======================================== *** THE INNER SWINE *** Volume 5, Issue 3, September 1999 www.innerswine.com ======================================== "Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." -- Napoleon Bonaparte CONCEPT BY: Jeff Somers, Robert Gala, Ken West, Jeof Vita COVER ART BY: Jeof Vita EDITOR: Jeffrey Somers PUBLISHER In Absentia: Cassie Moore WEBMASTERS: Jeof Vita, Ken West, my own bad self ADVICE & FREE DRINKS: Send Resume c/o The Inner Swine PRÜFREADER EXTRAORDINAIRE: Karen Accavallo OVERALL OFFICIAL COOL CHICK: Lauren Strutzel OFFICIAL FILM DIRECTOR: Stanley Kubrick, who died way too soon. FRIENDS OF THE SWINE: Lauren Strutzel, who has moved to Colorado despite our protests, but who remains our Overall Official Cool Chick; Misty S. Quinn, esq, who still cracks me up and who smells real purty; Jeof Vita, of course, for continuing to draw the good art for us and for not dying earlier this year; Rob Gala, for tolerating my attitude while writing his article last issue and for remaining my friend; [REDACTED] for telling everyone he meets about TIS; Jenna, Marlene, and Pauline for getting so excited about this crappy zine; RA, despite not taking my advice and having yet another child, for being an example of grace under pressure for lo these many years; Cassie Moore, who still does a damned good job of feigning interest every issue; The Duchess for actually buying a TIS in a Philadelphia Tower Records; Elizabeth Augoustiniatos who I don’t talk to enough any more, in one of those sad twists life hands you sometimes; Clint Johns and Mark Purkeypile of Tower for continuing to send me checks; Ken West, for no reason inparticular. ======================================== TABLE OF CONTENTS ======================================== LETTERS FROM THE HOME OFFICE: "Why I Think Jeff Somers is Real Smart./An Open Letter From Jeff Somers" EDITORIAL: "The Morons Come to Jersey" COMMENTARY: "YOU WRITE LIKE YOUR ASS CHEWS GUM" OUR SAD PERSONAL LIVES: "Jeof Vita’s Sleeping Tour of Chicago, annotated. (Or: How We Discovered Brilliant Yellow #12)" JEFF’S STUPIDITY: "My Day In Traffic Court" INTERVIEW: "Ten Questions With Karen Accavallo" VIRTUALLY ARTLESS COMIC: "Mr. Mute! #2" THE FREAKS COME OUT AT NIGHT PART 3: "GERM ENCRUSTED AND PROUD" COMMENTARY: "Lonely and I’m Cold: Your Gentle Editor’s Hangups" COMMENTARY: "The Inner Swine’s Top Ten Stupid Things Otherwise Smart People Do." ADVERTISEMENT: "Medical Science Cures the Shame of Dimwittedness!" FICTION: "Time Will Forgive" COMMENTARY: "A Barren Existence that Ends When I Die" ---------------------------------------- The Inner Swine Volume 5 Issue 3. Magazine published March, June, September, and December by Oinking Sow, Inc. © 1999 by Jeff Somers. (There is no company, really) Individual subscription rates: $5.00 (cheap!) per year in U.S.; $6.00 (cheap!) per year foreign including Canada. Single Copy $2.00 (cheap!) plus $1.00 (cheap!) for postage and handling if ordered by mail, but stop teasing me, you’re never going to order a subscription, you heartless bastards. Free trades are absolutely entertained, send me something, and I will mail you treats. Checks payable to Jeff Somers, Editor. Address submissions and correspondence to Jeff Somers, The Inner Swine, PO Box 3024, hoboken, NJ 07030; mreditor@innerswine.com. But if you send me something, make it good or I will be angered. All submissions or requests for Guidelines (there are no guidelines, though) must be accompanied by S.A.S.E. Accepted submissions are paid in quantities of Misty S. Quinn, Esq’s (pictured) silky undergarments, unless you’d prefer Jeff Somers’ slightly soiled ones. ======================================== WHAT THE FUCK'S BEEN GOIN' ON? ======================================== YOU might think it’s easy to bring the Razzle Dazzle™. I make it look easy. But it isn’t easy. The Razzle Dazzle™ is a hard cross to bear, my friends, and I bring it to you for one reason alone: love. I love the small amounts of cash you all give me for every issue. Well, some of you, anyway. What is Razzle Dazzle™? Hard to explain, really. The Razzle Dazzle™ is when I’ve had a few beers and am convinced to play pool with Jeof Vita and somehow sink three balls in a row that would have challenged Minnesota Fats. The Razzle Dazzle™ is when I’ve had a few beers and am convinced to dance with my date and somehow end up doing a complete split to end a Swing routine Glen Miller would have been impressed with (and find myself paralyzed the next morning). The Razzle Dazzle™ is when I’ve had a few beers while brainstorming for the new issue of The Inner Swine and somehow write 25,000 words in one evening, usually without any memory of having done so. Sometimes I swear this zine is written by elves. The sheer intestinal wear-and-tear, not to mention liver damage, involved in generating the Razzle Dazzle™ is Homeric. And a little nauseating. OUR superiority to most of our peers having been proven conclusively by Woodstock ‘99, I expect to be deified (along with anyone else on my level) any day now based solely on my middling intellect. It’s obvious standards have fallen and you no longer need to be really smart or wise to be deified, simply not having been at Woodstock ‘99 qualifies you, the assumption being that you weren’t there on purpose. Of course, TIS Security Chief Ken West intended to attend but then had to beg off, so we’re not sure about him. Ken is always up for some destruction, but we’ve always regarded him as bright...we are investigating the possibility that he sparked the riots and perhaps controlled them via remote. Our findings will appear in future issues, if we survive. SINCE June, piggies, we here at TIS have been preparing a novel for possible publication with a publisher we’re not sure we trust entirely and planning our vacation. The book will either be published or not. The vacation, one blissful week in Cape May attempting to get Misty Quinn drunk enough to play strip poker on the beach (shouldn’t take too long), may well bankrupt us. We’ve also been collecting checks from Tower Records and reviews from our friends in the Review Zine Community, and struggling through the worst heat wave in history here in Jersey. You think it’s hot where you are? New Jersey is built entirely on top of the largest chromium deposit in the universe, which absorbs the heat and radiates it back with an eerie green glow all night. It’s like living inside a glow-in-the-dark digital watch, except: really hot. Oh, and we had a birthday in August, in case you’re keeping score at home. We celebrated in the usual manner, or at least that’s what I assume since I cannot remember any of it. How old am I? Old enough to remember when Thundercats was shown every weekday from 5pm-5:30pm, bwana. And that’s old. And now, without further ado...The Inner Swine, already in progress! ======================================== 1999: The Year of ME Heres what they're saying about ME: ======================================== Ninjalicious of Infiltration fame ($2 cash/postage to POB 66069, Town Centre PO, Pickering, ON, L1V 6P7; www.infiltration.org; ninj@infiltration.org) checked in once again with his new issue (#13) concerning ‘going places you’re not supposed to go’ (in this issue, that means The Sheppard Subway and Festival Hall in Toronto), which generally means exploring, that ancient and noble human urge. He also provides some tips and advice on how to explore construction sites/off-limits areas safely and comfortably. Lots of fun to read, even if the last time you dared get your socks muddy was in the twelfth grade, like me. Ninj also had this to say about TIS 5(1): "‘Twas a magnificent issue. The Maxim article was utter satirical brilliance. I didn’t love ‘Freaks of the Industry’...didn’t seem to have much mirth or purpose...’I Would Eat my Cat’ was hilarious....painfully funny. Out of paper. Oh well. See ya sucker." We think Ninj is a classy guy who obviously knows good writin’ when he sees it, and we salute his good taste in bathroom reading material. We (that’s the royal ‘we’, by the way) also think he maintains a rockin FAQ for the alt.zines newsgroup. Stop by and troll, we love it. BTW, Ninj has recently gotten some hassles from the Toronto officials who feel that a) he shouldn’t be poking his nose into private property and that b) he certainly shouldn’t be broadcasting how he does it to millions of impressionable youths via his zine and web site. Show the man some support and buy an issue, you’ll be pleasantly surprised. M. Cameron Newell bought a subscription from us back in May and then wrote us this: "Sure, I was giddy with schoolgirl-like delight when I received confirmation of my subscription to The Inner Swine...I was also pleased ro receive several back issues of TIS which immediately went to good use carpeting the inside of my cats litter box (thanks again), never before has my pet done his business with such a look of total serenity and demure...I was miffed at Mr. Somers’ remark stating that he was displeased knowing that I ‘make buckets of money...yet only spent 5 bucks on one subscription’...It can be inferred that I even enjoy reading it, even though its combination of apathy, cynicsm, and foul humor has degraded my usual lust for life. The thing is entertaining, yes. So for a brief moment I considered sending more money to get a subscription sent to someone else...But I quickly reconsidered. It is one thing to willfully subject oneself to the content contained in TIS, it is quite another to press it on to someone else...someone perhaps who still feels optimistic about the slippery slope...current society is on toward the Lake of Fire..." Mr. Newell claimed in his earlier missive to "...make buckets of money...enough to fund my upcoming run for Pope." Now, that’s a lot of scratch, bwana, and I think I was justified in whinging about getting a lousy five buck subscription. At any rate, the TIS lawyers have looked into the situation and have assured me that we have no obligation to either return Mr. Newell’s money or stop sending him swines, so we’re happy. Cathleen Grado of Dreemykreem (PO Box 6304, Hoboken, NJ 07030, $1.00/selected trade or $10 year sub) wrote us the nicest letter ever: "Thank you so much for The Inner Swine. The writing is amazing. I read it cover to cover in one set. I could relate to many of the ideas...and respect you and your writers’ ability to articulate your thoughts clearly and with wit..thanks so much!" While the possibility that Cathleen has confused us with some other zine must be considered, we’ll take the compliments and run, baby. Dreemykreem bills itself as "decadence for the wicked" and I really dig its choice of illustration. Check ‘em out. Ten Things Jesus Wants You to Know (8315 Lake City Way NE #192, Seattle, WA 98115; www.10things.com) reviewed us again, and once again we disappointed them big time: "The funniest thing about reading this zine is that I was sitting on a toilet when I read the first few pages. Why is this funny? Because they quote a previous 10 Things review and that reviewer "read it on the crapper" as well. Hey, at least I got a laugh out of it. There’s some interesting (and slightly amusing) writing buried somewhere in this zine, the trouble is that it’s surrounded by annoying babble that unfortunately makes you want to put the issue down. The gem here is an essay titled "If reality were based on Maxim magazine. (reviewed by Lee P). Well, at least we’re the reading material of choice for the bathrooms over there, that’s something, isn’t it? Emersøn Damerøn asked for a sample issue and then wrote back: "I can say with only a limited degree of sycophantic stammering that the Swine is among the finest zines I’ve encountered of late. The writing is fluid, intelligent, and sometimes painfully humorous. Also, needless to say, the cast of characters is embarrassingly lovable. Aces, my friend. Aces." He also sent us ten bucks, and as such I must say: no, Emersøn, thank you. We love Emersøn. You should too, and maybe he’ll send you ten bucks. Jen Angel sent us a copy of The Zine Yearbook Vol. 3 (probably because I sent her $7 for one) and we’re mighty impressed, despite the fact that our name only appears at the end on the Honorable Mentions page. Fix! Fix! No, really, We dig the yearbook, it’s a fascinating collection of the cream of the zine crop from 1998. We encourage everyone to send Jen some cash and check it out for yourself. If you like to read things Oprah will never hear about, this is a good place to start. (Become the Media, POB 353, Mentor, OH 44061). Some person named Khiori emailed me rather mysteriously to say: "Your writing is *VERY* good. No, I am not an editor or anything of the sort. Just a person whose hobby has always been reading. In the last couple years I've read quite a bit of short fiction posted on the web, but nothing that comes close to your caliber. Have you published a collection of your short stories?" I ask you, how is that someone like me isn’t rich and famous? It must be my potential foot odor problem. Zine World checked in with a pair of reviews of us, at least no one mentioned the freakin bathroom, eh?: "The Inner Swine v5#1: This is really hit-and-miss. The whole gag seems to be utter contempt for everyone, including readers of the zine. The articles are written well enough, but they tend to go on too long (especially the uninteresting ones). There’s a long editorial about technology’s drawbacks, a decent but too-long deconstruction of Maxim in particular and men’s magazines in general, an OK short story called "The Monosyllabic Girl," and a lot more. The Inner Swine is worth taking a look at, if you can stomach the attitude, but it feels sort of like the zine is treading water:Joe" and "The Inner Swine v5#2: Jeff’s main interest in life is clearly Jeff, but he’s smart, he’s funny, he writes very well and swaggers in style, so his self-infatuation is perfectly understandable. Among the many high points here are "5 Ways to Rebel in Everyday Life," "It’s Mr. Mute" (a "virtually artless comic," and a pretty damn funny one), and presidential candidate Levon Sobieski’s platform: free beer for everyone, and no religion, no rabblerousers, no troublemakers, please. Some parts of TIS didn’t work for me, like a long exchange of emails planning a weekend get-together between friends, but hell, maybe that’s just me. This remains, however, without doubt, one of the finest zines ever to emerge from Jersey City. Recommended, in case you couldn’t tell. This is some serious high-quality shit: Wendy" Well, one out of two ain’t bad, and we love seeing our name in print no matter what else. Zine World rocks, you shoudl buy a copy. Aiko of Cobweb Junction (2800 Marilona Dr., Sacramento, CA 95821; 1 copy for stamps/trade) wrote us a nice letter in which they said, in part: "I picked up The Inner Swine #5 yesterday and, to be eloquent, it’s great....You’re right about everything, you bastard, and that’s all I’m going to say about that." Aw, shucks. Aiko’s zine is interesting and well worth two stamps, check it out! Skye Bergen emailed me too: "I just happened to get my paws on my first issue of The Inner Swine and, might I say, I am now an eternal fan. I am the magazine buyer/slave at Tower books in Sacramento. I adore your zine and wish you many happy issues." They then went on to threaten me with bodily harm if I didn’t answer ‘questions’, so I turned the matter over to Ken West. Craig Purcell sent me a lovely piece of mail art in which my own heavenly mug had been used as the base image. It’s gorgeous! And the art ain’t bad either. Thanks, Craig! Vincent Voeltz of Breakfast (3621 153rd Lane NW, Andover, MN 55304-3020; http://www.winternet.com/~voelzv/breakfast; breakfast @winternet.com; $2.50 for sample issue) sent me issue 1(1) of ‘the zine about your favorite meal’. "I enjoy your posts on alt.zines...and I can’t wait to read your zine. (I loved the .aiff of Mrs. O’Connor on your site: ‘Couldn’t it be more positive?’" I didn’t realize anyone was downloading those sound files, that’s very nice to hear. Although Mrs. O’Connor stopped talking to me shortly after I used her phone message without her permission to milk yuks out of my web site....chicks, man. Breakfast is a neato little zine. Very rarely do I give a shit about zines that cross my desk, but Breakfast a) looks great, with a clean, well-printed design and b) is fascinating. Breakfast is a meal and time of day loaded with possibility and crammed with vapors from the evening before, and for a man living in a state with so many Diners breakfast has always been an interesting time of the day. Especially since I rarely indulge in it. Vincent and his cronies write about anything breakfast-related: restaurant reviews, recipes, and my favorite, a man trying to eat at every Denny’s in the world. Not in the USA, friends, in the world. I heartily reccommend Breakfast to all swine. (See ad on page 60) DB Pedlar of Skunk’s Life wrote us too: "If your zine is even 1/4 as amusing as your posts in alt.zines and letters in Passions I should have a grand amusing read. Enclosed $3 for latest issue..." Anyone who sends me $3 is an okay person in my book and gets a personal recommendation to heaven from yours truly. Thanks, DB! Well, that’s it for the TIS mailbag. Thanks to everyone who thought to write me, especially those who reviewed us or gave us money. Remember, we’re living in a society here, and communication is the foundation of any society. We here at The Inner Swine love mail of any kind in every envelope. Sadly, we often find only letters. We’re not sure what love looks like, but we’re getting to be pretty sure it don’t come in envelopes. Unless you count those Adam & Eve catalogs I get. Which I don’t, usually. ======================================== *** LETTERS FROM THE HOME OFFICE *** ======================================== ---------------------------------------- Why I Think Jeff Somers Is Real Smart by Levon Sobieski ---------------------------------------- Hello! Levon writing here. First off I’d like to thank everyone who wrote me to express their support for my Presidential Campaign! According to Mr. Somers, I don’t need anyone’s ‘support’ since we’re going to win through ‘theft, fraud, and implied violence’ and Mr. Somers is never wrong, but it still warmed my heart. Thank you. Mr. Somers is why I’m here, talking to you through this new invention Mr. Somers taught me called ‘writing’. In my house when growing up people who knew how to read and write usually turned out to be witches and had to be hunted down and killed like dogs, by the Men of the village. My Mother forbade us to learn, for fear that Satan would convert us through writings. But Mr. Somers has cured me of that illusion, and under his strict tutelage I am learning fast! How’s my English, America?! As my campaign ‘gets into gear’ to take on Mr. Bush and Mr. Gore and that strange-looking man Mr. Forbes, I am more and more impressed by Mr. Somers’ immense genius. When I learned that the theme of the new issue of The Inner Swine was to be the nature of intelligence, it seemed only right that Mr. Somers’ intellect be reported on, and I knew he was too humble to do so himself. As a surprise to him I worked on this article in secret, during my rare rest breaks, usually writing on toilet paper in the small bathroom stall which also serves as my ‘Presidential Suite’. It took me many weeks, especially since Mr. Somers’ strict tutelage usually leaves my fingers broken and bloodied, which makes gripping the charcoal difficult. Mr. Somers is strict because he demands perfection from me. I remember -well, not actually remember but I’ve reconstructed events from other peoples’ accounts- the first time I mistook Jeb Bush for George Bush Jr.; Mr. Somers beat me unto blindness. My sight returned a few days later while recuperating, but I learned a valuable lesson anyway. I’m not sure I can articulate this lesson, but my God did I learn it. Mr. Somers has taught me many things: the English language, the Art of Politics, how to cheat at Solitaire. But most importantly, he has taught me that he is one of the most brilliant men in the world today. Once, I saw him bend a spoon just with the power of his mind! Think of how powerful a brain must pulse beneath his skull! Then he told me that any time he could unleash that power on me and bend me, like a spoon. Then he told me he could read my thoughts and knew I was plotting against him, which was odd since I never plot against Mr. Somers. But then I thought about it and realized that subconsciously I must have been, or else Mr. Somers would not have read those thoughts in me. Mr. Somers has a plan for the world once we have secured ultimate power. I cannot understand his plan, it makes no sense to me, but that is only because I am not as intelligent as Mr. Somers. If I were I would see its obvious advantages and the benefits it will bring to mankind, or at least the members of mankind who meet Mr. Somers’ exacting standards, of which I imagine there will not be many. He is a great man. Once I saw him consume an entire gallon jug of cheap red wine and still drive our campaign bus with exact skill and cat-like reflexes. Most men would have passed out and vomited from that amount of alcohol, but Mr. Somers has powers beyond those of normal men. It is important that everyone understand this as we head out onto the campaign trail. A vote for me is really a vote for Mr. Somers, and rest assured you will be getting the most brilliant man alive for the job. In closing, I’d like to thank everyone for reading this, and I hope my English was acceptable. Through the teachings of Mr. Somers, I actually get nauseous whenever I try to write an incorrect or incorrectly spelled word, so my writing has improved greatly. Remember: Vote for The Inner Swine Irritation Party in 2000! Or else Mr. Somers will seek revenge, and I will be powerless to stop him. ---Levon ---------------------------------------- An Open Letter from Your Editor: I need your cash. by Jeff Somers ---------------------------------------- Readers, the question comes up again and again: "Why aren’t you guys so rich and famous you’ve totally forgotten your roots and become ultra lame and fake?" The answer, of course, is that despite our daily efforts (via booze, television, and trashy paperbacks) to forget our roots they persist in our minds like feral weeds, strangling the life of luxury and malaise we all aspire to. And also too we’ve always been lame and fake. Obviously, we here at The Inner Swine are Promotionally Challenged. Most of the world is happily ignorant of our presence -we exist like Carpenter Ants, silently chewing away at the fibers of society, hidden until the whole fekken cabinet collapses around us, and there we are, mouth full of sawdust and that Alfred E. Neuman What me Worry look on our faces. Most people, when pressed (on public buses, at parties, in bars, and, sometimes, on particularly boozy and lonely evenings, on the busy streets of this sad forsaken city) admit that’s exactly how they want The Inner Swine: hidden. Possibly missing. Still, men and women of our prodigious talent and obvious greed would be expected to have made several TV movies about our tumultuous lives by now; what’s gone wrong, you ask? Gentle reader, Your Editor here has only one answer, shocking and shameful as it is: INTERNET PORNOGRAPHY. We’re absolutely ruined by it, hollowed out from the inside by popup websites and Adult Verification Systems. Whatever thin sliver of talent and energy we had left after sacrificing our last brain cells to last year’s New Years Debacle has been spent, and spent foolishly, on things like videos of Pamela Anderson Whoever doing every man she’s ever married, dated, spoken to, or brushed up against accidentally on the street. Here’s the scenario: Encouraged by three or four subscriptions sold due to a good review in Zine World, I vow to put together a hundred disto sales pitches, sending off the best package of materials they’ve ever seen and guaranteed to make us millionaires by the sheer volume of fool’s gold trickling our way from suckers worldwide. I’ll fire up the computer to start writing letters, laying out one sheets, and we’ll think -hey, might as well check our email, see if anyone decided to say hello, send us some virtual money or whatever. Our future glory still singing in my head, I connect to the Internet, planning the poetry, priming the pump to tap into the reservoir of semi-sincere bullshit I’ve been coasting on for years. I promptly find an email from www.catholicschoolgirls.com. Result: After a spam advertising prompts us to boot up the ole’ browser, the next few days are a blur. When I finally emerge from my apartment, I am pale, shaking, gaunt, and somewhat dehydrated. I have been fired from my job, and cannot bear the sight of plaid. With nothing better to do, I start working on the new issue of this zine, until an innocent search on the word "Pig" brings me www.porkingpaula.com and the next few days are a blur, too. As you can see, I have a disease, I need help. But, of course, such help is expensive, so I need all of you....my readers....my friends....my probation officers, to buy as many issues of The Inner Swine as you possibly can. I need money for lawyers, medication, and, most importantly, my ISP account. --- Jeff ======================================== *** EDITORIAL *** Pig In Shit #16: THE MORONS COME TO JERSEY A Comedy About The Nature of Intelligence. Or something. By Jeff Somers ======================================== NOTE: no one was cast in this production due to similarity with the character, so no one come whining to me. Dramatis Personae The Unutterably Attractive Witches: Misty Quinn, Cassie Moore, Lauren Strutzel Your Editor: Jeff Somers The Gimp: Jeof Vita Lothar, The Incredibly Dense: Ken West Dullard Fillmore: Rob Gala The Good Queen of Common Sense: Karen Accavallo ACT I Scene I: The Inner Swine offices in Jersey City, NJ: dank, dark, and filled with piles of pornographic magazines. Enter the WITCHES. Ugh - look at this place! Does he keep monkeys in here? On manufacturing days I think he has winged chimps stapling for him. (picking up a magazine daintily) Yuck. What the hell does ‘Strapped On Midget Clowns’ mean? (peers at cover, screams, and averts eyes) Enough fooling around -we came here for revenge, don’t forget. Revenge? For what? For casting lovelies such as us as witches in this stupid play. Mr. Big-Shot Editor’s gonna regret the day he gave me a gnarled, wart-ridden nose (wiggles nose irritably). What’s that in his typewriter? (reading) ‘Everyone But Me is Incredibly Dumb’ by Jeff Somers. Looks like the next editorial. Why that man thinks he’s funny, I’ll never know. It gives me an idea. He thinks he’s so smart? Sisters, let’s show him what real idiocy is! How? Are we gonna call him names until he cries and then call him a sissy? That usually works. Uh, hello? We’re witches? We’re gonna cast a spell on the little runt. Yay! (The witches join hands) (in unison) Pull a piggies tail What he hates the most Make everyone the bastard meets As stupid as a post. Shazam! (nodding) Now that oughta do it. If we’re witches, why aren’t we conjuring ice cream or having sex with demon studs or something fun? Sex with demon studs? Or...something. Come on, dammit. Let’s go turn someone into a newt. Yay! (exeunt all) Scene II: Jeff Somers’ apartment: smaller, danker, and darker than the TIS offices. (in bed) Ohhhhh, my aching head. What the hell’s in a ‘Fanny Banger’ anyway? (enter The Good Queen of Common Sense) Holy crow! What’s that smell!? Who the hell are you? Oh no...I didn’t stop drinking again, did I? (alarmed) Where’s my emergency bottle! Out of the way, woman, I need to pry open my toilet tank! Bugs! Bugs under my skin! (restraining him) Calm down, fellow. You’re almost pickled, any more fire water I’m afraid we’ll lose you, and I am NOT performing CPR on you, get me? I still feel like there are bugs under my skin. Listen to me: you’ve been cursed. I’m here to warn you. Three witches have cast a charm upon ye. You will meet three visitors today. What lessons you take from them will decide your fate. Uh....I still have to...uh....make it to the bathroom soon....for, uh, for different reasons... (thundering) ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME? (crumpling up into a ball, holding his ears and weeping) Oh, begone, foul spirit and let me vomit in peace! Take your barbed tongue and shrewish demeanor and torture someone in better physical shape! (pauses) Oh man, that smell is me. Oh, brother. Listen, you’ve been warned: three visitors, each one dimmer than the last. Be careful what you take from their company! Your fate depends on it! (she vanishes) Take thy beak from out my eye....oh, she’s gone. Whew, that’s the last time I drink anything brewed in someone’s bathtub. ACT II Scene I: The Inner Swine Offices by light of day: even danker, somehow. (enter Jeff Somers, looking slightly less jaundiced) Let’s see....I know I left that shrimp salad in here somewhere... (enter The Gimp) Gimp gimp gimp! My goodness...I thought we’d fogged you bastards out. Stay right there, I have a can of DOD-Strength Raid here somewhere -you bastard, did you eat my missing shrimp salad?!? I’m not a roach, although I can tell you a whole lot of pseudofacts about them. Did you know that a roach can live for weeks after its head’s been cut off? It eventually dies from starvation. Did you know that roaches will explode in the microwave? Did you know that one pregnant roach can give birth to thousands of baby roaches? Did you know that after coming into contact with humans roaches wash themselves? Did you know that a duck’s quack makes no echo, and no one knows why? I’m not sure that last one is true. Where’d you read it? (shrugs) I don’t remember. Reading’s dead anyway. Did you know that 75% of the population that still reads newspapers is over the age of 50? Did you know that - Hey, what is this? I’m The Gimp. I’m a species of human who equates a large knowledge of useless, largely unsubstantiated, and disconnected ‘facts’ with intelligence. I can reel off data for hours. I think I’m smart because I know lot’s of trivia. You don’t seem too bright to me. And some of the things you mentioned aren’t true - That’s the point! It doesn’t take intelligence to memorize lists of facts, especially if you don’t bother to substantiate them or comprehend the underlying concepts. But you’ll never convince me! As long as I can pull more quotes and strings of data out of my ass, I’ll think I’m smarter than you. Speaking of asses, did you know we used to have tails and that the spine still has some useless bones and muscles back there for it? Did you know that - (screams) Stop it! Your endless stream of disconnected factoids is torture! It’s just a ruse! You don’t really know anything! That’s not the way I see it. (enter Lothar, the Incredibly Dense) A-ha! I see you have met my companion! My apologies, good sir; he gets away from me sometimes. Gimp boy! Over here! Thank god. He was beginning to drive me crazy. You smell like...sardines, I think. It is offensive. Perhaps you were leaving? Did you know that there is no singular fish called a ‘sardine’. The term is used to describe a large number of small Atlantic fishies which are caught and packaged under that name for consumption. Shut up, Gimp. Yes, sir. So tell me, sir, what do you think about the Economy? Our foreign policy? Midgets? The rights of the diseased? Warehousing of criminals? Uh....who’s asking? Why, I am. Come now, what