Welcome to "Michael's vision quest". Check your "vegetable mind" at the door and prepare to be a carnivore of sensory overload that stomps on the dandelions and butchers tapirs.

At the very farthest reaches of this strung-out state, you will feel as if you are floating inside a giant cheeseburger-- warm and salty and indulgent and greasy and shameless like a wild-haired James Brown when heat is cooking out of your eyes like eggs sputtering on a mamma-san's grill in a downtown pill-box of a diner that is only open at screwy hours. You're a star child, and the universe is instantly available at a million access points like perfect fluid should you only want to go there with a snigger, when everything's comical and that saber-tooth tiger about to jump on you from that cliff is really your best friend. . . . .

But it takes the right combination of caffeine, sleep withdrawal, hyper-speechifying, and lapsed pharmaceutical discipline from prescribed medications to be taken to this land. . . . . if not a whacked-out consciousness in the first place that drinks from the chalice of experience.

Years ago, Michael had a strikingly original way "to wire the house" for electricity out there in the social game and bring into his existence all the modern amenities of popularity and girlfriends. But like the mishaps in a Thomas Pynchon novel, he blew out the whole block and his social neighbors came to the window, cursing and spitting.

What of this vale of tears, trying to play "catch-up"?

The latest technology and frittering things can be pulled along by the rattiest of shoestrings (-- Broadcast.com) and there will be enough suckers out there who will "go for the bait", led on by the audacity of the pitch and a great sales presentation.

Myself, I had always been "a late adopter" and conservatively never went for things until it became so abundantly clear that I had but no choice. It's like watchin' all those California dreamers washed up on the shores with their Betamax players on the losing side of technological history, floppin' like fish with their puckerin' mouths before they go gorpin' back to the river "of what they know".

My parents shall be led off by the shuddering apocalypse when any kind of outlet for their 1973-thinking (-- when they quit TRYING) will seal up like so much digitized death-drone where there's no place for them on "the matrix". Spreadsheet slaughter, Microsoft holocaust. At a stooped scrap-heap near you. . . . bring your own shovels.

On that note-- "How 'bout those 'Bears?"

It's "hunting season" for a Super Bowl win! It's "Miller Time". . . . . and an occasion for Tostitos chips as we caper and grin and seduce like hand-flapping assholes. The end has come. . . . . on this next commercial break on this paleolithic slab of media hype that is ultimately MEANINGLESS.

Think of something that really matters. . . . . like a guitar player jammin' out the chords to Jimi Hendrix's "Are You Experienced?" with that neo-Eastern tang of the sun dappling off of pagodas with eyes.

There was a time in the 9th grade when there was a girl I had a crush on, not necessarily the $4000 golden guitar hanging up there on the rack, but the equivalent of a nice $150 "starter kit" that a boy would give his eye-teeth for "to play". But I didn't know how to approach the guitar, how to talk to it nicely, and reached out for the girl and knocked her over with my clumsiness. The room booed and hissed; the guitar was insulted. . . . . I had started off on the wrong foot because no one had ever instructed me how to approach such a wonderful instrument.

Bad experiences like that can leave you pretty jarred & shaken, so you have a hard time "figuring out what to do". But slowly and surely, you "piece it together" and can stand up for yourself. Part of the reason I was acting "like Donald Rumsfeld on speed" was to make up for the fact that I was so bumbling and incompetent. I so desperately wanted my life to be military and 4-square, going to bed in olive pajamas that had general's stars on them, that it only belied the fact it was all "a mask".

And then one comes across as "this hooded phantom", an absurdist superhero figure in an ordinary world who does not have "extraordinary powers" and kids are laughing at him. Then he starts jumping up and down and flapping his arms at an attempt at aggression and they're laughing harder. At that point, I don't expect anyone to be able to salvage anything from a situation like that, and the thing to do is "slink off".

Enter the world of pimply goat-headed fantasy. . . . .

A great conversation is like two ace guitar players-- say, Jeff Hanneman & Kerry King of Slayer trading speed guitar licks back and forth and holding the concert together in this swirling maelstrom of doom metal intensity-- whether for the fate of "The West" or man's prospects on this hellish earth-ball when you had a simpleton sitting on his ass, gnawin' on a bone and squintin' into the wind. Chunk an empty can off his noggin and he'd look up about two beats too slow, after-the-fact, as the tribal hordes sling weapons and raid each others' camps. Let the Satanic slaughter begin! Or change the channel over to the giggling, faggot-assed "Teletubbies" to forestall "The Grim Reaper" like a howling spirit-skull of outstretched menace!

(Pretty Gnarly)

Until then, continue to be your old father's truss and don't go "too hard" on the old fuddy-duddy lest his head explode like that scene from "Scanners".

And real men STILL don't each quiche.

*******************

"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

(Rheeee of Crickets)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

("I heard that, Missy!")