Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental, a play in three acts.

Act the first

Lord Boomer, Viscount of Foxglove: Bob Dylan remains The Finest Exemplar of the Cosmic Greatness*, whilst John Lennon is his worthy apprentice who in some learned circles, surpasses the master, & the Lady Yoko is a vastly underrated reservoir of non-migraine songcraft.

"What about me, I stung like a bee, chump."

Miss Prunella Vulgaris, The Duchess of Hammer-on-Dulcimer, esteemed member of the Peonage: /yawn/

Juan, the Earl of Valdez, less esteemed member of the Peonage: /Olafian metal face/

Lord Boomer, Viscount of Foxglove: Well, I never! /stomps/


Act the second

Baron Bald of Aquarius: Access to the Sacred Wisdom of Our Age will reveal to the universe how to be saved, love & peace, man, I saw Hair back in the day. I have a big house. My taxes are too high.

Miss Prunella Vulgaris, The Duchess of Hammer-on-Dulcimer, esteemed member of the Peonage: /rolls eyes like that young chick in the Exorcist, was there pea soup, who can say, not I, your humble playwright/

Juan, the Earl of Valdez, less esteemed member of the Peonage: Oh, do tell!


Act the third

"The World devolves into chaos, oil & water ever vanishing,
yet when the last Arbiter of Things by a Demon ravishing
boils in its own bloody red,
Authority now lies dead
& the survivors survive on glorious Power Chording --
-- & processed food, how ironically ironic!"

fin.

Something wicked this way comes

Get ready for the newest volume of Choose Your Own Death, Jack Russell's Inferno or We Built This City On Dead Eardrums don't bore me with fussy details like no Slick or you'll ruin the joke, jerk. Speaking of the apocalypse, check out the Hi Super Nintendo Chalmers I'm Learnding! available where Hussein X speechified El Destructo the other night:

Does not require embiggen clearance, Lester.

Difficult to choose, but my current favorite might be the Power, Ideology and Legitimacy course that mentions Al-Qaeda, communism, fascism and "other utopian ideologies." Insert own punchline here.

It was a dark and stormy blend*

The horror that is reality begins at 1:25.

*we'll see if this Gothick-style Kynge's Brew is worthie of thy Crown.

SIP

Verily, yum!

Let us sit poor Mr. Rensenbrink & what he crystallizes aside for a moment. The mighty Agalloch was indeed, flesh vibrating on bone, spinal shivers of darkthroning in the Northwestern woods, earthquake heart, & epic kudos to the teenageristic dude who didn't check his iPhone LOL LEET NOOB OMG TXT once, air clawing guitaring from the first chord to the last. Metal blood flows in your veins, son. Sniff.

Now, what is life but a crucible of hitting the post**, perpetually reborn into one more inevitably mishit strike such as Don Anderson dealing with broken strings not once, not twice, but thrice, thus we cling to this illusory salve, musical (& sporting) over the political if you're not megalomaniacal. Aside: what then of Mario Kempes & Argentina, the ever-elusive victory? The other, necessary half lest toes curl & eyelids flake off in a gibbering madness that can do nothing but wait, grinning, for the red giant to stride over the earth.

**for those not in the know, if the Dutch had scored in the 90th minute, the odds are decent that they would have won the World Cup, their reward fractured skulls oozing bloody pulp via agents of the military junta wielding that shiny trophy. Or not, but it makes for compelling storytelling.  

Mr. Ligotti's right, but I'm going to enjoy the deception as long as I can.

Roll d6 for damage

"Wanna see something really scary?"

"Yawn."

"Nooooooooo!"

1. So any of you angsty rural cracker meth heads cooking up names for venting the non-sequential, four-suit hand you've nelsonmuntzly been dealt via the time-honored & fiscally-lucrative grindcore tradition, remember where you first saw Tranny Fisticuffs.

I'm looking at you, Proto-Bros. (Hey, that's a good one, too.)

2. This is what tags & tracks us peonage:

If The Man's local HR rampaging technobot minions had the biggest Bon Scotts of them all, this is what should tag & track us peonage:

Harder to slack from a sack of Olympian stomach acid, n'est-ce pas?

3. Storm of the Yeti!

4. Look man complete stranger patron client customer client, when the staff is Juan Valdezing over bunga bunga, Son of Qa/Kha/Gha-daf(f)i artwork & Cleveland hitman (woman, in this case) folklore, how about you might as well not jump in with tales of there being neither hitmen nor La Cosa Nostra only FBI operatives. As the Peonage has long been aware of the likes of Beatrix the Bilderberger & her Masonic Illuminati operatives, you're redundantly simply being redundant. 

