Category: UPSETTING DAY

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UPSETTING DAY

Let’s Read: The Prison Alphabet 🌭

Here in America, we’ve designed an easily corrupted, very racist justice system. Then we incentivized everyone involved in that system to be the maximum amount of lazy and evil. After that, we declared it a virtue for you to put all your trust into it. It has not gone well. This Upsetting Day, we’re talking about THE PRISON ALPHABET.

A fun way to determine if your country is fucked is if there are 2.7 million potential customers for your educational coloring book specifically for children of incarcerated parents. This is obviously a cursed abomination created by people with good intentions. And to their credit, they seem to know what they’ve done. It’s the only coloring book I’ve ever seen that opens with two pages of small-font apologies and explanations. There is maybe some perfect tone appropriate for a kid’s coloring book on this dark subject matter, but Bahiyyah and Muntaquim Muhammad did not find it. This shit is crazy.

Maybe it’s for adults who didn’t know that in prison “D stands for Dentist?” Maybe it’s for prisoners who love to color? Maybe it’s for kids to frame and display on their bedroom wall? They honestly have no idea which direction they should take this very, very bad idea. This is like building a whoopie cushion that blows out the words, “Inoperable cancer means you have to say goodbye forever!” instead of farts. It’s like hiring a magician to play the cello at a miscarriage party. No, I’m serious: THE PRISON ALPHABET is legally the same category of thing as a laser tag pet funeral.

This is fun, right? ARREST– The thing that certainly went well for your parent! There has to be an A-word that maintains this high level of education without reminding the prisoner or their child about the terrible moment already burned into their brains. Why not “ASS– Your mommy better watch hers if she’s going to run her fucking mouth.” Or maybe “AMENDMENT– The 13th one created a loophole that let us keep slavery!” I don’t know, I’m probably the worst person for writing coloring books. Well, okay, obviously not the worst.

It’s a common misconception that prisoners sustain themselves with a large communal salt lick or by constructing hamburgers out of snitch hair. Let me educate you: they are given a thing called “FOOD” to eat. “FOOD” is served for each meal, and we are approaching the limits of man’s understanding of “FOOD.” The only way you can get your own “FOOD” is to poison a boyfriend like your mommy.

I’m sure the children of the incarcerated can appreciate this nice pro-authority spin on handcuffs. They’re to keep your dad from killing himself, kid. You see, the system that took his dignity and freedom is only here to help. There are a lot of perspectives you can have about the penal system, but this HANDCUFFS entry seems to accidentally reveal the one held by the authors. This could have been Hh for HOOCH or HANGDOG HANDJOB, but they chose the H-word where your parents get chained up and then the coloring book takes the side of the prison. That’s fucked up. And a few handcuff-eyed Amazon reviewers picked up on this too.

Alan Mills, a top contributor for Fantasy Books, looks like he has every reason to side with the status quo and even he knows you shouldn’t try to get children of the incarcerated to root for the handcuffs.

This anonymous Amazon Customer bought this coloring book to learn and it only took them 8 letters before they realized, “This is either a joke or total bullshit.”

Debra M. finished the entire alphabet and her takeaway was not “I know a lot about prisons now.” It was, “I hope the author consults with reputable psychotherapists next time publishing a book to purportedly help children.” I don’t need to tell you Debra is, ugh, the worst, but she’s probably right. Do you have any idea how shitty you have to be at making coloring books if you’re a professor of criminology named Muntaquim Muhammad and some random Debbie has a better take on the prison industrial complex than you? This is like Lena Dunham getting body acceptance explained to her by a guy named Footslut Jake.

Pp is also for PRIVACY which your parents won’t have! Plus, Pp is for PROFIT because unchecked capitalism has turned even your mommy’s love for you into a revenue stream!

Jesus, Ss is for SADNESS. I’ve had a lot of criticism about the artistic decisions made in this coloring book, but good luck representing the soul-crushing monotony of losing your freedom better than this page, all future art.

As a parent, I’ve been exposed to a lot of alphabet-themed media, so I’m used to xylophones and x-rays being brought up in wildly unrelated premises. But what the fuck is this? “X-rays are taken by prison doctors who check inmates for broken bones?” If you have to make up crazy shit, just skip the letter, Muntaquim. The only way American prisoners get access to a radiologist is if the guards can’t remember which inmate they left their baton inside.

They really did it! Zz is for fucking ZOO! Color the stated metaphor for how your daddy is an animal, kid. And look, I know THE PRISON ALPHABET is nothing more than a series of regrettable mistakes and it’d be best to ignore it and never think about it again. Still, for not being able to draw tigers for shit, this artist is saying a lot with this zoo picture. These animals are living in harmony inside one giant enclosure. Giraffes share a pasture with tigers along with a baby elephant who gets to grow up surrounded by the love of its family. Coloring children, these caged animals have it better than your parents. Let’s skip to the About Page to see what in the hell is going on with the publishers of this book.

Oh my god, there’s an entire THE PRISON ALPHABET universe with child superheroes? Which, wait, means they have fantastic powers but believe their criminal parents were justly imprisoned and should be left there? I need to see what in the goddamn fuck is going on with these Project Iron Kids. It says for more information on them and upcoming books, visit www.projectironkids.com and… oh, there’s nothing there. Maybe their parents paid their debt to society and they lost their powers? T-that can’t be right. Let me see if I can find out more.

