Working at a corporation is a humiliating experience for the low-level employees.  Its’ not enough for those suit monkeys to monopolize your time and energy; they want your soul, as well.  This particular job paid $7.00 an hour with no benefits, which was a mere 50 cents above minimum wage, and for that extra half dollar the company expected you not only to show up on time with a smile for the customer but to also express gratitude for the opportunity to scrub their toilets and receive abuse from their patrons.  The official company motto was, Let Us Entertain You, but unofficially it was, Thank You, Sir.  May I Have Another?

At some point, a group of pencil-pushers at corporate headquarters organized a focus group and decided they needed to boost employee morale.  I can say without reservation that a livable wage and a dental plan would have improved my outlook considerably, but instead the company decided to mandate certain celebratory activities.  On birthdays, cheap cakes were purchased and songs were sung.  Cards were handed out during major, non-religious holidays, and Valentine’s Day became a compulsory activity.

Few things are more degrading for the average human being than forced happiness.  Telling someone they will be fired if they don’t have fun is a bit like requiring a POW to write out a thank-you card after his tormentors have broken all his fingers.  America has always been known as the Land of Eternal Optimism, where brilliant minds like Walt Disney and Henry Ford are allowed the freedom to realize their dreams. However, once those dreams have come to fruition and those genius brains have been rotting in wormy graves for a few decades, another American tradition takes over: greed and exploitation. In our current system, it’s not the innovators who are rewarded but those who take a wonderful, new idea and transform it into a cheap cliche that can be crammed down the public’s throat with such relentless determination that the original dream becomes nothing more than a shallow mockery of itself.

Hence, Valentine’s Day.

But I digress…

During the first week in February, the employee break room at my workplace was suddenly cluttered with brown paper bags, scissors, construction paper, glue sticks, tape, markers, crayons, and glittery paint. It looked like a kindergarten classroom for clinically depressed children. Two days later the staff received a memo stating that every employee was required to create a Valentine’s Bag with his or her name on it and give one another cards by Feb. 14. Or else! In response, I wrote my name on a bag with a black marker and placed it in the designated area. My supervisor was not amused. He called me into his office and delivered a speech similar to the one given to Jennifer Anniston’s character in the movie Office Space concerning the amount of flair she had on her Chotchkie’s uniform. I was told that my attitude was a problem and it needed adjusting. Why couldn’t I be positive about this? Was it really so bad to spread a little love and good cheer to my fellow employees? What was the issue here?

I was twenty-two years old at the time and incapable of articulating the precise reason why being mandated to spread love and cheer by an amoral, money-hungry corporation made me want to firebomb my supervisor’s BMW, so I capitulated. I decorated a new sack with various pink and red hearts, while secretly cursing my supervisor for making me do so. The bag was then filled with stupid little cards and those gross heart-shaped candies that taste like chalk. I quit two months later.

Over the years, my attitude toward Valentine’s Day has not improved. If anything, it has gotten worse, a prejudice that has often made my love life difficult. Though I have never been the type of person to date girls who listen to Celine Dion or cry during cheesy romantic comedies, most of my exes wanted to at least acknowledge February 14th and perhaps go for a nice meal at a restaurant that didn’t feature a drive-up window. Go figure. Arguments ensued and I was often accused of being unromantic and cynical, insults that are difficult to deny while you’re setting a Nicholas Sparks novel on fire. In the end, the reasons most often sited when these relationships ended were my inability to express emotions and my impulse to see the negative side of every situation. I was exhausting. And depressing. And narcissistic. And misanthropic. And I wore socks to bed.

These things are undeniably true. I am not good at relationships; I hate expressing emotions; and even though I am now in my mid-thirties, I still make gagging noises whenever I see couples feeding each other in public. (I don’t care how in love you are–if the recipient of the food is not wearing a diaper, there is absolutely no reason to feed another human being. Ever!) An ex-girlfriend who also happened to be a psychology major once diagnosed me as “a pathologically unromantic person who uses humor to hide your true feelings.” My response: “You get me!” She then added immaturity to the list.

…

Several years ago, I met a blind date at a bar near my apartment building. This was my favorite dating bar. If things went well and it looked like intercourse was on the horizon, I would take the date back to my place to consummate our doomed relationship. If things didn’t go well (which was usually the case), I could say goodbye to my date and get blind, fall-down drunk without having to worry about how I’d get home. It was a win-win.

This particular date was a young woman named Michelle whom I’d met via the Internet (long story). When she entered the bar, she hovered near the door for almost a full minute, her gray-blue eyes darting around like those of a frightened mouse searching a new environment for a hungry cat. I waved. The fear in her eyes did not dissipate. Nevertheless, she crossed the room, sat on the bar stool next to me, and, in a voice barely above a whisper, told me how much she hated bars. “Actually, mostly I hate people,” she said. “And bars are always filled with people. Strangers. And sometimes they try to talk to me.” She shuddered. The look on her face indicated there was nothing so horrible in her opinion as unwanted human contact.

It wasn’t difficult to see why strange men would attempt conversation. She was beautiful in a way that was almost disturbing. She had perfect alabaster skin, a long sexy nose, a swan-like neck, and dark brown hair that she was constantly attempting to hide behind. Oh, and she had pointy ears. Like an elf.

I have always been attracted to physical abnormalities, so I asked her about these ears, and without a hint of reservation she told me it was a genetic trait called human vestigiality, which is a characteristic passed down from monkeys that still appears in certain human beings. “You know, like some people have a vestigial tail,” she said. “When you think about it, we’re really just a bunch of animals. If you condense evolutionary history into a single lifetime, we just climbed down from the trees about five minutes ago.”

I was smitten.

