YOU'RE STILL WRONG..
I
used to go to a crap chiropractor who also did acupuncture. I
poo-pooed it but whatever, I let her do her thing. During a visit, I
was going through a bout of bronchitis. I used to get bronchitis
twice a year, every year. She remarked on it and popped a needle in
my chest. I rolled my eyes and laid down. I have not had a case of
bronchitis in over 20 years since.
Jennifer
Fogeliscious-Legof (personal letter)
If you take an ineffective sugar pill, at your sickest, it's odds on you're going to get better, in exactly the same way that if you sacrifice a goat, after rolling a double six, your next roll is likely to be lower. --Ben Goldacre in The Guardian
FLASH TO NEW ORLEANS, April 10,1861: Marie Laveau sits in her parlor in the city’s French Quarter. Marie is not French. She probably has some Haitian blood. In any case, she is among the few born-free Colored People in The South. She’s Colored by default, as it will still be in 2020, when mixed-race people either choose their color or have it chosen for them.
Marie’s abundant hair is covered… more wrapped than covered.. in a red and white cloth… hatpinned together along the seams. In her hands, she holds a doll… a kind of stick figure… made from straw... arms and legs divided from the torso by thread at the hips, wrists and shoulders and ankles... the head partially separated by another tight thread at the neck.
Marie takes a long hatpin from the cloth around her hair. She sets the pin between the legs of the doll… pointy side facing the crotch. She pushes upwards.
Just then... a hundred and sixty-two miles northwest... on a plantation where the Colored People are still slaves.. a handsome young slave screams… grabbing between his legs and falling to the ground.
FLASH
TO FEBRUARY 2020: 80-year-old Marsha Goldstein is up at 6AM. She
struggles to pull on her compression socks and fix her prim skirt.
Pushing one hand against the wall, she limps from the bedroom down
the short hall to the closet where she stores her walker. Propped on
top of the folded metal support, is a half-empty box of rubber
gloves… just purchased from CVS. Pulling out a pair of gloves, she
struggles… one hand at a time... into them. Then she opens the
walker.
It’s shopping day. Mrs. Goldstein has to stock
up on chicken and vegetables for soup… maybe some noodles. Senior
shopping hour starts at 7AM. The store will be freshly sterilized,
chemicals sprayed over the produce and on the boxes of Captain
Crunch. When Marsha walks in, a huge bottle of 80% alcohol
hand-sanitizer waits for those dumb enough not to wear gloves. At
least she doesn’t need one of those stupid surgical masks. You
can’t breathe in those things… And scientists at the CDC say that
Corona comes from surfaces… not from the air. Near the prunes, a
man with dark eyes coughs. In a month, Mrs. Goldstein is dead.
FLASH
to GERMANY 1960: A new drug has hit the market. Science has found
a treatment for cancer, morning
sickness,
and maybe infertility. Germans discovered it and marketed it. Another
medical wonder… a gift from science. Morning
sickness… vomiting, nausea… one of the many pains of pregnancy…
can be helped… finally.
Some
women take the drug for infertility… an “off-label”
prescription. Lo and behind, they have children. It works! The
children, however, did not have arms, but a drug-induced birth defect
that
connects their
cute little hands directly to their cute little shoulders. The drug
is called Thalidomide.
FLASH TO 1979: Harvey DiPecora is fat. His doctor tells him to lose weight, lower his cholesterol, eliminate saturated fats from his diet.
“I
gotta do it,” thinks Harvey. “That means that awful shit
margarine… it’s like eating jellied snot. But I gotta do it to
save myself. No saturated fat there. Just hyrdrogenated
this
and that. It’ll save me!”
Magazines and newspapers
tout the scientific findings that any kind of non-saturated fats is
good for you. Harvey believes in science.
Harvey’s toast in the morning… every morning… smothered in Blue Bonnet margarine. Everything’s better with Blue Bonnet on it.
Ten
months later, Harvey dies of a heart attack. Scientists change their
minds and say that trans fat is deadly… deadlier than saturated
fats. Besides heart attacks, it “might cause or contribute
to:”
Alzheimer's Disease, Cancer, Diabetes, Obesity,
Infertility in women,
Major depressive disorder, Diminished memory and oh yeah, Acne. Check Wikipedia for details.
Every
day during the lockdown, I watch daytime TV filled with ads for
scientifically proven medicine, for
blood pressure, psoriasis, a-fib …
just take it once a day. But please note:
Dangerous
side effects may include growth of an extra head, testicles rising
into the large intestine, internal bleeding until it comes out of
your eyes, inability to clip your toenails... and death.
It’s
4AM, I feel my body returning to me. There was some dream about a
large Frankenstein-ish monster… naked… with a tiny dick… limp
as wet spaghetti and about as thick.
“I’ll take yours!” The monster says, suddenly on top of me… pressing his fist into my stomach. I feel the pressure… the pain… As I wake up, the pain does not go away. I feel it in my stomach… and upwards almost to my throat. This is not the dream. This is reality... my GERD (Gastro-Esophageal Reflux Disease) acting up… waking me after beer and pizza… and I’ve run out of NUX VOMICA.
That disgustingly named plant is the key ingredient in the tiny homeopathic pills that keep me from getting GERD. My friends tell me homeopathy doesn’t work. They say it’s psychological… it’s all in my mind.
So
fuckin’ what? Who cares WHERE
it
is? Mind?
Body?
It fuckin’
works!
If I take the pills, I don’t get the pain. If I don’t take the
pills I do get the pain.
