Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Casual, or new, readers may notice a lack of Cornell coverage on this site. This is because Thoughts on the Dead is grad-level, baby. We’re above that here, Enthusiasts; you should have covered the fundamentals somewhere else.
I’ve also written about the stupid show for, like, the past seven years and have nothing more thoughts. Search for ’em if you want.
Corona delenda est
TotD is negative for Bonus Maronus. I repeat: no ‘ronus. The kabibble can officially go fuck itself.
Then what’s with your arm?
I am assuming terminal bone cancer.
Naturally.
“Jenkins!”
“Sir?”
“Why are you laying down?”
“Recovering from the trepanation, sir.”
“Quarantine has done strange things to our relationship!”
“Yes, sir.”
“But doesn’t your brain feel better?”
“Too early to tell, sir.”
“My brain feels like an over-plumped hot dog. My juiciness is coming to a froth, Jenkins.”
“Yes, sir.”
“A froth!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Hole in the head or not, I don’t know how comfortable I am with you laying down. I’m taking your posture as aggressive and insubordinate. Your sloth challenges me, boy.”
“You drilled a–”
“Sit up! Right now, up up up.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You can put your feet on the table.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Wait. Not in those shoes. Take your feet off the table.”
“Sir, did you have a business idea?”
“Business!”
“Yes, sir. You’re excellent at that.”
“Oh, yes. Ever since business school.”
“You got good grades?”
“I acquired the school and flipped it for a quick profit. I may have sold it to sex people. I was also voted ‘Most Likely to Sell the School to Sex People’ in the yearbook. College! Oh, to be young again.”
“Sir, what was your new business idea?”
“Not so much a new idea as a variation on an old one. On the original idea, as a matter of fact.”
“Do you want to slap a Stealie on some shit, sir?”
“So very much!”
“Why screw with success? What should we slap a Stealie on now, sir?”
“Umbrellas.”
“No one’s going outside right now, sir.”
“Confederate stock certificates.”
“With a Stealie?”
“We’ll call it art, man.”
“No one will buy that, sir.”
“What if the Deadhead gives us a hundred bucks, and we go to his house and punch him right in the center of his face? Then we toss a handkerchief at him and sneer, There’s your Stealie, y’greasy ape.”
“Why would anyone pay a hundred dollars for that?”
“It’s like Cameo!”
“It is not, sir.”
“I had another Cameo-related business idea.”
“We can’t sign up a Bobby impersonator.”
“That wasn’t my idea. But we should totally do that.”
“We can’t. What was your idea, sir?”
“A reverse-streaming service.”
“What’s that?”
“The Deadheads pay ten bucks a week to let the band have access to their webcams.”
“No one would sign up for that.”
“What if there were a premium level where Mickey would cheer you on as you masturbate?”
“Fewer people would sign up. Let’s stick to tangible products, sir. Historically, the Grateful Dead sells stuff. We should sell something that makes sense in these troubling times.”
“Nothing but trouble, these times!”
“Very troublesome, sir.”
“If these times were a stranger at a bar, you’d glass him right in the eye. On sight! No words exchanged! And the bartender would fete you for your heroics. You would be made king of that bar, Jenkins. From amongst the women, you would seize your reward. That’s how public drinking works.”
“Possibly, sir.”
“This year is ugly-mugging us, dammit. What if we burned the calendars?”
“Wouldn’t work.”
“Many people are saying that we can defeat 2020 by setting fire to all the calendars. Many people are saying this.”
“They shouldn’t be. And you shouldn’t–”
“I just tweeted it out!”
“–say it in public. Sir, think of the stockholders.”
“I was! I was gonna charge fifty bucks a calendar!”
“Even Deadheads won’t fall for that one, sir.”
“Lotta overlap between the Jam and Antivaxx scenes, Jenkins. Maybe not even overlap. More like ‘irreversible intermingling.’ Some thoughts are pernicious, Jenkins.”
“Yes, sir. I think we should ask ourselves what the fans want during quarantine.”
“I know what they want.”
“Sir?”
“Blood. We’re more primal than we appear. This sort of disruption calls for sacrifice. The gods have ben angered, Jenkins. Maybe someone took a shit on the Field of Ixtum.”
“Oh, I hope not.”
“Ixtum has absolutely no sense of humor. Whatever happened, the mystic modalities have been knocked askew. Vast reservoirs of magicks must be drawn upon to fix this, and that’s gonna require blood. Jenkins, do we have an emergency plan for the Reconciliation of Ahura Mazda?”
