de-siecle filth and the emerging global perspective on cuticology with my interlocutors in Radio and Gender Performance in Postwar France or Quilting in Third Generation Filipino-American Families.

The conference began wonderfully. Under the yellow morning glow of the ballroom chandeliers, we plied our trade, broke new conceptual ground, and changed our understanding of human behavior with the three to four people who were willing to listen to us. At least two of those people had come thinking there would be free coffee.

Sadly, the free coffee years were over. Like many of the humanities disciplines, history has fallen on hard job times. Granted, you would never know this from the steady stream of effluvia coming out of the historical discipline.

But there were subtle hints of underlying slump. The Career Resource Desk in Annex D of the Hyatt had a “back in five minutes” sign posted on the table for the entire weekend. The buffet spread for “Young Scholars” consisted of raw broccoli, steamed peas, sunflower seeds, and a giant punch bowl of ranch dressing. And I’m pretty sure I saw a scholar of early modern Poland picking cigarette butts off the parking lot.

Of course, that didn’t stop us from enjoying ourselves. In between presentations, we historians unclipped our ties and frolicked in the San Diego sun. The terrace came alive with ill-fitting suits poring over footnotes by the pool and heated discussions in the sauna about the battle of the Bulge.

Then things got real.

A group of masked men with guns burst into the Hyatt. They barricaded the exits, corralled us into the grand ballroom, and bound our hands and feet with duct tape. They told us we were being held for ransom. Apparently, the Mexican drug cartels had also fallen on hard economic times. To compensate, not only were they diversifying their job skills with increasing forays into kidnapping; in conducting business across the border, they, too, were adopting a transnational perspective.

Unfortunately, their plans for profit were misguided. When the university deans received the call announcing that all their historians had been kidnapped, their eyes lit up. A whole departmental budget would be free to pump into a new ergonomic finger gym for the school of engineering. Suddenly, a new solution to the universities’ budget crisis had appeared on the horizon.

When our kidnappers started filling car tires with gasoline, we knew we had to get out of this situation on our own. The time had come to bring our historical knowledge to bear on the present.

A young woman crawled to the podium.

“The first thing we have to do is sufficiently theorize our methodology.”

“We need to adopt a global perspective!” someone shouted.

“But one that is still attuned to the nuances of gender construction!” yelled another.

“Let’s be serious. We can’t move forward until we rethink the boundaries of kidnapper-kidnappee and the intersubjective process of identity formation.”

“I’d like to remind everyone that digital media technology can serve as an excellent pedagogical tool.”

The crowd murmured its assent, albeit reluctantly.

Thirteen hours later, we had struck on a plan. We would survey the historiography of slave revolts, prisoner riots, and hostage resistance from a transnational perspective, but with attention to the specific cultural dimensions of local institutions and practices. This would indicate a direction for future work on emancipation. Meanwhile, we would deliver a series of power point-supplemented lectures aimed at making our captors aware of the normative discourse of masculinity and the legacy of Spanish colonial oppression they were acting out in their transgressive roles.

But when we went to give our first lecture, we came upon the kidnappers at the “Young Scholars” buffet, sprawled out dead on the floor. The empty punch bowl of rancid three-day-old ranch dressing told the tale.

Once again, the unexamined past had brought the present to its knees.

Filial Piety

I overheard the following conversation between two young men tonight at the Palo Alto Caltrain stop. Once I heard the phrase "fighting with my grandma," I knew I was listening to gold:

Dude, I totally broke my ipod the other day.

Oh, really?

Yeah, I was fighting with my grandma. I was in the bathroom, and she was all yelling at me through the door and I was like, "Fuck you, Grandma!" And I was so pissed, I took my ipod off the counter and threw it at the door as hard as I could and it bounced off the door and flew into the bathtub. Totally busted it.

Wow. Really?

Yeah. And she was all like, "You shouldn't use language like that." And I was like, "Shut the fuck up, Grandma. I can use whatever fucking language I like!"

Whoa.

Well, that's my train. See you later dude.

Yeah. See ya.

Getting Down to Business

So much for New Year’s resolutions. There I was on Jan. 1, knee-deep in luggage, resolved to board a greyhound to Lafayette, La. to begin my new life as a philosophy major. Then a tweet came screaming through the ether into my iPhone. UL-Lafayette had announced it was doing away with its philosophy degree. Extinguished were my hopes of becoming an educated southern gentleman, drawling on Epictetus and gazing into the Heraclitean flux of my mint julep.

The pain brought to mind the trauma of last fall, when I showed up at Michigan State with a trunk full of Sophocles and some nasty stuff by Catullus in my back pocket, only to be informed that MSU was axing its classics major. No dorm room bacchanalia with maenad coeds. No drinking Old Milwaukee out of a kantharos. No impressing girls by reading aloud the letters on the fraternity houses.

I was beginning to fear this country no longer had room for a man of my liberal arts persuasion. Thereupon a dark spell came over me. I alternated between carving out chunks of my flesh and flipping through Forbes magazine.

But, just when I was poised to toss a coin and either hack off a limb or major in business, a tweet came blistering through the ether into my iPhone and restored my will to live. The University of Texas at Austin has paved the way to the future of education with a new course: The English Major in the Workplace.

Here students read Death of a Salesman and follow it up with strategies for networking, writing good resumes and giving successful job interviews (this is not a joke). With classes like that, UT is a school that is going to hang onto its English major.

At last, the fuzzy and worthless humanities have become relevant!

Before, we of the humanities had to lurk in the shadows of the nation’s majority, the business majors–teaching their children, writing their newspapers, eating from dumpsters, going to law school when resignation struck. All the while we envied their productivity, their synergy, their output-ability. But most of all, we admired their scrupulous attention to ethics, those questions concerning our collective wellbeing and ultimate aims as individual human beings. Now, finally, we’re getting the specialized workplace skills we need in order to join them in the bang-up business they are doing all across America.

