RATS OF PARIS

They Erupt from the sewers and gutters
Riding old waffles like chewy surfboards
Energy of the rain propels their destiny

It is their world now
A world of rotting damp fur
and Half Eaten faces, bikini tops shredded
Little boxes of deep fried gizzards
and Breathless Hope
All the time knowing, Agony wins out

They are the Scourge of France
Maxwell Smart with a naked tail
There are thousands of them
jaws clamped around young thighs

If only you could open your eyes
Live again; if only you could see
this time it might end diffeently

The Cure At Last??

No One Expected The Hillbilly Virus To Be Cured By the Beatniks.  

A seasoned and well-reasoned Beatnik happened upon what turns out to be the cure for the Hillbilly Virus.  Just as simple as that.  It was totally random, totally unintentional, whimsey and impulse. Fate slapped her lips around the siphon hose and pulled back a mouthful of fumes just in time to contaminate the House In Town with the exhalations.  

Beatnik, name of Flappy Jo-Jo, happened to step into a tank of water while going to the Pom-Pom Club in order to take a leak out back.  Simultaneously he coughed in my mother's hair, swallowed a mouthful of vinegar, and scraped his head on a doorframe.  I will try and hold myself in line.  I am trying to memorize this small issue so that I can go out in the world and explain how to beat the virus.  The hillbilly in question (Flappy) slept for a good three hours and then awoke with the words of Ferhinghetti dousing the fires on your brain and mine and everyone else within earshot.

First act was to fix the family - and not to mess with the ones who had died.  Once your family & friends are brought back, go forth into the world and multiply.  And by that I mean a bunch more 45s in a wire rack, stuff like that.  If it makes no sense to you now, reading this - then you must still have the Virus or its lingering after affects.  Go ahead now, go to bed and plate glass the dog's red hip with a new staple runner and patterns.

You'll know how to proceed, where others have failed.

Don't Eat The Naughty Pine

When the hillbilly wave crested on the west coast, Hollywood was more than happy to turn the reins over to the intruder.  The decadence of the arts fostered some unbelievable combinations of human DNA mixed with Go-Jo Hand Cleaner and Spam.  Beings composed entirely of old sheet music, jellied meat product, broken shoelaces and dried out Play-Doh began to climb on the signs and attempt to drive away anyone who retained a half of a brain.  

Burma-Shave products was such a massive company and they were rising to the occasion, following their moldy destiny.  If Microsoft wanted to survive they were going to have to scrap the computer software market and go to manufacturing full sized billboards to educate the remaining populace on how to be indistinct.

The converted 'billlies were just too damned adaptable.  They focused on their limited areas of expertise and somehow managed to thrive along a narrow path; narrow but running deep.  Some of the coastal hillbillies learned to breathe  through gills and so they took to the muddy rivers and stagnant ponds, hoping to breed with their own particular kind of filth.

Mabel in the Stable Painting Caleb's Table

Social media was being lambasted by the Hillbilly Virus. High tech electronics were devastated and rendered useless.  The only thing tweeting was a bird here and there.  Television programming was "Hillbilly-ized" across the nation.  There were only three channels and they all were playing the same thing: episodes of "Hee Haw", "Mayberry R.F.D.", "The Real McCoy", "Francis the Talking Mule", "Petticoat Junction", "Green Acres" and cartoons featuring Mushmouse and Punkin Puss.  It may sound like a lot of variety but it wasn't.  

Radio stations all switched over to bluegrass and country ballads and a strong dose of country gospel by folks like the Louvin Brothers, who were horrifically exhumed.  Cell phones were paperweights (although paper was now in short supply).  Long johns with a built-in trapdoor and groundwater divining rods moved up to drive the stateside retail marketplace.  

Bank presidents and yodelers bought floppy straw hats, cut eye holes in them, and pulled them down to their noses.  Razorback hogs rioted in the streets (where there was room around all the other riots).  Things were so bad after dark that a seriously debilitated Congress attempted to pass laws making night time illegal.

Nobody knew what to do, so most people just started eating Fig Newtons and walking through trailer parks waving twenty-dollar bills above their heads.  It was provincial chaos.

Hard to Harmonize With A Violent Nosebleed

THIS IS THE HILLBILLY VIRUS INSTALLMENT EIGHT.

