M o n d a y M u d
Volume Uno Issue 19, July 26th, 1999
Vacation
All I ever wanted
Vacation
Had to get away
Vacation
Meant to be spent alone
- The Go-Gos
The other day, I ran into an existential chum with a bottle of rum and we wound up thinking all night.
A mutual acquaintance of ours was throwing a "A Midsummer Night's Dream" bash as a reminder that we better get in a little fun before the Vikings head to Mankato and maybe save someone the airfare to Melbourne (check the archives).
Everyone was supposed to dress like their favorite character from Shakespeare's play and even act out the character depending on how drunk, or desperate for attention they were. I applaud the effort of my friend Greg Theseus and his lovely (but pushy) wife Carol Hippolyta but sometimes I wonder when they're gonna sweep their "English-Major" pasts under the proverbial rug and get on with real life, like me.
I mean, it took me years for that "college thing" to wear off but eventually it did and soon I was as crude and as insensitive as the next guy and it felt good. I finally found myself not giving a shit about fine art and was soon free to read the comics and watch prime-time TV once again.
I remember the moment exactly, I was standing in front of one of my favorite Gauguin paintings at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris for what must have been the 5th time in my life and I remember thinking "Big deal." I turned to admire another favorite of mine by Wassil Kandinsky and sez to myself, I sez "What is this shit?"
Next thing you know I'd hopped on le Metro looking for a place that sold Cuban cigars, Cabernet Sauvignon, Moroccan hashish and love by the hour. I spent the rest of the week in Amsterdam and was so broke that I had to sleep in the movie theater of the Milky Way Hash Bar on my last night. Hey, I'm not complaining, they were running Austin Powers that night, yeah baby.
Oh yeah, I was telling a story, right?
Because I'd ditched all that Shakespeare crap along with all that post-impressionist poo, I no longer had a clue what characters were in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." All I could conjure up was an image of Mickey Rooney and that didn't seem right so I just went as Qui-Gon Jinn, the Jedi master from The Phantom Menace (all I have to do is cut & paste from Monday Mud, Issue 14 May 24, 1999) ........ since all I really had to do to prepare was not shave and stay in my robe all day, which is my weekend routine anyway.
It was BYOB which is somewhat of a problem these days since I'm on the Denny Green Diet and beer isn't one of the better things to be consuming because of the carbs. I love drinking wine but it just seems too pretentious to be sipping my Cabernet at a damn party, well, it was a pretentious party but I just felt self-conscious about it. I just brought a six-pack of Reddi-wip and a couple strawberries (just to make it look good).
Sometimes it throws people off when you bring Redi-wip to a party but it can be a good conversation starter. When I walked out into the pool area, a young thing dressed as Hermia walked up and said,
"Oh Lysander, thou has broughtest the Redi-wip for the orgy!"
I was stunned for a moment but then did one of those "should'a had a V8" things when I realized that I'd just figured out "Use #1,001" of "1,001 Uses" that they brag about on the can. All these years I'd been stuck at "Use #999" till someone told me about the strawberry thing. Then, on this sultry Midsummer Night I finally get to the end."
The conversation was going pretty well at that point till an old nemesis of mine, Keith Oberon breaks it up with a dose of reality and a dose of trivia.
"Hey Gather T. dressed as Qui-Gon Jinn again I see. Say, how are the wife and kids doing?"
Hermia glares at me and says "Wife and kids? And I suppose your name isn't really Qui-Gon Jinn either?" and she stormed off.
I shouted across the patio to her "Have you seen Eyes Wide Shut yet?"
She comes back "Oooh, have you? That Tom Cruise is TO DIE FOR!!!!"
It's funny, that seems to fit Nicole better but I decide not to push it.
Oberon brings out the heavy artillery, the dose of trivia followed by a dose of bummer news.
"So Gather T., I see you're still addicted to the Reddi-wip."
"For your information Oberon, I'm not addicted, I can quit anytime I want ..."
