Thoughts On The Dead

Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To

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Feather or Dot?

September 6, 2016 / / 3 Comments

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Describe yourself in one word.

“No.”

Who was Herodotus?

“A fabled man.”

How many discrete pieces of clothing do you have on?

“31, but each is small. How are you finding Burning Man?”

Mostly on Instagram.

“The mediated life, once-removed. Clean and neat.”

My place is a mess, actually. How do you smell?

“Relentlessly human. Do you renounce solipsism, last-Tuesdayism, matrixism, and the brain-in-a-jar hypothesis?”

I do renounce them.

“Do you renounce nihilism, and the catalytic converter?”

I do renounce them.

“And Satan?”

Which one?

“Satan Laramie.”

Linebacker for the Rams?

“That’s him.”

I do renounce him.

“And what about this clown made out of drugs?”

What?

burning man clown

“WHO WANTS A  BALLOON SWASTIKA?”

I hate Burning Man almost as much as this bit.

Beauty And The Beast (Starved)

September 6, 2016 / / 2 Comments

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I want to colonize you.

“No longer, oppressor.”

Let me destabilize your democratically-elected government.

“Then I will flourish in opposition, and identity inchoate will coagulate.”

And when do the ghosts of empire dissipate?

“When the arm that controls the Invisible Hand is revealed. When the land is returned to the people, and the people returned to themselves.”

Have your shoulder-chains gotten stuck on anything?

“Just once or twice. Manageable.”

Where does capital come from?

“The same place ducks come from.”

Lakes?

“More metaphorical.”

Imaginary lakes?

“Capital comes from need, and the exclusion of those that do so. Capital was born when the first lock was place on the first grain silo.”

Are we going back to the ducks?

“Forget about the ducks.”

You brought them up.

“Do you know joy?”

What is joy?

“A soul’s glistening; to float.”

Is it to be sought?

“No: positioned for. Sometimes joy throws curveballs. If there’s a righty at bat, you need to shade towards first.”

Your eyebrows are ferocious.

“Lefty once beat a mugger to death.”

Teach me your foreign ways.

“I’m from Los Angeles.

Foreign enough.

“You seem like a complete dolt, so I won’t. Plus, I’m here with my boyfriend, tax reform advocate Grover Norquist.”

What?

grover norquist burning man

“PARTY CAN START NOW THAT GROVER’S HERE, BITCHES!”

Oh, what the fuck?

“LET’S GET TO THE ORGYDOME AND GET OUR FUCKS ON!”

Last one. That’s it. No more.

A Good, Old-Fashioned Fund Raising

September 6, 2016 / / 4 Comments

art ftw jerry clouds tda

The fourth thing Kitty Hawk did after taking over the Museum of Modern Terrible Dead Art (Or MoMTDA, pronounced “Mom: Ta-DAA!”) was lawyer up, which she viewed like putting on your seatbelt or locking your front door at night. You may recall that the third thing she did was locate the Time Sheath, but that’s a whole other story for a whole other time, and also I forgot to tell you about the second thing she did, part of it at least.

Fundraising! Funds are low; raise them. Lift those funds like Simba, and show ’em to Jesus. Gotta raise them funds up.

Kitty had never fundraised before; she liked the idea, though: just asking for the money. She had traded goods and services for money; scammed people out of it; absconded with it. She had flat-out stolen quite a bit of cash. Asking for it was a whole new angle for her, but she got her head around it in a day or so. Kitty Hawk was born for the Ask.

Because she understood there was no asking involved: you were still selling something, it just didn’t technically exist. Not a widget, in other words. There was legacy, and Kitty wished every rich Deadhead wanted legacy; she had a deal going with a plaque engraver in Little Aleppo, and would gladly slap your name on whatever you could afford. (Except for the parking lot: she titled that the Patrick J. Leahy Parking Structure, and she did it for free. Never hurts to kiss a Senator’s ass.)

Legacy was easy, but it turned into ego, and ego was a pain in the ass but had more money. Unfortunately, there were only so many main galleries in MoMTDA to sell the naming rights to. She floated a trial balloon about leasing the rights to a different rich guy each year, but it don’t go over well: people with the money to buy main galleries want to buy them for good, and bolt their full names in blocky, san-serif, metal letters to the wall, and giant, old-fashioned oil portraits of their mutant families.

