I remember a long time ago my friend Phil was bemoaning a People Magazine spread on Mark David Chapman.  Included was a photo of Chapman holding a copy of The Catcher in the Rye, looking fucking smug even in the prison uniform he presumably still wears.

This was around twenty years ago, so sorry for the paraphrasing, but Phil was all like, Can you believe these motherfuckers?  Who gives a shit what Mark David Chapman thinks?  The only noteworthy thing that asshole ever did was pump six bullets into John Lennon's back!  And I'm supposed to care about what he fucking thinks about The Catcher in the Rye?!

I've quoted Phil without credit ever since.  I completely subscribe to his newsletter on this one.  His words fostered my contempt for documentaries and fictional portrayals of serial killers and mass murderers.  Because really, are these accomplishments?  Generally, people are so trusting that it would be quite easy to corner and kill lots of them.  So, how much airtime should this behavior get?  The Chicago Sun-Times has a policy of never running a mass murder story on their front page, since publicity and brand recognition is so often the clear intent of random acts of carnage.

I propose, why even let these motherfuckers continue to have names?  Why not name them like we do hurricanes?  We could call this recent mofo Mass Murderer Katrina.  Or SMF-1138.  Because if all they are known for is their force of destuction, if all they are known for is their inhuman want to inflict their sorrow and rage upon others, then perhaps they should have their human name taken away from them and have it replaced with a coda that is useful for filing purposes only.  I think at a certain point you lose the right to identity and must be referred to and categorized in disease terminology.

I just had a bunch of mail forwarded to me from a previous office location.  In the clump of credit card offers there's a rare hand-addressed envelope from San Francisco.  In it is a nice note thanking Bobbindoctrin for being in their new issue.  There's a clipping in it and I see a picture of Melissa and Patricia from The Long Christmas Ride Home.  I look at the headline and it says 2006 LESBIAN THEATER AWARDS.

At last.  I can't wait to see what awards Gay Pirate Play garners.  (And that's the title I decided on for the show.  The working title was The Gay Pirate Play, but dropping the 'The' made all the difference.)

Earlier today I thought I had a computer virus.  My keyboard was acting completely haywire.  I scanned my system thoroughly and even got some new antivirus software.  Nothing helped.  Then I saw that a sparkly pinwheel I put in my pen can had fallen in front of the wireless keyboard antennae.  My keyboard's signal was being refracted as if through a prism.  It was not a fun way to write.  It felt like my computerbrain had had a stroke.

But it was just a sparkly pinwheel.  I have since burned it, as my antivirus software demanded.

My mom & stepdad got me a fountain setup for my patio.  I assembled it and filled it and conditoned the water and bought five goldfish and personally spayed and neutered them and released them into their new prison. 

Even during my vegetarian period, I have always believed that animals exist as our slaves.  Cattle?  Meat slaves.  Dogs?  Joy slaves.  The goldfish are my mosquito-eating slaves.  They'll eat passing mosquitos and any eggs or larvae in the water.  The first day I saw one jump up out of the water and get a bug, and I thought, Cool.

Then later that day I went outside and saw that same fish on the ground outside the fountain.  It had jumped out completely.  I asked, Are you dead? and touched it and it flipped.  I tossed it back into the water and it listed down to the bottom and turned on its side.  I put my hand in the water and pushed the fish along.  It swam when I pushed it, so I did it for a while, to get some water moving through its gills.  But it would go motionless when not prodded. 

It had become the zombie of fish.  The other four fish still avoid it, which is easy, because the zombie fish only moves enough to suspend itself upright in the same place all day every day.  You think fish have dead eyes?  Try staring into the undead dead eyes of a fish.  They look alive.

So here's to the snappy salute, to spit and polish, the clicking of booted heels, the singing of martial odes. 

Here's to the officer's club and the swaggering commandante, to the loving but abusive drill sargeant, to the constant flow of insult that is the philospher's stone of survival. 

