Now he’s hanging the shirts up from the don’t walk sign outside the L stop, steeled for ad hominem criticism, ex-girlfriend attacks or people who would tell his mom that, despite years of pretension, her son is out on the street slanging T-shirts. And his mom would whoop his ass if she heard that shit.

People got off the train, looked at the shirt and asked “How much?” Like many artists I misunderestimate my massive talent and sold that second pressing of “Defend Brooklyn” for just ten dollars. Cheap.

Business was slow the first night. I made just enough money to buy a giant bottle which I shared with my roommates to help them forget the monolith of T-shirt boxes I’d parked in our loft. I tried to have a good time, but no matter how fast I drink my money away, I couldn’t shake this nagging feeling that I’m an impulsive drunk with terrible business sense.

The next day came up clear and sunny. Perfect T-shirt weather, but I was afraid to attend my own opening. It’s brutal for a sensitive artist type like myself to confront his critics at the purchase point with no agent, gallery or even a frame to hide behind. There’s a lot more honest dialectic on the street. When they shout “Defend Brooklyn from what?” you answer “What you got?” If they try to get “Brooklyner than thou” you tell them “fugeddaboutit.” If they talk about “Why does there have to be a gun?” you let them know that you’re armed and they can take that line of jive on home.

It was nothing less than fear of abject impecunity that forced me to shake off the stage fright, pick the melted Twix bar out of my hair, untangle myself from the lime green bra and drag that box of shirts to the corner and sell those motherfuckers to some insane people.

From my corner vantage that sunny Brooklyn day, Williamsburg was a small town idyll where we’d found each other. I saw a lot of talent riding around on bicycles on a Sunday free of zealots, control freaks or speed traps.

Now those without sin might try to denigrate my contemporaries by calling them “hipsters” to which I reply “it takes one to know one.” If I have to be hipster then I take the word back, like when Lord Buckley was one of us or when all the “colored people” turned black.

I sold a shirt, then another. Then ten in a row. The price went up to 20 dollars. I still sold a couple dozen more by the end of the day. Those shirts sold like hot fire. Wildcakes. All that. It was as if the neighborhood saw “Defend Brooklyn” the first night, slept on it and come back the next day, ready to buy. What dream did they dream that night that made it okay for liberal types to wear a gun on their chest? What Jungian archetype was agreed upon from behind the wall of sleep?

I suspect it was one of the old dreams about how that nowhere called utopia was now here, even if it were for only a little longer.

By the end of the weekend I’d accrued enough money to move out of my windowless room at the kibbutz. I can’t explain the satisfaction of graduating from a mewling artist with no money to a character from a Reagan speech, bootstrapping my way to financial freedom by standing on the street corner peddling dub sacks of apples or whatever.

Then I hired a beautiful girl to sell the shirts and she clocked between four hundred and eight hundred dollars sunny weekends. She was an Arab whose fierce eyes evoked caravans of opium rebels, resisting armies of infidels with only their Kalashnikovs. It was the summer before 9/11 and freakonomics was different then.

Soon enough I was a certified T-shirt genius, which happened to be coolest thing to be that year, right after the grafitti artist/drug addict or bike thief. I was so cool that some fashion magazine called Vice let me write articles which were then changed completely and printed under someone else’s name, but I didn’t care. It was such an honor to be invited to the Viacom frat party. I made buddies with a bunch of really neat guys who are still my great friends to this very day. They helped me advertise “Defend Brooklyn” on Tap Dancing Outlaw Jessco White and his lovely mama in their photo issue.

Suddenly, I had enough money to return to the real work of overthrowing the government and get back at those goddamn Jump Off Rock cops.

Apparently, the rest of the country was with me on this. There was a palpable anger at the government. It was right when greedheads were having a hard time meeting anywhere without thousands and thousands of radicals fighting back and defending Brooklyn all over the world, wherever it was. I know we can’t remember this because those precious Twin Towers burned and fell. Patriotically, we have forgotten those issues which are important enough to throw rocks at cops and burn down banks.

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DON’T YOU DARE MISS THE NEXT DEFENSE INDUSTRY REPORT: “ADVICE FROM ELECTRIC LARRYLAND ABOUT NINELEVEN AND FASHION CUNTS”

People told me I could make a lot of money selling the “Defend Brooklyn” shirts I’d been giving away, but I couldn’t waste my time because I’m so smart at writing. My first major effort as a writist was the beautiful tale of a Satanic mountain climber who eats his partners in order to climb the world’s holy mountains and desecrate the summits with evil demon penis figurines.

I went to Hollywood and, by Beelzebub, I’d have Babylon Working now but for a misunderstood ritual performed in a certain talent agency after a couple or three bloody leroys. I was just being me. I’m not one of these salon satanists. They got all “you’ll never work in this town again” about it. Who knew that Hollywood Agents are a bunch of humorless assholes?

Regardless of what The Suits thought, Swedes love dark satanic things and so I was able to land a job in Stockholm converting proven Swedish movies into American scripts hoping to get funding from Hollywood shitheads.

This convolution became contentious when, in a Swedish script, the cops had to wait for the taxi-driving murderer to do something wrong before he was placed in ergonomic handcuffs and escorted to a nice room with cable television, whereas in the American version the police would detain anybody they felt like and jam broom handles in weird places for being an immigrant or because it was Thursday.

The Swedes acted like I was exaggerating the freedom the police felt to commit barbarous acts in America. They knew from television shows and Dirty Harry that American cops were greatly hamstrung by the likes of the ACLU. I countered that in my experience there were cops in American schools and roadblocks in the roads.

I tried to explain that The War on Drugs meant that American cops get to do whatever they wanted and you had to figure out what you could do about it. The Swedes argued that if this was so there would be a huge outcry, people would march on Washington burning flag shirts. I pointed out that intelligent radicals were disappearing faster than pay phones. Today’s Abbie Hoffmans have been medicated since elementary school, their fervor redirected into obsessing over the construction of Burning Man E-tard vans.

Unconvinced, the Swedes asked their English buddies if my claim of a culture of police corruption was true. The English said the coppers weren’t that aggressive in England, as if that had any bearing on a discussion of the behavior of American Pigs. I countered that the lads of Albion are raised to pass soccer balls while little no-neck bastards tackle each other for footballs in the New World. Consequentially American lawmen tend to rush through doors in a scrum of body armor while the Blue Bottles will wait for an offsides to kip filthy rotters into the gaol.

The Swedes accused me of wrongheaded jingoism and, further, suggested that I’d concocted a “tougher than thou” stance most likely cribbed from rap music. This misunderstanding sent me back across the puddle.

A friend and I tried to drown the sorrow of unemployment on a little West Texas vacation, but were involved in another massive imbroglio with small town Southern cops on the way to the bar. I mean, you know this country is fucked when a white and black man can’t go 96 miles an hour to make last call without the local cops calling in the hounds.

The overzealous flunkies had gone so far as to deputize a damn dog to make it okay to go through your car and person. “Officer Fido has indicated that you may or may not have contraband in your vehicle.” This was a new low. We didn’t have any contraband, or if we did it was in a half-eaten cheeseburger, a place a cop would never look because he knows the dog is stupid and the whole thing is a vulgar dumbshow designed to make you give up one of your most basic rights.

We drove away from the fruitless search plotting ways to bring up the fact to overzealous cops that a major tenet of being an American is violated constantly. I’m thinking that maybe I should get the Fourth Amendment tattooed on my face, “It’s right here, officer, I know you can see it.”

I meet a man in San Antonio who made T-shirts which read “THC” configured to the “STP” logo, or “Weedies” instead of “Wheaties,” the kind of pablum found in a college bong stores. He’d made a decent enough living off this bullshit to have a pool. So I told the him about my “Defend Brooklyn” T shirts and how they would be like a Trojan horse to get people to wear their Fourth Amendment.

The T-shirt man reminded me that that ideas are a dime a dozen, every damn body in America has a T-shirt idea, and 99 percent of them suck.

“The public is a wily beast,” he said. “To know her is to bottle lightning.”

I insisted that these Defend Brooklyn shirts were in high demand already. I’d made twenty and already they were in magazines.

The guy was like “okay, put your money where your mouth is. ”

I knew it was a genius idea because I have enough humility in me to bring down an army. I wanted to ape the resolve of the Weathermen and Baader Meinhoff. I wanted to suggest a militia into existence. I wanted a pool.

I was so full of revolutionary spirit that I faxed in a letter to transfer the money over right then and there. How many shirts was in an order I had no idea. The fact I had never sold t shirts before never bothered my mind either because I was drunk as shit.

I went back to Brooklyn and tried to figure out where my money went, forgetting about the whole buying a couple hundred T-shirts thing until a UPS guy planted 23 boxes in the doorway of the Israeli kibbutz/loft where I had just rented a windowless room.

The stack of boxes was in the doorway. My new roommates were understandably freaked out as they were busy working on a political fishing documentary about boundaries.


I told them to relax, and having no other choice or plan, packed a box up with various sizes of these T shirts and hung them from the “Don’t Walk” sign outside the L stop in Brooklyn.

Then I sat on the paper box and tried to look casual as I waited for the train to let out.

COMING NEXT: GIVE A BUM A GUN AND HE CAN TAKE IT FROM THERE..

Revolutions are born in cities because it’s hard to be revolutionary when you’re thankful to make it home after too much beer and zeitgeist. The real freedom of Brooklyn was the freedom from the pig’s eye and his harsh blinking lights, crappy polyester uniform and horrible reform school shoes. Brooklyn cops didn’t pull over a responsible citizen asking “Where’s the fire”, “How did my sister end up in your car?” and “Why is she wearing only a tubetop?” because they didn’t have time and I didn’t need a car.

I turned into a man of many bicycles as rubber on the wheel is faster than rubber on the heel. Cycling in New York is more lethal than riding a motorcycle in Los Angeles. It’s roughly the same drunk/medicated population and chossy roads but New York has the added hazard of the Taliban cavalry driving yellow people squashers.

