This comic is based on an old family tale. To read the comic, I suggest clicking on the image and making it full screen. You could also download it after you click on it for the primo view, I suppose. I've also loaded the panels individually below if you like scrolling down (it works either way).
For more fun (albeit words, not pictures), read one of my novels, such as the latest, Fast Guy Slows Down!
And I had fun making this song and track. I stuck a microphone in bubblewrap and rubbed the wrap for the chorus percussion. That's probably the weirdest instrument, though beatboxing like The Fat Boys for the hi-hat sounds and beating on a suitcase for the bass drum aren't too common either. Other than that, it's the usual voice, guitar, keyboard as bass, and drum. Lyrically, the singer seems to be either coming from the future when the USA actually has fallen apart like the old USSR or he feels like an alien in his own country, a metaphorical former USA. Either way, I'm not sure I believe him when he says he's having fun. It sounds more like he's trying to convince himself. On the other hand, if he is having fun, then that should be a source of comfort to anyone worried about a second civil war. Like The Beach Boys playing a gig in an apocalyptic wasteland, there are still some good times to be had! Lyrics are below:
My father likes to sing when he thinks that nobody is listening.
Meanwhile, almost everybody else is talking about their new social media strategy.
I have one as well. It's called deleting all my accounts.
Because I'd rather have no friends, then a thousand fake ones.
Oh, I'm having fun living in the former USA
It's where they tell you you're crazy if you start to think for yourself
instead of following the advice of so-called experts and buying your opinions off the shelf.
It's where they like to smear everything so no one can see,
and the more they talk about freedom, the less we're free.
The rot of empire has a tremendous opportunity cost
Sections of Cleveland look like The Russians bombed them already, but it was just us.
I have one uncle left, and he told me to start calling him Samantha.
I feel like we're dreaming together a book called Finnegan's Wank.
For more Wred Fright music, listen to the Yeast? 7" or give his latest album a listen or download at your favorite digital music site such as Spotify or Bandcamp!
I am sure this "greenwashing", as it is known, has plenty of reasons to explain how even though the Better Cotton product you just bought doesn't actually contain Better Cotton, it's still all good and green and sustainable, but it's still basically like buying organic orange juice and then reading the label and finding out it may not contain organic oranges.
Or even oranges.
Ah, corporate America . . .
Maybe buy something from an actual person instead such as my new novel, which contains 100% individual writing!
Fortunately, I've only had to do drug tests for employment a few times. Since I don't use drugs, I don't care too much, but the privacy invasion is annoying, and the waste of money (which we pay for ultimately as consumers in the prices we pay for products and services) is more galling. Employment drug testing is a dumb tradition that should be abandoned. On the other hand, it did inspire this comic strip, and the notion that every day in America, planes, trucks, and maybe even boats are all carrying little bottles of pee across the country is pretty funny. To read the comic, I suggest clicking on the image and making it full
screen. You could also download it after you click on it for the primo
view, I suppose. I've also loaded the panels individually below if you like scrolling down (it works either way).
To see why I don't need drugs to have a good time, please read Frequently Asked Questions About Being Dead.
When I was in the Underground Literary Alliance, I paid a bit more attention to the Nobel Prizes in Literature, usually lamenting the fact that mainstream American literature (and mainstream stuff is all the Nobel judges will usually know about, though if you're a professor of literature or otherwise eligible to nominate someone for the prize, you can try to direct their attention a bit deeper--I did that for a few years when I was teaching; my apologies if I was supposed to keep that secret for a half-century or something), had gotten pretty bad, and, as a result, was unlikely to have anyone win a Nobel anytime soon.
I was right. It took until 2016 for an American to win the prize, and it was Bob Dylan. Now, I love Dylan. I have quite a few albums from him and saw him in concert before, but he's not exactly on the level of Thomas Pynchon or someone else who might have been considered Nobel quality in literature (Chronicles is amusing as an odd memoir, but Tarantula is just bad, so the Nobel committee must have just given up on American literature and started out handing prizes for folk/rock music instead). As best I can tell, the Nobel judges were either responding to pressure that they hadn't picked an American in decades (the last real American was Toni Morrison in 1993, though there may have been a couple laureates who settled in the USA later in life for a creative writing teaching gig or something) or they just were big Dylan fans and wanted to meet him.
In any case, that combined with reading a few laureates whose work underwhelmed me caused me to not care much who won. The judges did have a nice run though for a few years, hipping me to writers such as Kenzaburo We, Dario Fo, and Mo Yan who might otherwise have escaped my notice.
The Nobel prizes in general, not just the literary one, used to be more prestigious, and they probably still are for some folks, but stuff like giving Obama a peace prize (a guy that ordered drone assassinations on a daily basis) just because he wasn't the horrible George W. Bush was pretty bad, so the Nobel brand has gradually waned in prestige for me and many others. The latest Nobel blunder is giving the mRNA folks an award so that vaccine hesitancy could be combated, but, you know, maybe it would be nice if the vaccine actually worked instead of just causing autoimmune issues and other nasty side effects, up to and including death. I wrote about the prizewinners a couple of years ago here. If I could figure out their success was dubious years ago, why couldn't the Nobel committee this year?
At this point, it may be getting wiser to just avoid the people and work the Nobel committees award prizes to . . .
Like Sartre, I would refuse the Nobel. Unlike Sartre, I will likely never be offered it, but you can still read my work here.
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