In the About The Authors section, a normal thing for a coloring book to have, it says Mr. and Mrs. Muhammad’s next book “100 Questions Children of Incarcerated Parents Ask” will be published Spring 2014. So I’ll just search for that and… okay, it doesn’t exist. Which means, and I don’t know if this is a happy ending or not, THE PRISON ALPHABET was so terrible it undid the life’s work of its authors. To put it another way, if you lived in a universe where children of the incarcerated had adequate educational material, this exact coloring book is what you would send back to erase your timeline from existence. And that’s a banana you can suck on, kemosabe!

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, The Artist Formerly Known as Devon. C stands for Champion, Devon! Oh. Oh no, sorry. It’s Crack. C stands for Crack.

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UPSETTING DAY

Gary Busey Pet Judge 🌭

Things are getting dire in the streaming era. Nearly everyone has their own streaming service. I do. It’s called Brok and so far I only have the rights to rebroadcast a Slovakian public access documentary about tainted wells and every single episode of Joey. I’ve made eighteen dollars this month from ads assuring my viewers that discount tire companies are here for you during These Uncertain Times. There are too many baskets and not enough dicks, I guess is what I’m saying here. There’s just not enough quality programming out there to fill all the services started by the shitty sons of sketchy Russian millionaires. Even Amazon Prime is having troubles, which I assume from watching their new series, Gary Busey: Pet Judge.

Gary Busey moderates funny pet-related disputes in a mock Reality TV parody of The People’s Court, and if you recognize every part of that description as wildly outdated, well then I’m sorry you didn’t get that job as head of programming for Amazon Prime Video. If you made this show fifteen years ago people would have said “really? A People’s Court reference? That is so fifteen years ago. Now please get out of the way — I have to ride my pocket bike to a Franz Ferdinand concert and I’m already late because of that flash mob pillow fight. Poker will never not be cooooool!”

Let’s watch it anyway. There’s a plague. The fuck else are you doing?

Gary Busey is, as always, a Greyhound station at 2AM:

And every case is an excuse for aging improv actors to demonstrate why they failed that MADtv audition.

Gary Busey: Pet Judge owes about half of its comedic stylings to Best In Show, and the other half to Tim and Eric — the two properties responsible for more damage to comedy than Borat. Don’t get me wrong: Best in Show and Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! were both great, but they taught a generation of aspiring comics that anyone can be funny without telling jokes, and then those comedians spent the next decade inventing new ways to prove that wasn’t true. Now everyone that’s not sure where to start with this whole “funny” thing does this:

Dude looks like he’s attending a Halloween party as ‘Misremembered Napoleon Dynamite Reference.’ He is here to be incredibly awkward in a way that you are very prepared for, and he doesn’t even get real people to sweat on. He only interacts with other gasping improv comics whose every character is ‘myself, but more unlikeable.’ 

Luckily there is a crazy beating heart in the chest of this desperate premise. Yes, it’s the King of Quirk himself, Gary Busey:

Haha, classic Busey! Always looking like a drunk mop and saying shit that sounds like it’s been translated to Chinese and back. I’m sure they’ve written some baseline setups for his weirdness, but you cannot get Gary Busey to follow a script unless you tape it to the ghosts he thinks are attacking him. At the very least, you know all of the strange acronyms and endocrine references are pure unmitigated Busey:

Hey thanks! That’s really cool. Listen, I do not have a cigarette and I’m starting to think I missed the last bus to Akron. I’m just gonna go to the bathr-

You’re going to follow me to the bathroom, aren’t you?

Gary Busey has the mannerisms of a shell-shocked lizard and he talks like he came unstuck from time while having an argument with Bjork. But hey, real quick, do you know why Gary Busey is like that?

If you’re of a certain age, you probably remember that. It was a huge deal. But we’ve been making fun of Gary Busey’s brain damage for so long that a whole generation of young adults have no idea ‘the weird dude from reality shows’ actually left every third thing he knew on a California sidewalk back in 1988. Gary Busey is only “quirky” because he was in the most ironic type of motorcycle accident:

And has been suffering from long-term degenerative brain damage ever since. In fact, that’s where those acronyms come from. He’s not joking about those — they mean the world to him, and they literally started the second he scrambled his brain.

If you’re under 30, Gary Busey’s just a Hollywood Weirdo best known for being the wild card that derails the Build-A-Bear challenge and gets Team Leader Xzibit sent home. But start at the bottom of his IMDB page and scroll up to watch a man lose his mind in slow motion. If they’d picked any other host, this series would have only been disappointing. But by anchoring the whole thing on Gary Busey and then staffing it with quirky extras doing Eric Andre impressions, they have effectively made a show where everyone is pretending to have mental problems except for the main character, who is genuinely trying to communicate with other humans through a broken interface.

I’m not trying to take the moral high ground here. The savvy among you may have noticed I made several Gary Busey jokes, myself, and if you missed them, here’s another one: Gary Busey is like if Nick Nolte fell into a vat at Ace Chemicals.

I don’t even know what the moral high ground is in this situation, because the alternative to paying Gary Busey so you can laugh at his brain damage is not paying him at all. I’m just saying half of this show is written to be “quirky” and “awkward” and the other half of this show is trying to cushion Gary Busey’s forehead as he headbutts holes in the drywall looking for wall gold. 

Please note that those improv comics’ hilarious response to this one was “stunned silence,” followed by “checking around the set to see if anyone was coming to help.”

Amazon have effectively made a show called “guess which one has genuine mental health problems” and it is fucking crazy that premise got greenlit! It’s literally a comedy show designed around trying to ‘one-up’ a mental patient as his scattered brain draws faulty conclusions from neuronic connections whose other half is coloring a curb in Culver City.