At the end of a Manhattan night I’d have to get on my bike, navigate traffic and cross the muggerland of the old Williamsburg bridge, drunk and hopelessly clipped into my pedals. It was dangerous but I was healthier than my Lower East Side peers who only had to stumble a couple of blocks home to nurse their habits into junkiedom.

In 1995, going back to Brooklyn meant you’d had been voted off the island. Bowery Boys and Loisidas loved to shame me about how they never been to Brooklyn and where was Brooklyn anyway?

Damn right I defended it. I’d been kicked out of college and run from the Bible Belt. Disney and Giullianification priced me out of Manhattan. I had to make a stand before I got pushed into the sea. Brooklyn was the Masada of me.

When I say “Brooklyn,” I mean before the raw food dipshits got there and it was all rice and beans or pierogis. Before the graffiti got all cute. Before the neighborhood was defined by the cookie cutter do’s and don’ts of Viacom.

I’m talking about Brooklyn when you could get a Heineken and bolsita right over the counter at Kokie’s. The kind of place you might shoot a king rat with a twenty guage shotgun in your apartment on Lorimer Street and your Chinese landlord never said a word because he was scared of getting deported. That place where Haitian families felt comfortable enough to burn a mattress and cook a goat on the sidewalk. A time so poorly lit that Monk could fall down the steps at Rug o Lad and then spit bloody teeth at the bartender so we could nab the Absinthe. The Brooklyn where you pour beer on the floor of the Greenpoint Tavern in order to twist with Horsey and Carlos on Christmas Eve.

That place is gone a long time now, banished to East New York or squelched behind facades of baby clothing shops. I’ve been going through the black box, trying to parse the day, the hour, the moment that Brooklyn turned into a mall. 
I remember a big bus pulled up. It said RISD on the side, which must be some kind of fashion academy because everybody that got off it had a bedhead and a pair of hundred dollar jeans slouched half off their ass.

They came in, ordered slices and checked their hair in the bulletproof plexiglas. There was a local kid named Mando in the pizza parlor, famous to us for a trick of breaking into David Henry Brown Jr’s apartment late at night to sell him drugs. Mando eyeballed the RISD kids, turned to me and my boy and shook his head solemnly.

“Remember? This neighborhood used to be hard.”

Mando was blaming the pioneer hipsters for how fashionistas thought it was safe to primp in Brooklyn. Mando intuited that the presence of these nabobs meant that the neighborhood had forgotten to keep up an illusion of danger. The ability for them to exist here indicated that the corruption was now systemic, as gentrification exponentializes so quickly. He was suggesting that it was our presence that brought this plague upon us.

Soon it became obvious that Mando was right. Every day overwhelming number of non-weirdos and normal job-having motherfuckers came in on the trains and paid exorbitant rents on time to live in our charming bohemian cesspool.

It’s the same every time: alpha hipsters and indie bands make coffeehouses which are patronized by fashionstas until the gays and college reality shows find out where they are and then suddenly all the buildings have doormen. The neighborhood keeps getting nicer until one day the local crackhead doesn’t come around to pimp Nazi uniforms, alligator heads or any other treasure reclaimed from the garbage. The Koolman is run off by hipster taco trucks. The cops write tickets for drinking beer on the street.

I wanted Mando to be wrong so badly that I went to the printer that day and had them make twenty t-shirts that read “Defend Brooklyn” with an AK-47 emblazoned on it. I didn’t try to sell them yet. Back then I didn’t want to be a t-shirt merchant. I just gave them out to like-minded people hoping to spark a war, like Red Dawn II if it was written by Genet featuring a cadre of wastrels vicious enough to break windows, burn down coffee klatches and scatter syringes around the neighborhood so we could still afford to live there.

Understand that I’m describing pre-9/11 thoughts and actions. Since then we’ve all made money, lost money and seen things that make the language and stance of “Defend Brooklyn” moot. Twilight Zone things like people that know they can’t fly jumping out of buildings and the BQE empty at rush hour.

NEXT: Just Wars Are Just Wars, Man.

That’s right. I have become a thousandaire by harvesting the pocket litter of jingoistic hooligans and those who pay to dress like them. The quick wisdom of the “Defend Brooklyn” slogan has eclipsed everything else I’ve done in my life. Women have loved me, left me and tried to kill me with weapons purchased from the filthy profits of this T shirt. It introduced me to famous people and conned that bunch of Hollywood hacks calling themselves “writers” to let me into their guild.

But why is this? What does it mean? What the fuck? Defend Brooklyn thrives in ambiguity like middle east politics or the lyrics of Powderfinger .

First off: I am not really from Brooklyn. Brooklyn became home for me after a series of nasty run-ins with North Carolina authorities, culminating in an assault on a police officer. (Be careful about assaulting a police officer, as you will end up like Danny Chavez of the seminal Negroclash band “Apollo Heights” or or worse.)

I was acquitted of assaulting said police officer not because of my rights or anything but because I was not wearing a seatbelt at the time of my harassment. Still, small town cops watch out for their own, so they sharked ever closer in my rearview mirror, trying to force the swerve. Eventually I called a friend of mine who’d been kicked out of college the same week as me for some advice. He told me to come up to his spot in New York City where the cops don’t give a damn about anything.

I was such a hick when I got off the plane. I had never eaten sushi, falafel balls or lox bagels before. I thought Alphabet City was so named because the bums walked around chanting “A” “D” “C”, only to learn that these are the initials of drugs (acid, heroin, cocaine respectively) they peddled. And they were junkies, not bums. Things like junkies were news to me.

My boy’s “spot” was a squat sponsored by a Cooper Union painter. We were allowed to crash in his studio at night along with a guy named Doug, who seemed normal until he lost his life paying Russian Roulette. We took herbal ephedrine to help us relax while playing chess and waiting for photo assistant gigs.

I was able to enjoy my birthright of a full flowering southern degeneracy by drinking beer day and night anywhere I wanted: forties on the stoop, tallboys on the train, a wee nip in the hall to help soften the floor for a good night’s sleep. Dinkins was in office and the Lower East Side was an open air drug market. I couldn’t get arrested in that town. Nobody cared about a white boy with all his teeth.

My friend played saxophone with downtown jazzbos Cecil Taylor and Butch Morris. We smoked weed with Zorn, who clowned my choice of clubwear. It was made clear to me that I had to get hip quick or get shipped back to the sticks. They were famous downtown horn tooters and piano beaters but who was I and what did I think I was doing stomping around New York City in hiking boots?

To rank as a New Yorker one had to do something. But what? I didn’t think to just steal somebody else’s idea, paste it on a shirt and sell it as my own, which would have made me an equal with my contemporaries in the t-shirt propaganda game, without having to go through all the messy work of actually being creative.

As I pondered this situation providence intervened. An undercover cop disguised as a barefoot rasta busted a friend of mine for drinking beer on the stoop. It was Giulliani time. Overnight, our idyllic crowded Lower East Side squat zone became an expensive, cop-infested hell. I cried, tore hair and lost all hope, until a real rasta told us shit like that never goes down in Brooklyn because those cops out there are busy.

So, we scouted across a dangerous mix of rusty metal plates cattywamped between patches of thick blacktop and muggers called the Williamsburg Bridge .  

The caged walkway ended in dark, pocked leavings from the great insurance fires of the seventies. It was 1994 and the area near the bridge was empty, except for an old Amish mobster singing weird songs though a big tube on top of the Jew church.

As we headed north the streets were rimmed with fresh-off-the-jet types, drinking beer on the stoop, radios turned up to eleven. Back then it was correct to consider Williamsburg a tough neighborhood in San Juan. Every day was Puerto Rico Day, and then at nighttime too.

When cumbia and car alarms mixed together on Bedford it was disorienting as a casino. It was the summer lazer pointers came out, so we had to advance up the Avenue fighting the urge to flinch at the red dots dancing on our shirts, comforted by the belief that maybe there wasn’t a gun at the other end of the beam.

The locals sized us up. We were too weird to be cops, too fat to be junkies. What did we want? I told them, “I want to be in America. Okay by me in America. Everything free in America.” We had the dance-off, and I won. (footage lost) So, according to their custom, they had to treat us as equals and rented us some rooms above a Bodega for six hundred dollars.

After this, an initial force of somewhere between six and ten white black and french types occupied that room, spoke English and dug in. More Alpha Hipsters came across the bridge every day, run from their hometowns like common lepers or Mormons, unafraid, broke and weird. The world had cornered us in Brooklyn, between the recycling plant and where lead paint sandblasted off the bridge fell to the ground.

next: The Glory Days of Gentrification.

In 1996 I printed this design on T-shirts and handed them out to friends, musicians and bartenders to curry favor:

There are many like it, but this is the real one.

Positive feedback from my target market helped me realize that I had minted a blue chip slogan.

Since that day, my minions and I have distributed a veritable shit ton of these Defend Whosiwhatsit shirts allowing me to enjoy the riches and fame of a rich and famous man, without the benefit of proper health care or competent legal counsel that he gets.

Every week a random amount of money appears in my Paypal account. This windfall has allowed me the modicum of financial irresponsibility necessary to scribble drivel at this competitive level.

You may have not seen Defend Brooklyn before. It’s okay. I’m not claiming that it’s a famous design or anything, or that it’s everywhere.

Or maybe you hate the design. All I can suggest is that if you have seen “Defend Brooklyn” enough to hate it, then you are one too. Stop hating yourself or you will turn into a “Hipstler“.

Defend Brooklyn is not a saturation thing like “I Heart New York.” It’s more a “now you see me now you don’t, some will see me others won’t” piece.

I’m not claiming to rank as one the captains of the T-shirt age, nor have I masterminded a contagion of meme on the scale of the Grateful Dead, Che or even Obama. I’m not in the old guard of the T-shirt industry such as Rolling Stone lips, “Frankie Say Relax” or “CBGB.” I’m aware that I’m somewhere below the “I’m With Stupid” progenitor in harvesting disposable income. I know that I will never have “Shut Up and Fish’s” money because my graphic is too challenging for mass consumption.

