Also, check out the cam portals. We have added quite a handful of new ones in the last few days, most recently illussion and Logan. Note to cam people: try to update with some regularity, k? I have been staring at that same damned pic of Shnakeman for far too long now.

Everybody is returning from their holidays, hope all of them went well, everything around here is picking up once again.

Well, we're re-accepting applications to be on the cam portal, this time with no age requirements. All are welcome. That means you, MrSherman. So give one of us a ring if you would like to be on one of our illustrious cell blocks. Or post in the corresponding thread in Suggestions.

Time to get some hair of the dog. Hope you all had as happy a New Years as Dick Clark and I did.

That is all.

Wonder and I are back on 24 hour patrol.

And Dingle is back on 26.

This is a documentary that basically runs as an extended interview with underground comic legend R. Crumb. For those not familiar with his work, he basically created underground comics in the 60s. Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural, Keep on Truckin', are all on Crumb's resume. His stuff is very strange indeed. Sexually explicit, socially subversion, sometimes just downright nuts. He went from being a weirdo artist on the fringe of society to attending gallery openings and lecturing at art schools. This film punctuates the narrative with showcases of his stuff, most of which is howlingly funny, sickeningly strange, or unsettlingly intriguing.

But to say the film is only about the life and work of this one man is to short it on it's depth and power. The film explores the entire history of Crumb, his whole life, and a large part of that was and is his family.
Let it be said that R. Crumb is a very strange man. Quite possibly off his nut entirely. But when the film begins to explore his upbringing, begins to interview his family, we see why, and we also begin to realize that Crumb may be more sane than any of us.

Take his brothers. One of them is certifiably insane. In and out of instituions. He has a bed of nails that he made himself from nails he found on the street. He is a panhandler. He enjoys cleansing his large intestine from time to time (hey, who doesn't). Then there is the older brother, who is in his 50s and still lives with his mother. He has never held a job since he was 18. He doesn't bathe, he doesn't go outside, he just sits in his room and reads Hegel and Schoepenhaur for recreation and occasionaly tries to kill himself. And then there is the mother, a hophead who "fights with invisible enemies". The are a motley crew to say the least.
What makes these seeming side-notes so potent is what it has to say about people in general, about the power of nurture over nature. These people all grew out of an incredibly abusive and perverse background. To deal with it, they each went quite a little mad. The strangeness of R. Crumb is in retaliation to the strangeness and hostility he was raised in. When shown against the backdrop of his family, everything R.Crumb does begins to seem perfectly natural. As bizarre a man as he is, he is the stable one of the family. If everyone on earth were insane, the sane would be the deviants. It is that theme, that paradox, that forms the core of the movie. The most sane way of dealing with an insane world is to go insane yourself. Chew on that for awhile.

Another thing that makes this film so intriguing is that all of the Crumbs are brilliant in their own eccentric ways. They wax intellectual about the whoredom of corporate America, discuss the meaning of humanity and art's place in it, and loathe the pervasive advertising that has become a cancer to our society. We learn that R. Crumb is moving to the south of France (he bought a house there by giving the owner a briefcase of his scetchpads). Crumb muses "I can't wait to get out of this fucking place." Some of the themes Crumb broaches are similar to Fight Club and movies in that vein. Crumb may be the deviant, but in his opinion, the normal people around him are the truly sick ones. He loathes the attractive, the popular, the accepted. He is the epitome of the high school nerd who hit it big, but he has not forgotten what life was like before he was famous. He is the zenith of the fringe, and he knows it. Fuck, he thrives on it.

But it is not a dry humorless documentary either. It is doused in perverse humor, interviews with R. Crumb's exs who discuss his strange fetishes (he digs piggyback rides), and the more we talk to the people that know him best, the more he begins to come into focus. At many times this movie is very funny. At others downright sad. But it is always fascinating and insightful. So many themes are at work here, this film has so much to say, that it gets overwhelming at times. And at the heart of it all is this very very strange human being, the gangly and goofy looking R. Crumb, who in the beginning of the film appears to be absolutly mad, but by the end seems the only sane person left in America.

[note: you may have seen this before way back when. I am taking the week off from writing. Will return next Friday with something new. Thank you for your support. ]

Being a pledge in my fraternity was not all fun and games. Every Saturday morning at 1 PM (8 AM frat time) we were required to come to the house and collect all the bottles and cans lying around from the previous night’s party, as well as to clean up the piss, vomit, passed out sorority girls, cigarette butts, and other assorted trash that was lying around. We were also pretty much at the whim of the active members of the house. And there was one responsibility that loomed over the pledge class all semester.

Cave Party.

Every December, for the last 20 years or something, it was the tradition of my fraternity for the pledges to throw a massive party for the actives and their dates (and the pledges can come too). It isn’t your normal party, however. Oh no. This was a far more sinister ordeal. For instead of this party being a massive drunken drug orgy on the first floor of the house, this party was to take place all over the property. What’s more, the entire party was to occur entirely inside of an elaborate cave system made out of cardboard that spanned the entire house, all three floors, the basement, the porch, everything. And it was the pledges’ job to create this elaborate cave system.

We were informed of this duty of ours from pretty much the first day we signed up for the frat. And all semester the actives hounded us to collect from all over Greater Des Moines as many gigantic cardboard boxes as was humanly possible. What’s more, all those cans, bottles, and sorority chicks we picked up over the course of the semester were to be recycled, and the deposit money was to go into the Cave Party Bar Fund.

This was a big deal not only to the members of our fraternity (the best party of the year, as far as they were concerned), but also to pretty much every girl on campus. It was a big honor to get to go along to this party, which tended to overwhelm any other social functions on campus in terms of notoriety (we’ll get to that later). So believe me when I tell you that we were HOUNDED by the older guys of the frat to get as much money and as much cardboard as possible, to ensure the most booze and the most elaborate cave system we could conceivably create. A bad cave party would go down in the ledger as a major black mark to the fraternity, not to mention the abuse that we would have to endure if we fucked it all up. This was the World Series of frat parties.

So we dutifully collected about 3 tons of cardboard over the semester, and about 5 thousand dollars in recycled beer paraphernalia for the booze. And about 10 pledges spent a helluva lot of time and energy over the five months making cardboard cave schematics (which, in a travesty of America’s job market, does NOT, in fact, look good on a resume).

And the more work we put into it, the more the actives assured us it would not be enough.

And the Cave Party day was drawing closer and closer.

Oh yeah, two things I forgot to mention.

The party was to occur on a Saturday night. And we were not allowed to begin setting up the cave system until that same day. An engineering problem that would Frank Lloyd Wright weep. This was due mostly to the fact that about 35 people lived in the house in which the caves were to be set up, and partly was to test our resourcefulness and wherewithal (at least that is the bullshit explanation they gave to us, the lazy bastards).

This brings us to the other major obstacle involved in the creation of the caves.

Every year, since 1974, none of the actives have ever willingly left the house to allow the pledges to set up the caves.

Let me repeat that.

Every year, since 1974, none of the actives have ever willingly left the house to allow the pledges to set up the caves.

It was not the actives’ job to leave the house bright and early that morning to allow us to begin the massive job of setting up the party. It was, in fact, the pledges’ job to GET the actives out of the house to begin the massive job of setting up the party.