It just so happened that on this particular night there was an open-mic poetry reading at the bar in question. I hadn’t known this when I planned the date. I hate public poetry readings. They are most often attended by the type of annoying artsy people who wear scarves indoors and insist on talking in loud voices about Allen Ginsberg so that everyone in the room can overhear their witty repartee. This event was no different. As the room filled with bongo drums and tweed jackets, I shifted uncomfortably on my bar stool. I was enjoying the date so far and did not want to risk expressing my loathing for what was about to happen next. After all, Michelle didn’t look like the type of person who delighted in reading poems about her menstrual cycle in front of Kerouac wannabes, but you never could tell. She seemed anxious, but I got the feeling this was pretty much her permanent emotional state. It was impossible to know how she felt about the whole affair. Finally, when a a young man in a goatee and beret stepped up to the microphone and announced that he’d written a haiku about Charles Bukowski’s liver, Michelle broke down. Speaking rapidly and in a voice that sounded as though it was attempting to suppress a mounting hysteria, she said, “I’m-having-a-really-good-time-and-I-don’t-want-to-offend-you-but-I-hate-when-people-read-poetry-in-bars-I-can’t-stay-here-I’m-sorry-can-we-please-leave.”

I downed my beer in three swallows.

Since the night was young and we had no specific plans, I suggested we take a walk through a nearby cemetery. Michelle thought this was a fine idea. As we strolled, I pointed out my favorite tombstones–Adolfus Livernash, Samuel Belcher, Esther Reeks–and we talked about how much we hated open-mic poetry readings.

This all happened two years ago.

It turns out Michelle is even more antisocial than I am and just as repulsed by modern romance. Currently she works at a gourmet chocolate shop, where she spends five days a week making expensive cakes and candies. Feb. 14 is their busiest day of the year, and Michelle has forbidden me to say the V-word. After spending ten hours a day crafting chocolate roses and attaching hearts to cheese cakes, she wants nothing to do with the holiday.

There are other words we don’t feel comfortable saying, as well. The L-word, for instance. I realize there are those who believe saying “I love you” several times a day is an essential part of a good relationship, but we are not these people. We tried it a few times, and it just didn’t take. It felt forced and embarrassing, like an enema. However, there are instances when even pathologically unromantic cynics feel the need to express (blah) affection. Therefore, we’ve had to improvise.

For awhile, I told Michelle that I “lurve” her, a line from a Woody Allen movie called Annie Hall, which we both admire for its unhappy ending. Eventually, “lurve” transformed into “larve” for no particular reason, “larve” became “larf,” and then “larf” made the inevitable metamorphosis into “barf.”

This is the perfect expression for us because it removes all sentiment from the term. To say “I love you” in our current culture means to act out a scene from some cheesy Meg Ryan movie. However, to say “I barf you” is to express a shared hatred for the cliches of modern romance while simultaneously sharing something personal and sacred. We’ve never actually discussed this, because that would involve expressing our feelings to one another, which would immediately make those feelings disgusting and shameful. Therefore, we simply continue to barf one another in text messages and email. We barf each other in restaurants and we barf each other at the mall. We barf each other in the morning and we barf each other at night.

On Feb. 14, we will return to that old cemetery near my apartment building where we had our first date. We will stroll amongst the tombstones thinking about all the poor saps out there buying flowers and feeding each other chocolate-covered strawberries in an effort to reenact some unattainable bit of cultural nostalgia that has long since become a trite marketing ploy. We will laugh and enjoy ourselves. We will sneer and roll our eyes. We will drink cheap wine. We will avoid poetry at all costs. We will talk about all the things we hate about Valentine’s Day. And then we will fall in barf all over again.

July 2008

…

I’ve always had trouble falling asleep. I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe it’s because of all the caffeine I consume. Or the sugar. Or the cocaine. Or maybe it’s because of the troll that lives in my closet named Tum-Tum who likes to taunt me by playing Rod Stewart’s “If You Want My Body” on the acoustic guitar after sunset. Who knows? It’s a mystery.

Whatever the cause, the fact remains that I often lay awake late at night, staring at the inside of my eyelids. When this happens, I try to take my mind off of Tum-Tum’s incessant strumming by inventing new television shows for the FOX network. For some reason, this helps me relax, and I soon drift off into the dreamy world of unicorns, faeries and Sean Hannity. Here are some of the shows I created this week:

1) Bill O’Reilly Yells At A Baby: This is a show that I’ve been working on for a long time. Sometimes O’Reilly faces off in a political debate against a newborn baby, sometimes it’s a puppy, and sometimes it’s just a potted plant that happens to be leaning too far to the left. In any case, the basic format of the show is always the same. O’Reilly sits at his desk across from the baby/puppy/plant with a look of utter derision on his face. His hideous turkey neck pulses in anticipation and the horns on top of his balding, liver-spotted head begin to glow bright red. “So what’s your opinion on stem cell research?” O’Reilly asks. However, before the baby/puppy/plant can respond, he screams, “That’s ridiculous! What are you, French or something? I am very attractive and very smart! You are a communist!” The baby cries, the puppy whines, and the potted plant photosynthesizes (but in a very distraught manner). “Oh, stop being such a wuss!” O’Reilly says. Then he sheds his skin, unhinges his jaw, and swallows his opponent whole.

2) Former Celebrities Undergo Abject Humiliation So The Rest Of Us Can Feel Better About Ourselves: This is a reality show that features child celebrities who are now grown up and addicted to crystal meth, or sex, or doing crystal meth while having sex. Danny Bonaduce is on the show, as well as Rudy Huxtable, Punky Brewster, and the boring youngest brother on Home Improvement that no one ever liked. The producers of FOX put them all together in an insanely expensive house and force them to perform various humiliating activities, such as vacuuming and making their own beds. If the show starts to get boring, Ted Turner murders one of the celebrities in their sleep (presumably the kid from Home Improvement) and blames it on Danny Bonaduce. The remaining cast members hunt down the accused killer with crossbows, and then they write a hip-hop song about it.

3) Fat Guy & Attractive Lady: This is a sitcom that stars a dim-witted, over-weight man who is married to a beautiful, intelligent woman. The man works at some innocuous blue-collar job where he makes semi-clever jokes about his boss, while the woman pursues vague ambitions of working outside the home. The husband has a wacky friend who lives next door and sometimes causes trouble by convincing the husband to go bowling on his anniversary. Hijinx ensue. The wife’s parents also live nearby, and they come around to belittle the husband whenever the show starts to get dull. Other possible names for this show include: The King of Queens, The Honeymooners, According to Jim, The Flintstones, Grounded for Life or Still Standing.