Government officials are mostly changing into ancient folk singers with crew cuts, matching striped shirts and penny loafers.  The Letterman Party gains political prominence with a membership made up of patrons who are all a few jelly beans shy of a jarload.

This could be the first time in history that government has harmony but it's the wrong kind and all the social services are going straight to Hell.  Jackbooted midgets march and drill in the streets of Detroit and Beijing - they raise high their standard which depicts BUDDY EBSEN sitting on a park bench with AUDREY HEPBURN, eating birdseed and simultaneously shitting themselves.

We thought that the beatniks and profiteers were all dead and buried in the tomb of jack keroac but it turns out they were just hiding in abandoned boxcars and cooking rhesus monkeys over open barrel fires, waiting for their moment.  Now it has arrived.  Using lyric poetry and ramped up bug zappers they are forcibly gaining control of all religious zealots and also most of the hydroelectric dams.  anita bryant is exhumed and her corpse paraded in the streets, while music speakers blare her Christmas albums at an intolerable volume.  Things are intense on the home front, yes they are.

HILLBILLY VIRUS: I Own The Apple, The Apple Owns Me

Whenever there is trouble everybody wants a cop, but this time it's a no go.
Most of the officers have gone barefoot, quit the force and started  concentrating on their bunions and freshly minted buck teeth.  The few still on the beat have no interest in anything except banjo lessons and laying hens.  

Fights erupt in bus depots, coffee houses, temperance unions, broom closets, fast food restaurants and rodeo grounds outhouses - any place where two people can squeeze into close proximity and then start a feud (usually over one man's hog or another man's daughter).

Anybody who owns an old upright freezer - or anybody who can buy or steal one - converts it into a smokehouse.  It turns out grilled meat can make your day when the wave of hillbilly virus-infected people is basically overwhelming.

In the smokehouses hillbillies love to jerk and they don't much care what.  Gums are bleeding and teeth are loosening up, as the average hillbilly diet includes beef jerky, pork jerky, squirrel jerky, leather seat cushion cover jerky, boll weevil jerky and even cockroach jerky.  In the trash the stench of the upstairs cafeteria was dominant from the many table scraps.  The offal provides a real West Virginia atmosphere but anybody whose nose is still working properly is going to fall to their knees every time the wind changes direction.

Meanwhile the courthouse is jammed with gruff men in bib overalls, trying to get their names legally changed to "Devil Anse".  Others fight everybody and you must be strong to get close enough to what is your share of the pie.  Those with clear title might be in luck and end up with a loan to put towards development of their own chicken range.  These things are springing up and often they are the only way to find your lipstick and apply it, or come in with me to pick up the loot.

Supremely disturbing is the development of the "Snuffy Smith Syndrome", suffered most dramatically in people living near the equatorial line.  What happens is, the small men are marrying the gigantic and misshapen big girls - they make babies and the first one to show up comes out hairless and smoking a corncobb pipe.  The parents are so crestfallen and so discouraged by the little tyke with the pipe that they are attempting to drown their fears in apologies.

Hillbilly Virus - Your Skull is Sagging

<< THIS IS HILLBILLY VIRUS PART SIX, or something like that.  Don't start in the middle.  It won't make any difference anyway, but don't do it. >>

How does it travel?  Everybody wants to know.  Dead people and Republicans don't want to know as bad as everybody else.  They are both trying to figure out how to make money off it.

Rumors fly.  Bad advice and melting ice cream cones.  Shoeless indigents quote William Burroughs but don't know why.  Hundreds die from injecting Kool-Aid into their veins; others swallow too much air and their heads pop.  All in an effort to stop the pain, stop the progress, stop the presses and keep on keepin' on.

Word goes around that anyone who drives a Dodge Coronet across the state line will be immune.  Many are already displaying symptoms and are unable to drive an automatic transmission.  Plus most of the old Coronets are up on blocks in Tennessee or else have raccoons living in the radiator.  Just the thought of becoming a hillbilly panics so many - they break out in hives, they stick their heads in bee hives, the try to swallow Adirondack chairs, washing the fragments down with white lightning until their craw is jammed full and they die.  Die, die, die.  It's the one thing anybody can still do - smart, stupid, everything in between including television evangelism.  But nobody watches TV anymore.  Most of the sets have been made into bunkbeds or moonshine stills.  Programming-wise, this closes the gap on room for improvement.