This was known as “House Takeover”, and was just as much a feat as setting up a quarter mile of cardboard caverns in a three story house.

Thus, all semester about 10 people were given the duty of establishing schematics for the caves. And about 5 of us were put in charge of planning the impending invasion.

Enter Lieutenant Colonel Paint CHiPs.

Now mind you, there were a few things that were unsaid. The active members were not going to come out of their rooms with knives and guns, and we were not supposed to punch or throw people out of windows (both of those rules got broken that year BTW), but still, we had a pledge class of 25 people, and there were about 55 active members (30 or so of which lived in the house). Still, none of them were getting out of that house without a fight.

So the other 4 members of the ad hoc War Committee and I spent the semester devising various schemes, and collecting materials. The pledges had the advantages of organization and planning. The actives tended to not hatch schemes until the night before, whereas we planned out various scenarios for weeks in advance. Also, we had the element of surprise. All the actives knew was that we would start the invasion sometime between Friday night and Saturday morning (we would need to have all the actives out of the house by at least 8 AM to get enough prep time to set up the caves for the party, but it was an implicit understanding that to invade during the prime drinking hours of 7 PM and 10 PM Friday night was unkosher at best). The actives, however, had the distinct advantages of knowing the terrain better (they lived there after all), of outnumbering us by at least 2 to 1, and of being able to dig in against our assaults.

In retrospect, it was kind of like Vietnam.

The Wednesday before the cave party, one of the pledges, a guy ironically enough named Charlie, who worked with the House Manager (the active who lives in the house and fixes shit), snuck into the House Manager’s room and stole the set of master keys for every room in the house. To be honest, the keys were for the most part a formality, as 90% of the doors in the house could be jimmied with nothing more then a sturdy credit card, but they were nonetheless nice to have for that other 10%.

The next day, the Thursday before the Cave Party, we all had a big party in the frat house that night, the last friendly exchange of drinks between the actives and the pledges that would occur before the big party. We all had fun, and then all us pledges went back to our rooms early that evening to rest up for the day that was ahead of us.

Well, not all of us.

Charlie (known as Fat Screech to us, if that says anything about his personality and demeanor) had a little too much fun in the house that night. After all the other pledges had gone home, he stayed on to drink more whiskey and fuck around with the actives. He was not a bright man.

At some point late that night, while all the other pledges were fast asleep in their dorm rooms, Charlie must have looked up from his shot glass, noticed he was sitting in a room with 20 actives and no pledges, and then realized they were all eyeing him with evil grins on their faces. I am almost positive that at this point, Charlie looked around nervously, smiled, and said something to the effect of “Hey fellas. What’s up? Why you all looking at me like that?”

At which point the actives jumped him, duct taped him (the weapon of preference for frat guys everywhere), loaded him into a pick up truck, drove 60 miles into the middle of nowhere, released him from the bondage and the truck in the middle of a forest, and then drove back to the house.

I can almost picture Charlie standing there in the Iowa wilderness in the middle of the night, drunk off his ass, 30 minutes after the guys had driven away, and shouting to nobody in particular “Hey guys! This isn’t funny anymore! …Guys?” *insert coyote howl in the distance here*

However, earlier that day, Charlie had given the set of keys to one of the other pledges.

In any case, the next afternoon, the pledges (minus 1) all met in a guy’s dorm room with all our materials (save the building materials for the caves, which were locked away in the basement of the house), and then me and the other head of the War Committee stepped up and explained our (in retrospect) very half-assed plan for invading the house that night.

“Weapons check!
17 cases of bottle rockets?”
“CHECK!”
“100 smoke bombs of various colors?”
“CHECK!”
“20 stink bombs?”
“CHECK!”
“40 Super Soakers?”
“CHECK!”
“Good good. Remember fellas, fill those with whatever you like! Okay, 80 rolls of duct tape?”
“CHECK!”
“Two Slip N Slides?”
“CHECK!”
“Small arms!”
“CHECK! Along with the various waterguns and water balloons, both filled with various liquids, Stimmel even brought his .45!”
“Stimmel, put that away! We can’t take that!”
“It’s loaded with blanks, dude.”
“Oh, okay. Good, good. 5 queen sized mattresses?”
“Um, we only really have 4. The fifth is all infested with fleas. Maybe we shouldn’t have buried it to hide it from the actives.”
“Can it, soldier! A functional mattress is a functional mattress!”
“Um, okay, 5 then.”
“Dude dude! My cousin also gave me 10 flash bombs. He was a fucking Green Beret, man, these things are dope!”
“Excellent.”

And so on and so forth. We were well prepared, to say the least.

At the same time that all this was going on, the actives were preparing as well. Now, while 30 or so people actually lived in this house, EVERY active member of the fraternity showed up for the takeover (about 57 or so I think). On the third floor, at about 5 PM Friday night, about 8 guys bunked down in a room with a full keg, determined to barricade themselves in there until the cave party, in theory drinking away as we set up the caves, and to maybe pop out in the middle of the day and smash to bits everything they could see. Every room was similar, though the third floor room (known as The Observatory) was the only one with a keg. It was also an implicit understanding that the actives who were not rooted out of the house, who were missed, would, at some point, emerge from whatever rock they were hiding under and attempt to demolish whatever progress we had made on the caves. That, and every active we DID manage to root out would at some point during the day, while we labored away constructing the caves, attempt to force themselves BACK into the house and fuck everything up.

And while the actives in the house were busy preparing their defense, about 15 of the actives were preparing an offense.

We had about 25 pledges, and 20 of them lived in a gigantic dorm building called GK (Goodwin-Kirk). This was a dorm building that was 90% freshmen. 5 other guys and myself lived in the upper-classmen dorm buildings around the campus. So, as our plan was to assault the house very early the next morning, after the weapons’ check and the final discussion of our plans came, we all dispersed to our respective rooms to take a nap to prepare us for the long night ahead. This was at about 2 PM.

I don’t remember much of what occurred after that. All I remember was that at about 3:30 PM, I was awakened to a terrible burning sensation on my skin and the heavy weight of a knee to my stomach. Apparently my roommate (a 5’ 4” 350 lbs. homosexual music major from Minnesota, a story for another day) had let in 5 active members of my frat against my express wishes, and the actives then proceeded to shoot off a fire extinguisher at me while at the same time two of them had gotten on top of me and pinned me down. Before I knew it, I was mummified with duct tape.

And while having been in my hazy states of being still half-asleep I don’t remember much of the actual abduction, I remember quite well the events that followed. I was carried, fully duct taped, from my dorm to the frat house, being lifted high above the heads of the 5 actives.

When they reached the frat house, I saw that two other pledges had been abducted as well, both in duct tape, both guys who did not live in the freshman dorm building, and both being carried high above the heads of five actives towards the back door.

They threw us each into separate rooms, while we were still duct taped, and locked us all in. The other two guys were locked in separate third floor rooms; I was in the President’s room on the second story. They threw me on the couch in that room and then left to drink more downstairs, locking the door behind them.

Here was their mistake.

Of the other two guys kidnapped, one was a skinny drummer from Nebraska. The other, however, was my co-chairman of the War Committee, the president of our pledge class and the only sophomore of it, and he was also a football player from Texas (6’ 3” and 300 lbs.).

