Tag: “Bob”

Cult of the Hidden Joke.

Double Identity

IN ADDITION TO what else one may find in a wallet (money, DL, &c.), mine contains two cards that license me as a member of the clergy.

They’re neither what you think – I’m not a rabbi, nor will I likely become one in this life – but they do tell a semi-religious story nonetheless.

The first came c. 1999, after a friend who was a member of the Universal Life Church asked me if I too wanted to be ordained. “Sure! What do I need to do?” I asked him. After anointing my head with a frosty cold one (it was a very hot day, in the way that only Northern California Renaissance Pleasure Faire days can be very hot), he declared, “You’re in.” He then told me where to write and receive my free ordination credentials.

ULC espouses a single creed: “Know your beliefs and be true to them.” And because ULC is legally recognized in California (and other enlightened states) for solemnizing weddings, I have since married a handful of friends – which was, really, why I wanted ordainment in the first place.

The other ordination, also legally recognized in some places, belongs to the Church of the SubGenius. Those behind that inexplicable parody religion/religious parody/living art project published a trade paperback in 1983 which – much like science-fiction conventions and DEVO – assured lonely misfits that they too had a place, and a people, they could call their own. Of course, I took to it in a big, enthusiastic way.

Unlike the ULC, the CotS then charged $20 for an ordination kit. So, justifying it as for a good cause, I mailed a Jackson to their Dallas, Texas headquarters. Within a week I received an ordination card, a poster of Church frontman J. R. “Bob” Dobbs, and various pieces of SubG propaganda (some of which I distributed in the summer of 1985 at 2 a.m. in Times Square – but that story is classified.)

For a long time, my ULC and CotS “ministries” helped me feel as though I belonged somewhere spiritually important. I am grateful to be able to do that now in other ways. But I will always be respectfully grateful to the Revs. Kirby Hensley and Ivan Stang for opening their secretly famous doors and inviting me in.

Machine Time

HOW MANY HOURS do we waste waiting for our thinking machines to do their thing?

Browsers to load. Files to open. Printer jobs. Email delays. Forms to register. TFA codes to arrive. And a hundred other petty inconveniences that result in impatience, lost tempers, and general cussedness.

Now, I am a patient man, but I swear – if I had a dollar for every minute spent waiting for my machines to catch up to my schedule, I could retire to my own private Idaho. It’s a ridiculous feature of modern life that these (what used to be called) “labor-saving devices” may be actually causing more helplessness than enabling usefulness.

I have no solutions to this mishegas – what can one person do against a vast cultural tide anyway? – but I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels this way. Perhaps that Butler fellow had it right all along. Who’s with me?

Silent Revolution

PROPOSAL: EVERYONE-BE-QUIET DAY.

The Idea: We were fretting about leafblowers disturbing the local birds, and wondering what the world would sound like were all the machines to be turned off for a while…

The Action: On June 1, 2026, between 12:01 a.m. and 11:59 p.m. UTC, everyone in the world turns off all cell phones, computers, televisions, radios, games, leafblowers, lawnmowers, weedwhackers and cars — in short everything that beeps, rings, roars, rattles, or makes a sound louder than a normal human conversation and isn’t essential to maintaining human life. (Sort of like The Day The Earth Stood Still, but voluntary.) Conversation is optional during this period, but it might be fun (and instructive?) to enjoy the silence in silence.

The Method: Get the word out by linking this announcement through Facebook, email, Twitter, texting, DMs, Usenet, phone-pole posting, graffiti, listservs, Bluesky, letters to the editor, and whatever remains of talk radio. (Pretty please.)

Motto: “Shhh.”

Teapot Tempest

OUR SMALL COTERIE WAS IN Oakland in 1989, and in that aftermind imbued by any Grateful Dead concert: happy, playful, joyful and a wee bit mischievous.

We were also ravenously hungry, so on the way back to the car we stopped halfway through Chinatown and took in a restaurant crowded with locals. Somehow and somewhere along the way, I had acquired a small chip of dry ice and was amusing myself (and the others) by tossing it about inside my top hat. But once we were seated, I realized I needed to divest myself of my acquisition.