I tip the can up, bottoms up, and with a loud cappuccino-maker sound, take a 40/60 hit of Reddi-wip and, the gas of the gods, pure nitrous-oxide. For a moment I'm silent, eyes closed, head & shoulders weaving in a hypnotic counter-clockwise motion, mouth foamin' like a damn rabid dog, and I utter the infamous words.......
"... I just don't want to."
Oberon was out to bum me out, to wreck my Reddi-wip dream and he knew how to do it. Then he dropped the bombshell ...
"So did'jya hear that Aaron "Bunny" Lapin died today?"
My eyes were wide shut but now, man, they were wide open.
"What??? Are you serious????"
Hermia looked confused, she said "Who's he, who's that Bunny guy?"
I was stunned, I was weaving from top to bottom, Oberon knew he'd scored big and was gonna finish the job with cocktail party trivia.
"Oh, he was only the inventor of whipped cream in a can. He was 85. He had homes in New York City, Miami and Los Angeles. He died of heart failure at a Los Angeles hospital."
I felt like I was going to be sick. I groped around for a patio chair but it only found one of those cheap chaise lounges from Target that I can never figure how to adjust, especially with a head full of RW and heart full of grief.
I knew it was bumming people out, someone even turned off the music to make it more dramatic.
With the limited energy I had left I uttered this information as if someone had just sent me an email from the Associated Press....
"Reddi-wip was first sold in 1948 by St. Louis milkmen...." I let out a little cough, Hermia sat next to me and started rubbing my back, trying to comfort me. Apparently I hadn't set up the patio chair very well because the whole thing clicked down to the 5:00 position and she fell into the pool. Her top came off and someone turned the music back on, if I remember right it was "Friday I'm in Love" by The Cure. She quickly put her top back on, the music shut off again someone doused the citronella torches and I continued " ... "Distribution quickly expanded throughout the United States and Canada." I became very choked up and began weeping the remainder of my trivia knowledge. "And now, one of every two cans of aerosol topping now purchased in these United States .... is Reddi-wip."
Oberon stepped forward cleared his throat, adjusted his horn-rimmed glasses and began presenting his soliloquy of Reddi-wip trivia "In addition to packaging Reddi-wip, Lapin's Clayton Corp. made and sold its own valves for the whipped cream enterprise. Clayton was one of the first companies to put shaving cream in an aerosol can, but Lapin decided not to market the product because he didn't want to compete with shaving cream makers who might buy his valves ... hello? Hello?
Oberon hadn't noticed that during his speech the entire crowd from the patio cleared into the house where there was nothing but the sound of cappuccino makers and 1,001 uses of the Kama Sutra of aerosol toppings.
Later on as the crowd thinned out I was just about to do the same, Puck was standing there in back of my cheap Target chair said "Gather T. don't I know your name?"
Hey! It was my existential chum with a bottle of rum!
I was very excited because after about 1,300 words I hadn't planned on writing, I was finally going to get back to the point of the story!
It was my old college chum Rob Goodfellow. He was dressed as Puck, which was a pretty easy costume, just a pair of Old Navy drawstring shorts and the letters "PUCK" painted across his chest. He'd been dribbling rum down his chest so at this point, the "P" looked like an "F".
We caught up on old times, reminiscing about all that Liberal Arts crap and how wonderful it was to be free of the shackles of a higher education. Rob was a Philosophy major and the last I'd heard, he was heading to Harvard to get his Ph.D.
Turns out he changed his direction quite a bit after he moved out to the Boston area. One day he saw a job opening for a janitorial position at the University and landed the gig. I guess one of the full-time janitors turned out to be some kind of math genius, fell in love with a beautiful but brainy English chick and decided to hang up his floor buffing machine.