are your opinions concerning the Space Program, feeding the homeless, athletic scholarships to universities? I haven’t even had my morning coffee yet - It is two in the afternoon. Uh, yes, but you see....I don’t care about any of those subjects. Not before several cocktails, at least. You must have some opinions. Express just one, please. I wish to demolish your arguments and argue with you incessantly. My own opinions must dominate. Oh, no, you’re an Opinionated Bastard, aren’t you? You’re one of those assholes who thinks having opinions is the same as being smart, who can’t stop themselves from constantly expressing those opinions, whether they’re welcomed or not! Oh, the horror! Personally, I believe that horror is an over-rated word. What do you think? I’ll use whatever words I wish any way I wish - You mean you don’t believe that words have fixed meanings and definitions and proper usage governed by grammar and structural rules? I disagree, and proclaim you a moron to utter such an opinion! Words require fixed definitions! If we allowed you to just make up your own shadings and creative usages, it would be chaos! No one would know what you meant! Like Jabberwocky. Huh? Oh, god. Ah, religion! What is your opinion on God, then, dolt? (picking up a convenient baseball bat) Out! I will not have endless and ultimately meaningless arguments with you! Opinions are the commonest coin of man’s mental economy, dammit! It takes no special intellect or talent to have an opinion, and people who proudly proclaim themselves to be opinionated thinking that this is some sort of intellectual qualification are just plain wrong! Ahem, sir, allow me to direct your attention to the following issue of your own publication, wherein you proclaim yourself to have "...more opinions than anyone else..." and that you may well be "...the most well-defined person in the world..." (Jeff snatches the copy of The Inner Swine from Lothar’s hands) I take it back! Even simpletons can have opinions. Simply ponderously forming sentences that begin with the phrase I think that does not qualify you for genius. Dammit, stupid people have opinions too! Your opinions, I might point out, may very well be asinine, as mine have invariably been proven. Give me a few beers, some intense minutes paying half-attention to Night-line, and I will conjure up an opinion for you. That does not, however, make me or anyone else a genius. Winning arguments makes you stubborn, not smart, necessarily. But, you see, I am a very opinionated person by nature... So what? So am I. So’s my Mom’s cat. Nowadays stating that you’re very opinionated is the same as saying I think I’m pretty smart, natch. I’m sick of all of you. Fuck you and your dull, worthless, second-hand regurgitated opinions leeched off of television and pretentious magazines. Or, maybe just plain old fuck you. Such a temper! Perhaps we should leave this place, Gimp, and seek good arguments elsewhere wherein to prove our astounding intellect. But it’s so nice and cool and dark here... (hefting the bat) It’s gonna get darker any minute now. Violence is, in my opinion, the refuge of the lowbrow! (exeunt Gimp and Lothar the Incredibly Dense) Christ. Now where’s that shrimp salad? Scene II: A tavern in New York City. Dark, smoky, filled with aging pensioners and former circus performers. (enter Jeff Somers) Jeff! Hello, fellas. I think I’ve been sobering up without my expressed approval. The usual, then? Line ‘em up! (enter Dullard Fillmore) Drinks are on me! Who’re you? Fillmore’s the name. I’m filthy rich. Can I buy your friendship? Always, and it comes cheap. It’s good to talk with someone who isn’t an idiot. Far from it! In fact, I’m the smartest person I know. Uh-oh. What makes you think that? Clearly I am the most successful person here. I could buy this place, you know? Therefore I must be doing something right. Sure, but do you know what it is? Excuse me? Just because you’re a success materially speaking doesn’t mean you’re smart. Maybe you’re lucky. Maybe you’re instinctively good at one thing that’s made you a lot of success. Can that Ayn Rand Objectivist bullshit. There are plenty of moron millionaires, you know. No no, I’m a Darwinist. If you’re struggling, if you’re a bottom-feeder, it’s because you’re stupid. Smart people succeed. It’s obvious. I had an old teacher who used to say that just because you can say that when it rains you get wet doesn’t mean you can say that if you’re wet it must be raining. It’s backwards logic. As a matter of fact, I’d say that reverse-engineering riches to genius is something only an idiot would do. That’s it: no drink for you, buddy. That’s okay, I’ve got a tab. I’ll go further and suggest that truly smart people don’t really desire great riches, they’re too busy working on their own projects and getting things done. Maybe sometimes this involves getting rich, but often getting rich is a side-effect that smart people stumble on -luck. Just like it was probably luck with you. You always talk like this? Only when making a point. I see. I guess I’ll go drink over there, where people don’t complain so much. (Exeunt Dullard Fillmore. Enter The Good Queen of Common Sense) Criminy. You again? Well, knave, what have you learned from this little adventure? I’m not drinking enough. If you drank any more, you’d likely liquify right in front of me. Watch it, freak girl, or I’ll stop drinking and when the DTs strike I’ll sic my human-sized green rats on you. All right, whatever, I think the air in here is making me dizzy, let’s get this over with. What have your three visitations taught you? Answer wisely, or the curse cannot be lifted. (Enter witches) Hey, whose side are you on, sister? Back off, skanks. I’ll scratch your eyes out. Chick fight! Well? I learned that intelligence isn’t easy to define and that people make a lot of bad assumptions about it. (in the background, soft inspirational music begins playing) Most of us will choose a theory of intelligence that leaves us at the top of the pile, naturally enough. But true genius has nothing to do with a large store of useless if impressive trivia, or how stenuously and proudly opinionated you are, or how successful you are in any aspect of your life. Good enough for me - (interrupting) I learned that as long as people like me continue to assume everyone they meet are dolts and idiots, we can never live in true peace and harmony - All RIGHT! I’ll lift the curse! - that as long as the cruel and haughty owners of the breweries and distilleries of the world continue to deny their fellow men the most basic of human rights, the right to free liquor, we are doomed to continue our lives of quiet desperation and hungover misery - Good christ, fine then, stay cursed, ya buffoon. (exeunt Good Queen of Common Sense, and every body else) - that as long as there are unnecessary and ridiculous laws against public urination - where is everybody? (shrugs, hops the bar, and starts mixing himself a drink.) THE END ======================================== *** COMMENTARY *** YOU WRITE LIKE YOUR ASS CHEWS GUM Being an Unknown Writer Ain’t All Milk and Cookies, Sweetheart By Jeff Somers ======================================== I trace my desire to write to a pair of head injuries I suffered as a child. No, really. The first was when I was very young and my brother Sean and I were wrestling in the living room. Sean is three years older than me and possesses that weird sort of superhuman strength previously only found in Bruce Banner: push Sean too far and he’s like Lenny in Of Mice and Men, he breaks things. That night, he broke me. He tossed me across the room like a sack of marbles and I cracked my head against a chair and suffered a slight concussion. The rest of the evening is a blur. I got my revenge later in the year by causing Sean to sit on a lead pencil, in the hopes that he would acquire lead poisoning and die. Obviously, I failed, and currently I think I don’t regret that. Such is the progress that my sibling relationship has made. A few years later I suffered the second head trauma. In the city, during the summer, the temperatures often reach giddy levels of Salvadore Dali-like hallucination and the inhabitants have traditionally staved off mass death by opening up the fire hydrants and basking in the cool, bitter water. This usually means a few buildings have to burn to the ground due to a lack of available water, but it’s better than melting alive, which is no way to die. At any rate, one summer the superintendent of the apartment building across the way had opened up the hydrant to save the childrens’ lives and I went out to run amok in the water. I was having a great time, until my second head trauma. All I remember is looking up in time to see this red-headed kid who must have weighed six hundred pounds bearing down on me. The next few hours were just a blur. Another concussion, another hospital trip. I was never quite the same. I spent the next few months wandering the house in a bathrobe, feeling strangely disconnected and meaningless for a nine-year-old. I started smoking cigarettes, drinking heavily. I called a lot of 1-900 porn numbers. When school started again, I dealt some drugs and got into a lot of fistfights. Got that embarrassing Fred Flintstone tatoo on my ass that I’ll never live down; all I can say it sounded good at 3AM in Union City after a handful of Reds and a six pack and an evening dancing to Samba music and betting heavily on the cockfights. And then, one day, I just started writing. Since then, the only thing that has stayed constant in my life is writing. Through various rehabs, blackouts, hospital stays, prison stretches, relationships, and personalities, I’ve always written. And the one thing I can say for sure about the business of writing is this: the Editors are all fucking crazy. I got my first rejection letter sometime in 1987 from a magazine called Fiction Network. It was a form letter, beginning with the unpromising salutation "Dear Writer..." At the time I was disappointed by this; I’d hoped for a personal letter that began "Dear Massive Undiscovered Genius..." Nowadays, form letters are the best kind of rejection, because otherwise you get a glimpse inside the often evil, usually bizarre mind of the Editor on the other end. You think I’m fucked up? At least I don’t spend my life rejecting the pathetic writings of others, building up an ego the size of Jupiter like a massive oil deposit melting off the dead dinosaur of your timid creative offering. Besides, I have head traumas. What’s their excuse? My first brush with that curious animal I’ll term the Editor Insane came not much later: a little blue rejection slip dated 1/11/88 from a magazine called Samisdat. I got Samisdat’s address from The Writer’s Market and in 1988 I was 16 years old. Here’s the cheerful little personal note I got back from this bastard: "Dear Jeff: I don’t trust photocopies, or any excuse for sending them (I’ve heard them all.) Apart from that [your story has] a plotline probably old when James Thurber worked it 50 years ago. You probably can place it. I’d recommend a magazine explicitly serving writers; Samisdat mainly serves activist writers." On the front of the rejection letter was the cheerful motto: "If you write like your ass chews gum, we’ll say so." To say that this rejection scarred me emotionally would be accurate. While I eventually got over the damage to my pride and determination, I remain haunted by the man’s statement that he didn’t trust photocopies. The implication being that I’m supposed to send him my original? My one and only copy of the story? Or perhaps he required handwritten works, to ensure that desktop publishing was not the culprit. I wonder about this man to this day, what kind of emotional Nazi he has to be in his real life. I feel for his children. This was hardly my last brush with The Editor Insane, but it remains a frightening glimpse at the arrogance necessary for someone to imagine they know good writing. A lot of Editors seem to assume that if they take an interest in your short story or freelance proposal, then they’ve purchased your attention lock, stock, and barrel. See, it’s not the criticism that bothers me so much; people have been telling me that I suck pretty much from the first words I scrawled on paper. No, what bugs me is the fact that they feel compelled to express their world view to me. I’ve received over four-hundred and seventy-five rejections in my time. I’ve sold a grand total of seven pieces of genuine Somers fiction. That ratio is even more dispiriting when you consider that of the seven sales, only four have actually made it into print. Here are the fates of the three publishers who never actually printed my work: -- The Andromeda Press: went out of business in 1990, 13 months after agreeing to publish me. -- Kubicek & Associates: went out of business in 1989, 1.5 years after agreeing to publish me. -- Another Chicago Magazine: have apparently disappeared, or else they’re avoiding me while making millions publishing my story in foreign countries. Add in the fact that Acclaim Comics, which bought a story of mine for a Sliders comic book, also went out of business (albeit after successful publication of the comic), and you’ve got a disturbing phenomenon of fiscal failure connected to my creative energies. I call it the "Somers Curse" and I dutifully warn prospective publishers about it. I might single-handedly ruin the industry, given enough time. I have made a total of $1607.50 for my writing (not counting the fortune I’ve made hawking The Inner Swine): $1600.00 for the story I co-wrote with Jeof Vita for the comic book Sliders: Blood and Splendor, $7.50 for the story "Glad and Big" published by Aberrations magazine (My first check!), and a big fat zero for two stories I published in a magazine called Being. Being was my first printed credit, and it taught me a big lesson: markets that don’t pay you have very little by way of a screening process, which is to say they’ll publish anything. What the hell -they’re not investing anything into it. These days, if there’s no paycheck involved, I don’t get very excited, unless the venue is huge as far as exposure goes. If Playboy wanted to publish one of my stories for free, I’d be ecstatic. When Benny’s Personally Photocopied Zine wants to publish me pro bono, I don’t mind, but I don’t get very excited about it. So, with enough rejection slips to wallpaper my apartment with, I’d say I’ve got a little experience. Let’s say not as much as some, more than others, to be fair. I don’t mind the rejections; most of the stories I’ve submitted over the years have Sucked with a capital "S" and I consider the rejections warranted, usually. No, what has ground down my will to live has definitely been all the Editors Insane I’ve met along the way. Like the Grammar and Spelling Nazis. In 1991 I got a rejection from Square One Magazine out in Milwaukee. The Editor didn’t even read the story, because I misspelled the word "Received" in my cover letter. I got back a scrawled note saying "Cover letters can kill...sad but true...