4) Horny Rich Teenagers with Stupid Problems: This is a high school dramedy set in California, where all the teenagers look like adults and all the adults look like teenagers and all the breasts look like beach balls. Nothing remotely interesting ever happens on this show, but the audience pretends it’s interesting because, well, everyone is so darn beautiful. And as we all know, beautiful people are better than normal people, who are icky and pointless. Everyone on the show is obsessed with sex, but no one ever gets naked. Instead, the girls practice being pouty and anorexic, and the boys practice looking pensive. There’s one James Dean wannabe from the wrong side of the tracks and a slutty white girl who doesn’t fit in—they exist to remind the audience that poor people can be pretty, too. At the end of every episode, some awful emo band sings a whiny song about how difficult it is to be rich and narcissistic in America and then everyone converts to Scientology.

Prague is a strange, beautiful city that has been conquered several dozen times, and therefore, its citizens are of a peaceful, cantankerous disposition.  In all the times I tipped my elbow there, I never once saw a Czech man get into a physical altercation.  The Czechs don’t like to fight with their fists unless absolutely necessary.  This does not mean they are cowards.  Not at all.  They just know what their strengths are and play to them.  A citizen of the Czech Republic would much rather insult your country, your mother, and your soccer team (in that order), and reduce you to a blithering pool of insecurity than waste his time dirtying his clothes with your blood.  They are a verbal people, and they know how to turn an insult.  On the other hand, they are also a mumbling culture, so it is sometimes difficult to know when you’ve been insulted.  I once asked an elderly local why the Czechs always spoke under their breath, and he looked at me like I was an idiot.  “You ever had tongue cut out by KGB?” he asked.  “No,” I said.  “Me neither,” he said.  And then he mumbled something I couldn’t understand.

I couldn’t sip a Pilsner in Prague without eventually being approached by a local who wanted to know what was wrong with my country.  I seldom had an answer for this, so I simply bought them beers and listened to their opinions on the subject.

The conversation always started off with George W. Bush, of course.  This is not a political blog, and I’m not interested in getting into a debate on the subject of whether or not Bush was a good president.  However, I can say with absolute certainty that no political figure in my lifetime has been more reviled by the citizens of foreign countries than Mr. Bush.  I once knew a French woman who couldn’t say his name without spitting afterward.  True, the French are a little on the, ahem, expressive side, but still, no one wanted to face her in a public debate.

However, Bush was despised by people at home and abroad for a variety of reasons, so this criticism was nothing new.  What really interested me was the second person that was brought up when listing the reasons why they hated America.  Almost without fail it was Tom Cruise.

It must be said here that I have disliked The Cruise for quite some time.  Don’t get me wrong, I loved Top Gun and Risky Business when I was sixteen as much as the next sexually-repressed, testosterone-charged boy, and over the years I have enjoyed numerous other Tom Cruise movies, but at some point I began to grow sick of his smug face appearing on giant screens all over the country.  Still, I’d never really thought of Tom Cruise as the representation of everything wrong with America until I started talking to the Czechs.

Actually, the Czechs didn’t have a theory about it either, just an intense hatred.  Whenever they were asked what pissed them off about American culture, they fumbled around for a few minutes, passing over things like McDonalds, Wal-Mart, and Congress, eventually settling on Tom Cruise.  They couldn’t place their finger on it, but he represented something rotten in our culture.  The first couple of times it happened I sort of shrugged it off, but after hearing his name bellowed by unshaven drunks all across the city I decided to give the matter some thought.

Here’s what I came up with: Foreigners hate Tom Cruise because he is a very charming, very handsome egomaniac, and our culture has chosen to elect him as our ambassador to the world.

Now, I know what you’re thinking.  You’re thinking, “I didn’t vote for that guy to represent me.”  But in a way you did.  I did.  We all did.  Do me a favor.  Go to Tom Cruise’s IMDb page and count how many movies he’s made that you’ve seen.  Go ahead, we’ll wait…

Finished?  Was it more than you thought?  It certainly was for me.  I’ve seen twenty-four Tom Cruise movies.  Twenty!  Four!  And I don’t even like the guy.  He is a blockbuster machine thanks to American culture.  We created him.

Tom Cruise is a charming man, but he is not a very good actor.  Whenever he’s playing a character that requires more than a smarmy smile (Eyes Wide Shut, Magnolia, Vanilla Sky, etc.), he looks like one of those male betta fish when you hold a mirror up to its tank: nervous, angry, and absolutely in love with itself.  Tom Cruise is Marlon Brando without the intellect or talent.  Everyone knows this, but it doesn’t make any difference.  Would we rather have Steve Buscemi or John Malkovich as our leading man?  Sure, in a theoretical world.  But Buscemi and Malkovich just don’t fill the theaters like The Cruise.

And what’s so bad about Tom Cruise, anyhow?  Is he really such a terrible pop culture ambassador?  Well, yes, actually.  Besides the fact that he’s a mediocre actor and has a weird nose (looks like it’s made of Silly Putty or something; what’s up with that?), he also has such an enormous ego that he actually believes the Scientology muckymucks when they tell him that he’s on a higher spiritual plane than the rest of us because they want to feed off his celebrity.  In fact, every time Tom Cruise has tried to speak without a script in the past five years, he ends up sounding like he’s one step away from getting himself a pair of Nikes, starting a cult, and hopping on the next comet.

So are the Czechs right?  Is Tom Cruise evil incarnate?  No, he’s America incarnate.  That’s the problem.  American culture has voted, and this is what we’ve come up with.  Charming egomania.  Is this really what our country is all about?  Of course not, but it’s what our cultural democracy has decided to put on a pedestal.  Can you blame other countries for wanting to take him down a peg?

June 2008

…

“Where do you get those weird ideas for your column?” my friend asked during a recent phone conversation. I told him that my ideas come from the same three muses that inspire all writers: sex, rum and cheeseburgers. He asked me to elaborate…

It’s 1:36 a.m. on a Friday night/Saturday morning and I am sitting at a bar on Pearl Street, gently stirring a double rum and coke, sort of half-watching Ultimate Fighting on an old television set that is bolted to the wall in front of me and sort of half-watching a young man at the other end of the bar who is masticating the straw that came with his drink in a way that seems to indicatethat he has some  pent-up Freudian issues involving his mother. He is one of those impossibly beautiful people whose hair always looks perfect, even in the middle of hurricane-like winds, and he’s talking to a girl who also has hurricane-proof hair, and they smile and they laugh and they generally look like a toothpaste commercial, except for the fact that this impossibly beautiful boy is drunk and this impossibly beautiful girl is also drunk, and it’s quite clear that they will soon be going home together to have impossibly beautiful drunken sex, and this knowledge somehow makes me both happy and depressed at the same time.

