I'm not sure exactly when I became Doctor Faustroll. I did an advice column called Ask Dr. Faustroll at Smoke Signals when it was a print publication in the early to mid eighties. I still respond with something for Uncle Mike whenever Mr. Goldini asks, which is usually 12 hours before deadline. Goldini knows I have no life. I know I'm supposed to give links, but I did that yesterday and I probably come back at do it to this post in bullet time in the matrix, but until I do you can used Google, Yahoo, Bing, Spewgle, and that new crazy ass place that sounds like an episode of Star Trek remember in a moment of extreme inebriation.
You don't want to? Doesn't matter to me. Nothing matters to me.
When I was doing All the News To Give You Fits, after I moved the Portland Pataphysical Outpatient Clinic, Lounge, and Laundromat from Pittsboro, North Carolina, to P.O. Box 40710 at the downtown Poorland, Oregasm post office on Fifth and Oak during the days when the NOMF™ was still recovering from the savings and loan debacle helped by another of the wonderful Bush leaguers, my name was Nada, which means nothing in Spanish and even less to me.
I had a sick and twisted sense of humor at the time whose name was Little Al Jarry, a hideous dwarf who travelled by tricycle and wore shoulder-holstered twin 38s, as did his main squeeze. She was a marvel, but that's a different post.
I guess it was logical that I would become the second most intriquing and courageous creation of Alfred Jarry, a man who devoted his life to inebriation and debunking metaphysics, arguing that people who drink water are evil, because water was invented by Satan to poison the fallen humans by making them drink the same liquid in which they shat and bathed and washed their various modes of transportation throughout the ages. Drink your SUV sludge, Satan says, and you say, where's the car wash? Does it take VISA and American Express?
How can you argue with that? Seriously. If you were God and you came back to Earth and the only way You had to distinguish between the righteous and the total assholes was doing field sobriety tests to determine who was drunk and who was happily swallowing e-coli over the rock or straight up, I mean seriously, people, I had no choice but to become the ultimate pataphysician. If it were physically possible to drink only purely alcoholic beverages and get my water through meat, fruit, muff-diving, and vegetative delivery systems, I would.
Wouldn't you?
I have warred with water throughout my lifetime in one way or another. Wells go dry. Droughts set in. People I go fishing with drown. I go camping and the road washes out. Have you ever heard of a road washing out because of too much alcohol?
At any rate, I occasionally go through detox to recharge the endocrine system and develop new and unusual synapses in my brain. Do you realize that ordinary people don't use 10% of the processing power of their brains at any time and that if you continually work at inducing optimally minimal damage to the cerebral cortex and the frontal lobes through the use of opiates, alcohol, stimulants, and other nasty generally illegal shit that you can sometimes achieve 15% efficiency?
I didn't think so. Look around, assholes. Give yourselves all Bush era medals of freedom. Even Obama gives them, the fucking uppity liberal nigra. What is he thinking? He's the fucking President of the United States, for Christ's sake, and even Christ doesn't give a shit.
I got kicked out of detox twice for not being repentant and obsequious. I was asked not to come back to three different Alcoholic Anonymous cluster fucks because I wasn't thankful enough for a year or two of sobriety. Granted, some of the people in AA were totally fucked and needed a health care system that would simply have put them down, but was that my fault? Do you think Obamacare is going to be the be-all end-all for those ignorant disposable pieces of shit?
The higher power stuff during group always pissed me off. The only higher powers I have run across during my ludicrous lifetime were brutal cops, abusive religious figures, idiotic parents, fuckwad teachers, stupid neighbors, and people exercising their second amendment rights to ask for my wallet on a dark street.
But whenever you are stuck in these idiotic situations where you have to share personal information with the rest of your peers, many of whom sell their genitals to avoid having their driver's licenses suspended, it helps to have a ready list of higher powers that are ironic and subtle enough to avoid electroshock.
My personal favorites are compost and the faces of missing children on milk cartons and post office bulletin boards or the names on Amber Alert reader boards. This always confuses the buttfuckers in charge of the insurance-covered clusterfuck sessions while making even some of the droolers consider how totally irredeemable their lives really are, no matter what happens.
I got the shit kicked out of me in Northwest Portland for mocking the Serenity Prayer, which even Kurt Vonnegut used in his writings as an ironic bitch slap to brain dead moralistic numbnutted dickweeds and ordinary dumb cunts, at least to my reading. He never responded to my missives as Montana Wildhack and Paul Lazarro.
I can't remember how it all happened but I was in group with a bunch of people who should have been hosed out of the womb at ten days or less. They compared their stories to episodes of various daytime and prime time soap operas I had never watched. They had dreams and hopes and goals and objectives that I found hideous and deadly and boring as hell.
They were the prototypical mothers and motherfuckers and motherfucking twisted and worthless offspring of what I finally realized was the nation of miserable fucks (NOMF™).
Note to self: Milton was also a misogynist, wasn't he? How much of that was based on myth and how much on job placement?
So here's what I recited the night I got the shit kicked out of me by caring Christians without a clue:
Gus grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change
which is nothing
courage to change the things I can
which is also nothing
and wisdom to know the difference
which don't mean squat to no one no time no way
You realize, of course, that the entire Serenity Prayer was written by Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr, a man who drank shitty water and loved it? He's dead now.
Relax.
No one is coming for you. No one is coming for me. Whatever is coming for anyone is coming for all of us without any awareness that we are even here.
That's what keeps me keeping on.
And the bills, of course. I have to keep paying the bills.
If I didn't pay the bills, who would?