This format does not function in any other permutation! You can’t pair a bunch of young actors pretending to be goth with one that’s genuinely suicidal and bill it as a comedy. You probably can’t set it on a bus and call it Across the Street or Down the Road. You can’t start a dating show by mixing a bunch of reality skanks in with one seeking help for a crippling sex addiction. Maybe her name is Penny, but even so, you certainly can’t call it Penny For Your Thots. You can’t… you can’t pair a bunch of comedians doing cruel impressions with a guy who actually has Down’s Syndrome and then bring on contestants who have to guess which ones are faking. You can’t call it Don’t Bring Me Down’s. You can’t do it! You should go to jail for thinking it! You can’t hire a bunch of improv dropouts and put them in a room with a mental patient and tell them all “everything he says is your next prompt” and call it Gary Busey: Pet Judge. Oh wait, shit, that’s the real one!

This article is brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Kenlel Paisley: The Shogun of Slam, the Daimyo of Damn, the Tenno that’s a straight ten, yo.

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UPSETTING DAY

Let’s Visit: Babyland Hospital

Have you ever wanted to visit Cleveland, Georgia? Probably not because you know someplace is shitty when it’s not even the name brand version of Cleveland. Or, maybe there’s just something about the place that seems off-putting to you. An otherworldly chill that creeps down your spine at the thought of Cleveland, Georgia, and that’s because even though you don’t really know what’s there, a deep, primal, part of you knows it’s the home of Babyland General Hospital.

It takes a very specific kind of psychopath to say, “Hey, we should take an old hospital and stuff it full of dolls. Children will love it!” That psychopath’s name is Xavier Roberts, the creator of The Cabbage Patch Kids.  I’ve always found Cabbage Patch Kids hilarious because they seem like the creation of someone who just really didn’t want to say the word vagina to their kid and then let things get way out of hand. 

The Cabbage Patch Kids origin story actually has more mythology to it than you might expect. It’s high concept 80’s sci-fi that involves magic crystals that fertilize the cabbages with the help of Bunnybees, alien creatures sent to earth to destroy it through overpopulation, or something. There’s also a stork named Colonel Casey who oversees the Cabbage Patch Kids, but apparently, he doesn’t do a great job because the children are constantly begging to be adopted by someone, anyone else. 

A fun fact about Colonel Casey that I learned at Babyland General Hospital is they really don’t like it if you ask if he fucks the cabbages. They’re very firm on the fact that nobody fucks the cabbages, and magic crystals aren’t a euphemism for anything. 

Xavier Roberts opened his toy store designed to traumatize women into buying dolls in 1978. The employees dress as doctors and nurses because you know, everyone loves the vibe of a hospital. They actually play recordings of babies crying in some of the cribs to up the drama. In the early days of the hospital, they would occasionally have an ambulance pull up and bring in a doll on a stretcher for media events. They went out of their way to combine the joy of a child’s imagination with the horror of living in a decaying human body. 

If you don’t feel traumatized enough by the idea of all these dolls begging for your affection, in an old abandoned hospital, you should check out the floor show! The big attraction of Babyland General is a live birth. That’s right Mother Cabbage, (who is a big tree for some reason) gives birth once an hour. An idea that, by itself, is traumatic enough. 

This involves an LPN (Licensed Patch Nurse) reaching into mother cabbage with both hands as they crack jokes about the horrors of childbirth. “The procedure we’re doing today is called an easyotomy,” they say jauntily as every woman in the audience pales. I won’t tell you what an episiotomy is because it’s not something you can unlearn, but let’s just say no woman on earth has heard this joke without experiencing the same feeling a man gets watching someone else get kicked in the balls. 

All of the jokes in the show involve pretty in-depth knowledge of childbirth to be understandable, which is so confusing because this is a show for children, right? When the doctor says, “He’s coming head first and not feet first, which would be a branch delivery.” Are you supposed to lean down and whisper to your child, “So, a breech delivery is when a baby is born bottom first instead of head first. It only happens in like, 3-5% of pregnancies, and it can be extremely dangerous causing fatalities for both the mother and the baby, but this is a cabbage so he said branch delivery instead, which is funny.” 

Once mother cabbage has a baby ripped from her womb, the crowd is asked to name it. This sounds fun, but let me tell you, no matter how many times you yell Baphomet The Blood Pisser, they’ll never name it that.

Babyland hosts tons of special events. They have a ballroom that seats 30 available for birthday parties, weddings, meetings, and conferences. During these events, they will occasionally have performers in horrifying life-size Cabbage Patch Adult costumes go around and beg guests for even the tiniest bit of affection. 

Man, if they want people to adopt these kids they really shouldn’t advertise that this is how it’s going to look when it grows up. Can you imagine trying to dodge that thing at a corporate retreat? Do the companies that have meetings there use it as one of those haunted house, “Whoever survives the night gets the promotion” kind of deals? 

If you do make it out of Babyland General Hospital alive, you don’t necessarily have to take home a doll as a souvenir. Their shop sells all kinds of sweet merch, like mugs, bibs for your babies real or fake, and a shot glass for when mommy needs to get litty. 

BabyLand might be a creepy reminder of a bygone era now, but I can’t stress enough how popular it was in the 80’s at the height of the Cabbage Patch craze. In 1983 people would pay fifty bucks just to sniff a cabbage patch kid. Three million dolls were sold that year alone, and there still weren’t enough to supply people’s insatiable demand for sad orphans. 