(unintelligible)" and a photocopy of an article about good cover letters. I don’t think this bastard read another word after "received", which was the second word of my cover letter. Now, I fully admit that troubled spelling in a cover letter is not a good sign and I can understand why they might not have wanted to waste any more time on me, but the enclosed article just made me grind my teeth. There was nothing wrong with the content of my cover letter, I misspelled one fucking word. When I buy a magazine or a book and find a typo, I don’t put it down and stop reading in stifled horror, do I? In the time it took this idiot to photocopy the article and scrawl their quip, they could have at least read the first page of my story and rejected me for a real reason, like everyone else. Another fun brush with Editorial insanity comes with the Disorganized Moron. Maybe I’m wrong to expect a certain level of organization from people who solicit submissions from me. I mean, I know that editing a small press magazine isn’t easy (believe me, I know) and if you add in getting thousands of submissions from thinly talented and strongly egotistical fiction writers it can become a nightmare. But if you’re gonna do it, do it right. When I send off a submission I gotta make a photocopy of the story, write a cover letter, package it up nice, mail it, and then keep track of when I sent it so I can follow up when the Disorganized Moron loses it and then forgets they ever got it in the first place (which has happened so many times I almost expect it, now.) My favorite Disorganized Moron came in 1993. I submitted a story to a magazine in New Jersey (which shall remain nameless) and then didn’t hear from them for quite some time. A polite letter was fired off. I received letter which stated: "Dear Writer, BEYOND is no longer accepting manuscripts...since we will not be publishing any further issues." At the bottom the Disorganized Moron had scribbled "If you don’t send a SASE [self-addressed stamped-envelope] or return postage, you will never hear from a publisher, particularly not one of the Pros" Well, la-di-da. Then, two weeks later, I got a standard rejection letter from the Disorganized Moron in the SASE I’d sent with the submission. I pondered this, and realized there probably was a reason this magazine had ceased publication. Of course, I’ve made clerical errors in submitting stories, and sometimes been forgiven by kind-hearted Editors, so perhaps I have no right to bitch about such things. Fine. Let it drift. The ultimate insult in submitting your works o’ genius to a small press is The Incest Factor. Incestuous Editors send your rejection note back on a subscription form to the magazine, which to me is the same thing as the old beat cop asking you for your paperwork in hopes of getting a Benny from you. The implication here is that subscribers make up the bulk of the magazine’s writer-pool. Certainly, even if this isn’t true, it isn’t hard to imagine that purchasing a $25 subscription might make the Editor friendlier towards you. Problem is, if I could afford to buy fifty $25 subscriptions, I wouldn’t need to get paid for my writing. Hell, I could just take that $1250 and print the fucking thing up myself. Equally disturbing is the idea that all the writers represented in the magazine are the subscribers, too, which makes the magazine more of a writers club than a legitimate market. There’s something sad about The Incest Factor, all these people basically engaged in subsidy publishing, fooling themselves into thinking their incredible skills is all it took. Finally, a monstrous outgrowth of The Incest Factor is The Opinion Strongarm. Most of your big, established magazines (e.g. The New Yorker, Story, Ploughshares) just send you impersonal notes which say polite, colorless platitudes and little else. This at least grants you the dignity of corporate blandness, you know? When you do manage to get a little note from someone there, it feels like a triumph to have broken through the platitudes. People will tell you that "feedback" is a writer’s Holy Grail, but I disagree, because too often "feedback" is merely The Opinion Strongarm in disguise. When you get an Editor cursed with The Opinion Strongarm, watch out: you’re about to get a lesson in toadying. Basically, The Opinion Strongarm is an Editor who contacts you, either with a "just-missed" rejection or a tentative acceptance, based on future editing. In the course of the contact, they direct you to read some example stories from their publication, or mention some theory of writing popular at one of those WASPy Ivy-League Creative Writing Courses. The expectation is that you’ll run along and read what they’ve told you to, and then come running back panting about how great it all was. The stories they suggest you read are invariably ones they bought for the publication, the theories invariably ones they themselves subscribe to. The expectation is, you will agree with anything they say because they’re dangling a sale in front of you. This happened to me just a few weeks ago, in March 1999. An Editor contacted me about a story and suggested I read some of the stories they’d championed at their publication. Why? Ostensibly to see what style they were looking for, what kind of work made their grade. In reality, there’s no reason for me to know this. Either they like my work, or they don’t. The real reason I was directed to read these stories was so I could congratulate the Editor on their amazing taste. I couldn’t do it. I’m a moron, I know, but I read some of the stories suggested and found them boring to a fault, the usual literary bullshit that gets published a lot and hardly ever remembered ten years later. I didn’t say it quite like that, of course, but I did tell the Editor that I didn’t find those stories very appealing. What followed was classic Opinion Strongarm: several more responses from the Editor wondering how it was possible that I didn’t like those stories. Also included was a lot of detail on this Editor’s Philosophy of Editing, about how it didn’t matter if they liked you personally, only that they liked your work. Yadda yadda yadda -bullshit. What this Editor wanted was for me to agree wholeheartedly with their opinions, their tastes, and then they would (possibly) reward me with the symbolic reach-around of a published credit. Oh, it can suck, baby. I continue to mail out submissions (90 last year alone) and I continue to sell next to none of them. That this has possibly made me bitter towards Editors has to be considered, though I don’t think it has. When I get a reasonable rejection, or even a form rejection, I don’t feel much beside disappointment. It’s the Editor Insane that drives me nuts, y’know? Let’s face it, being a successful writer of fiction or poetry or freelance magazine pieces is along the same lines as wanting to be an actor: lots of wannabes, a few talented and lucky people, and the rest of us scrambling around for a break. It’s easy to prey on someone’s hopes and dreams, and I think a lot of Editors do so to feed their own egos. Which is better than ripping them off in some sad subsidy publishing deal, but which still sucks. Thank goodness The Inner Swine has made me a millionaire. ======================================== *** OUR SAD PERSONAL LIVES *** JEOF VITA'S SLEEPING TOUR OF CHICAGO (annotated) (Or: How We Discovered Brilliant Yellow #12) by Jeff Somers ======================================== 1. Pennsylvania May Be Larger Than It Appears FIVE minutes in the car and a rumor began to circulate that Ken had a copy of MAXIM magazine’s ‘50 Hottest Hotties’ issue somewhere in the car. We had a twelve-hour drive ahead of us, and Ken had been relieved of his car radio the night before by the kind and generous criminals of Jersey City, always eager to be of assistance. In the stark and quiet interior of what would serve as our mobile prison for the next half day, we’d already begun eyeing each other nervously, and I’d already referred to Jeof Vita as "shithead" twice. At the wheel, Ken West was sobbing softly, tears running gently down his face[1]. We all knew: entertainment was going to be essential. If there was a MAXIM filled with half nekkid babes somewhere, we were going to need it[2]. Half an hour later, I am burrowed into Ken’s trunk, searching frantically for the rumored periodical, which is proving elusive. My facial expression resembled James Brolin’s in the scene from "The Amytiville Horror" when he’s searching for the lost catering check. In the front seat, Ken is bravely driving through Jeof’s bout of Entertainment Withdrawal. As Jeof writhes and froths next to him, Ken softly hums the "Theme from Shaft" in a vain attempt to soothe him. We’re not even in Pennsylvania yet. ROUTE 80 through Pennsylvania and Ohio and Indiana and, hell, any other part of the country that doesn’t have a measurable murder rate is a barren, charred wasteland of scorched earth, dead cows, and Rest Stops. It takes about 3 Actual Hours to cross Pennsylvania, but the extensive field of mind-numbing Apathy generated by the state dilates time, so that it takes 75 Dilated Hours to escape Pennsies unique gravity well, during which one can cross the line into insanity and come back out again[3]. We passed the time somehow. I regaled my fellows with descriptive tales of my self-pleasuring techniques (I can still hear Jeof’s twisted scream: "Get the image out of my head!! AHAAHAA!"). We stopped at a Howard Johnson’s for a really greasy breakfast and really, really great coffee. Not to mention several newspapers in a desperate attempt to stop talking to each other. While driving, Ken amused himself by pretending that the deep humming noise made by our car moving over rumble strips were gaseous emissions he couldn’t control[4]: (Sound of car over rumble strips): BRRRRRRUUUMMMPP[5] KEN: Oh my lord! Excuse me! JEOF & ME: Hee hee! In this manner, we staved off madness. Although at some point Jeof and Ken found it amusing to recite that fucking Eminem song "Slim Shady": KEN: Hi! JEOF: My name is... KEN: What? JEOF: My name is... KEN: Who? Probably because it drove me to conniptions, and my pain amused them. So perhaps madness found us after all. Eventually Jeof dozed off into what would prove to be a semi-permanent doze, leaving Ken and I to stare straight ahead in silence, both of us poised to murder each other at the slightest provocation. Upon arriving at our hotel in Chicago, we carried Jeof into the room, stripped him naked, and took photographs until it was time for bed. 2. You Say People Gonna Die? We got lost on the way to Wrigley Field due to Ken’s arrogance. While he struggled to come to terms with his failure, Jeof and I annoyed him by imitating Jar Jar Binks from The Phantom Menace in response to...anything[6]. KEN: I think we’re in Milwaukee. JEOF/JEFF: You say people gonna die? Ken got increasingly white-knuckled under this assault but did, to be fair, eventually deliver us to Wrigley. Cubs Vs. Mets. Most probably due to the torrid pace of Cubs’ world championships, Wrigley Field turns out to be the coldest place on earth, and we fuse to the seats instantly. The game is a cold one too, and by the 7th inning the Mets are down 2-0 and we are almost done freeing ourselves via the liberal use of hot chocolate, applied directly to the flesh/metal spot welds which have trapped us. Jeof, announcing that cold makes him sleepy, has to be carried away gently. Ken and I bear him to the car, lock him in the trunk, and go off to do some shopping. Upon our return, we find that Jeof has soiled Ken’s trunk, demonstrating his disapproval of our actions[7]. 3. Shappy After a quick stop at our hotel to clean up, make more masturbation jokes, begin our complex and layered plot to make our fortunes via hotel towel theft, and to lay the groundwork for our Lingerie/Tickle-Fight Rave (all women invited) planned for later on. In short, we planned our Saturday Night in Chicago[8]. We drove to Halstead Street. On the way we discovered that a mysterious man named "Shappy" was apparently hosting parties at several clubs around town. This feat of endurance, performance, and apparent cloning impressed us, and after a spirited discussion we had used shappy as a new root word meaning excellence and created several hundred new words, such as: Shappy? (is it excellent?); Shappy! (yes! it is excellent!); Shappadelic (transcendentally excellent); Shapped (defeated egregiously); etc. For the remainder of the evening, Jeof Vita and I held hundreds of conversations which consisted of just two words (followed by inevitable commentary from Ken): ME: Shappy? JEOF: Shappy! KEN: Good grief. Lured by the promise of ‘killer margaritas’ we went to a Mexican place called Ceasar’s where we were served drinks the size of Lake Michigan. By the time we were staring blearily at the bottom of our mammoth glasses the evening had reached that magical moment when anything at all seems possible and absolutely none of it is in any way advisable. Arm and arm, we staggered out into the street in search of a new bar and new adventures. "Shappy?" I would shout. "Shappy!" Ken and Jeof would respond, like Pavlovian dogs without motor control[9]. 4. Sure Shot The later events of our Saturday Night in Chicago are sadly lost to a combined blackout, a lack of investigative fervor on our part (we really don’t want to know) and, possibly, the Illinois State Prosecutor’s Office. The facts are these: I woke up in the bathtub. Ken and Jeof were found in the car, out in the parking lot, engine running. In the trunk we found 114 packages of instant pudding. All of us were viciously hungover. The rest is lost, mere speculation. We could not wake Jeof. Since it was noon, we went to a local IHOP for lunch, where things were quickly made shappadelic again thought the liberal application of grease and chocolate shakes[10]. Then we motored to the Chicago Art Institute for some culture; Jeof Vita’s continued somnolence became worrisome, and we had to put together a little harness so we could carry him around with us, from place to place. This proved to be less of a problem than we would have supposed, since we quickly found we could leave him anywhere with a crude sign affixed to him ("DANGEROUS: DO NOT FEED OR TICKLE") and he was left alone by the wary Chicago natives. Everything went well at the museum until we made our way into the Modern Art section. Ken West emerged from one walled-off room scowling and began pushing people and smashing sculptures, saying "What they’re calling ‘art’ in there is just ridiculous. Jeof and I investigated and in that very room we coined the second term of our evolving new language: Brilliant Yellow #12[11]. Briiliant Yellow #12 (brill-yant yell low number twelve; noun). 1. Nothing. 2. Emptiness. 3. Worthless. 4. A blank white canvas with a thin yellow border painted on it on display at The Chicago Art Institute as a work of art. This painting was completely blank, except for the thin yellow border around it. It was Cow Eating Grass, for God’s sake, and it gave us a new term for "nothing" or "worthless", used thusly: ME: Jeof’s artistic skills amount to brilliant yellow #12. JEOF: Oh yeah? Your love life has been brilliant yellow #12 so long your right hand won’t even talk to you. KEN: Shut UP, you brilliant yellow #12-heads, I am trying to DRIVE. Outraged, we joined Ken in setting the place on fire. Then we went to Grant Park nearby, where Jeof once again fell asleep. We tried pushing him into Lake Michigan, but the bastard floated and was rescued every time we tried it. After the third try we got a stern lecture from the Park Rangers and we had to cart Jeof off to the Buckingham Fountain to let him dry off a little before hauling him back to Ken’s car[12]. Like a dog hanging its head out the window, the ride revived Jeof a little. We debated what to do with our last evening in Chi-town, but every suggestion seemed to fail. Jeof began mimicking the beginning of that Beastie Boys song "Sure Shot": the sound of a tape winding down, and then the flute riff. It was his way of indicating failure. After a while anything I said was met with Jeof’s International Audio Symbol for Failure, "Sure Shot". We were tired and cranky on our last night in Chicago, and for some reason (probably connected to our adventures of the night before, but who knew?) we were constantly being eyed suspiciously by Chicago police, who often surrounded the car, making notes in their pads and nodding ominously. We decided we needed a place to lie low, and being tourists we figured the dark and lonely-looking Pizzeria Uno was our best bet. There we discovered a remarkable thing: the original Pizzeria Uno is exactly like all the other Pizzeria Unos. It’s smaller, but otherwise the experience is exactly the same. We reflected on the Malling of America for a moment. Then Ken suddenly began to sweat and shiver, and in a quiet, calm voice informed us that Caesar’s Revenge had him in its oily grip and that we had to leave. Immeidately. We added to our truly amazing level of Chicago Bad Debt by skipping out on the bill, strapped Jeof to Ken’s back for the ride back to the hotel, and fell asleep amidst the garbage, discarded lingerie, and broken glass of our room[13]. 