Civic Fixture

             Civic Fixture

 

             Menace, one of the stupider supervillains, threatened Working Joe’s family. Working Joe went to Captain Blue for help, but Captain Blue said “Give up your day job, and come with me to fight crime.”

             Working Joe said, “I’m no trust-fund baby like you, I got a wife and kids, I gotta work for a living.”

             So Working Joe then went to Big Boss. He said, “I’m not asking you for anything, I’m just telling you I can’t work under these conditions, and I’m thinking of leaving town.”

             Big Boss said, “No, stay. Don’t worry about that moron. I’ll take care of him.”

             Working Joe said, “So what do I owe you?”

             “Nuthin’. You worth plenty as is.”

             And what do you know, the very next day it was Menace who suddenly left town.

 

          Moral: Follow the money.

 

Meet Working Joe

             Meet Working Joe

  

            My daughter Hannah and I have, between us, invented an alternate comic-book superbeing; “Working Joe”. He’s not a superhero, nor a supervillain; more like a super-worker. He has the usual superpowers, but he uses them strictly for heavy construction work. He’s the guy who cleans up the mess after the superheros and supervillains stop battling. Unlike superheros, he’s in it for the money; unlike supervillains, he wants only honest jobs.

             Working Joe neither fights crime nor commits it; he just works, very very hard. Don’t call him a superworker, he doesn’t like being set apart. He’s a Union man, of course. His contract with the Metroville Reconstruction Authority states that after a superfight, he does the heavy lifting and the dangerous labor, and the other Union people do detailing. What with all the superfights, all the time, it’s steady work.

             I envision an episode consisting of nothing but him cleaning up after an action-packed sequence, all off-stage; we see him pick up the pieces afterwards, commenting all the while on the super-fighter’s super-carelessness. After restoring the city to its pre-fight glory, Working Joe says, “Another job well done!” and flies home.

             No secret identity for him; but he has a wife and kids (all of them super) so he can’t afford to antagonize anyone. He’ll do honest work if the pay is good. So Working Joe moonlights as an independent contractor, building fortresses for both superheros and supervillains! The superheros look down on him for his mercenary streak; the supervillains despise him for his habitual honesty; he consoles himself that they need him more than he needs them.

             Wife and kids also have superpowers. The wife is Home-Maker. She has super-endurance, she can read minds, and she can see out of the back of her head. The boy is Hyper; he has superspeed and ADHD; the girl is Goth; a moody teen with the power of invisibility. Raising superkids is super-expensive - so many home repairs! - so that’s why Working Joe has that mercenary streak. Part of the hidden joke of the comic is that he always needs money. He has wealth-creating superpowers, yet the system is rigged so that he constantly has to keep hustling.

             And how did he get those superpowers? His origin story is that his maternal grandmother was not only an alien, she was an illegal alien!

             Other characters in Working Joe’s Metroville: GoodCop/BadCop, Bankster, Suxel, and supersalesman “Bob”.

             Once Working Joe met a boyhood hero of his; Fireman. Working Joe stammers his admiration, Fireman graciously returns the compliment. “Who built all the firetraps I rescue people from? Guys like you! Who do I rescue from those firetraps? Guys like you! Who pays my pension? Guys like you!”

             I visualize Working Joe as wearing denim overalls and a helmet, and drawn in angular buff Socialist Realist style. Something like Spain’s “Trashman”.

 

 

Three Berkeley Trips 3

       Three Berkeley Trips 3

    

          Trip 3, by Abstinence

        Or: Planet of the Boobs

         

          The nurse said, “You need to schedule another blood test next week.”

          I shrugged. “OK.”

          “And to test hormone levels,” she continued, “you’ll have to abstain from all sexual activity.”

          “All sexual activity? For a week?”

          “Mm-hm.”

          “Including masturbation?”

          “Mm-hm.”

          I shrugged. A week without masturbation sounded easy enough. We scheduled the blood test, I went home and put away my one-hand magazines. (These were in the days before the Internet.)

          A day came and went without inconvenience, then another. But on the third day something odd happened. I was walking down Telegraph Avenue, and I noticed that every woman on the street had unusually large breasts. Not just some of the women; all of them. This strange change in half the human population of Berkeley persisted all day, and I realized that it wasn’t them, it was me.

          My perceptions were distorted, due to hormonal imbalance. Every woman’s breasts weren’t really bigger than before; they just seemed that way to me. I was hormone-addled, and seeing things strangely; I knew this, but the knowledge did not decrease the perceptual distortion effect. 

          The effect increased on the fourth day. Every woman, everywhere, had an amazingly ample bosom. I knew that was an illusion, but it was a very convincing illusion. I tried not to look, or seem to notice; but my judgment was probably as impaired as my perception; so if you noticed, then please forgive my peeking, dear women of Berkeley!

          By the fifth and sixth days, I was adrift in an impossible parallel universe of fantastic mammary antigravitation. I knew that I was hallucinating, but still I saw the mirage as plain as day. I was amazed how clear, specific and florid the hallucination was; and as before, knowledge of illusion did not dispel illusion.

          On the seventh day I went to the clinic and gave a blood sample. Then I went home and got out the one-hand magazines.