I finish my drink and order another because Last Call is looming around the corner like a 400-pound ninja with a grudge, and I don’t know karate. My drink has too much ice in it and the soda is flat and the bartender slipped a lime wedge in there even though I told him not to and I take a sip and think, Ah, just the way I like it. On the television, the Ultimate Fighter in the white shorts is now beating the ever-loving shit out of the Ultimate Fighter in the black shorts, and across the bar the impossibly beautiful boy and girl are asking the bartender for their check, and at that exact moment, Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean” comes on the jukebox and you can almost see everyone in the room smile at the same time (even though “Billie Jean” is an incredibly sad song when you think about it).

I have now reached the perfect level of drunkenness: warm and sort of swimmy but not stumbly. Of course, this is the moment that I choose to text-message all the people I should not be sending text messages to while I’m drunk (ex-girlfriends, ex-girlfriend’s friends, ex-girlfriend’s exfriends, etc., etc.). While I am trying to spell “It wasn’t my fault” on my cell phone, a girl sits down next to me and asks if I like Michael Jackson. This girl has cornflower-blue eyes and blonde corkscrew-like hair, and I tell her that I definitely do not like Michael Jackson. I tell her that the word “like” is not sufficient to describe my feelings about the music created by the King of Pop. His bass lines are groundbreaking. His hooks are transcendent. Michael Jackson is a genius. She says that she likes Michael Jackson, too (“No matter what he did or did not do to McCulley Culkin”), and then we have an intense debate over what was his best album, Thriller or Bad, and I lose the debate because she brings up M.J.’s collaboration with Paul McCartney on “The Girl is Mine,” which is not really fair because it’s impossible to argue against a former member of The Beatles. I’m trying to work up the courage to ask this blonde girl for her phone number, but suddenly some guy wearing a They Might Be Giants T-shirt swoops in and beats me to the punch and I curse the little birdhouse in his soul.

The walk home takes about 45 minutes, and it’s the best 45 minutes of the whole year. The stars are bright. The air is charged with nocturnal romance. And I find a quarter.

McDonald’s is three blocks from my house and their drive-thru window is open 24 hours, and even though I don’t have a car, the 15-year-old Night Manager lets me order a double cheeseburger from the dollar menu and I go home and sit on my balcony and eat my delicious, un-healthy, un-organic food product, and I think about all the things in the world I truly love that no one else really cares about: zombie movies, Billy Joel, SkyMall, documentaries about seria killers, documentaries about religious cults, documentaries about aliens, ThunderCats, Hot Pockets, Footloose, Michael Landon, Spider-Man, Miles Davis, Scott Baio, the Rocky movies (except for number five), Rambo, pretty much Sylvester Stallone’s entire career, The Dukes of Hazzard, Bill Hicks, Spaghetti Westerns, The Karate Kid movies (except for number four), Netflix, interviews with prostitutes, taxidermy, books about Scientology, Christian rock and tater tots.

And that’s when I write my column.

© 2012 Dale Bridges

…

hey sara.

hey kelsie.

u hear bout the end of the werld?

yeah. bummer.

i know right?

right.

fire and brimstone.

yeah. brimstone smells like ick.

totaly.

BTW, ricky sutton talked 2 me 2day.

no way.

way.

THE ricky sutton?

yeah.

no way.

way! way! way!

cool. just a sec. my parentz r totly freakin out bout the zombies.

yeah. this apokalips is lame.

tell me bout it. yestrday my bro got fed to The Beast.

the cute bro or the 1 w zits.

cute.

oh. sorry.

its k. i get his room.

score.

i know.

did u see the skirt jenny wore for the genocide?

i know. totaly 2011.

yeah, i was like, That skirt is totaly 2011!

good one.

right?

hey. gotta go. my stupid mom wants me to join a cult with her.

which 1?

the 1 that werships a pole with a photo of tom hanks on it.

cool. the tom hanks pole cult is the best. suzie is a membr.

sweet. see you in hell.

totaly.

November 2009

…

It has been more than four years since the literary powder keg known as Hunter S. Thompson exploded off this mortal coil with a defiant shotgun blast. He was a figure of great controversy who served as America’s national conscience during one of the most tumultuous periods in our country’s history, and he left behind an enormous collection of written material that will be studied and debated for generations to come.

However, like so many cultural supernovas of that era who burned hot and bright, Thompson’s artistic legacy is in danger of being overshadowed by his iconoclastic persona. If you ask the average fanboy about Thompson, he will most likely wax poetic about the trippy sensationalism of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or the satirical revulsion of “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved,” but he won’t know a damn thing about the larger canon. It’s a shame in more ways than one. Thompson was a gifted wordsmith and philosopher who represented everything that is pure about the American way of life. He was not just some stoner in a safari hat.

At the height of his career, it seemed that Thompson would never run out of energy or idealism. If there was an important event, he was there, wielding his typewriter like a sniper rifle, picking off the bad guys one at a time. In Thompson’s hands, words were more dangerous than bullets. A noun could pierce a blackened heart. A verb could blow a hole clean through a man’s head. He never slept. He never ate. In the public mind, he became a mythical figure, indestructible and omniscient, a cross between Billy the Kid, Prometheus and Superman. He ceased to be a human being and was transformed into an idol.

Of course, this is mostly bullshit. If Thompson possessed any extraordinary quality, it was that he was more human than the rest of us, a fact he made abundantly clear at the end of his life. Yes, he fought the good fight, but he battled almost entirely alone, a general without an army, and eventually the counterculture he loved so much traded in its revolutionary fantasy for a suburban wet dream.

Thompson spent the last years of his life in Woody Creek, Colo., on his “fortified compound,” Owl Farm, where naked women in rubber Nixon masks abounded and high-powered explosions often pierced the night. Although his own career had slowed to a crawl, Thompson frequently entertained young artists and writers who came to his house seeking inspiration.

One of those writers is a good friend and colleague of mine named Ben Corbett.