Washer Woman's Elbow Cha Cha Cha

HILLBILLY VIRUS hits the intellectual hardest of all.

Watch in horror as doctors become lawyers, lawyers become mud.

None remain to care for the sick and the incontinent so they are the first to be eaten. The insane get masters degrees.  Barnyard animals earn scholarships.

Cows write poetry in the pasture; crap out Hemingway, Tolstoy.  We all look down the barrel of a big, hairy gun.

Whimsical troubadors
die by the thousands - you can hear them moan and croon.
"John Lennon was right; John Lennon was right."

Chaos in the comics as Archie marries Reggie and they opt for a reverse mortgage. 
Solomon Grundy eats Miss Grundy, poops out Jughead.

Porcupines explode, piercing the sky with destiny
"Tomorrow is just another day," rasps the toothless corpse of Andy Griffith.

"Just another bloody day, pissing down rain on the righteous."

DUNK NOT, BRAVE DOUGH NUT - Hillbilly Virus pt 4

Go to bed calm, but awaken as a hillbilly and mad.  I have seen it happen before; we all have - but not like this. Behind a symphony of bulldozers, the dogs massage a snake's thigh.  It is as erotic as sanskrit on a cupcake. Joan of Arc, purse zipper broken - time to die, time to die.

Underneath the mud crawls slow, thick revenge. We search the horizon for a tower made of simpletons. Everywhere is the smell of blood boiling, it stirs the surly appetites of the gods. Back at the ranch the weekend explodes.

Hillbillies are dunking their bloody, severed limbs in cold coffee in the rubble of fallen donut shops.  It is redemption through cauterization. But this revelation comes too late for everyone, even the ones who have an uncle named Jake who writes almanacs.  What does the future hold for the mountain creatures? Just more blank pages. Cocks don't crow - they spit.  A mouse squeaks and the world ends.

What Makes A Good Comic Book Villain?

                                                                                                                       S. Sibra 4/2014



When it comes to the bad guys, some of them just have what it takes to excel, and some of them come up short.  Doctor Doom has never been anybody's patsy, and never will be.  Paste Pot Pete, however, has been alliteratively pathetic from his first bucket of glue forward.  Even other make-believe people have never taken him seriously.

So what do you need to really get your bad on in the comic book world?  Well, I think that, like anywhere else, it all comes down to motivation.  Vengeance and world domination are the two most common motivators. The need for world domination generally comes from some deep seated inseurities which the comic books rarely spend any time explaining.  As for vengeance, someone has either been done wrong or believes that they have.  The aforementioned Doctor Doom probably is as good of an example of this category as anybody.  He was a real cock-for-dolly science wiz lab college student until he got careless and blew up his face one quiet Wednesday afternoon.  Somehow this was, in his mind, the fault of his nerdy school rival Reed Richards - so they both end up super-powered, and Doom just naturally wants to eradicate Richards while the good Doctor is on his merry way to world domination.  It's kind of a side project with him.

My friend Erik suggested to me that another possible motivation for a person to go down an evil road is sometimes as simple as their name.  Could Sinestro have done anything other that be consumed by evil?  I do suspect in many cases the name came after the manifestate of ultimate evil in their souls, however.

More interesting to me, however, is the bad guy who is motivated by the particulars of his own natural misfortune.  Let's look at one quick example of this:  Doctor Strange's arch-nemesis, the "Dread Dormammu".  Now this sucker is really pissed off.  Even Ultron-5 can't match the naked, unbridled anger of Dormammu.

Dormammu is a powerful being from another dimension, so naturally the physical laws of our world do not apply to him.  This doesn't stop him from frequently kicking down the door between the realities, and barging in on us like your drunken Uncle Mert does at the family Thanksgiving every blessed year.

Dormammu is one hundred percent mad; he is solid gold mad, he is Grade A Certified furious.  He is never not mad.  He sleeps mad.  He wakes up in the morning - mad.  Gets dressed in his cape and body suit, has some breakfast - still mad as a wet hornets' nest.  Gets in the car - drives to work mad.  Really mad, in traffic on a weekday.  Wait, you thought Dormammu worked at home?  No way, Jose; he has an office gig and punches the clock.  He is especially mad at the clock.  And he does, literally, punch it.