5. Electrical Engineering is Easy[14] I don’t care what anyone tells you, waking up at 6:00AM in order to get into a car already befouled by three days worth of your own BO, farts, and snack crumbs is NO WAY to live. One step ahead of the hotel goons who were intent on making us pay for all that damage, I climbed wearily into the familiar back seat of Ken’s car, saw my butt prints from our 12 hour drive to Chicago, and began to moan softly as I settled into the welcoming indentation as if I were sinking into the comforting confines of failure. Obviously, we desperately needed a radio. Otherwise we were going to throttle each other. We pulled into an Indiana rest stop, bought an adjustable wrench, and began the complicated process of installing the radio Ken had bought. Ken struggled to connect wires while Jeof dozed and I amused myself by randomly connecting the battery: KEN: Let’s see...red on.... ME: (connects positive bolt on battery) KEN: Augga! ME: Hee hee! Happily, the shocks also granted Ken limited amnesia, so he never remembered being shocked. Numbed by pleasing music, we didn’t talk much on the way home. Pennsylvania took longer to cross this time. But it was okay: we were going home, and we’d never have to speak to each other again. Outside my apartment we took a solemn oath to never reveal the events of the weekend to any other living soul, and then I ran giggling upstairs to begin writing this article[15]. THE END ---------------------------------------- ANNOTATIONS [1]We were supposed to leave at 5:00AM. I made Ken promise to be on time and not make me regret waking up at 4:30AM. Needless to say, I regretted it. Actual time of departure: 6:23AM. [2] 4/23/99 6:45 AM: First masturbation joke made, implying alternate uses of my hand lotion. The Misty S. Quinn Theory of Male Sexuality states that all men masturbate every chance they get: at home, at work, while driving -whenever. Sometimes I think she really believes this. [3]Gary, IN is the current murder capital of the United States. No one not living in Gary cares about this. [4]Our waitress liked to meow like a cat. It seemed to embarrass her. But not enough to make her stop doing it. [5]Rumble strips are grooved sections of pavement designed to slow you down without causing the serious axle and crankshaft damage speed bumps would inflict at 65 MPH. Ken’s mocking of his gastrointestinal system would come back to haunt him. [6]The first person we asked directions to Wrigley from laughed at us because we were as far from Wrigley as you can be and still be in Chicago. Then the motherfucker lied to us and got us even more lost. [7]At the Chicago Tower Records, we find 4 copies of The Inner Swine on the racks and buy one. I am so full of myself I refuse to speak to Ken or Jeof for the rest of the day, since they are ‘nobodies’. [8]We made $500 in cover charges from the Lingerie/Tickle-Fight Rave, proving for once and all what we’ve always believed: when chicks are alone with each other they like to relax in sexy underwear and have tickle-fights. Or maybe pillow-fights; the evidence is inconclusive on that point. [9]The choice of Mexican Food of course was dubious and at various moments over the following day we were all felled by ‘Ceasar’s Regret’. It was ‘Ceasar’s Regret’ that kept me mysteriously locked inside a public restroom at the Chicago Institute of Art for 35 minutes. I managed to escape before the paramedics arrived, but it was close. [10]At the IHOP there was a large group of hungover college kids, 18-22, who made us all feel old and dried up. We considered beating them up outside, but we were too tired. [11]Also on display were several other more-or-less monochrome masterpieces which made us question reality. But in the same section were paintings by Lutian Freud and Richtner which gave us more hope. So it all evens out, I suppose. [12]The Malling of America is a troubling concept. Across this grand country chain stores and franchises are eating away at the individual flavor of our towns and cities. Everywhere you go there are the same stores as in your town, the same food, the same choices. It’s like America is turning into a huge open air mall. This gives you comfort and security in strange places, and sometimes finding a Dunkin Donuts is a sight for sore eyes. But it also means that sometimes you travel 3,000 miles and have to wonder why you bothered. [13]The damage to the actual room proper was minimal and cosmetic. The real damage we were fleeing the consequences of was to the toilet, which would never be used by humans again. [14]Did I think I was going to die in a fiery car crash on this trip? oh yes. Many times. [15]Chances that Ken West might ever be the same after all that electrical voltage are slim, but it did offer us a few moments of entertainment that was maybe the difference between madness and our safe return. ======================================== *** JEFF'S STUPIDITY *** MY DAY IN TRAFFIC COURT By Jeff Somers ======================================== I’ve done some dumb shit in my time. Lured by the promise of free steak dinners, I spent the entire month of June helping Misty "Boobies" Quinn and her paramour Jeof Vita move their separate households into the new Vita-Quinn stronghold in Jersey City, where they’d be free to make cheesey love any old time they wanted to. That’s right, the entire month of June. This Bataan Death Move required three rentals from U-Haul and several hundred bottles of Doans Pills, not to mention four lavish dinners for myself and our other mover, Ken West. At any rate, during our third and final rental experience with U-Haul (their motto: we have no idea where these trucks come from) I accidentally hit a BMW parked at a gas station. This was all Misty’s fault, of course. Misty had been drinking all day in the truck and was getting out of control, and kept coming on to me, flashing her breasts, and belching. Naturally, after hours of this in the blistering heat of Jersey City, I got a little distracted. I tore up the poor BMW’s hood and grill a little, but did nothing more than cosmetic damage. I popped out of the truck and began professionally kissing ass in all directions until I realized that U-Haul owned and registered the truck, and therefore would have to handle any damage claims. At that point I grew casual and cool and started treating everyone with the disdain and ennui-layered aloofness for which I am deservedly famous. The friendly Jersey City cops came and took our information, and then informed me cheerfully that the U-Haul had two different license plates, neither of which were actually registered anywhere. They impounded the vehicle and cited me for operating an unregistered vehicle and having no proof of insurance. I was no longer quite so cheerful, but I smiled and shook their hands anyway because you never know when a cop is going to beat the shit out of you. Misty and Jeof nicely bought me dinner anyway, because they are cool people. At any rate, about a week later I made my way to Jersey City Municipal Court to defend my good name. I have always found the indignation and outrage of guilty people an amusing aspect of the human condition. From overheard conversations, I quickly ascertained that most of the people in the courtroom were guilty as sin, and yet they were all pissed off as hell that they’d been cited for something. For example, one fellow who was loudly bitching about racial profiling in Jersey City was pissed off not because he’d been summoned for having failed to stop at a stop sign, which he freely admitted he had, or for having an obscured inspection sticker, which he freely admitted he had, but for getting a ticket for Failure to Inspect when he clearly had a month left before he had to be inspected. Now, don’t get me wrong: you get cited for something you didn’t do, you show up and plead not guilty. Fine. But don’t stand outside the courtroom like you’re the new Rodney King when you obviously committed at least some of the crimes you were nailed for. After the fastest reading of our rights in history, the Judge dismissed several dozen cases within the first few minutes and a cheerful, easygoing spirit filled the room. The prosecutor was a harried man who never seemed to remember which case he was discussing at any given moment, which was okay because I had, of course, prepared a brilliant argument concerning U-Haul’s responsibility and the Evil of Corporations, a six page treatsie on my relative innocence, not to mention my stupidity. But I didn’t speak a word. The Judge called my case, I stood up. PROSECUTOR: Your honor, the State moves to dismiss these charges. JUDGE: Yeah, okay, these charges are dismissed. Thank you. And I went home. ======================================== *** INTERVIEW *** I EAT ERNEST BORGNINE FIRST Ten Questions with Karen Accavallo, Authority ======================================== 1. Rick Springfield and Eric Clapton are locked inside small metallic cages from which there is no escape, and subsequently dangled over a deadly lake of fire. The winches holding the cages are each controlled by a diffeerent computer. The computers will release the cages in ten seconds. You can reach either one of the computers in nine seconds and disable the program, saving one of the singers. Which one do you save, and why? Eric. He’s had a hard enough life. 2. Will you be haunted by visions of the singer you don’t save? For the rest of your miserable, tortured existence? No more than he haunts me now. 3. Please explain what a Packet-Switched Network is. "Packet-switched" describes the type of network in which relatively small units of data called packets are routed through a network based on the destination address contained within each packet. Breaking communication down into packets allows the same data path to be shared among many users in the network. This type of communication between sender and receiver is known as connectionless (rather than dedicated). Most traffic over the Internet uses packet switching and the Internet is basically a connectionless network. Either that, or something to do with cheese. 4. You, Jeff Somers, and Ernest Borgnine are the only survivors of a plane crash on a remote tropical island. There is nothing to eat on the island or on your persons, and nothing edible survives the crash. There is no hope of rescue. Who eats who first, and why? I eat Ernest Borgnine first, because he is so fleshy, when I’m done I can tear the skin off his body and make a suit out of it to stay warm. Eating Jeff would make no sense, as I don’t like hot dogs. 5. Can you justify your existence and consumption of valuable resources or are you a useless leech on the body of society? Please explain. My existence is perfectly justifiable. Without me, the Inner Swine would only have one reader. 6. Why are you so angry? Does it have anything to do with uncomfortable shoes? Uncomfortable shoes are a bitch. I have corns. I have hunks of skin hanging off my feet - wouldn’t that make you angry? 7. What pick up lines have worked on you in the past? Do you think pick up lines are an art form? Do all pick up lines work on you? "Aren’t you my cousin?" always adds flavor. I also like "How about keepin’ the sun off me with your breasteses?" But basically anything works on me. "Grunt" would be OK. 8. Explain what a "Frotcher" is. Like you don’t know. A Frotcher is someone who receives pleasure out of rubbing up against people inappropriately on public transport. If you’re ever in Rome, stay away from Bus 64. 9. What do you see in the following: The plight of a sensitive man in an overmechanized society. Either that, or something to do with cheese. 10. A man enters a restaurant and orders Albatross Soup. When it is served, he takes one taste, stands up, and leaves the restaurant. Once outside he pulls out a gun and shoots himself. Why? Because he never really liked Coleridge, anyway. --------------------------------------- KAREN ACCAVALLO is a dear, dear friend of The Editor, and also serves as writer, proofreader extraordinaire, and rumor control warden for The Inner Swine. Karen has invented her own World Order called "Orderism" [see TIS 5(2)] and likes to invite people over to her apartment and then act out bizarre rage plays on her guests, She loves Rick Springfield and Eric Clapton and hates all music created after 1980, except for the aforementioned artists. ======================================== *** VIRTUALLY ARTLESS COMIC *** MR. MUTE! MY ROOM-MATE ======================================== When I was a sophomore in college, I had a room-mate in the dorm named Phil who, I am convinced, was a serial killer. I have never proven it, or even attempted to, because I’m not sure what would be the preferable result: that he was, or that he wasn’t. I preferred to consider the possibility and ignore the facts. Every night when he got in from class and his part-time job, he would put on old, worn clothes, grab the same red backpack, whirl and warn me vehemently never to search through his stuff, and leave. I never wanted to search through his stuff, but his constant warnings against the attempt made me curious. A few hours later, he would return to the dorm and walk directly into the bathroom, slamming the door, running the shower, and emerging naked an hour later rubbed pink from scrubbing, naked as the day he was born. He’d get dressed furiously, curse at me for a while due to imagined searches of his possessions. Then he’d sit at his desk stiffly, writing into a marble notebook savagely. There were dozens of such notebooks in his desk, filled with mystery. Every night this went on. In the mean time, I never once took a phone message for the guy, and I noticed that his boots were always caked with mud. He never once missed one of his nocturnal missions, and his general level of rage was amazing: he simmered morning, noon and night, and was liable to take anything I said or did the wrong way and blow up at me. His fingernails were ragged and his lips were chewed, his personal habits were savage and I lived in a quiet nightly terror of him. I had no proof, mind you, but I knew on some instinctual level that somewhere on campus were a lot of freshly dug mounds of dirt, and that under those mounds were his victims. Every time he screamed at me for allegedly using his toothpaste, I imagined myself being dragged into one of those imagined mounds, with my room-mate’s leering face grinning down at me. For months, we lived in a stalemate, barely speaking (except when he would mount a tirade concerning some social transgression of mine) and trying to avoid each other whenever possible. I took to sleeping a lot during the day so I could stay out of the room until he was asleep. After a while, I did start using his toothpaste, just to take a stand. He still cursed me on a nightly basis, it didn’t seem to change anything. Things came to a head after he started waking me up in the middle of the night because he was doing one-handed push-ups on the floor of our room while saying the Lord’s Prayer. I crawled off to sleep on the lounge couch, found