Babyland has a wall dedicated to pictures of celebrities who visited the facility that includes John Travolta, Fred Savage, Whoopi Goldberg, and Henry Winkler. Hey, none of them disappeared under mysterious circumstances never to be heard from again, so it’s probably an ok place to visit! 

You should follow Lydia on Twitter. 

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UPSETTING DAY

Classic Remaster – Dumb Things White People Think About Other Races

Once, long ago, there was a comedy website that only wanted three simple things: to make people laugh, to teach them a few things, and to make enough money to skywrite a new penis every day of the week. It succeeded in two of those goals, before getting piledriven into the dirt by corporate scavengers. Some of its archives have been deleted, some of them have been corrupted, and some just suck. You decide which one this is. It’s…

Note from Brockway: Most people got this just fine, but I did take some heat for it. For the record: the lesson here is not that gentle bigotry is okay. Gentle bigotry is like Bud Light Seltzer – just as bad as the real thing, but marketed toward pussies. The point is that even ‘positive’ racism sucks. In general, keep one thing in mind while reading any story in which “Brockway” is a character: I’M THE BAD GUY. DON’T AGREE WITH ME.

Also check out this killer short play some kids made out of this article.

…

“I’m pretty sure Mexicans enjoy things more than me,” I grumbled, picking at a cowlick of fine white thread jutting from the seam of a black leather sofa.

“Why do you think that?” The therapist replied. 

“Anything I’m doing — I don’t know, it just seems like there’s a Mexican out there enjoying it way more than me. Like, say I go have a beer: I’m okay. I’m vaguely happy. I turn my head, and three stools down there’s a Mexican guy, just loving the shit out of his beer. He looks like a beer commercial. I swear to God he exhales frost after every sip. And the worst part — do you want to hear the worst part?”

“Go ahead,” he frowned at me as I continued plucking at his precious string.

“It’s not even a better beer than mine. It’s a goddamn Coors or something.”

“Maybe you’d like Coors better.”

“Maybe I’d- no! Fuck Coors. That’s just an example. I could be stuck in line at the grocery store behind a lady trying to use expired coupons. I’m standing there nurturing an ulcer, thinking, ‘They’re expired! Expired! You can’t haggle the unceasing forward movement of time! Pay the 15 cents extra! I’ll kill you! I’ll wipe your seed from the Earth!’ Then I look back, and three spots behind me, there’s an old Mexican woman just smiling away. She’s not even doing anything. She’s just looking at the mints, smiling. What the fuck is that? Those are funny mints? Fuck you! This bullshit is burning irretrievable minutes of your life, same as mine, and you don’t even have as much time left. Why aren’t you here, unhappy with me?”

“So you have problems with Mexicans?”

“No, that’s not it. Go out on a sunny day and walk around for a bit. I promise you, you’ll find a group of Mexicans all just standing outside, talking to each other, laughing. They look like how I picture nostalgia. I go do the exact same thing and it’s nothing. It’s garbage. The whole time I’m thinking ‘this sucks, I’d rather be rereading Achewood or some shit.’”

“It sounds like you need to reevalua-“

“Black people are better at conversation.”

“What?” The doctor blinked up from his pad.

“Black people never have to worry about making conversation! They just open their mouths and start going, and it’s great. It’s friendly, it’s easy, it’s totally relatable. And I don’t mean just to each other — to everybody! I talk to any given black person and it’s always the best goddamn conversation I’ve had in months. It’s fantastic. Everybody loves talking to black people. But I open my mouth at a stranger and it’s like I’m vomiting awkwardness into their ears. Just an endless stream of ‘ums’ and ‘ahs,’ and then I start saying shit like ‘ostensibly.’ Or-“

“I think the theme here is a lack of confi-“

“OR,” I barreled through his interruption, “or worse! People say, ‘Howdy’ on the street, and I shakily whisper, ‘Good, and you?’ And that’s if anything comes out at all. Sometimes it’s like they’ve snuck up on my throat and all I can do is squeak.”

“We all have our-“

“I squeak. At strangers. On the street.”

“Casual interac-“

“Like an incel chipmunk. SQUEAK,” I squeaked, “SQUEAAAK.”

“Casual in-“

“SQUEEAAAAK.”

We glared at each other in silence. He took a deep breath, scribbled in the corner of his pad to get his pen going again, and exhaled.

“I think-” he started.

“I’m just saying: Never been squeaked at by a black man.”

He frowned at his notepad. I finally got a good, solid grip on that stray thread and started to work it back and forth. The rattling pen fell quiet, and the therapist harrumphed at me.

“Sorry,” I said, making a big show of releasing his stupid thread. Which I didn’t even want anymore. 

“Yes, well, you clearly have some racial issues to work through. Now, most patients that enroll in my program-“

“Enroll? Is that what you call it? The only ‘enrolling’ I did was the cops ‘enrolling’ my ass through that doorway.”

“I was just trying to be polite, but if you insist: Most offenders placed in my program have some hostility to work through, but yours seems to be rooted almost entirely in jealousy. You’re laboring under the impression that other groups — essentially all the other groups — have it easier than you: A white, straight, middle-class American male.”

“That’s not fair,” I said, and surreptitiously raised my knee to block his view so I could really go to town on that thread. “I totally get that I have it easy, and a lot of other people have it way harder. I watched Fresh Prince; I know all about racism. I’m just saying that some groups do some things better than others, and pretty much all of them do everything better than me.”

“And you don’t see how that statement might be insulting or unreasonable to some people?”