Kitty briefly considered selling the main gallery to four or five people, but that would require fleeing town (which was always an option) or engaging in some sort of wacky farce on the occasion that two of them showed up at once. It was the short, dumb money; she started a bidding war between a  tech bro and a weed millionaire by accidentally forwarding one the other’s offer, and then accidentally doing it five or six more times until the price was high enough.

art bears river tda

The real nightmares were the ones who wanted access. Oh, God, they wanted to be treated like family. Important and valued and listened to, but mostly they wanted a picture with the band. Kitty underplayed the fact that the Dead and MoMTDA were loosely connected at best, and legally not at all. In fact, she underplayed it so well that she would generally say the exact opposite thing; sometimes she would claim that Bobby had just left her office.

The access guys, though: they had cash–though not as much as the legacy or ego-driven donators–and unlike the high-spenders, they were amenable to being part of groups. Rich guys demanded time-consuming one-on-ones, but your lesser strata contributor would congregate. This gave Kitty a chance.

“Jenkins?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“We need Grateful Deads. How do we get them here to be nice to our beloved patrons?”

“Pay them.”

“I don’t want to.”

“It would be much easier if you did.”

“Still.”

“You could give Bobby an award. He’s on his victory lap.”

“Call the plaque guy, then call Matt Busch. Tell Busch there’s a grand in it for him if Bobby shows up, no one has to know.”

“Invent award, bribe roadie. Check.”

“Who else?”

“Mickey, ma’am.”

…

“Drums are art, right?”

“Sounds good to me, ma’am.”

“300 patrons at a grand apiece? And we engrave their names on something.”

“We should renegotiate our deal with the plaque guy.”

“Maybe bring him in-house. Great: call Mickey, tell him it’s a lecture or a whatever.”

“Hire plaque guy, lie to drummer. Check.”

“What abut Billy?”

“You have to pay him, ma’am.”

“What if we–”

“No, you have to pay him.”

“But how about–”

“No, you have to pay him.”

…

“Let’s move on. Phil?”

“Maybe a charity deal.”

“A real one?”

“He would probably check.”

“Pass. What about Garcia?”

“Jerry Garcia? He’s dead, ma’am.”

…

“Right.”

And that conversation leads into the story that I mentioned about Kitty Hawk and the Time Sheath, but it’s for another time.

Burning Questions

September 6, 2016 / / 0 Comments

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I like your boots.

“Real wampa.”

You’re dressed for many climates.

“My wardrobe is vast; it contains multitudes.”

Where does freedom end?

“In the littorals by the river, where the marsh stinks and the fen sucks shoes off feet. In the fields beyond are Absalom, where fear is the tribute of their gods.”

So freedom is to be found here, and here alone?

“Yes, until your stomach takes it from you.”

All fascism stems from the gut?

“Hunger is the first and true tyrant.”

But there is still choice.

“When it comes to hunger? Choice is death.”

How sandy are your genitals?

“Like they were playing the female lead in Grease.”

I don’t love you, but I could fake it real good.

“It’s Burning Man: we’re all faking it.”

Shall we hump publicly?

“Sure. Just let me tell the Romulus and Remus of Black Rock.”

Huh?

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“WE ARE THE LIVING SPIRIT OF BURNING MAN!”

“CAN WE HITCH A RIDE HOME IN YOUR PLANE?”

I need to stop going to these things.

Phrases That Will Get Your Meeting With President Obama Canceled

September 5, 2016 / / 2 Comments

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  • I’m gonna tackle that fancy fuck.
  • Son of a bitch.
  • Son of a whore.
  • Son of a goat.
  • Deez nuts.
  • Well, golly: I hope nothing bad happens to the president while he’s here, but who can tell the future?”
  • I’m gonna shove an electromagnet up his ass and push him into a sword shop.
  • Dicks out for Harambe.
  • Obama’s uncle is the most affordable pricksuck in Duluth.
  • Commander in chief? More like Commander of my foreign dickcheese.

At Last, Everything Is Back To Normal

September 5, 2016 / / 1 Comment

CELL PHONE NOISE

CELL PHONE NOISE

“John Mayer, butthole slayer.”

“You should let your bandana wrangler answer your phone, John. You’re awful at it.”

“President Katy?”

“No, John. After the Time War and all the freejackings and Doctor Gary selling the White House on Craigslist and Philly getting destroyed, I was impeached.”

“It’s been two days.”

“It was an open-and-shut case, John.”