it occupied, and went to sit outside the school Housing office until nine o’clock, when I promptly requested a new room assignment. The Housing Director took one look at my unshaven countenance and wrinkled pajamas and promptly approved my request. I briefly considered just leaving all my stuff and starting fresh, but there were vital things: my schoolwork, my clothes, my wallet. Eventually, I had to sneak back and start moving. Of course, he caught me, and what followed has scarred me to this day: the sight of my serial killer room-mate throwing all my worldly possessions out of our third-floor window while shouting "Leaves of Grass" line for line, one item per line. It took almost four hours, from my stereo (sadly, ruined) to my socks. By the time he was done, we’d gathered a small crowd staring wild-eyed in terror at his hulking form. In the end I grabbed a few pairs of pants and ran for my life. As a creepy epilogue, he had a knack for finding out what my new phone numbers were; every time I changed them he would call and leave one line from "Leaves of Grass", laugh, and hang up. The only way to get through was to assume he was harmless, turn of the doubtful part of my brain, and move forward. It set the pattern for the rest of my life. ======================================== *** THE FREAKS COME OUT AT NIGHT PART 3 *** GERM ENCRUSTED AND PROUD by Jeff Somers ======================================== Going to the bathroom in any sort of public restroom is like taking a quick tour of an abandoned insane asylum. Surrounded by the atmosphere and implements of a such a basic and primal act, the weaker personalities among us drop their reasonable, civilized restraint like a prom dress in the back seat and quickly descend into feral madness. We make this conclusion from various data: the observed behavior of total strangers within public restrooms, the condition of a public restroom after a day of use, and unreliable anecdotes from our drunken, hostile friends. This madness takes on many different forms and presentations, which THE INNER SWINE has studied lo these many years so you don’t have to, but the basic handling of all these lunatics remains the same: say nothing, and never take your eyes off your own genitalia. This report is, however, concentrated almost exclusively on male restrooms, since your humble Editor here is a guy and doesn’t make it into as many Women’s Rooms as he used to, and women just purse their lips and abuse me when I ask about subjects like this. Although I have it on good authority (i.e. chicks themselves) that women are often even worse than men when it comes to the sanitary conditions of their public restrooms and their behavior within, I have no first-hand experience and therefore will leave that up to someone else to document. Someone else who isn’t already regarded as a repeat offender when it comes to being caught in women’s restrooms, that is. As for men, they can all be divided into three main categories of Bathroom Freak: Howard Hughes Germ Warriors, Urinal Talkers, and Bodily Function Advocates. Fear them all. Equally. 1. Germinus Rex and the Germ Warriors Defend Their Purity Call me crazy, but my one solitary goal when entering a restroom is to vent some wastes and get the hell out of there to resume my life already in progress. I like to think I don’t have any serious hang-ups about my biological functions, but then again you’re always the last to know, so let’s assume I have some hang-ups, just to be safe. Still, I think I’m justified in treating our public restrooms as transient locations no sane person would want to spend a lot of time in. The basic goal is: get in, perform waste expulsion, wash hands, get the hell out. This should not be more complicated than as stated: people who add steps, ceremonies, or, lord help us, scripts and costumes to this basic human function enter into the land of the Nuts. Here at my job, there is one jolly fellow who I regard as the Lord Emperor of the Howard Hughes Germ Warriors. Let’s call him Germinus Rex. This guy refuses to touch anything in the bathroom itself. He has developed a complicated system of towels to make sure that no part of his body ever comes into contact with the metal and porcelain of the restroom, which he explained to me thusly (against my will) one day when I observed him using towels to open the door: Germinus Rex: "I never touch anything in here. It’s a known fact that 90% of people don’t wash their hands after using the bathroom." Me: "Is that a fact?" Germinus Rex: "Oh yes. Take no chances!" My first silent thoughts on this were a) where the hell was that study published and b) what the hell does Germinus Rex there think those towels are doing for him? When it comes to virulent pathogens I doubt three millimeters of recycled wood fibers is gonna save him from the Andromeda Strain. Rex is only the tip of the iceberg, however, because there are plenty of people who seem to be convinced that when the Great Plague comes and wipes out most of the world’s population, its origins will eventually be traced back to a grimy restroom in a Tucson bus station. Worried authorities will appear on television in those CDCR space suits to announce "Apparently the Andromeda Strain was contracted by Horace Amberger in Tucson after Mr. Amberger failed to utilize protective towels when handling the fixtures in a public restroom. We regard Mr. Amberger as ‘Patient Zero’ right now." And the Howard Hughes people will nod their heads and continue to spray Lysol on themselves. They come in several forms: those that construct intricate ass-guards out of towels when they have to actually sit on a public toilet, those who use Rex’s patented towel-to-implement shield, and those who spend twice as much time ‘scrubbing’ at the restroom sink than they do actually going to the bathroom (as if that pink soap given away free by the building is gonna kill the Andromeda Strain.) And then there are those who regard the entire world as one big dangerous toilet, and have all sorts of antibacterial lotions and soaps and such at their disposal. These freaks are single-handedly preparing the way for super-germs which will eventually kill us all, as they contribute to the growing strains of antibiotic-resistant microbes -but hey, at least they feel cleaner after touching the escalator handrail. Me, I’m one of those people who only washes his hands effectively if I get a ‘lot’ of my own urine on myself in the urination procedure. 2. Urinal Talkers and Their Scatalogical Smiley Faces We here at The Inner Swine, however, are very mean and bitter people, obviously. Not so everyone! Some people are very friendly folk, and regard any situation where they find themselves in close proximity with another human being to be the right time to strike up a friendship. To these gentle folk, the Urinal Talkers, the fact that everyone gathered in the restroom is there for a common purpose just adds to their feeling of community and their willingness (nay, compulsion!) to make friends. Often I’ll find myself standing at a urinal, humming softly to myself, and a Urinal Talker will suddenly appear to occupy the urinal next to me. UT#243: Hey there. ME: UT#243: Nice weather we’re having. ME: Now, maybe this is one of our hang ups, huh? Maybe being friendly in a restroom isn’t odd. But it seems to us that there are plenty of places where you can have a friendly conversation with people who aren’t partially undressed and holding a delicate part of their anatomy in one (or two) hands. Now, we understand the old cliche of women being very talkative and friendly in restrooms, but at least they’ve got some privacy. Not that I would engage anyone in conversation when sitting in stall, either. Now, no one is proposing a ‘vow of silence’ be invoked in the bathroom, and if someone says hello to me as we cross paths in there, I’ll say hello back. But there’s absolutely no reason we need to have anything resembling a conversation while we’re urinating. Personally, I’d like an opaque tube to slide down around me whenever I step up to the urinal, obscuring me from my fellow urinaters. Not because I’m afraid they’ll look at me; the Somers Goods are always available for inspection, we’re proud. No, because I’m afraid they’ll talk to me. 3. People Who Seem Overly Proud of Their Irritable Bowel Syndrome Our final guests in this Parade of Freaks are some of the stranger people we’ve met. I’ve lumped them all under the miscellaneous heading of Bodily Function Advocates because the only explanation for their behavior I can summon from my limp reasoning abilities is that they must absolutely love everything associated with going to the bathroom. This loose confederation of freaks includes: -- The Loud Larry’s: these fun-loving individuals like to express themselves, letting the world in on their various moods and well-being. They do this in one of three ways: a) by letting out loud, exaggerated sighs or whoops when initiating use of the bathroom (i.e. "Oooooh, yeaaah", "Aaaaaahhhh!", or "HOLY SHIT THAT BURNS LIKE A MOTHER!"), b) by emitting (or manufacturing) exaggerated bodily sounds whilst sitting on the toilet; once in a movie theater restroom some wag had brought in a whoopee cushion just to entertain his fellow bathroom users, or c) by direct verbal confirmation of their bathroom experience, i.e. "Oh, thank God" or "Jesus, what have I been eating?" -- The Porcelain Lurker: I’ve only met one of this kind, but where there’s one there’s probably a whole suicide cult of them. This guy occasionally likes to wander into the bathroom and, for no apparent reason, peer over the stall divider to see who’s using the toilets. I’m not sure what he’s expecting to see. -- The Men of Principle: Here’s a group that must be a hoot to hang out with. This describes a small minority of men who regard the urinal as an unnatural aberration in this world, and thusly refuse to use it. The favorite reasoning technique these Men of Principle utilize is I don’t have a urinal at home, why would I use one here? They purposefully stride past these tools of the Devil and enter a stall to urinate with the proper privacy (the difference between using a stall and my own desire for an opaque tube is that I am fleeing unwelcomed discussion delivered by freaks to a captive audience whereas the Men of Principle are simply hiding -what, exactly, they are hiding, is what I’d like to know.) If, for example, a transparent tube were substituted for the opaque one, I’d be just as happy. Well, there you have it in all its ugly and glorious detail: The Bathroom Freak Report. After all, freakism starts at the most basic levels of a human being’s nature, and it don’t get much more basic than taking a dump. The Inner Swine! Boldly going where no one else will dare open their eyes. ======================================== *** COMMENTARY *** Lonely and I’m Cold Your Gentle Editor’s Hangups by Jeff Somers ======================================== "I respect the man from ‘Sunset Boulevard’ He’s got a heart somewhere, but won’t let down his guard; Doesn’t trust happiness or the bad luck that it brings He’s lonely and he’s cold -he’s proud of these things." -Too Much Joy Fans, I know I spend an awful lot of time in this bathroom literary staple (the key word there being ‘awful’) pissing about the ‘freaks’ I meet. I’m obviously a very intolerant bastard with a lot of issues. I’m generally an unfriendly back-stabbing pain in the ass, that’s obvious, but my tirades against the Freaks inspire some people to mutter about throwing the first stones and pots calling other people freaks and stuff like that. The Inner Swine is all about openness and honesty, as long as that openness and honesty is a) carefully vetted by our legal department before being released to the general public and b) easily refuted in a court of law. With that in mind, I’d like to waste two pages in my arrogant little personal publication to clear the air concerning my prejudice against the freaks. Certainly, if you take that sort of thinking too far, everyone becomes a freak, and before long you’ve got Freak Deathcamps set up processing anyone I don’t like into Soylent Green. No one wants this! At least no one wants this badly enough to put in the kind of work and effort (not to mention expense) that this sort of societal change would require, you dig? Besides, I am fully aware that under such an intolerant and violent system, I would be a prime example of freakdom, and probably would end up burned to ash in one of my own ovens. So, let’s let my Freak Flag Fly for a little bit, shall we? Just to prove that while I hate almost everyone and fear daily contact with the rest of the human race, I certainly don’t think I’m any better than the rest of you. Smarter, definitely, better-looking in tastefully flared bell-bottom velvet trousers, almost certainly, but better? No. To show my good faith, I’m devoting these couple of pages to a discussion of Your Editor’s Personal Hang Ups HANG-UP #1. Waiters and waitresses make me nervous. Anyone who’s been conned into buying me dinner has witnessed my pathetic display of discomfort whenever the waiter/waitress approaches the table. I get ultra, fawningly polite. I wring my hands. I tense up and start to sweat. It has ruined more than one otherwise pleasant evening. Why is this? I’m not sure. Certainly I cannot recall any bad experiences with homicidal and drugged-up waitresses when I was a youngster, and as far as I know no one has ever spat in my food out of spite (note: as far as I know; if any one has information to the contrary please contact me immediately). I think it might have to do with the fact that we Somers’ are simple folk, and the idea of having someone serve us is pretty weird. Deep down, I kind of feel like I should take my table’s order, serve the food, and bus the table. I mean, what am I, some sort of royalty, that I need a servant? I buy my clothes at Bradlees, for christ’s sake. HANG-UP #2. I cannot eat at restaurants or attend movies by myself. Once, during a fit of suicidal depression some years ago (brought on by an overdose of roach poison) I went to see Thelma and Louise in the theater by myself. This was the first and last time this has ever happened, and it was only because I was already sucking the pipe in the back of my mind. Now that I’ve regained my mental health, I can’t possibly do it. These two activities are so ingrained in my mind as social activities the idea of doing them alone is the same as admitting I’m an irritating loser who has no friends. Which is what I think everyone else in the restaurant or theater is saying about me when they run into each other in the lobby or the bathroom: "Hey, didja see that guy by himself out there?" "Yeah, he must be that irritating friendless loser I keep hearing about, Jeff Somers. Writes that stupid zine, The Inner Banana or something." HANG-UP #3. I will endure any weather conditions or other deprivations to avoid public transportation. The New York City Subway System scares the living shit out of me, and I have walked miles in blizzard conditions to avoid having to figure out the trains. I would rather walk my legs down to bloody stumps than get lost in Queens, which is what I am sure would happen no matter what. I could take the #7 Bus in Jersey City and end up lost in Queens. Trust me. HANG-UP #4. The moment some woman shows more than nominal interest in me, I experience a detailed and lengthy hallucination involving our messy and violent divorce proceedings during which I am charged with contempt of court several times for screeching "You bowlegged bitch you’ve ruined my life I’LL KILL YOU!" and diving at her, restrained by court officers and my attorneys who all sustain painful bruises in the process, and the court officers beat the shit out of me later on in the holding cells in revenge, and because the bowlegged bitch paid them each $25. Uh, I’m sorry, I blacked out there for a moment....that definitely sums up my inclination to remain single. Sure, marriage is a sham of ancient pagan superstition and just obviously doesn’t work, but the honest reason your gentle Editor here remains single despite his obvious charms is pure, blinding, feral fear. HANG-UP #5. I suffer from "The George Costanza Everyone Must Like Me Syndrome". In brief, while I feel smugly justified in hating everyone and loathing humanity in general, I demand that I be regarded with respect and affection by everyone. This means that I’m generally speaking a yellowbellied wanker who will smile and make poilte conversation to your face and then shudder and write terrible things about you in this zine that I will then never show you. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! HANG-UP #6. I refuse to engage in conversation in public restrooms. Well, I don’t refuse, because of the aforementioned Hang-Up #5, but I dread it and avoid it whenever possible. I’d rather drink urine than speak to people while we’re taking a piss. Men who speak to me in bathrooms are instantly disliked and avoided by me in the future. I can’t help it. Something inside me just feels like it’s within centimeters of having sex with this guy: we’re partially undressed, in a private area, touching ourselves. I’d rather avoid anything, like speaking, which potentially leads to intimacy. There are, of course, hundreds more. I won’t even mentioned the fact that I am terrified of clowns, I mean, who isn’t? But there’s so much more. This sampling, however, I think covers the basics and demonstrates my point, which is that I’m a deeply fucked up individual who leads a sad lonely life inside his little box, and that I deserve all the pity sex I can get. ======================================== *** COMMENTARY *** The Inner Swine’s Top Ten Stupid Things Otherwise Smart People Do by Jeff Somers ======================================== Stupid is as stupid does, as the saying goes. Since this issue vaguely concerns intelligence, it occurred to me that it would make sense to detail exactly what The Inner Swine thinks is stupid. Who better to explore this issue? I have a long and varied history with stupidity, and if I were going to be completely honest certain events from my own life would have to occupy at least four of the spots on the Top Ten Dumb Things. I have crashed cars, shorted out my car while trying to monkey with the wiring while it was running, traded for Mike Scott in a 1988 Rotisserie League deal that haunts me to this day, and made a fool of myself for love far too many times. However, The Inner Swine, happily, hasn’t ever been about honesty and truth, so I can ignore my own stupidity and concentrate on the stupidity of others, which is very Swine-like. The funny thing about stupidity, when you think about it, is that it comes in two forms: the congenital idiocy that is generally a lifetime affliction, and spurts of moronic behavior that can strike anyone, of any IQ, at any time, for any duration. Some generally smart people have done some abysmally dumb things, and sometimes people you would normally classify as smart ‘uns make some very stupid choices in their everyday lives. Any serious inquest into the nature of intelligence would have to include an analysis of Dumb Things That Smart People Do. For purposes of fairness I will not be discussing "zine publishing" at all in this article, either as a sign of intelligence or otherwise. Plus, we have ever been overly fond of the ‘list’ as cheap literary/journalistic technique, filling up pages in this rag with alarming efficiency. So, without further ado, I offer you The Inner Swine’s Top Ten Stupid Things Otherwise Smart People Do 1. Vanity Plates on automobiles. Why it’s Stupid: the mindless communication of any aspect of your existence to random numbers of passers by and motorists is in itself, well, mindless. Does any one care that you’re GROOVN? I doubt it. Second, vanity plates force you to form horrific new words missing all sorts of vowels and consonants and punctuation, which makes you look stupid even if you’re not. Finally, consider that all of us, at one time or another, are faced with a situation wherein we’d like to flee the scene of a crime. A vanity plate is the easiest license plate to remember. Even your fellow morons can remember that GROOVN fled the scene, whereas HYU 76R might slip their smooth minds. 2. Cell Phones (with apologies to Ken West). Why it’s Stupid: The Inner Swine fully admits that under certain circumstances, a cell phone is a useful and reasonable appliance. Car sails off of bridge and into Hudson river and you are trapped within a watery tomb, calling 911 from your cell phone is a miracle. We have no problem with this use of the cell phone. You are likewise excused if your job forces you to carry a cell phone; that certainly is not your fault, eh? But people who use Cell phones to call from the bus, to chat on street corners about nothing in particular, and to disrupt movies and museum trips with that incessant, irritating ringing -morons. 3. People who wear messages on their clothes. Why it’s Stupid: You’re either paying someone to be a walking advertisement for them, or you are so unoriginal you believe wearing a mass marketed witticism makes you look smart. How dumb can you be? Let Tommy Hilfiger pay for advertising like the rest of the pigs, and try forming your own thoughts for a change instead of walking around all day with beam me up scotty no signs of intelligent life here printed across your chest, you fekken simp. Those of us who like to wear rock concert shirts or South Park shirts fall in the cracks on this one; I think you look like an idiot. But now we’re drifting into pure, biased opinion. 4. Mindlessly pushing elevator buttons. Why it’s Stupid: The fact is, elevators follow their programming and ignore you no matter how rage-filled, impatient, or canny you are. Hitting the DOOR CLOSE button repeatedly does not cause the elector to move faster, nor does pounding your floor’s button. When waiting for an elevator, hitting both the UP and DOWN buttons do not make the elevator come any faster -they may cause the elevator to stop on your floor whilst heading in that direction, but if it isn’t the direction you wanted, you haven’t gained anything. The fact is, human beings will press buttons. Put a red button on a wall with nothing marking it, and we, like innocent toddlers, will warble up to it en masse and press it, over and over again, giggling. Elevator buttons are no exception, except that some of us believe our sheer determination and cool under pressure can alter the implacable forces of physics, mechanics, and computer engineering, as if they were God of the Elevators, or something. 5. Obsessively using antibacterial products (with apologies to Alison Culshaw). Why it’s Stupid: Come on. First off, we’ve survived millions of years bathing daily in bacteria, bugs, and germs. Secondly, the human body is pretty much covered in bugs, bacteria, and germs as it is, and washing your fekken hands all the time ain’t gonna change that, so it’s useless. Also, it encourages the growth of resistant strains of bacteria, which are going to kill us all someday, so it’s harmful too. Hmmmn....useless and harmful, eh? Not too good. 6. Highbeaming in the passing lane of the highway, unless you are driving on the fucking Autobahn. Why it’s Stupid: Why not just drive around? People will zoom up behind me on the highway, blink their lights impatiently, and then wait for me to get out of their way. My attitude usually is: fuck ‘em. Immature, but exhilarating. Sometimes it takes these dolts minutes to figure out I am not going to bow to their imperial command. If they’d just go around me in the first place, they’d be on their way, instead of spending another minute or so hovering next to me, waving their middle finger at me in a threatening way. Highbeaming someone ahead of you over and over again is equivalent to pushing your vacuum over a stubborn bit of lint embedded in your rug over and over again, rather than simply bending down and picking it off the floor. Morons. 6A. Honking your car horn in immobile traffic. Why it’s Stupid: Do you really think you’re the only one with the bright idea of reminding slumbering motorists that people are behind them via your horn? Come on. The car horn serves some legitimate purposes, but mostly it’s a rage venter. Get over yourself. Traffic will move or not move regardless of your horn blowing, natch, and only a simp would claim otherwise. 7. Using laser pointers for fun and frolic. Why it’s Stupid: Normally anyone who helpfully points out all instances of breasts on a movie screen is appreciated, but the teenage morons who enjoy the amazing multimedia fun of a laser pointer can’t really even claim to be legitimate smut-champions. Consider the mental levels that must be plumbed before a red dot becomes entertaining. 8. Littering. Why it’s Stupid: People who toss their trash wherever they happen to be standing that moment are likely the dumbest morons in the universe, and I find it amazing that they find the mental spark plugs to breathe. In order to litter, I believe you have to have a complete inability to relate the immediate moment with a potential moment about thirty seconds in the future: namely, you walking by a goddamned trash can. When I see some baggy-panted teen wunderkind drop an emptied bag of chips onto the sidewalk I feel like taking those baggy pants and giving the motherfucker an Atomic Wedgie that would make me famous for decades to come, a legendary subject of song and screen -not because of the environment or anything, but because of the simple, brutal stupidity of the action. 9.Choosing Telemarketing as a career. Why it’s Stupid: I can safely say that I would rather clean prison toilets for a living than be a telemarketer. I’d rather taste test KY Jelly. I’d rather sell vital organs. Telemarketers cannot even kid themselves that they are performing a service or in some way helping people with their loathsome jobs -they are simply annoying. Sure, they have to put food on the table, and telemarketing is a job. It remains the stupidest career choice of all time: all you get is hang ups, verbal abuse, and the occasional triumph of bilking some old woman out of $59.95 or so. I’d rather be a Geek in a traveling circus. 10. Making lists of everyone’s faults. Why it’s Stupid: Isn’t it obvious? No one gives a rare fuck what I think. Screw you. There you have it, friends. What’s that? You do some of these things? Unless I have already apologized to you in the interests of continued friendship, fuck off. You do dumb shit, you live with the stigma, baby, just like me. ======================================== *** ADVERTISEMENT *** Medical Science Cures the Shame of Dimwittedness! Worldwide experts combine 3 types of psuedoscience into powerful new IQ test! by Jeff Somers ========================================= ASK yourself one simple question: friend, are you stupid? Do you move your lips as you read these words, sounding out each syllable in a futile attempt to interpret their meaning? Is your thick monobrowed forehead wrinkled in frustrated confusion as you sit there right now? Do you sometimes laugh just because everyone else is laughing, when you really don’t understand the joke? Do you find yourself time and time again lost in a muddled cacophony of discordant indecision because you are incapable of parsing simple printed instructions? Are you completely unable to understand the preceding statement? Do you find yourself in the grip of an ice-cold rage at people who master simple tasks more easily than yourself, prompting you to use violence to ‘knock them off their high horse’? Was school merely a convenient place to smoke cigarettes and buy drugs for you? Do you sometimes ride the elevator all day feebly trying to remember what floor you want to get off on? Do you often embarrass yourself by forgetting that you have to enter the lavatory before ‘going to the bathroom’? If you answered YES! to any of the preceding, then, my friend, you need to read on! Recognizing you as our core audience (morons who don’t know how bad TIS is) The Inner Swine Labs, Inc. has devised the first-ever Inner Swine IQ Test specifically designed for you, the imbecilic percentage of the population. With this powerful tool you can make even the most intelligent bastards look as stupid as you! Our lifelong mission for the past few months has been to somehow equalize the playing field between the Intelligent and the Retarded. Some of the finest minds in the world have been gathered at the offices of The Inner Swine for the expressed purposes of a) drinking all the beer still left over from Jeff’s Birthday party in August and b) somehow finding a way for the Lows of the world to pass for Nobel Laureates, in a pinch. After all, the stupid amongst us are unfairly held back simply because they have been unable to master simple concepts like the English Language, basic math, and deep philosophical issues. We here at TIS didn’t think this was fair, although we certainly have enjoyed lording it over all the morons we encounter in our daily lives. So Jeff Somers, who has been called by some a L. Ron Hubbard for the 21st century (and by others a lying sack of drunken shit who has owed them money since they can remember -time will tell!), chose to dedicate his time and considerable mental energies, not to mention the benevolent and extensive resources of The Inner Swine, Inc., to leveling the playing field for all you dummies. "End the suffering of the stupid!" Jeff cried, and he assembled The International Stupidity Equalizer Team (TISET), a group of renowned scientists, mercenaries, and former Vice Presidents of The United States, all now dedicated to advancing the rights of idiots everywhere, knowing their loved ones will be safe and sound as long as they continue to work tirelessly for Jeff’s pet projects. First, of course, TISET had to establish what, exactly, stupidity is. Being classically trained minds of the highest caliber, we ran to our copy of The Random House Dictionary, which was published in 1980 and which proclaims in eye-catching red on the cover that it is "The Largest Dictionary of its kind!" Though we admit we are unsure what kind of dictionary it is, we assume being the largest is a good thing. The Random House Dictionary defines stupid as: stupid, adj. 1. Mentally slow or dull. 2. Senselessly foolish. 3. Tediously dull or uninteresting. 