BUILDING OUR OWN SHIP

Stang Report 4-27-01

My hands!! Normally weak, smooth and soft like a baby's, they are now thickly calloused, covered with tiny cuts, permanently filthy, and POWERFUL! From assembling almost 20 sets of cheap metal shelves, each requiring 68 nuts and 69 bolts.

My legs!! Like mighty thewwed tree trunks, well, bonsai tree trunks anyway or dwarf maples, from toting boxes of dead media formats down two flights of stairs and then up three!

My back!! Like a sprung Slinky! Intermittently requiring special aids just to become straightened upright!

My feet!! Far flatter than they were when they kept me out of the Vietnam war!

MY EVERY MUSCLE AND FIBER -- IN TERRIBLE CEASELESS ARTHRITIS-LIKE PAIN, UNASSUAGABLE BY ANY DOSAGE OF ASPIRIN, ACETOMINEPHEN OR IBUPROPHEN!!

And we haven't even MOVED yet!

Ah, but We/I have finished repainting the Wei studio, painting the Stang studio (using Lonesome Cowboy Dave sweat for paint), taping, bedding, primering and painting the SubGenius Foundation Storage Facility and Tomb of the Faceless Bobbie, and last night I not only FINISHED THE SHELVES (!!!) but filled them halfway with ancient crumbling SubGenius tapes, video, text and artwork already extracted from the previous abode.

On Monday, the hired professional gorillas come and hoist all the really MASSIVE items down from the second story balcony of this old house and up into the second story balcony of that new house. The new place has narrow, Amsterdam-like stairs with "L" bends in them, affording no passage for things like my roll top desk, the Rack, the Hour of Slack production table, much less the iron lungs and maidens.

Then after that, perhaps an evening of this week, I will rent a Ryder truck and lead the Morlock SubGenii of Cleveland to the "Church Wharehouse" under the secret cult headquarters building, where they will help me transfer HUNDREDS MORE BOXES OF TAPES, BOOKS, PROPS, PULPITS, PORNO, etc. to the truck and thence to the painfully prepared BANKS of SHELVES way up at the top of Stangian MegaFisTemple Lodge #4. Or is this #5?

As probably no one has noticed, I haven't been very active online lately due to this move. Indeed, the only reason I am sitting here writing this is because my van's battery died and I'm waiting for Wei to get home with a new one. I have, barely, been able to keep filling video/audio orders and pumping out Hours of Slack. But soon things will become very artful, rantful and social again.

We have a devival here in Cleveland at the Euclid Tavern on Saturday, May 12, with ESO and also Saint "N" and Hellena Handbaskett, and perhaps Bobcore will spew! I have heard tell that the Quijibo and Pittsburgh contingents will be coming, including Dr. Pissoff and Barbara Alien, so perhaps we can arrange a pre or post show party.

On May 27, I am doing a wedding, only this time I'm not officiating -- a Unitarian minister is -- and I'm the groom. I have been through this routine before, but Princess Wei hasn't, so she is going bonkers arranging this ceremony. She will have spent WEEKS on something that will last an hour. (Sigh) Girls. The wedding is in a small theater and is a mostly family thing. It will not be a ShorDurMar. There will be no mention of "God" although we may throw in some Jewish elements -- I'll get to stomp a wine glass anyway. A week later, on June 2, there will be a second reception that will be more of an all day party at a private residence. This is where I will repay the folks who helped us move by getting them REALLY DRUNK.

At that point I will be up to my testicle in Tesla Coils getting ready for the final good-bye to Earth and the Pinks, the day we are Ruptured, July 5th, 2001, 4X-Day. Incidentally, I have dibs on the Grand Canyon, including Flintstones Bedrock City, Monument Valley, Utah (God Damn it I think P-Lil already reserved Devil's Tower in Wyoming!), all the furniture in the west wing of the Reijksmuseum in Amsterdam (Dok Frop can have the Vermeers... I don't want any violent showdowns to mar what should be our most glorious time of Looting. (Remember, after X-Day anything not made by MWOWM will be a "collectible".) That would make a funny scene in an X-Day movie actually -- about 20 minutes into the Rupture, you show the foyer of the Reijksmuseum. There's dust falling from the ceiling as explosions outside rock the ground. A cowering Pink is startled to see three figures suddenly "beam down" Star Trek style in front of him, each holding futuristic weapons and eyeing each other with extreme suspicion. They are Dok Frop (who is veiled in supernaturally thick smoke throughout the scene), Jesus and Ivan Stang. They ignore the Pink and are obviously in some kind of "Mexican standoff," ready to blow each other away, like the climax of THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY. Psuedo-Ennio-Morricone music sting with rattlesnake effect helps make the point. Finally Stang (who now looks 33, 6'5 and built like Conan) breaks the tension -- "You can have the fuckin' Vermeers, Dok Frop, all I want is the furniture. Just the furniture." "Okay," says Frop. "I'm gonna take the Rembrandts too even though that guy SUCKED by comparison." Jesus, wearing boxing gloves, a Cuban cigar clamped in his teeth and a Terminator style machine gun slung over his shoulder, cooly growls, "Well, Magdalen asked me to pick up some diamonds and a few other rocks while I was out... so just stay out of the East Wing, boys, and maybe we'll meet up again later on the Saucers." (We see that the Pink in the corner has wet himself with paralyzing fear at this point.)