That said, if you print the word “Defend” in an arc over the image or the shadow of a gun and the name of a town on a T-shirt, you’re guaranteed a return better than American real estate or drug money. It’s so easy and fun that the danger of this article is that you might try to steal the concept, damning yourself to being a biter.

Basically, I have found the wellspring of profitable jingoism. Me and the people who steal my ideas are some of the few reliable money makers left in America. We are a veritable Defense Industry.

Why is this slogan so popular? I can only posit that it uses the same force which enables soccer hooligans, Reaganites, Bruce Springsteen and Hitlers.

Or maybe it harkens back to the wily and armed “don’t tread on me”-populace, rather than one so is easily duped by a bunch of Ivy League clowns who take power through double talk and Diebold deals.

Either way, I think Defend Brooklyn suggests some dark thing about human nature and the slogans we use to advance our agendas.

I thought Defend Brooklyn was a mere opus minimum, an ante in a game bigger than T-shirts, only to find that there is no bigger game. If one were to analyze all the relevant data we would find that Earth is primarily a T-shirt producing planet.

Please take this time to re-approach this meme with me as it has allowed me to observe certain things about the damn kids today that might be useful to those who would manipulate the whimsies of the thinking population into a functioning mandate, or take their money, or both.

Next Installment: The real story of how Defend Brooklyn came to be in “THE DEFENSE INDUSTRY REPORT NUMBER 2!” WITH A SPECIAL OFFER OF A “CHOOSE YOUR REVOLUTION” HOW-TO KIT! WAKE UP YOUR FRIENDS! TELL YOUR MOM!

According to both articles neither the “opalescent horror movie sky” or the “big rolls of big smoking clouds” has ever been described in the entire course of whichever history you accept as definitive.

Does Thurston know about this?

The Mosquito is a new device that emits a piercing noise that will only hurt the ears of little kids, leaving the adult population safe to enjoy spending their money on flash-fried food in peace. The little buggers hate it, too. Watch the pretty, pretty little girls run when the mosquito does its work.

According to the press kit “The Mosquito™ Anti-Vandal System is the solution to the eternal problem of unwanted gatherings of youths and teenagers in shopping malls, around shops and anywhere else they are causing problems.”

Damn kids today.

“The presence of these teenagers discourages genuine shoppers and customers’ from coming into your shop, affecting your turnover and profits. Anti social behavior has become the biggest threat to private property over the last decade and there has been no effective deterrent until now.”

“Acclaimed by the Police forces of many areas of the United Kingdom, the Mosquito Anti-Vandal System has been described as “the most effective tool in our fight against anti social behaviour”. Shop keepers around the world have purchased the device to move along unwanted gatherings of teenagers and anti social youths.”

If this device existed in the 70’s we might have avoided the tragedy of “Over the Edge”

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And how do the little shits respond to the “Sonic Youth Weapon”? The sneaky brats made a ring tone out of it so their parents can’t hear the phone ring. Shouldn’t have raised their allowance.

Evidently there’s ring tone for every year of existence until death, after which you just hear horns.

I am pleased to report that, according to my ability to hear  ringtones, I can still take calls with the thirty year olds.

Unbelievably enough, the technology has advanced and now they  have a mosquito MK4 which can disperse any age group at will.

I know the last post about the greatest thing in the world, WFMU, was a little skimpy because I got greedy for those big bloggin’ buck$ (A man like me has NEEDS.) There are so many deeply personal things a radio station called WFMU does for me that I can’t tell you about.

For example, if I admit that Irene’s Trudell’s mellifluous voice has cured me of performing messy rituals to The Unnamable One—

—then my enemies might think I have gone soft in my old age. (Dear Enemies: I have gone soft. Come by my place for your hug while I’m getting my thirty eleventh wind by freaking out to the late night random geniuses BEASTIN THE AIRWAVES or THE FROW SHOW. Don’t bother knocking, it’s open.)

I can’t tell you about how Bob Brainen’s comforting little ditty at the beginning of his show reminds me to put tin foil over the windows before the sun shows its horrible teeth. With the free-form webcast, Mr. Brainen is allowed to spin psychedelic smutty blues with some maniac jabbering over it, which I’ve found to be comforting when taken with sixty milligrams of Adderal. It’s a good thing the scheduler at the station alternates the Yankee accent of Bob Brainen’s against the down home accent of Laura Cantrell from week to week, or else I wouldn’t know that time was passing at all.

she sounds like she looks

Helpful Hint: If you tape Laura’s picture to the speaker when her show is on it’s like she is there in the room with you. It works even better if you put a gingham dress on the speaker too, and some little cowboy boots at the bottom, but watch out! That damn woofer hole will shock the hell out of you if you stick the wrong thing in there.

Late Night Deejays like Stan or Marty Mc Sorely or HotRod do Deejaying like our grandfathers used to do, with none of the fur-lined fallout shelters, bubbles, or monkeys that the daytime Deejays get. I consider the Night Deejays to be custodians of my sweet sweet sanity, influencing my interstate crime sprees and my incredible career as a photographist.

Somebody put this picture on the WFMU blog.

I put this picture on the Arthur blog. Creepy, huh?

And when I went to the history part of the WFMU blog thing and realized WFMU listens to my prayers and not whatever God I was praying to before. Note: Blogging about blogs denigrates me to a third degree blog belt, but this I will do for WFMU. That’s how strong my love is.

For example, scroll down in the history part of the blog and listen to a ballad sung by my shero, Patty Hearst , recorded while in captivity (not really). LISTEN TO TANIA!

Another reason why WFMU is so good is that they have shows in which they are able to leave all the nasty, naughty, filthy words so you can hear beautiful fucking music the way it was supposed to be heard.

The morning deejays are allowed to play whatever they want even if it would offend those grannies at the FCC.

GMILF: The F is for Free

That’s right, Hot Rod has a web-only platform where one can finally hear the important works of the “Faggot Fairys” with all the naughty bits unbleeped. I find it is beneficial to vent this type of evil late at night after the children are tucked away safely in their cages.

For all the sanity that the Nighttime Deejays have provided me, the Early Morning Webcast deejay crews have made an equal mess of my mind. Culprits such as  ”John Allen” or  ”Brad Labonte” careen through genres and play Dolly Parton after Jesus and Mary Chain, and then some disco or Andy Milonakis singing “Twitter Dat” until I pour coffee in my cereal. Real funny, guys.

Whenever I find myself kidnapped by drug dealers I use the STEINSKI archives to gain the trust of my captors and gain my freedom. The Latin Tinge in particular makes Scarface types happy enough to call you “cabrone,” which is like a “friend” in their land.

Steinski’s origins in music as a way to sell weed is further proof that everyone in Hip Hop has always had “High Priorities,” har de har. Speaking of High Hop Billy Jam and $mall Change can take care of that ish for you out by the fire escape during the long songs. ( Um, why isn’t there an all curse word hip hop show on a web-only platform? I can’t to go da club to stay current with what the kids are using for argot these days and I’m feeling out of the loop).

I don’t have time to get into how Trouble has grown with me over the years and provided a woman’s touch in my Modern World when Laura Cantrell was being all “shocky”.

I would love to gas on about Evan Funk Davies and the sheer philanthropy of introducing so many types of weird into my life. Or how Transpacific Sound Paradise is a great way to learn geography without joining the armed forces. I should write something about a fellow Tarheel who keeps the sound safe with the Safe and sound with Trent show but I get distracted by Irwin and his damn genre-skipping tokenism.

FUCK MAGARITAVILLE I GET DOWN IN JONESTOWN

Glen Jones and X Ray Burns are the bloody mary breakfast before going to the church of Teenage Wasteland, where Bill Kelly reaches the beaches with the Real News of the Weird.

Nor can I forget the Media Squat with Douglas Rushkoff, no matter how much I drink. Rushkoff is a certified genius and writes for this magazine which you are reading now and he kills me in interwebs traffic. So, yeah, Rushkoff is the greatest, but it’s not a contest so just shut up about it.

I don’t know why I tried to do this blog as it can never be finished, my fingers hurt. There are too many awesome Deejays and they are all good. My words do WFMU no justice. Go and listen for yourself or else and then pay them their tithing when it comes time for the Marathon or I will summon HIM again

And the End of Days will be upon us for real this time.

Disclaimer: I don’t in general listen to people who talk on the radio because I can’t stand it when people interrupt me when I’m talking to myself. I’m sure all The Talk Show guys are great, but like Hamlet, “the world is too much with me,” and I prefer the sweet sound of the voices in my head telling me to tune into Downtown Soulville as that crazy guy works up a cold sweat playing soul forty-fives for an hour (23 or 24 to be exact), and I dare you to find something wrong with that.

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In an era when everyone pretends that the mobius strip of endless ipod jams are satisfying I choose to stay freshly amused with a battery of living deejays who never leave the station in East Orange, and even if they did leave they’ve archived every show since forever and there’s no commercials.

I was first taken in by WFMU in the 95th year of last century when some deejay played the entire radio conversation between a train driver who had lost his brakes as he was heading into a big curve and certain doom. I think someone had put something in my drink because by the time the guy jumped from the burning train (and survived! he gets on the radio and tells everyone he’s buying them beers tonite!) I was crying and checking my radio dial to try and figure out who had just saved my life.

I’m serious when I say that I lived in New York until this radio station went live on the interweb. Out of all the New York things I could not part with, WFMU was the most important one.

When people ask me what I’m listening to I tell them, “WFMU, never ask me again!” because WFMU is all I listen to, ever. There is nothing that WFMU can’t do. I used to be worse. If I went out of town i would be overcome with ennui, wondering what Brian Turner might play this week. The sense of loss was overwhelming, depressing even.

People always want to know how come I write so good. What I tell them is: I listen to Brian Turner on Tuesday, followed by the brilliant and bizarre Dave Emory (Daves of The World Unite!), who would have to be my greatest inspiration in my amazing career as a whatsit.

My favorite five hours all week to get the drivel wrote is Tuesday because I know that Brian Turner is deejaying just for me. Yeah. We work together, me and Brian. Of course Brian doesn’t know about me yet, but he will, and one day we’ll be together.