The story seemed interesting to me, partly because it had a familiar ring to it, and partly because I found out that if you pull the green tops off strawberries along with the peels and put them in a microwave for 45 seconds, they make some damn good smoke. I was stoned out of my freaking gourd and I still had my reserve can of Reddi-wip stashed in the big pocket of my robe and I hadn't even hit the Bacardi 151 yet. Rob had a can with him too, out in his '76 Plymouth Volaré.
Rob told me that his boss, a guy named Spence, reassigned him from the mathematics building to the dental school. Well, it wasn't long before he was riding the nitrous train.
After he got a good buzz going he would go back to buffing the tile floors and soon became mesmerized by the circular motion of the buffing machine. He said it was very Zen-like and it soon began to change his life.
He lit the pipe that we'd pieced together from a hollowed-out strawberry and the stem from the aerosol can and took a big hit. I was anxious to have another hit myself and it seemed like he was toking down on strawberry peels forever.
I felt like I knew the answer but I had to ask.
"What happened to Spence, your boss?"
He slowly exhaled and for a minute it smelled like cherries, no ... like strawberries, like that cheap strawberry shampoo I always seem to buy at Target.
"I don't know ... one day he just .... disappeared, he vanished, he hobbled back to his janitor closet, tapping his pipe against his hip then putting it back in his pocket. He walked no more than three more feet when he mysteriously vanished! Disappeared right before my very eyes, I'm not talking metaphorically or anything like that. This was pure Star Trek transport stuff. Funny thing is, when I asked around, nobody had ever heard of Spence. There was no record of him on the payroll system and he had for sure never been to any of the after work happy hours. It worked out OK for me though because I copped his coffee mug and since he had left the keys for his car, I took that too. It wasn't the greatest, a '78 Plymouth Volaré wagon but it got me around for the past few years."
I was sitting there like Clevis, the Slack-jawed Yokel wondering if I'm going to have to add hyper-text links to my website just so people could follow this freaking story.
"How 'bout you Gather T., what have you been up to for the past few years"
"Oh, pretty much the same as you I suppose."
I took my first hit of the 151 and it helped clear the taste of strawberries from my palette, actually it enhanced it, nothing like pure cane sugar on strawberries, the next logical step would be some Reddi-wip and some shortcake. I was getting a severe case of the munchies.
"Hey Rob, you wouldn't happen to have any shortcake in your Volaré would you?"
"Naw, I'm on the Pete Carroll Diet, too many carbs."
"So, Rob this deal with the circles and Zen and all that, what's the deal? Are you a Zen Buddhist now or what?"
"Yeah, pretty much, except I've figured out a few loopholes. I combine it with a little Capitalism so that I can indulge myself in electronics and other material gadgets up the Yin Yang, then I throw in a dash of Christianity so I don't stay out too late. I reach enlightenment and shit though my pure & simple physical work but when I get home I like to get high and channel surf on my new board, a 55-inch High Definition rear projection Toshiba outfitted with DVD and a killer Dolby Digital Surround System, surf's up Dude!"
He took another long toke off the strawberry when his alarm clock went off on his watch.
"What's that? You gotta roll?"
"No, That's just to remind me to set up my DVD recorder back in Boston."
He pulled out a sleek Nokia cell phone, plugged it into a Hewlett Packard Palmtop PC, punched a few keys, a really cool pie chart graphic came and swept clockwise a full 360 degrees and then shut down automatically.
"What are you recording?" I asked as I chugged some more Bacardi.
"Oh, VH1 is running this acoustic Dave Matthews concert ...."
I did a spit-take that would have made Danny Thomas proud as the 75.5% alcohol spirits tore through the flames of the citronella torches, igniting the sky to full daylight conditions for close to 30 seconds.
Rob never one to miss a chance to inhale any type of second-hand smoke took a deep breath and said,
"Mmmmmm, I love the smell of Napalm in the wee hours."
As stoned as I was at the time, it just didn't seem all that funny, maybe it was the confusion of the Dave Matthews factor that was messing me up.