The second mistake is that I was well known as being stark raving mad. To compound their mistake, although the house is three stories high, the second story contains a roof (for the gigantic front porch), a big sturdy roof that we often sat out and drank on. There were two rooms whose windows opened up to access for this roof. A room called The Beach (inhabited by the pothead and the beatnik), and the President’s room.

And obviously, despite the considerable handicap of being duct taped, I had to escape.

Somehow I managed to get to my feet, and as my legs and arms were duct taped together, I sorta hopped over to the door to the room. It was locked. But as I was known campus-wide as being a raving lunatic, I didn’t let that stop me.

So, I proceeded to bash my person into the door about a dozen times, as hard as I could.

Finally, about the tenth time that I lunged myself at the door, I heard something crrrrrrrrrrrrack. After several seconds of me making sure the crack was not a bone, I realized I had torn off most of the outer lock. Another two lunges, and the door burst open, the lock flew out, and I ended up sprawled out on the floor of the second floor hall.

After about 5 minutes I got to my feet, hopped down the hall, and then carefully began to navigate my way down the back staircase (remember, I had duct tape from my ankles to my neck).

Unfortunately, at that same time, the president of the house got home from work. He entered the house and proceeded to climb the back staircase on his way to his room, where he would change clothes for the heavy drinking bout that proceeded the House Takeover.

And on his way up those stairs, he encountered me, in all my silver adhesive glory. We looked at each other for a moment. As he had not been around that day (at work), he considered my duct tape visage quixotically, unsure of what exactly was going on. I stared back at him for a moment or two before it dawned on him that I was a fugitive.

So after that moment’s contemplation, he approached me, put me over his shoulders, and carried me back to the President’s room, where he laid me down on the couch.

“Brad, that’s not cool. You could fall down the stairs and break your neck,” he lectured, fulfilling his role as the President.
“Well, if I was untied, I could navigate the back staircase with ease!”
“Fuck that.”
“Can you at least loosen the shit on my chest, I am having trouble breathing.”
“Fine.”

At which point he got out a knife and cut a few strands of duct tape that were wrapped around my chest (there were about 20 left, but this left me a little bit of squirm room). He then changed his clothes and exited the room to hit the drinking binge going on downstairs. He closed the door behind him, not realizing that my partially dislocated shoulder had made short work of the locking mechanisms.

Unbeknownst to me, the other pledges had by this time realized what had happened, and had set up a rescue operation. Also unbeknownst to me, the Texan on the third floor had rolled over to a spot on a bunk that had sharp edges to it, and had cut off enough duct tape (and skin) to be able to free himself. He then retrieved the skinny drummer guy from Nebraska in the next room and they both huddled next to a third floor window nearly above the porch roof and attempted to hatch a plan. At around the same time, the rest of the pledges had subtly surrounded the house.

So here I was duct taped from my ankles to my neck, when I hear a commotion coming from downstairs, where all the actives were. I heard people running up the stairs, on their way to the third floor. A great stampede of drunken frat guys. I then heard some commotion going on outside, and the actives apparently trying to ram their way into the third floor room that contained the two prisoners.

At this point, I had no clue what was going it. Only that the pledges on the outside must be up to something. But I knew it was a good enough distraction.

I wormed my way from the couch to the floor (read: rolled over and fell), and began furiously contracting and expanding my chest. I was also doing the same with my arms and legs, putting as much force behind separating my legs from each other and my arms from my sides as I possibly could. Unless you have been there, no man can possibly fathom the extreme strenuous physical stress of trying to literally bust yourself from a duct tape cocoon.

Cut to the third floor. Apparently, the remaining members of the war committee had concocted quite a brilliant plan in rescuing us. They had parked a car an inch away from the back door (which opened up to the parking lot), and had used bungee cord to secure the front door. At the same time they had a large length of rope and a grappling hook rigged from table legs. Thus, when they saw The Texan and the other pledge leaning out of the third floor window, they threw up the rope. Meanwhile, in the third floor room, the two pledges had moved as much furniture as possible in front of the door in an attempt to block actives from entry while the pledges attempted their escape. And they then secured the table leg grappling hook to some guy’s bed.

At about that point, one of the actives inside must have glance out a window and seen 10 pledges hanging on to a rope that went up to the third floor, shouting commands into the air. The first impulse was to scream “PLEDGES OUTSIDE!” at which point all the actives threw their beers on the ground and went to the back and front doors. Upon finding them unpassable, a few stayed behind to try and bust open the doors, while the rest all went to try and bust into the third floor room.

For some reason or another, the Texan decided to go first as the Nebraskan kept tight hold of the rope. The Texan grabbed the rope and started shimmying his fat ass down towards the ground. He was about 6 feet from the ground when an active opened up the second floor window that was right next to the rope, looked up to make sure nobody else was climbing down the rope at the time, and then produced a pair of gardening sheers, the long kind you use to trim trees with. He stuck them out the window and cut the rope. The Texan fell to the ground, and the Nebraskan, who had been holding the rope steady, flew backwards across the room as the force of the rope went from 400 pounds to 5 in half a second.

This all occurred over a span of maybe 5 minutes, and in that time, I was exhausted, but I had ripped a significant amount of duct tape off myself (or at least had broken enough strands). So I rested for about 30 seconds, and then finally put all that I had left into one tremendous body-wide muscle expansion, which snapped the rest of the strands apart. I sat there panting, red in the face, sore all over, seeing stars, for at least a minute, before I sat up and freed myself from the remaining few strands of tape.

At this time, the actives had succeeded in nearly tearing the third floor room door off of its hinges, and the Nebraskan was panicked. Finally, in a fit of terror, exhilaration, and stupidity, he secured the remaining length of rope to the bed and then grabbed hold and sort of repelled out the window. He was now at about the second floor, and there were actives hanging out of that second floor window trying to grab him and pull him back in. This was the side of the house, and the porch was on the front of the house, but the roof to the porch overhung enough that about 10 feet of it sprawled out past the side walls.

The Nebraskan decided it a good idea to start leaping from right to left in an attempt to gain velocity. Finally, when he felt he had enough, he swung as far as he could towards the front porch roof and let go of the rope. He somehow made the 8 feet distance to the porch roof, and landed on it with a thud. He rolled down the slightly inclined roof for a moment before catching himself and thus stopping himself from falling. At that point, the actives came bursting into The Beach (the second floor room near where I was), and were opening the windows that led DIRECTLY to the roof.

At which point the Nebraskan just jumped off the damn thing and landed in some bushes.

Meanwhile, I had jimmied open my window and was considering the short climb to the porch roof outside. The porch roof was not directly outside of the window to this room, but rather there was about a three-foot wide gutter walk to get to it. Easily negotiable in the summer, but in the middle of December this was caked with ice. Think of the scene in the Matrix when Keanu Reeves was trying to walk around his office building. Kind of like that. Oh yeah, and a brick walkway lay directly beneath the window.

I thought about it for a few minutes before chickening out. It was only a two-story drop, but still. I may be crazy but I’m not fucking crazy.

So quietly, I opened up the door to the room. There was nobody around, though I could hear the commotion of people nearby, very close.