“I totally do not. Is it racist to say that Chinese people are more resilient?”

“Yes, absolutely, that is basically the definition of racism.”

“You put me in a Chinese guy’s shoes — basically any Chinese guy’s shoes — and no way could I handle that. I’d be dead in a week. You know there’s a Chinese guy downtown that pulls tourists around in a little wheeled cart?”

“Rickshaw?”

“I don’t know his name dude; he’s the guy that pulls the fucking cart.”

The doctor inhaled through his nose for a very long time.

“I get winded walking up hills,” I continued, really getting my sweet unravel on. “If I had to strap a cart full of fat Germans to my ass just to earn some sandwich money, I’d probably lay down somewhere quiet and try not to starve to death in anybody’s way. Not Rick, though. Rick fucking endures.”

“While it’s clear you have just a … an ocean of issues to work through, let’s talk about what brought you here, to my office today.”

“A squad car?”

“The incident,” his scribbles were coming more often now. His pen was running low. “You know which one I mean.”

“The Native American guy,” I admitted.

“Yes, the one you assaulted and forcibly stripped on 4th street this morning.” 

The man’s tone had shifted from casual to factual. 

“Yeah,” I said, “… yeah.”

“Why did you do that?” The doctor leaned back and fumbled for something on the desk behind him. He came back with a new pen, the hint of a smile on his lips.

“Extenuating circumstances,” I answered. 

I had this thread thing down, now: Smooth, slow, even strokes were the key. You had to keep a constant light tension going, so as not to break the fragile strands. It was unraveling into little loops that settled in the space between couch and cushion. My secret treasure horde.

“Go on,” he prompted, uncapping his new pen and settling in.

“I was walking down 4th, just doing how I do — kicking at people’s heels then gesturing to the guy next to me when they turn around — when I bumped into this huge crowd on the sidewalk. After a few minutes of angry elbowing, I noticed they were all looking the same direction: Up. Then I saw it: Some girl was out on the roof of this ratty little hotel. Out on the ledge. Something in her body language — I don’t know what it was — but I just knew she was going to jump soon. And there was nobody there yet. No cops, no paramedics, no firemen, nothing. Just the crowd of us, all the way down on the street. People were trying to yell things up to her, but she was too far away. She couldn’t hear. I knew, I just knew that she would do it before anybody got up there to stop her.”

“And … how, exactly, did this lead to your fourth-degree sexual assault on Mr. Kohana?”

“Well it seems stupid now, but I guess I just panicked. We’re all standing around, knowing that there was nothing anybody could do: She couldn’t hear us, we couldn’t get to her, she was going to jump and she was going to die. That was it. Then I looked over and saw a Native American guy. I thought I saw a chance — no matter how remote — and I took it.”

“The police report here says that you ‘leapt upon Mr. Kohana’s back, pulling at his shirt and screaming ‘transform, you heartless bastard, take eagle form and fly to her! There’s no time!'” 

The doctor looked up at me.

“Are you going to make me say it?” I whined.

He stared. I pulled thread.

“I secretly believe some Native Americans can shape shift,” I admitted, ashamed.

“Why on Earth would you believe something so preposterous?” He started to note something on his little pad, but almost immediately moved the pen back up to the corner and began scribbling again. He groaned.

“Well, why is it so ubiquitous, if there’s not some truth to it?! Every comic book, every sci-fi novel, every horror movie, every anything with a Native American guy in it has him transforming into some kind of animal at some point!”

“Those are just stories,” the doctor answered tersely, tossing his pen in the wastebasket and reaching for another.

“Right, but what’s the common theme for say, Puerto Ricans in pop culture? That they’re passionate? You know what, in my limited experience, I have found them to be kind of passionate. The French? Sophisticated. Sure, there are some hooligans and idiots, but generally speaking, they’re a pretty cultured people. White American guys? Ignorant. Well would you look at that? Here I am, a white American guy, thinking Native Americans can turn into wolves if they just want it badly enough. Sounds pretty ignorant to me.”

“Well, it’s hard to argue that,” he admitted, clicking the new pen and touching it to paper. 

My busy fingers. Idly twisting thread. Around and around. Steady, even pressure.

“So when it came right down to the wire, when the stress kicked in, when it was really life or death on the line, yes: I figured there was like a 30 percent chance that man could turn into a bird. Is that really so stupid?”

The room was quiet, save for the thirsty rasp of an empty nib tearing through paper. Windows broke behind the doctor’s eyes.

“YES!” The doctor screamed, his cashed pen bouncing off my skull. He stood and yanked at his tie. His face went flush. “IT IS STUPID! IT IS THE STUPIDEST THING! IT IS STUPID AND RACIST AND HARMFUL AND THEN STUPID THREE MORE TIMES AGAIN!”

A soft pop. I had broken the thread loose from its last mooring, and a long flap of black leather plopped over onto my belly, revealing the wispy cotton padding of the couch beneath.

“RRRRRRAAAAAAAGH!!!” A scream tore out of him, ripping him open from crotch to throat. His skin burst like an overcooked sausage and sloughed off into a pile of rubbery meat. In the therapist’s place, there was now a slavering black bear. It dug its claws into the pulpy bamboo floorboards, muscles visibly pulsing beneath layers of fat and fur, and exploded through the closed door. It loped down the corridor beyond, a tide of panicked screams receding with it.

The stunned receptionist stared in at me from the waiting room.

“Holy shit,” I breathed. “Rosenberg’s a Native American name?”