“I met Hunter after I wrote an article on him for Boulder Weekly,” said Corbett. “I talked to him on the phone, and he invited me out to Owl Farm. We hit it off really well. Over the years, I probably interviewed him about 12 or 14 times.”

Thompson and Corbett were starting to develop a personal friendship at the time of Thompson’s death. In fact, at the exact moment that Thompson committed suicide, Corbett was sitting at home composing a letter to the famous Gonzo journalist.

“It sounds strange, but I sensed that time was short,” said Corbett. “I just had this feeling that he wouldn’t be around much longer, and I should see him while he was still with us. I found out later that he died at the exact time I was writing the letter, down to the minute. It spooked me.”

At the time of his death, Thompson was working on a new book with editor/publisher Steve Crist. Corbett met Crist at a memorial service for Thompson at Aspen’s Hotel Jerome, the venue that served as campaign headquarters when Thompson ran for Aspen sheriff in 1970.

They hit it off, and Crist asked Corbett to contribute to Thompson’s final book, GONZO, which features a lifetime of Thompson’s personal photography, notes and memorabilia.

The new “Literary Edition” of GONZO hit the shelves recently, with an introduction by Johnny Depp and a biography by Corbett. It is a book about the man behind the legend, and it was created by the people who knew him best and loved him. GONZO attempts to peel back the layers of celebrity that haunted Thompson and return to the true meaning of his work. It reads like a final love letter to his friends and fans, a colorful diary of musings and pictures that originated from inside the man’s head. Appropriately, there are no page numbers in GONZO, and it ends with the quote, “It never got weird enough for me.”

I spent several years editing Corbett’s insane scribblings at Boulder Weekly, and I can’t think of a better person to write about Thompson’s legacy. They are kindred spirits — the same naive bravado, the same crooked smile.

Thompson and Corbett are my favorite type of people: clinically insane but with a lot of heart. If anyone can rescue Thompson’s image from the media cranks and Hollywood hacks, it’s Corbett and Crist. Of course, this book won’t do it, not really. The myth has grown too large, the memory hole too powerful. But GONZO will serve as a type of Rosetta Stone for the select few who really want to understand the man behind the mystique. It is an important cultural artifact.

“Hunter was a romantic deep down,” said Corbett.

“He really believed in the goodness of humanity. He valued things like truth and virtue. That’s what his readers should be focusing on. Hunter wanted to inspire people to fight for a better world. That’s his legacy.”

Related articles

• Hunter Thompson Calling (misterbulger.com)
• Hunter S. Thompson: Fear And Loathing At The Gazette (pittsburghflashfictiongazette.com)
• Hunter S. Thompson Lives! (slackmovies.wordpress.com)
• Galliano Does Hunter S. Thompson | Christian Dior’s Diffusion Line’s Fear & Loathing Advertisement (bagbunch.com)
• I love me some Hunter S. Thompson on a Sunday afternoon (thegrumpygerman.wordpress.com)

April 2009

…

I was hanging out at a bar on Pearl Street, trying to suck the last vestiges of life-giving nectar from a beleaguered rum and coke, when the young man sitting next to me started berating his girlfriend for her “bad taste” in music. He was a snarky little prick, decked out in designer blue jeans, a popped-collar Tommy Hilfiger shirt and a mesh trucker hat turned sideways. (Quick aside: Can we place a moratorium on these ridiculous trucker hats already? Yes, I know Ashton Kutsher is like a god to all you moronic post-adolescent MILF hunters out there, but it’s starting to get annoying. It’s not cute, it’s not ironic — it’s just plain stupid. Do you want to know the main difference between a frat boy and a trucker? The trucker has a real job, and the frat boy’s daddy buys his clothes. OK, now back to our regularly scheduled program…)

ANYHOW, this metrosexual shitbird’s primary argument was that his girlfriend’s artistic discernment was inferior for one reason and one reason only: she liked Garth Brooks. In his mind, anyone who knew all the lyrics to “Friends in Low Places” was uncool and probably not very bright.

This is essentially why I can’t stand hipsters. They are the Hitlers of cultural cache, constantly attempting to control the opinions and perspectives of the people around them. It’s not enough for them to appreciate a certain style of art; they have to force the rest of the world to conform to their aesthetics. And when the rest of the world finally comes around to their way of thinking, what do the hipsters do? They declare those aesthetics “too mainstream” and turn their noses up at them.

I once had a roommate in college who constantly argued that the Red Hot Chili Peppers had “sold out” when they stopped making thrasher/punk music that no one cared about and started cranking out catchy alternative-rock hits that everyone loved. When he and his insular group of skater buddies were the only people who knew about the RHCP, they were cool, but as soon as the sorority girls across the hall started singing along to “City of Angels,” the band’s musical capabilities suddenly came under question. (Incidentally, this former roommate was also fond of trucker hats.)

For the record, there really is no such thing as “good taste” or “bad taste” when it comes to art. It is a concept that was invented by snooty elites to sell magazines and expensive clothing. Someone’s personal opinion about a subjective medium cannot possibly be wrong. You either like it or you don’t. Period. Does that mean all art is created equal? Absolutely not. There is a world of difference between Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of “Purple Haze” and some 15-year-old stoner’s bastardization of the same song. But hipsters aren’t talking about talent or skill when they discuss bad taste; they’re subconsciously talking about exclusionary group dynamics.

In other words, they want to feel superior to you.

Hipsters often accuse Garth Brooks of creating the musical genre “new country.” This is a fairly accurate assessment, although one could also make a reasonable argument for Alabama, Brooks & Dunn, Hank Williams Jr., Kenny Rogers and possibly even Dolly Parton. But it’s true that Garth eclipsed all of these icons back in the 1990s with his unique combination of country-western twang and ass-kicking pyrotechnics. He made the definitive decision to meld arena rock with cowboy hats, and this earned him piles of money and the eternal ire of hipsters everywhere.

Hipsters absolutely hate new country, and, therefore, they are also obligated to hate Garth Brooks. At this point, I don’t think they even know why they despise these two entities, but I’d like to pose a theory: Hipsters hate new country because pathologically uncool people love it, and the hipsters cannot convince these pathologically uncool people that their music is actually uncool. Consequently, when you think about it, this makes new country very cool.