I quietly made my way down the hall and towards the front staircase. All of a sudden I heard a person shouting about six feet behind me “Ack! The pledges have stormed the house!” (he was speaking of me, BTW, and had mistakenly concluded upon seeing me loose that somebody had freed me), at which point I bolted down the staircase, opened up the door at the bottom, straight-armed an active who was on his way up (in the neck, BTW, he fell to the ground gasping for air), and like a jackrabbit flew across the large main room in which about 20 actives were gathered at the moment and leapt out the first open window I saw, landing on my shoulder in the driveway. I then heard shouts from the parking lot to my right, and glanced over in that direction. Since my glasses were still on my bedside table back in my room, all I could see was a group of people running at me while shouting my name.

So I fled. I took off across the yards of the other frat houses and sprinted for a solid ten minutes, jumping over fences and cutting across yards until I was convinced I had shaken my would-be pursuers. When I finally felt it safe, I doubled over behind somebody’s garage and threw up on a pile of snow, solely from physical exertion. I had exhausted myself that much. That hour period in which I busted out of my duct tape mummification and sprinted for 10 minutes solid probably marks the highest level of physical exertion I have ever encountered. Kinda sad, really.

In any case, once back on campus, I trudged through snowdrifts towards GK. When I got there, I made my way up to HQ (some guy’s room). When I entered the room, all the pledges, including the Texan and the Nebraskan, were gathered about taking shots of rum and planning the next step. They looked at me when I opened the door, bruised, battered, and with vomit all over my pants, and then all half-cheered/half laughed at me. After a few minutes of me telling my story, somebody spoke up and said “That’s amazing and all, but why the fuck did you run away like that? We were in the parking lot when you jumped out the window, we saw you and starting calling your name, and you just fucking took off!”

I tried to explain to them that after having just been pursued by 50 guys intent on duct taping me and locking me in a closet for 24 hours, that running after me shouting my name was probably not the best way to get me to lower my guard.

In any case, I passed out for the next hour or two. When I awoke, I went right to jumping into the conversation regarding staging our offense on the house later that night.

It was about 7 PM by then.

So I took a shot of rum, pounded a beer, and commented “We attack at dawn.”

To Be Continued…

My handle is not really a mystery. Paint CHiPs. Fairly straightforward. At least in the respect that you know, presumably, what a paint chip is, unlike other handles that you can only guess at the meaning of (What the fuck is Nutrimentia?).

However, the reason I use this handle is a bit more of a mystery.

Granted, I have explained it many times in the past. And enough people know the movie from which the phrase is lifted (Tommy Boy) to make it not quite as enigmatic as, say, TimeenoughforLove. As I have said before, the handle is my real life nickname, which I acquired while in a fraternity in Des Moines, Iowa (and also for the record, CHiPs = California Highway Patrol).

However, I have never really gone in depth as to the background of the story.

So I thought I would share that aspect of it this week.

I went off to college like any student, full of a combination of nervousness and excitement, of naivete and something called “inhibitions” (a concept confined to people who have yet to hit puberty, certain tribes in Papua New Guinea, and the state of Utah). I didn’t know a soul at my new school, and have never been what you would call a social animal.

I did know a little about the college, however.

It is a small private college in Des Moines, Iowa. The alma mater of both my mother and my father (where they met in fact) and both had been heavily into the Greek scene during their tenure at the school. Both could not say enough good things about the fraternities and sororities at Drake University, and both urged me to check them out. Well, my mom did at least. My father said something like “We’re sorry, the number you have dialed is no longer in service.”

So, for the first few weeks, I kept to myself, attended to my studies, and then, once rush came around, promptly signed up.

Granted, none of my friends from High School could see me joining a fraternity, and many guffawed at the very prospect. I am just not “the type”, they would tell me; and I would agree. But you have to understand that at a small private midwestern college in the middle of fucking Des Moines, Iowa, there is not a helluva lot to do. The entire social scene of the campus was vicarious through the fraternity functions. That, and the fact that it was rumored that some of them even drank alcohol on occasion, was what sold me. Also, realize that I am pretty anti-social by nature. And one of the good things about joining a fraternity is that one day you don’t know ANYBODY, and the next day you have 150 fast friends.

Rush, for those that don’t know, is the process by which male freshman are put in groups, and they go around to all the different fraternity houses and spend some time in each one. The frat guys clean up their house for it, and try to bullshit the freshman as best they can as to why their fraternity is the best. At least, that’s what they do to the freshman they like.

Well, I was put in my little rush group and shuffled around to the various houses. Immediately upon spending maybe 10 minutes in each particular house, I could get a very good bead on what they were all about. “Ah, this is the preppy rich kid frat!” Or “Hmmm, all these people are football players.” Or, “I smell roofies!” Or “These guys keep checking out my ass!” Or ”Hmmm, I appear to be awash in a sea of Abercrombie and Fitch!” You get the idea.

Then I ended up at one house that I couldn’t quite peg. I was first introduced to a real dorky guy, but still kinda cool. Reminded me of Newt Gingrich. Expect for that kinda cool part. Then I was given the tour by a complete stoner. Then I sat around and talked to a guy from Israel, a really preppy but quite cool guy known only as “Bowser”, a rugby player who was missing a few teeth, and some total beatnik guy who kept gesturing in stabbing motions as punctuation for whatever it was he was saying, kinda like Mussolini discussing the intricacies of sneaking drunk women into a dorm room.

I went back to that house and that house only for the next two rush sessions.

I have to admit something here, I was bullshitting half the time when I was talking to them, especially the guys who I could sense were “in charge”. I was discussing things about how a fraternity is a commitment for life, how I love community service, things of that sort. In retrospect I don’t feel so bad, as they were basically doing the same to me.

A wise man once said that when a person states “to make a long story short”, it is probably already too late.

So in any case, the fellas in that fraternity decided to pledge me, and I accepted.

That day, they had a big party for the new pledges. There were only about 30 guys present in the house when I was going through rush, but once the kegs got there, I realized the house actually contained closer to 75.

Now when I said earlier that this place was hard to describe, I meant it. Most other houses were a clique of one certain type of person. This house seemed to be a combination of all the cliques. A few football players, a few real upstanding go-getters, a bunch of stoners, some preppies, some hippies, and a representative of just about any personality type you could possibly think of.

Yet there was one constant.

Whenever I would mention the fraternity I was in to somebody in ANOTHER fraternity, they would nod and say “Good guys. Do you drink a lot?”

This was Animal House, or as near as the real world allows.

During that first experience, the big pledge party, they introduced me to a tradition known as “roof testing”. The house was three stories high, with a parking lot, and when somebody had a major appliance that had been giving them trouble, the normal solution was to throw it out of the third floor window and see if it worked any better once it hit the pavement below.

Also, they were known kleptos. Now, every fraternity steals something as a gag every now and then. But my frat had turned it into an art form. We had a piece of furniture from every single building on campus. We had the Dean’s desk. We had a fucking WALL from another frat house. We had a fucking TOILET from a sorority house (the story of how we concocted that plan is a column unto itself). We had billboards from highways (mostly for strip clubs). We had also probably damn near a thousand various knick-knacks and odds and ends from all over the Greater Midwest. And whenever our smoke alarms would go off (which was more often than you would think), the main concern was not putting out whatever fire may be burning. Rather, the entire house would become intent on hiding all the fire hydrants we had stolen so the fireman wouldn’t see them (and for the record, a fire hydrant is damn near the heaviest thing I have ever lifted in my entire life. I suspect they are made of anti-matter).