…

This article was brought to you by our fine patron and Hot Dog Supreme: Adrienne Hisbrook, who has gotten away with every human crime, and six dog ones.

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UPSETTING DAY

Fucking WHAT, Archie?!

In 1980, Archie Comics Group published Archie #298 of the Archie Series, and I am here 40 years later to make the case for it being the craziest comic ever published. It is the first media of any kind to ever score the rating of MAXIMUM!? on the Archie Derangometer, which says it all making everything past here mere whimsy in support of a point already perfectly made.

The story begins like nothing has or ever should start– with Archie shrieking the word “PLASTIC!” at no one and with no context. He’s furious, screaming it like a curse. Archie is filled with a dark insanity and the people around him live in constant fear of it bursting out like Anne Frank’s family watching her hold in a sneeze. When it comes out, the rules of everyone’s universe suddenly change and nothing can escape the wet spray of Archie’s madness. Welcome to Archie #298.

Note Jughead and Betty are not saying, “Oh this plastic bullshit again.” This is the first time Archie has ever spoken to them about plastic, much less lost his mind at them about plastic. There’s also no plastic on or near him which means he was on a walk with his friends in the park and his own thoughts wandered to plastic crimes so awful he had to stop and scream “PLASTIC!” He continues…

Archie exists in a fiction with loose rules. He has addressed readers directly to sell Twinkies, fought the Predator, and killed wizards by calling on the actual Christian God. So it isn’t unusual for the horny Riverdale gang to stop rubbing their pubises on Archie to do something like an environmental PSA. But are we sure that’s what this is?

It seems to be an environmental rant, right? Maybe Archie read something about the dangers of non-biodegradable waste and he’s simply having trouble remembering it or expressing himself? Maybe there’s a reasonable explanation for this famously conservative and known psychopath to be howling about the plastic apocalypse?

Well, aside from violent, philanderous, stupid, cruel, and ginger, the best way to describe Archie is “a teenaged cranky old man.” This comes out here because the first reason he gives for his seething hatred of plastic is not how it kills seagulls or overcrowds landfills– it’s how plastic prevents him from listening to goddamn records before he goddamn buys them like he used to.

I’m not sure this is plastic’s fault since plastic has been around at least as long as vinyl records because vinyl is fucking plastic, but Archie accidentally makes a good point– retail trends have eliminated nearly every opportunity for consumers to masturbate in record stores.

So in case you fell for my masterful misdirection up there, no, this is not an environmental story. This is Archie deciding he hates the shit out of plastic and desperately trying to justify it while his loved ones try to reason with him. And to be clear, this is not a genius writer hiding a metaphor for American politics in a children’s comic. This is nothing more than what it is on the surface– a fictional character losing his mind because he’s being written by someone losing his mind.

Oh, by the way, Archie comics in the ’80s had three stories inside each issue. Let’s take a quick break from this plastic one and look at a scene from the second Archie feature!

Oh. Oh no.

Let’s maybe go back to the plastic one?

So Archie’s second reason for hating plastic is because of fastener packaging. Not because it refuses to decompose and its manufacturing causes carbon pollution, but because teenagers can no longer go into a hardware store, paw through a vat of unlabeled nuts and purchase a single unit. Again, I’m not sure this is the doing of plastic. This is like declaring war on zippers because no one will let you suck them off.

Anyway, Archie’s third reason for dedicating his afternoon to destroying plastic is cheese. CHEESE! SEE IT IN THERE?

Fucking try to open cheese! Archie DEFIES YOU! Oh, you say it’s got an e-z opener tab!? AN E-Z OPENER TAB!? BETTY, YOU TRUSTING, IGNORANT BEAST DID YOU SAY IT’S GOT AN E-Z OPENER TAB!? TO ARCHIE!? YOU’LL NEVER KNOW WHAT IT IS TO EAT CHEESE OR BE LOVED! PLASTIC CONSPIRACY HOW CAN YOU NOT SEE YOU’RE IN ON IT I’LL KILL YOU I’LL RIP YOUR FACE OFF AND PRESERVE IT FOREVER IN Y-YOUR PRECIOUS PRECIOUS PLASTIC!

With no one taking Archie’s warnings seriously, he does what every ranting lunatic does– he merges his new anger with his previous frustrations and loses all perspective of the original problem which he was wrong about this entire time and all contradicting facts are evidence of a deeper conspiracy. Archie is now only this rage and obsession, and he declares to a grocery store that sealing albums, wood screws, and cheeses in plastic will lead to the end of all things.

Let’s take another break from the plastic story and check back in with the one where Reggie leapt out of the bushes to sexually assault Midge.

I’m not fucking with you; I didn’t edit any of these panels. The full context is this: Reggie saw Archie running and had an idea: if he blinded and face raped Moose’s girlfriend, it would look like Archie was running from the sex crime! The one hitch in his plan was how he chose to commit this act on a girl in Riverdale, each of whom can identify Archie by taste.

So to sum up, the less crazy story in this Archie comic is one where Reggie ambushes Midge, licks her mouth to frame Archie for sexual assault, it doesn’t work because she doesn’t care, and then it also doesn’t work because everyone licks her mouth all the time, the end. Let’s get back to the plastic thing.

