Dutchmen, Wal Mart, and the Soapy Boys

How strange a thing it is to be in the same place at once. How poor an anchor the body and how flighty the rest of it, riding into the sun on a flaming snowflake of Japanese design. The Japanese really do have a knack for building snowflakes, you know, capable of twisting and turning and executing majestic maneuvers through the rigging of a lonely wooden bar stool that stands starkly in front of the long, scuffed white expanse, standing and remembering. It was here long before the girl in pinstripe pants whose job it is to sit on said stool, and it remembers. It remembers the good ole' days, when men were men and squirrels were slightly larger, and it remembers how stagnant and serene yonder lake was before that fateful hour when Buck Rogers rode out of the sky on his plastecine steed, a-screamin' and a-hollerin' and cursing the very feet that bore him across the oceans of cumulonimbus, all the while singing, "GOD DAMN THEM ALL! I WAS TOLD WE'D CRUISE THE SEAS FOR AMERICAN GOLD! WE'D FIRE NO GUNS, SHED NO TEARS! NOW I'M A BROKEN MAN ON A HALIFAX PIER, THE LAST OF BARRETT'S PRIVATEERS!" He knows a thing or two about that sort of thing. Do you? How many flying dutchmen have you seen? None? That's what I thought. He's seen four, so he knows a thing or two. Honestly, where the fuck do you get off thinking you can correct him when you've never even seen a Dutchman (well, at least not one that flew)? That's what's wrong with America these days, and to a lesser extent Vatican City. Everyone steps on each other's foreheads over things that they aren't qualified to step on people's foreheads over. Why can't we all just drop it? I don't want to step on any foreheads; I just want to play cards in Montenegro. That's right, Montenegro. Gatsby's Montenegro. Bond's Montenegro. My quintessential nest of pretension and disdain for all things sold at Wal Mart. And while we're on the subject, I've been meaning to ask Wal Mart a question for quite a few hours now: Wal Mart, do you really think that blanking out the cusses on your CDs is fooling anyone? The word's there, and everyone knows it's there whether they can hear it or not. You're just feeding the very same process that spoiled these words in the first place. If you left them alone, no one would care. They'd just be letters, and no one would give a flying fuck one way or the other. But when you go and pawn it off like it's contraband, well then you've done it, haven't you. Little boys everywhere getting fat off soap, while you sit on your lifeguard tower in the middle of your cornfield and show "I DO DECLARE-" But then you sort of trail off, because you realize you have nothing to declare after all. But you can't just shout "ACTUALLY, I DON'T DECLARE," because you'd look foolish and the panel is watching and God forbid you look foolish in front of the panel. So you wing it, and you say something that really doesn't itself matter, since it really isn't anything because you really had nothing to declare and that was the point. The panel nods, you exhale, the corn cheers, and the soapy boys each cry a single tear at what their world has been hammered into.

Skippy Skip Washington

Why is it that whenever I want to write, lyrics from some shitty pop song that I don't even like are all I can think about? I started this page with a "why", that much is certain. After that, though, I was in terrible danger of following with a "can't I breathe whenever I think about you?", which is a line from a song by Liz Phair, which is a certain woman that makes chick-rock even though she's a little too slutty looking to make chick-rock. How in Jesus' name did I manage to leap over this lyrical pitfall? It takes great agili-tah (agility, for those unnapreciative of southern drawls) to navigate one's way to the "is" and avoid quoting some nauseatingly infectious collection of noises arranged and assembled in such a way as to create an aurally appealing experience for the everyman, who would much rather just call it a "song". So, then, that is that. Hm? What say you? You don't like "songs"? What are you, some kind of deviant? A rebel of sorts? Some kind of revolutionary? I'm sorry to piss in your coffee, my good man, but it just doesn't work that way anymore. You have to put it in writing, on paper, or perhaps something that isn't paper but that has enough in common with paper that it can still be written on. Birch bark, maybe. Or perhaps the lower back of a willing and adventurous young lady who wears hats and smokes cigarettes and tastes like espresso beans. No, actually, when you say it out loud, it does sound more or less rediculous. So it's probably just paper. Whatever you in all eventuality decide to write on, what it is you write is what's important. These cats, they don't care how you do it, they just want to see results. It's all about that word that begins with an "a" that I can't quite remember at the moment. Ah, fuck it all, it'll come when it comes. The point is, they don't give a rat's ass about the means. They don't have the same understanding you and I and Eddie have. They can't really be blamed, though; I mean, they haven't ever listened to Skippy Skip Washington, the great white bluesman of greater Groton. They haven't heard his foot stomp against the floor every-so-slightly out of time. They haven't felt the tears he's cried over his own mediocrity on the other side of his unfashionably thick spectacles. If you've seen Skip, in his fedora and chains, then you get it. You've seen him, I've seen him, and anyone else worth a damn has seen him singing his ragtime sorrows. I bet he wouldn't know the "a" word either. He hasn't had a single brush with success or results or achievement or any of their synonyms in his long, hokey life. Stay sharp, lad; you don't want to end up like that, passing your hat through someone else's crowd every Friday night. And before you accuse me, "achievement" isn't the "a" word I was thinking of, so don't call me out on using it a few lines back if you were planning on it.