What Happens in Las Vegas ... or Mykel's Blog for November 2023

What Happens in Las Vegas ... or Mykel's Blog for November 2023

You’re STILL Wrong

or

Mykel's November 2023 Blog/Column 

What happens In Las Vegas    

by Mykel Board

If life gives you lemons, make lemonade. If it gives you cancer, make lemonade and spike it.” – Unknown

“Las Vegas: all the amenities of modern society in a habitat unfit to grow a tomato.”
                                                 – Jason Love

“For a loser, Vegas is the meanest town on earth.”
                                                – Hunter S. Thompson

Some point to the horrors of the Israeli – Palestinian war… where bombing by the Palestinians is terrorism and bombing by Israelis is air strikes. I point in a different way… to the bulging cotton in my Depends… weighting me down… sloshing right and left… forcing me to walk like a cowboy just dismounted from a 20 mile ride on his appaloosa. Evil to the right. Evil to the left. You cannot doubt that there is a God… and she’s a bitch. So much evil… so much wrong… so much pain… so many embarrassing leg drips do not happen by accident. If there’s a coin toss and after 25 flips you haven’t won once… you know the game is fixed. God did it.

So back to my full Depends. No... further… to the doctor who said my cancer was “still operable.” Just a shot and 5 times with my legs spread for the cyberknife… and I’ll be right as rain. Oh yeah, THE SHOT.

“The cancer feeds off of testosterone,” says Dr. Marrans. “If we get rid of the testosterone, the cancer will starve to death. One shot of this super anti-testosterone magic elixir… and blam! Good-bye testosterone!”

“And what are the side effects?” I ask.

“Nothing good,” answers the doc. “You’ll go through menopause… hot flashes… fatigue… temper tantrums. And…”

He points toward me with an outstretched index finger. Then, he gradually relaxes the finger until it points toward the floor.

I flush hot... right there… before any needles... my testosterone still at my horny 73 year old level. But the shot I get. My insurance company tells me it costs $2180. They’ll pay a chunk of it.

The cyber-surgery itself is no problem. No doctors in the room, just the control panelists outside and a scary robot arm inside. I can choose the artist of my choice to sing to me during the operation. I change it ever day: Louis Armstrong, Patti Smith, Frank Sinatra, John Cale… I avoid any band with DEAD in the name… Boys, Kennedys, Grateful, Milkmen… It might be bad luck or spook the robot operator. You never know. Frank Sinatra should be safe… soothing to all of us. I’m lying there and the first song starts:

And now the end is near...
And so I face that final curtain

This does not bode well

But the surgery goes smoothly… five treatments over six months. After the last one, the technician takes me into a special room with an old fashioned bell. “You’re done with the surgery! Ring the bell.” he says. I grab the rope attached to the clapper and swing it back and forth… heralding in the start of my misery.

On the way home from that final surgery… on the subway… I piss in my pants. It’s only been worse from there. Hot flashes… always tired… farting up a storm… pubes fall out… it doesn’t end. I haven’t had a hard-on in six months. And suddenly, my left eye doesn’t see straight lines.

I look at the edge of a table, or the top of an elevator door and I see a bump… a flare… something that’s not there. My macular degeneration has… like my Depends... gone from dry to wet. Pow! Off to the eye doctor.

“Sorry, Mykel” he says, “it’s not my department. You have to see a retinologist... and you need to do it fast.”

Eyeball shots. I need eyeball shots. A hypodermic filled with some magical –unimaginably expensive– liquid… PACHOOKII! Right in the eyeball… and that fixes it right up… yeah right. Every 5 weeks another eye poke. Feels like I have a small pebble in my eye for a day… for the rest of the week it just itches.

I wonder if the Brooklyn Bridge still has space enough to let me climb over and jump. But I get on with my life.

Now, I should tell you about THE GIRL… but you need some context.

