She Carried On Without a Comma
January 13, 1999

Electricia and I are sure that Galahad moonlights as a cabana boy, but he refused to answer any of our questions about how he got his butt-pasties to spin in opposite directions, much less whether or not there was a red sequinned G on the front of his gold lame g-string. Leave us not even get into the testicle-tassles. So Auntie leaves it an open question: how many highly paid computer programmers have a secret urge to shake their booties, maybe at Comdex or the MacWorld Expo, maybe being tipped with badly scrawled schematics for BHA or the latest Rockwell chipset? Is that a scanner in your pocket or are you just glad to see Galahad?

These things keep me up at night. Not that it's hard to keep me up at night. "Wanna go gawk at a big crane?" "Wanna build a bonfire on the marsh and watch the tide eat it?" Which reminds me of Faulkner, who unlike damn near every other writer I've spoken to, I can't stand, I find his characters flat and his style a chore, but reminds me of the other line I liked in Mosquitoes, where a smoker was having his cigarette eaten out of his mouth by the wind.

"Do you have a watermelon and a gun?" was asked Auntie quite recently by a young man with an aptitude for making things explode, and sadly she had neither. Guns don't grow well in Canada, we don't have the climate or the temperament.

It's too easy to keep me up now, between plagues that won't quite leave and won't quite go away, with this foul Maritime weather that gives me splitting headaches every time the temperature bounces which it does constantly, daily, going from -30 Celcius (around -20 Farenheit) to +12 (about +60 Farenheit) in a matter of six hours, five and a half hours in Newfoundland, from snow to rain to sleet to mush to mud to me slipping on the wet uneven ice and cracking my skull as neatly as my father once did, though unlike him I haven't required stitches. He said that if the hospital didn't get all the stitches out, his head would pop like a balloon. Oh Dad, thanks so much for grinding the naivete out of me at a young age, you who have been dead so long even the dust thinks the place is run-down.

Grandpa has not been dead nearly so long, and has been yet another excuse for me to conscientiously avoid daylight hours, more death, of Uncle Dynamite's grandmother, the death of Uncle Demon's aunt, having an aunt of my own who likely has breast cancer and a more distant relative who is on the brink of slipping under from it as well, and lo, 1998 was the year of death and destruction and the murder of all things good.

So let us talk of butt-pasties and testicle-tassles and things that are immortal. I have a great pile of Frank Zappa, Saint Zappa, patron of the fucked and the doomed, and he will ward these ghosts with a flick of his moustache. Deliver me, Saint Zappa, from this icy Mephistophelian hell of the Maritimes, send me back to the west coast clutching a plane ticket and my saxophone and some relocation expense cash. Deliver me from this flashy death fad before it gets us all.