OH YEAH, I almost forgot. I also have dibs on the Vatican, Mecca, Chichen Itza, the Nazca Plain, the entire Red Light district of Amsterdam including the Pink prostitutes (that's for Philo actually), the Pyramids, the Sphinx, the Alamo so that no one else may descrate it but ME), the New York Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian, the British Royal Museum of Natural History, Gaudi's Cathedral in Barcelona, the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, the Black Rock Desert and playa, Carlsbad Caverns, the Petrified Forest, that beach in Spain where they filmed those Harryhausen costume epics, Angor Wat, the Watts Tower, Rock City (Tennesee), ALL the Anasazi ruins, the Playboy Mansion, the Victoria Theater in San Francisco, the Texas Schoolbook Depository and Dealy Plaza (a present for Wellman), Brushwood (for the owners, Frank and Darlene, in case they forget), Epcot Center, the Forbidden City in Beijing, the Kremlin and St. Petersburg (for Sterno), Pigeon Forge, Dollywood, Graceland, all the Ripley's Believe It or Nots and Madame Tussaud's, the Winking Lizard Taverns (for former alt.slackist Lou Duchez, who will be too surprised when he's ruptured to remember to grab those), Big Tex from the Texas State Fair, a couple of those old Big Boy collossi, Enchanted Rock near Austin, the Ackermansion, that house in Tucson that Hal Robins painted the wall of, Paul Mavrides' apartment (since he won't BELIEVE X-Day is happening when 1998 finally rolls around) and ALL the roadside attractions listed in the book ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS. All of these will be the BACK YARD of my NEW new house, my Escape Vessel! OH YEAH! The entire studio lots of Universal, Paramount, MGM, and all the shit at ILM. Wait a minute, I don't need those, I'll be able to THINK the movies and MWOWM will "print them out" in 3-D, SMELLOVISON and FEEL-A-ROUND!

However, before that wondrous time, 4XD aka the REAL July 5 1998, I desperately want to print and mail that legendary STARK FIST OF REMOVAL that Rev. Christopher Lee laid out and that we owe the Members... after updating it... even if I have to borrow more money. Hell, I just borrowed money to buy a HOUSE, and it was EASY! Companies were falling all over themselves trying to loan us money! They were willing to loan us FAR more money than we could EVER sanely hope to pay back. Come to think of it, I haven't actually gotten to the "paying back" part of this loan business yet, but I know that the first part, GETTING the loan, is a CINCH.

I also have a monumental amount of really cool text pieces and art that I've been copping dutifully from alt.slack and alt.binaries.slack, which I was about to mount on SubSITE when this HOUSE thing presented itself. We stumbled upon it the very day it went on sale, and it was "now or never" -- and 6 days before the Amsterdam Field Trip. So, I intend to get SubSITE that long-promised facelift finally. All of this should be a lot easier, physically, in the new studio space, which is about 5 times larger than the U-boat cabin sized cell I'm using now, the former broom closet of the old Princess Wei's Pleasure Dome.

AND there are about 4 new types of SubGenius BOOKS I'd like to compile, like an ART OF THE CHURCH book, the BUMMERS project, 4 Fisted Tales, the Stark Fist Reprint book... just to start. I also finally have the MOVIE IDEA ready for concentrated effort. And the only thing holding up the HIGH WEIRDNESS and 3 FISTED TALES reprints is this move!

So, you see, we aren't JUST sl/jacking off around here. The Dallas office informs me that we had a good week, swag-wise, and have been able to reorder a couple of Con-machine-made Sacred Products that were back-ordered (and were holding up Membership Packs!!). The Jesus family and dangerous Nickie Deathchick are as hectified as I am, but HANGING IN THERE, praise Dobbs and hail Connie.