So I dropped it in the hot teapot sitting in the middle of our table.

You may imagine the scene which unfolded next. (No? Well, then: imagine a thick column of steam roiling up from the pot’s spout, expanding outward along the ceiling to the edge of the room, and slowly creeping down the upper part of the walls. Silence reigned among the astonished diners, while I sat there wearing my best “I meant to do that” face. Got it now?)

The rest of our meal passed in peace and relative quiet, concluding with an enormous tip and profuse thanks to the unsmiling owner.

It’s a wonder he didn’t kick us out. I guess you can’t argue with physics.

Wonder Standing

THREE YOUNG MEN relaxed inside an enormous paper-recycling bin circa 1980, musing over their preferred futures.

Youthful dreams don’t always come true. But …

“I want a huge apothecary and knowledge of all kinds of medicinal roots, herbs, and such so I could heal people,” said the short blonde one.

“I want my own piece of land, so nobody could tell me what to do,” said the tall Japanese one.

“I want the world’s biggest library, filled with books of great wisdom,” said the bearded Jewish one.

The first young man left his companions in 2002, mission largely accomplished; the second, last year and likewise. The third is still working on his (the library, not the leave-taking).

My buddy Sputnik’s apothecary existed in considerable and connected chunks strewn throughout his relatively brief life; not to romanticize it, but his curiosity-fueled meanderings (medical and spiritual) always seemed to end up benefitting everyone around him.

My buddy Ralfh took a dark turn. Kind and gentle, yet terribly, terribly lost, he did eventually get his land – and also some serious incarcerations, which he bore as marks of grim defiance.

My quest for “the world’s biggest library” resulted in inheriting the textual legacy of one of this planet’s oldest and most misunderstood peoples. I don’t know it all, by far, but I do know more than I did – though considerably less than there is to know.

Youthful dreams don’t always come true. But sometimes, their ripples may reach beyond imagination. Here’s to absent friends – and the open sea.

Cool Exchange

DESPITE ITS MANY FLAWS, I still use Facebook every day to keep in touch with good friends without which and from whom I would otherwise fall out of contact. As I seek to entertain and uplift, most of my usual posts are questions or tasks for my friends to play with (“Who was your first crush?” or “What local sights would you insist visitors see?” or even “Picture silence.”), Good Shabbos messages (many of which also appear on this blog) and other Judaeocentric-but-universally spiritual items, and the occasional random observation.

Today is the second anniversary of Paul Rubens’ death. His humor was and still is a big part of my life, and I have nothing but warm feelings for his most famous character, Pee-wee Herman. I was a never-miss viewer of his 1980s Saturday morning “kids” show, Pee-wee’s Playhouse; Pee-wee epitomized for me the importance of play, silliness, and innocent but subversive fun. As my longtime friends have roughly the same tastes I do, I posted the following this morning:

If I had a patron saint, it would be Pee-wee, whose second yahrzeit is today. May his memory continue to be for a blessing, and may his laughter never cease.

This prompted a friend of mine to say:

I recognize two secular saints,
St. George Carlin and
St. Frank Zappa.
(There is room for my pantheon to increase.)

To which I responded:

I respectfully beg to differ. Prophets don’t get to be saints; saints are universally loved, but prophets “comfort th’ afflicted and afflict th’ comfortable” (as newspaperman Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936) put it). Being a saint is easy – just do the right thing for the right people at the right time – but a prophet’s job is a much harder one: Bring The People The Truth. Most folks don’t want to hear that sort of talk; if they did, the world would be very different – and wouldn’t continually need prophets _or_ saints. MTC; YMMV.

Don’t get me wrong – I think this most interesting of all possible worlds needs both saints and prophets – but let’s be clear on who has what job, and why. Dig?

Audiomobile

“COGITATE COGITATE COGITATE COGITATE COGITATE…”

So ran one of the many “found sounds” (today called “samples”) on the pass-around tape collages that were a fringe benefit of membership in the Neo-Pagan Society of Diablo Valley College in the early-to-mid-1980s. (Accent on “fringe.”)