And this is only the beginning. I can only dream of all the other potential edifying courses I will be able to take as an English major in the second decade of the 21st century. Look for these classes in your upcoming course catalog:

How to Sell Your Soul: The Faustian Tradition

The Brothers Karamazov and the Brothers Lehman: The Pitfalls of Family Finance

Siegfried Sasoon/Vidal Sasoon: A Comparison in (Entrepreneurial) Style

Heart of Darkness: Kurtz as Corporate Visionary

Email, Text, Tweet: Advanced Composition

How to Tie a Tie

Selling/Stealing, Brokering/Bamboozling: The Power of Rhetoric

Naked Lunch Power Lunch: A Chat n’ Chew, Meet n’ Greet for Wingtipped Beatniks (martinis and mechanical dildos provided)

Speaking in Complete Sentences and Other Interviewing Strategies

The Power of Positive Thinking: A Study in Textual Exegesis

Bleak House: Sub-Prime Mortgaging and the Dickensian Dignity of Poverty

The Cubicle: A Space for Creative Exploration (prerequisite: Thinking Outside the Box while Inside a Cubicle)

If only the University of California would start offering courses like these. Then its alums would make so much money, they, rather than the state, could subsidize the cost of tuition.

With this new business casual makeover of the bed-headed patched-tweed English major, my degree is sure to make me a valuable worker in the jobless economy. Now I don’t have to major in business just to get ahead in the bread line.

What’s more, I can look my relatives square in the face when they ask me what I’m going to do with a degree in English and tell them:

“Why, I’m going to join the workforce, juggles spreadsheets, earn great big pots of money, sink it into an oversized house, boost the GDP, watch shitloads of prerecorded television, sire some children who will be even more ignorant than I am, get laid off, lose the house, get sick, and then hope to God by that time one of my idiot kids has majored in business and makes enough money to put me in a private nursing home, where I will slowly drool out all memory of my existence.”

“Wonderful,” they’ll say. “That sounds just like a business degree. Eminently practical.”

Gentleman's Library

Please, step into my gentleman’s library. I don’t leave its leather-bound confines these days, and to receive a visitor is a rare treat indeed. Please, please, don’t be shy. Wipe your boots on the sable fur mat, set your cane in the well and cross the threshold to my kingdom.

Pray, sit down. Make yourself at home. Hang your hat on the elk antlers, the bronzed rhino horn, wherever you like. My gentleman’s library is your gentleman’s library. Only I must ask that you not remove the laminate on the sofa. We’ve been told it’s not gentlemanly. Don’t mind that shriveled woman there. She’s sound asleep. Simply pretend she’s not there. Instead, turn your gaze upon the marvels of my collection. What you see before you are the spoils of lifelong travel and the learned discernments of a private scholar. These mounted heads are trophies from my big game hunts on the Dark Continent. That folio there is the erotic diary of a 17th-century courtesan in the sultan of Brunei’s harem, a gift from the sultan himself. And here, adjacent to the wonder cabinet, betwixt my astrolabe and the collected works of Hume, is an original medical prescription written for John Milton’s gout.

For these treasures, I entangled myself in innumerable romances and intrigues round the globe. But I eventually grew weary of the world of men and retreated to the sanctuary of this library. Like the immortal Montaigne, I have consecrated the rest of my days to a life of the mind. If you look at the mantel, above the busts of Plutarch and Carlyle, you’ll see that I have inscribed for all posterity my vow to pursue knowledge strictly within these hallowed walls.

This vow has been notarized and carries with it the authority of the state of Indiana. Impressive, you say? Well, not only did the local government endorse my scholarly reclusion, they even honored me with a flashing jeweled bracelet to commemorate the deed. I have been instructed to wear it here, just below my sock garter and directly above my spats, and never to remove it. Fetching, isn’t it?

Behold, next to the fireplace, a complete collection of all knowledge, bound in gilded leather, befitting a man of my station. Every luminous pearl of wisdom from Heraclitus to Hegel–oh, forgive me. How rude I have been. I entirely forgot to offer you a beverage. And you must be terribly thirsty. I believe we have some claret in the cellar. Just a moment.

“Grandma, wake up! He-llo, Grandma! Up and at ‘em! Can’t you see I have a guest and that we’re both beyond parched? Be a dear and fetch us some claret from the cellar.”

“Now, Clarence, you know you’re not supposed to have visitors. The judge was very clear about that.”

“Grandma, please don’t tell me what to do when you’re in my gentleman’s library. That’s one of the rules.”

“Well, I thought we also agreed you weren’t going to fuss with my Reader’s Digests. Please put them back next to the fireplace before they get bent. Also, what did I tell you about putting your rocks in the linen closet?”

“You mean the wonder cabinet.”

“Sure. And, for the last time, stop writing ‘Collected Works of Hume’ on my Dean Koontz books.”

“Grandma! Just fetch the claret, would you?”

I’m sorry. She’s totally senile. I tried barricading her in the bedroom, but then I realized there would be no one to cook and tend to the scullery. After all, a gentleman must have his victuals. Now let me show you my volumes of Voltaire.

“Clarence, I didn’t see any drink called claret in the fridge. Just your usual Grape Tang. Now, make sure your friend doesn’t spill any on the sofa. That laminate is hard to clean.”

“I know, Grandma! Now would you mind–we’re trying to have an intellectual conversation about Voltaire.”

“Clarence, you know what the psychiatrist said. That Voltaire is what got you into all this mess in the first place.”

“I was just fighting for enlightenment against the blackguard clergy.”

“You exposed yourself to a nun, while shouting lewdly in French.”

“There’s nothing lewd about ‘ecrasez l’infame,’ Grandma.”

“There is when your wiener is hanging out.”

“Grandma, go to your room! You’re embarrassing me in my gentleman’s library!”

“You and your friend can visit until four, Clarence. Then my programs come on. Make sure you un-tape those cardboard animal heads from the TV by then.”

“Fine, Grandma, whatever. Just leave us alone.”

“Oh, one more thing, Clarence. Have you seen my gout prescription from Dr. Milton? I can’t find it anywhere.”

“I have no idea where it is, Grandma.”

I really must apologize. She’s quite the philistine. What’s that? You have to go? What a shame. Now, what was that you mentioned at the door about selling cookies? Never mind? Oh well, you can tell me about it next time.