“But,” comes the last ditch
effort of those who worship science. “If you only stop the pain in
your mind, it might keep you from getting the help you really
need.”
By the
help you really need, they
mean those drugs that will cause you to grow another head. (Just a
few months ago, Zantac, a popular SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN GERD
medication, was recalled because it causes cancer.)
In science, your experience doesn’t count. That’s called anecdotal evidence. Only numbers count in science-- not people.
Would I take homeopathic medicine for cancer? Would I go to a voodoo priest if I were hit by a car?
Of
course not. I’m not against medicine or science. I’m against the
WORSHIP of medicine and science. I’m against thinking science has
all the answers, and if it’s not SCIENTIFIC it’s not REAL. THAT
is wrong. Homeopathy and voodoo are
no less real than science.
And yes, science doesn’t
always fail. Sometimes it
gives
us things that work… right out of the box… POW! Like… well…
like the atom bomb. What’s wrong with that? I donno, but
I think I’ll stick with Nux Vomica.
- end -
ENDNOTES: [You can contact me on facebook or by email at god@mykelboard.com. Through the post office: send those... er... private DVDs..or music or zines... or anything else (legal only!) to: Mykel Board, POB 137, New York, NY 10012-0003. If you like my writing, you can be notified when anything new is available. Send me an email with SUBSCRIBE in the subject line. Back blogs and columns are at https://mykelsblog.blogspot.com
→
Love
Science or They’ll Get You dept: For
the first time ever, (over 100 years) Scientific
American
is endorsing a presidential candidate. Or rather, opposing one.
Here’s what they have to say:
The
evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the
U.S. and its people—because he rejects evidence and science. The
most devastating example is his dishonest and inept response to the
COVID-19 pandemic, which cost more than 190,000 Americans their lives
by the middle of September.
Remember, you oppose SCIENCE at your own peril.
→
Aah,
aren’t lower taxes making America great
again? Dept:
CNBC
reports
that
nearly one out of five of the Fortune 500 companies paid NO TAX in
2019. These companies include: DowDuPont, United States Steel, Eli
Lilly, Netflix, and our perennial favorite: Starbucks. I wonder how
these corporations
will
say THANK YOU in an election year, don’t you?
→ Parody
is impossible in 2020 dept:
Yeah, MRR is dead, but its ghost lives on in the virtual world. I
shit you not, but the MRR
website
diddlers have decided not to publish ANYTHING by white writers,
unless they are writing about black artists.
Maxiumim what? That great fusion of black and white music created when Elvis Presley 69-ed with Chuck Berry... where Bad Brains and The Ramones played together at CBGBs… Where… ah you know the story.
Now,
in a parody of the old MRR PC gone bonkers, they’ve outdone
themselves.
Yes, MRR is dead… and now it’s deader than it ever could
be, leaving only a virtual grave to piss on.
→ Speaking of pissing dept: CNN reports The city of Amsterdam is going green in an attempt to stop random pissing. The local council has installed eight hemp-filled urinals in the city's "wild peeing" spots.
The urinals look like traditional planters, with greenery sprouting from the top. But there’s an opening in the side. This is the target zone for the piss.
There are now 12 of the urinals in Amsterdam, inventor Richard de Vries, an environmental psychologist, worked with the council on the project starting in 2018, installing GreenPees in four hot spots in the center of the city.
"The result was there was a 50% reduction in wild peeing," said De Vries. "It was a great success."
My question? The Dutch are the tallest people on earth. Can the rest of us reach? And what about girls? Can they aim well enough to hit the spot?
--See you in hell! MB
LINK TRADE DEPARTMENT:
I read that the search engines like lots of links... and it's also nice to support my friends and enemies in their blogs. So facebook me or email me if you have a blog, webpage or something else to connect to. I add you. You add me.
Here's a start:
Here’s Richard Goldberg: goldberg.wordpress.com
Poetry and humor fans will like Justin Martin in The Latency
And my friend Mike R has a nice site with recipe hits from the past! (He cooked for me once... great stuff.) Check out Yesterday's Recipes.
And here's one by a member of ANTI-SEEN... a tour diary of sorts.
Andy Shelton has an interesting blog here.
Savage Hippie is a guy who has been YouTubing for a long time. Our opinions largely overlap... but he complains that I'm a Communist. I'm not! I'm a communist.
Chris Stecher publishes a zine called PRECIS. You can see the back issue links there... and he promises a new issue soon.
George Fertakis has a very nice graphics-heavy blog... with music and books featured prominently. If there’s no link here (I can’t find it temporarily), then Google… er… Duckduckgo him for information.
And my long-term pal Sid Yiddish contributes with his Mishegas Master Blog.
And connect to TRUST Zine, a long-running German punk zine… that STILL PRINTS!!! Yeah, they have a website too… of course! It’s here.
Kyle Nonneman is in prison in Portland. At least he can’t be kidnapped by the secret police… I think. I post his blog for him, he can’t do it from the klink. Lots of stuff about noise metal… and some very weird politics that will either fascinate or repulse you… or both.
Here
are a couple video links.
This from Jon Cox
https://squelchchamber1.bandcamp.com/album/down-so-low
And this one from my very long-time friend Roger Armstrong.
Oh yeah, then there’s me. I have a blog of stuff I’ve written mostly from last century. You might enjoy it. Then again, you might not. It’s here.
Let
me know if you have a blog… or a print zine… or a YouTube and
want to be added to the list. You show me yours… you’ve already
seen mine. god@mykelboard.com