My initiation into this three-part sonic conspiracy – which included “Mr. Bird” and “Zoro X.R. Troll” – came about on receiving from Zoro a postage-stamped 60-minute cassette tape with no explanatory note save “PLAY ME” written on its label. Curious, I popped it into my boombox and pressed “Play.” My ears were happily assaulted (in machine-gun succession and no particular order) by excerpts from: Alan Watts, William S. Burroughs, The Grateful Dead, Firesign Theater, a straitlaced radio preacher, Mr. Bird’s paranoid brother, Tom Robbins, Zoro’s favorite inspirational readings, The Beatles, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and various other audial offerings now hazed by time and headspace, as well as Zoro’s drawled invitation to add to, subtract from, or otherwise mess with “this here tape” before sending it either back to him or on to Mr. Bird.

The process was simple:

1- Wire up two cassette recorder/players from output to input (this also works just as well, if not better, if you have one two-bay cassette player/recorder).
2- Load output player with whatever you like: music, spoken narrative or poetry, movie/tv soundtrack, sound effects, live microphone, &c., as limited only by imagination and source material.
3- Load a cassette into the input recorder, press “Record,” and engage the Pause button.
4- Play a section of the output tape.
5- Disengage input ‘s Pause button to record as much output as you want, then re-engage.
6- Switch output sources, the more incongruous and/or thematic the better.
7- Repeat process until you lose interest. (WARNING! It’s addictive.)

To simple, mad minds like ours, the results were vastly entertaining, and inadequately depicted in writing: “output1 (click) OUTPUT2! (click) OuTpUt3? (click) oUtPuT4…” ad infinitum.

After it was exchanged for a while, the tape had mutated into something very odd and layered indeed. One surrealistic iteration included dialog between myself and elements of David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust.” Another had Mr. Bird and Zoro calling out each others’ names in weird voices and at unexpected intervals. Yet a third featured Jim Morrison repeating the lyric “learn to forget” over and over and over.

For whatever reasons, we three eventually drifted away from this collaborative creation. Yet I still have a copy of the original tape kicking around here somewhere, plus one which I slowly built up over a period of nearly 20 years, always meaning to send it on to my colleagues.

Perhaps, one day, I will.

The Zine Scene

A LONG TIME AGO, IN a post office far, far away, our mailbox was fraught with wonder and excitement.

In those cultural Dark Ages of pre-public Internet access, creative folk could communicate through the medium of “zines” – homegrown/amateur magazines, usually (but not always) photocopied by the dozen at the local 24-hour Kinko’s. Zine subjects were limited only by the interests and imaginations of their creators: politics, music (mainly punk rock), personal essays, communality, underground comix, satire, movies, TV shows, media criticism in general, religion, cassette culture, spirituality, alternative lifestyles, history, science fiction, fantasy, sexuality – the list goes on.

At the hub of this textual universe stood Factsheet Five, the quarterly “zine of zines” stuffed with hundreds of brief reviews and publisher contacts. Each issue opened up entire worlds of conceptual adventure, and she and I would take turns devouring it and highlighting the publications we wanted to receive. Per-issue costs could be anywhere between a few stamps, a few bucks, or trade for “something interesting” — including one’s own zine.

We were both well-supplied to swap: she with her women’s spirituality “perzine” (personal zine) Sacred Wilderness and me with my elsewhere-described Far Corner, a UFO/paranormal satire journal. For those small but intense investments – thinking, writing, copying, and postage – we netted a substantial return from independent publishers all over the planet.

Factsheet Five has passed into the What-Was, having ceased production in 1998. Blogging, vlogging, Substack, YouTube content, and social media in general now fill the creativity gap once occupied by zines; they’re cheaper, have a potentially longer reach, and can be published and accessed with greater immediacy. As a result, the weekly post-box trip has become more prosaic and less exciting. But the memories remain, of a secret world populated by anyone who could afford to get their personal word out and connect with likeminded others. I like to think that, though the medium may have dwindled, the spirit hasn’t. Long live the revolution!

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