The people who listen to new country are the same people who shop at Wal-Mart and watch NASCAR and eat McDonald’s and vote Republican. They are the people who wear sweatpants to social events and often live in trailer parks. I know this because I grew up in a small town and I shopped at Wal-Mart and wore sweatpants to social events and listened to new country.

When hipsters try to shame people for liking Garth Brooks, in a way they are also trying to shame them for being proud of their subculture. It has nothing to do with bad taste, but it has everything to do with cultural elitism.

In the end, the guy at the bar who accused his girlfriend of having bad taste should probably examine his own political and social insecurities. And get rid of that stupid hat.

Related articles

• Garth Brooks wins breach of contract case and punitive damages (lawprofessors.typepad.com)
• Garth Brooks is Top Selling Artist of the Last Two Decades (celebs.gather.com)
• Garth Brooks Can Not Be Played; Wins Lawsuit Against Swindling Hospital (perezhilton.com)
• Garth Brooks awarded $1 million in Oklahoma hospital case (music-mix.ew.com)
• Friends in Law Places: Garth Brooks Wins Suit Over Donation in Mother’s Memory (eonline.com)

2007

…

I am a 14-year-old girl at a Justin Timberlake concert. I am wearing glitter nail polish and a T-shirt with the word “Juicy” pasted on it in puffy, pink letters. I am in love. When the music starts, my heart goes pitter-pat-pitter-pat, and I scream so loud that dogs in China begin to howl. People look at me strangely, but I don’t care because I am a 14-year-old girl at a Justin Timberlake concert…

I know it’s not exactly professional, but this is how I feel about interviewing Sherman Alexie. I want to giggle and invite him to my house for a sleepover.

Book critics are not supposed to admit we have personal reactions to prose. We are just literate androids that consume novels like flavorless bowls of oatmeal and then spew out dispassionate, semi-witty quips about the authors who write them. But I can’t help it — I love books, and I love the people who write the books I love. If you want to read a cold, impartial review by some priggish academic, pick up the New York Times. I’m a fan.

Alexie’s latest novel, Flight, is a short, tender satire about a young American Indian/Irish orphan named Zits who has spent the better part of his 15 years bouncing back and forth from foster homes to juvenile detention in Seattle. He has been scarred — emotionally and dermatologically — by life.

On one of his visits to juvy, Zits meets a handsome anarchist named Justice who inundates the angsty American Indian with left-wing revolutionary dogma. Justice supplies Zits with an amoral philosophy and a pair of handguns. The journey ends in a public massacre.

However, just as the brain matter begins to fly, Zits is transported by postmodern powers through time and space into the body of a white FBI agent in 1975. The rest of the novel follows poor Zits as he jumps back and forth through history witnessing (and sometimes participating in) horrible acts of violence.

In another writer’s hands, this could be a really corny book. But as always, Alexie deftly imbues his characters with equal parts cynicism and compassion to form a sophisticated, modern parable. It’s a bit like Catcher in the Rye meets Gunsmoke meets Quantum Leap.

I spoke with Alexie about his novel while he was doing laundry at his house. (His favorite red shirt was recently stained during a book tour.) He greeted me kindly with his soft reservation accent and then proceeded to shatter all of my political and social opinions one by one.

Boulder Weekly: There’s a scene in your novel where the main character goes on a public shooting spree. Did the events at Virginia Tech change the way people perceived that narrative?

Sherman Alexie: It’s interesting. I think there has been some reaction to it but not a whole bunch. I don’t think people have a way of talking about it. Nobody seems to have connected [the shootings at Virginia Tech] to the fact that we’ve been in a war that’s lasted longer than World War II. We’ve been watching our president’s amorality for years. How can people not think those amoral decisions are going to influence sociopaths like this kid?

BW: Were these all themes you were thinking about while writing this book?

SA: Yeah, I was trying to explain war and talk about it in one way or another.

BW: How do you feel about the way this book has been received so far?

SA: It’s about what I expected. It’s about 60 percent positive and 40 percent negative. I knew there would be an elitist literary reaction to the time travel factor — that I would dare to have a genre element.

BW: Some critics thought it was strange that Flight was not published as a hardback.

SA: Actually, we did that for a number of reasons. There are so many returns of hardcovers that it’s an economic model that’s broken for most writers. So I did this to try to remove some of the stigma from publishing a paperback original. I took a lower advance, and we published in paperback to send a message: This is the way [writers] are going to be more successful. It’s also the way more first-time and experimental writers will get published.

BW: But not everyone saw it that way?

SA: This is the first time I’ve gone public with the idea — with the Boulder Weekly. Part of it is that I’m responding to a review in the Rocky Mountain News by Jenny Shank. She thought Black Cat (Flight‘s publisher) hated the book, and publishing a paperback original was like a studio not allowing a movie to be reviewed before its release. It was shocking to me that someone with very little experience in publishing like Jenny Shank would even have a guess at that. The arrogance was astonishing. So I’m telling the Boulder Weekly all this so you guys can hammer on your competitor, the Rocky Mountain Fucking News.

BW: We definitely will.

SA: Good.

BW: I’ve heard that you don’t actually like to write novels.

SA: It’s not that I don’t like them. It’s just not my natural form, so it takes a lot more effort.

BW: Do you feel poetry is your natural form?

SA: Yeah, it’s still what I write the most. I’m always working on a poem.

BW: What do you feel is the state of poetry in America right now?

SA: Poetry has always been, is now, and will always be mostly ignored. But that’s only in its most literary incarnations. I hear poetry whenever I turn on the radio. Eminem is a better poet than just about everybody. He’s better than Billy Collins; he’s better than Richard Wilbur; he’s better than me. “Cleanin’ Out My Closet” is better than Sylvia Plath‘s “Daddy.” People’s elitist notions of what poetry is prevents them from seeing that it’s everywhere all the time.

BW: You surprise a lot of people with your views. Quite a while back, Boulder Weekly published a review of the movie Narnia, and you wrote a letter to the editor defending Christians. I think that surprised some of our readers.

SA: Well, I am a Christian. I’m a Catholic. The reflexive, anti-Christian thinking in that particular review was just lazy. It was as shallow as any attack by Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly. We liberals pretend to be smarter, but we’re not.

BW: Do you think America is filled with reactionary junkies?