CONTEXT: Couch-surfing,org is like Air BNB for free. Well, you do have to pay a yearly membership fee. But after that, there’s no charge at all. You don’t need to pay to stay. You just flop on someone’s couch, or sometimes even a bed. It’s like touring with a punk rock band. You converse with with your hosts, make friends, maybe go out together. I’ve couch-surfed in at least 10 countries. And the best meal that’s ever been cooked on my NYC stove has been cooked by 2 couch-surfers from Lebanon. I don’t know how they found the ingredients here, but whoa boy… they got it right. They stayed five nights I think. The microwave got a rest.

Every Tuesday, there’s a couch-surfer meet-up at the Peculier Pub just down the street from me. I go when I’m not teaching. I like to sit at the head of the long table where the surfers meet, then go their separate ways to circulate among the crowd. It’s about fifty percent locals and fifty percent people from everywhere… Alaska to Saudi Arabia and most everywhere else.

It’s surfers and surfees… mostly 20/30 somethings… a couple of actual adults. I’m probably the oldest. The crew at our table grows and shrinks… people from Mexico, Croatia, Dusseldorf and the Lower East Side. As a natural show-off, I switch my vernacular when I can and offer to teach “cheers” in various languages. I usually lie. Ask your Serbian friends what Pitchka Ti Mate means. Those couch surfers think it means cheers.

A butch young woman… in her twenties comes to the table. Butch... young... woman… need I say more? If I weren’t just cyberknifed, my throbbing throbber would make me unable to walk from the table to the bar. “Is that a double-A battery in your pocket or are you happy to see me

But tonight, I can only greet her and entertain her with my German translation of “cheers”… Leck mich am Arsch. We talk in English and German. She plays guitar and loves punk rock. And I’m the most famous punk-rocker no one has ever heard of. I’m in heaven… except for the limpy. Her name is Lucie.

She’s surfing with somebody in Brooklyn, but she’ll meet me tomorrow for a punkrock tour of the lower East Side. FLASH TO THERE

“This is where CBGBs used to be”… we walk inside the fashion store.

I walk to the back, and make a broad hand gesture.

“This is where the stage was… yes, I played on it… and around the side in the back was the dressing room. And the bathrooms… I never went to the ladies, but the mens room was a piece of art… The toilet was by itself.. no walls around it… up on sort of a stage.”

Then we go outside to Joey Ramone Way, and I take a picture of her under the street sign. We talk punk.

“You know,” she says, “there’s a punk rock museum that just opened in Las Vegas. We should go there.”

I’m in love.

Bonus: I soon find that my old pal Fat Mike from NO FX is a big macher at the museum. AND he now lives in Las Vegas. Hooeeee I could impress her with that. Maybe I could even get him to take us on a tour… show us the Mykel Board Room… I could sign autographs for the other museum visitors.

“Let’s do it.” I tell her. “You set a time. I’ll meet you there… in the desert. Las Vegas is a strange city. I haven’t been there in decades though. It’ll be fun.”

That’s what I say. What I think is: “Fuck you God. Here I am with a punk rock girl who wants to go to Las Vegas with me and I’m wearing diapers and couldn’t get a hard-on if a 1976 Joan Jett and a 1979 Leif Garrett danced naked in my living room.” But still... Just to hang out with her. Spend some time talking punkrock. Hold her in my arms as I fall into a farting, get-up-to-piss, snot-dribbling sleep. Ah what a joy that would be.

“Don’t worry Mykel,” she says, “I’ll take care of reservations and stuff.”

We split with a hug and the next day she returns to Germany. It isn’t long after that we connect on WhatsApp.

“Hey Mykel,” she writes, “dates are fixed and I booked a place for us.”

Ahhhh… If it weren’t for the hormone shot… if… if… if…

So I book my round trip ticket to Vegas. I’ll stay a week… maybe once I can… well, even if I can’t. She’s just so cool, just sharing a bed will bring me dreams to dream about. A couple weeks later back comes the WhatsApp message: All booked, Mykel. Got us three nights at The Sin City Complex. We can walk to the punkrock museum from there.

“Three nights?” I whine. “I’ve got a week!”

“I’m meeting a girlfriend,” comes the reply. “We want to go to Grand Canyon and stuff, sorry”

Oy.

