In the early 1980s, I wrote a column for Multnomah Monthly Magazine called All The News to Give You Fits, which employed several dozen illegally alien and imaginary patients and staff at the Portland Pataphysical Outpatient Clinic, Lounge, and Laundromat to focus on the really important news that was often hidden between the lingerie and cosmetic dentistry ads buried deep in the bowels of the daily news cycle.
The person who first exposed me to the daily news cycle was Randal Ashley, a roommate at one time of both Mrs. Faustroll and I, who danced on the Berlin Wall when it came down. He has been dead awhile now, but I keep getting e-mail from Reunion.com, that wonderfully binary and caring service whose purpose I don't understand, saying they have finally located Randal so that we can commune together again, but Randal is not the subject of this post.
At the time I wrote All The News to Give You Fits, I was known as Larry Nada (and occasionally as his twin brother Dick), whose last name meant nothing in Spanish and whose first name was chosen from a National Geographic map that showed the seaway connecting the Great Lakes with the Atlantic Ocean.
I had a dwarf body guard named Al who rode a velocipede and wore twin shoulder-holstered pistols because he knew his second amendment rights. He also acted as my court jester, which means I paid him to cover for me on jury duty or stand in when I was charged with conduct unbecoming this or that incomprehensible rule of law.
The Portland Pataphysical Outpatient Clinic, Lounge, and Laundromat was, ironically, originally founded in Clemson, South Carolina. I have no idea why. It seemed right at the time and had something to do with a news article I read in the Clemson Study Hall in 1967 about the CIA issuing a warning that the weather was going to be totally unpredictable for the next 50 years or so and everybody should be prepared to stay at home and ride it out.
The Clinic moved from South Carolina to Arkansas to South Carolina to New York to South Carolina to North Carolina to Virginia to North Carolina before finally getting its first real office space in a post office drop box formerly occupied by the Anarchist Film Study Group at the Oak Street post office in downtown Portland, but that’s another post as well. This post is about how I still find the most interesting news in this imaginary world between the tire rotation and food ads printed in the local papers.
For instance, did you realize that fat people may be the clue to defeating the zombie flu? I was amazed to learn this myself. I always thought that fat people were only hideous on the outside, and that underneath they were special like all the other special Corkies in the NOMF™.
It now appears that fat people — from chubby or blubbery through obscenely massive and morbidly obese — suffer from diminished brain capacity and, in some cases, deteriorating gray matter that is definitely not as nutritious as yours or mine, assuming that like me you are not a chatty fatty.
Originally called Swine Flu because victims swell up to resemble ordinary obscenely fat Americans, infected zombie flu victims become ravenous for human brains and will stop at nothing to obtain mouthfuls of the soft, spongy foodstuff that people who are immune from being dead prefer to keep inside their skulls for reasons best left to your imagination.
A healthy brain can keep an infected zombie animated and eager to chomp through unsuspecting skulls for weeks, so the secret to controlling these armies of unhealthy liberal zombies (and yes, most zombies are liberals, just ask Rush Hindenberg) when the fall arrives — unless your thing is hacking off dead heads or driving umbrellas through their eyes and into their zombie woofs — is to round up all the fat people you know and put them in malls surrounded by hungry zombies.
No. This is not Nazi talk. Obamacare is Nazi talk. This is common sense.
The zombies will eat the diseased fat people brains, and those diseased brains will not be nutritious enough to sustain the hungry stupid zombies who will quickly grow too weak to leave the mall to seek out my brain or yours, assuming you don’t need something from the Imaginarium or Borders or the Orange Julius, and voila! Problem solved.
Who says the news can’t be useful?