"By the way Gather T., I found the Monday Mud by accident a few weeks back when I was surfing for porn and I think it's just f-----g (fucking) hilarious. It reminds me of Howard Stern."
I did a spit-take that would have made Danny Thomas proud as the 75.5% alcohol spirits tore through the flames of the citronella torches, igniting the sky to full daylight conditions for close to 30 seconds.
Rob never one to miss a chance to inhale any type of second-hand smoke took a deep breath and said,
"Mmmmmm, I love the smell of Napalm in the wee hours."
As stoned as I was at the time, it just didn't seem all that funny, maybe it was the confusion of the Dave Matthews factor that was messing me up.
"Howard Stern?" I thought. Is that what my rejection of the Liberal Arts has brought me down to? For God's sake I used to listen to Jackson Browne! Of course ... he did do that "Rosie" song, maybe he did start this whole degeneration of the American male.
Not to knock Howard Stern either, the guy can be funny I suppose. When it comes down to embarrassing career-desperate celebrities about their sex lives, getting lesbians to make out in the studio, and fondling strippers from behind, the guy's a fucking genius!
Maybe I've absorbed too much pop culture and it's time to retool and reboot. That's why I've decided to take a brief vacation, stock up on some classic cultural materials from that place where they let you borrow books; my Gregorian Chant CD and maybe a Mozart Opera, oh, and maybe the last one from Fountains of Wayne or the new Tom Petty; bring a no-frills guitar and one pick; and a book of classic art, maybe some Ruebens nudes or something, I haven't thought a whole lot about it yet. Oh, yeah, and some strawberries.
Then I'll head up to land of sky blue waters and do a little writing. Unfortunately I don't have a laptop so I'll have to remember how to operate one of those pens. What the hell, Abe Lincoln used to write on a fucking shovel for Christsakes, what am I bitching about?
Actually a friend offered to lend me a 286 laptop PC that doesn't boot up, said maybe if I get in and mess with the autoexec.bat and config.sys files maybe I can get it rolling. I appreciate the offer with all my heart but I'm an Apple user .... it would be easier for me to write on a fucking shovel!
Next Week "Fear & Loathing
in Paul Bunyan Land"
But check out the archives before you shut down!
02/15/99 Orientation
02/22/99 Smoke on the Water, Billy Ocean &
EBay
03/01/99 Dream Weavin', Sgt Snorkel's Secret
Code, Ruby Tuesday's
03/08/99 Styrofoam Circles, Exchanging Coffee
At Lunds, Somewhere on the East Coast
03/15/99 The Never Ending Story Part 1, Corrections
and Influences
03/22/99 The Never Ending Story "Part
Deux"
03/29/99 Summer Movie Preview Contest
04/05/99 "Hey, It's a Cult!", Amateur
Theology, An Unused Cartoon From the Early 80's, Contest Answer
04/12/99 Reverting to Old Ways, Going Off on
Commercials, The Masters Tournament
04/19/99 Special Piece of Crap Issue: Life
During Wartime, It's a Gas! Dock-umentary Preview
04/26/99 Previous Issue Apology, No More Horny
Hillbillies for Prez, Aging Rock Stars, MP3 Files
05/03/99 Guest Writer Gus Grimstone Simplifies
the Mysteries of the Universe With A Gut Punch
05/10/99 Writer's Block, Television vs TV,
Stamping Out Crime with Sporks & Scotch Tape
05/24/99 Star Wars, nothin' but Star Wars,
if they should bar wars, don't let them end.
06/07/99 Amnesia & Other Excuses, Film
Critics on Weed, Last Random Notes
06/14/99 Surly Rantings; Yes Virginia, there
is a Rastler Governor; The Clipboard Gauntlet
06/28/99 Is Dave Matthews Cool?; Surfin' Safari;
Safety Trip Tips; Patch Adams & Other Random Notes
07/12/99 Summertime Blues, Unemployment Fantasy
#1, Still on Dave Matthews Case, Catholic Rock Festivals
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