Jeff Johnson's Blog: Will Fight Evil 4 Food, page 2

Imagine, if you dare, a world without the arts…

Imagine, if you dare, a world without the arts. We live in hive buildings, dress in gray gunny sacks, and since there are no books, no music, movies, or television, we watch the news until it’s time to eat our tasteless slop. No tattoos, no fashion of any kind- we are lumpy. There are no paintings in our cubes within the hive, just a gray bed, a gray bowl, a gray spoon.

If you’re in that weird shitty window at the end of a long winter and your life in the arts seems like a crazy idea dreamed by a much younger and dumber version of yourself, buck up. Even if you scribble awkward pictures of three-legged cats with crayons, if you write gibberish, if you make YouTube videos about armpits and burping, you are fighting on behalf of your fellow man to keep the gray world away. You are one of the bold motherfuckers on the fighting line. Spring will come! The rains will end!

New Shows For The Breaking Bad Universe

Don’t give up on yourself, people of the Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul World. We see it all the time in life, you know what I mean. The chef who becomes tender with age and rather than flay cows he monkeys with cauliflower. The old con man who retreats to his den and in the end lies only to himself. The skater who takes up video games after one brush with a bumper too many. All tragic, but here I am pointing at the architects of Breaking Bad and its wily and glorious freak of a baby Better Call Saul. Don’t give up! Here are a few spin-off ideas, new chapters if you will, to keep you going. This has been floating around on a notepad on my coffee table for weeks now, and my wife hasn’t said anything, but… It’s time to squirt it out into the world in hopes that it lands on the right cheek.

Sheriff Pinkman

Think about it! Poor Jesse, after his many ordeals, his salvation and damnation cycle seemingly complete, has a new row to hoe. He settles in a small town. The Sheriff fucks with him because he senses a darkness in this newcomer. Jesse, in a neurotic moment, befriends the dude rather than run. That simple choice spells his fresh doom after the Sheriff is killed and Jesse rises to become the top hog in these new lands. Mystery after mystery, thrilling Alaskan weirdo after weirdo, Jesse brings it home. I don’t like cops and I definitely don’t watch their stupid fucking TV shows, but I’d watch all seven seasons of this.

SONS OF GOMEZ

Two or three of them. Wicked pissed. These dudes wanna know what the hell happened to their dad, and when they find out, holy shit, they discover at the same time that Gus Fring’s entire operation is headless and parts of it are still intact.

The Quiet Salamanca

The one who got away. Tuco’s strange, creepy kid is just as bad as he was. In the smoky ruins of the Albuquerque meth scene, a new player emerges. He sniffs his fingers. He wears pink. He might be a cannibal.

Ehrmentraut

Mike’s illegitimate son, the product of his dalliance with a big haired hooker named Maximum Maudelle, arrives on the scene looking for daddy. He’s a total bozo- an English major washout who took up true crime podcasting to impress a chick who will never, ever remember his name. He needs the help of his father and by god he’s gonna get it. Except Mike is dead. This heel goes from bad news to surprising horror every episode, slowly going mad. Dudeboy breaks bad in weepy increments and slowly becomes a curious vigilante, documenting his own bloodbaths and looking for the mysterious killer that is himself.

The Gus Fring Chemistry Scholarship Geeks

The guys and gals! A total no brainer! Horrified nerds realize why Gus put their misfit pack through school, grooming them for a life of crime, and they call each other, hoping to console one another. But Gus was a criminal genius after all, and he saw something terrible in each and every one of the. The dark seeds sprout as they all break bad together! Succession is an HBO show I’ll never watch in a million years, I gather it’s about a family of austere, wealthy, pitiful zeros trying to rip each other off. This would be like that, but the characters wouldn’t be so ghastly on page one. They’d start sweet and damaged and bright rather than as polo club bathroom ghouls.

Zafiro Anējo

The tequila they all drank! Jimmy and Kim drank it, Gus put poison in it, that fire water is everywhere! And… it’s run by some hard news vatos. The Rock is pimping tequila. So is the Deadpool guy. All of Hollywood wants a piece of the agave nectar. It was only a matter of time before a Brad Pitcock or a Botox Toilet tried to edge in on the Zafiro title. When it happens, it’s part LaLa Land and part El Mariachi with a liberal dash of Slow Torture Puke Chamber (a vile movie that will make you want to rinse your TV off with cough syrup).

Better Quality Vacuum

Something has to be done here. This place is simply too priceless to let go. The Man has to have a daughter, a smart, chunky gal who maybe hater what her father did, but she loved the old guy because he was good in all the ways that mattered. So she takes up the mantle and slowly, slowly, she breaks bad just like her old man.