Here's to the young lieutenant fresh from the academy, to the troop ship's soldiers with their duffel bags slung over their shoulders, their cloth caps slouched and angled on their brows.

And here's to weeping parents, sweethearts, and children clutching at the skirts of their mothers, to final tearful embraces, and brass bands playing. 

Here's to the night before the battle, to the assault, the coursing landing craft, to going over the top, to the airborne troopers plunging from their droning seed pods, to the rubber dinghy landing at night.

Here's to where the farm boy and city dweller meet and are made equal.

Here's to the arcing shell and the magnesium dawn and to the clanking treads of armor personnel carriers, to bullets and howitzers, carbines and recoiless rifles, to mortars and anti-personnel bombs, to fragmentation grenades and teargas canisters, to machine gun emplacements and flame throwers, to agent orange and mustard gas, to the serrated bayonet and the deadly rain of schrapnel. 

Here's to mine fields fraught with sudden fragmentation, to screaming Sargeant Death commanding the ragtag remnants of his courageous platoon.

And here's to raising the flag on the shattered field of victory, to the prisoner of war camp, to the medivac chopper, the hospital ship--sacrosanct, yet sunk--to chaplains, to burial details, and body bags, to taps and other songs.

And here's to the brave pilots who in their cavalier ready-rooms prepare to become the airborne messengers of death, to the dog-faced infantry who dedicate themselves to the earth as much as their own cause.

Here's to words like courage, sacrifice, discipline, glory, maimed, dead.

Here's to war.  I raise my glass to you and gaze into the roiling liquid of death's own intoxication.   

O war you have made the low elevated, you have created heroes and history will be written by your winner.

Peace is pallid next to you.  Peace can skulk and shrink, a weakling, a coward's paradise.

Peace, you lukewarm bowl of grandmother's mush, you washed-out stand-in for manly behavior.

Peace walks through the marketplace offering secondhand bargains.  Peace, the shaver of points, the cut-rate merchant. 

Peace, you miserable converter of men into swine, you destroyer of valor, quicksand in which nations founder, the bleeding wound in the side of a great avenging angel.

Peace: the apologist, the compromiser, the appeaser, the rust upon the edge of courage's great sword.

What is peace but an excuse, a reason for cowardice, a refusal to accept one's responsibilities?

I spit on peace.  I lift my leg on peace.  I have my dog despoil the miserable garden of peace. 

There are no medals to peace, no honors, no marching bands, no great monuments to peace, no hymns sung, no great odes, no martial melodies, no parades to peace.  There are no gigantic firework displays, no champagne corks popped to peace, no last cigarette smoked in its honor. 

There is no night before peace, no declaration of peace, the very absurdity of a nation declaring peace on another shocks the imagination.

And who among us say that he has heard of the spoils of peace?  Is there such a thing as a peace hero?  Who among us have gathered with his old cronies late at night, hoisted a glass, and told peace stories?  What valiant young man has been welcomed back from peace? 

What young boy has gazed longingly at his father, saying that he would willingly go to peace to save his country?

     --Joe Frank

       I'm Not Crazy

Happy New Year!

Have a seat.  Make yourself comfortable.  Here, have a pillow.  Would you like a glass of urine? 

Ask me what time it is and I'll tell you how the watch is made. 

I grow older.  Grains of sand are falling in the hourglass of my life, and the bottom is fuller than the top.  I know how much sand has spilled out, but I don't know how much is left above me.  Time is like a river that rushes along, carrying everyone in it toward the great sea of oblivion, in which we all must drown.

Time is like a wall that grows and encircles us, until finally cutting us off entirely from everyone we love.