Pumpkin Pie Famine

“There is definitely a shortage of pumpkins and it’s really due to a smaller yield this year. The pumpkin yield nationwide was down 70 percent, so that’s a huge reduction in what we’re used to,” said Vivian King of Roundy’s Supermarkets.

This is potentially bad news for pumpkin pie lovers like Pat Moore. Moore said that he just had pumpkin pie at his niece’s birthday and will be disappointed if the shortage prevents him from having more.

“We like pumpkin pie and everyone was commenting on how delicious it was, so it would be missed if there’s a shortage,” Moore said.

– WISN News, Milwaukee, “Bad Pumpkin Harvest Could Affect Thanksgiving Dessert Plans”

Sweet Jesus. Hide your children. Lock the door. Good. Now lock it again. If Pat Moore smells pumpkin anywhere near your family, he will eat them.

I don’t mean to be an alarmist, but I used to work with Pat Moore. He had the cubicle next to mine. Seemed like nice enough guy, into golf and boats, that sort of thing. We used to take smoke breaks together. But one time, I remember, we walked down to Roundy’s to pick up a pack of cigs, and while we’re walking through the store, Pat stops dead in his tracks and just stares at this bin of pumpkins. His eyes go all googly and he starts muttering to himself. Something about ample harvests, sweet round lovelies, and then all of a sudden he raises his arms and screams, “All my crusts shall be filled!”

I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Someone’s always flipping out at Roundy’s. It’s just that kind of place. Besides, Pat seemed totally normal otherwise.

The next year Pat’s wife left him right at the end of October. So we decided to invite him over to our place for Thanksgiving, you know, to cheer him up. We figured if he got a load of my family, then he might not mind being divorced and completely alone.

Now, this was back in ’02, year of the Great Pumpkin Famine. As you well remember, it devastated everyone’s dessert plans. The cans of filling disappeared from store shelves in September. The pumpkin bin at Roundy’s stayed empty through October. Many pumpkin farmers jumped out their windows. Fortunately, most of them lived in ranch-style homes. But their state of desperation was not lost on us. Come the week of Thanksgiving we thought long and hard about how we were going to get by. We had heard reports of people making pie with nettles and shoe leather. My Estonian barber told me he had fought the Soviets for fifteen years in the Baltic forests subsisting solely on salted dog turds, which, he assured me, tasted just like pumpkin pie. But we swallowed our dignity and settled for blueberry filling. Sometimes we must be thankful for very little.

The day of Thanksgiving, my extended family rolled in. I say rolled because my Aunt Blanche, in the years prior to her stomach stapling, had to be wheeled in on a dolly, while cousin Elmer had taken to wearing roller skates to family events ever since his head injury. Uncle Poot arrived true to form, farting the national anthem and in his customary overalls whose baggy depths concealed loaded firearms.

Then Pat Moore showed up. He had a crazed look. He said he had just come from his niece’s birthday. “Guess what? They had pie there. It was pumpkin pie. I ate it. Little girls don’t deserve pumpkin pie. Pat Moore deserves pumpkin pie. We will be very disappointed if something prevents us from having more pie.”

Sure, I was a little unnerved, but I felt sorry for the guy. Everyone was hard hit by the pumpkin famine, I told him. It was only natural to be upset. And here I gently inserted that this Thanksgiving, given such dire circumstances, we would be concluding the meal with blueberry pie.

At that moment I saw the switch flip in Pat Moore.

We tried to proceed with the meal like everything was normal. But Pat just stared at his plate. Not even Uncle Poot’s racist jokes could trigger a reaction. Cousin Elmer, oblivious to the tension, chirped: “Hey, Pat doesn’t eat turkey. Just like Elmer. Elmer only eats ham!” Pat slowly looked up, his eyes swelling as they took in cousin Elmer’s orange protective helmet. “Pumpkin?” Pat intoned, raising his finger to Elmer’s head. “Pumpkin.” And with that, he dove across the table and, with a gruesome efficiency, tore poor cousin Elmer’s head clean from its shoulders and devoured it whole. By the time Uncle Poot had fetched his gun from his overalls, Pat Moore was gone.

In the days following Thanksgiving, brigands could be seen roaming the suburbs. Looting the wilting jack-o-lanterns from their neighbors’ doorsteps, lopping the hands off homeowners clinging to their gourds, plundering autumnal cornucopias in window displays, the pumpkin gangs ravaged the Midwest on their campaign of terror. Their leader: a man named Pat Moore, a savage man, a man like you and me, a lover of pumpkin pie. Give thanks that he doesn’t find you.

The Plight of Pure Genius

People often ask me how I got to be so smart. That’s why I carry a briefcase full of photocopies of the second chapter of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, “Why I Am So Wise,” his last moment of lucidity before the spirochetes churned his brain to butter. I let Nietzsche do my talking for me since I’m usually too busy philosophizing to answer people’s questions.

For example, just yesterday at the café I was lecturing a peasant on how best to raise his unruly children, whose horseplay was disturbing my moment of intense contemplation (whether to have crumb cake or lemon poppy seed loaf). The dim fellow asked me, “What makes you so goddamn smart, asshole?” At which point I plucked Nietzsche out of my satchel and said, “So glad you asked, dear man. Here, read this!” He mentioned something about joining him outside, perhaps for an al fresco reading, but I had already returned to my lofty meditations.

Of course, I’ve never read Nietzsche. I wouldn’t want to contaminate the originality of my ideas. But I’m confident we’re on the same page, since Nietzsche, like me, was a misunderstood genius. Contrary to what most people think, being a misunderstood genius is not all free meals and hot oil rubdowns. Normally, I would just hand you the Nietzsche printout to explain my point, but I’ve run out of copies and Kinko’s has banned me from all California locations for Xeroxing my anus one too many times. So now I shall condescend to you, public, to share the plight of my prodigious intelligence.

I was bred to be a genius. That’s why my parents named me P.G.–Pure Genius. Well, technically, I was christened as Ralph. But after a year of witnessing my superior mind, and from the stories they tell, my amazing talent for eating nails, rubber bands and other household detritus, Mom and Dad had it legally changed. This new name was, for them, an endless source of pride and enjoyment. “Hey, Pure Genius,” they would shout, “Come open Daddy’s beer with your teeth.” Or, “Pure Genius, I bet you can’t drink a whole jug of anti-freeze.” Given my precocious intellect, I instantly mastered such activities.