Skinny

Skinny Pete is fried. His nerves finally lit up like wires in a lightbulb and so, like many before him, he started drinking hard and playing the piano. He plays jazz mostly, at a divey dump called Rosco’s Beef-N-Gin, and at the end of the night he sweeps up. Nobody listens to Pete until the fry cools into crazy and he begins freestyling vocals with his rambling tunes and like in the awesome show Patriot (on Amazon, do watch it) the contents of those songs are dark and secret. A million directions to go with this. Pick two.

WOLF PACK on Paramount+ A Review

Every rare once in a while I see an exceptionally dumb TV show, one so sluggish and dithering that I make caveman sounds at the TV. Wolf Pack is such a show. The plot is epic crayola on toilet paper, so I can’t really simplify it for the sake of this blog. It’s that simple already so here it is- A mean cabbage chick, very frowny, and a head case creampuff dork get all bit up by a CGI werewolf. Said werewolf has two kids, finger sniffing jizz toilets both, and the four of them have to band together and do stuff. These characters are as shallow as the film of cooking oil on your cast iron skillet, totally on par with nightmarish garbage like Fantasy Island or The Love Boat. I watched, making cave calls, hoping the principal cast would die, but I made it through one and a half episodes and god damn it, they were all still alive. Oh! Buffy the Vampire Slayer is in this. For a few minutes. There’s also a big fake fire.

The Stories We Keep

Years ago now, I was tattooing this gnarly old hippy and he asked me what happened to my ear. It surprised me a little. I shrugged and said time and poor impulse control. He liked that, but he clearly wanted a story, so I asked him how he got the ancient scar that cut from the edge of his upper lip up toward his ear.

“Ah, that.” He nodded. “It was the early 70’s and I was in Northern California at this giant party in the woods. LSD was unpredictable in those days so the trick was to take as much as you could when you came across it, which is what I did. Two hits of Orange blotter and boy I was on the moon watching the Earth turn into a giant transistor radio. I was too high and I knew it, so when Someone passed me a bottle of whiskey I drained it and I pretty much passed out. When I woke up, oh my god it was awful, I had a mixed-bag hangover and I was wet from sleeping in the rain. Sun was up and everyone was gone, the whole clearing was trashed to shit, so I went looking for water and the road. I wandered for a time and came to a huge field and on the far side I could see the highway, so I started walking. Seemed like an hour went by and I was halfway there. I thought, shit, I might be walking in circles out in this field so I trained my eye on a lone fencepost right by the road. I walked. I stumbled and staggered. I was still pretty wasted. But finally, finally I was almost there, almost to that post, and as I came up on it I realized I’d walked across that huge field all drug and blazing and I never fell down, and just like that I tripped and smashed my face right into the post. Broke my nose and got this here scar.” He smiled proudly. “You know what I learned from that?” I was about to answer when he stopped me. “Nothin’ boy, I didn’t learn nothin’. There ain’t a lesson in everything.”

Well, blow my mind.

The Nova Christmas

The holidays are different things for different people, and the entire occasion is colored by the highlights of the past. For me, the Christmas that set the bar and formed a high water line I’m not likely to surpass in this life was what I think of as The Nova Christmas. It was some 25 years ago and it was Christmas Eve. It was snowing in Portland and the roads were empty. No one was out. At around ten at night I decided to go for a drive and maybe try to find something to eat. I drove past a few shuttered Mexican food places, and even Taco Bell was closed, so after a little while I gave up and just drove. I passed by familiar old places. My car was a 1972 Chevy Nova, just an old beater, but the heater worked and it always reminded me of driving a big go cart. I liked seeing all the Christmas lights out. The entire day had passed without any kind of holiday feel for me, but seeing all the lights, alone in the city, I gradually developed what I thought of as a bald little nub of Christmas Spirit. I was trying to keep to the back streets, I don’t really know why, and I came to an intersection and realized I was right in front of a little café where I used to get coffee. Right around the corner was a tattoo shop I’d worked at part time that summer. I’d quit months ago when the place took on a lame artsie hair spa feel, but right then I realized I still had the key. Amazing! So I parked where I’d usually parked, around back by the dumpsters, and went on it. It was cold and dark and closed, obviously, but I turned on the radio and listened to Christmas music for a few minutes and stared out the window at the empty street out front. Midnight came and went and just like that it was Christmas Day, and there I was, sitting in a tattoo shop I shouldn’t even be in. I thought about cats, strangely enough, and right then I had a holiday revelation. There are indoor cats and there are outdoor cats. I knew in that moment that I was an outdoor cat, destined to watch these holidays through the window, but I felt pretty good about it. None of the finger sniffers and mamma’s boys would ever know an instant of the odd freedom I felt at that moment, and I felt that freedom often. There was a little refrigerator in back where the robot bozo yuppie tat zapper kept their artisan lunches so I went and looked inside to see if there was anything good. Nothing at all except two beers, and fancy ones. I took them back out to the front and drank them. After that, I went home and I took the long way. In the years since I’ve done my best to get a whiff of that ‘holiday spirit’. I’ve in fact spent small fortunes chasing it, and when I thought I had a piece of it I knew in my soul it was as fake as a ride at Disneyland. Anymore I don’t bother, and just smile and tag along with whatever holiday stuff is going on for the people around me. In my heart, with the magic lens of hindsight, I know the truth and it comforts me. Conditions have to be just right, true, but even an outdoor cat can experience the holidays. I savor The Nova Christmas memory and I know that I discovered something important then, about me and about life. I can find magic, but it will always be in unlikely places, at strange times, and never when I’m actually looking for it. Maybe the same is true for you. I dunno. The whole thing paradoxically makes me feel like I won something.