After Brian Turner’s show, Dave Emory delivers a well-footnoted dissertation confirming what I suspected about how Nazis are still the running the game, whilst I get all the cooking and cleaning done. Then I get drunk, abuse myself and cry to Al Jolson songs during the Antique Phonograph Music Program. It’s a cheap date night and everybody is happy afterward.

I then float off on the night time deejays who often do the greatest stuff because they are allowed to get weird. Solid Gold Hell with Sue P. never fails to gird me up for the extra hour of an all-night typing binge.

I love the ever discombobulated Terri T and her little Attitude (”I said don’t call when I’m on the mike!”), and I can’t tell if I like Dave the Spazz or Fools Paradise with Rex more. Rex has the politically incorrect 78s in the fur-lined fallout shelter with the bubbles. Dave the Spazz has a monkey. Both of them use soundbites that seem to work with my life (”Dave? Dave? this is highly irregular. I think you should take a stress pill and think things over”.)

The station is also a great way to scare indie rock idiots or Vice types out of your house at four in the morning if you know how to blast the awesome, unparalleled gospel show called “The Sinners Crossroads which is worth the link just to hear Kevin Nutt’s North Carolina accent. It makes their haircuts hurt!

If there is something on WFMU that doesn’t suit you, like that guy who screams in ersatz german (stop it for the love of god!), you can always go to the recent archives page.

Do you remember on our last sojourn through the great state of Texas when that huge baby in a cop uniform pulled us over for going sixty eight miles an hour in a sixty five mile per hour zone to check us for knives and Xanax (thank god we’d left that bullshit behind like I told you to).

THEY WERE LOOKING FOR DRUGS DAN

I remember the way the flashing lights let me look into the deep cerulean blue eyes of the curious cop’s soul to see a man who just wanted to know what we were doing out in West Texas this time of night.

Well, Dan it turns out that I was wrong, those curious eyes wanted to take us to jail because of a thing that all cops use called “profiling.” I didn’t believe it until I saw the movie done by an ex-Texas drug force trooper who is cool now that he smoked a joint after he was jailed for not returning Jeepers Creepers 1 and 2 to the video store. And guess what? Turns out that jail in Texas sucks.

And then Barry Cooper realized that he had been putting people in a terrible place “and terrible position to get raped or even shanked which is stabbing.” Barry has to smoke pot now because he put so many people in jail for smoking flowers, man. It tripped him out so bad that he made a movie for the likes of freaky people he used to beat up on back in high school called Never Get Busted Again with Chambo—whoops, I mean it’s called Never Get Busted Again with Barry Cooper.

Then as if that wasn’t enough he went to Canada and did a three-foot bong hit on YouTube before launching into a dissertation about how much nicer the potheads where when he busted them compared to winos.

Then he even rented a house in Texas and pretended to grow pot but it was all just a set up to get the cops to do an illegal raid (drugs do weird things to your brain Dan). And they did it. It’s called Kopbusters and it has a Beastie Boys soundtrack, who I know are your favorite band.

Then he gets all crazy and tells you how to set up a grow house without getting busted. Must be the weed has got to his brain and he has done gone reefer mad!

HOW TO HIDE LIKE THOSE HUMANS IN TERMINATOR

I’m not kidding Dan, if you are going to continue to drive around armed and profiling yourself with whatever drugs you are on that makes you get hair cuts you have to watch this movie now, and look up Barry Cooper while you are down in that awesome state.

Barry Cooper says if you see that baby cop again don’t touch your head because it lets him know that you are lying about that knife collection that you keep under the dashboard. Luckily we took enough Xanax to forget about it, so we weren’t even lying. That’s why we got away.

Remember Dan, policemen are your friends, if they have gone to jail and smoke weed on youtube.

Viva Terlingua. Tell the Doodlin Hogwallops “wassup” for me. (Can we get a picture of this band godammit?)

love dave

It was two days before Christmas and my girlfriend was crying about some Christmas baggage. I needed to get out of the house.

There was a place at the top of my town called Jumpoff Rock where an Indian maiden jumped to her death for the love of her brave. It was said that if you went up there at night you might see the ghost of this Indian girl.

I figured it would be best to get out of the house, blow the stink off and hopefully see a ghost. It was a long drive up the curvy mountain road.The girl claimed carsickness but when we crested the ridge and saw the little town shimmering in the valley below winking under the light snow shower, she stopped crying.

There was a cop parked in the Jumpoff lot. Woopwoop. He hit the whirlilghts. I pulled over.

I asked if it was alright if I came up here. All the cop said was “sixty dollars.” He repeated the figure. I looked him over, trying to figure out if I knew him, who his relatives were. He was a big fat bastard, with his chin slopped over the collar of his bulletproof vest. I could tell by the way he talked through his nose that he was from somewhere else.

Up until that time because I had enjoyed small town immunity, as my dad sells building supply. After donuts, building supply is the thing cops love the most. On any given weekend, 90 percent of off-duty cops are re-paving their yard, shoring up the aboveground, or leveling the doublewide.

This was some new guy, though. An outsider, a yankee even. He asked me to step out of the car as he made a visual inspection, blinding us with his maglite. He poked through through the detritus of a recent kayaking trip left in the back of the truck; life jackets, helmets and pizza boxes.

What was I doing up here? “I live here,” I said. I explained that I had come up to Jumpoff Rock to see the ghost. No big deal. The cop told me that I had to come back in the daytime. I told him that the thing about fucking ghosts is that they don’t come out in the day. I asked this policeman why he stopped me. He informed me that my crime was “cursing on his highway”.

I notified the cop that this road is our road and if he wasn’t going to charge me with anything then I had the right to get in my car and leave. I knew my rights. He bodychecked me into the car and asked me what I thought my rights were.

I told him that my first right was that he was going to back the fuck up off me, and then I pushed him hard enough to back him up, but not hard enough to hurt him, which proved to be a not so smart move.

“Assault on a Police Officer” coupled with “First Degree Highway Cursing” is a major crime. My advice: If ever in the course of the game you must tackle the referee, stick him good. The penalty is going to be the same.

I passed the rest of the night at the “cop disco” with several young men dancing me through various submission holds, snow falling through the strobes. The more I complained the more fun they had.

Then they searched my truck for three hours. As I was frosted away in the back of the police car, I realized that despite all the documents written by learned judges and all the wars fought to guarantee the right of Americans to go about their business without fear of unreasonable searches and seizures, your rights are fleeting things to be snatched away by a junior college flunky at any time.

Around the time they finally found the joint hidden in the little buoy of my floating keychain, I suddenly realized how one might bring up the whole “having your rights” thing to a cop without pissing him off.

Sew your rights into your clothes so you will always have them with you.

Along the way I was reminded that Indian reservations are awesome places to get the essential weapons and fireworks one needs for Mardi Gras by providentially breaking down at Bush Brothers Truck stop in Jamestown, New Mexico (exit 39 off I-40) that has all your personal items like tear gas, switchblades and this EYEGOUGE KITTY.

A weapon whose sheer cuteness means you might get it through the metal detectors.

MAKE EM SAY “ME OOWW!”

Remember, ladies, the eyes are the other balls.

We broke down again in Weatherford, Arklahoma, where we were punished with 3.2 beer. Impossible to get drunk on. I will not describe this horrid church town or the stinking vindaloo of the hotel room.

Nor will I mention the tow truck driver who upon seeing our California plates kept trying to get us to “break out the joint” even there were obvious Christians mulling about.

new orleans

The first night in New Orleans, I apparently went to go see a band called “Tirefire” in Metarie.

TIREFIRE GETS DOWN

Tirefire were opening for one of the “eyehategod” guys’ side projects (I’ll find out what it as called later. Evil army? I dunno, my notes are too bloody) where I stabbed myself in the hand with my newest of a dozen milano switchblades I have owned over the years to assuage my condition.

These knives have a malfunctioning safety mechanism which encourages a “pocket pop” when the owner is doing something like getting jostled in a room full of sweaty freaks. In the short useful lifetime of the spring this design flaw allows these evil little spikes to poke more holes in people than a jail full of three-peckered soccer hooligans. (It’s in Wales, I think).

So, I was covered in blood. It’s a good thing too because otherwise those fucking hicks would have moshed me and I would have to pull out the FIST KITTY and render them oedipus wrecks. Jesus-some one stop me from writing this drivel any more-

I passed out. Woke up. Had po boys. Ended up at a Katy Redd show. If you don’t know about her then you don’t know the biggest name in bounce music which is okay because bounce music sucks. These chicks were hot though.

Luckily I was able to clean out my ears with the glue of “Wizzard Sleeve.”
The drummer in this band plays keyboards while playing drums and the lead singer fixed the electrics on my sisters house (illegally). They are just what I needed to forget the bounce “music”.

GUERRILLA ELECTRICIANS = GOOD MUSICIANS

I have to get back to the serious business of watching black Indians do syncopated dances while sipping on coke and rum. So what I’m drunk it’s the freakin weekend baby I’m bout to have me some fun.

A: The fleas get fat for a while because the elephant is busy being dead. Then the fleas fall too, and the fleas on them rejoice, until they know better.

( I know you don’t want to see any pictures of George Bush any more but what about if it is pictures of him crying? It still makes me happy.)

Mad magazine

Is anything subversive enough to not be quashed by republican clusterfuck of money mismanagament? Not even the bastions of subversion can survive the last republican administration. There is no god, not even the one that we kill people for.
MAD magazine is going quarterly because Editor John Ficarra
said, “The feedback we’ve gotten from readers is that only every third issue of MAD is funny, so we’ve decided to just publish those.”

They tried, using the same formula that we are using here Arthur, except Arthur is more in the documentary style:

from the New York Times article march 28, 2001

“…The magazine has begun to include sexually explicit content and runs ”Monroe,” a strip about a dysfunctional family in which the father is a drunk, the mother a floozy and the son a dejected and alienated boy. Monroe has drunk bong water. He was forced into the car of a pedophile by his father, who wanted him to sell more school chocolates. His mother, who has a pornography site on the Internet, has slept with numerous characters, from her Tae-Bo teacher to Steve the lawn boy. His grandfather is a shellshocked World War II veteran who parades around the house in Nazi uniforms he stripped from German bodies.