 

 





5. Reader's choice! Throw those child's bones! Everyone's a wiener!*




6. One day till catharsis woo! 

*hey, I gave your ass an out before more metal. Taisez-vous, connard.

The indifferent cosmos ain't so much after all

'tis the only plausible explanation for this so-called serendipitous return of winter in light of the impending holy service to be held this Saturday evening.

Oh, a bunch of crazy crap happened yesterday & is likely happening now. I'm sure someone somewhere is raging about it & I'd wager some of them are right on. For those about to type, we salute you.



Two days till catharsis woo!

Speaking of death, bah & humbug. Sure, the library's "vault" is a not-that-underground, asbestos-infested rathole, but I'm not that blind, so yours truly wins the dystopia, triumphant hardee har har.

One Seventeen Bourbon(s), One Twenty-Three Scotch(es) and One Six Cases of Beer

Whew! I can finally wipe off the dust & put that to good use.

On a more less not-all-that serious note, folks bag on goopers as being smart as a sack of really dumb rocks, but this is ingeniously supervillain, for booze, like porn, is coated with a year's supply of Recession Wax. I'm not saying the loot won't ooze to the usual suspects 'cause duh, thus my fellow Ohioans, please join me in a soon-to-be more expensive drink, not like you weren't gonna get blotto anyway 'cause you can't afford hookers n' blow like said usuals especially after hearing from fellow peonage about the technocracy's local HR bot layering red cake razzmatape (shorter: don't you or your future-winning children even *think* about getting really x 3 sick who do you think you are

"First, your shorter isn't very short. Second, everyone already knows this."

You again.



expendable worm, a said usual? [ed. note: deathly ill? Non, though it would be handy to have some basement junk to hawk on the Legitimate Businessman's Market, mayhap I'll become a pretzeldent]) at yesterday's staff meeting that I never attend & now I wish I had 'cause I rather enjoy a zesty snifter of angry blood ritual & a chortle chaser, this calls for some metal facing.  



Three days till catharsis woo!

Gov. Kasich & the Booze Czar (do we have one?) explain the finer points of scamola to a filthy rube. (h/t Charles)

When Zesta Met Enzyte*

Copulate, midlife crises, copulate a lot, pop & slop that help to ahhh
are we still freedomizing Libya here? Dropping Lockheed? Drop lite beer!

& that's my informed comment on crap I'm much uninformed on 'cause weekends are hermetically sealed to keep sanity fresh & delicious. Mmmm, brains.

*apologies if you came here for greying naughtiness. Not now, I've a headache.

Why board games are better than real life

A crawling, tentacled horror of bulbous slime from the beyond the stars or an Armani-clad huckster, I know which one I'd fire upon. Au moins the former only wants to eat you.

Hole in the sky cosmic ceiling of consciousness & my wallet but not my heart well maybe just a little one

Man, it's hot.

Sweet merciful crap yesterday was unseasonably sweaty, Right Guard aplenty, that rhymes & you know that rhymes don't hang me for my crimes such as this café sunburn darkthroning in the woods with his chicken dinner a mere seventh of a fortnight earlier.

Man, it's not.

OMC*WHOATEALLTHESNOW!?!?!?!?

*Oh My Cthulhu



I did have a lovely dream last night as lovely goes for moi parce qu'I never dream about naked chicken dinners it's not fair, though, after coolly sloughing off the shock of sting from a giant psychedelic wasp, I watched Cryuff's miracle flight pock noted thespian Stan Stamenkovic into the great beyond blood & bone splattered across the continental drift, man, I loathed loathed that diving bastard. Kai Haaskivi motherfucker.

Cleveland has now decided, after years & years of low-key thee green boozeroony, to party for their right to fight.

 



Dear Moneyed Jerks of America,

For the low low cost of one-half of a quarter of a bomb (this is going to go well -- for the usual suspects, that is, chortle), you too can buy one gently-used Baltimore Poe House & Museum. You'll be the envy of all your friends at the next passive-aggressive charity gala. Don't make Li'l Edgar cry.

Ever your slacker,

Employee 78911265-B-27Q

The Importance of Being Awful

I had to go commit certain deeds

No, I was no gulpy or flat nibbed by some miltonian. A dab of the holywater sprinkler ye deserve, for I was with me lackin suffering a Cleveland particular.* Puckering, this shirkster is? Cost ye a sprat to find out.