House of the Dragon – A review

I just finished watching the latest suckisode of House of the Dragon, the one where King Rotting Dude is dying. Episode 8, I believe, is my last one. This show is disgusting in the same ways as GOT, but, and this is important, there are no interesting characters. Aristocrats are all sorta boring, really- they don’t know how to do anything, what they try to do they’re bad at, and they seem curiously itchy and smelly under their wigs and robes. But these people blow spore. Ten points for lame. All the epic sets, all the dragon effects, all the smooth camera work, the sound, the music, and yet they failed to give us a John Snow or a Tyrian, a doomed but noble Ned, a badass and magnificent Arya. There are no underdogs worth rooting for here. House of the Dragon, where pale, horny toilets vie for pickled pig’s feet. Even their doom will be stale.

Quantum Leap 2022- A Review

The impossible does happen. Once I was sitting on my front porch filing one of my front teeth. Tiny little chip, not the kind of thing I needed to flush a grand on at some hack dentist front, so there I was. My neighbor Nathan (it was a duplex) was there drinking beer and cheering me on when our landlord appeared. He was a retired lawyer turned finger sniffing weekend biker and he scoffed at these antics. “I’ve never had a cavity,” he boldly declared, clearly disgusted by how close his poor tenants were to the seasons. “My teeth are perfect. In fact I-” and then he stopped talking and a look of bewilderment stole over his rudy features. He reached up and spit a tooth into his hand and then stared at us in stunned horror. “One of my teeth just fell out,” he whispered in a quavering voice. He turned around and walked away, wobbling, smaller, diminished by the cold whimsy of the cosmos. That happened. We were all stunned. Clear and unassailable proof that the impossible does occasionally occur.

What does not occur is a TELEVISION IN A SHITTY GETAWAY VAN IN 1985! McDuh! Holy fuckin moly are you an idiot or just a gluehead cretin? THAT DOES NOT/DID NOT HAPPEN! EVER! Okay. Okay. So a dude name Sam invented a time machine, dudeboy got lost, it was way back when, he had no one but Harry Dean Stanton to talk to. Bummer, shit happens, lotta coke around in those days, people were crazy. I confess I didn’t watch that show, I don’t think I even had a TV in the late 80s, but say all that went down. Now here we are today. Bruce Campbell’s daughter is hot on this science guy, he’s not too sharp for a physicist and he makes the leap! Aw no he lands in a van, a shit van mind you, in 1985 I hasten to add, and there’s a motherfucking television in it! That much impossible is simply truly impossible, as in not at all possible in any way at all, ever, so much so that even thinking it should not be possible. Rewind three minutes because I hilariously forgot to mention one of the science dudes dresses like a guy from Tom Petty’s touring band. Boop. Change channel. Never to watch again. Now I’m not sure about television in general.