Archie has become so defined by his hate for plastic and so detached from reality by trying to make excuses for it, he is now willing to literally die rather than give any ground in a deranged argument he started for no reason. He’s willing to sacrifice all his dignity and relationships in the name of some unclear vision of the way things used to be. I want to stress again: we have no reason to believe this is a metaphor for American politics. This is ordinary Archie craziness wobbled slightly off its axis to accidentally create exceptional Archie craziness. Assuming this meant anything would be like watching a cat run across a typewriter and thinking it wrote “Help me I didn’t die from heart failure I was poissned you need to solve my murder hi this is mom, *poisoned, sorry typing is hard w/ ghost hands” on purpose.

As if this would end any other way, Archie self-destructs. His plan (to drive himself mad with cheese packaging rage, close his eyes, and sprint into the street) backfires almost immediately.

While Jughead and Betty try to find all of Archie’s neck shrapnel, let’s take a look at this comic’s third Archie feature. Maybe it’s not the troubling work of a lunatic!

Jesus, I’m not glad we did this at all. If I’m following the plot, this story is about Jughead smashing an unattended boy’s toy boat? Who would write that? And why? Surely there must be some kind of denouement that…

Oh. So in the ’80s when a group of strange teenagers broke your toy you… went with them into the open ocean? They didn’t even put a life vest on this boy they kidnapped. They just let him stand on the deck while Veronica cranks that shit into the chop like a racing motorcycle. She’s 15-years-old and her boat doesn’t have railings! There should be another panel of this comic where the gang takes a blood oath to never speak again of the boy, whose name they never learned, who they borrowed without asking and lost at sea.

So now that we’ve finished the backup stories of whimsical sexual assault and well-intentioned child abduction, let’s get back to the final page of Archie’s plastic adventure and see if he learned a lesson.

What the fuck? Archie didn’t learn anything! A fucking ice cream man could have pulled up and said, “That’s why you don’t ignore reason and implode your life over nothing, son! If you want to stay safe, make sure all your products use Real Plastic™!” and it would have been fine. Instead, Archie heard a doctor say the word “plastic” and he recreated the exact circumstances that just injured him. And is it “a long story,” Betty? Or is it, “Our mentally ill friend decided plastic was attacking him 10 minutes ago and we’re children with no means of helping the criminally insane.” And then it just says END after the main character has a mental breakdown and flees from his own delusions.

This is a targeted attack against everything you know to be true and right. It’s so deranged the author gave a Story By credit to the abortion ghosts who shrieked it at him in the night and it should have been the last Archie story ever told. The idea of Archie coming back to Riverdale High in issue #299 for another everyday framed-for-facerape story seems absurd. He’s like a wild animal. These kids can’t be around someone capable of assaulting them and running into traffic any time he can’t open cheese. Every issue of Archie after this should have been about the authorities hunting him, END.

…

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: yossarian, who will burn this place to the ground unless they change the Sonic movie back.

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

The Piss Scene From The Boy Who Could Fly 🌭

Anthropologists believe the very first joke was invented some two million years ago, when a Homo habilis held an oversized elongated object up to his crotch and said, “Whoa, look at this! Haha. Eh? Honey, are you looking? Hey.” But modern humor as we know it wouldn’t be invented until much later, when Homo sapiens learned to trick each other into drinking piss. All subsequent jokes have simply been variations on this theme.

So when attempting to quantify the Most Important Comedy Scene in Cinema History, we are all but obligated to draw from Hollywood’s deep, fizzy well of nonconsensual piss-chugging scenes. Perhaps we could dip our ladle into one of the specific subgenres — who can forget the iconic scene in Dumb and Dumber in which Jim Carrey tricks a police officer into guzzling his piss, or the scene in Hollywood Knights in which Robert Wuhl also tricks a police officer into guzzling his piss?

But I feel our choice for the top spot must honor a true prodigy, a man considered the Mozart of comically weaponized urine: Fred Savage. When he was just eight years old, he appeared in the 1986 film The Boy Who Could Fly (from Escape from New York writer Nick Castle), a film which did what all great comedy should do: it pissed the envelope. The creators involved asked the question no one else dared: “What if we had a child force another child to gargle his piss? And what if we could make America cheer when it happens, to the point that the Washington Post will call it, ‘soaring … a refreshing catharsis for the whole family‘? Would that not secure a place for us in comedy history, if not a seat at the right hand of Satan’s very throne?”

For reference, here is the resulting scene, presented in the format it most deserves: as a fuzzy ten year-old YouTube upload from someone in a filthy living room shakily recording their television.

First, you should know that Fred Savage does not play the titular Boy Who Can Fly, he’s the eight year-old little brother character in a movie mainly about a budding relationship between a teenage girl and her neighbor with autism who (spoiler) can fly. This was a period in Hollywood in which studios heard the complaints from disabled populations loud and clear, that they were tired of being portrayed as inhuman monsters. Studios nodded and said, “You all want to be portrayed as mysterious, magical beings. Got it.”

Savage, who three years later would star in a film about a boy with a mental disability that makes him magically good at video games, plays Louis. He is introduced wearing a t-shirt that says “KILL ‘EM ALL – LET GOD SORT THEM OUT” and the expression of a man who from birth has seen every mouth as a potential toilet.

He exists in the movie only for the child-on-child piss crime which occurs in the finale, the culmination of a subplot which slowly builds in the background while this suburban neighborhood learns the heartwarming lesson that people with autism are to be celebrated as long as they are also superhuman. Said subplot kicks off when, just minutes into the film, Louis encounters a pack of bullies led by the teenage Sonny, alarmingly leading a gang of much younger children.