*how we received a calamity day (a truly beautiful phrase that conjures up so much more than the sober 'snow day') & the lunatic offspring didn't is one of the Eight Wonders of the Postmodern World. Perhaps I need to rethink the err-on-the-side-of-worthless of the pretzeldent. What, three of a kind already? He's the most whimsical gent of the season.

Calamitious addendum: stuff like this

Ross Local Schools Superintendent Greg Young said that while he’ll be glad to have the calamity days restored, in the long term he believes that American school years need to add more days in order for the U.S. to be globally competitive [ed. note: Winning the Future™] and more in line with the educational systems in other industrial nations.

& this

Part of the impetus behind reducing the number of calamity days, he said, was because each day is important to a child’s education.

always chuckles my gullet unless my electric eye biology somehow missed the memo about papers meaning jack sprat when the jobs shuffle midst where low, low salaries & non-copping benny hills are tolerated you fuckin' kids better be readin', ritin', rithmetickin' & not teaching yourselves Japanese what nerds I raised sob video gamin' (oh crap, I do too, bad example, bad, oh crap, let's go kill some zombies) each day is real important to your indoctrination education but once you're in it's not 'cause funny how six (gasp!) schoolhouse rock sick days (quelle horreur!) gets a sternly worded letter flush with such bunk (importance!) sloughed off by yours truly & the peonage also yours truly gets told to stay cough home cough wheez a sick worker's not a productive worker here drink this hand sanitizer but watch your allotment, we're watching you squeeze squeeze, it does tricks.


A kick in the pants, only a 7.0 on the dive

Speaking of turning doing tricks, even with an expanded playoff format**, can any non-inebriated observer Nostradamus my adopted footie squad DC United -- "even with Branko! & fredsux redux?***" -- getting a participatory gold star? Oh, regressive, you're so mean, having all that talent go west, young man.

**Dear MLS, there's no non-fiduciary need to imitate the basketball or the hockey & their Everyone Gets A Trophy raison d'moolah, but, there it is. A cynic can only hope Real Salt Lake happens ad infinitum.

***now there's a t-shirt idea if ever I get shitcanned. Hope I won't owe royalties.

Oh, who's gonna drink from Lord Anschutz's cup? Don't know, but I'd lay a few bucks down that it won't be the best XI.


Time to kick back, drinks some beers & smoke some weed

 

Not that I've ever increased the increasingly private reserve eww gross American product, a city & two state universities being my last three employers, but now I'm really not going to unless you count chowing down on heavily-salted crap I bought at the grocery store whilst glued to Fux Soccer & the pages of tomes bought in another enterprise of the non-nourriture variety, wow, I really do want to win the future, unlike you Thursday drunkards rerouting precious public transportationistas though you do buy copious amounts of booze I retract the hate you're the real heroes you baseball-capped bros future boardroom & cabinet masterminds. It's too late for this greybeard, if only I hadn't kept my kids home from school when they were vomiting. I'm the worst parent ever & you can rest assured that's exactly what I'll be working on while away from la bibliothèque, swear.

Who is driving? Oh my God, bear is driving! How can that be? A Play In One-Half Act

Characters
Miss Prunella Vulgaris, The Duchess of Hammer-on-Dulcimer, esteemed member of the Peonage
Juan, The Earl of Valdez, less esteemed member of the Peonage
Bear, bait and loveable ursine scamp
Snowpocalypse, noted archfiend

Library, interior, nighttime. SNOWPOCALYPSE's Artificial Contraption of Contrapuntal Precipitation has trapped DUCHESS and EARL in a Doppler Spiral of Infernal Immobility.

EARL: What a gaff. I feel like I'm in a bad episode of Placeholder Place.

DUCHESS: But you repeat yourself.

EARL: 'tis another snow job, 'tis.

SNOWPOCALYPSE:  I snow what you mean.

DUCHESS and EARL: Snowpocalypse! You hold a candle to the devil!

SNOWPOCALYPSE: I know you are. But what am I.

Snow continues to fall.

EARL: You won't get away with th -- hey!

DUCHESS: Are you two alright?

EARL: Where's the fucking stage manager? Fake snow, dumbass, fake! It's hot as fuck in here, this is gonna melt and now I smudged my makeup. Wardrobe!

SNOWPOCALYPSE: Erm, should I stay in character?

DUCHESS: Shhh! The audience can hear you!

SNOWPOCALYPSE: What audience?