I will not say that the fraternity was full of fuck-ups, because it was not. There were often Greek events, and we would almost always win them. For example, one of them was something of a talent show, different frats would put together song and dance comedy sketches, and every year my frat would win. It kind of reminds me of this forum. Everybody, in their own way, was a bonafide fuck-up. But everybody was also far more talented and inspired, in their own way, than your average Joe.

But we were certainly infamous. We knew most of the DMPD on a first name basis, and were rather notorious for getting out on our front porch at 3 AM and singing drunken songs by the moonlight.

“That girl was just like a statue of Venus!
I’d fuck her if I had a petrified penis!
Oh roll your leg over,
Oh roll your leg over,
Oh roll your leg over
It’s better that way.”

Or

“And now she’s gone and we don’t miss her
Ya Ho.
Ya Ho.
And now she’s gone and we don’t miss her
Ya Ho.
Ya Ho.
And now she’s gone and we don’t miss her
Cuz now we’re fucking her little sister!
Get in get out quit fucking about
Ya Ho Ya Ho Ya Ho!”

Or any of the other 50 or so horridly obnoxious drunken ditties we had.

Another tradition, at least for the stoners in the house (who were kind of like an unspoken majority, an underground current in the fraternity), is that they would take all the obvious stoners out of the new pledges, as well as the stoners that were already members (actives, they were called), and then pick out 2 or 3 of the dorkiest looking new pledges to fuck up.

Apparently, I fit the bill.

The beatnik guy and the stoner saw me on the front porch from their 2nd story window (they were roommates). The stoner, apparently, pointed me out and said “That kid! That blonde guy with the glasses, the straightedge motherfucker, let’s smoke him up! Har har har! Welcome to college!”

So, while I was smoking my cigarette and drinking my 10th or so keg beer, the two approached me and said “do you smoke?”

As I was smoking tobacco at the time, I figured that wasn’t what they were asking about.

“Why…yes,” was my reply.

So they loaded me and 5 or 6 other pledges in the car with 3 or 4 of the actives and we headed to a nearby apartment. The whole time the head stoner kept talking to the actives about me. “Oh, this is going to be SO fucking funny! Look at this kid! We’re gonna get him TOE UP!!!!”

So, we hit the apartment, and the bong starts going around.

I take a hit large enough for the actives’ eyes to get as big as dinner plates. Then I asked if they had any painkillers or shrooms laying around. They did.

I won’t go into further details about that event, save to tell you that by 10pm, the room was surrounded by about 10 passed out frat guys, lying in all sorts of positions all over, and me and this stoner guy. He couldn’t smoke anymore, so I was the one packing the bowl again as he shook his head in disbelief.

I gained a lot of respect there.

There are SO many stories that I could tell about my experiences in this fraternity, and I may later go into them. Hell, I may continue this piece next week. There is a WHOLE lot of tales that came about during that period, so many that to share them all right now would to be akin to folding my cards too early in the game. Just trust me when I say that my next two years were, well, rather interesting.

“Craig, I go to college! Translation: Drunken orgies with occasional Cliff Notes!”
---Night at the Roxbury.

In any case, you are a “pledge” for a semester. That means you have to do the shit work, clean up after parties and whatnot. Once you go through initiation, you are an “active”, at which point you have to do jack shit save for bossing the pledges around.

After a semester of being a pledge, you have to endure one week, a single week, affectionately referred to as “Hell Week”. After you survive that week, you become an active, and are allowed all the rights and privileges that active status entails.

I can’t go into the details of what Hell Week consisted of. I took a sacred pledge of secrecy. And while the pledge of secrecy is not what keeps me from talking about it, the fact that somewhere in this country there are literally thousands of men who would be more than willing to put up the money for an airplane ticket to draw and quarter me does.

But, I can tell you that for a week straight, you are not allowed to speak to anybody but other members of the frat. You live in the basement of the frat house, you are not allowed to bathe, drink alcohol, or smoke, and you get (if you are lucky) about 2 hours of sleep a night.

Every year, there is always one person who cracks first. One person, out of however many pledges there are, who loses his mind. This person may be the first to do it, they may be the only, but there is always at least one.

That one was me.

Now, before you start, I had always had a negative view on hazing. I no longer do, for a few reasons. For one, there are few better ways to solidify solidarity than for a group of men to endure hardship together. And hazing is a way of virtually guaranteeing that hardship, and thus that solidarity. The fact that it may be a somewhat artificial way of doing so does not in any way decrease the effectiveness. Furthermore, it is a way of negating any sense of entitlement to an achievement. When you don’t get somewhere because you are supposed to, but because you had to endure hardship to do so, it means more to you. Just as a millionaire who is self-made is less likely to spend money on lavish luxuries than one who inherited his fortune. You appreciate more what you earn. Also, it tells you a lot about yourself, and the others that you went through it with. As an example, you would get a LOT closer to a person by being stuck in an elevator with them for a few days then by working with them for a year. I won’t go into it in detail, and when I say hazing I am not speaking of physical abuse, but there is a reason why the military is so notorious for hazing. It builds solidarity and, to a degree, character, no matter how cliched that seems. I was dead set against it until I went through it.

In any case, after only two days of being denied cigarettes and booze (the bathing and speaking thing didn’t bother me so much as I go without both for days at a time anyway), I was found in the basement, staring at a corner and playing the bongo drums while singing the Canadian national anthem. I also, on more than one occasion, threatened my fellow pledges with death by spear as I was convinced that they were shortening my bed sheets. And, during a psychology class no less, I kept hearing voices. It wouldn’t have been so bad had A: it not been a psychology class, and B: other members of the frat had not been present. Basically, the prof would drone on, and the second she would stop for a breath, I would hear somebody shouting at me in a demonic voice (full volume), until the prof continued, at which point the demonic voice would cease. I was able to endure this the first two times it occurred, but by the third, the prof would finish a sentence about research methods, pause, and then I would bolt upright to my feet, and shout “DON’T STOP TALKING YOU FUCKING CUNT!!! WHEN YOU STOP, THEY BEGIN......AGAIN!!!” This occurred about 5 more times during that one 2 hour long class, with such variations as “AAAAAHHHHH!!!! DEMON VOICE, 666, LEAVE ME BE!!!” and, “WHO THE FUCK IS THAT!?! IS IT YOU!?! IS IT YOU!?! I BET IT WAS YOU, YOU COCKSUCKER MOTHERFUCKER!!!” until I was escorted out by security and promptly dropped from the course.

In any case, a few hours later, that story had already circulated through the entire fraternity (and most of the campus, I imagine). And one of the other pledges approached me and asked “Did you eat paint chips when you were a kid?”

The name stuck.

To this day, if you were to accompany me to any bar in Des Moines, Iowa, upon my entrance, at least a half a dozen people will raise their glasses and yell “PAINT CHIIIIIIIIIPS!!!!”

Over the course of the next year and a half, I gained quite a quixotical reputation. In the house that contained the biggest drunks on campus, I was the biggest drunk of them all. I was also, however, the person with the highest grade point average. I have NO clue WHAT that says about me, but I am quite sure it says something.