The trouble started when I came of schooling age. Unlike my parents, who accepted my talents as a natural emanation of their own brilliance, the base and conformist world tried to break me. An incompetent doctor diagnosed me as a low-grade cretin. Clearly, the man could not see past superficial appearances, basing his diagnosis solely on my goiter, my lucky propeller beanie and my sardine-can shoes.

Back in those days, they tried to cure cretinism with corporal punishment. Here again, my learning prowess was apparent, as I quickly mastered how to take a lashing like a veteran sailor. I absorbed blows with the same zest I had for absorbing vocabulary words. Some geniuses, the slower ones, read widely; I read the thesaurus. It had all the good words in it, as well as the high quality, excellent, first-class, virtuous, noble, satisfactory and advantageous words. Pretty soon, I had traded up my vulgar colloquialisms for a mellifluous lexical arsenal, spoken in a cheeky East Midland accent. Needless to say, this led to only more beatings. At the age of 16, I decided to leave the third grade and light out on my own intrepid quest for knowledge.

After years of wandering, I arrived at Harvard. I had followed a frail-looking old man from the bus station onto campus, hoping to overcome him with my intellect and steal his wallet. But he was not as weak as he looked, and after considerable tussle, I retracted my claim to mental superiority and limped away. Nursing my wounds, I had a revelation. This man must be a genius, too. That was the only possible way he could have out-wrestled me. I realized this was where I belonged.

The Harvard admission director seemed shocked when I made my customary offer of sexual favors. I explained to him that this was how I had risen through the ranks of the merchant marines, how I had traveled the world and how I opened my first checking account.

“But anyone can open a checking account,” he said.

Flustered by this affront to my intelligence, I frantically displayed further evidence of my genius. I recited the thesaurus. I drew a really cool, but scary clown. I even strapped on my sardine cans and did a shuffle. Again, my genius went unrecognized.

So I came to Stanford. Here, I decided to forego the whole admission process. Instead, I have erected a perfectly habitable ivory tower of my own made from driftwood and coffee cups, right next to the Hoover Institute. It’s a one-man think tank called the P.G. Institute, and it’s open for business. Current projects include publishing an “Idiot’s Guide to Understanding My Genius in Three Easy Steps” and trying to recruit Condi Rice to come for a yearlong fellowship.

Selling Out

Dear readers, I’m feeling the pinch of the economy. In order to buy my weekly gruel, I’ve had to lease my column out to advertisers. Fortunately for you, not to the same advertisers that have leased out space on my forehead. Otherwise, you would be reading the words “Enjoy Scruggs’ Whole Meat Nuggets” for the next 700 words, without experiencing the pleasure of the adorable dancing nugget that wiggles when I blink.

Although I would like to take this opportunity to say that Scruggs, a family (style) farm operated by the Nihilex Corporation, has been producing the finest naturally flavored Whole Meat Nuggets that you’ve come to know and be strangely chemically addicted to since 1973. Of course, I receive compensation for the Scruggs Dancing Nugget I sport in two-tone color above my eyebrows. But I assure you there was no financial incentive for the Scruggs Super Bowl XXXII Nugget-Off glow-in-the-dark tattoo that shines through my underwear–that appeared after a hazy night out on the town in the company of two Scruggs Nugget employees with a vial of GHB and a penchant for prank tattoos.

Just so you know, I’m not the type of guy who goes around hurling reckless accusations of being slipped the date rape drug by Scruggs employees. But I know for a fact they did because they left this message on my phone: “Hey P.G., remember us? We’re the two Scruggs employees who slipped you the date rape drug. Yeah, and we tattooed that huge glow-in-the-dark Super Bowl Nugget-Off ad on your ass!”

Initially, I was considering litigation, but then Scruggs came to me with an offer I couldn’t refuse. They threatened to smash my fingers into splinters unless I agreed not to file suit. As compensation, however, they did offer to send me a shipping crate of Scruggs Whole Meat Nuggets and tattoo the Scruggs Dancing Nugget on my forehead. I told them that if they left the date rape drug out of it this time, we would call it a deal. I’ve always loved that dancing nugget.

But love and money are two different processed meat products. And while I may love Scruggs’ nuggets, Bickelmeyer’s pork berries pay the bills:

The following is a paid advertisement by Bickelmeyer’s Old Country Partially Dehydrogenated Pork Berries, a member of the Domicorp Group:

Do you know what’s in your nugget?…Scruggs, subsidy of the Nihilex Corporation, may look like your average God-fearing Midwestern mom-and-pop genetically modified industrial chicken farm, but what if we told you it was really a terrorist training ground, nourishing al-Qaeda one nugget at a time? What if you were to learn that Osama bin Laden has stayed alive all these years thanks to a steady supply of Scruggs Whole Meat Nuggets? That’s right, the nuggets you feed your family may be costing us thousands of innocent American lives.

Did you know Scruggs imports nuggets to a place called Venezuela, a SOCIALIST country? Did you know that socialism is a diabolical plot to rid the world of private healthcare, devised by a Marxist named Karl Marx and carried out by his Oriental henchmen Mao, Stalin and Barack Hussein Obama? Did you know Scruggs means “atheist” in another language?

Why support terrorism and the obliteration of democracy when you can enjoy a delicious freedom-loving, partially dehydrogenated Pork Berry brought to you by Bicklemeyer’s? The folks at Bicklemeyer’s have been cultivating pork berries right here on Main Street* for over 40 years. Our Old Country flavor tastes of a simpler time in America, when kids could play stickball on the streets and munch on a pork berry, without fear of being recruited into a terrorist youth organization or lured into a homosexual marriage. That’s because each pork berry is genetically infused with the spirit of Christendom. Yes, sir, when you bite into a Bicklemeyer’s pork berry, you’re consuming the blood of Christ.

Transubstantiation not enough? Well, after they come off the petri dish, we roll our pork berries in the American flag, sing “I’m proud to be an American” to them and press them between the pages of an abridged two-for-one edition of the U.S. Constitution and the Bible.

