Guest Post: THE PANTAGRUEL: CONTINUED, PT 1

Hey guys. Just wanted to share a few things with you.

First, thanks. I've been doing good. You may remember that when I left you things weren't exactly looking up.

Flan dumped me. Then she didn't want to get back together (she stopped answering my texts), my blog was shut down, I had to move in with my sponsor, tried to quit smoking, was depressed, gained weight, my face broke out, I was nauseous, constipated, my feet swelled, gums bled, sinuses clogged, I got heartburn, was cranky, and gassy. And just as I was poised to write about ghosts, this shows up on my Facebook feed:

I GUESS. NOT.

Well Bunky, let me tell you: I snapped. The last thing I remember  is how suddenly the viscosity of my blood reached Three Stooges proportions, and then blacking out.

When I woke, I was in Montana, caked in Doritos crumbs and IHOP receipts like papier-mâché. That's gotta mean something.

Don't ask me how. Neither I, nor the locals (who have taken to calling me "the grokel yokel") have been able to figure out how I turned up here. Someone said they heard unusual howling the night before I was found half-naked and equally lucid on the steps of the Lutheran church. My hunch is it had something to do with booze and ghosts. I've been roughing it out here ever since.

As in, I'm homeless. Which, while not all it's cracked up to be, has actually stirred a kind of haggard self-confidence in me. I feel like a man, all swaggerly and adventurous and inappropriately certain about stuff. 

So there's that. And I like it.

My head's not right. I can't stand the loneliness. 

I mean I'm doing great.

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Speaking of male pattern badassery: Damien Fisher, husband of Simcha Fisher, whose blog sometimes hosts a mysterious movie reviewer with an officious nom de plume, is posting his weekly column on a personal blog, Over the Edge. 

The Jerk? . . . nope. My cousin.

Check it:

Just the other day I saw the end of the world. It was on the Drudge Report, so you know it’s true. Scientists have devised a way to give rats a sixth sense. 

Are you scared yet? You should be. These scientists implanted some kind of … thing into the rats that allowed them to feel infrared light. They say it will some day help people, but we know that will not happen. People have five senses; sight, hearing, touch, taste, and purple. Now rats have one more than us. This is a disaster. Do you think the rats will stop at six? They’re rats. They’re like Nietzschean supermen with fur. They’re probably halfway to seven sense right now with plans for eight and nine. They won’t stop. Ever. Until we’re all dead. This is just like the time they built Skynet. 

It gets worse. The infrared sensor picker-uppers they put in the rats also gives them a form of telepathy. Yeah, mind reading rats. Basically, we’ve just handed rats the biggest evolutionary advantage since opposable thumbs. Why not finish the job and give them the ray guns the Pentagon is hiding in that warehouse along with the Ark of the Covenant? 

We’re doomed. 

Lookit, I know for a fact rats hold people in contempt. They are clever, devious creatures with ambition. Just last year, my son brought home his classroom pets over the Christmas break. Guess what? They were rats. Every time you walked into the room they would jump up onto the sides of the cage and just hang there, watching you until you gave them a peanut. I don’t know if they were using some kind of mind control on me or not, but I gave those rats a lot of peanuts. 

And that was without any implanted sensors, imagine if those classroom rats had the telepathy and such, I probably would have been making them sandwiches and handing them beer. Actually, I may have done that too. I don’t really remembered. There was a lot of beer in the house around Christmas.

I like to think of this as Good News, in the same way that drug addicts are the Good News.

Speaking of, have you heard of The Growlers? They're moody fun.

Speaking of less ramshackle, but still moody fun, The Black Lips released their new album today.



That's all for now, folks. I'll be back soon-ish maybe.