the timboucher experience

Paul Westerberg put a screwdriver through his left hand while “trying to get some wax out of a candle.” Weird part is that Reuters started reporting this based only on the hearsay of a blogger who’s friends with Westerberg. From what I can tell – at least in their early stories – they had no outside verification of the event.

I’ve been listening to the Replacements a lot lately and I didn’t actually know who Westerberg was when I clicked on that news story. Earlier this year he re-united with his band The Replacements to put out a retrospective called “Don’t You Know Who I Think I Was?” I didn’t know this either, but the title of the retrospective – and even the name of the band itself – is fitting into a larger pattern I am plugging into in my life lately: twins, doubles, erasing your identity, etc.

Apparently the “history” of the band is rife with these sorts of deceptive identity-trading shenanigans:

According to Replacements lore, Westerberg was working as a janitor, and while walking home from work one day, he happened to hear a punk band practicing in the basement. He talked his way into the band by convincing the singer that the other band members–Bob Stinson, Chris Mars and Tommy Stinson–were going to fire him. The singer quit and Westerberg joined the group, which eventually became known as The Replacements.

So what does any of this mean – if anything? I’m tempted to orchestrate an orgy of connections around this whole thing in the way that other conspiracy writers use events like 9/11 as a locus for occult energies from across this great big universe.

But my days have been much more mundane than that lately. Though presidents and pop stars pass away, I continue to walk to the restaurant every few days to eat a burrito. Wrapped up in it are as many mysteries, black beans, cilantro and peculiar connections as my mouth can handle at any one moment. I find myself wishing they had a better hot sauce than - Tapatio maybe, or El Yucateca, or that one with the wooden ball on the top - instead of Tabasco sauce. Replacements, you could say. Something with some flavor instead of just salty vinegar.

But the burritos I can’t complain about. The Muppets, on the other hand… What’s this shit about the Muppets doing a special program for the Military Family Initiative? I didn’t grow up with Sesame Street and the Muppet Show and John Denver’s Christmas album with the Muppets just so that they could turn around and pickle-slap me with pro-war propaganda for kids. Can you imagine Jim Henson okaying something like that? No fucking way man. I sure can’t. It’s not easy being green, but I guess it’s easy to get some green nowadays when you’re ready to whore out a generation’s dreams and values for Wal-Mart and the US government - if there’s any difference left between the two, or ever even was to begin with.

They say that Capgras delusion is “the belief that (usually) a close relative or spouse has been replaced by an identical-looking impostor.” Although there are countless variations on the theme, some which say that familiar objects have been duplicated, or that “that people in the environment swap identities with each other whilst maintaining the same appearance.” I don’t know which of these best describes what’s happening to us in our world nowadays, but whatever it is it’s pissing me off.

This one’s really funny too: “Feds: Homeland Security project didn’t protect privacy.” What’s that Bill Hicks quote: “It’s irony on a base level, but I like it.” Or even better:

I mean, I know we’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but if this guy came to my house to babysit my kids dressed up like that with those leering eyes and that unholy out-stretched hand… well shit! I don’t even want to say what I would do, but just have a gander at what this dude has the gall to do for his Christmas eve mass:

POPE Benedict has ushered in Christmas at midnight mass, saying the image of the baby Jesus born in a manger should remind everyone of the plight of poor, abused and neglected children the world over. …

“The child of Bethlehem directs our gaze towards all children, particularly those who suffer and are abused in the world, the born and the unborn,” the Pope said in his homily, making a reference to abortion.

This from the same hell-beast who as a cardinal used the authority of the Church founded in Christ’s fucking holy name to systematically cover up cases of child abuse by priests:

In 2001, while he was a cardinal, he issued a secret Vatican edict to Catholic bishops all over the world, instructing them to put the Church’s interests ahead of child safety.

The document recommended that rather than reporting sexual abuse to the relevant legal authorities, bishops should encourage the victim, witnesses and perpetrator not to talk about it. And, to keep victims quiet, it threatened that if they repeat the allegations they would be excommunicated.

That’s not even ironic “on a base level.” That’s fucking sick and twisted and sad and scary.