SA: Yeah, and I’m a born-again gray-issues guy. I was fairly fundamental before 9/11, but that morning everything changed. What really got me pissed was Ward Churchill blaming the victims, saying that the people in the Trade Towers deserved their deaths. He’s just an evil bastard, and those are evil words, but what killed me was people’s rush to defend him. My defense would have been: “Yeah, he has a right to say what he wants, but he’s completely wrong, and it’s evil.” The problem for me with liberals is that we’ve abdicated our moral responsibility to the universe.

BW: Do you have any idea where we lost that?

SA: Looking back, I think it was when white liberals abdicated the Christian church. They lost their tribal identity. Their religion became less about tribe and justice and more about self-help. Facetiously speaking, I think yoga fucked us.

BW: Do you think there’s a liberal politician out there who would be a good president?

SA: The guy who won in 2000: Al Gore. I’m still pissed at the Nader-ites for that one. Talk about fundamentalism. And I’m sure Boulder voted for Nader about 90 percent. Dumbfucks. (Editor’s Note: Actually, it was 20 percent, Sherman.)

BW: Have you ever been to Boulder before?

SA: Many times.

BW: Do heads explode when you come here?

SA: Generally, yeah. But I get away with so much because I’m an Indian. Everybody feels like shit in the presence of an Indian. I get invited to speak at all sorts of stuff: Christian conferences, right-winger events, diversity business things. People just like to be beaten up by an Indian. I’ve made a lucrative living pounding on the left and right white people of America.

BW: That’s so fantastic that I don’t have any words for it.

SA: I know. And recently, I’ve been getting grief from people because I’ve become an optimist. I love my country, and people have such problems with that.

BW: You’re a patriot?

SA: Well, I have to speak autobiographically. I live in a country where a reservation Indian boy, whose parents didn’t go to college, who used an outhouse until he was 7, is now one of the most published and awarded writers in the country. That does not happen anywhere else.

April 2008

…

About a month or so ago, during a conversation over beer and queso at a Mexican restaurant on The Hill, Daniel Grandbois told me that he once broke down in tears during an Elvis Presley concert.  He was just a kid at the time, and Elvis was his hero.  In fact, Grandbois’ loyalty to the Memphis superstar was so great that he refused to even listen to other musicians.  His friends tried to introduce him to The Beatles and The Beach Boys, but Grandbois scoffed at them.  There was only one King of Rock ’n’ Roll. When Elvis finally arrived in Colorado on a comeback tour, Grandbois’ parents took him to the show, and he got so excited during the performance that he started to weep right there in public.  His mother asked him what was wrong, but he couldn’t explain it.  He still can’t.

It takes a certain type of boy to become a devoted Elvis fan.  You have to be whimsical enough to appreciate a dude dressed in a sequined jumpsuit, but it’s essential that you also understand the playful melancholy inherent in the music.  Elvis’s songs are often deceptively happy on the surface (especially the early ones), but the lyrics usually describe a tragic scenario.  Like all great entertainers, Elvis was a storyteller at heart, and his unique blend of upbeat rhythms and lonely narratives set a precedent in pop music that persists to this day.

It will probably come as no surprise to learn that Grandbois eventually became a professional musician and a writer of bizarre, poignant tales.  He currently plays bass in popular local bands such as Slim Cessna’s Auto Club, Tarantella and Munly, all of which have been integral in shaping “The Denver Sound.”

I met with Grandbois to discuss his book, Unlucky Lucky Days, a dainty little tome that contains no fewer than 72 stories in no more than 119 pages.  I call them “stories,” but I’m not sure that’s an accurate description.  While every piece features characters of some kind who engage in conflict, the events do not follow a traditional literary format.  The writing is too surreal to be classified as flash fiction, but it’s not structured or conceived as poetry.  In fact, it might be more accurate to call them “narrative poems,” although I’m not sure such a designation exists, since I just made it up.  Here’s an example from a piece called “The Tunnel”:

A man and a woman stepped into a tunnel. It was lighter inside than they had expected. In fact, the deeper they went, the lighter it became until the light was so bright that it blinded them both.

That’s the entire piece.  Three sentences.  But what’s sort of amazing is how much Grandbois achieves in three sentences.  There are two characters who take action to accomplish a specific goal.  There is an obstacle in their way.  The characters overcome the obstacle, but they suffer in the process.

Do I know what it means?  No.  But I do get a definite feeling from the piece and a vivid mental picture — a sense of adventure and obsession that ultimately fades to loss.  Grandbois is not exactly sure how to categorize his writing, either, and like any good artist, he’s reluctant to push his own interpretations on the reader.  They’re experimental ideas, he says.  They’re pieces of a puzzle.

But it’s a critic’s job to define the indefinable; therefore, in a desperate attempt to look like they know what they’re talking about, book reviewers have compared Grandbois’ style to Borges and Kipling and even Dr. Seuss.  Of course, this is mostly bullshit.  Grandbois’ writing isn’t subversive enough to be true satire, and it’s too sophisticated to be classified as children’s literature.  If Unlucky Lucky Days ever makes it into The New Yorker, I’m certain the term “magical realism” will be bandied about with the appropriate level of intellectual snootiness, but I don’t buy that moniker, either.  While there’s definitely some Kafka action going on here, it’s mostly conceptual and only partially stylistic.  Kafka’s sense of humor was much, much darker than Grandbois’, possibly because the Czechs are just a morose group of bastards in general and possibly because Kafka was dying of tuberculosis while he was doing most of his writing.

In any case, it’s my opinion that Grandbois has tapped into something more obvious and elemental than the intellectual garage sale he’s been associated with.  Like Les Claypool (another bass player turned writer), Grandbois is finding ways to bring pop culture into the literary sphere.  Ultimately, when I read this book, I think of a man standing alone on a stage dressed in a long, white cape.  This man is old, but he wants to be young.  He has long sideburns and a beautiful pompadour of jet-black hair.  In the audience, there is a young boy, sensitive and full of imagination.  The man sings about blue suede shoes and women who ain’t nothin’ but hound dogs and letters that are marked “return to sender,” and the boy cries.  But he doesn’t know why.

