I know, I know. I shouldn’t-a dunit. But I dunit. They left me no alternative. Do I suck? Maybe. But at least you know where I stand. (Am I standing? Feels like sitting…)
Howdy, friends. Expect you recall last week’s tiresome debacle and the intolerable acts of our extraterrestrial overlords, as they came to occupy our humble city hall. Who could forget the arrogance of a certain Gizmandiar? A gentleman he is not. (Neither gentle, nor man… nor any other species I’ve ever come across.) I am not being ungenerous. Consider, if you will, the bill of particulars with regard to said Gizmandiar. He and his minions hath:
- deliberately and wantonly, with malice aforethought, driven us from our ancestral (relax – that’s just the paint color) home and consigned us to a life of enhanced beggary
(that’s like the beggary we enjoyed previously, only with 65% more cat’s pee); - issued the intolerable and wholly despicable decree known as “Special Order 14-2007” which directs us, on pain of prosecution, to “refrain from employing any foul, obscene, or abusive language commonly known as ‘swearing,'” thereby foreclosing our most immediate (and highly satisfying) remedy to item #1 (dag nab it!);
- taken the foul and underhanded step of using his considerable resources to purchase our corporate record label (Loathsome Prick Records), subsequently employing that organization as yet another tool in our ongoing persecution (which is to say, well beyond the level of persecution we had experienced previously simply by being associated with Loathsome Prick Records);
- heinously and relentlessly transformed the distressed brick courtyard of our beloved abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill into a carpet-like monoculture of lawn grass, later applying the same pernicious ground cover to other public and private spaces throughout our community.
Need I go on? I think not. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is pointing frantically to his watch, so… How do you battle a well-heeled cadre of space aliens who have taken over your town and evicted you from your squat house? Fight fire with fire, my friends. Oh, yes… Gizmandiar and company are not the only space aliens in the universe. And we of Big Green can name one space alien of long acquaintance who could easily mop the floor with these 
interlocutors, these usurpers, these…. gall-dangit, I wish I could fricking swear!!!
Ahem…. that space alien is, of course, sFshzenKlyrn, our occasional sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon, located in the small Magellanic Cloud, quite a long ways from here. Didn’t want to do it, but with all that’s at stake, I put a call in to sFshzenKlyrn and asked for assistance. Are there risks? Oh, yes. Great risks. Remember what happened a few years back when our Zenite friend had a few too many flapjacks. (Suffice to say, they had to add a whole new chapter to Lost New York in the last edition.)
So, yeah… I know I may have acted rashly. But I think we can control the unpredictable force of nature that is sFshzenKlyrn this time. Or not….
disastrous war he started more than four years ago. This in the wake of yet another 9 U.S. service members killed and god knows how many Iraqis – scores over the past few days. I know I’m not the only one saying W.T.F., though it’s not so much out of surprise as it is just pure exasperation. I mean, a watery timeline for withdrawal with a plethora of caveats – that hardly constituted a radical departure from Rumsfeldian warmaking (precisely what we need). And yet that has morphed into a no-strings-attached allocation of billions for the continued occupation of Iraq. Is that what people voted for last November? Was that the theme called out from the podium as party leaders implored us to turn the G.O.P. out? Not hardly.
This is criminal behavior, pure and simple. Bush wants to keep this sucker going so that it won’t be “lost” on his watch (or “watch”, as many might put it). The Democratic leadership, for its part, refuses to draw a firm line in front of the president even when his popularity is at a historic low, largely due to the war in Iraq (even in my moderate-to-conservative district, Bush polled about 28% in a recent Web survey by the local daily paper – that’s almost unprecedented for a Republican). It’s obvious that neither of the major political power centers in this country is going to put a stop to this slaughter. And judging by the news coming out of Iraq – Parliament supporting a timetable for withdrawal, Muqtada al-Sadr re-emerging, Iraqi youth in Basra (!) cheering over a burning security contractor vehicle – it may in fact take the Iraqis to send our military home. Until we can get ourselves politically beyond the idea that “supporting the troops” means extending their service in a hell hole, I see no other way out.
What’s up with all this? Don’t ask! You insist? Rrrrrr…. okay, then. But you asked for it, friend. First of all, welcome once again to the general vicinity of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, where we have availed ourselves of those alleys not already occupied by creatures significantly more fierce than ourselves. (Mice? They tolerate us. Rats? We surrender. Simple rules of the unforgiving streets.) Dislocated and made homeless by that extraterrestrial usurper, Mayor Gizmandiar (formerly of the planet we know as “New Earth”), we have applied every legal remedy we can think of to reclaim our squat house. And all it has earned us is a gag order… and a bitter betrayal. Oh, yes…. betrayal!
First, the gag order. Actually, it’s not your usual variety. It’s more like a judicial parental filter, the “v” chip, if you will, of legal proscriptions. The local magistrate (also an extraterrestrial now, by the way… I think that was a case of transubstantiation, but I would need Mitch Macaphee here to confirm that) has ordered us to refrain from any “foul, profane, or abusive language that might ordinarily be considered ‘swearing’ or ‘speaking obscenely'”, an addendum to his writ helpfully listing words and phrases covered by the gag order. They include:
Okay, now as if that wasn’t bad enough, we have just learned that sometime over the course of the last few days, whilst we were seeking warmth in cellar window-wells and sifting through garbage for sustenance, Gizmandiar and his fellow lawn-obsessed space aliens got together enough scratch to buy out our corporate label, Loathsome Pr*ck Records. Under their new management, they have (of course) refused to intervene on our behalf and are now threatening to cancel our distribution deal if we don’t swear our allegiance to Gizmandiar. J*sus effin’ Christmas!