The magazine’s parodies, which used to expose popular culture or give it a new slant, now often seem to echo society’s divisiveness.

‘It was a gentler magazine,” said Mr. Sacco, the cartoonist. ”It divested young boys of innocence, but in an easy way. The magazine I see now slams you over the head with much more prurient material. It is harder core. It is for worldly, deeply cynical kids, but maybe those are the only kids out there.”

Don’t forget to duck and cover!

These are my favorite pretty, pretty pictures of the Star Wars Defense Initiative Missiles going off over your favorite south Pacific secret military base island called Kwajalien. Who cares if these missiles work or not?

Yes, it is sad to think about Polar Bears drowning but what about Grizzly bears getting run over?

The helpful folks at Pattagucci have hooked us up with something to do about the climate change rather than stew in the juices of ennui.

Patagonia is a great company that gives one percent to the environment (which doesn’t seem like a lot until you see how expensive their clothes are).

So Stop the Hegemoney of the running dog farmers who might win the prize and therefore change the course of history with less than superior organic foods for our last and greatest “Hope”.

Seriously, Della Ends of Scotch Hill Farm really does grow the best food for the president so vote for her or else you will have to eat inferior GMO food until you turn stupid! Vote now and vote often before the January 31st deadline!

This document rates the most valuable trends of the coming year, rated by some unknown pool of hipsters.

See how well they called the trends of last year! did we have a year of 3 d movies? Is the new look “Chonga”? Did you have a virtual affair this year? Aggh-

for your next apocalypse

WE SHOULD SEND SOME OF THESE TO IRAQ UNTIL WE GET THEM SOME OIL

I can’t believe Chamberlin is moonlighting with this company.

no one remembers this

Plimpton reads Denis Johnson talking about my best friends Starcookie, Ramone and a young blond Jay Babcock.

The whole blog rules. They have all the killer writers like Nabakov, Terry Southern and Dave Reeves.

What can I tell you about going to work on a weed farm that the Grower, The Trimmers and The Landowner won’t kill me for? Soft criminals are especially tense about getting put in cages by men with guns….

A very special edition of Dave Reeves’ “Do The Math” column in Arthur 32/December 2008. Illustration by Arik Roper. Photos by Daniel Chamberlin.

In 1996 Californians passed a Proposition called 215 that allowed a citizen to go to a doctor to get certified as demented enough that a federally banned vegetable substance known as a “Joint” is the only remedy. The Doctor gets a hundred dollars. The Citizen gets a number, a little patch, and if things go a certain way during the Bush Obama changeover, a free ride to a Special Federal Camp.

The distinction between State’s Rights and Federal Law has led to some lively debates, most notably “The War of Northern Aggression” (1861-1865), after which it was deemed that, in spite of the Constitution, Feds make the Laws and States shut up. So sorry California, weed is still illegal in the US. This has created a situation where Growers, thinking they can cultivate legal weed behind their Prop 215 permission slip, get robbed by Federal Agents. The Grower can’t call the Sheriff, and the number at the UN is always busy.

If the production of weed were legal, trimming weed in Humboldt would be a lot like the seasonal job of stomping wine in France. It is not legal, so trimming weed in Humboldt is like cooking meth in Kentucky. What can I tell you about going to work on a weed farm that the Grower, The Trimmers and The Landowner won’t kill me for? Soft criminals are especially tense about getting put in cages by men with guns.

For the sake of this story I will posit that every Grower is, due to certain skill sets and predilections, essentially the same kind of guy. All Growers have three shitty houses but don’t live anywhere in particular; all Growers are trigger hippies who learned to drink in the Army and don’t like to have a boss; all Growers have a truck, a dog and an ex-girlfriend with an axe to grind; etc. I don’t know if crime makes cliches come true or if it’s the other way around, but I would guess that a variation of the following drama is acted out in remote camps across Humboldt every year at harvest time.

The first nights at the camp were the loudest nights. It was rumored that a Mexican gang was pistol whipping and robbing growers around the valley. So the neighbors would let off a shot, and we’d follow suit, letting the theoretical Mexican gang know that the whole mountain stood in a steady state of readiness or madness. It had yet to dawn on me what was fishy about the Mexican gang rumor because after a day of cop watch reports and terrible music on radio station KMUD, my brain was washed of all sense. I was ready to believe anything.

The main camp consisted of a reclaimed meth trailer, an outdoor kitchen and a drying shack made of some found wood: exactly the same as one of those tobacco shanties you see slouching haphazardly around the South, except it reeks of skunk. Outside the drying shack was the kitchen: a freestanding gas jet normally used to fry turkeys, a Coleman two burner camping stove and a gas grill, all covered by an elegant tarp roof. The living room was comprised of several wonky chairs arranged in front of a fire pit cut into the road leading down to the green house.

I considered myself lucky to be passing a bottle around out in the woods while the stars skated around the sky. The dirt road out in the middle of nowhere was easy street compared to the economic uncertainty of the real world down valley.

The Grower sang “All we are say-ing/ is stay on your land” to the tune of “Give Peace a Chance” while merrily blasting a fresh faced pumpkin away with his service .45. The Jack o Lantern’s bright eyes and toothy grin provided almost a half an hour of joy before his brief candle was snuffed. I let the tragedy ride as I was outgunned and, judging from the Grower’s marksmanship, underserved.

In the course of an evening the simmer of pistols graduated into salvos of “deer rifles” gilded with small arm glissades until the show of force spent itself leaving only a lonely nine pop-popping out an echo in the valley below. The percussion movement was in a magnum key and provided great comfort to all Growers within earshot, but it like totally freaked out the hippy masseuse/trimmers and their fat vegetarian mutts.

The Grower had set up a three-season R.E.I. tent in which I was to sleep and guard the fortune flowering in the lower greenhouse despite all the best efforts of voles, the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP), the Department of Justice, the California Highway Patrol, the California National Guard, meth heads and the natural enemy of any grower: The Ex-Girlfriend.

Eventually I drank enough to decamp to the tent hidden in the scrub. The natural camouflage that made it hard for helicopters to spot also made it hard to find at night in my whiskey shoes. Using my superior sense of direction and a flashlight I was able to fall in one direction consistently until I fell onto something which proved to be my tent. Anticipating the character erosion of the untold riches I’d soon reap for this work, I got in the tent and fell asleep quickly. I dreamt of a white owl, big as me, hooting in the halls of a great library.

Sometime later I woke to the sound of some thing breaking sticks and mumbling. Mexicans? Ex-Girlfriends? I had no way of telling as I was pistol deaf and blind under the rain fly. Remembering from Spanish class that Mexican gangs never leave witnesses to warn the others that a Mexican gang is coming, I jumped out of the tent, butt naked, hoping for the element of surprise. My flashlight beam froze a fawn and her mother, cracking their pistolwhips.

“Lo siento.”

And so I slept the rest of the night fitfully, for the camp was set up on a well-traveled deer trail.

Dawn was cold, as the sun couldn’t penetrate the Redwood canopy. Getting out of a warm sleeping bag to shiver in the long shadows is always a matter of will and black coffee. As I trudged up the hill to the kitchen in the main camp, to catch one of the few breaks in the thick forest to catch a glimpse of the one view allowed from the hidden hollow, out over the Humboldt fog wreathed at the base of the dry brown hills below.

The Trimmers were already at work with KMUD on the camp radio as I put a pot of water to boil on the blue jet of the turkey fryer. All the Trimmers were strong women with independent streaks that render them unemployable in the real world. They are the Grower’s New Girlfriend (of course), a Lesbian Couple, and some badass cafe au lait chick from L.A. with Jimi Hendrix hair. The Lesbian Couple were pros, never missing a minute of trimming at the standard rate of 250 dollars per pound. Years of scissorwork had wizened their eyes back in their heads so they looked like two little possums futzing with the weed. The L.A. Trimmer and the New Girlfriend were new to the trade, so they took time to eat breakfast.

The only accepted topics of conversations in Humboldt are what’s your sign, what you can’t eat or what dream you had. I told them about the white owl because I’m obviously an omnivorous Scorpio. The femme of the Lesbian Couple allowed that white owls were “harbingers of good fortune” while her girl stole my coffee water to make oatmeal for her dog.

We had to listen to KMUD radio for the Community Safety and Awareness Report provided by The Civil Liberties Monitoring Project who watched for any big moves by law enforcement. Paranoia becomes more insidious when framed by the destitution of listening to “Legalize It” for the eleventy hundredth time.

We had been listening to terrible music for days when, finally, they came on the radio and announced: “This is KMUD with a Citizen’s Watch Report. There are three police trucks with ATVs on the back heading up Goose Creek Road. Okay? Repeat: citizens watch has just got a call from a concerned citizen. They said they were heading up Goose Creek Road about three minutes ago.”

“That’s our road,” the Grower’s New Girlfriend pointed out.

The Lesbian Couple seem nonplussed but the LA Trimmer and the New Girlfriend got up and started worrying, ready to run.

The Lesbian Couple shrugged. “It’s a long road.”

The sound of helicopters thundered over the valley. The Grower burst out of the reclaimed meth trailer: “Didn’t you hear the radio?” he asked, throwing water on the fire, sending up a big puffy smoke signal. The helicopters passed over, on to bigger things.

The Grower’s actions were strange because he had all the Propostion 215 Medical Marijuana cards. The rule of thumb was that the local D.A. won’t bust for less than 99 plants and the local sheriff won’t do anything the DA doesn’t like. The Grower also said that he thought a mom and pop operation like ours was unlikely to be busted, but then the Grower also thought that his Ex-Girlfriend was going to be cool, and that hadn’t stopped her from showing up and acting like a maniac.

The pale face and bipolar dart of the Ex-Girlfriend’s eyes gave her that early Manson Family brio. Her pants were belled around her feet so she walked on heels, her greasy straight blonde hair parted in the middle. You could see the vein in her forehead jump when she yelled at the Grower, screaming at him for two hours meaner than a soap opera. And then she left. We all breathed a sigh of relief and laughed at what had been a tense situation. Then she came back and caught us laughing.