“Sir, I have asked you time and time again to stop watching those weird YouTube channels, or at least to stop believing them.”
“You cannot prove that 2020 is not the result of a swimming pool full of orgone going rotten.”
“No, but we can assume.”
“We’ll sell halberds.”
“The long spear?”
“Yes. Stealie on the handle. And we’ll engrave it. It’ll say Stick me in some asshole’s guts. Yay, the Grateful Dead. Doodley-doo, you’re a winner with a halberd. They’ll snap them up!”
“Deadheads will not buy a weapon that insults them. Besides, I don’t even know if you’re allowed to ship halberds.”
“We’ll just say they’re pikes. No problems.”
“Sir, it’s a non-starter.”
“Morning star.”
“Morning star?”
“The big spiky metal ball on a stick. Not a flail! Flail’s the one with the chain. Sure, you look bad-ass swinging the sucker around, but you dissipate all your power. For crowd control, you want a morning star.”
“Please let’s not sell any melee weapons, sir.”
“The populace is rambunctionizing, Jenkins! We need to anticipate the market. What if we sold neighbor-swords?”
“Which are?”
“Swords.”
…
“For your neighbor.”
“Sir, let’s not actively accelerate the Great Collapse.”
“Your eyes, Jenkins: Do you have them?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get ready.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get set.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Blast them!”
…
“Yes, sir. The Grateful Dead cannot sell swords.”
“Rambo knives?”
“No, sir.”
“Flying guillotines.”
“Absolutely not, sir. Imagine the chaos on the lot.”
“You call it chaos, I call it a hoot.”
“No flying guillotines, sir.”
“I WILL SLAP A STEALIE ON AN EDGED WEAPON IF IT KILLS YOU!”
“What about a hatchet, sir?”
“Hatchet! Yes, that’s a perfect idea Half our audience thinks they’re lumberjacks, and they other half live in Brooklyn. Both groups need axes!”
“What should we have engraved, sir?”
“Some hippie bullshit. Whatever.”
“On it, sir.”
…
“You’re still sitting down, Jenkins.”
“I’ve lost a lot of blood, sir.”
“You didn’t lose it. It’s right there soaked into the carpet.”
“Yes, sir.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f16ZTSGu1XQ
Goin’ on a Kraftwerk jag.
Dunno why the video won’t embed. It’s from the ’81 tour, the one with the red shirts and skinny black ties; that color scheme is preferred by the Bavarian.
Florian Schnitzel–
Schneider.
–died today; the great Jesse Jarnow hips us all to this pristine SBD of their 5/7/75 show at the P.N.E. Garden Auditorium in Vancouver, BC. Kraftwerk’s music is both relaxing and unsettling, like taking a nap on a couch made of human skin. Kraftwerk’s music also won, at least in terms of influence. Every deejay sounds like this nowadays. Zeppelin was much bigger in ’75 than Der Werk, but only one band sounds like Zeppelin now and we all make fun of them for it. You could release this on Spotify under the name DJ Klaus von Bulow and no one would know it was 45 years old. It is au courant, or however you say au courant in German.
Questions do arise, though. Look at this bullshit:
How fucking popular were Kraftwerk in North America? Was Kraftwerk really drawing as many kids as the Dead? (And, yes, I know the Dead technically wasn’t drawing anyone in 1975; don’t be pedantic.) They’re playing the same venues, so they must have drawn around the same amount of fans. How many Kraftwerk fans could there have possibly been in Nebraska in 1975? Was their midwestern popularity, somehow, fallout from Watergate? Why hasn’t Werner Herzog done a documentary about Kraftwerk like Scorsese did about Dylan? Ooh, or Can. I DEMAND WERNER HERZOG MAKE A CAN MOVIE.
Stop yelling into the void.
I’d rather yell at the servants, but I ate them.
As is your right.
As is my right.
“You got the boney maroney, Ass?”
Maybe.
“Walk a couple miles out of town and bury yourself alive.”
No.
“Save the world some work. You’re done for.”
I might not have it. And if I do, it might not be that bad.
“Nah. I can read your aura. You know what color it is?”
What color?
“Chinese malfeasance.”
Not a color.
“It’s yellowish.”
Racist.
“Everything’s racist to your generation. You better get over that, man. This plague’s gonna reshuffle the world via several rohowas.”