DUCHESS: Good point. Anyway, to wrap this up, Bear stopped toking long enough to drive his super off-road dayglo horse-drawn carriage through the drifts to save the Peonage, keeping the world safe for the noble pursuit of book learning. Bravo.

SNOWPOCALYPSE: We're still getting paid, right?

DUCHESS rolls her eyes as SNOWPOCALYPSE shakes his fist towards the heavens in a combination of haughty hubris and ash-in-mouth defeat like all supervillains do after finding out there's no cold cut tray backstage.

fin

Rancidity Redux, Or, You Think Coming Up With Crap A Few Times A Week Is Easy?

Rawhide hitting the leather, everyone & their hipster sporting sandals with the attendant smelly feet, the gently creeping bloom of color, body odor, roaring motorcycle gangs, suburban crackers thumping faux street cred from their tricked-out rides -- does anyone remember Zeppelin? -- yes, the diabolical sun is gearing up to make its annual rounds round town.

Which means this oldie but baddie torn out of the great web in the sky:

Spring has certainly sprung, how can I tell?
Tolling of a bell, 60° hell?
Absence of ice or a blizzard of snow,
Moonboot prints as far as the eye'll go?
Gasp! No! something far more insidious,
Vilest demon haunting each of us!
A puff of smoke, a whiff of gas that kills
First flowering buds, birds on window sills.
Servant of the state, what on concrete lie?
Three or four butts, wrappers, clean that pig sty!
Infernal grinding, black cacophony
Of filth in our eyes, morn's dark misery.
Grimy combustion, gusts kicking up dust,
Lord, our bane has returned! thy words we trust:
Run, run from the Beast, faster, not slower!
The Devil's creation, the leaf blower!

Sniff, that's bloody awful doggerel.
Sniff squared, sweet printemps retch.
Logarithmic infinity sniff, what, no room for Roombas? Ten buck old fucker claws. There aren't that many cig & stogie butts down & out, buttheads.

GRIM REAPER UPDATE:



Whaddya know, it is raining.

You gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em

"The bottle was this big."

Twenty years ago next week, I'll have been acquainted with my sometimes-better-half for twenty years, I'm not crazy, ree-ee-dundancy! You're the one that's crazy! re-ee-dundancy! Why now & not then? Vacation Winning the Future™, duh, plus last night we digressed & ended up regaling the lunatic offspring with misty "cigarette" smoke memories of our first concert together that June oh wherefore art thou Richfield Coliseum sniff



You say this Layne cat's not an H-ed up invalid?

& autumnal tales of visiting drunken debauchery pre-posterity back at the home of the Gerry Faust Invitational. They're already warped, so relax, Mrs. Lovejoy, & I'm still pissed I lost that fucking game of Tecmo Bowl to the RA 'cause the fucking CPU didn't credit me with a safety on the scoreboard even though I sacked that sonofabitch in the endzone my first loss ever. Sweet Cthulhu, Yukon Jack is bloody awful (Uno!) but that gent was sure kinder to underagers as was the Illusion-during-MNF-halftime hawker (I remember when 28 was old, Dr. Pepper) than the field stabber or whatever probably more colorful less accurate sobriquet we saddled him with. Can't avoid the Gauntlet of Doom if we're to booze, dood, all because I chose a blind date over a game of cards & ended up nukyular instead of dead in a black metal ditch.* Now that's gambling.

*in truth, I'd likely be a peon somewhere else. Habitual ATF no-nos ain't cheap.

Aw man, I think the clock is slow

'tis cold, a blustery auster, the Hyades bring rain, & the Promethean gift of microcircuit technology allows the holy warbles of Alice to ring out. In headphones, those ear buds are mighty uncomfortable, don't know how the whipper-snappers do it. Feel like writing, aesthetic's right (conveniently ignoring current locale, death of all work, work minus), but the pen is drier than the sword of Ozymandias. Birmingham-West Brom it is.

Porn, pizza rolls, pulpy pages, penalty kicks & prestidigitation, parsimoniously.

O, Mighty Kasich, teach me how to slack whilst lifting loot just like you.

When you concretely know that carved in stone but with the skill of a free market disembodied hand not a haughty unionized (re: teachers, read: teachers, not the educational system itself, don't be daft diploma millerite. What DC United's angriest fan said, but cut the Tweedledums some slack. Tough to read polls when busy getting sexfully massaged by corporate, now back to your regularly scheduled pointless crap) jackhammer that collectively bargained lazy man vacation is on tap but not beer 'cause not a fan for a lazy man, yours truly in case you were wondering & whether you were or weren't I don't give a hoot, hard to give a hoot.

