A micro-Reader's Digest in my neurons

"I am," I announced (in response to this), "inoculated against American weirdness."

To expound. "I can handle pushing cars out of the snow and Bible school. I have watched PBS and small-town high-school football. You can't scare me." I have a tackle box and a snowmobile suit. I ate Mickey Mouse pancakes for breakfast while watching Road Runner cartoons. I have cleaned pig pens and pulled weeds out of soybean fields that you could spend all day walking up and down, between the rows. I have been to the Corn Palace and Wisconsin Dells, where they let me drive an amphibious vehicle from World War II.

It reminds me of Joe Malik saying that he got stoned and read a whole Reader's Digest and tried to become one with it...*

"No wife, no horse, no mustache," Malik repeated. "That's all it said."

"I beg your pardon?" Case asked, intrigued by something nonmusical for the first time in his life.

"It was in the Reader's Digest," Malik explained, trying to clarify matters but not sure how much Case had already missed.

"The Reader's Digest?" Case prompted. "That was the whole point," Malik went on earnestly. "I was stoned on Alamout Black hashish, the best in the world, and I sat down to read a whole issue of Reader's Digest all the way through and become one with it."

"Become one with the Reader's Digest?" Case was in beyond his depth and sinking fast in ontological quicksand.

"I wanted to experience a totally alien, science-fiction reality," Malik pursued his theme. "Reader's Digest comes from another universe, grok, from a world occupied by millions of Americans who are not New York intellectuals. These people sincerely believe that our government has never waged an unjust war, that the hair of a seventh son of a seventh son cures warts, that millionaires get rich through honesty and hard work, that a Jewish girl once got pregnant by a dove, and all sorts of things like that, which are regarded as medieval superstitions in my normal environment. Entering Reader's Digest through the empathy of hash is a quantum jump to another reality."

There was a momentary silence in which Case distinctly heard Juan Tootreego whispering, "... nose candy from Marvin ..."

"The trick," Malik went on, "is to concentrate on the reality projected through the printed page. Every sentence is a signal from another world, a nervous system different from yours with which you can interface synergetically ..."

"You mean," Carol Christmas breathed huskily, "you were deliberately brainwashing yourself to believe in this Reader's Digest world?"

"Of course," Malik said, with an isn't-it-obvious shrug. "A single ego is a very narrow view of the world."

"So in effect I became Middle America. Bouncing off the printed page into my retina, grok, decoded by nervous system circulating through Memory Storage the words formed a micro-Reader's Digest in my neurons. I honestly began to worry about the dangers of premarital sex."

"Nothing to compare with the hazards of marital sex. Do you have any idea how much alimony I'm paying every month?"

At that point, unfortunately, Case dozed off in his chair (one joint of Colombian too many) and he never did find out about the man with no wife, no horse, and no mustache.

Ths is the only time I've ever been glad to have grown up in a Reader's Digest world. I can effortlessly slip into the world that mippy is now marvelling at when she found the issues of my parents' local paper that they bought me a subscription to: the ice cream social, bingo night at the Ellendale Liquor Store.

A couple of days later she asked me if the state fair was like an exhibition or a funfair; I said both, and regaled her with tales of livestock, machinery, more fried food on a stick than you'll ever see outside of Scotland, 4-H projects... I can't believe I didn't get around to telling her about the beauty-pageant contestants whose heads are sculpted in butter.

I did actually worry about pre-marital sex, and vow I'd never do it. (Of course that's easy to say when your male classmates are pimply FFAers who never seem to get tired of their argument about whether Arctic Cat or Polaris makes better snowmobiles.) I didn't have to learn to Just Say No because no one ever offered me anything. I didn't even think South Park was funny.

Such a reality tunnel, if you want to call it that, is not a nice place to be... but it's a nice place to be from. It's still lying there, dormant, neglected, but functional if I need exercise in switching worldview. I don't even have to get stoned.

It's good to remind myself, when I feel like I'm stuck in a rut (as I do now) where I've come from and just how far I've wandered.


* I love this book so much, it pains to me to have excised the stuff I did from this conversation, but I thought it better not to be any more convoluted than I already am here.

Our imaginary lesbian street gangs have been decimated already

Hey!

Why did none of you tell me about the glories Bill O'Liely has wrought in the past week?

I have no TV here, you know. For better or worse. No Faux News, no Keith Olbermann, no Stephen Colbert. (I'll let you guess which of those I think is better and which is worse.) So the responsibility for informing me on these things falls to you, dear internet pals. I must say I'm not impressed with your performance this quarter.

What's all the fuss? It seems that the Daily Kos is planning a convention. Budget airline JetBlue is sponsoring it, offering a few ticket vouchers or something.

If that doesn't seem very fussy, perhaps like me you suspected that Daily Kos is just a popular and respected politically-progressive blog site wth forums and glossaries and all sorts of cool stuff, but look who's here to tell us how wrong we are.

What we didn't realize, apparently, is that it is nothing but a a Far-Left Hate Site! Vicious. One of the worst "hate sites" America has to offer. Hatemongers. O'Liely compares it to the Nazis and the KKK. Fox sent some teenage "reporter" to badger the JetBlue CEO when he was trying to leave his apartment and get to work, and then got all self-congratulatory and magnanimous here when the CEO asked to have JetBlue's name removed from Kos's convention website. "The mistake JetBlue made," we're told in a Mister-Rogers tone of voice, "is hooking up with haters. There's no room for that in America." Take that, you h8ers.

Of course Daily Kos, as you can imagine, is shattered by all this. "Do you realize how devastating it is to be named the enemy of one of the most mocked figures in news, a man so identifiably muleheaded and egotistical that he spawned an entire television program satirizing his habitual hallucinatory fictions and barely lucid emotional fits?" It's a masterful piece.

And, as always, Keith Olbermann for president, please.