“Ha ha, I’m real funny huh? Don’t you ever fucking laugh at me.” She got in my face and I agreed with her, wanting no part of it.

“You got that, sister?” She called the L.A. trimmer “sister” because she’s kind of black, like brother Obama. “Don’t ever laugh at me. Do you know that you’re trimming my weed right now?”

The L.A. trimmer shot back, “Then you know that you should be here doing the work instead of standing around fucking me up.” It is dangerous to pull a Trimmer out of the focus required to sit and snip in a lopsided camp chair all day.

“Lets just talk about what’s on my plate, sister.”

“I’m not your sister,” the LA Trimmer shot back.

“Yes, you are. And I will call you that, sister. Let’s talk about what you got on your plate.”

“This ain’t Oprah. Fuck around and call me sister again. See what happens.”

The Ex-Girlfriend’s eyes bulged and she threatened to do what everyone told her she should have done a long time ago. Leaving just what that was to our imaginations. And then she left. We laughed, quietly this time, lest she return.

The girlfriend’s sudden appearance cast a pall over the camp and the Growers excuse of “Don’t worry about her, she’s just insane” was little comfort, considering what she could do with just a phone call to the right Law Enforcement Agency. Soon every plane in the sky was Feds.

So the Grower delivered the boilerplate pep talk for skittish pot camp employees: “Law guys won’t, as a rule, follow anyone into the woods for fear of booby traps. So, just hit the woods and they won’t follow you. I’ll show you the escape route, but you won’t need it.”

The escape route followed the extension of the deer path where my camp was and then ran downhill over a series of fences and through a gullywash where you can’t stop running or else you’ll slide and fall. Then over a fence and though some poison oak only to come out at the Landowner’s contraband greenhouse.

“Then you go out to the road and act like you’re there to see what the helicopter is circling about.”

“Helicopter for us?”

“Or a plane. I guarantee that when CAMP comes it will be with a spotter. They come in low and circle around in what they call a death spiral.”

Since we were in the neighborhood, the Grower thought this might be a good occasion for me to meet the Landowner, who was as stereotypical as the rest of the cast of characters on the farm. The Landowner is invariably a man living in the woods alone because some heartless wench has stolen his crops every year. The problem is so prevalent that many growers who still mess with women insist on blindfolding their dates before bringing them back to their camps. Some even have a no girlfriend rule, having given up on wenches in general. This leads to a culture almost as devoid of women as hip-hop. Which is why guys like the Landowner happen.

Our Landowner is one of the old school growers, and looks every bit of it: six-five, 270 pounds, about 60 with a shoulder-length bowl cut tied down with a bandanna, “Magaritaville” wifebeater, flannel shirt, Daisy Duke shorts with his balls hanging out, tube socks and high top chucks. He is known to be a bad man.

The Grower is essentially a sharecropper to the Landowner and owes him 35 percent of the harvest take. So The Grower and The Landowner traded market rumors from town of “panic pounds” selling for eighteen hundred dollars, way below the accepted Pot Farm Bureau Co-Op price of three thousand. Could these jumpy carpetbaggers make the bottom fall out? Could it be that this whole weed-costing-as-much-as-gold thing is just another California bubble?

A girl wearing rubber boots and a peacoat and a white dude with dreadlocks waved to us.

“This guy, he’s a good trimmer.”

“A dude that can trim?” said the Grower.

“Yeah, he has a wife,” the Landowner offered by way of explanation. Everyone knows men can’t trim. It’s one of those patriarchal generalizations like white men can’t jump or girls can’t skate which proves itself true often enough that even Proposition 8-types accept it.

Back at the camp the Grower spent his time doing bong hits, marveling at how he must have at least 40 pounds of good weed (though he was afraid to tally it up and know for sure just yet). He was living the dream between calls from the Ex-Girlfriend.

The Grower would hang up his cell phone and update us, “There she goes threatening me again. I wish she would stop it.”

“What’s she saying?”

“Oh, she’s like she’s going to come up here and kill all of us,” he’d laugh, drinking the neck off a bottle of Jack Daniels.

Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now” report played tape of some fool reporter getting stomped by a cop horse at the RNC. This made the Grower mad enough to subvert the dominant paradigm by getting around to harvesting some more weed. Without “Democracy Now” getting Northern California hippies motivated is like herding cats, if cats went everywhere with fickle untrained dogs.

The Grower took me and his dog Mystre back up to the greenhouse. He cut plant tops and placed them on strings. Then I plucked the emblematic seven-fingered marijuana water leaves until my latex gloves were gunked with pollen. Yes, the buds were all those marijuana words like “crip,” “juicy” and “dank.” Go get a glossy weed porno at the 7-11 if you want to read jargon about the architectural intricacies of a bubba OG kushtop because I’m over it. It’s a weed. It shouldn’t cost as much as gold or put people in jail.

***

I hauled the buds from the greenhouse to the drying room and hung them on strings to cure for trimming. Back and forth for many days and nights. Days burned away into weeks. I don’t know how long I was up there. Time wasn’t really my trip anymore. The monotony of country life wears the chat out of you. The group droned on, glued to the radio, stopping whenever the helicopters passed too close.

Things happened. They must have. The Grower and I would get drunk and shoot the place up to keep the camp safe from maniacs. We got good at running the escape route at night drunk as hell because … I forget why. Oh yeah, because it proved good training when the Grower went to town and the Ex-Girlfriend showed up and the shit hit the fan.

I was enjoying my role as the cook early one evening, bribing the Trimmers with hot chai and fried turkey swiss sandwhiches when the Ex showed up.

“Where the fuck is The Grower? “

“He went to town.”

“When is he going to be back? “

“We don’t know.”

“Okay then, I guess I’ll wait.”

The Ex-Girlfriend took the strangest spot in the area, up at the top of the firepit dug into the road. The Trimmers did their best to not feel threatened as The Ex Girlfriend lorded over them, seething.

“Why don’t you go wait somewhere else?” said the L.A. Trimmer.

The Ex-Girlfriend, being used to the way hippies do things, said “Bet you won’t come up here and say that in my face because, bitch, I will pounce on you, I don’t care if you do have scissors in your—“

The L.A. Trimmer, being used to the way they do things in L.A., leapt from her seat and flew up the bank into a flurry of girlfight. She went upside the Ex-Girlfriend’s head and knocked her down.

“Who’s a bitch now?” asked the L.A. Trimmer.

The L.A. Trimmer walked away from the tussle with just a patch torn out of the shoulder of her long johns. The L.A. Trimmer took the cigarette proffered by the now smitten lesbians and lit it up while the Ex-Girlfriend peeled herself up from the dirt.

“Try and cuss me again,” said the L.A. Trimmer.

“I want a do-over,” the Ex-Girlfriend mumbled. “I wasn’t ready.”

“Better get out of here before I teach you some more manners.”

The femme lesbian Trimmer told the Ex, “ Can’t you feel that this energy is not working here right now?”

The Ex-Girlfriend was dazed enough that I could herd her down the road, shooing her like a stray cow every time she wanted to turn back. The road fell off steeply from either side and there was nowhere for her to run back but through me, and doubting the quality of my mercy, she trudged on. I felt like a man taking a dog for that final walk.

The Ex-Girlfriend got to the fence where her brown car sat, blocking the gate. The final steps to her car had the ring of resolution in their heels as she grabbed her cellphone and dialed. I walked back nonchalantly until I heard her on the phone telling someone directions to the camp

“Going, yeah right on Goose Creek, the third pullout on the right with a no trespassing sign…I have been assaulted… yes, I am still here now.”

I ran back to the camp, calculating how far we were from town. The Lesbian Couple and the L.A. Trimmer were eating chips and salsa and reliving the fight.

“She called the cops.”

“But she was trespassing.”

I grabbed the weed out of the drying shed, hoping that my drastic action of taking $40,000 of weed and stashing it in the woods might rouse them to action but when I got back they were still eating salsa.

“She was assaulted on a pot farm. If she tells the cops, they’ll take everyone to jail and sort it out with lawyers.”
They chew more slowly as they cogitate.

“We can’t leave by the road because she’s out there waiting. So we need to button up and get suited and booted. Get ready to run and maybe even sleep in the woods tonight.”

We gathered up whatever incriminating evidence was lying around, pulling the old half bloomed plants up from the greenhouse and tossing them into the woods. Then the New Girlfriend rolled in, with fresh dents in the hood of the truck.

“That bitch is crazy.”

We arranged with the New Girlfriend to meet us on the main road by a particular sign because my cell phone’s battery was due to run out soon. I got together a day pack with a change of socks, water, emergency bivvy blanket, flashlight, knife, heavy jacket, warm hat, sleeping mat, chocolate, laptop computer and 20 pounds of marijuana in six black plastic garbage bags, and slid down the hill on the escape route.

“Listen for a minute.”

Me and the L.A. Trimmer could hear the Ex-Girlfriend barking at the Grower, but could not make out what she was saying. An airplane buzzed the valley. Was it coming for us? I took the weed and hid it in the apex of a gully in a dry creek bed by placing ferns on top of it. Then I turned and walked away, leaving a year’s worth of the Grower’s work hidden in the woods.

We walked quiet as spiders on the redwood duff to the Landowner’s house, listening for sirens, planes or the chop of a K9 unit dog in pursuit. The Landowner’s shanty came into view. I had my doubts about approaching the house unannounced, as Landowners are known to keep vicious hounds. Plus it was his shotgun that had provided the contrapuntal thunder to the valley. The sun began to set. An owl hooted. It occurred to me that there is nothing so tragic as an omen misread.

The L.A. Trimmer and I went up to the road so as to approach the Landowner’s house the way a normal person would (if there were any normal people in these parts), holding our hands up, yelling the his name over and over again.

The house was a free-form corrugated tin burrito structure that used to be a greenhouse. It had the look of a camp hastily erected and then lived in for years. The Landowner was inside watching television even though his old hounds were at the door barking.