4. Keanu Reeves. This was less helpful than the team had hoped, and we realized pretty quickly that another tact would have to be taken. We figured that if stupidity could be defined as the opposite of real smart, then we would first have to define what makes someone intelligent before we could define stupidity. After all, most people think they’re smart, and many of us think we’re positively geniuses. Hell, the TIS offices are packed tightly with geniuses, apparently. And certainly, a great many stupid people think they’re smart. There is obviously some sort of communication breakdown operating here, and we were charged with getting to the bottom of it. What is intelligence? What makes someone smart instead of brain-dead? Currently there are several proposed ways to determine someone’s intelligence, but all of them have serious flaws: Standardized Tests rely far too heavily on certain skills and do not take into account ‘unmeasurable’ skills and hard-to-define abilities (such as Jeof Vita’s uncanny ability to Eat Anything and Live) while ignoring external circumstances, such as negative self-image, poor performance under pressure, and study aids. The perfect example, the team felt, was the High School ordeal of taking the SAT tests. All the team members could name at least one certifiable moron who had scored highly on the tests, usually due to an expensive Prep Course which taught them how to play the odds and recognize the patterns of the tests. Team members were also brimming with examples of very intelligent kids who did poorly on the tests, usually due to their poor social development (from having spent their childhoods locked in basements and dark closets, watching Star Trek reruns) which resulted in their being spooked by large crowds of hulking peers. Examples of geniuses who did poorly in academic situations (e.g. Albert Einstein) abound, as well. Inner Swine Editor and general all-around annoyance Jeff Somers was prompted to reiterate one of his favorite sayings: "If kids like Joe Kim* can get a 1300 on their SAT score, why can’t someone like me use my mental powers to control people’s minds?" Accordance of Opinion describes a popular but patently false perception that people who share your opinions must be intelligent, due to the fact that you yourself subscribe to that point of view. To be honest, the offices of The Inner Swine are sick with this syndrome. The flaw is obviously that stupid people very often consider themselves to be smart, and thus can, through AOO, incorrectly classify other insipid Lows as geniuses. Most people, either consciously or otherwise, engage in this sort of Intelligence Scoring, classifying anyone who dares disagree with our cherished and obviously superior opinions as Dumbasses. Without objective confirmation, any classification via AOO is suspect. What would be objective confirmation? TISET usually examines the subject closely for I’m with Stupid T-shirts or Spice Girls merchandise. Trivial Pursuit Championships are sometimes misinterpreted as de facto IQ tests. After careful consideration, TISET rejected the concept that deep stores of information necessarily indicated a high IQ, finding that all it really required was a good memory and very little else to do. While encountering someone who can name every President of The United States in order may make people feel momentarily dumb, the savant in question might display little else by way of mental power, and might fail miserably when asked to apply the information in a practical manner. In the words of Jeff Somers, "If we learned nothing else from the work of Spencer Tracy, we learned in "Desk Set" that having infinite storage banks of data meant nothing without a sharp human mind to apply it. And that Kathy Hepburn was probably a good lay." Technical Competence is achieved through years of experience and practice in various skill sets, but can be achieved by a broad range of intellects. Being able to navigate a complex computer system doesn’t necessarily require smarts, it requires a good memory and an intuitive feel for digital systems. Too often men and women who have simply survived long enough to become experts in some small part of our world are granted Genius status by the other Lows, simply because they’ve performed certain tasks so often they no longer have to wrinkle their brows and hunt through cheat sheets for the proper sequence, and can produce solutions to occasional problems which were devised by others long before they arrived, solutions then buried in time and known only to those who have dug deep enough. This kind of dedicated expertise can appear to be intelligent when the time and effort required to forge it is overlooked. In reality, it is the ponderous repetition that breeds such dextrous mastery. As Jeff Somers is fond of saying, "Understanding, after five years of experience, how to use CHMOD in Unix doesn’t make you Ken Thompson, sister." Obviously, all of these techniques previously used to determine one’s level of intelligence fail in that endeavor, poisoned by personal desires and easily skirted controls. Plainly, if intelligence was to be quantified and defined, a more subtle and more flexible system would have to be devised. The Team members felt uniquely qualified to devise this bold new plan, since they had all failed the aforementioned current systems by various margins and have often been mislabeled idiots before they managed to prove themselves. Certainly the new IQ Determination System would have to be culture and gender neutral, would rely less on memory than true intuitive and creative thought, and would be easily mastered by all members of the TISET Team. While this last requirement caused all manner of harsh words and tense moments, obviously it wouldn’t do to have members of the Team classified as Morons by the very system they devised. Heh heh. In the end, some blood was spilled but science triumphed and we now have THE INNER SWINE INTELLIGENCE DETERMINATION SYSTEM The Team considered how to measure intelligence, drawing on all its powers of thought and scientific training. The system had to be simple in implementation but subtly rich and infinitely flexible. It had to be gender and culture neutral. It had to incorporate core values without introducing pop culture or prejudice. It had to be graphical and symbol-based rather than text or language based. Our solution was revolutionary. Our solution was ingenious. That’s right, our solution was Goofus and Gallant Cartoons**. All you have to do is read the captions and study the accompanying images carefully, then fill in which one you believe to be Goofus and which one you believe to be Gallant. Then check your score at the end and you’ll finally know which of five intelligence categories you belong in: Super Genius, Genius, Normal, Dim-witted, or Low. A hint for those of us doomed to do poorly on this test: "Low" is bad. CHOOSE: GOOFUS OR GALLANT? 1. ____________ breaks laws and societal conventions when he can get away with it, out of a sense of primitive aggression 2. ________________ obeys laws and conventions he believes to be just and has reason to flout others 3. ____________ isn’t interested in finding out how things work; there’s too much pro wrestling to watch. 4. ____________ is curious and always trying to find out how the universe operates, so he can harness its awesome power for his own uses. 5. ____________ is polite only to those stronger than him, out of simple craven fear. 6. ____________ is polite to everyone out of a sense of basic civilized dignity, even to morons 7. ____________ capitalizes on the weak and detests their weakness. 8. ____________ aids and protects the weak, so he can use them, later on, during his bloody revenge plots. 9. ____________ respects nothing, not even his own posessions, believing there is a good reason to mindlessly consume material goods that he doesn’t really need. 10. ____________ learns to care for material goods, knowing that good things are meant to last and that his resources can be better spent.. HOW TO SCORE: Give yourself 1 point each if you marked 1,3,5,7,9 "Goofus". Give yourself 1 point each if you marked 2,4,6,8,10 "Gallant". Give yourself -1 points if you wrote in anything besides "Goofus" or "Gallant." Now use this simple chart to determine where you rank on The Inner Swine Intelligence Determination System: SCORE CLASSIFICATION ANALYSIS 10 Super Genius Quit reading this and build that Time Machine, dammit. 8 Genius You could be Batman. 6 Normal You can probably hold down a job. 4 Dimwit Quick! Wipe your mouth! 2 - 0 Low You’re pretending to read this, aren’t you? Now you know where you stand in the world of intelligence. If you didn’t do well, you can now take it again and get a better score. If you don’t get a perfect score the second time around, we would suggest getting a prescription of some sort. It shouldn’t be hard. We here at TISET hope this has cleared up any confusion, although we personally feel that there are a lot of different types of intelligence, and that one test is probably insufficient to determine your true talent. Some of us are good at some things, some at others -in the long run, as Gary Coleman teaches us, it takes different strokes to move the world. The Inner Swine believes that we’re all insufferably arrogant, and we will choose to champion whatever IQ test gives us a high score. If you scored highly on some standardized test in high school, chances are you think standardized tests are pretty accurate. If you didn’t and the school Guidance Counselor tried to steer you towards the Fast Food arena, you probably pooh-pooh standardized tests and champion a more laterally-oriented IQ test. We here at The Inner Swine have a neat solution to this quandry: we think you’re all morons. You’d be lost without us. If, after reading this, you still wish to purchase whatever amazing new product we’re somehow advertising here, please send us $150.00 in cash: 293 Griffith Street #9, Jersey City, NJ 07307. You’ll get something in the mail in a few days. ---------------------------------------- * The Story of Joe: Joe Kim was a kid Ken West, Jeof Vita, and I went to High School with. I am unafraid to say that he may have been the dumbest motherfucker I’ve ever encountered. In Senior year our English teacher, Mr. Campion (a pompous ass himself) discovered Joe had plagiarized a term paper using material from the World Book Encyclopedia, which isn’t, last I checked, the most obscure text in the universe, which is usually what you’re looking for when stealing material. But I digress: Mr. Campion publicly humiliated Joe by accusing him in class and presenting the evidence: the very volume of the World Book Joe had copied from. Joe’s lamebrained fight-or-flight response was to respond: "Yes, I copied from the World Book; so what?" The next day the school was plastered with fake obituaries of Joe which began "Joe Kim was crucified in class yesterday by Mr. Campion...." and ended with the immortal line "Joe Kim will be remembered for having copied his entire life from the World Book Encyclopedia." Joe went to the Princeton Review and eventually got a 1300 on his SATs, and ended up going to Wesleyan University. If there’s any justice in the universe he failed out and died hanging in his closet after a bout of autoerotic asphyxiation. ** Chosen both because of its elegantly simple good/evil dichotomy and because all members of TISET are proud to say they had jokes published in Highlights for Children at various times in their childhoods. Sample joke (submitted by TIS Editor Jeff Somers at the tender age of 9: "What kind of fish can cut your fishing line? A SwordFish." It was obvious the young Jeff was doomed to either edit a Zine or be a civil servant, until TISET came along. ======================================== *** FICTION *** Time Will Forgive by Jeff Somers ======================================== tea and sympathy I told myself to shut up, and sipped scalding tea. Mrs. Andrews’ living room carpet was so plush and so deep I was afraid to step on it. I figured there were probably salesmen and other visitors still down there, wading through the stalk-like fibers, sweating, coughing on dust and hair. I walked gingerly along the edges and sat on the Visitor’s Couch, the only place I’d ever sat in this house, at least when Mrs. Andrews was there. I crossed my legs nervously and noticed for the first time that my socks were subtly different shades of blue. "Tea?" Mrs. Andrews snapped like a brittle line. I didn’t dare refuse. The Andrews’ house was like a museum. All the objects held within were under invisible energy fields which alerted Mrs. Andrews if anyone attempted to touch, admire, or utilize anything. This included the useful appliances -I had never, in fifteen years, witnessed or heard rumor of a television, blender, stereo, or telephone being switched on or operated. I suspected even the toilets were encased in psychic gloopstick, untouchable little porcelain pools of chlorinated water, unrippled and possibly jellied by now. I also suspected that Mr. Andrews, long missing in a scandalous family drama, might actually be in some sub-basement, encased in his own force-field, an exhibit. Or possibly in the living room carpet. I imagined Mrs. Andrews walking into the still-life kitchen and taking her tidy hairdo out the back door, walking two blocks to Pirelli’s Diner, and bringing back two styrofoam cups of tea. Derek Manley, the ruin of womankind Perfect jeans. Boundless good humor. The ability to wear after-shave correctly. A handsome five o’clock shadow. Endless lustful energy. An ability with colognes. The right level of nonchalance. Knowledgeable of when to stop speaking to maintain mystery. A self-assured and masculine way of smoking cigarettes. Holds his beer bottle with his whole hand, with confidence. Laughs too loud. Irritates other men. And charms the pants off the women he meets. tea and sympathy My tea was brought by a shaky hand in a delicate cup and a bright white saucer. Mrs. Andrews had put sugar and lemon and milk in my tea without asking. I held the cup awkwardly. Mrs. Andrews sat on the home’s couch. She was a stern old woman now. I’d known her for fifteen years, now. In all that time her hairdo had not changed. This had always fascinated me. As we spoke, I found myself drifting, studying her hair, waiting for it to do something. "It was good of you to come." An intricate puzzle of grey and shadows, slightly curled, and held in place with cruel-looking pins and wires. It had the property of looking completely foreign on her head, disconnected. I wondered heretically if she maybe wore a wig. I wondered what might be found under it -a smooth white sphere? A pockmarked moonscape? A throbbing brain? I wondered if it might rise up and flap around the room. "None of Henry’s other friends," she said ponderously with the odd pause, "saw fit to drop by." she sniffed. I pictured her bald, and spooked myself. There was a second level to the house, I had deduced from the windows outside and a grim, shadowed set of stairs off the foyer. Stairs leading up into an aged darkness that I felt friendly with, having known it for so long. Every visit to the Andrews house, the second-floor darkness had been there, forbidden but waving to me cheerfully. I glanced quickly at Mrs. Andrews’ hair to make sure it had not moved. "Not that I cared much for most of Henry’s friends, of course. But you were always different. You were the only one who said hello when you came over here." I nodded and sipped tea, resisting the urge to spit it out rudely. wet leaves in fall, a smell like She got drunk too easily, too quickly, Cheryl did, a flushed stocky girl with a painfully gorgeous face, and there was a long list of regrettable evenings to prove it. Miserable in the morning over coffee and puke she would relive the awful evenings, torrid tales of small talk, whispers, sex and betrayal. Who was betraying who was a matter of opinion. Hangovers and a rose perfume, scrambled eggs and tears, coffee and self-loathing. And still with a smile for Monday morning. tea and sympathy Once, when Henry and I had been nineteen and home from school we’d opened up his mother’s liquor cabinet and mixed up a batch of martini’s for ourselves, feeling continental. Henry had been in a phase wherein he insisted that everyone call him Hank, trying for a level of manliness, but that afternoon we’d referred to each other by our full names in stuffy faux-English accents that deteriorated as the pitcher of martinis shrank. Mrs. Andrews’ liquor was kept in crystal decanters which mystified me. They were unmarked -how did you tell them apart without sampling them, which seemed rude in front of guests, and did you buy the decanters full? I could not imagine the tidy Mrs. Andrews pouring whiskeys and vodkas from their garish store-bought bottles into these blank and uneasy containers. Henry and I had dozed on the Visitor’s Couch for a while and had, upon w