In this batch are various longer pieces I’ve written over the years that either depend heavily on their HTML layouts to work or would simply be a huge pain in the ass to transport over to JP.com’s fancy-pants new WordPress layout. As with my Lampoon post, it’s a bit of a grab-bag here; still, based on word count alone it’s a pretty imposing stack of free writing, so if there end up being a few stinkers in the batch I make no apologies. (I should also note the appearance here of several pieces I’ve gotten emails about concerning their disappearance, in particular “A Tribe Untouched,” “Torso Messiah,” “Love Letter” and “Lordo Ringfellow.” So to the two or three people out there who still remember them and actually care enough to ask: bless you and here they are. Feel free to stop emailing me about them.)

• A Tribe Untouched
• Back of the Bible
• Lordo Ringfellow
• News Skim Comics
• The Trailer Trash
• Batman Begins Primer
• Teenagers are Retarded
• Me and Fred Savage
• How to Assemble an IKEA Desk
• Torso Messiah
• Inspector Poon
• RingLord III: The King’s Revenge
• These Are a Few of my Favorite Things
• Urban Legend Database
• Summer Movie Preview 2004
• Steve Bartman and the Cubs
• Charlie Sheen Super Keen Dream
• Charlton Damned Heston.com
• Love Letter
• Wendy’s Employee Newsletter

One of the drawbacks of whoring your comedy-writing ass out to anyone with a handful of cash and a website is sacrificing the right to your own work in exchange for a paycheck. The upshot is that I’ve watched material I’d slaved over for weeks (and, to be honest, some weak material I dashed off over a weekend for beer money) get time-humped to oblivion whenever the comedy site I’d been writing for changed formats, went bankrupt, overhauled their backend website system or otherwise obliterated my stuff in the name of progess and decency.

So it’s been a nagging irritation for me that all my National Lampoon stuff got wiped from the Internet Hivemind some time last year to make way for that upsetting next wave in internet comedy, video clips. (Even the Onion’s got the damn things now.) Why bother writing things when you can upload clips of fat men getting hit in the nutsacks with objects of various weight, or cats wearing/doing/dry-humping things they shouldn’t, right?

Though not complete, here’s what I managed to unearth (and a big thanks to Scott Mulder’s generosity shortly after I left NL, without whose email packages of old archived material I most likely wouldn’t have even these). Varying quality here, I admit, though in particular check out “Golden Heat,” a piece of such unapologetic stupidity that it still makes me smile years later. My apologies that, post-Zoolander, it now reads a bit “done”. In my defense, though, this piece pre-dates Stiller by a considerable margin (as did the dancer-in-the-coal-mines bit, also a later Zoolander scene. Perhaps I’ve got a tasty lawsuit on my hands?)

• Al Jazeera Guide
• Bono’s Third World Products, Inc. (with Karla Pacheco and Scott Mulder)
• Conserving Energy in the Home
• Flush-Rite Holiday Catalog 2003
• Things You Didn’t Wanna Hear
• The Curious Adventures of Inspector Poon
• How to be Loathsomely Repellent to Women (with Sean Crespo)
• The Thrashing of the Christ DVD Release Page
• Christmas ‘Round the World (with Sean Crespo)
• Golden Heat: My Life as a Solid Gold Dancer
• The NL Guide to Taxes

Back when I was living in Toronto, I was lucky enough to see Wilco a few times live. The highlight of the shows, for me, was a beautifully spare and moving unreleased song alternately introduced as “Spiders” or “Kidsmoke” that frontman Jeff Tweedy played unaccompanied on acoustic. I simply loved the song — having not really listened to Wilco a lot prior to seeing them live in concert, you could go so far to say “Kidsmoke” was the song that made me a fan of the group. It’s just that good a song.

And then they ruined it.

Jeff Tweedy and Wilco utterly and completely destroyed everything that was beautiful about the song. I mean, they wrote it, so I guess they’re allowed to do what they like. But they shouldn’t expect me to applaud. Occasionally I’d do an mp3 search for the latest live version, only to hear it mutating and devolving over time while they fussed and fidgeted the poor thing to death on the road. By the time Wilco wrapped up their tour and headed into the studio, the alt-country Tweedy was knee-deep in an ill-advised flirt with electronica. The completed studio version of “Spiders (Kidsmoke)” that I’d waited patiently for for years? A tragic ten-minute hot mess of shitty drum loops and untuned guitars. Even if you’re a diehard Wilco fan, I’m sorry, but it’s embarrassing.

Okay, time to tie this into Radiohead and In Rainbows. If you’re a Radiohead fan like me, you’re doubtlessly aware of the cumbersomely large back catalog of unreleased songs these guys have. Live and demo versions of great songs like “Lift,” “Follow Me Around,” “Big Boots,” “Big Ideas” and many, many others circulate around the net, but to date haven’t made it onto an album. Worse, Radiohead at this point is well-renowned (infamous?) for their experimental (indulgant?) studio noodling, spending months and even years recording endless variations of their songs. Every time a new Radiohead album comes out, I’m always a bit leery of hearing some previously unreleased and long-cherished song of theirs in its new electronica-dance-ska format.

Concerns were not appeased after I’d heard several of the new songs purported to be on their next album, which they’ve meted out in dribbles over the past two years while trying out the material at live shows. Granted, you’re hearing these songs through a glut of crowd chatter, through the use of the shittiest recording equipment available, so it’s always best to take a wait-and-see attitude. Still, it was hard to listen to a brash, sloppy, dischordant live track like “Reckoner,” to take but one example, and not think to oneself, “Wow, that really doesn’t sound very good.”