Our pork berries are what made Ayn Rand so wonderfully selfish. They’re what Rush Limbaugh gave up painkillers for. And they are the only partially dehydrogenated pork product that Glenn Beck dunks at tea parties.

Bickelmeyer’s Old Country Partially Dehydrogenated Pork Berries. Real American taste to die for!

*Main Street is what we call our industrial labor campus for children in Burma. Educating the community is a top priority at Bickelmeyer’s.

My Living Will

Dear reader,

Lately, my thoughts have been drifting toward swine flu. I find this alarming, since usually my thoughts drift toward encephalitis, botulism, and syphilitic brain-softening, in that order, right after I think about what I want for lunch, contemplate the good, and imagine a naked lady. What is this new fear in my hypochondriac closet of illnesses? It’s making me nervous. Only a sick person (perhaps someone with encephalitis!) would add a new disease to his litany of imagined infections. Granted, swine flu seems an upstart compared to a healthy neurodegenerative disease. And it’s so low brow. Even the newspapers scrawl about it. But, then again, the 1918 Spanish flu killed millions. And I have always been drawn to anachronism….

I’m sure this epidemic is nothing to worry about, but just in case, I’m writing a living will. Since you are the only person I trust, I am designating you to execute it. In the event of an emergency, please see to it that my wishes are carried out. Thank you, even though I despise you for staying alive and healthy longer than me.

Yours,

P.G.

----------------------

Dear Executor of my living will,

If you are reading this, then I am lying in a hospital bed in a completely leguminous state, no doubt stricken by one of the maladies I so feared. And you called me a hypochondriac. Looks like I really did have something to worry about after all. Just out of curiosity, what was it that got me? It was that dented can of lentils, wasn’t it? Or maybe a flesh-eating virus from riding the city bus that one time? I told you public transportation would be the death of me. Well, whatever it was, I’m not dead yet. I intend to drink up the dregs of life still floating in my inert limbs. And you’re going to help me.

Did you ever see that movie “The Bucket List”? I saw it on an airplane, and though I was feeling a little panicked and congested from all the microbes circling in those winged germ labs, I found it poignant (though poignancy is a common side effect of Dramamine). And it got me thinking; before it it’s too late, there are some things in life I want to do. Why should I be cooped up in bed comatose when there’s a whole world out there for me and my many tubes and breathing machines to explore? Carpe diem!

First, I’ve always wanted to go water-skiing. Before I fell into a coma, I refrained out of fear of pollutants. The Great Lakes seemed like one giant network of bed pans. I figured I might as well have gone swimming in a toilet. That was the old me. Now I want you to take me to Cleveland, strap some skies on my feet, tie me to a boat in Lake Erie, and let rip. Then I want you to take me swimming in a toilet.

Next, I would like to write a novel. The fancy kind where everyone talks about what a thundering talent I am, makes excuses for my fascist sympathies and infamous drinking problem, and writes me bootlicking poems on my birthday. First, put an eye-patch on me and carve a deep gash in my cheek—something that will leave a scar and give me an old world literary mystique. Then, they say to write what you know, so for a working title I’m thinking Portrait of the Artist as a Drooling Vegetable. Of course, this will require your help. I’ve devised an ingenious system of communication, where every time I twitch you start cycling through the alphabet and when I twitch again, you write down whichever letter you’re at. If I am not twitching, feel free to jostle me. I think this is going to be good.

Becoming a famous novelist has made me realize how important family is. It’s the seemingly trivial moments— sitting around the dinner table, sharing stories by the hearth, sponging down my lifeless bed-sore body—that really count. That’s why I want you to move my body to my brother’s home and see to it that I enjoy three meals a day with his family. His wife Deb will see to my feeding and hygienic upkeep. As is my want in my helpless state, I’ll have French toast for breakfast, a roast for lunch, and chile rellenos for dinner, all piped down my food straw. See to it Deb stuffs the chiles herself, daily, right after she gives me my mid-morning undercarriage scrub. Every afternoon, the kids will tell me how school was. For the sake of their education, I’d like to make them legally obligated to answer in full paragraphs in proper Latin and German. And on the weekends, my brother won’t have to go through the trouble of looking for someone to share his season tickets. I’ll gladly go to every game with him. That should make up for his having been the favorite son.

Thank you. This coma has given me a new lease on life. My will is done.

p.s. Don’t pull the plug!

Malcolm Gladwell polishes a turd

This piece was published in When Falls the Coliseum and can also be read there.

A page from Malcolm Gladwell’s moleskine

I haven’t slept for days. No idea when I last ate. My mind is on fire. Synthesizing all that data has turned my head into a furnace. Seriously, my ears feel hot. Correction: It’s my hair that is on fire. I must have nodded off on the stove again. It looks like my snap decision to work in the kitchen today was one of those snap decisions with adverse effects. Which only confirms my thesis: Sometimes the decisions made in the blink of an eye have positive outcomes, though, in certain cases, the outcome is negative. That’s the “50/50 Effect.”

Or consider it this way. My great great-grandfather Clemens came to this country as an indentured servant in 1773, employed as a grease monger on the estate of a prominent Rhode Island rum merchant. The savage Highlander that he was, and Rhode Island winters being what they were, he acquired a habit of loitering in his lord’s kitchen and warming the underside of his kilt on the wood-burning stove. Kitchen loitering became a tradition in my family, passed down through the generations. Pair that with the fear of scissors that my mother instilled in me at a young age, a residue from the Great Scissors Uprising in Western Pennsylvania–as it turns out, all sons of Western Pennsylvanian mothers who grew up during the Great Scissors Uprising have wild unshorn hair. Then factor in the nearly 10,000 hours I have spent at the end of a manic streak dozing off in strange places.

Seen in that light, it wasn’t my guarana-fueled gut decision to put my notes in the oven and set my laptop on the griddle this morning that turned my hair into a flaming orb. It was the combination of unique opportunities, historical circumstance and habitual behavior that enabled me to make that seemingly idiosyncratic decision. That’s the “Other Stuff Besides You Matters Hypothesis,” which is all the rage these days in certain circles of corporate market–I mean, social psychology.

