Hey what’s up! I’m looking forward to having a pretty chill weekend with the most exciting thing being checking out that Wesley Willis documentary at Alamo Drafthouse. I’m sure it’s gonna be a lot of fun. The first time I had ever heard of Wesley Willis was his appearance on Howard Stern back in 1996. That was during his “play the keyboard demo and sing the title of the song over and over” period in his career. “Who is this cat?” you may ask. Wesley Willis is this schizophrenic cat that has these 3 distinct voices in his head that tell him that he’s worthless and insult him and tell him to do fucked up things. He currently has about a dozen or so records out on Alternative Tentacles. I warn you though, if you pick up one, you may wind up with a whole album of cheezy Casio demo riffs with him singing someone’s name, say “Alanis Morrisette” for example, over and over. But then he also has some really brilliantly funny songs like “Cut that Mullet” and “Batman Kicked My Ass”. You never can tell what this cat will come up with. My personal favorite stuff is whenever you hear him with his full band. To hear a really good Wesley Willis song, check out the one on the “Tromeo and Juliet” soundtrack. It’s a fantastic paranoid tune told from the perspective of the voices in his head urging him to drink whiskey and hurt people. Good stuff.

Man, other than looking forward to that, I had the hardest time coming up with an excuse to wake up this morning. I feel like that Le Tigre song “Do you wanna stay in bed all day? YES! Do you remember feeling any other way? NO!” Things are really scary these days; it’s hard to get the courage to keep going. Even the “funny” pages in the newspaper don’t cheer me up like they used to. I mean, yeah, the funny papers have always catered to the “middle of the road” politically, and I know that Garfield has used the same 4 gags for over 20 years, and that B.C. has always been a source of sugared over misogynist theocratic bullshit, and that the comics pages really haven’t been the same since Calvin and Hobbes, the Far Side, and Bloom County were still around. My particular complaint today was with the comic strip “Wizard of Id”. It’s always been a bad, unfunny strip. But ever since the cat started sneaking actual politics into it, it has become kinda scary. I would really hate to meet this cat. The strip shows a sneering contempt for the unemployed and suffering, and even though the authority figures are shown to be bufoonish, no attempt to undermine their authority is made. I could go on for days. But today’s actual gripe comes from a quote he made of one of our Supreme Court judges. The strip has the king and a monk (in Franciscan garb) discussing the death penalty. The punchline delivered by the friar is “well, if you’re a believer, it’s not a penalty…” DOES THAT NOT SCARE YOU AT ALL? The reference I assume he was making was to Justice Scalia’s quote “The more Christian a country is, the less likely it is to see the death penalty as immoral…to a believing Christain, death is no big deal.” HOLD THE PHONE! Was he serious? If a supreme court judge can say such Epicurean bullshit with no sense of irony, then WE ARE ALL IN BIG TROUBLE. I don’t know about you but no matter what my opinion of the afterlife, DEATH IS KIND OF A BIG DEAL TO ME. There’s quite a few things I’d like to get done before then. It’s getting pretty scary out there, even for people (like me) who don’t believe in the apocalypse. Sorry to make my final note a bummer, but I’m out of time.