The Sin City Complex is easy to spot. It’s across from a mural/painting of a girl puking into a toilet with a graffiti-esque caption “Vegas Night!”:

I go inside to check in. I give my name to the desk clerk and explain that Lucie booked the room. She looks it up.

“I gotcha,” she says. “You’re in room eight… bed three.”

“Bed three?” I ask.

She nods. “If you’d prefer a top bunk,” she tells me, “I think one’s available.”

After I download the room key on my phone, I trudge upstairs to the 8-bed (4 bunk beds) room, stick my backpack into a locker… hold back a tear or two and head downstairs to find some place for lunch. Lucie hasn’t arrived yet and I need some air conditioning. I’m having a hot flash.

See you in hell,

Mykel Board

ENDNOTES: [You can contact me on facebook or by email at mykelboard@gmail.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]

→ Admissions dept: It really wasn’t as bad as I made it sound, although we had a horrible snorer in bed number 5. Lucie was a terrific companion, and we did meet up with Fat Mike who gave us a tour of the museum. Mike was really great to us. Besides the tour he gave me a copy of the NOFX book… a NY Times best seller... really! We also got to the Double Down Saloon and saw the great band Franks and Deans… and they had a stripper… 2 strippers as a matter of fact. People were friendly, and Anil, my pal of 40 years, took Lucie and me out for a patty dinner. Delicious! I also went to the Mob Museum, to spend some time with Al Capone and some model electric chairs. You can see my Las Vegas pictures here.

→ Giving Good (Doll)head dept: Lucie introduced me to THE DOLLHEADS, a very young band (13 year old drummer) with a great sense of humor. We met up at the museum. There is a “jam room” upstairs. The band played up a storm, and Lucy joined in for a rendition of 99 Red Balloons. It was one of the many highlights of my stay. Actually, I had fun.

→ I missed this in Vegas Dept: After I got back home, I read a news story about what happened before I got there. Mysterious brown or black droplets fell from the sky on some Las Vegas homes. One resident said the droplets had rained on his home, cars, RV, basketball court, and just about everything else for three to four weeks.

"It could be grease? Oil? I don't know," said the home owner while looking at the hood of his mystery liquid coated SUV. "It's very hard to maintain my vehicles. It's very very difficult to be outside in my backyard knowing that I can't even cook or barbecue or anything like that because of droplets on my food."

See you in hell redux,
MB

THE NATION AGAIN

I’m a long-time subscriber to the The Nation. It’s the only lefty publication that I find myself not only agreeing with, but also getting inspiration from. Strangely, when I post this stuff on facebook, no one looks at it. My “friends” would just rather call me a “Trumpist” or a “Republican” for all the times I don’t follow the party line. If it’s printed in THE NATION, it should give me street cred, right? Yeah right.

Just when Bill Gates has almost rehabilitated himself, here’s more information about how he’s working with Big-Farm on genetically modified seeds that help destroy small farmers in Africa.

And Sascha Cohen writes about a new law that supposedly helps “sex-trafficked” people, but actually endangers them.

And I just found an old (2018) article that questions the believe the woman focus of #MeToo# and shows how things can be different (better) without the pre-conceptions.

LINK TRADE DEPARTMENT:

I did a nice interview with The Aither zine. Interesting questions, complete, and questions I’ve never been asked before. You can read it here. It’s a good one.

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:

Jason Rodgers sent me his book Invisible Generation… free! And I lost it. Jason, a long-time partner of Suzy Poe, has been bugging me to review it… and I can’t. So the best I can do is promote it. I have a lot of respect for Jason… he is a libertarian (in the best sense of the word), and a super-smart guy. When/if I find the book, I’ll give you some more details.

Video of the week: My long-time friend Sid Yiddish appears on a YouTube DatingGame-like video. Guess who wins the bachlorette!

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.

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.

Jim Testa moved his long running zine, Jersey Beat, to the blogosphere awhile back. You can read it here. Jim also recommended a kind of unique album… in a style you don’t see to much of these days… or any days. Neo-Hassidic Rock Opera. You can stream the album 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.

My long time pal, Jim Hayes rightfully complained about my leaving out his blog. He’s a great writer, so it was a tragic omission. Here it is.

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

MB