FRAND GOOD, TURNPIKE BAD

A grand time was had in the human city of Pittsburgh by clenches of SubGenii and various SubSymps and SimpSubs at the wedding of St. Andrew the Impaled and Rev. Erin Just Erin.

I was privileged to serve as the minister at this tying of the permanent marital knot. The whole thing was quite emotional. In all the marriages I've performed I've never seen a couple who so obviously WANTED to be MARRIED. Erin in her bridal dress and Andrew in his tux, why, they looked just like a beautiful movie star princess and her faithful little purebred mutant doggie. It liked to make my eyes water up.

In the course of the wedding I got to use that quote from THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, "Friend... good!"

The location happened to be the Bingham Gallery -- the former church in which was held the first Pittsburgh devival -- where I first met most of the weirdos involved in this wedding!

The Bull Seal Collective maniacs were there, and my entertainer friend Phat Mandy (formerly of Circus Apocolypse and Chicken John's Circus Ridikulous) -- and her fiancee, who looks just like the young Tom Waits. Phat Mandy herself looks sort of like an evil She-Bozo from Hell.

A band called "The Crawlin Low" played, and I was astounded by their talent for totally destroying old pop music saws like "The Lonely Bull" by the Tijuana Brass -- very reminiscent of The Jethros in their style of deliberately fractured music. However they also do a lot of Cajun style and original songs that demonstrate actual prowess that they otherwise disguise. They have some stuff at http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/156/crawlin_low_band.html (I recommend the tune "Monkey" to start.)

Many of Andrew and Erin's close friends I recognized from the 4X-Day Drill. And alt.slack star Rev. Alliekat and HER fiancee, Rev. Jason, escorted me to their FABULOUS home after the wedding and allowed me to sleep in their guest room, plus served a fine repast in the morning. Rev. Alliekat and Rev. Jason are fixing to get hitched themselves! Weddings are breaking out all over. Love hit 'em like a case of... I digress.

It turned out that Alliekat and I have something in common -- both of us were influenced in years past by an Irish band called PLANXTY, which does traditional Irish folk music, but in a style far more rousing than what most people think of as Irish folk music. In fact it prompted Alliekat to learn how to play the stuff, and now she's part of an active Irish folk music band. Me, I just vampirized the band's talent psychically.

As I have found over 20 years of waking up on SubGenius guest room beds or living room floors, there are two basic kinds of SubGenius homes. There's the cluttered, toy-robots-and-dinosaurs, bulldada-everywhere type of pad; my place I'm afraid is probably one of those, though "under control." Then there's the kind that you never expect, the shockingly clean and classy home decorated with tasteful art and with nothing out of place. This is how Jason and Alliekat live. I dunno how they do it. Gewer years' accumulation of crap and Church, I suppose. Anyway, they were SUPERLATIVE hosts and altogether I had a great time being a working SubGenius Minister in Pittsburgh.

Unfortunately I had to get there and back using the PENNSYLVANIA TURNPIKE. It fucked me. Getting reamed by a major toll road is no fun. But it will do it every time. I should have been prepared, because this has happened before.

On the PA turnpike there are sometimes no rest stops or places to so much as get a drink of WATER, for FIFTY MILES. Gas stations? Forget it. Oh, there are EXITS between Pittsburgh and Ohio... 3 of them. I tried all three. They lead to country roads that lead to 5 way country road FORKS that each go for miles up hillbilly roads through "towns" that have no filling stations, no convenience stores, no NOTHING. Every time I got off the turnpike looking for a drink of water, I felt like I had entered that John Carpenter movie, AT THE MOUTH OF MADNESS.

Pennsylvania makes Ohio seem downright CIVILIZED by comparison, state turnpike-wise.

When I got back to the 4th MegaFisTemple Lodge complex in Cleveland, Princess Wei was still out with the Queen Mom at a "SPACE PEACE CONFERENCE" -- I'm serious, it really was a conference about the militarization of outer space; the fact that Wei is a Space Princess is unrelated. So I got on the web and started reading the News of the War. I looked at about 20 news websites, many of them British, and learned about 50 times what I had in the 6 hours of talk and news radio that I monitored during my turnpike trip. About all the news media talks about is the news media, it seems.

I even listened to Rush. I swear to god, he got this call: "Rush? I've been listening at your show since I was 14 and I'm 20 now. Rush, just tell me this. Can you give me one good reason why we don't just nuke 'em?"

That is an actual quote or close to it.

To Rush's credit, he actually outlined several of the reasons why we should not nuke "'em," more or less saying that most of the people "over there" were not the "'em" she wanted to nuke. He also got a call from a 22 year old college girl who asked, "How can I defeat the war protesters at my school?" (U. of CA at L.A. I think). He said oh, ignore them or mock them... they're just robots, mindless America haters repeating crap they were told by liberals...what percentage roughly of your fellow students are doing this?

She says, "Oh, about... one or two percent."

Rush had thought she would say "40 percent" or something and said since it was just a couple of people, she should just turn up a silly song on a tape deck real loud whenever they started their traitorous and senseless questioning of authority, the government or the media.

But, what the fuck, I shan't let the Bim Limbaughs of the world question my traitorous and senseless questioning of ALL HUMAN SO-CALLED "REALITY," 'cause a LOT of that "REALITY" stuff just plain SUCKS!!

Or "suxors," is that what I'm supposed to say? What the FUCK is that about, anyway? Suddenly everybody was saying "it roxors" and so on, did I miss something? Should I have listened to the radio or watched TV at some point between April '99 and Sept 11, 01?

Well anyway. On Sunday it was past time to do HOUR OF SLACK #807. Luckily, Susie the Floozy had just sent me a tape of her first War Show on WREK, and also I had gotten war rants on the recordings from the Tampa devival. Princess Wei and I sat down to listen to Susie's show while transferring it to my computer.

HOLY FUCKING SHIT!!! My friends, our sister Rev. Susie the Floozy has outdone EVEN HER OWN SELF this time. Wei and I were scraping our jaws up off the office carpet as we listened to the sound collage editing she had done for this war show. Fucking absolutely mind boggling. She is the BEST!! With BARE MINIMUM equipment and NO FULLY FUNCTIONAL BRAIN CELLS, Susie nonetheless blows ALL other sound cutters out of the water. The music selections that fill out the show are WRENCHING and so is her rant. But I must say, it's kind of hard to take at times. At the beginning of her show, Susie warns the "faint of heart" that maybe they might not want to listen to this episode, and I could see why. As SubGenii are wont to do, she let it get rather UNFLINCHING a couple of times regarding the, uh, "being buried alive" thing, which most of us have probably avoided thinking about directly. Well, Susie's an extremely sensitive person along with being a perverted sicko ultra-weirdo beauty queen, and that combination, along with her stupendous sound cutting talent, makes for a JARRING and then TEAR-JERKING experience.

So, look for some of that on Hour of Slack 807 and 808. Also, you can hear Susie's show, the original "Bob's" Slacktime Funhouse, for a whole week after each show -- it's archived that long -- via RealAudio on http://www.wrek.org

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Little known fact: WREK Atlanta was one of the first stations to stream audio live over the web, using a format created by Rev. John Selbie, the manager of the station back then (early-mid 90s)

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Original file name: Frand Good, Turnpike Bad - converted on Monday, 21 July 2003, 13:44