Sonny blocks Louis’s path like a mythological troll demanding a toll for passage, stating, “Nobody goes around the block in this neighborhood unless they get our okay, and you don’t got it.” Louis attempts this trek repeatedly, always to the same result, until the film’s final moments. Finally, after everyone in the neighborhood has been inspired to overcome their personal challenges by the titular aerial teenager (the protagonist literally gives a climactic speech that culminates in the demonstrably untrue, “Anything is possible if you really try!”), Louis mounts his Big Wheel one last time and heads into Sonny’s territory. 

The gang leaps into action, driven into an inhuman bloodlust at the mere sight of this eight year-old they barely know. They chase their prey down the sidewalk until he is cornered by Sonny himself, who steps out with a baseball bat, ready to bash in this second grader’s skull.

I should interrupt here to explain something to our younger readers. Remember that scene in Stranger Things where the teenage bully puts a switchblade to the throat of one child and forces another to jump off a cliff to his death? That scene was an homage to 80s movies in which the teenage bullies were usually sadistic spree killers on the side. Every kid who grew up watching these movies entered high school assuming their academic career would end with their own intestines splayed on a locker room floor.

Thus, our Neganesque bully stands ready to decorate his bat with some child brains. Fred Savage’s Louis pulls a squirt gun that is an exact Uzi replica …

… and I guess I should interject again to note that in the 80s, squirt guns were indistinguishable from actual guns, with no colorful markings to ease the minds of any nervous cops nearby. I actually had one just like what he’s carrying up there, it even had a fake spring-loaded cocking knob on top and a removable plastic magazine — we wouldn’t buy a toy gun back then unless you could 100% rob a bank with it. “Jeez, it almost sounds like the grownups wanted you to die,” you say. Haha. Yeah. 

Where were we? Fred pulls out his Uzi and says, “Go ahead, make my day,” which it should be noted is a catch phrase from the 1983 film Sudden Impact aka Dirty Harry 4. The R-rated movie this eight year-old is quoting is about a woman who is brutally raped and then goes on a rampage of vengeance by, no shit, shooting her rapists in the cock. This line was referenced in this lighthearted PG-rated film about a magical teenager under the assumption that all of the 1986-era children in the audience had seen this nightmarishly violent rape movie and that assumption was absolutely a safe one. 

Sonny the Bully says, “Oh, I’m supposed to be real scared of a water pistol?” to which Louis replies, “Ain’t no water in this gun,” and then works the action to chamber a round, because squirt guns used to be awesome. The bully, who really should already know, asks, “So, what’s in it?”

“Piss,” declares Louis, who then blasts a laser of hot urine right into Sonny’s mouth. 

It is in this moment that Sonny finally sees his adversary for what he truly is. “LOOK UPON MY FACE!” Louis’s determined scowl seems to say, “AND LICK UPON MY PISS.” Oh, this troll will be paid, all right — only this toll will be paid in liquid gold.*

The bully falls to the ground, in shock at having been so thoroughly piss-toll whipped. He screeches for his nearby doberman to come and maul this child to death. Having been trained only for this, the dog flies into frame, the promise of tender young meat having driven it into a frenzy. How many such small, screaming meals has this beast enjoyed in the past?

Louis then calls for his own dog, Max, to come sacrifice himself to defend him. The dog obeys, leaping toward the attacker and, if I remember correctly, fucks the evil dog to death.

It is over. “He was hungry for power,” Louis thinks to himself, “and I prepared for him a fine feast indeed, a liquid feast, consisting of twelve courses of my own exquisite piss.”

The greatest cinema is like jazz, in that sometimes what matters most are the notes that aren’t played. In Jaws, you barely saw the shark, because you didn’t need to — it lurked menacingly in your mind regardless of whether it appeared on screen. The unseen shark of The Boy Who Could Fly is Fred Savage, in his bathroom, awkwardly attempting to fill a squirt gun with his own untamed spray of child urine.

For you see, that plastic Uzi would have had only a tiny quarter-inch hole with a plastic plug, intended to be filled from a faucet. The process of loading that gun with his own urine would have resulted in a child — and an entire bathroom — that was absolutely glistening with errant piss, a hundred times more than wound up on that bully’s tongue. It is understood, if not stated outright, that this was the price Louis was willing to pay. For in that moment, Louis was standing up for all of us; Sonny symbolized all of our oppressors, Louis symbolized the select few bold enough to resist even if it means sacrificing everything, the piss symbolized piss. This is what great art should do, embolden us to tap into the golden spring of our own fighting spirit, to exhort us to never turn away from an opportunity to speak piss to power. 

This is the theme that would define Fred Savage’s career. Just three years later, he would star in Little Monsters, which features a scene in which a regular-sized monster played by Howie Mandel pisses in a child’s juice bottle, Savage watching as that child greedily chugs it down the next day. In 2007, Savage would make his directorial debut with Daddy Day Camp, a film which features a child filling a balloon with his own piss and smashing it into the face of another child. The man came into this world with a singular vision and intends to see it through. 

Speaking of which, here’s the trailer for the new “almost as stupid as what you just read” novel I have coming out, give it a watch. Or, just imagine something like this column only it’s 110,000 words long. Publisher’s Weekly called it “brilliant” and we’ll all die not knowing if that was sarcasm or if the entire world has gone mad. It’s not for me to say and the only way for you to find out is to give me your cash.

*Piss.

You can pre-order Jason “David Wong” Pargin’s book Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick on Amazon, at Barnes and Noble, Bookshop or any place books like this are sold. You can also follow him on Twitter, his Instagram, or Facebook, or YouTube or Goodreads, or any of the many accounts he’s forgotten about.