Diagram that sentence, correctly, & you can have one, one, pizza roll. Rumble, rumble, toil & misplaced essays from the library's lost & found! (I miss the worst ever piece on Miles Davis' Bitches Brew LP. What gloriously discordant putrescence that was. Sniff.) What's this, political turmoil in the canal kingdoms? Curses, slacking will have to wait! 

Hup Holland! 

So you thought the Netherlands was a democratic country? You thought human rights were being respected in that little Kingdom by the North Sea? You got it all wrong there. Don't you believe the Netherlands is a friendly constitutional monarchy with happy, loyal subjects tending their tulip fields and polishing their wooden shoes! Beatrix von Amsberg, the present queen, rules her realm like a medieval fiefdom, with an iron fist. Of course, there is a constitution, but in actual practice its lofty principles are not enforced.

Avengers, assemble!

In conclusion, Beatrix the Bilderberger has sound reasons to regard Mr. Lensink as a very dangerous man. His actions and contentions are a threat to the survival of the monarchy. Therefore, she had him locked up in her own version of the Bastille, the Vught Maximum Security Prison.

We must assault the Castle of Chortling Composition! I am prepared to lead the way with my +3 halberd of exclamation points! Sir-Mix-A-Lot, stop your crying! Beatrix the Bilderberger must be stopped! Don't scoff at being easily amused or your heads'll roll, too!



I - like - big riffs & I cannot lie. Tack, svenskar, for praising this glorious day.

Your democratism has no limits!*

"Would you like a filbert, Melissa Gilbert?"
Kendra Wilkinson's (who?) asked, too, can't answer;
Horton hears a duuude, must be the bong, that hit's long
but you'd hit long if hit by a hitless Kim Kardashian song --
Radioactive Sino-French lizards & King Kong
don't dig theatrics, gets in the way of the gong --
CIA Chuck shouts "where's the blow?" (Charlie knows)
ow! don't hit so hard, dance is the word, dontcha know
Sugar Ray, "peace with hookers n' said blow"
says the Sheen 2012 Fucked Up Actors Need Sequels show.
Ford & interest rates, fiduciary swag, yawn --
Mikhail, didn't you out! damn spot! on a glasnost gig?
Pizza 'twas, all this, 'tis all garbage so take a swig,
me, mighty busy supervillaining zombie ants
to rescue from non-Randalness Christina Hendricks.
Noted Cleveland footie: someday, some of these tricks
'll be a juvie special. Learn from the master, puppets.

*title lifted from an English Pravda best-of the Pooty-Poot suckups. I simply wanted to share the too-few bounties of democratism with those poor post-mail check Yahoo trendies whose voice is never heard in our oversaturated monoculture & when do I ever have anything to add of substance on worldly fuckery that once the various The Mans find alternate means of being mean, mean everything drops, the cycle of shit, catch the fever. You're welcome & Cthulhu bless.

P.S. I know this is probably, despite the hefty competition, my lamest post ever. Je suis désolé (not really)

Awesome, totally awesome! Alright Hamilton!

Whatcha gonna do when your neighbor comes for you!

If it's the chick across the street & down a way, yes, well, hrm, once again, the Sword of Austerity™ plays its cards right 'cause once we're all laid off, it's either be rehired at minimum wage into the university's nonexistent-but-its-time-is-a-coming See Something, Say Something Badge Patrol Brigade, or flip grease at Mickey D's which is at least within walking distance of Chez Randal joke's on you, security state.

Fine, I'll slack at work instead & how is that any different from any other day I'll let you decide

So that's why all the viking kids grew up to rape & pillage.

As the young people say (did say? I don't know, Daddy-O, hey hey you you get off of my cloud), word. Oh, mucho thanko to a certain ethnic plumber broadcaster for darkthroning on the radio this crisp morn & if I was an ultra jerk instead of a part-time jerk, I would've put it on speaker for all the public transportationistas to enjoy.

Look man, I better use up some of this vacation before it's outlawed & you know what they say about outlaws. Printemps break falls within a serendipitous collection of works (creating's the real work, motherfuckers & the stuff I've got for swanky zine action, shudder, I suck & unofficial deadlines are made to be horribly axe-murdered, no?) & days, a Michael Stanley double shot of Champions League action & public drunken bunga bunga avoidance. Kill two crows with one well-placed potato gun shot, wee lasses & lads, I'll drink to that.

[ed. note: for your edification, the Undisclosed Location has been disclosed. Sloppy, CheneyBot, sloppy.]