Back To The Brine

Back To The Brine

"Cuz I'm praying for rain
And I'm praying for tidal waves
I wanna see the ground give way.
I wanna watch it all go down.
Mom please flush it all away.
I wanna watch it go right in and down.
I wanna watch it go right in.
Watch you flush it all away.

Time to bring it down again.
Don't just call me pessimist.
Try and read between the lines.

I can't imagine why you wouldn't
Welcome any change, my friend.

I wanna see it all come down.
Suck it down."
- Tool



I drank and went out for late-night fast food, listened to the soundtrack of the Apocolypse, and laughed a lot.

Stanhope wrote me back. Here's the conversation:

 we will drink at sneaky petes, my friend.


Fuck yeah, we will. Goddamn, dude. You have no idea how much I need to shake your hand and thank you for how much of a fucking inspiration you are.

I've been playing classic rock with a band every week for a long time now. This Friday, I'm doing my first solo gig in almost seven years. Along with shitloads of acoustic rock (loads of Zevon, Neil Young, etc) I'm doing weird improv bits with a bass guitar through various effects units. I intend to compile a CD of my favorite bits of you and Bill Hicks to play over the top of this shit. Then I'm gonna plug your campaign. It won't mean shit in a town as backwards as Marion, Indiana, but the fact that I have the chance to do this at ALL is a fucking great thing. I have no faith in our power to prevail over this goddamn stupid system we find ourselves in, but I have plenty in our ability to fuck with the edges and have a goddamn good time doing it. I love you, you disgusting bastard. See you next week.

Au contraire, Pierre. You have plenty of power in Marion.

Those dark cracks in the country are where the change will come.

Trust me.

stanhope

--

I told him that I'm praying to gods I no longer believe in that he's right. But other times, I pray that Tool is right, and I'll someday get to watch Mom flush it all away.


As much as I laugh at their superstitious nonsense, I feel a certain kinship with my literalistic Christian friends. I long for the end of the age too. Not for their reasons. I know of no Heaven to go to, and theirs sounds fucking boring in the first place. No, I just wanna see it all flushed away. I wanna stand on the precipice and witness the end of this failed experiment called humanity. I'll laugh, drink another can of Steel Reserve, then jump into the brine. 2007 - a merman I should turn to be.


Bill Hicks spoke of southern California sliding into the ocean and becoming Arizona Bay.

350 million years ago, this part of the country was covered by a shallow sea. For the purposes of this demonstation, we'll call it Pennsylvania Bay.

With any luck, a reprise of this geological event will be one of the results of global warming.

I'm getting my aerosol cans ready. Learn to swim, motherfuckers.

Love,
Dougie
-------

"...That's why I like natural disasters. All these natural disasters that been going on, I fuckin' love 'em! I cant get enough of 'em. When nature's going crazy, throwing things around, scaring people and destroying property, I'm a happy fuckin' guy. I'm a happy fuckin' guy! I look at it this way... For centuries now, man has done everything he can to destroy, defile, and interfere with nature. Clear-cutting forests, strip-mining mountains, poisoning the atmosphere, over-fishing the oceans, polluting the rivers and lakes, destroying wetlands and aquifers... So when nature strikes back, and smacks 'em in the head and kicks 'em in the nuts, I enjoy that. I have absolutley no sympathy for human beings whatsoever, none, and no matter what kind of problem humans are facing, whether it's natural or man-made, I always hope it gets worse. Don't you? Don't you?! Don't you have a part of you, a part of you that secretly hopes everything gets worse? When you see a big fire on TV, don't you hope it spreads? Don't you hope it gets completly out of control and burns down six counties? You don't root for the firemen do you? I mean i don't want them getting hurt or nothing, but i don't want 'em putting out my fire. That's my fire, that's nature showing off and having fun. I like fires...


"You know something else i like? Those spring floods in the midwest! Aren't they great? Like clockwork, spring floods in the midwest. Now I'm starting to notice, I'm starting to catch on, that every year... it's the same story! Another flood, in the same place, with the same people, on the same river - SAME FUCKIN' PEOPLE! And these people do not move, they will not fuckin' move! They repaint, put down new carpet and wallpaper and they move right back into the same fuckin' house on the flood plain, next to the river, and then they wonder why grandma's floating downstream with the parakeet on her head! Fourth time, again, fourth fuckin' time. There's no learning curve with these people. It's very hard to feel sorry for them. Every year, same people, same rowboats, out there paddling around, rescuing a chicken! What the fuck kind of a life is that? 'Well our kids love it here...', Oh really, what do they got, gills? And while they're showing all that shit on the screen, the announcer's saying to me ', It's been raining steadily for 3 months now, the ground can't hold any more water, the river's cresting higher than it has it 2 centuries, the levees have washed away..." And i just hope it keeps raining and raining and raining and raining and raining and raining and raining and raining and raining and raining and raining and raining and raining, and it rains steadily for 5 years... and then after that, for 10 years it's cloudy... with occasional showers... and the river never returns to it's natural banks, it becomes a completly new river, and the borders of 3 states have to be changed, and all the maps and atlases have to be redrawn and reprinted... and no one's couch ever completly dries out. For years and years, every time they sit down there's always that little 'Squish...' 'Dan, Linda, come on in you guys, have a seat - squish squish...' I like that, I'm an interesting guy...


I always hope that no matter how small the original, it's going to grow into bigger and bigger proportions, its going to go completly out of control and I'll give you a concrete example...