          The next day, every woman’s breasts were back to normal size.

 

Three Berkeley Trips 2

        Three Berkeley Trips 2

    

Trip 2, by Sleep

        Or: Which was the Dream?

 

          I was sitting up in bed, reading a book. It was late, I was tired. Then I noticed something odd; the words of the book were changing and shifting. But why? Then I noticed something even stranger; my eyes were shut. I felt my eyelids firmly sealed together; yet I could see. But how?

I realized that I was asleep and dreaming. Within that lucid dream, I looked up from the book and scanned the room. There was the bookshelf, there were the knick-knacks, there was the couch, there was the computer desk, there were the windows and shades… all dreams.

          Then I willed myself awake. I opened my eyes, and the first thing I noticed was that I was slumped over. I sat up, closed the book, and looked around. Same bookshelf, same knick-knacks, same couch, same computer desk, same windows and shades.

          The two rooms were identical.

 

 

Three Berkeley Trips 1

       Three Berkeley Trips 1

     By a Goat, Sleep, and Abstinence

         

 

          I had some wild times during my days in Berkeley, California. The Sixties were long gone by the time I got there, but some of the spirit lingered, and I sought it out. My three trippiest times there had nothing to do with drugs. These three weird experiences were caused by, respectively, a goat, sleep, and abstinence.

 

          Trip 1, by a Goat

        Or: Thurber’s World

 

          I was visiting Marion Zimmer Bradley’s house. After a few rounds of dilemma chess with the fantasy writer’s son, I stepped out to their back yard for a stroll and a breath of fresh air.

          It was evening; the zenith had darkened to deep blue, the horizon glowed orange and red. A crescent moon shone, and a few stars, and Venus too.

          I stopped, amazed; for there in front of me stood a goat. An Angora goat, waist-tall, with silky white hair… and a single horn.

He was Lancelot, a successful animal-husbandry experiment by Morning Glory and Otter Zell. At the goat’s birth, they had surgically fused Lancelot’s two hornbuds together; the fused hornbud grew into an imposing monohorn.

          Lancelot was a unicorn. That surgically-modified Angora goat looked like he had stepped out of a medieval tapestry. Morning Glory and Otter Zell claimed that surgery like theirs was entirely possible for the medievals; so perhaps unicorns had been real enough all along.

          Just then, in the evening twilight, with Moon and Venus overhead, that unicorn looked more than real; for Lancelot was eating Marion Zimmer Bradley’s rosebushes. Those of you who have read James Thurber’s stories know the one about the unicorn eating the rosebushes. In that surreal moment, I learned that a visit to Marion Zimmer Bradley’s place can put you in a Thurber story.

          I also learned that unicorn droppings are about one centimeter long and about half a centimeter wide.

 

         

 

 

In Praise of Vermin

             In Praise of Vermin

 

I write this essay in praise of all those critters that survive despite all mankind’s best efforts to exterminate them. I do so out of respect.

So kudos to weeds, pests and plagues! Tough enough to take us on! Here’s to dandelions, crabgrass, poison ivy, poison oak, and kudzu! Here’s to roaches and flies and fleas and mice and rats! Here’s to Asian carp, tiger mussels, raccoons and coyotes!

I think it the height of hypocrisy for us humans to complain of invasive pests. It’s no easy thing to be an invasive pest; you need some advantage. Raccoons have hands, rats have colonies. Invasiveness requires adaptability, as we well know, being invasive pests ourselves.

          I praise vermin and weeds because they prove that life’s vitality exceeds ours; so a natural history beyond ours is guaranteed. I take comfort in this reflection. The raccoon’s hand proves that this planet needs hands, and if we drop the job then there will be another team to pick it up.

          I have a modest proposal; that we find some rapidly-warming steep-sided Arctic island; that we stock it with all of the weeds and pests mentioned above. Then stand back, and watch the ecology of the future evolve.

          I’m sure that experiment is already in process!

 

Family Shames: 4 of 4

          Family Shames 4

A Shameful Tale

 

          If you put together the speculations of the previous three posts, then you get a truly shameful tale of human prehistory, as follows:

          In the old days, Big Men had harems, and all other men were losers. The only hope the loser men had was to slay some Big Man, kill his children, and then rape the women. Of course the women detested this lion-like system, but those compliant to it reproduced more than those resistant to it, which left a genetic trace that our species bears to this very day; as proven by our adulation of killers and tyrants.

          One day a loser man discovered a marvelous magic trick. Simply share spoiled fruit juice with an otherwise resistant woman. She will lose control before he loses potency. This trick spread. Women easily made drunk reproduced more; a genetic trace that our species bears to this very day. The same evolutionary pressures that created violent men and submissive women, then started to create devious men and drunken women. In other words, rape started to shift from force to fraud.

          Eventually someone figured out the brewing of beer. It requires settled colonies and the hard labor of farming; an indignity that men were willing to suffer, for the sake of a magic sex potion.

Big Men dominated these colonies, but soon were outnumbered, and they were forced by political necessity to institute sexual socialism; share and share alike. The losers won… it seems. It’s fraudulent of course; Big Men still gather harems whenever possible.

Civilization is full of fraud, for it is based upon fraud; a genetic trace that we bear to this very day.