Racial holy wars?
“Just like Dio sang about.”
Dio did not sing about racial holy wars.
“Absolutely did. Just in secret. Those dragons in his lyrics were racist as shit.”
I don’t believe you.
“Me and Ronnie James used to hang in the 80’s. Went skank-shooting together. He liked tall chicks, so we used to drive down to LA and watch the UCLA women’s volleyball team practice. He’d jerk it sometimes. Great little guy.”
None of that is true.
“Irregardless, you stay at least nine miles away from me.”
I will respect your Personal Health Radius.
“If you die, I don’t want any of your stuff. Everything you have is crap.”
Thanks, Billy.
“Hey, I’m here for ya. Just go away.”
Sure.
Not dead, listening to live Elton John from 1971 when his band had the same configuration as Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, but a completely different hairdresser. You don’t have to worry about me as long as I’m listening to Elton John. When I throw on Tom Waits, then the end will surely be near, but old pre-crazy Elton is cheery music, even the sad songs.
My doctor is still practicing, but only online. He sends me a link to a chat site whose name was maybe in a Neal Stephenson novel. The UI of the app is straightforward and professional. There are no filters, so you can’t force the doctor to talk to you while you’re a dog or a wizard or Gritty or whatever. Very trustworthy app that I’m sure will be broken into within weeks. He is wearing a clean shirt, and has a recent haircut, and sits up straight. We all pretended it was a normal doctor’s appointment as hard as we could.
It was the sweats last night that got me on the phone with the doc. Woke myself up three times. Snoring yourself awake happens to all of us, but sweating yourself awake is a bad sign. Doing it three times is an ill omen.
I described my other symptoms to the doctor. That my spleen was bothersome, that my schnoz was cocksnootled, that the cane was twisted up on my brazos. He refused me opiates, and suggested a Covid-19 test. The state is administering them for free at several drive-through locations near my home, but the state I’m talking about is Florida, and so there have been issues with thieves sneaking into people’s trunks while the driver is distracted. And, obviously, alligators have been involved. Florida leads all states in the category of “arguments settled by one party throwing an alligator at the other.”
Some of the food trucks on the farm roads now offer testing, but they just charge ten bucks to take a picture of your dick and give you a thumbs up.
There was also a walk-in clinic half-a-mile from my house charging a hundred bucks, and I contemplated my privilege and asked myself whether I wanted to involve myself with a system nahfuckthat I immediately put on my pants and charged outside waving cash overhead like a captured flag. A q-tip was then shoved into my medulla oblongata. The physician’s assistant pressed on it one way, and I could smell my old bunk in summer camp, and then she shifted it and my eyeballs shut off.
“One, two, three–”
IT’S IN MY MEMORIES, WOMAN!
“–four, five.”
And she withdrew the stick from my brain. I ask if there’s not, say, a blood test for the virus.
“Oh, yes. But we enjoy watching you struggle. Your leg went up and down like a little doggie.”
I thank her for noticing. She refuses me opiates.
The test will be sent to a lab. Or maybe they do it in-house. Or maybe they just throw away the swab and eyeball it? However they do it, pipettes are involved. Can’t do science without pipettes. Results in three-to-five days; until then, strict quarantine.
As far as quarantines go, it’s a teddy bear gig. This is the first plague with WiFi. Used to be you were locked in your house with a Bible and your dick, but now there is a Couch Tour, and that is better. You can also access various pornographies, or have a poor person bring you a pizza. You could even have powerful cannabanoids mailed to you. Those that suffered through the Black Death of Marseille in 1720 couldn’t even get ditch weed mailed to them, so temporal gratitude is in order.
You will be kept updated.
CELL PHONE NOISE
Hello?
“Good morning, Mr. on the Dead. I am calling to set up your telemedicine call with Dr. E—-.”
Oh, great. Thank you.
“And I am also calling to see if you would like to join my OnlyFans site?”
I don’t think so.
“You will already be playing around on your phone!”
Still.
“I will send you a textual message containing a hyperlink. I had a hyper cousin growing up. We called him Impulsive Tony.”
Okay. So I follow the link.
“Unless it leads to sin. Then you must forge your own path.”
I don’t think the link will lead to sin. More likely, a website.
“Many websites are nothing but sin! I know of one where men’s feet get pooped on. It employs Impulsive Tony.”
We were talking about my telemedicine call with the doctor.