But how can we explain the meteoric rise of the Floofkin theory? In 1944, philosopher and accordionist Gabe Floofkin escaped Nazi-occupied Poland only to fall into the hands of the Russians. Under suspicion of espionage, he was sent to the gulag. There, under conditions of extreme deprivation and routine buggery, Floofkin developed his theory of burnished matter. Lacking writing materials, he commissioned a thief to tattoo it on his body with a rusty screwdriver. Two weeks later, Flookfin died from tetanus. But his legacy would live on.

Mysteriously, his frozen body wound up on a Vladivostok cargo ship bound for Brazil, fell off en route and, after months at sea, washed ashore on Venice Beach. The next morning, a lifeguard named Eugene Krik, originally from Odessa, discovered Floofkin’s theory inked across his chest in lewdly stylized Cyrillic. It read: “You can’t polish a turd.”

Within weeks, the Floofkin theory went viral. What started as amusing shower banter at the lifeguard hut quickly achieved critical mass and exceeded the tipping point, the point at which ideas become diseases and it is necessary to use the language of epidemiology to understand cultural change. From its Los Angeles epicenter, the Floofkin theory swiftly infected California, ravaged the Midwest and gave shingles to the entire eastern seaboard. Children in Cheyenne, grandmothers in Fort Meyers and news anchors on CNN all conclusively endorsed the Floofkin theory. As a result, turd-polishing plummeted, even in New Jersey. That’s a perfect example of the “Sometimes Ideas Spread Fast Effect.”

But the story doesn’t end there. As always, market research statistics have some really fascinating insights into how the world works–ones that just might overturn the Floofkin theory. The advertising industry has long disputed the Floofkin theory and has thrown a lot of money at the social science departments of major research universities to disprove it. Researchers at Yale have recently found that if you put a turd in a box and polish the box, 57 percent of consumers will consider the turd itself to be polished.

Which leads me to my latest thesis: You really can polish a turd. Except that you can’t. But sometimes you can if you put that turd in a box, polish the box and find some people who will believe that the polished box with a turd in it is, in fact, a polished turd.

On a Manhunt with Joe Arpaio

I had just put on my pajamas and taken off my face when the Sheriff battered down my door. “Lace up your boots. We have to hunt a man.”

“But I just took my face off,” I cried.

“Well, slap ‘er back on. It’s man-huntin’ time.”

This was to be my third manhunt since the Sheriff moved in across the hall last week. And as much as I had grown to appreciate a good manhunt, I really just felt like getting cozy with a chalice of scotch and some old episodes of “Murder, She Wrote.”

But I couldn’t tell the Sheriff that. I needed to buoy his spirits with a good manhunt. Some recent jurisdiction problems at work had made him melancholic. He also hated “Murder, She Wrote.” Jessica Fletcher’s crime-solving philosophy was anathema to him, and whenever he caught the muffled sounds of the show’s catchy piano and strings theme music coming from under my covers, he’d batter down the door in a rage, screaming about illegal immigrants. “The Mexicans did it! Not the jealous real estate agent! Those dirty illegal immigrants did it!”

I tried to explain to the Sheriff that this was impossible because there weren’t Mexicans, let alone illegal ones, in Cabot Cove, Maine, where Mrs. Fletcher did her sleuthing. But the Sheriff was beyond persuasion, busy bloodying my rug with his raw knuckles. “When will that old crone get it? We gotta build a giant wall to stop this murder spree in Maine!” he shouted, heaving his battering ram through my walls.

I don’t mind the Sheriff’s company, but I do wish he would leave his battering ram next door. If only because Lardbottom, my domestic partner, suffers from hypertension, and every time the Sheriff pays a visit, the flying door and drywall splinters spike his heart rate. Fearing for Lardbottom’s tranquility, I resigned myself to the manhunt. I put my face back on, made some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and created a mix tape to put us in the right mood for hunting men. We drove into the Arizona night with hunger in our hearts and Hall and Oates on our stereo.

As the Sheriff had taught me, the secret to a good manhunt is surprise. Just as we had swooped from the rafters on an unsuspecting John Tesh mid-concert on our first manhunt, and waited for three hours in the sweltering backseat of Charles Barkley’s car during a promotional event at Footlocker on our last manhunt, we would disguise ourselves as American Idol contestants and pounce on an unwitting Ryan Seacrest on this manhunt. It was thanks to this kind of cunning that the Sheriff had hunted down dozens of famous men (and women on his womanhunts) and amassed his impressive collection of celebrity photos and autographs–or, as he called them, his scalps.

As usual, in route to our manhunt, the Sheriff pulled over anyone he reckoned was an illegal immigrant and threw them in the back of the truck. Some might call this reckless racial profiling. But, I assure you, the Sheriff employed the latest techniques in physiognomical and phrenological science. The occipital calipers he wielded so deftly had once adorned the desks of such legendary men of science as Count Gobineau and Josef Mengele. Of course, the calipers only confirmed what his nose already told him. According to the Sheriff, illegal residence in the United States had a specific smell. He said it was redolent of sorghum molasses, smoked birch wood and traces of artificial cherry.

We cruised through town, tracking the sweet scent of illegality. This particular night, illegal immigration must have been rampant, as the Sheriff found the smell on nearly everyone we passed. We filled truckload after truckload of illegal aliens, dressed them in pink lingerie and herded them off to jail. Meanwhile, Ryan Seacrest was wrapping up at the convention center. Our manhunt was slipping through the cracks.

I pulled out a sandwich and offered it to the Sheriff, hoping to calm his nerves. But he declined, unwrapping one of his own.

“What kind of sandwich is that?” I asked.

“Sorghum molasses and cherry jelly on smoked birch wood.”

Unfortunately, food seemed to aggravate the Sheriff only more. Seacrest was long gone and the Sheriff was returning from his manhunt without a scalp. In his impotent fury, he turned to immigration. He said the smell of it was everywhere, even right here in this car. On the way home, I caught him measuring my skull with his calipers.

By the time we got to the apartment, the Sheriff was beside himself. He had turned his suspicion on himself and was measuring his own skull. Then his gaze fell on Lardbottom, my domestic partner.

“What kind of cat is that?” he asked me, his eyes slowly coming aflame.