“Sure. Well, either way: I’m sorry. How you taking it?”

katy perry burning man

“I’m at Burning Man.”

“Of course you are.”

“Once again, I have returned to my ancestral home, which is an ultra-RV in a field they used to test nukes in.”

“Can’t you just take drugs at home like the rest of us?”

“John, Burning Man is about so much more than taking drugs: it’s about art on drugs, and sex on drugs, and freedom. Drug-related freedom, but still freedom. There’s a lot of drugs, yeah.”

“How’s Doctor Gary?”

“Busy!”

“I would assume.”

“He made a new drug, John. Blackrock for Black Rock. It’s Glyco-Morphohexahydrobenzoylmethylecgonine.”

“Is that spelled right?”

“I have no idea.”

“What is it?”

“Speedball, but you vape it.”

“Wow, did the world not need that to be invented.”

“Selling like hotcakes, John. Also selling well are Hotcakes, which are waffles in a psilocybin/fentanyl syrup.”

“Where is Doctor Gary making all this stuff in the middle of the desert?”

“He stole a couple mobile labs from the CDC when I made him the boss over there.”

“Sure. So: Katy Perry is a Burner.”

“Oh no. I’m with Hillary, John.”

“BurnER.”

“I’m a hunka hunka Burning love, John. I am cleansed by the wind of the Playa. The dust scours the world from me, and the sun bleaches my bones of sin. If only all the world could be at Burning Man, John, then there would be no war. No strife. Just love, and sand, and drugs.”

“That was a terrible speech.”

“These are my people, John!”

“Who?”

“Sybarites. Tech bros. The professionally fuckable. Unplaceable Europeans. The familiarly last-named. Arms dealers’ nephews. The inexplicably famous. Peter Thiel. Tout le monde, John.”

“Good bunch of folks.”

“And, you know: staff.”

“Obviously.”

“Burning Man is all about radical self-reliance, so you have to bring your own staff.”

“Sure.”

“What are you doing, John? Why don’t you come up? I’ll send a helicopter.”

…

“Doctor Gary also stole several helicopters.”

“You should give those back.”

“Do you have any idea how many helicopters the military has? They won’t miss 20.”

“20?”

“Or however many it was. Let’s not do math during Burning Man, John. Come up here!”

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

john-mayer-builds-homes-for-military-veterans-in-shreveport-03

“Remember when you blew up my house with cruise missiles?”

“I didn’t do that, John.”

…

“They were smart bombs.”

“Gotta go.”