For everything, there is a season.  A time to be born and a time to die, a time to drink a flute of champagne on the balcony of a hotel overlooking the Carribean, where the trees dance in the island breezes.  And you can see, standing on the bridge of a passing cruise ship, maidens with pearls in their hair.  And a time to reach deep down into my vest pocket to retrieve from it the Ingram watch that has, since my father's death, run backwards.  A time to swallow oyster shells and tinkerbells.  And a time to have a seizure, because everything else has failed.  And a time to close my eyes and watch on the back of my eyelids, as though projected from the rear of my head, an unedited NC-17 rated film of my life, beginning with the severing of my own umbilical cord and ending with the turning off of my life support.  In technicolor.  My head as though a great amphitheatre with ten thousand seats, each one occupied by a brain cell. 

And I'm sitting there, watching this film, becoming increasingly agitated as my life is spilled out onto the screen.  And I think, What a waste and a failure.  And I get up, wearily, and leave the theater.

     --Joe Frank
       At the Dark End of the Bar

Happy New Year!

Sometimes I feel my life is to breathe sorrow and eat shit, then exhale words and shit puppets.

And the joy is somehow sweat.

Got this email today.

Art is very interesting. It can create many feelings in people. We enjoyed the talent from most of the group!
I must admit that our group was highly offended with your distasteful puppet show ("The Crucifer") Saturday night at Rudyard's. Although it is stated that the show is not intended for children, maybe a disclaimer should be stated regarding the offensive nature of your work regarding the Christian religion. Very poor taste. The show was interesting until the very last! Too bad.....
Happy Holidays

I replied:

Nature is full of so many eyegouging blights that we have evolved to either tune them out completely or go to great lengths to believe that they are actually beautiful.  I offer as a point in case, the Moon.

When I'm outside at night and it's a full moon and someone nearby says, Oh look at the moon, it's lovely--I shudder within and suppress vomit.  What exactly are they praising?  Its ability to reflect light?  I don't think they hand out medals for that.

Idiots look up at the moon and think the barren rock is looking down at them.  Smiling at them.  Laughing with or at them.  Or perhaps condemning them.  Some people can find praise or insult in cloud formations.  These are the same type people who unconditionally love the moon.  These are the suckers in our midst.

The moon is our world's largest light polluter.  When full, like tonight, it blots our ability to see all the stars in the night time sky.  These stars represent whole other galaxies we cannot even pretend to understand.  And what blocks the way is the light of the moon.  The stupid fucking moon.  It gets in the way of our understanding the entire universe, with its mere power to shine.

The moon slows the earth's rotation by 1.5 milliseconds per century.  If we destroyed the moon right now, we would get that time back.  Every decimal of millisecond would be longer and hopefully feel that much more fulfilling. 

And don't get me started on the goddamn tide.  Stealer of purses, wallets, cameras and clothes, the tide is another moon devilry.  The very existence of tides and our laziness to remember them bespeaks the Satanic powers among us.  For if God is the sun, the moon must certainly be Satan.

There has been some talk about returning to the moon.  I am all for this endeavor, as long as the astronauts bring the explosives required to decimate the moon to harmless spacedust.  I'm thinking a nice ring.

I am totally serious about this.  Even my cold dead body will not find rest until my arch enemy the moon has been vaporized.  Fuck all you hippie moonloving candyasses.  If we want to evolve, the moon must go.

End of story.

Been busy with long days at the puppet mill.  Feeling challenged but in a great mood.  I'll be on a live local Fox TV broadcast in five 3 minute segments between six and nine AM tomorrow.  It'll be all like, We're at a rehearsal for HGO's Hansel and Gretel at the Wortham Center.  And we have to act like we're there all the time at that hour, not sleeping off drunken binges.

So many things presented to us are fake.  We just believe them because it's the easiest way out of thinking about the absurdities.  This is why puppets are becoming increasingly more relevant.  It ain't that much a stretch, drooling idiots we are.

A real report: This is Lannie Griffith from Fox TV news.  I'm here live in Joel's bedroom watching him sleep.  As you can see, he is grinding his teeth furiously, and seems to be completely unaware he is gripping his night erection tight with both hands.