Listening to the new Radiohead album over coffee this morning, one track in particular jumped out at me as one of the more acheingly, beautifully melancholy songs I’d heard in years, and demanded immediate repeat listens. Imagine my surprise when I pulled up my mp3 player to find out what this track was called: “Reckoner.” Radiohead took a song that — well, I’ll risk offending the diehards and just say it, the live version of “Reckoner” is complete shit — and massaged it into one of my all-time favorite songs by the band. Perhaps by any band.

I should probably wrap this up with a bow at this point, so you don’t feel like you’ve slogged through all this for nothing, so I guess my point is that studio noodling sometimes works, so long as you’re able to keep Jeff Tweedy away from a Casio beat machine.

Due to a longstanding familial obligation involving my birth and raising, Karla and I are once again making our annual trek to sun-dappled, palm-shaded Ontario, Canada for Canadian Thanksgiving. In truth I’m looking forward to it. Getting from Seattle, Washington to Kingston, Ontario is, granted, something of a day-long plane-and-train nightmare; but once we actually arrive, and get a chance to take in the multi-colored splendor of an Ontario autumn, I’m sure we’ll be glad we invested the time, at least for a good twenty minutes, until the novelty of dry orange leaves wears off and we realize we’re still in Kingston, Ontario for some reason.

In prior years, my American friends’ perplexed expressions at the idea that Canada might have its own Thanksgiving — “What do you have to be thankful for?” “You just stole it from us, didn’t you?” “Why is it in October? Is it because you guys are idiots?” — led to heated debate and explanation. This year I’m better prepared, and have so far managed to cut the hataz off at the pass with a curt “We have our harvest earlier in Canada because of the weather,” and if necessary, “We have plenty to be thankful for in Canada! Having a great neighbor like America, for instance!” and “Yes, we probably stole it from you. Is that firearm loaded? You got it at Wal-Mart, did you? Fantastic!”

Yes, this year I know what I’m doing, and in fact only two things have managed to catch me with my metaphorical pants around my ankles: that we told my parents some months ago we’d quit smoking (we had), but haven’t told them that we’ve since backslid and started back up again; and that the Canadian dollar is now actually worth more than its American counterpart for the first time in years. This in particular is cause for Yosemite Sam grumbling on my part, since I’d intended to pay off the last of the money my parents lent me years ago to get several bossy student loan collection agencies from phoning me every half hour (”Got the money yet? How about now? Is it cool if we come over and search your apartment?”) Realizing that if I’d settled up four years ago I could have paid 60 cents on the dollar is, I’m sure you can imagine, akin to finding a rented DVD under a couch cushion that you could have sworn you’d returned weeks ago, except with several extra zeros at the end. Luckily, it looks like they’re throwing in a big turkey dinner, possibly to “sweeten the deal,” so while I’ll be returning to Seattle significantly poorer, I’ll at least be fatter, a big plus in the realm of poverty.

Well, we’re off. Keep it real, America! Don’t touch my stuff while I’m gone!

Every morning I use the elevator in the building across the street from mine, taking it down to the parking lot so I can walk across the sky bridge to my office. (If this seems needlessly complex, keep in mind that the area of Seattle I call home is built on top of a mountain that engineers sliced the top off of in the ‘30s and sold as real estate. This means you’re constantly on the look-out for elevators and sky bridges that obviate the need to inch your way down steep 200-foot embankments—inchings that, if it’s early enough and you’re not paying attention to the task at hand, can easily become a pants-peeingly terrifying, rapidly accelerating two hundred-footing.) 

Back to the elevator. Every morning I wait with a group of other people for the elevator. They press the UP button, I press the DOWN. We wait, jiggle our keys and make faces at each other that I’ve assumed are meant to imply a working substitute for conversation. (I’ll feel incredibly embarrassed if it turns out I’ve been giving tight-smiled nods to ackowledge that they’re merely constipated.)

Every morning, without fail, most of the people I’m waiting with file into the UP elevator when it bings!, and one of the group will break off from the herd and follow me into the also-bing!ing DOWN elevator. “Guess they’re heading for the sky bridge, too,” I think, until the elevator moves downward and they get this crushed, befuddled look on their faces. They’d watched all the sheep file into the first UP elevator, but had spotted a way to beat the rush by taking the second, thinking themselves pretty clever. Now, descending to the parking lot with a pudgy redheaded guy making faces at them like he’s constipated, they feel betrayed.

“Looks like you hijacked me!” one woman laughed, half-joking but with an unmistakable sprinkle of accusation in her voice. “I thought you were going up,” huffed a man another day, like I own the elevator or something, and enjoy spending my mornings purposely misleading innocents as to its direction.

It’s hard to get angry or indignant over it. Even for me, it’s just such a small, silly thing to get bent out of shape about. Plus, since I don’t even work in the building, I don’t think I’m technically allowed to use it. Still, though: I’m starting to resent this daily implied accusation that I’ve somehow fraudulantly misrepresented the directions of elevators to strangers. Not to spoil the secret here, but a giant circular light activates and there’s a loud bing!ing noise, you fucking meatheads. It’s not my fault you’re not checking which light it is. If you’re too lazy to pay attention, maybe you deserve to explore the parking lot for a few minutes, to pause and reflect on your navigational hubris.