Thoughts On Space Without Research

September 5, 2016 / / 1 Comment
  • Space is very big.
  • Really big.
  • Stop that.
  • The word “space” is hilarious: there’s Earth…
  • …and then there’s space.
  • 14 billion light years across and trillions of galaxies and quadrillions of stars; every single thing within this observable reality that isn’t precisely us.
  • “Space.”
  • Humans are adorable.
  • Anyway: space.
  • We have never been there.
  • We’ve sent semi-self-aware robots and dumb-as-shit tin cans into a tiny bit of space, and people (and also dogs and chimps and a cat or two) have been into the first little bit of space, but we have not been to space.
  • Not space space.
  • Space premiered 14 billion years ago to terrible ratings, but over the years the audience grew; despite running out of ideas, the thing is still on the air.
  • The story scientists are going with now is that the universe started with the Big Bang, an infinitesimally short moment of energetic expansion that occurred everywhere at once.
  • Which makes no sense at all, but is better than what the scientists used to say, which was, “However you say it happened, Your Majesty. Please don’t torture me to death.”
  • There were particles, and the particles attracted themselves to each other, and then again, and once more, and now things start spinning and accretion is beginning, and gravity becomes an issue, and the universe has its first rise in temperature, and reactions chain, and and then there were stars.
  • Let there be light.
  • But these stars were too big, and they exploded.
  • Then the whole process happened again, but with more elements floating around, and the stars (including ours) reignited; this time there were planets (including ours).
  • Those first stars might have had planets, too, but fuck ’em.
  • We have a G Class star, and got lucky with it: it is middle-aged and stable, not given to the spasms of system-sized violence of a younger or older star; maybe a bit bored, in a rut, maybe married the wrong person.
  • Our sun is a good provider.
  • It is a yellow dwarf star, and–again–that’s the one you want; every other color is terrible.
  • Black holes will eat you; brown dwarves will disappoint you; red giants will not activate your superpowers; blue moons mean you are standing alone; oranges are not stars at all, but fruit.
  • Oranges are not terrible, but they are high in sugar.
  • Besides stars and planets, there are also moons, asteroids, ringworlds, comets, clouds, Galactuses, nebulae, and the multi-system civilization of the Felis Empire.
  • And all of those things are moving incredibly fast: our own sun travels through the universe at a million billion miles per hour.
  • Without research.
  • It’s difficult to overstate space’s size.
  • Okay, I did a tiny bit of research: the most distant star we can see with the naked eye is in Cassiopeia, and it’s 16,000 light years away, which even Precarious could not drive.
  • Space is bigger than that.
  • Remember when I said it was 14 billion light years across?
  • I was wrong: the universe is 14 billion years old.
  • “But, TotD,” you interrupt, “if the universe is 14 billion years old, then it must be 14 billion years across. Speed of light and what not.”
  • And I would slap you on your plump cheek for derailing my train of thought, and I would also say, “That was the mistake I made. It turns out the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light, and it’s actually 46 billion light years across.”
  • Putting aside that that fact is terrifying on an unnameable level, look at the numbers: 16,000 to 46 billion.
  • Here’s how to picture that: you can’t.
  • Human brains are ill-suited for thinking about space, but we still do.
  • On the first night of the first day that the first man walked on this planet, he looked up.
  • There was space.
  • Then he was eaten by something.
  • The second guy, however, got the third guy to keep a lookout while he looked up.
  • Space was still there, and so that second guy said, “What the fuck is that?”
  • This was the birth of Astronomy.
  • Quickly, there were advances in the field: the movement of the heavens was plotted, and not to bother if it were cloudy.
  • Until remarkably recently–within the lifetime of some Enthusiasts–whether or not you could do Astronomy depended on the weather.
  • We really are just a little baby species.
  • Our ancestors knew the stars and the night sky better than we do, though.
  • First of all, they hadn’t invented lightbulbs, so they could actually see the stars.
  • Second of all, they hadn’t invented GPS, so they needed the stars to navigate at night.
  • Third of all, they hadn’t invented literally anything, so what the fuck did they have to do other than look at the stars?
  • Early on, we noticed that several bright stars zipped through the sky at ludicrous speed each night.
  • The Greeks called them “wanderers” but they did it in Greek, and these were the planets.
  • Every single society found them, and everyone named them and made gods out of them.
  • Roman bullshit and Mayan bullshit and Chinese bullshit and Zulu bullshit: people saw those lights moving overhead and started making up stories like they couldn’t help themselves.
  • Because they couldn’t.
  • Earth was the center of the universe, obviously, because it was, just stop asking,
  • The thing is: you can make precise-enough predictions about the sky using that faulty assumption, and we remember that today as the Ptolemaic system.
  • Ptolemy’s heart was in the right place.
  • If you begin with the statement “The sun and planets revolve around earth,” than you can absolutely tell where, say, Jupiter will be on the 19th of October–hell, you can even predict eclipses–but if you plot out the yearly course of said planets, they do loop-de-loops and take weird turns; it’s so clearly moronic and wrong.
  • But until about 1000 years ago, that was how the universe went.
  • In the year 1328, a Dutch monk named Abelard Telescope invented something.
  • Stop that.
  • Did Galileo invent the telescope?
  • I seem to recall being told that in second grade.
  • As an adult, it seems more likely that a bunch of people invented the telescope.
  • Maybe Benjamin Franklin invented the telescope: he invented so many other things.
  • Sure, there would neer to be time travel involved, but I’m willing to state with conviction that Benjamin Franklin invented the telescope.
  • The telescope was a game-changing invention: we soon learned that we were not the only planet with a moon, and that Saturn had rings, and that the lady who lives across the street does not close her curtains all the way while she bathes.
  • It also gave rich guys something to put in the corner of the study.
  • For a while, people were all, “No, everything revolves around us! GRRRR!” and then they were like “Oh, who gives a shit?”
  • A few scientists got murdered by a few Popes or kings or whoever, but then again: a lot of people got murdered by Popes and kings and whoever for much dumber bullshit.
  • The past was terrible.
  • Space: we go from standing in a field looking up, to standing on a hill looking up, to realizing that climbing the hill hadn’t made much of a difference, to calculating the sky, to extending our sight, to once in a while going there just a little tiny bit; only took a couple millennia.
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