****

THE NEW BATTERY WORKED!! My diseased looking, thief-repelling vehicle is ready for another load. I doused the battery cables *real good* in Anti Corrosion Spray, too, which looks just like menstrual blood. The old battery was so corroded that it was as if some kind of exotic, colorful fungus was growing on it, with "feathers" reaching out like delicate crystals for several inches. Amazing that the corrosion has built up into such fragile patterns without being shaken loose. So much of it flaked off when I hammered at the terminals that when I finally got the car going, the hot engine burned off GOUTS of battery-acid vapours from beneath the hood. Leastwise I hope ta GAWD that's all that smoke was.

And so, now that I know I can leave the old office again, I shall not. I only have two more days to finish clearing all the "schmatta" from around the big furniture. That includes my entire Control Module. But before I do that, I must compile an HOUR OF SLACK as fast as I can. PRAISE "OR KILL ME RADIO 90.5 FM" for the great stuff they played last X-Day Drill, and praise Rev. Patrick Volkerding for recording it all and sending me CDs of it! I listened to the first 2 (of 6) CDs while screwwing full metal shelving, marked the not-too-cussfilled cuts as Hour of Slack-PG-Version-OK, and now all I have to do is extract those and do credits. Dr. Philo Drummond also gave me a CD compilation of his favorite novelty tunes, which includes much novelty rap, and I have plumbed that CD as well. AND, Rev. Chris Lee recorded The Residents live in Chicago recently, and I have lots of THAT to extract, and assemble by file number.

When you make an audio program this way, you don't actually have to LISTEN to the stuff you're playing. (I do, but today I might not.) You don't even HAVE to have heard it at all, ever. You can just yank the files off the CDs, put them in order (perhaps alphabetically!) on your hard drive, whittle what your pile down to about 600 megabytes, yell some credits into a mike, intersperse those appropriately, and cook it all onto another CD. Or 20 CDs in the case of Hour of Slack... that's how many copies I have to make and label and mail by TOMORROW (Saturday)!!

((And that reminds me of ANOTHER project that got put off, but would be easy to complete on some spare day -- some more "UNCLEAN" Hours of Slack, shows made just-for-internet, utilizing our VAST collection of historic taboo tapes -- epic prank calls, truly surreal crazy-comedian filth, schizophrenic improvization, bulldada "erotic party records," Philo and Sphinx, etc. ... ah, on some spare day...))

But... on Sunday...

My friends, on Sunday, I am going to unplug Muleskinner II and BOX HIM UP. This is the equivalent of shutting down a HAL 9000. I will be offline for at least two days!!! All the crap which is stacked up around me right now, like a 3-D Tetris game gone mad, will likewise be boxed. Wei's gear too will be DISCONNECTED. It will be the LAST NIGHT in the old Pleasure Dome.

But when Muleskinner II awakens and looks around him, he will think he has ascended to SubGenius Computer Heaven. A cavernous room painted all in glaring white, with a RING of work tables, not a SQUARE, but a RING of them, surrounding not one but TWO rolling chairs! And Muleskinner will feel back along his plug butt and realize that he's getting PURE, PERFECT, EVEN, UNBREAKABLE, GROUNDED ELECTRICAL POWER from his OWN wall socket -- for there are 8 PAIRS of electrical outlets in this room NOT COUNTING the ones on separate circuits for the heaters and AC!! And not just electrical outlets -- CABLE TV coaxial sprouts from each of the FIVE phone ports in the room... AND ETHERNET lines, like 12 or more total. The cable and networking cable isn't CONNECTED to anything yet, but HEY. All I have to do is put the hub in and splice connectors onto all the wires.

AND there's a room next to it that was in the process of being similarly equipped, and we just finished up that job, "joint compound," "Bull's Eye Primer," "smooth textured wall paint" and all, so I have a place to put ALL THE ART, SOUL SCRAPINGS, KRUEGERANDS AND TAPE THAT *YOU* EVER SENT TO THE CHURCH!!

See, this house was built around the turn of the century, but the last owner was a young SOFTWARE ENGINEER and home handyman. By the time we got it, he had replaced all the plumbing and wiring, totally rebuilt the kitchen and bathrooms, spiffed up the basement and walls, and was most of the way through turning the attic into this computer lab.

