Tuesday, June 27, 2017

The Fault in Bodie's Stars and Other Wrongdoings

Been working, off and on, with several novels-or-novellas-in-progress...the one that seems to be picking up steam is INDIGO. These passages concern the character of Bodie Lewis----think of him as the Robert Cohn character-----not to compare INDIGO to THE SUN ALSO RISES, but just looking for a butt-of-all-life's-bad-jokes thumbnail to roll with. Enjoy or whatever.

 I'm not sure I like Bodie. I like him but I don't.
As the get-together (I'm loathe to call it a “party”) wears on I hear him in the other room and he's in a heated discussion with this girl---I don't know who she is. She'd been having a loud conversation earlier about pheromones---how you give off a pheromone when you're involved with someone and people are attracted to you---you can't beat suitors away with a stick. When you're single, however----and apparently this relates to the fact that she'd broken up with her boyfriend---you can't give it away-----nobody's interested. Again, the mystery of pheromones.
Maybe there's something to all this jargon, I dunno. It imposes too many tacit rules and suppositions for my blood. You just need to be careful what you lay out there in front of Bodie, though, because now he's trying to get his foot in the door and it's not a pretty tableau.
“You said you can't give it away, right? I look at you, I look at me, I see two nice people who should just cut the shit and try being happy, you know? What's wrong with being happy?”
“I know, but, y'know.....no.”
“Come on!”
“You're just not my type, dude, no offense, just, y'know.....that's life! Oh well.”
“ 'Oh well', what the fuck's that supposed to mean?!”
“That's life, man, you just move on. S'not a big deal.”
“It's not a big deal for you, you can just shrug your shoulders and forget about it! I'm stuck here with this shit forever!”
“Yeah....maybe you are. I gotta go, dude.....”
Yeah, Bodie, maybe you are.
Eventually we all head down to the University Computer Lab, shanghai some terminals and fart around on the net. So we're all sitting at various points in the lab separate and yet gloriously together. Crazy Ed is in Goth Chat under a female persona then he cybers with some guy who thinks he's a 16-year-old hottie. He busts the third wall and scares the hell out of the guy. No one ever hears from him again.
Some guy from a Christian Chat site comes in and starts preaching at us, haraguing us, telling us we're all evil and going to hell. Why? I don't know-----because we like The Cure or some other nebulous reason. This prompts a mass exodus to the Christian Chat site where we heckle everybody there. Some cat calling himself Count Othmar starts calling himself “The Lion of the Tribe of Shecky”, which is a hoot and a half.
Bodie tries cybering with a whole slew of girls and they all laugh him off the net. He slams the table and leaves the lab in disgust, probably to the joy of several kids who are around waiting to work on their papers or do research. Life is tough.
The rest of us are there entirely too long. When we leave the lab it's early morning. The sun's not up, yet, but the night birds are scaring up one helluva racket. I'm almost sober again, and that just will not do.

                                                                    ***

    Bodie gets up and delivers some long, pompous, anal-retentive preamble about “intellectual property”, and how, if you relate something he said it's very important to tell people, even if all he said was a comment about the weather, that “Bodie Lewis said that,” that this is just as important as telling people “Bram Stoker said X” or that “ee cummings said x”. And by the point where folks are catcalling Bodie to get on with it we've all been appraised of how important all of this is to Bodie.
When the poem comes around it's a lot of rhymey doggerel about feeling one particular woman's “hot breath” on his neck (which he has never felt, obviously) and describing the look and feel of her legs (which he has also obviously never felt or seen)----the mystery woman is never mentioned by name, but I imagine it's Bessie.

