I could personally relate on my own tea bag paper, like: “Sucks we didn’t sleep last night,” “Don’t forget to turn off the stove after pouring hot water on me,” and “While I’m sure there are elements of the show Night Court that didn’t age well, I bet it still has its moments.” (We may need both sides of the paper for that last one.) I FEEL LIKE LANCER In his book, Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut mentions a greyhound named Lancer who had to live “in a one-room apartment fourteen feet wide and twenty-six feet long, and six flights of stairs above the street level … Lancer had a very small brain, but he must have suspected from time to time … that some kind of terrible mistake had been made.” I feel like when the forces of the universe decided to send me to this specific time and place on this planet where sociopaths are endlessly rewarded for cruelty, sex is demonized by religious dogma, hangovers get progressively worse, and the plants and animals have to eat each other just to survive, a terrible mistake has been made on a fundamental level. If there is an afterlife, and I get to talk to some celestial manager about all this, I’m going to have a lot of fucking questions. WHILE STANDING IN THE WHOLE FOODS ON WASHINGTON STREET, I ONCE DEBATED A WOMAN ABOUT WHETHER OR NOT I WORKED AT THE WHOLE FOODS ON WASHINGTON STREET “Which aisle is the soy sauce on?” she asked me. Taken aback by the question, I responded the only way that made sense. “I don’t know.” “How could you not know? Don’t you work here?” she asked. “I do not,” I told her. “Yes, you do,” she assured me. “I’m pretty sure I don’t,” I said. She sat with a furrowed brow on her face, obviously working out some information in her head. “Oh, you work at the library,” she said finally. And with that, I couldn’t help but smirk. As far as she was concerned, I was a servant, and she was momentarily upset that I didn’t know I was supposed to be serving her. “Why don’t they just cross-train all you worker people so that I don’t have to be momentarily inconvenienced whenever I go somewhere new?” she might as well have asked. I wanted to say something smartass, like, “Tragically, you may have to find your own soy sauce today.” But then I remembered she knew where I worked, and I didn’t want to go down that aisle, so to speak. IF I COULD TAKE JUST A COUPLE INCHES OF LAYOUT SPACE FOR SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION … Over the pandemic, I collaborated with San Francisco-area bassist Larry Boothroyd and over 60 other musicians in various states of lockdown from across the world to create the 23 song, double LP, Specimen Box II: Remote Communion. The record includes current and former members of Dead Kennedys, Victims Family, Built to Spill, Fear, Alice Donut, World/ Inferno Friendship Society, and Nomeansno, among others. I play drums on 13 songs (out of 23) tracks. Check it out on the interwebs by googling the name of the record, or go here: secretserpents.com. Thanks everyone! 9
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