I never did bring up the Church while talking with this fellow, but he got emails from me which have my same old sig in them... I wonder if he ever got curious and checked out SubSITE. The last time he came by to pick up mail and show me more House Secrets, the Dobbs dummy was sitting in the basement staring hideously, like an old drunk, but he never even mentioned it... I think this guy is a potential SubGenius type even if he might be "of a rival faith" or even an atheist, because of the novel and imaginative ways that he did ALL of his home renovation and repair. There's something "off" yet cool about every aspect. One room is shaped slightly off kilter. One doorway is painted HALFWAY AROUND. (He left the paints so we could finish stuff like this.) He must have had 20 projects "in progress" when he suddenly changed jobs or whatever and decided to move. There are parts of the kitchen counter that look really slick, but aren't attached to anything. The color scheme is ... a style, that's for sure. All pastels but dark... looks great with the old stained wood. But the colors are what Sister Melodious Chops dubbed "NECCO WAFER COLORS" -- the very flat pastels that those little candy disks come in. Kind of strange. Wei repainted the dark green room light blue for her studio. I could tell that the previous owner was horrified that I had painted the attic-office all-white. I like bare 100 watt bulbs, white walls, tons of light everywhere to dispell the EVIL SHADOWS, like the "Limbo Prison" in THX1138, and also because my eyesight is not improving. He probably had some dim purplish brown in mind. This guy looked pretty normal, almost young-Dobbs like come to think of it, but I get the feeling that in his own way he might be some kind of weirdo, like myself.

The place comes with a yard, with a huge 100 year old tree, and a TREE HOUSE!! A little kid's fake factory-made treehouse, but a treehouse nonetheless. Also a little stream of water through the basement 2 days after it rains, but that's what dehumidifiers are for.

I think what REALLY sold us though, what made us feel that if we DIDN'T try to buy this house, we'd spend the next 5 years looking at CRAP houses and saying, "IF ONLY WE'D TRIED TO BUY THAT COOL HOUSE THE MINUTE WE SAW IT!", the real deal clincher, was that one of the rooms has OUTER SPACE WALLPAPER fringing the top... not just dopey stars but SATURNS and MARSes! Needless to say, that room is now the master bedroom. Or will be on Monday. I slept in there last night on a cot because my battery had died and I couldn't go to Old House where my bed and fiance were, or to the ESO radio show for that matter, and it was 2 am, and even if I got somebody to jump me, the risk of having that battery die again while driving through my OLD neighborhood to go home was JUST TOO SCARY. My old neighborhood s no place for an old hippie to be walking late at night. In my new neighborhood, on the other hand, I will be the scariest looking thing walking down the street late at night -- which I intend to do a LOT!

Incidentally, my new fancy-like neighborhood is ALSO predominantly black. With a really large community of Orthodox Jews too. This combo makes standing in line at the local fancy-ass grocery store a real laff riot sometimes to a SubGenius Texan like me, who is more used to Anglo-Mexican laff riots. There also appear to be lots of fully-out gay couples around, also "college perfesser" types, you know, eggheads, art nazis etc. But this seems to be the part of Cleveland where everybody gets along... probably because most of them are not POOR. Wei and I call this "The Rainbow Rich People's Neighborhood," of which we are probably its poorest citizens. But RICHEST IN SLACK!!

Yes, I think you can tell by the tone of this letter, we are indeed the RICHEST in SLACK. By Gobbs, I was sitting on the Throne of Excremeditation, lately, day after day... hour after hour... and I've been perusing some magazines that Wei brought home from work, magazines which NORMAL people read. I have subscriptions to The Onion, Mac Addict, UFO Review, Photo Electronic Imaging (PEI), The National Enquirer, and Pope Bob Anton Wilson's e-list, and these have provided me with more than enough of the news that I need. Especially The Onion. But the magazines for those who want to be MORE NORMAL... or even MORE NORMAL THAN NORMAL... my god man, I still can hardly believe the shit that's in these huge, HUGE, glossy, incredibly expensive magazines. I'm talking of "W" and "GQ." Christ, I must have been secluded in my styrofoam tower or something, I had no idea it had gotten THIS BAD. The PINKNESS! THE PINKNESS, I tell you! The sheer, unrelenting, and, yes, I must say it, PROUD Pinkness! *GAG* *CHOKE* The MODELS! The CLOTHES! The ADS! The PHOTOGRAPHY! Lavishly, luxuriantly PINK PINK PINK!!

MY GOD -- the TROUBLE they go to just to be "UPPER NORMAL"!!! *UGH*!!!