                                                                   ***

                   “You really like that one girl, huh?” Says Bodie, and I'm getting a distinctly creepy, polluted vibe off him.
“Do what, now?” I don't look up at him, which is a more and more frequent occurrence in my interactions with Bodie. I can smell him, though, from the doorway. He smells like jerky, hotdogs, Budweiser, stale BO and stale, jizzed-in, unwashed underwear.
“That one girl,” he says. “I don't know her name.”
I choose not to fill in the blank for him.
“You're a cuck,” he tells me, a hint of practiced contempt in his voice.
“Do what, now?”
“I'm a MGTOW,” he says, with what I imagine to be a kind of subdued pride.....I misunderstand him at first and think he says, “I'm Big Now.”
“Proud of ya,” I offer.
“It means I'm a Man Going My Own Way,” he elaborates, correcting what I'd initially inferred. “I don't need women to make me happy. My eyes are open. I've taken the Red Pill.”
My first comeback to “I don't need women to make me happy” might be to respond, “Bodie, how do you know?” But I guess that would be mean.
“You know, that girl you like, she'll dump you. You know, that's what they do.” He repeats it, as if he's trying to implore me to listen. “That's what they do.”
“Nice to see you've got that figured out,” I shoot back.
“I do,” he says. “I see it all the time. It's my world. It always will be.”
“I don't doubt you're right.”
“Yeah,” he says, in a quieter voice. Whatever's going on in the next room draws him away, where I imagine he'll tell everyone out there he's big, now, and that he's taking red pills. He's no longer trying to pry Gayla's name from me, so....the desired effect.

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As of this writing I've got my irons in a few fires.....first and foremost “The Abbey of the Lemur” is BACK!!!! This is our first show since 2014 and we're hitting a string of milestones....


        This is the first-ever episode of the show where we embrace cellphone technology. The centerpiece for “Lemurs at Monte Ne” (the 15 minute video of our trip to the ruins at Monte Ne) was all shot on my phone. It's not great video, by any stretch, but it's one more stab at putting the production and dissemination of art and culture in the hands of whoever wants to do it.
It also marks the first appearance with written sketches of our little friends, the Devil Goats, since their brief origin in 2014's “The Megalithic Bamboozler” Beyond that we just padded it about with old stuff. Have fun.
Past that, expect two more episodes in 2017....one will be a tribute to late TAOTL cast member Adam “Dead Guy” Jardine----the other will be related to our 20th anniversary on the airwaves in Fayetteville. Past that I couldn't tell ya, but like Joe Strummer said, “the future is unwritten”.
This also marks the very first episode of “The Abbey of the Lemur” to be uploaded on to YouTube in its entirety....all thanks to our wonderful providers at FPTV. You'll need to sign in to YouTube as an adult to watch it, and that's just what we gotta do. Prior administrations in the city (perhaps illegally) didn't offer the privilege of being shared online to VDA shows, so we're happy to let FPTV set up that precaution.
        ENJOY!

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          The SE Apocalypse Krew's album----tentatively titled “RISE”----is officially in the can! Yeah----it only took us 30someodd years!
You're gonna have to wait a little longer for the official release....right now I'm wrangling with the visual art aspects and then there are other logistics....but HEY! Lemme know if you're interested in covering this thing/reviewing or helping to promote it. Who knows? We could hook you up.
I'll personally tell you Mike and I are happy as hell with this beast----and it is a beast. 17 songs in 58 minutes and the thing just BLASTS. Mike had been floating me dailies on the production and even I wasn't ready for the face removal that is the final product, mixed and everything else. I spent over a week with it in the car, blasting it up and down the streets of Fayettenam. At long last, we're the monster I'd always hoped we'd be.
Heavy metal sprouted from the blues, originally, and in some respects, even as it's evolved into sort of a post-rock'n'roll genre, it is, in a lot of ways, similar to blues. Metal has its indelible conventions and tropes, just like blues does---its musicians and fans love these tropes and conventions and are dedicated to their perpetuation and preservation.
Mike and I, in that respect, are more jazz guys. Push to shove we'd rather hear someone break from the old tropes and take things in a direction we don't expect, and we like to do that ourselves. Not that you can't hear our influences----you'll hear a little Black Sabbath here, a little Black Flag there----a little Dead Boys here, a little Jimi Hendrix, there----a little Wes Montgomery here, etc., etc., etc. And yet at the same time we're our own animal.
Stay tuned.