Let's say a water main breaks in downtown Los Angeles and it floods an electrical substation, knocking out all the traffic lights and tying up the entire city and emergency vehicles can't get through. And at the same time, one of those month long global warming heat waves comes along, but there's no air-conditioning, there's no water for sanitation, so cholera, smallpox and dissentary break out and thousands of people start dying in the streets. But before they die, parasites eat their brains, and they go completly fuckin' crazy and they storm the hospitals. But the hospitals can't handle all the casualties, so these people rape all the nurses and set the hospital on fire. And the flames drive them even crazier, so they start stabbing social workers and garbagemen, and a big wind comes and the entire city goes up in flames. And the people who are still healthy, they get mad at the sick people and they start crucifing them; nailing them to crosses, trying on their underwear, shit like that! Then everybody smokes crack and PCP and they march on City Hall where they burn the mayor at the stake, strangle his wife, and take turns sodomizing the statue of Larry Flynt. And at this point, this point, it looks like pretty soon, things are going to start to get out of control...


So everybody panics and tries to leave the city at the same time, and they trample each other to death in the streets by the thousands, and wild dogs eat their corpses, and the wild dogs chase the rest of the people down the highway. And one by one, the dogs pick off the old fucks and the slow people 'cause they're in the fast lane where they don't belong. Get the fuck out of the fast lane if you're an old fuck, if you're a slow fuck, get over on the right, get over on the right. And then, and the lucky ones, the lucky people who managed to make it all the way outside of town, they discover when they get there, that big sparks from the city have lit the suburbs on fire, and the suburbs burn uncontrollably. And thousands of identical homes have identical fires with identical smoke killing all of the identical soccer moms and their identical kids named Jason and Jennifeeeerrrrrr!


And now, the fires press into the farmlands, and the farmlands burn intensely at 425 degrees creating millions of baked potatos. And, as the farmlands burn, as they burn, thousands of barns and farmhouses begin to explode from all their hidden meth labs. And the meth chemicals run downhill into the rivers and streams, where wild animals drink the water and get completley geeked on speed. So bears and wolves, amped up on crank, start to roam the countryside looking for people to eat, even though they're not really hungry. And the fire spreads to the forests and the forests burn furiously and hundreds of elves and trolls and fairies come out of the woods screaming 'Bambi is dead, BAMBI IS DEAD!' And he is, he is, finally that little cunt Bambi is dead, DEAD!


And now, hundreds of regional fires come together into one huge interstate inferno, and all 12 of the western United States are burning out of control, except for Utah where they don't allow fires. And the fire spreads across the Great Plains, toasting the wheat and cooking the cattle producing...hamburgers, actually. Then it leaps the Mississippi and races through the South, blowing up stills, interrupting lynchings, and killing millions of imbred people!

And then, it turns northeast and heads for Washington DC where George Bush can't decide if it's an emergency or not! He can't decide because Dick Cheney is in prison. So instead he takes a nap, he takes a nap! He puts his empty brainless head down on the little pillow his mother gave him at Christmastime, and he takes a fuckin' nap! So the fire moves to Philadelphia, but it's a weekend and Philadelphia's closed on the weekends. So the fire moves to New York City, and the people in New York tell the fire to 'Go fuck itself!, Go fuck yaself!' And it does, yeah, and it does, so instead it burns down Long Island and Connecticut, killing all the rich white assholes and completly destroying their evil faggoty golf courses.


And while all of this is going on, Canada burns to the ground but nobody notices...


And now the entire North American continent is on fire, producing a huge thermal updraft and creating an incendiary cyclonic macro-system that forms a hemispheric mega-storm, breaking down the molecular structure of the atmosphere and actually changing the laws of nature! Fire and water combine! Burning clouds of flaming rain fall upward. Gamma rays and solar winds ignite the ionesphere creating huge clouds of ionized plasma. Bolts of lightning, 20 million miles long, begin shooting out of the North Pole. And the sky fills up with green shit! And then suddenly, the entire fabric of space-time splits in two!!! A huge crack in the universe opens, and all of the dead people from the past begin falling through. Babe Ruth, Groucho Marks, Davey Crockett, Tiny Tim, Porky Pig, Hitler, Janis Joplin, Alan Ludlin, my Uncle Dave, your Uncle Dave, everybody's Uncle Dave! An endless stream of dead Uncle Daves falling through the crack.

And all the dead Uncle Daves gather together around a heavenly kitchen table. They light up cigarettes and they begin to talk. They talk about how they never got a break, how their parents never loved them and their children were ungrateful. They talk about how the government screwed 'em out of money and they just missed out on the big job! They say the Jews own everything and the blacks get special treatment. And all the bitterness and hatred drips out of these people and forms a big pool of liquid hate. And the pool of liquid hate begins to spin, round and round it spins, faster and faster. And the faster it spins, the bigger it gets. Faster and faster, bigger and bigger, until the whirling pool of hate is bigger than the entire universe.


And then suddenly, it EXPLODES into trillions of tiny stars, and every star has a trillion planets, and every planet has a trillion Uncle Daves. And all the Uncle Daves have good jobs, perfect eyesight, and shoes that fit. They have great sex lives and free healthcare. They understand the Internet, their kids think they're cool. And they all love their neighbors. And every week, without fail, Uncle Dave wins the lottery. Forever and ever until the end of time, every single Uncle Dave has a winning ticket, and Uncle Dave is finally happy...


Now do you see why I like it when nature gets even with humans?"

- George Carlin