December 2008

…

Believe it or not, there is a man in Boulder named Sam Kent who lives with an 8-foot-tall robot named Gort.  At first glance, Sam and Gort do not seem to have much in common to base a friendship on.  Sam is small.  Gort is humungous.  Sam wears round, bookish spectacles, brown corduroys and Velcro shoes.  Gort wears a helmet with a visor and is the color of a shiny new dime.  Sam is witty and gregarious and has a mischievous twinkle in his eye at all times.  Gort is more of the strong, silent type and—well, he doesn’t really have eyes, much less ones that twinkle.  However, despite their many differences, these two companions share a modest, two-story house near the downtown area.  “He’s not much for conversation,” said Sam during a recent interview.  “But he’s a great listener.  Besides, I probably do enough talking for the both of us.”  Gort had no comment.

If you are ever invited to Sam’s house, the first thing you will probably notice is that the doorbell plays an odd tune when you ring it.  Instead of the usual ding-dong, you will hear the theme song to Steven Spielberg’s famous extraterrestrial movie Close Encounters.  The second thing you’ll probably notice is Gort standing motionless no less than five feet inside the front entrance.  Gort is a life-sized replica of a character from the classic sci-fi movie The Day the Earth Stood Still.  Sam found him at an auction in Newport Beach—where Gort was hanging out with other replicas of other famous Hollywood robots, such as Robbie from Forbidden Planet and Dave from Lost in Space—and decided a faceless, silver automaton would be the perfect addition to his foyer.  Sam admits that it might be slightly unnerving for some visitors to be greeted by an enormous creature from outer space when they cross the threshold of his house, but he can’t do anything about it.  “That’s is the only spot where the ceiling is tall enough,” Sam explained.  “He won’t fit anywhere else.”

It’s difficult to tell what the next thing is you’ll notice after entering Sam’s house.  It might be the framed, wall-length poster in the dining room commemorating a movie called The Island of Dr. Mareau, or perhaps the incredibly realistic Frankenstein head in the work room, or the rotary phone in the kitchen shaped like Mickey Mouse, or the rare scale model of Captain Nemo’s submarine from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.  But one thing is certain: you won’t have a problem finding something to notice.

Sam’s passion for movies started when he was a child growing up in Chicago.  “I had about 12,000 cousins living nearby at the time,” he said, “and when we all became too obnoxious for our parents to handle, my older brother would take us to the movie theater around the corner.  I was particularly fond of monster movies and the old, animated Disney films.  I can’t really explain why.  Perhaps it was an escapist technique, although I’m not sure what I would have been trying to escape from at the age of six.  I’ll give you my therapist’s number, and you can ask him.”

Not content to be just another voyeur in the audience, Sam was bitten by the performance bug at an early age.  When he was 9 years old, he began frequenting magic shops, and would often entertain his family by pulling quarters out of their ears and producing floral arrangements from empty hats.  “Is this your card?” became a common phrase in the Kent household.

In high school, he found a place amongst the quirky, melodramatic teenagers known as “theater nerds,” and this social outlet eventually developed into a bachelor’s degree in the performing arts from the University of Colorado.  Since that time, Sam has remained a fixture in the local arts and entertainment scene, albeit often in unorthodox ways.

“People sometimes have limited perceptions of art.  They think if you’re not dressed in tights performing Hamlet in the park, then you’re not an entertainer.  I don’t like that. I say an entertainer is anyone who entertains you.”

After graduating from college, Sam worked his way through a variety of jobs connected to the entertainment industry.  He spent time booking shows at the Boulder Theater, attempted to broaden the public’s awareness of Dracula movies at the Video Station, operated a movie-poster store in Denver, and even returned to his childhood fascination with magic for a brief period.

“For a few years, I owned a magic store in Boulder,” said Sam.  “It was really great. I had all kinds of neat things in there.”

Like what?

“Like trick knives and handcuffs and playing cards.  I also had some white rabbits and some doves that I would let loose from time to time.”

You let animals loose in the store?

“Oh, yeah.  I think a magic shop should be magical, don’t you?  I think it should be more than just a place to buy things.  It should be its own little world.  It should be an experience.”

Creating new worlds is another one of Sam’s passions.  He is a firm believer that reality is what you make of it, and Sam likes to make his reality as imaginative and whimsical as possible.  In his house, Sam has created a tiny, carefully organized universe filled with all of the things he loves: model airplanes and boats and monsters and aliens and amusement park rides and anthropomorphized cartoon animals.  Many of the items are rare or one-of-a-kind, almost everything appears to be vintage.  Sam has no idea what his entire collection is worth, and what’s more, he doesn’t care.  “I’m never going to sell any of this stuff,” he said.  “So I guess that makes it all worthless.”

Sam does not look like the type of passionate eccentric who would own such an unusual assortment of pop culture bric-a-brac.  In fact, he looks more like a landlord. In fact, he is a landlord.  Currently, he makes a living collecting money from a number of tenants, who rent space in various buildings that he owns.  However, Sam has a restless nature and seldom sticks with any job for more than five years or so.  He’s the type of man who is prone to flights of fancy, and recently he developed a new obsession that might soon lead him down yet another track: trains.

“There’s something very romantic about trains,” said Sam, holding up a caboose that he’s been working on for some time.  “Historically, they represent innovation and connection.  The United States is a big country, and railroads helped unify the nation—you know, back before we had the Internet.  I think the sight and sound of a locomotive will always be an exciting experience.”

How many times has Sam been on a train?  Twice.  But that’s not really the point.  Once again, it’s all about inventing your own little world and finding new opportunities to entertain the public.  Serious train modelers don’t just build railroads; they create an entire landscape for the train to travel through, complete with cities and cars and people.  In other words, they reconstruct our world, only smaller and hopefully with fewer lawyers.

This time, Sam wants to go public with his vision. “I would like to create a complete scale model of Boulder in the 1950s.  That’s when I first moved here as a kid.  It was a different city back then.  There weren’t so many trendy restaurants and shops; it was just a town near the mountains.  I would give tours and answer questions—I think people would really enjoy it.  The thing is, I’m at a point in my life where I’m ready to settle down.  I want to find a career that combines all of my interests and dedicate myself to it. I’d also like to get married some day.  I’m really an old-fashioned kind of guy at heart.”

Sam glanced over at the large shadow near the front door and grinned.  “Of course, I’d have to talk it over with Gort first.”