Wanna Bang on my Drum all Day:
September 8th, 1998

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away... Actually, that's not true at all. It's about a half hour away. In any case, about ten years ago I put a sign up over my Production God desk that read:

The floggings will continue until morale increases.

Not much of a witticism, I grant, but I was young and foolish then (old and foolish now, da da). The point is that the manager fella made me take it down because, according to him, it was "bad for morale."

I have every reason to believe that he also stole the silver hammer Noogie gave me for Christmas the previous year. I'm not sure what happened to the Executive Axe that we kept in the engineering locker either.

It's a cold night here at Dynamite 109. Rained all day because I pinned up laundry yesterday afternoon. I'm not taking it in. It can hardly get any wetter, and if I take it in, it'll be sunny tomorrow until exactly a half hour after I get out of bed. I hung it with the awareness that it would probably get rained on. But let none accuse me of engaging the warm lovely environmentally unfriendly efficiency of the dryer. God's going to dry my clothes or spit mildew trying.

Auntie took off last night and took the sun with her. She ran over three traffic cops and an Acadian poet. Left wavy skid marks by the high school, which is conveniently located between (honestly, my brothers and only friends) a tattoo parlor and a strip club.

Small wonder my younger brother Halogen doesn't attend regularly. At his age I felt high school was overrated, and despite having misspent the years I snagged from it like a fishnet stocking on a Christmas tree, there's no way I would've done anything else. Every second I stole from them was lived in a manner that I wouldn't rescind.

Despite my soggy dainties and the packs of wolf spiders infesting the droopy sunflowers outside, despite how monumentally screwed this year has been, I feel peculiarly serene tonight. Probably prior to cutting my wrists. I have a worthy opponent in the brownstone down on Church Street and I will headlock each and every one of the school administrators until they allow my brother an educational experience that won't turn him into a gasoline jockey. At worst I'll teach the little bastard arts and computers myself; he already has a hard science tutor.

Oh, shut up. You know what I meant. Besides, he's not my type.

Then I will conquer the goddamn noisy box, which is to say teevee. Teevee is a worthy opponent as well. I've done print, Internet, photography, radio, painting, music and theatre, all with at least moderate success. Never teevee, though, so I look forward to that.

Two words: Streakers Anonymous.

I have switched to a brand of cigarettes that are almost a formality, and drank exactly two glasses of bad Hungarian red wine in the last month. I even went on a date... accidentally. The young man proposed a second date, but no. Dear boy, you've never cracked open a really good pinot gris, never listened to Rossini with the lights off, and your Maritime slang grated on mine shell-like ears after the first half hour.

No no, my fate is to be kept by a particularly rich old man with nose hair and warts, to inherit his estate and the wrath of his children, whereupon I will have Auntie hire someone to kill them all. She and I will emigrate to The Seychelles. We will hire Galahad as our sysadmin and my morose friend JayJay as an anti-jester. It will be JayJay's duty to walk around with a stock ticker that spits out negative cookie fortunes speaking of the inexorability of death, the law of entropy, and treading in dogshit.

When the 666th word of your column is "dogshit", it's time to move on.