“…Mexican hairless,” I whispered. A tear rolled down my cheek.

The Club Man's Gambit

Beauty is the beginning of terror.

That’s what my Uncle Randy used to say. It always stood out among his other sayings, like, “Quick, ‘fore the government catches you,” a holdover from his bootlegging days, and “Dammit, Gladys, you’re one mean old cow,” a phrase of conjugal endearment. Only later did I find out he had learned it in a book of words by a deadbeat German with a sissy name: Rainy Mary Some-in-er-nother.

If only Uncle Randy had been there to offer those wise words last Monday. Then I would have known that the beautiful gift in my mailbox was not to be trusted. Instead, when I saw that card emblazoned with my name, I shrieked with joy, “I’ve been admitted to the club!” Thanks to my remarkable display of character, wealth and sartorial taste, I had become a card-carrying member of the West Coast’s most prestigious organization: Safeway.

I don’t even remember how I got to the store, I was so ecstatic. I vaguely remember driving, but I am certain I do not own a car, especially one with a baby in the back.

The doors to Safeway opened before me, no doubt sensing the club-member pheromones I was emitting. Inside, the fruit looked riper, the Cheez-Its cheezier, even the pock-marked baker had a charming Gallic air about him. Every Muzak tune on the loudspeaker was my favorite song.

As I danced my way through the aisles, it became clear there were two kinds of people in this world: club members and non-members. You could smell a non-member from the other end of the store. They slouched, were usually deformed, had a mucous-like film covering their hands and were improbably flatulent. The more respectful ones bowed and groveled when a member passed by. The others just growled and stared at their betters with desperate eyes.

At least these clubless hordes were forced to pay a higher price for the foodstuffs they clawed off the shelves. But, really, I began to wonder whether having to suffer their presence were a violation of my member privileges. What right did they have to nourish themselves on my groceries in my club?!

These questions sent me marching in indignation to the meat department. I couldn’t let the riffraff feast on the precious flesh of animals, particularly not the meat that had been collected caringly from the feces-ridden floor and put mindfully through a rusty grinder for me and other club members to enjoy at 88 cents a pound. I grabbed all the ground beef I could fit in my cart and made for checkout.

I’ll spare you an account of the emotion I felt when they swiped my club card. Let’s just say the $6.57 I saved on groceries was only half as valuable as my sense of belonging.

Back at home, I slipped into my Members Only tracksuit, put on some thumpin’ club music and whipped up some club sandwiches, along with 16 pounds of rare hamburger meat and a sleeve of club crackers.

An hour later, the trouble started. I felt a rumbling in my gut, followed by swelling in my ears. I tried to cure it with club soda and lime, stirred with my Safeway club card. Then I blew a gasket.

The E. coli sent my sphincter and all 16 pounds of rancid hamburger through the back of my track suit. The bacteria attacked my softening brain, sending me to seizure country.

I came to in the hospital parking lot, paralyzed from the teeth down. The hospital had refused to treat me because, apparently, I didn’t have what they referred to as “health insurance.” They must not have seen my club card, which, at the time, was in my mouth to prevent me from swallowing my tongue.

Now, drooling on my benumbed body crumpled on the asphalt, I felt like a non-member.

Suddenly, a mustachioed man wearing a skull cap, stropping belt and a straight razor appeared from behind the hazardous waste bin, hoisted me up from my wretchedness, and brought me to a door marked by a moving candy cane pole.

Inside was a bustling scene of combs and cauterized flesh, the floors wet with blood and barbicide.

“Where am I?” I asked.

“Welcome, poor man, to the barber-surgeon local No. 37,” said my barber savior. “We are an ancient guild. Once the beacons of modern medicine, we were forced underground by doctors. Now we ply our trade in secret, treating those infirm or in need of a trim. We are the shadow public option, healthcare for the clubless.”

Just as I was about to protest and show him my club card, he kicked my inert body into a spinning chair and lathered up my sideburns.

“Don’t you worry, young fellah. Let me give you a good bloodletting whilst you browse the nudie magazines.”

And there, as the lifeblood drained out of me while I stared into the swirling centers of two areolae, I again felt like a club man.

My Red Book

Curse you, Carl Jung! Just when the world was ready to forget about you, you unveil your sordid little Red Book.

For nigh on half a century, deep in the gold brick-lined vaults of Zurich, lay the tales of your vaunted vision quest. Meanwhile, your modern acolytes were busy alchemizing your high-falutin Nazi-sympathizing Swiss sorcery into one big, mealy-mouthed, touchy-feely, rainbow massage crystal to cure the world of its cosmic pain. Your legacy seemed right on track for an ignominious whimper of an end.

Then, all of a sudden, the New York Times announces the long-awaited publication of the “holy grail of the unconscious,” a tale of a psychiatrist’s struggle with psychosis, a modern man of science conversing with ancient demons and a personal discovery that would transform our understanding of the human mind. Now the salivating Jungians are dusting off their Ouija boards and polishing their monoliths, priming for personal revelation and an orgy of “Aha!” moments.

Well, I’ve got news for you, C.J. (I know your spirit is present. I can smell its foul pipe tobacco). You are not the only one with a secret diary detailing the mysteries of the unconscious. I, too, have cut new swaths of wisdom into the tangled jungle of the psyche. Everyone already knows about your break with Freud on the eve of World War I and the personal crisis it precipitated. Boring! But how many people have yet to read about my break with Dr. Leaky McNuds in those ominous summer months of 1997 and the voyage of self-discovery that ensued?

I had been a devoted disciple of McNuds for five years, enjoying the role of confidante and heir apparent in his elite circle of rogue urologists. He called me his “golden shower child”–potty jokes being a staple of the urology community. Naturally, I was flattered and my affection for my mentor was sincere. I saw McNuds as a sort of Old Testament prophet of the penis, thoroughly free from illusion or propriety, and committed to probing the depths of our field from sac to tip.

The tension between us began with a conversation one evening in McNuds’ study. We were discussing the significance of maladies arising from overzealous shaking when at the public urinal. McNuds was convinced that the act betrayed a repressed sexual wish. When I suggested that there might be a less sexual and more sincerely spiritual meaning to the gesture, perhaps akin to the waving of a sorcerer’s wand to purge the soul of evil spirits, McNuds stared at me, aghast. I knew then that if I were to pursue my own urological convictions, it would cost me my friendship with McNuds. And it did.