In publishing there are editors. Almost none of them are as dumb as the producer who insisted they put a TV in that van. No editor alive would let that TV slip by if it wasn’t their idea (unlikely, but I did see that tooth pop out), they love a ‘whoa dumbass’ smackdown way too much, as they should. In restaurants, another example, if you were a pastry chef and you placed a slice of braised heart of pig on a slice of cake, you’d be fired and a waitress might even try to stab you a little in the ass on your way out. Because waitresses get enough shit already. Or take automotive repair. That television is akin to taking your car in for an oil change and having them paint it orange. It just makes no sense and it even makes you look crazy, and not in a Captain Beefheart way but the wrongheaded dim whit Kid Rock way. I don’t know what the fuck happened there, but I do know this- I was surprised enough to write this review. Quantum Leap 2022, so bad that I made it through ten minutes and felt tainted, like I’d discovered a pickled egg in a donut. I am confused and dumber now.

Recognizing The Good Old Days When They’re Now

How do you relish a period you will later look back on as the good old days? Hard to say. How do you even know you’re in one of those periods? Also challenging. I slyly interviewed some of the big thinkers in my circle (a music producer, a very clever writer, a professional artist) and here are the results.

To begin with, everyone agreed with my description of ‘the good old days’. There are periods, years long, that you look back on with relish. You might miss them, but as you get older that changes into ‘damn I’m glad I did that’ or ‘shit those were good years’, modified by time in that you realize you would no longer enjoy living in such a phase. It was time specific, or in tune with where you were in your allotted lifespan. Crazy days lived when you had crazy energy, etc. Everyone agreed that ‘the good old days’ last a minimum of two years, and they further agreed that the ‘bad times’ in between get shorter and less, well, bad. Bad periods, as you age, are punctuated with little snatches of brightness.

On to the answers. If you begin to think with uncommon frequency about the things you wholesomely enjoyed as a child, like comic books, horses, whatever, that positive nostalgia is a sign that you may be enjoying a period you will someday look back on fondly. The results of this Q-n-A are slanted because pretty much everyone I know is a ‘creative type’ (dork) but they all said that during the good old days of yore they dreamed (as in productive growth) a little bigger and a little more often. No giant leaps of creative scope came during these periods, just solid, well-conceptualized progress. A further slant- we’re all in what we’ll later think of as a ‘good’ period.

The most interesting thing to come from these discussions was what I’ll call ‘the pendulum effect’. It seems that people generally believe that the motion between these phases, the swinging of the pendulum between good and bad, is a dynamic force in life. That motion builds. What it builds no one could agree on. I personally believe that motion builds. Period.

Jury Duty

My notes- Here I am in this room full of strangers, watching a justice system for dummies video. I personally don’t care for cops, judges, lawyers, any of it, and I don’t watch their dumbass TV shows or read the John Grisham fanboy stuff, either. I’m especially eager to get on with it.

Directly across the street is a pawn shop. I can see it through the window. This is America. I am in a visual haiku of some kind. This reminds me of the dream I was having when I woke up. I think I was alarmed. Something unlikely had happened. There was a horse in the shoe store, or a helicopter had dropped a pig in my yard. Something like that. And I thought shit, what if I die today, and that was the last dream I have in this life. My second thought was that my first thought of the day was depressing.

Ooop! The next video is about Unconscious Bias, our inborn horned locust. They give it to us straight, like baby food dumped in rather than spooned. There is no truth, only stories. Too bad they didn’t just say that so we could get moving here.

I can’t pay attention.

I have to move to Mexico. Maybe Florida is far enough away. In Florida, I could sell fake meth or take up professional taxidermy. No one cares what happens there, I might be better off. The jig is up.

Today’s News- 1950’s Revival, Orgies, Cocaine, Non-Twitter Cults, Hookers, TV Dinners… And You!

A few weeks ago I decided, for my own well-being, to stop doom scrolling. I don’t watch the news on television, either. I restricted myself to Phys.org, Smithsonian, and sometimes a little MIT Review. And you know what? The daily hatred and paranoia that never came naturally to me faded away and I felt waaaaaay fuckin’ better. It was always just under the surface, like an LSD hangover or a gas station burrito burn, but now it’s gone. Until today, when I could actually feel the bad news hitting me like a super high-pitched whine or a freakish seismic vibration. The Supreme Scrotum, in all its Corporate Iron War Jesus glory, launched the first wave of their attack. They picked pregnant women first. Next, of course, will be gay marriage, trans everything, and the Blacks will surely suffer, but the charge has begun. And I felt it.

Why bring back the 1950s? As a man of books and letters, I’ll give you a few clues. First, if the literature is to be believed, there were more orgies. Rich people had cults that didn’t involve Twitter. Also, and this is not in dispute, the cocaine was better. Hookers were cheap, varied, and plentiful (STDs were not a huge thing). All told, a groovy time for ugly white males with a few bucks, low self-esteem, moderate perv, and drug problems.