DOUBLE WIDE

by Jim Parnell

Home on the Strange
or, "You just couldn't keep
your hands off it, could you?"

As High Cresticle of the Risen Gorge, First Church of the Undigested, it is my infinite pleasure to share with you a letter which is typical in its enthusiasm and theme, a missive representative of almost three quarters of the mail we receive here at the First Church of the Unrecommendable:
"Dear High Falute of the Unrecoverable,
I have received my Burt Batrach statue and have been petting it all over as instructed. As prophesied in the pamphlet, my personal inspiration from the Great C'Bubba soon seethed willfully through my bodily areas, engorging said unmentioned realms with a fiery desire to hear the Voice of the C'Bubba uplift and separate me from my last paycheck from the Wriggly Piggy.
Please publish more sayings and Deep Whizzdom in the Chronicles. Help me achieve true oblivion and ever-lasting moronitude ASAP, QED, vis-a-vis those awe-inspiring and nauseating views from His awful domain of space, time, and space-time -- that vertiginous, swirling vortex of His own steaming desires (a ghastly vision of surreality so nightmarish it would make a megadose of Brown Berkeley acid run yelping like a whipped dog from the mind-blasting conflagration), where Rod Serling was once heard to blurt out, "Holy Space Weasels, I must of OD'd on that shit!"
Dude! I just can't get enuf ... o' that fonky stuff,
Fred <fnord> Hammerbanger"
Another satisfied customer approaching Nirvana on a quantum chemical level. I'd like to stay and chat, but I must fire another flat of Batrachs for tomorrow's post. I leave you with more tales from the Great C'Bubba.
Now where'd I put the ergotine glaze...

Home on the Strange -- A vignette drawn from a Western Parallel...
The cowboy gently reins in his horse and halts on the ridge to take in the last light of day. Gently it dapples the cliffs and mesas in umber, scarlet, and azure. His lined face and drooping moustache, his worn boots and dusty garb all testify to years of hard work in hard weather. Yet there is wisdom and laughter, as well as proud self-reliance written deep in those leathery creases. He draws out a pouch of brown leaf and paper. One-handed, he absent-mindedly rolls a smoke.
He watches the suns race toward the horizon: one a bloated red giant, the other an angry white dwarf. Perpetually locked in Newton's dance, their failing light combines to cast gold over the box canyons and looming cacti.
Drawing deep on his smoke, he adjusts his hat, straightening the brim between the thumbs of his right hand. He nudges his mount. The not-quite mare unfurls her wings and the cowboy rides off into the sunsets, carried swiftly, steadily over the uncanny almost-landscape to his warm and familiar home, home on the strange.

Home of the Strange -- Not a cut and paste error. Well, maybe an ergotine paste error...

Oh give me a home
Where the drones do not roam
Where the weird and the wild ones do play.
Where never is heard
A banal, cliched word
And the dreary are too scared to stay.
Home, home of de-ranged!
Where the queer and the outre do play!
Where never a word
That could be understood
Would be uttered by ships in the bay!
(Huh?)
Holmes, homey, you're strange!
Ain't heard such bizaare stuff in days!
I'll be callin' those gents
With the butterfly nets
To be haulin' your nutty butt 'way!

Well, I thought it was avant-garde -- snif!

Home of the Strange (and charming moo-ons, and downer bozons) -- Just to prove I can ride a theme till it drops, by Gum!
Funny how things are connected...
Once upon a time there was a whole bunch of places to see, people to do, and things to go. This-all was collected into a tiny ball so small you couldn't even see it, but it was massive enough to suck your brains (and anything else that was too light) right into it.
Then, when there was enough sucked in gray matter and whatnot, the dang thing exploded, splattering cultural artifacts and artifeces all over the durn place. This is what's known among popular TV show hosts as the Big Sling, which is all part of the Unified Theory of American Cultural Imperialism.
This Imperialistic Vomiting Forth was so despised by the French that they conspired to have massive strikes every Christmas, just to hammer American corporate retail profits so bad that management would be forced (kicking and screaming) not to give their employees a raise.
Doggone those Snail Eaters...
So disgruntled Yankee workers began casting about for something to go, or people to do, and they decided they would find some of those cool places that the Big Sling splattered around in the first place.
But lo and behold, the Big Sling didn't splatter Amurrican Cultcha uniformly. It did it in globs and blats, virtually burying some locales in places to see, etc., and leaving others as devoid of things to go as the dark side of the moon (great album, BTW).
Bad news for us Gringos: it's hard to achieve critical beer-hall mass on something as big as North America.
And now, every place is gettin' culturally pasteurized. Only New York (too damn far to drive) and Los Angeles (WAY-Y-Y too damn far to drive) have anything worth going anymore.
And even they're losing it. Cripes, it's a bleak picture quantum cultural mechanics paints: Since we didn't start out with enough people to do, the Big Sling will keep on expanding into the Great Nothingness of Daytime TV until there ain't nothing left.
The Meat Death of the Universe.
The Bart said it best, "Bummer, man!"

"Ramblings with No Meaning, but You Bought The Book, Fool"
- The Great C'Bubba

You get what you pay for. Now go find something better to do fer chrissakes!

Jim Parnell slays bugs for a living -- the ones that live in your computer. One of these days, we're going to find out where he lives. Then he'll be sorry he ever messed with us, yeah. He's going to regret it, just wait and see, yeah...

You can e-mail Jim Parnell at bubba@recomnet.net