Travis

wrote a friend in New Scotland I hadn't heard from in a long time. The basic message was, "I think I've finally gone completely batshit."This is a condition where you might suppose that imaginary friends would appear in the form of teddy bears that pick up random telephone conversations and incessantly relate them to you without regard to the fact that you're attempting to shower, sleep, or dream of a world outside of your dingy apartment which you haven't escaped for a week and can no longer sublet due to the rug being bleached white in pretty spirals from wall to wall after that freak out one night at 4am because maggots wouldn't stop crawling through the carpet after 12 relentless hours of picking them up and flushing them down the toilet even though I didn't have any food in the apartment and nothing spilt on the floor for them to be feasting off of. But it's not like that at all.15 months. 250 applications. Not one single response from any job. From Sitka, Alaska to Greenville, South Carolina. From bus boy at a shitty cafe' to a decent reporter job to shooting video at weddings with my own equipment. Truck dead. Dog gone. Had to move out of house because roommate strangled me for no reason and I lived in an enclosed porch infested with cockroaches and mosquitos where a bed didn't fit so I'd have to say, "I sleep there baby!" while pointing to a Wal-Mart carpet with a blanket on the floor for the one girl nice enough to bang me this last year.The batshitness seems to manifest itself in chain smoking and a heavy habit of staring at walls for hours on end going, "I think I must not actually exist." So I go outside and ask someone the time. "Good. Not invisible." Too bad actually because then I could just move into a high school girl's locker room, but i digress.Moving to Chicago - Why? Why the fuck not?I got back from there recently from visiting the German Beef Initiative's old drummer and liked enough. So it looks like GBI will rise again. An aside: ZULEMA! MOVE TO CHICAGO!An odd thing though during my visit to Illinois. I have traveled quite extensively with my whammy screw, double octave Strat that I love. No one in Texas, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Britain, Ireland or Finland ever got confused as to what was in that rectangular case clearly embossed: Fender.But to my surprise, not once, not twice, but on three different occasions was I asked, "What type of rifle/gun is this sir?" The last one to ask me was lovely Helen, the American Airlines attendant at Chicago's O'Hare airport.I was already slightly pissed off because I showed up to check in for a 12:38pm flight at 12pm on the dot and was told, "Sir, you'll have to take another flight. You must check in a full 40 minutes before departure with baggage." Fuck me runnin' daddy. I used to get away with coming home at 12:55 when I told my folks I'd be home 12ish, but let's move .. paying the $25 anal rape fee to get the next flight, Helen asked the question yet again. "Sir is this a rifle?"I made a perplexed face. That was all."Sir! It was only a question!""I know. I'm not offended. I'm just surprised. I'm from Texas and've never been asked that before. Everybody knows what it is."After the bitchy remark about people always traveling with guns there, I said, "Maybe we're just more refined in Texas." She was not amused in spite of the fact that I was trying to de-cuntify here attitude. She didn't even bother to ask the bog standard dumbass "is there a bomb, did you pack this, has it been with you the whole time" bullshit.But that leads me to a lovely open letter I discovered this evening while reading articles on Cathars and Tunguska tonight while contemplating if I should go to the bar on the one night I could get really fucked up even though there's freezing rain coming down.The first time I laid eyes on it I was at my pop's house with my girlfriend. She fell asleep on the couch and my dad said, "You should check out this blue collar thing." He sticks in the DVD and the retarded faggotry begins.Give me a break! If this is comedy, then I guess I've never laughed. It was worse than my idiot childhood friend in Oklahoma that while watching television (at the age of twelve mind you) every single female appearing on the screen from a detergent commercial to Cheeta-Ra on Thundercats, "Man, would you fuck her?! Oh, dude! Would you fuck that? Man, I'd fuck the shit outta her!"Okay. I would fuck Cheeta-Ra, but that's not the point here. The Blue Collar comedy crap (lead by a guy who's career I thought had seen its 15 minutes: Jeff Foxworthy) is abysmal trite. It's like Beavis & Butthead only not a caricature making fun of our culture and stupidity, but a celebration of anti-intellectualism and prejudice reinforcing the POVs of those zombie walkers and vacuum assholes without the courage to live a life they desire and long to oppress the existence of anyone/anything not self-sentenced to the same fate - all told through the bad jokes I heard on the playground in Oklahoma and Texas as a kid.The thing spurring my thoughts back to that horrid night where dad thought I would be amused hearing Ron White talk about Texas getting an express lane for execution (Oh, yeah! We got our 1,000th state-sanctioned murder since reinstatement. Can anybody say Fuckaire?!), was an open letter by David Cross to Larry the Cable Guy.Thank god not everyone has been completely overtaken by the starring-at-walls disease and have some passion to acknowledge the truth.Zippo time.