“Yeah?”

“Ah, The Ex-Girlfriend came back and one of the Trimmers beat her ass.”

“Well she deserves whatever beating she gets.”

“What’s the best way to get her out of here? The Ex-Girlfriend is still up on the road,” we paused and listened. Half a mile away and we could still hear her shrieking.

“She probably called the law,” I added.

The Landowner looked over my shoulder at the L.A. Trimmer, who had tucked her hair away under the camouflage hood of her jacket.

“Well you could take the ridge back up,” the Landowner swept his arms at the ever darkening forest, “or, if you let me catch the dogs, I’ll give you a ride.”

The Landowner peeled the tarp off a derelict Chevelle in the yard.

“This car is real life,” he said. The Chevelle was modified with a homemade gearbox of shiny sheet metal riveted in under the dashboard. “I take the door panels out and run this fucker all the way to the East Coast every year.” He turned the key and the car farted up a cloud of blue exhaust and then roared. His dogs jockeyed for position on his lap as the Chevelle spit gravel all the way up the steep road.

The L.A. Trimmer hid in the back under a blanket as we swerved past the gate where the Ex-Girlfriend was still parked. She ran into the road frothing at the mouth, beating on the Landowner’s car and screaming “This man grows marijuana!”

“Jeezus. It’s about time for her to leave the county,” said the Landowner.

He took us to the two-lane road and dropped us off at the sign where we agreed to meet the New Girlfriend. A cop, a fire truck and an ambulance screeched around the curve with sirens lit.

We called the New Girlfriend to tell her that we made it. The Grower took the phone from the New Girlfriend.

“Where is it?”

I tried to tell him where the stash was. It was hard to communicate because he was worried. Worried that the raccoons would get into the weed. Worried that the meth-head neighbor might find a year’s worth of work and sell it for nothing. Then the Grower would have to kill everybody to prove a point.

“It was down that cut bank by the stump, take a right and contour across the hill until you hit a creek bed, under some ferns.”

“Yeah, okay. When you get to town, get your truck off the road. You know, cops look for dirty trucks coming off the back roads.”

The description of a Trimmer “sister” with a hafro and ass-kicking legs had the cops out in droves. I got the L.A. Trimmer tucked into a hotel off the main strip. We tried to clean off the three weeks of woods and waited for the Grower to run the gauntlet into town. Finally he showed up, filthy with fingernail scratches all around his neck.

“I couldn’t find the truck and figured you’d left town with the weed.”

“I left it in the bush, like I said. And you told me to hide the truck.”

“Well, I looked for the weed out there for a while.” This time the innuendo was harder to miss.

“It’s there.”

“I guess it is, if you’re here.” The Grower sat down heavily and produced a bottle of whiskey from his jacket. I noticed that he had his pistol tucked in his belt. He poured us all drinks.

“Shit, me and the Landowner thought you were long gone with the weed and the truck.”

A flash of regret must have registered on the faces of me and the L.A. Trimmer because the Grower laughed at us.

“Tell you what, have a drink. And live it up, goddammit!” he yelled, slinging Johnny Walker Blue all around on the carpet “If you’re gonna get into the game you got to live it up, because when they come through that door it’s all gonna change.”

We spent the night drinking and watching windows, talking business with the Grower in a room full of suitcases and guns. The love of easy money has been the ruin of many a poor boy and by morning you know I was one.

So call the cops and tell them to bust me. Tell them that I’m coming south right now with some of that dank Humboldt OG babyshit trainwreck kushywushy. Tell them they can’t miss me. I’m on the 101 with a dangerous Trimmer from L.A. right now. I’m in a white van, a dirty blue Toyota truck and a sedan with hollow doors. Doesn’t matter what I’m driving, really. Throw up roadblocks, pull everybody over and let the courts sort it out. Then bust everyone ordering pizza after ten o’clock. Bust all the turkey bag buyers. Get those skinhead pigs from Riverside up in a helicopter to look for dangerous flowers and send these growers indoors where they belong. Do every bit of that zero tolerance shit and let’s get this weed price up from the price of gold up to the price of platinum because I’m trying to live.
##

Dave Reeves has a short story titled “Bottle to Throttle” published in the Two Letters Collection of Art and Writing. Also he is expecting to have a movie he co-wrote with Larry Clark called Shame in production by March, but understands that everyone in this town lies to him about shit like that so he will jump through hoops like a little trained dog.

CULLING TIME by Dave Reeves

“A joke is an epitaph on the death of a feeling.”—Nietzsche

If we are in Iraq looking for the guys that did the Nineleven caper we’re stupid because, according to the FAA, the pilots are usually among the first people to arrive at a crash site.

The only other 9/11 joke I’ve heard is:

Knock, knock
Who’s there?
Nine eleven
Nine eleven who?
You said you would never forget me.

Yeah, it’s not funny. Not just because the feeling isn’t dead. It plays on the fact that 9/11 is an old heartbreak whore of ours, the one who unfettered our basest desires, which we’ll be paying for for the rest of our children’s lives. Har de har.

Your kids are going to be pissed when they see the pictures which Colin Powell pointed at when he talked us into World War Three.

“Daddy is it true that you guys started World War Three over a picture of a meth lab out in the desert?”

“Well honey see we didn’t have no education back then and so we didn’t know that nuclear fission takes whole buildings full of advanced ceramics, Germans and yellow cake uranium to manufacture…”

It’s good that we can’t tell a meth lab from a nuclear bomb-making facility because it means that our elders saw fit to give us the gift of bliss, which more judgemental people would call ignorance. With this bliss we are free to see the world without any preconceived notions based on science or pre-known facts.

Back when people got educations they were indoctrinated so thoroughly that they believed crazy shit like the Civil War was fought to free black slaves. Anybody stupid enough to think that white people went to war and killed other white people for the rights of black people will be stupid enough to believe that we are looking for Osama Bin Laden in Iraqian Permian basin.

That’s right: Though you’ve been taught that the American Civil War was some kind of freedom ride gone horribly awry, it was, in fact, an economic war. The propaganda that the War Between the States was about freeing slaves was made up for a speech called the Gettysburg Address, much as the “Axis of Evil” was made up by a speechwriter. All the proof you need is to witness the war being fought in the streets of America to jail black people today. Putting one out of six black men behind bars is a pretty good start at re-slaving America, chains and all.

How did we get so stupid? Practice, man, practice. Our acquiescence was bought behind the persistent machinations of faux-Fox News, whose confusions enabled Diebold machines to send Americans to do just that. Five years later, 4,000 soldiers have boldy died behind a mission yet to be defined. On top of that we didn’t even get the damn oil. Greed was good, back when it was smart.

Considering that the war industry is America’s biggest export, you may wonder how we got in a war and a recession at the same time. Plus, if we were to leave Iraq right now, some Pol Pots would jump up in the vaccum to turn our Fallujahs into Sinaloas.

Fallujaloas. I can already hear the heroin getting stronger.

With this is in mind we must be sure that Bush must not be allowed to kill himself. It is our job as responsible Americans to make an example of this man. I propose that the Decider, Laura and the twins be waterboarded to death at the Lincoln Memorial. If something of this sort is not done, World War Five will be blamed on you and me for the rest of our miserable lives.

It is a matter of style. The reason why Italians don’t get the proper blame for the Euro-fascism of Hitler and the boys is because the Italian populace punished the figurehead properly. They strung Mussolini and his bitch wife up by their heels and beat them naked and dead, in the middle of Rome. This act allowed the world to forgive Italy for sparking the pitiless hell which burned Europe and Japan to cinders. If the Italians hadn’t beat Il Duce like that then the world might have known the Pope was a gay Hitler way back then.

The responsible populace needs to do something to exonerate ourselves from being duped by ol’ George. It would be apropos to cut George’s head off with a butter knife on youTube while screaming some religious babble. Let’s flip the script on these Semites, like an Arab killing a stranger. We could leave the Bush women and children alive to be sold as curiosities in brothels, then chased from village to village in a hail of stones, allowed to live as a reminder of what happens to smug, stupid assholes who steal elections.

This nutty buddy of mine called the Constitution of the United States of America suggests an armed bunch of guys and gals are supposed to organize into a militia to do this. It’s like our forefathers were Nostradamuses to see a crooked politico clusterfuck like this coming.

I suggest some kind of hipster army. Why not? Jodie Foster had an army. It was only one crazy guy, but he shot Reagan. I notice George Bush is still unshot. I heard they let Hinckley out. John if you are reading this: “Try, try again.” You should be even more ashamed to let Jodie Foster live in a world with George Bush as president.

We must crusade for the good and get the mySpace poseurs to put the skateboards down long enough to get hurt for something more than a hobby. It’s springtime in the revolution, time to get down to the nut cutting. Real cowboys call it the “culling time.” Every head of the herd is to be saved or chopped off.

The price to join the militia is the procurement of some sort of protection system more realistic than calling the cops. Those that can take care of themselves look forward to whatever form the apocalypse takes. If you are not ready to save yourself, then what good would it do for a militia to save you? That’s two soldiers down for somebody that didn’t have the sense to survive in the first place.

Get some boots. Armies are made of leather and rubber. Procure a flashlight, shotgun, water, motorcycle, siphon hose, iodine, sleeping, bag, knife, lighter and set of cojones. If you have these things, you are a militiaman or militiawoman.

Say you don’t watch enough news to be mad enough to shoot anybody? Let me have your shotgun and you’ll be drafted to be a goddamn Politician for The Cause. In a world where Bush has a DUI, Obama admits to messing with cocaine, and Clinton had cigar sex with a girl in a Gap dress you have been thrust into the arena of the politically viable. Your peccadillo body modifications, aderal addictions, litanies of filthy text messages and binges of internet porn perversions have not freed you from being an American. Indeed, modern America is why you’re a modern American, and vice versa. When a major presidential contender has been cuckolded by a tobacco product you have to really limbo to be beneath being a viable candidate anymore.