My friends, I am SO GLAD to be a weirdo. I am SO FUCKING THANKFUL to the Slack of Dobbs and the Retardation of my Overmind that I am a scruffy, unkempt, funny looking, always-a-bad-hair-day, out of fashion, jalopy-driving, WEIRDO!!

DO YOU SUBGENIUSES REALIZE HOW LUCKY WE ARE?? How truly RICH we are to TRULY NOT CARE if we LOOK RICH?!?? To not actually give THAT much of a shit HOW we look? (I am especially lucky in this regard since I have vitiligo, a melanin deficiency that looks like burns on the skin, and it's a permanent condition. WHO NEEDS TATOOS?)

Imagine having to go to all that trouble to feel VALID. All those haircuts, skin treatments, expensive clothing brands, expensive cars, extraneous gizmos with flashing lights that just make it easier for the boss to control you; JUST HAVING TO KEEP UP WITH WHAT'S "COOL", ALONE, would be enough to drive a person MAD! But, I guess it's a lot harder to drive a Pink crazy, possibly because they're so much more NUMB. "I'd rather be dumb than numb any day," ha, I just made that up! That's a good one. Duh-hyuh-hyuh-hyuk.

Well, I am living proof that you can be an UTTER FAILURE, a COMPLETE DUMBASS in Pink Land and still be WAY better off than any of them. Because I am RICH in Slack. DEEP Slack. I have more kinds of Dobbshead t-shirts than anyone on the planet-- but that's not why I have Slack. I have the sexiest Space Princess known in all the Galaxies of Tarnatia for a girlfriend and fiance. That is enough Slack to kill ten elephants and last a man a lifetime, but even that isn't the kind of Slack I mean.

The kind of deep Slack I'm talking about is the Slack of REALLY NOT CARING if I'm NOT famous, NOT rich, NOT cool, NOT powerful, not a GQ kind of guy in ANY way shape or form. Perhaps I had to give up on those Things of False Slack in order to be able to distinguish the non-things that bring me REAL Slack. It's the Slack, not of being able to PRODUCE the Hour of Slack, but the Slack of being able to APPRECIATE what's PLAYED on The Hour of Slack. The Slack of appreciating... period. Of glimpsing occasionally how fucking incredible even the most mundane, brink-of-poverty SubGenius life is, every minute that you have a full belly and enough sleep.

I guess in short you could call it the Slack of being in a good mood, for a change.

I probably wasn't in the best of moods for a while there... it sure feels better to be me now. Proper diet makes such a difference when you're an old fart. It hardly ever sucks at ALL to wake up any more! Plus, my ex wife divorcing my ass was evidently a smart move after all. We musta done something RIGHT, though, because our KIDS sure came out that way. The Yacatisma could come tomorrow and kill me, and I'd feel no regret aside from missing X-Day and eternal life. I got to see the Eiffel Tower, a Jimi Hendrix concert, Mardi Gras, a Burning Man and 5 X-Day Drills, not to mention (embarrassing public displays of affection deleted), so baby MAH CUP RUNNETH OVER!!

For all I know it's simply that I finally got over the feeling that I would never have a girlfriend. Took me fucking long enough, if that's all it was, since I HAVE had a girlfriend since I was 19. But I'll bet some of you, who still don't have a sweetie but want one, and even many who DO have a True Yeti Mate, know exactly what I mean. It's an all too common feeling among some SubGenii, I'm afraid, loneliness is, and even if it's basically hallucinatory, it's really hard to shake. It's not just the ones that look like Little Fyodor and me, either.* I know lots of "cute," "popular" SubGenii who are still somehow Looking for Love. Or at least a dependable fuck-toy. Well, HANG IN THERE! You'll score on X-Day NO MATTER WHAT. Who knows, while waiting, you might just score anyway, after all. As the old saying goes, don't kill yourself, let "Bob" do it for you. And never try to second guess Matchmaker Connie. The hand that Dame Connie finally gets around to dealing you might come in the LEAST EXPECTED way -- maybe even in the MOST expected way!

God damn it, enough of this maudlin crap, I better get to doing that sick radio show made of other radio shows made of other people's weird as hell songs.

What was that about HATS again? People aren't wearing enough of them?

*UGLY GUYS: Note that Little Fyodor and I, though we are little funny looking fellows who are obviously completely out of it, have somehow managed to score PERFECT GODDESSES for girlfriends. Proper respect and appreciation for the lady can work wonders where genetics, plastic surgery and Charles Atlas weightlifting courses fail.


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