The last I saw of McNuds was at an uro-analysis convention in Indianapolis, a sausage fest, as it is called in the parlance of our discipline. I delivered a paper on Ancient Egyptian twisticles, wherein I remarked that Amenhotep IV’s scrotal contusion resembled the wracked state of contemporary McNudsian urology. McNuds fainted and, in a fit of guilt, I leapt from the podium to catch him. After depositing my fallen idol on the couch, I hobbled away, having just suffered a mild scrotal contusion myself, never to see him again.

Needless to say, I was drummed out of uro-analysis. Left virtually without a pot to have someone piss in, my livelihood collapsed. And it was then, in those sweltering summer days of 1997, during the great fen-phen epidemic, the fall of the Woolworth’s empire, the secessionist parliament of Scotland and finally-- the spark that set off the powder keg-- the death of Princess Diana, that I lost my mind. The ground beneath me seemed to open up and swallow me. I became trapped in the labyrinthine trenches of my own besieged brain, bombarded by poisonous shrapnel-filled thoughts.

There I was playing cards with a diffident proto-urethra and an ancient testicle from Carthage, worrying over my lost sanity and my pair of fives, when the hoary Carthaginian leaned over and whispered in my ear, “I am a nut, but you, my son, are perfectly sane. Go, engrave these trials on rune stones in a Gothic hand and illuminate them with instructive anatomical mandalas.”

I realized the only way I could maintain my sanity was by recording my phantasies, converting the crazed ravings of a castrated urologist into an epic poem about the male organ’s journey through all seven dimensions of spirit with his medieval guide Phallus Mundus. Phallus Mundus led me to these depths within my self, where I struck upon my revolutionary theories of the collective bladder of mankind and the Ur-pubis.

And as soon as these rune stones are hauled up from my grandmother’s basement in Joplin, Mo., where they have been kept safe all these years, I am confident they will be a penetrating stream of insight into the stagnant waters of urology.

This piece can also be read at http://www.stanforddaily.com/cgi-bin/?p=1033602

How it is Written

My first piece as a weekly columnist for the Stanford Daily ( you can also read it on the Daily's website: http://www.stanforddaily.com/cgi-bin/?p=1033130 ).

My summer bath had just gone from tepid to fart-warm, when I heard a rustling at the door.

I assumed it was the village hoodlums, no doubt angling for a peek at my unrobed flesh beneath the crack. “Fie, horse thieves!” I shouted, sheltering my nether regions behind my well-worn copy of Eat, Pray, Love. “Away with your wretched tom-peepery!”

To my chagrin, it was the mailman. Said he had an important delivery for me, marked urgent from the Oval Office. It read:

“Get out of that sordid tub and do something for your country! War is still raging, health care still failing, and there you are shriveled as a washerwoman, searching for enlightenment, aroma therapy, and a fab recipe for pesto. Your nation needs you. Take up that pen and write on a weekly basis, until your stomach bleeds! Sincerely, Barack Obama, the President.”

Right away, I had a sneaking suspicion that the letter was not actually from Barack Obama, but my grandpa. He’s always talking about doing things until your stomach bleeds. Seemed like a dead give-away. Only after I stuffed the letter down the drain did it occur to me that my grandpa was no longer living. An ulcer took him from us five years ago. Which meant the letter really was from the president!

In a panic I fished it out, but all the ink had been washed away. All that remained was a sequence of letters that formed the nonsensical words “Stanford Daily.” I took this as an auspicious sign, searched the internet for direction, and was guided to the very publication you now hold in your hands. I swore on the American flag and the pickled remains of my grandfather’s anomalous organ that I would write for this “Stanford Daily”— until the blood gushed from my innards.

At the time I was mystified by this strange series of events. Only later did I piece it all together. There is a chance that one Zed Shwarma, alleged student and editor of the “Stanford Daily,” wrote the note on the back of a sheet of Stanford Daily stationary as a sick joke, hoping to swindle me into submitting a weekly column to his newspaper. But the more likely scenario is that my grandfather’s ghost blackmailed President Barack Obama into writing the letter, and Obama, to avoid rumors that he was being haunted by my grandpa, set Shwarma up as the patsy.

Either way, I’ve been roped into this writing business—if you can call it that. I always thought writers were scandalously rich and famous, dated movie stars, and drew tens of thousands of adoring bare-chested fans to watch them kick a ball around a field for ninety minutes in matching shorts and socks. It turns out none of this is true. Well, at least as a writer you get to eat donuts all day, ride around in a car with loud sirens, and shoot bad guys, right? Nope. The lies we teach our children….

So, what is it really like practicing the world’s oldest profession? Well, for starters, you have to wake up at five in the morning because that’s when the creditors in Delaware start calling. This is not so bad, since I can use the steady rhythm of the phone rings to structure my work day. For example, rings 1-100, scream into pillow. Rings 100-200, eat breakfast. Rings 200-1000, prepare to write. Rings 1000- 1500, cry into pillow. And at ring 1500, I dry my eyes and wet my throat with gin.

And that’s when the real writing starts. I often do my best writing completely unconscious. Sure, sometimes I wake up in a black linen sack full of tarantulas in a cemetery outside Juarez. Occasionally I receive mail from the Navy demanding recompense for a battleship I have no recollection of sinking. And there is the infrequent coming-to in the white light of the airport detention cell after having removed my pants mid flight. But every time, I emerge with a column of limpid prose written in gravy stains on my undershirt. If only my cleaning lady would stop washing my undershirts, I’d have some truly great writing to offer you.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep spending hours staring into the abyss of my soul reflected in the computer screen, listening to my wife nag me about how she doesn’t like to be called my cleaning lady, and wondering what in the world this job has to do with getting paid to have sex with strangers. I’ll add word after excruciating word, and pray to a hybrid deity of President Obama and my deceased grandpa that it see fit sooner rather than later to fill my stomach with blood.

Until then, I hope you enjoy this column!