And, in any case, I got my nickname from it. The handle that has served me so well since. And probably half of the people on God’s green earth, to this day, know me only as Paint CHiPs.

I bet even Nutrimentia can’t claim that.

[to be continued. If not next week, then sometime after.]

Never in a coffee shop, either. I fucking hate coffee shops. Full of Phish and pretentious people. Besides, all those flavors confuse me. When I want coffee, I want coffee, not double-latte-tall-mocha-swiss-de-caff-frappeed-organic-pesticide-free-Tom-Collins-black with a whammy bar. Fuck all that. We would avoid those places like the plague and just hit the diners, with the other down to earth folks. I want to be waited on by somebody named Floris or Marjorie, not some bitch named Sunbeam.

In any case, in High School, I was also involved with the school newspaper. I was first a writer, then the editor of the features section, then by my senior year I was the Managing Editor (which is kinda like the Vice President). And this was a pretty large school too, large enough that when we ran an ad for a counseling hotline regarding questions of “sexuality”, the Reverend Fred Phelps started picketing us (you have not lived until you see your name on a gigantic sign that reads “*Your Name Here* Will Burn in Hell!!!)

Well, that year—my senior year--two people on the staff of the newspaper particularly stood out. One of them was the editor of the News section, name of Justin Ramirez. He was about 6 foot 6, one of the most popular kids ever, the school president, and had been on the Varsity basketball squad since he was a freshman, which was pretty amazing (fuck you MrSherman, this is a 6A school, some 6 thousand students). He was even being scouted to play for KU. A really great guy, charismatic and personable. And a true go-getter. Nothing could stop this guy. The guy most likely to succeed out of any of us, to be sure. And nobody deserved success more than he.

There was also a writer for our Arts section named Tommy Scott, who was about the sweetest kid you could ever meet. A senior, very kind and flamboyant, and also openly homosexual (which, BTW, did not help our case any with the Phelps crew), and I really respected that about him. The bullshit Machiavellian posturing of high school is bad enough without having to deal with sexual-orientation discrimination at the same time. To see him, you wouldn’t notice how strong he really was, but it was there. Certainly a stronger man than I. He wasn’t in your face about it either, nor was he sexually confused in the least. He knew who he was and that was that as far as he was concerned. I respected that about him immensely. Just a very courageous and charming young man. And despite all the shit he got, I had never once seen him anything but jubilant and full of smiles and charm.

Well, one day, the Editor-in-Chief and I (a good friend named Katie), were going about our business, as was the rest of the room, when some lady nobody had ever seen before (must have been a counselor, heh) came in and asked for everybody’s attention. When she had it, she announced very matter-of-factly that Tommy Scott had died that morning, about two hours earlier. Seems he was pulling out of his drive-way to go to school when a truck smashed into the side of his car, killing him instantly. He was 18.

I remember the next part very vividly. The counselor kept talking, saying something about how counselors would be on call if anybody needed them, something about a memorial service, but nobody was listening at that point. A girl, Tommy’s best friend, immediately began to scream as if a knife had been plunged into her stomach. A few people started sobbing. Must of us just stood there dumbfounded.

A few months later, Justin had gotten news (a few days before his 19th birthday) that he was very likely going to play ball for Kansas University. This was his dream, mind you. Immediately upon hearing the news, he got in his car and headed for Topeka (about 20 minutes away) to tell his family. He wanted to be there in person when he gave them the news.

Halfway home, he picked up speed in his excitement. Took his eyes off the road for a moment or two. Ran off the highway. Totaled his car, and himself. Died a few hours later. The rumors that he was to play for KU were, in fact, true, though not announced officially yet at that point. At his funeral, the entire KU basketball team laid a team jacket on his casket.

About a year later, a good friend of my little sister (who is 19 now) died. Her name was Anna Riphahn. She was 17, and already a published author and artist, who perhaps had gotten more coverage from our high school paper than anybody else. She had won some big contest with a children’s book of a fairy tale that she wrote and illustrated called The Timekeeper. A very beautiful work, I might add. She was one of the most promising young students at the school. One night, her and a few friends were driving home from a concert(somebody like Sting like Billy Joel or something). It was pretty late. Anna had laid down in the backseat and had fallen asleep. Some pickup truck swerved out of its lane and struck their car. Anna was killed, the others were fine.

[Names have not been changed to protect the innocent, because…. well fuck, because they’re dead.]

Well, about an hour after we had heard that Tommy Scott was dead a good while before Justin and Anna were taken, Katie (The editor-in-chief) and myself found ourselves in a nearby Denny’s, smoking over our cups of coffee. We had decided to take the rest of the day off. We were also discussing what the newspaper would say about Tommy’s death. Mostly, though, we were simply reflecting.

Midway through our conversation, a man at the next table leaned over. He was a blue-collar worker, already with a five o’clock shadow despite it being noon. Dirty from his day’s labor, scruffy, wearing old raggedy work clothes. He looked mean and harried.

“Excuse me,” he said as if we were old acquaintances in a bar, “What are you guys talkin’ about? I overheard you sayin’ something about a friend of yours dying?”
“Yes”, we said to him. “A friend of ours died a few hours ago. We just found out.”
The man scratched the hair on his chin for a moment, pondering this.
“How old was he?” he asked.
“18,” we answered.
“That’s a great age,” was his curious reply, and he pondered a moment more. “How did he die, if you don’t mind my askin’?”
“Car accident.”
“Did he suffer?”
“I don’t think so. They said it was instantaneous.”
“Was anybody else hurt or killed in the accident?”
“Ummm, I don’t think so.” He thought for a moment more.
“That’s a great way to die,” he said. We looked at him oddly. He continued.
“There is nothing me or anybody else here in this world could say to make it better. It sucks. That’s all there is to it. It just plain fucking sucks. But I can tell you one thing.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Only the good GET to die young,” was his reply. With that, he tipped his hat, paid his bill, and left solemnly.

I don’t know why I bother mentioning any of this. I know this will all sound sappy and contrived, and I suppose in a way it all is. It is just something I needed to write, something that has been festering in my head for awhile. Nor will I claim these three were close personal friends of mine. They were not. I knew them all, though I can’t claim I was very close with any of them. And I am not going to wax philosophical about the death of children. There is nothing I could say on that subject that has not already been said a thousand times over. It just plain fucking sucks. That is all there is to it.

I used to ponder death and the afterlife and all that shit constantly. I do not anymore. Why? Well, for one, after a certain amount of thought given to it, the ideas start becoming redundant. For another, I honestly just have no clue why people die or what happens to them after the fact. I don’t know, nor do I care to ponder a question to which the answer is unknowable. I respect the people who are sure that you enter nothingness upon your death about as much as I respect those who are sure of a Christian heaven and hell. What both fail to account for, and to respect, is the inherent mystery of the Universe.

And I freely admit I have no clue. Nor do I particularly want to know for that matter.

But I do have a bit of a wish. A request for God, so to speak.

I love to dream. I have such wonderfully vivid narrative dreams, full of a better mixture of fantasy and reality than any artist or author could ever hope to capture. If I could, I would live in my dreams. Just constantly be wandering the wonder and beauty that my subconscious produces for me every night. A place with no rules, no boundaries, where everything is as you paint it. Where anything is possible. Where everything is valid and knowable. Where you are the creator of your own universe.

