UNREMITTING FAILURE

The Fabulous Excuse Monkey

 

Today's Children Are Soft as Brie

Not to go all "in the old days" on your asses, but we find the evolution of the school playground alarming.  When we were a kid, a good playground was surfaced in child-toughening macadam, or old-fashioned dirt studded with lots of jagged stones.  Nowadays playgrounds are coated in a spongy rubber that you could be dropped from an airplane onto and not break a bone. The result: encroaching childhood pussification. 

The same goes for playground equipment.  Back in the day those pipes you could crawl through on your hands and knees were just that: pipes.  Made of iron or concrete.  But you'll look in vain for a concussion-maker these days because the pipes are made of soft plastic.  The jungle gym has suffered the same fate.  The one at Maple Avenue Middle School in Littlestown where we grew up was steel and the height of a two-storey building, and from its pinnacle you could just about see the top of the nearby sliding board, which was even higher.  A drop from either one was guaranteed to crack your skull, which was a good life lesson if you lived.  We also had one of those spinning deals that was capable of shooting you off at about forty miles per hour.  If you were lucky you landed in the sandbox.  If you didn't you got impaled on a tree branch.

It took grit to survive twenty minutes on a playground like that, and it's no wonder Doc Maitland's office was across the street, as was Little's Funeral Home.  One careless step and you could be declared dead and be on the embalming table before your little playmates got called back inside. 

  This is more like it

Today's Bold and Anthemic Sing-Along

Wheel in the Sky keeps on turning
Don't know where I'll be tomorrow
Wheel in the Sky keeps on turning
Journey wears diapers.

 

dirty poopy pants band

The Battle of Third Manassas

Anders took a wild shot.

"Yankees!" he shouted.

"Where," said his long-suffering wife Clara, turning to her husband, whose was sitting bolt upright next her in bed.  She was amazingly calm for having been jolted out of bed by the booming of an Enfield three foot from her head.

"Out the window!"

It was 1917.  They were in their bedroom.  Anders still had the Enfield pointed window-wards, his shock of white hair and long grey-white beard wreathed in a haze of gunsmoke. 

 

Really, It Was a Public Health Problem

Folk-rock duos were the crabs of the Seventies.

Hovel and Garden

Proud of his hovel, Kraack gloated.  He'd crow to the neighbors, "One room, filled with warming smoke!  With straw for the pigs!  They sleep better than I do!" 

Next door, Rick and Delores Andrews were gardening outside their Cape Cod.  "He has done wonders with that hovel," conceded Delores, pruning her award-winning roses.  "He certainly has," agreed Rick.  "I've got to say," said Delores, "I was doubtful when the realtor told us a medieval serf was moving in next door."  "You can say that again," said Rick.  "But the smell's almost bearable when the wind blows the other way, and I'm almost jealous of his thatched roof.  You know what slate costs these days?"

Kraack stepped outside, waved.  The Andrews waved back.  "And he keeps his lawn sickled," said Delores.  "That's more than you can say for the Daniels, and they've got that huge John Deere riding mower."

"His plague cart still gives me the willies," admitted Rick.

"At least he has a job," said Delores.  "With the economy the way it is, that's no small potatoes."

"Exactly," said Rick.  "People are always talking about medieval serfs sucking on the public teat, but not Kraack.  He's up before the dawn six days a week, collecting the dead."

"His wife's a bit standoffish," said Delores.  "Uppity, too, ever since they made the cover of Hovel and Garden magazine."

Writer and Agent

"I'm going to write a novel about Adolf Hitler from Blondi's point of view," said Chris Harlow, 41, sweater vest, beard, tall, big-boned, handsome, to Alan Fleisch, 48, sweater vest, beard, short, small-boned but with a shlong on him, his agent. 

"Blondie? The cartoon broad with the great big tits?"

"Blondi," said Harlow, "happened to be the name of Hitler's dog."

"That's an interesting idea," said Fleisch.

"That I should write a book from a dog's point of view?"

"No, that Hitler should name his dog after a cartoon broad with nice tits."

Harlow sighed and gave his agent the look.

Can't Stand the Rain

It's raining.  England Dan is dead.  We're listening to Wilson Pickett's take on Hey Jude.  Man, are we feeling soulful and sad. 