America took a page from the playbook used at the great Cradle of Wars of Dien Bien Phu, Little Big Horn and Israel: build a fort somewhere surrounded on all sides by hostiles, preferably at the bottom of a hill or a heights. Supply the Indians with rudimentary weapons and then make them mad as hell. Make sure to give the enemy plenty of chances with exposed supply lines to inflict damage so that the following wrath and retribution seems warranted. Occupy enemy territory using whatever means necessary. Repeat this process until the world is a Mall. Yee haw.

Our generation apes the criminal with the tattooes, the pimp cup wiggerdom and self-medication. Turns out that these are good impulses, because, like Hakim (if that is his real name) Bey says “there is always the element of the criminal in the Nietzschean overman.” So listen to your tattooes, you big overman, and be criminal enough to take the country back.

I’m here to tell you that America is good real estate, as long as you didn’t actually buy any of it on a subprime loan. See, the real America can’t be bought, you got to take it like our forefathers did. The time to flank these assholes is now, while their national guard troops are off on the fourth tour of duty.

Until then, ain’t nothing changed. America is up in an Indian war dressed like Custer again. There is talk of retreating out the back door of Iraq, also known as Iran. A bold move for sure, soon to be glorified in the cave drawings left by the survivors of the near future. I got a 9/11 joke: “Fission Accomplished.” The reason that one isn’t funny is because it’s not a joke.

David Crosby Reeves is working on a militia project and riding around on a motorcycle trying to eat everywhere that Jonathon Gold eats. Also sometimes he writes.

Siphon Your Way to Financial Freedom
by Dave Reeves

1. Pick your siphon
Get a clear hose, six feet long and at least an inch in diameter. Make sure you get a thick-walled hose because you are going to have to push it all the way down the gasshole of an SUV. Hardware stores sell them for about a buck a foot. Get a five-gallon gas can while you are at it.

2. Find a target
SUVs’ 40-gallon tanks are the most profitable vehicles from which to liberate gas. The sense of panic the SUV driver feels when his behemoth gets less than the normal ten miles to the gallon is an added benefit.

Try to pick a full one and don’t be deterred by silly gas tank locks which are merely cosmetic and can be turned with almost any key.

Donut shops provide great gas hunting because it’s like a law that police cars have to be all the way full all the time.

3. Sightlines
Getting caught siphoning is not cool. So pull your vehicle next to the target and open up the doors to make a little room where you can do the deed unobserved.

Put your gas can on the ground in between the doors. If someone eyeballs you pretend like you are changing clothes.

4. Hose pushing
Push the hose down into the target tank till you think you hit the gas.

5. Start sucking
Start sucking on the hose and get the gas going.

If you were smart and got the clear hose you’ll see the copper-colored nectar coming and be able to get the hose out of your mouth and channel the flow into the intended receptacle.

If you sleep on this step your breath will smell like west Texas for no less than three days.

6. Drain the pain away
Once the siphon gets going it will flow steady and strong into your gas can.

The “Siphon Effect” can be explained with all sorts of scientifical facts about how “atmospheric pressure” maintains the vacuum you created when you sucked gas from the higher “gravitational potential energy” up in the vehicle which seeks to stabilize itself by flowing into the can on the ground, but all that bullshit obscures the fact that the “Siphon Effect” is actually just magic.

I can get five gallons in four minutes flat. That’s three bucks a minute, and you can’t make that at Walmart.

Man Roots Culture
By Dave Reeves

Fall is here, and it’s time to think about how you’re going to maintain your erection for the long winter months. Buying Viagra pills might do the trick, but face it, you are going to be broke after giving all your money to the gas man, so take my advice and pick up a dub sack of American ginseng instead.

Buying ginseng is like buying drugs; you’re going to get ripped off unless you know the deal. They won’t have it at the hippie health food store because hippies are afraid of the awesome power within. For the real you have to go to Chinatown. Go in any place that has a neon ginseng root in the window, or a picture of ginseng on the sign.

If you aren’t overwhelmed by the smell of the ginseng when you go in the door then you are not in the right place. The best places will have barrel after barrel of various roots and then thousand dollar roots laid out in little boxes to look like little people—hence the Chinese name that ginseng was bastardized from: Jenshen, or “man root.” These roots are prized as much for their size as for their shape and the super fat ones will supposedly do the same thing for your penis, which is the real reason they call it a “man root”.

The ginseng clerks are going to come at you like you are a hipster tourist, pushing inferior Chinese or Korean ‘sang, but you must remain adamantine for “American Ginseng.” And don’t let them talk you into any Chinese medicine bullshit, either. You didn’t go there to get skinny or to divine the future, you are there for S E X that will disturb the neighbors. Don’t ever forget that, no matter what they offer you. Tell them you want the 20 bag of American ginseng, cut into dime size pieces. If they don’t have it, leave.

Take a piece of it out of the bag and stick it between your cheek and gum and let it dissolve for an hour or so until you finally chew it up. The flavor is bitter at first, but soon the sweet sweet nectar of immortality runs through your chi, hooking up your digestion and breath. You can feel your immune system double up and, according to the Soviet scientists, your cells grow more resistant to radiation.

The stuff you get will be probably be the typical gateway ginseng from Wisconsin. Start with the low dollar varieties as a novice, or else you might be overtaken by sexual urges and masturbate to death on the way to see your beloved (by the way, make sure you have some ass lined up before you do any of this). Later, when addiction takes hold, you will sell one of your many children for a rare wild root of panax quiquefolius poached from North Carolina or Virginia.

Unfortunately, this strain will die out within our lifetime as it has been hunted to near extinction by sex crazed hillbillies. The conscientious ginseng abuser will order a ginseng plants from Horizon Herbs (www.horizonherbs.com), which has everything for the modern spice witch, including hard to find ingredients such as henbane and belladonna. It’s every American’s patriotic duty to plant some ‘Sang today or else our children’s, and our children’s children’s sex lives will be cold and uneventful affairs.

Trigger Hippies

Blackout. Summertime. Populace accepts that utility companies have again fried the grid for profit. Hours go by. Americans go without television, SUVs, flash-fried food. Coffee runs out. Shortages of chronic and chronic shortages. Rumor becomes news. Alcohol reserves are drunk away and the rabble seethe in the street, commiserating about how it was this very publication that printed the recipe for the diabolical bomb that left the assholes standing but killed their precious machines. [see our Q&A with Derrick Jensen from Arthur 23 - ed.]

Emergency personnel stay at home because, like that great American Bob Dylan said, “The cops don’t need you and, man, they expect the same.” The National Guard is busy on the border, the French Quarter and Iraq. Everyone is a suspect.

“There he is! I saw him reading that Arthur!” the mob yells.

And then, dear reader, you realize that when the transistors are dead, the world is run by a lower phylum of machine: the gun.

Now I’m not saying you need to get one, but you can never be too careful what with this Arthur magazine monkeying around with these new-fangled technology bombs. Of course you are scared of guns because the liberal media constantly portrays people misusing these valuable tools. The smart hipster won’t let crappy television writers’ abuse of the pistol as a modern day Deus Ex Machina divert her from the path of preparedness. Just think of a gun as one of those “Talking Sticks” at a Rainbow Family Gathering: if you have a Talking Stick, you get to say something and people have to listen, and if you don’t have one you have to shut the hell up.

Here’s a list of “sensitive weapons” that even a vegetarian could use in the near future, cribbed in these last precious moments while this computer still works. I’ve listed them in the order that they should be purchased, so that you may gradually warm to the idea of being a citizen capable of doing what it takes to keep America on course.

Blow gun/sling shot
No big whup. These aren’t even weapons. They’re fun! When worse comes to worst and emergency supplies run out, you can shoot some apples out of the tree for food. Added bonus is that when the overarmed zealots take power and make the Holy Bible the law, getting that “eye for an eye” with a slingshot will be more sanitary than using your fingers.

Air rifle
Don’t let the word “rifle” fool you. It’s nothing but a toy which, with a little duct tape, can be modified into a directional claymore mine should an emergency situation arise.

Your dad should have given you a BB gun when you were eight, but since he didn’t love you enough to let you own the gift of freedom, I’ll give you the basic rules right quick:

1. All guns are loaded all the time, even when they are not.
2. You’ll put your eye out.
3. Fried squirrel is delicious.

A fun thing to do is get a target and put a picture of your least favorite politician on it. Practice taking his eyes out from further and further away. Try not to blink when you pull the trigger!

Shotgun shells

Okay, now that you’ve purchased a toy facsimile of a real gun you’re not going to feel so funny about purchasing a box of shotgun shells. These aren’t weapons, they’re just ammunition. Nothing wrong with that. You can still vote Libertarian.

Now let’s return to our scenario: A mob is at your door demanding food and water, not that you have any. Luckily, you took my good advice and got an air rifle and a box of shotgun shells. The time has come to duct tape a shotgun shell to the end of your BB gun. Be sure to line the BB’s path from the barrel so it hits the firing cap on the shotgun shell. If you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute.

Once the trigger is pulled, the BB will travel up the barrel and hit the cap. The cap then explodes, sending birdshot flying to poke little holes in everything for about 30 feet square in front of you, resulting in the distinctive striations in an assailant known as a “Tennessee Tattoo.”

As a liberal you love this weapon because it is tacked together with duct tape, clears a room faster than Al Gore and, like Karma, it doesn’t kill. Use the valuable shock and awe time to duck out and run run run. Make your way to Humboldt, Asheville, Lawrence or Canada. Travel by night. Moss grows on the north side of the trees.

According to a guy who lived in a post-E-bomb environment all the time, Thomas Jefferson, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants from time to time.” The liberty tree is looking rough right now because all we feed it is this new blood. Blood is fine like wine and needs some age and body to come alive. I’m sure Bush and Cheney wouldn’t hesitate to give some blue blood to the liberty tree, if some sharpshooter put a bullet in their eye. I’m not saying (in print) that anybody should shoot the president, but good citizen, get a BB gun and work on your aim. Soon we may have to provide a clear mandate that these criminals will not be able to misinterpret.

Hanging chads won’t matter when it’s time to hang George, dear patriot.