My idea of a perfect death is a quick one. One in which nobody else is hurt or killed and no suffering occurs.

And my perfect afterlife?

I wish to just be allowed to keep dreaming.

I wish that what happens is that you “fall asleep” forever. Where reality fades into your dream worlds, and you are left there, in your own universe, to your own thoughts and fantasies. The idea that you are thrown into the oblivion of nothingness upon your demise is just unfathomable to me. The realist in me recognizes that that may be the case, but the optimist in me will protest and fight that idea tooth and nail until the day I will know for sure.

I hope that when your brain shuts off your consciousness, that the other parts still run on autopilot for awhile. That you are still allowed the faculties that allow you to dream, to live vicariously through your own fairy tales. Perhaps you eventually fade away into nothingness. That would be okay. So long as you get that time in your own world, which would seem infinite enough to you. That is all I hope for. After you leave this universe, I dream that you are allowed to live in the universe of your own making.

One more ride out before you merge with the infinite.

I think the Universe owes us that much.

I dream that Tommy Scott is still alive, in a world full of painters and poets and where nobody is intolerant, everybody just sees the beauty in others. Nothing more and nothing less. Where he is respected just for being a person of value, just for being a good man. And I dream that he is happy there.

I dream that Justin Ramirez is still alive, in a world where opportunities are endless, where he is on a blacktop, teaching his kids how to play basketball, and going over all the productive things he plans on doing today. Where he is not thinking over past failures, but rather, is asking himself “what can I do NOW”. And I dream that he is happy there.

I dream that Anna Riphahn is flying through her fairy tales, immersed in the universe that springs from her unlimited well of creativity. Where she makes children happy, where she romps with the fairies and the wizards and whatever the hell else she can dream up. Where she can live in the world that she can create. And I dream that she is happy there.

And I dream the same for everybody else who is taken so young.

Mostly though, I just dream of being allowed to keep dreaming.

My first memory ever.

Cut to Asheville, North Carolina. The city of my birth. I was five at the time.

We lived in the heart of the Smokey Mountains. A cul-de-sac at the top of a hill. Kinda like a figure nine, with the loop being the top of the hill.

And in the middle of this loop was a single large spooky lookin’ Crab-apple tree.

I remember it was dusk one night and all the neighborhood kids were surrounding this tree. My twin brother and I were psyched because my mother was stuck on the phone and thus unable to put us to bed. It was a feeling of euphoria coupled with paranoia. We were joyful in the way only children can be at the prospect of staying out in the dark with the neighborhood kids, but constantly looking over our shoulders, sure that at any moment our mother would exit the house and scream at us for exploiting her mistake.

In any case, I remember that all of us were picking up the apples around the tree, and lobbing them into the branches and leaves.

Because in this tree were a myriad of bats.

Most could not be seen. It was dusk, a few minutes from total dark, and the tree had a lot of very deep purple leaves. The shadows played about, and we could barely make out the black shapes of the hordes of bats within.

So all of us kids were picking up the apples and lobbing them into the tree. You couldn’t see what your apple hit, but when you hit a bat, there would be a sudden fierce ruffling from within the endless sticks and branches. It was great fun, in a sadistic little boy sort of way.

My twin brother and I were not doing well. We were only five, and most of our apples barely hit the lowest branches of the very full tree. And this had been going on for awhile.

At one point, I wound up and with the most force I could muster shot the apple I was holding right smack dab in the middle of the tree.

We could suddenly hear a great squeaking noise and a larger amount of rustling than we had yet heard. We all took a few steps back.

And suddenly, the tree exploded in activity. I must have hit their leader or something. The entire hoard of bats suddenly took flight, exploding from their hiding positions into a great cloud of winged rats that shot out in a chaotic formation and took to the skies.

We all scattered, screaming like little girls.

End of memory.

Years later, in Topeka, Kansas, I was maybe 12 or 13. One of the activities I enjoyed most in those pre-Manilla Gorilla days was sewer exploring. Topeka, KS, as do most major cities, has a really cool system of sewers that span underneath the city. They were also all large enough to navigate. Some were small enough that you had to bend over like Quasimodo, some so large you could easily drive a car through.

In any case, my friends and I would often go explore them. We’d take cans of spray paint and pilfered cigarettes and go do our thing. We also would take along fireworks or whatever other assorted forbidden goodies we could get our hands on.

The sewers are wonderful places. The feeling that civilization and all the strict demands of authority figures was so close, and yet we were just beneath their radar scopes. We would spray paint messages, light off fireworks (which were spectacularly loud and brilliant in the sewers), and generally make merry in a 13 year old sort of way. It was great. Down there it is warm in the winter, cool in the summer.

Well, one day we were going down “the bridge”, which was a circular tunnel about 6 feet diameter, that connects the cramped tunnels of the residential areas to the gigantic ones of the city. When, ahead of us, we spied a black object.

We would see it fly towards us, then disappear as it stopped on the dark ceiling in some crevice or something. We would think it had left, start to advance again, and then it would pop out again and come our way. Repeat this about 6 times. To a 13-year-old, this is very frightening. And also, it was blocking the one tunnel we could use to go wherever it was we were going.

So we concocted a plan.

We had with us those fireworks, you know, the types that come all strung together and sound like a machine gun when they go off. Our thinking was that bats see by radar, using sound, and if we created a loud enough explosion, it would fuck it up or something. Actually, now that I think about it, I’m not sure WHAT we were thinking. But at the time it seemed like a good idea.

In any case, we put a whole mess of fireworks on a piece of paper near where we thought the bat was, lit the paper and ran back, covering our ears.

It took a minute or two for the fire to reach the fireworks. And just as they were about to go off, we saw the bat appear, fly right fucking above where the fireworks were, and disappear into some crevice.

BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG!!!!!!

Loud as a cannon.

As the smoke was clearing, the bat appeared out of it, making some sort of strange squeaking noise. It was also flying very erratically. When I say erratically, I mean the bat would fly like a drunk driver, and would occasionally smack itself into a wall.

We named him Stupid and he was our companion for the next few months.

We would be in the sewers somewhere and we would hear the sound of a bat flying into walls and know that Stupid was around. I have no idea how it survived, as it was probably stone deaf, and couldn’t fly worth a damn anymore, but it somehow scraped by.

In retrospect, I feel kinda bad about it. It was not a nice thing to do to one of God’s Creatures. But little boys are evil things. And that bat sure was funny.

Karma, my friends, is a bitch.

So I’m about 17, outside smoking late one night while on the cordless phone. Across the street there is a gigantic tree, very full, very beautiful.

So I’m standing there, and I see some black object fly out of the tree. I follow it with my eyes, just a passing interest sort of thing.

As I stand there and watch it, It kinda swoops down low and gracefully, and heads my way. I think to myself “this is odd. Some bird is coming right for me.” But just stand there anyway, expecting it to notice me and then alter its course.

It does not.

It goes straight for me, and then SMACK! It crashes into my face. Felt like I had just been socked in the jaw. I drop the phone (which breaks on the cement) and yelp. I had a black eye and my nose was bleeding.

I look down and there is a big-ass bat, with its back broken, lying on the ground. And me with a black eye that lasted for weeks.

I am stunned. I look back at the tree, and see another single black object fly out and swoop in my direction.