Scream it, Wilson.

W.H. Auden wrote vis a vis the death of W.B. Yeats, "oh all the instruments agree/the day of his death was a cold dark day."  W.H., baby, we agree with the instruments.

Are we kidding? We don't know anymore.  Live in the Twilight Zone of Irony long enough and sincerity becomes irrelevant.  Everything's true and untrue.  Just like in real life.  There's white smoke coming from the red brick chimney of a row house down the block.  It hangs, does the twist, dissipates.  Life, really, is that short.  A guy we knew, long-time junkie, just died.  This guy looked like Keith Richards' dad.  Seriously.  He had lines, grooves, on his face deep enough to bury a body in.  He hung out by a bakery, swept up for them, sat inside when it was cold or walked next door to Diego's hair salon to talk to Diego.  He passed while we were in London.  He was there, part of the bedrock of our morning, and now he's not. 

Somebody or other said that every death diminishes us.  We don't know about that.  But it walks behind each and every one of us, and takes people from us without asking, and will one day--today perhaps--take us without asking.  There are drops of rain on the window.  The sky's the color of East Germany. 

We're dead serious when we say it's all a big laugh.  Not that anyone's laughing. 

England Dan RIP

Every story, no matter how beautiful, has an ending, and the story of England Dan Seals, the squatter half of England Dan and John Ford Coley, ended the other day in Nashville Tennessee, where the "Man in the Horrible Green Leisure Suit" succumbed to lymphoma.  He was 61.

How can we say enough about ED & JFC?  We saw them hit their smooth groove live, back in '76, at some theme park or another, and we knew right then we were in the presence of greatness.  They were reeling in the success of soft-rock highwater mark "I'd Really Love to See You Tonight", and to see them in person, with their terrible hair and even more terrible mustaches, was to have an experience you'd never forget, at least not without therapy.

They had other hits, but not for us.  When they sang, "there's a warm wind blowin' the stars around" we knew what they meant; they meant our youth would go on forever.  Well they lied, or we misunderstood, but the point is that from that moment forward the two least-likely looking pop stars in the entire universe, who should never have put their faces on their own album covers but did it anyway, always held a special, if awful, place in our heart.

England Dan went on to a successful country career, but who cares?  Mainstream country is an idiot's business. ED was slumming, but still we were happy for him, because (a) he looked better in a beard and cowboy hat than he did in leisure wear and (b) he would always be England Dan, and not Dan Seals, to us.

We don't know where John Ford Coley is tonight, but all three of his names must be hurting. We're all hurting.  England Dan, you weren't talking 'bout moving in, and you didn't want to change our lives, but you did it all the same. 

Rest in peace, friend.

 

Mrs UF: "He looks like the dog on the Muppet Show"

Tarpaulin, Part III

It's not easy to write a Bernie Taupin lyric.  We tried earlier, and at first it was no go.  Then we figured it out.  The secret is to focus on the mantra "I'm a fricking genius" until you go into what we call a "Taupin Trance."  In this heightened state of awareness Bernie-Ready lyrics will just drip off your fingers onto the keyboards, all of them ready to be transmogrified by Elton John's alchemical pop skills into radio platinum.

Getting to your "Bernie place" isn't easy.  We did it, but we've always been in touch with our inner Taupin.  Bathos comes naturally to us, as does putting words together in inadvertently stupid ways.  In short, we were born to the business.  Another problem is coming out of the Taupin Trance.  It's a plane of consciousness so high, and so inaccessible to mere mortals, that once you're up there it's hard to get back down.  You risk winding up like Syd Barrett, only without the drug casualty chic. 

Still, it's worth risking.  When somebody asked that guy who climbed Mt. Everlast why he did it he said, "Because I'm here."  That's the way we feel about it.  You can sit around like a regular fart, drinking Tang while wearing a diaper.  Or you can put on your wax wings and start flapping them, like that Orville Wright guy who got too close to the sun and fried like a chameleon in a jar on a summer day. 

As for us, we're writing another Taupintune right now.  It's called "Rose Burned by a Candle," and it's about Lady Di being murdered by Marilyn Monroe and the chorus goes:

And you tried to let your petals fly

But she burned them all away

You died in a tunnel in

Paris

She died in the hay

 

We're a frickin' genius.