And you know what?

I want my fucking reality back.

Seriously.

I want to be able to wake up in the morning and not have this avalanche of confusion and anxiety over where this is all headed and what it all means be the first thing that engulfs me. I want to be able to walk to the grocery store and simply buy some food without having a moment of existential crisis in which I suddenly realize that I am treading a narrow and mostly invisible path which may ultimately cut me off from the rest of the world, but which still feels more real than any goddamned thing being blasted out at me in daily media bombardments. I want to be able to have a clear picture of what I should be doing in my life and how to do it (and not just my life, but fucking LIFE!), instead of this constant guesswork and toiling in darkness, trying to sort out amongst veiled threats and imagined offenses, and wondering all the while whether or not I’m just playing right into their greedy little hands.

Speaking of which: I figured out how you get famous and make a bunch of money. You want to hear it? To get famous, you position yourself at the center of a cultural story until you become synonymous with it - the “go-to” guy whenever anybody thinks about that subject. Then you run around trying to convince everybody that the cultural story that you’re synonymous with is actually relevant. What that means is simply that you teach them how to use your story and plug it into their story. Money works the same way: you can only get money by helping somebody else get a lot more money than you from what you’re doing, and then you get a little trickle from it and that’s that.

Easy, right? Just plug yourself into the pyramid and start shooting electricity up the ladder.

Last weekend I almost decided to end it all. Not suicide - cause I have too much to live for (twice-weekly burritos, cute girls I see but don’t try to talk to at the grocery store, etc) - but chronocide. The murder of time. Fight the future. And so on. It was late and I was veeeery intoxicated and I decided walking home that the best thing in the world I could ever do would be to donate everything I had ever or would ever write to the public domain.

The premise was simple. Destroy my ideas about the future. Wreck goals I had held for too long. Being famous. Being rich. Being something. Anything. Myself, I don’t know. The notion wormed its way into my head through someone talking to me about their “intellectual property” while simultaneously engaging me in a discussion about the destruction of identity. How could the two be anything but mutually exclusive? You can’t have something that’s “mine” without a “me” in the first place. To kill one is to starve the other to death.

Last night I dreamt of a severed head floating in a container of liquid. The head was still lucid, still talking. To me. I don’t know what he was saying, but of the people gathered, it was my job to “finish off” this head. But I realized I didn’t have the heart for it - even if it was an abomination. I went to find someone else in my group to tell them I couldn’t do it. When I got back, somebody had started pouring alcoholic drinks (possibly including pink cosmos or martinis with olives) into the vat with the head to poison or suffocate it. Instead the head began to drink the liquid in order to keep itself from drowning. I didn’t understand where it was being expelled though. The only exit from the head was the neck, with a gaping hole in it - obviously. And yet the water line lowered regardless. But the head also shrank rapidly and became transparent.

The dream ended. I don’t know if I succeeded or failed. I don’t know if the head survived or was transfigured.

What I do know is this: they have made “you” into a target. This is the central trick by which you are made to be continually aware of and protective of yourself (the second trick is that language is the strongest and most pervasively abused drug of all time). But the thing to realize - the thing I realized - is that: I am not “me.” I am just someone who “thinks like me.” Except, when you get right down to it, “I” am not “that” either.

So what the answer is, I am not sure. But I have two things written on my white board above my desk right now. First is “TO KNOW THROUGH ACTION” (which is a reference to this - and to the novel I am writing: probably the true hidden source of my current hysteria) and the other is something I read recently: “The answer to your problem is to find who has it.”

Everything else at this point remains a mystery. (What did you get for Christmas? I got drunk.)

My writing is starting to feedback into my ordinary life and my dream life in a massive and possibly cataclysmic way. I’m realizing that I am taking in information at a radically higher rate than I can possibly process it emotionally or physically. I’m starting to see what drives someone to spike their own hand with a screwdriver while “getting wax out of a candle.” Yeah right.

End the war on Mars!

• Narcolepsy
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• Vatican Lost Keys to Heaven
• A Short Review Session
• Excellent Paul Laffoley Online Gallery