I run inside.

I ain’t messin’ with no kamikaze bats!

A few months later I go see a concert. Bush/Hum/Toadies. I got dragged to it, as I abhor Bush, but the Toadies were great, so it was worth it (any band that brings a live donkey on the stage commands my respect). The venue is an old building, used to be a theater but is now falling apart basically.

Hum comes on, and the second they hit a really loud note, a huge cloud of bats comes out of the woodwork. This was amusing, though not scary, cuz the ceilings were very high and the bats were just flying this way and that way up there in a panic as Hum plays an opening number.

I look behind me and realize me and my group of buddies are standing near a large open window.

I look back up, and the bats are all headed RIGHT for us.

Suddenly, the 50 or so people surrounding the window are covered in a cloud of bats. In my hair, on my clothes, smacking into my chest in their desperate attempt to flee the trite alt-rock. The 50 or so people that are getting pummeled by the bats are screaming, everybody else is laughing, the music stops. The bats seem endless. I got pretty scratched up and had bat shit all over my clothes by the time the last bat had found its path outside. All the other people who had been bombarded compose themselves and laugh it off, but not me. I suspected malice.

About a year later. Visiting a zoo. The Topeka zoo has a really cool feature that is kinda like a mini bio-dome that houses a complete rainforest ecosystem.

It also houses a lot of the biggest goddamned bats you have ever seen.

So I’m walking along, and all of a sudden a bat bursts out of the brush and swoops so close to my ear that I could feel it’s wings against my neck. Then it flies up and disappears in some trees.

Whew, I think to myself, that was close!

I brush my shoulder to get all the dirty bat germs off, only to realize (a little too late), that the bat had shit all over me. It was nasty. It must have been saving it for awhile too, cuz there was a lot of it. Bat shit is not really much like bird shit, BTW. It is more like very runny dog shit.

Guano.

At this point, I’m getting pretty paranoid.

A few months later.

I go to my room one night, ready for bed, and the second I open my bedroom door I see these three bats flying around like nuts. I had left a window open, and they had apparently gotten in and now could not get out. I spent all night trying to get them out with a broom. They had broken two lamps, a shelf full of knick-knacks, a stereo speaker I had attached to the ceiling corner and had shit in my closet by the end of it.

I have since had maybe 12 similar encounters with the foul flying demons from Hell.

I am convinced that the bat population is trying to teach me a lesson. Trying to right the wrongs of my youth. I am on the bat shit-list, my friends, and it is no fun. I live in constant fear. I am always looking over my shoulder, examining trees with suspicion. I jump at the slightest squeak. And don’t even talk to me about sewers or Bush.

I am a broken man.

If I could have taken back that apple that hit the bat-leader, I would. If I could restore Stupid’s hearing, I would. But alas I cannot.

All I ask is for the bat community to please forgive me and let me live my life.

But they refuse.

They are a vindictive, stubborn race.

I have a bad case of the bat karma.

Tune in next week.

Same Bat-Time, same Bat-Place.

*twitches*

1. New poll up (I wonder which admin did THAT one!).

2. Latest Redguard posted. On Roads and Prisons.

3. You may notice that the random slogans (up at the top there for now) have been tinkered with. We have added quite a few new ones, and also, they now appear on the redirect page as well (the thing that says it will take you back to the thread in 2 seconds after you post but is always lying). That way us people on dialup can have something to amuse ourselves with while cursing our ISP.

4. If you are sent an invite for User Updates, please do them. It is an integral part of the site. If you aren't going to do it, or are going to be spending some time on it (like over a week or so), please e-mail me or one of the other admins and let us know, as we have to account for such things. That would be much obliged.

5. As always, if you have any unsolicited submissions for just about anything, feel free to e-mail one of the admins with it. We are constantly looking for new material, new features, new columns, new everything. If you have any suggestions, as usual, go to the Suggestions forum.

6. And finally, we just registered our 400th member, Harlequinn. Harlequinn = cool man/handle. Welcome him/her/it to the fold and keep the word of mouth going. More members = more lively forum.

That goes for all you friggin' lurkers too!

DON'T THINK WE DON'T KNOW YOU ARE THERE!!!!!

That is all.

Some of you have been asking me “Paint, we know you are a kick-ass housewife and childcare provider, but how do you keep YOURSELF clean and healthy?

That, my friends, is an excellent question.

I have acquired over my many years of being a drunken slob certain tips on how to keep yourself in tip-top condition.

So without further ado, I give you:

Paint CHiPs’ Guide to Personal Hygiene and Health.

1. When shaving, go against, rather than with, the grain of your back.

2. Although alcohol is indeed a disinfectant, beer is not a healthy substitute for antibiotics.

3. Those white bugs that live in your hair are not there to eat up all the smaller bugs, and no, it is not a “circle of life kinda thing”.

4. If you leave a ring in the tub after showering, you may want to consider showering more often.

5. Ears, despite common sense, need to be cleaned every so often. Failure to do so means you can no longer claim that you must have had a stroke when you lose all hearing in your left ear.

6. If you are considering shaving your head versus cleaning your hair, you may want to consider shaving your pubic area as well.

7. Despite the proclamation on the bottle that it is “all-purpose”, MrClean should not be used in most major body cavities. Maybe you should write the company about that one.

8. Your body is like a temple. Like that old temple in the jungle in the first Indiana Jones movie, all broken down with spider webs and shit in it. And if you try to steal my gold statues, I will drop my big rock on you.

9. I have no idea what #8 means either.

10. Flintstones vitamins and lots of beer are not healthy substitutes for “food”.

11. Heroin is not a good way to “flush out the system”.

12. When sticking a fork in an electrical outlet to pry something loose, make sure you are wearing rubber boots.

13. Bathing only for the sake of other people is not the attitude you want to have, though it is a good start.

14. Do not brush your teeth with shampoo. Or Windex, for that matter. Or bleach.

15. A good way to prevent tobacco stains on your nails is to chew your nails off.

16. Never, ever try to set a broken bone yourself, especially if you have no medical training whatsoever and if the broken bone is yours.

17. Facial hair is a good way to cover up all the sores on your lips.

18. Q-tips are for cleaning your ears. NOT for your eyes, and certainly not to dislodge urethral blockage.

19. Spraying Lysol all over your body is not a good substitute for bathing, no matter how much you want it to be.

20. Wiping your face with the dirty sock you are about to wear does not help make the face or the sock any cleaner.

21. When somebody says, “It’s so clean you could eat off it!” you should still not eat off it. Especially if nobody said that about it in the first place.

22. Do not use bath towels to clean the toilet.

23. No, “Let sleeping cockroaches lie” is not a common phrase. Kill it.

24. The garbage disposal is not a good substitute for a garbage CAN, especially as far as dirty diapers are concerned.

25. A dog, again despite common sense, is no a substitute for a vacuum.

26. If it can be helped, do not cut your own hair. Especially if you are drunk.

27. If you have become attached to the vermin and bugs that live among you, there may be a problem. Your apartment is not a beautiful rainforest ecosystem.

28. You cannot take the seats out of the van.

29. Do not burn trash INSIDE your apartment.

30. If “leftovers” to you is scraping up the dried melted cheese off of dirty dishes, you should at least consider microwaving the shit first.