So much for the days of knickers and short sleeves.
I’ve gotten out every day this week, including two short trail rides — the first on a Steelman cyclocross bike, the second on the DBR hardtail — and one short but luxurious hike on a day so warm I could roll up my sleeves and go bareheaded, get a little vitamin D into the old chrome-dome.
A fella has to make hay while the sun shines, don’t you know. The weather wizards predict a wintry one-two punch this weekend, with the Duke City getting the worst of it on Sunday.
His latest is about wearing the mask, something he was doing long before The Bug® came calling. When he’s not writing, editing, or wrangling his teenage son, Hal runs a jackass ranch, which means moving large quantities of hay around and about. Seems it helps to have something covering your face-holes to keep them from clogging up tighter than a bull’s butt in fly time.
In fact, everything I know about masks I have learned from hay. I’ve gotta figure over the years I’ve moved more than a quarter-million tons of the stuff by hand, and have eaten my share of dust, mold, pollen, fungi, actual grass and alfalfa, and no doubt been exposed to salmonella, tularemia and hantavirus in the process. At some point I started wearing a bandana, and then along came the face/neck gaiters. I’ve not moved any serious amount of hay without one since.
I mostly move serious amounts of words, which is easier on the snotlocker, and the lower back, too. Although I’ve thought on occasion while penning something particularly outrageous that wearing a catcher’s mask might be smart.
S. Clay Wilson made Robert Crumb look like Charles M. Schultz.
Captain Pissgums and his Pervert Pirates. The Checkered Demon and Star-Eyed Stella. Ruby the Dyke. Dude didn’t push the envelope, he lit it up and pissed it out.
I was a fiend for underground cartoons in their heyday, and still am, now that I think of it. My personal fave is Gilbert Shelton, probably because he paid at least as much attention to being funny as to being controversial.
There was R. Crumb, of course. And Bobby London, Vaughn Bodē, Spain Rodriguez, Rand Holmes, Dan O’Neill, Dave Sheridan, Skip Williamson, Jay Lynch, Greg Irons, Robert Williams … shit, the list goes on and on and on. Many were outrageous, and quite a few were funny, too.
But Wilson was out there, all by himself. Even Crumb knew it, and he could punch the squares’ buttons as well as anyone.
Interviewed in the early 1990s for The Comics Journal by the underground-comics aficionado Bob Levin, Mr. Wilson called comics “a great visual art form,” adding, “Primarily, I’m trying to show that you can draw anything you want.”
I took a page from Wilson’s book once, drawing a vile caricature of myself doing something unspeakable and faxing it to a publisher who had wronged me, as publishers are wont to do. I don’t recall whether the act achieved my purpose, but at that particular moment I felt that I could draw anything I wanted.
S. Clay Wilson died Sunday in San Francisco. He was 79.
We’re all bozos on this bus. Some of us more than others.
Well, I see the SS boys couldn’t keep Impeachy the Clown away from the TV all day yesterday, not even with hourly delivery of Happy Meals soaked in Thorazine.
No, he got word that his Name was being taken in vain, and he clenched his tiny fists and screeched like a gassy toddler, ordering aides to paint iguanas with the names “Raskin,” “Neguse,” and “Castor,” then biting off their heads. The iguanas, not the aides.
The House managers made Impeachy’s second-string legal team look like a couple of drunks pulled randomly from stools at Mar-a-Lago’s 19th hole. Their arguments for not going to trial were basically:
He didn’t do it.
Free speech! He was just sayin’, y’know?
Missed him, missed him, now you gotta kiss him!
Partisan Democrats!
Etc.
The Democrats said: “Let’s go to the tape!” Of which there was plenty.
Jesus H., etc. The writers at “SNL” can take this week off. They can just run with the transcript on this one. Maybe get Horny the Organic Shaman to do the cold open.
I know, I know; Impeachy’s tools could go full-on Clarence Darrow or just sit there and mumble “Fuck you” to everything the House managers say. The outcome is preordained.
But if they ever want to get honest work Castor and Schoen are going to need some more time at the practice tee. And they’ll get it, too. Impeachy is going to stiff them for this shit, and they’re gonna have to sue his fat ass for nonpayment, like everybody else.
So, we start the week with a shot of seltzer in the snoot for Impeachy the Clown and follow it up with a squeeze to the wheeze of our local Bozos and their e-buses.
Hur-ry, hur-ry, hur-ry! It may not be The Greatest Show on Earth, but it is another episode of Radio Free Dogpatch!
Yes, it’s free! Join the expectant crowd gathering now as we stop here on [Intellectual Property Theft Street]. Live in The Future: It’s just starting now. As for The Past, well — we’ve been taken for a ride down the Mother Road before.
P L A Y R A D I O F R E E D O G P A T C H
• Technical notes: This time around I cheapskated the podcast using an Audio-Technica ATR2100-USB mic (a model since discontinued) and Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack. Editing was in Apple’s GarageBand, with an assist from Auphonic. Sound effects courtesy of Zapsplat, including the background music, “Waiting Game” by Dave Miles. Special guest appearances by The Firesign Theatre and ZZ Top, who did not know they were making special guest appearances, and if you don’t tell them, we won’t either. Let’s just keep this moment of simulated exhilaration locked under our wigs.
Mad Blog Media 