“I love that word. ‘Telemedicine’ sounds so much nicer than ‘video chatting with a Jewish fellow wearing a white coat and no pants.’ By the way, I am legally bound to inform you before your call that the doctor may or may not be wearing pants.”
Okay.
“But in the spirit of friendship, I will inform you that he is definitely not. And sometimes the popsicle slides out of the box.”
Um, sure.
“It flops out! Audibly! The doctor is a man of meat.”
None of this is helping me.
“You will need to enable access to your microphone.”
Okay.
“And your camera.”
Right.
“And all the other information in your phone. Passwords, photos, location history, everything.”
Why do you need that?
“It is not a matter of ‘need.’ The Stimulus Bill of Last Tuesday gives us the ability to demand it, and so we are following the law.”
Whatever.
“Do you own a BusbeeTech 802 E-nurse?”
A what now?
“It is an all-in-one unit that monitors 18 different bodily functions and wirelessly transmits the information back to the doctor.”
How the hell–
“It goes up your butt!”
–does that work? Ah.
“It measures temperature, pulse, oxygen levels, perspicacity, ability to do the watusi, free radicals, expensive radicals, and whether or not you have Scottie Pippen Disease.”
Scottie Pippen doesn’t have a disease.
“Look at that man’s head and tell me there isn’t something wrong with him!”
Regardless.
“The 802 E-nurse is also, as I mentioned, wireless. The 801 required both a power cable and a USB wire. Very occasionally, knotting would occur. And also one time, this lady forgot she had it in and went to fetch herself some cole slaw from the fridge. She lost her asshole!”
Irrelevant to my case.
“The doctors could not reattach it! They had to mash together bits of elbow and earlobe to create her a new pooper. I have heard it doesn’t work right.”
Can’t imagine that it would.
“Which model did you say you had, Mr. on the Dead?”
No model. I do not possess a hospital-dildo.
“Well, let me check your insurance and see if you are worthy of one.”
…
“Fed Ex will be at your house within 16 hours. Please immediately insert the device so that it can begin getting base-line readings of your vital signs, and stop shrieking in terror.”
What now?
“Funny story! The BusbeeTech 802 E-nurse was programmed to have a debilitating fear of buttholes.”
Why are the medical buttplugs even sentient at all?
“Funny story! Lightning hit the factory and they all came to life. Don’t think about it too much. Just shove it in your soft-soft and ignore it when it begs to be let out.”
They can talk?
“Along with the debilitating fear of buttholes, it’s a feature that perhaps shouldn’t have made the final code. What’s done is done. Most of our patients recommend sitting on a pillow, or wearing headphones. They tire themselves out pretty quick.”
I’m not using this doohickey. Don’t send me one.
“Too late. It will be there in mere minutes, as the only vehicles on the streets anymore are delivery trucks. Thank you. I have several more points to go over with you.”
We’re not done?
“Nowhere near! At the beginning of your telemedicine appointment, we would appreciate it if you smashed that Like button, and subscribed to the doctor’s channel.”
Sure.
“I would like to remind you that the more you tip, the better the doctor is.”
There’s a tip button?
“It is 2020, Mr on the Dead. All humans have tip buttons now. We are two years away from being an entirely tip button-based economy.”
You’re probably right.
“Would you like to join the doctor’s Patreon?”
No.
“Would you like to see a collection of his TikToks?”
No.
“The doctor may ask you to position your phone so that he may view your grundle. If he does, the feed will go live to an app called Grundl. And before you begin to argue–”
That was in the Stimulus Bill?
“–you should know…. Yes, the recent one. Only about 14 people have read that thing front-to-back. There is tomfoolery in there! Do you recall chattel slavery?”
Yes.
“It is back! Someone really should have skimmed that puppy, but everyone wanted their $1200 so bad!”
That’s awful. But I really just wanna see the doctor.
“Is it the kabibble?”
That’s what I want to know.
“Are you taking wagers? Because I am looking at your chart, and I believe that you have it. Your luck is poor. Twenty bucks on positive.”
No bet.
“Fifty they gotta vent you.”
Stop that. When will the doctor be calling?
“The E-nurse will notify you ten minutes beforehand.”
Notify?
“You will know. I assure you, Mr. on the Dead that you will not miss the message.”
I don’t like 2020.
“It is an unrelenting behemoth of grief and loss! You have a nice day.”
You, too.
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