Now, what is there about Dormammu's plight that just naturally makes him so mad?  What is it that totally hacks him off, twenty-four seven?  Well it should be obvious.  It should be especially obvious to Doctor Strange; and you would think by now he would have a simple cure for the Dormammu blues, to be implemented each and every time the big D crashes our party here on earth and goes on one of his all-powerful, mystical death sprees.

Dormammu cops this horrible attitude for one reason, and one reason only:  HIS FUCKING HEAD IS ON FIRE!  As in, engulfed in flames.  All the time.  Day.  Night.  In the shower.  At the municipal pool.  In the pouring rain.  Sitting on the john.  Doesn't matter.  His head is flaming.  Can you imagine trying to lie down in bed and get some rest when your head is on fire?  Ain't gonna happen, dude.  Not likely.

Now I can't speak for Dormammu and say whether or not this condition is painful.  I would bet that it is.  But the sheer inconvenience of it, on a day to day basis, almost makes that detail irrelevant.  Get in the car, burn up the headliner, burn the headrest, burn the back of the seat.   Get within fifteen feet of a chick and he is going to singe her eyebrows, melt her eye liner, and probably cause a conflagration on her scalp - particularly if she favors hairspray.  Try to get a drink of water, it's probably boiling in his mouth before he can swallow it.  On the good side, raw sushi would be a lot less disgusting since it would cook as he brought it near to his mouth.  But that is one small consolation; one very small bone that he is being thrown by the cruel Hand of Fate.

So if Doctor Strange (self-described Master of the Mystic Arts) wants to diffuse the universal threat that is Dormammu, there is one obvious avenue which he should be pursuing, and which he blatantly ignores:  that is, he should be cooking up some potions or a spell of some sort that will put out the fire on Dormammu's head.  Snuff it, just like that.  Master of the mystic arts, should be able to handle that - right?  You know I'm right about this.

Put out his head fire and Dormammu is bound to mellow out, and right away.  Who knows how many hundreds of years his head has been on fire?  The absence of such an affliction would bear immediate fruit.  He might actually become a nice guy.  He might pick up a pizza on a whim and bring it to the Stephen Strange residence, unannounced, on a Friday night.  He might found a greeting card company.  It could be anything - but you know it would just turn his world around.  Period.  End of story.

At the least he would probably go back to his goofed up dimension and start a pet shelter or a soup kitchen for homeless magical weirdos.  There would have to be a big improvement.  There would just have to be.  His primary motivation towards doing evil would be gone.  Poof.  Just like that.  Up in smoke, you might say.

So how about it, Doctor Strange?  Ask the Ancient One for an old family recipe that will extinguish the flaming head of a rival.  Seems like it would probably be a pretty basic spell, like making macaroni and cheese from the recipe in the Betty Crocker cookbook.  No problemo.  Piece of cake, so to speak.

My wife also suggested that maybe just a fire extinguisher would do the trick.  I seriously doubt this, since Dormammu's flame is of a magical or mystical nature, and probably would not succumb to fire extinguisher technology.

Let's all sit down, right now, and write a letter to the Editorial department at Marvel Comics.  We can get this done.  We can do it to help out our fellow man - or demon, or whatever Dormammu actually is underneath all the soot and smoke and angry bluster.  Do it.  You'll feel better; you'll be glad you did.  And Dormammu's family will thank you.  Especially his wife or girlfriend.  Especially her.  So do it today - and on behalf of suffering super villains everywhere, I thank you in advance for your kind deeds.  

Hillbilly Virus Update

I will be taking a brief break from the diary of the Hillbilly Virus and will instead offer up other meaningless and unjustifiable drivel for an entry or two.  So please breathe a sigh of relief.  Don't worry - as with any other liquid moron, my idiocy will eventually rise to the surface once again.

Cereal of the Damned

Oh Yes, it's true - it's the Hillbilly Virus and every city boy everywhere is catching it and screaming for it and rallying to oppose it and the most miserable and downtrodden amongst us are the perennial standard bearers.  Raise high the roof beam, carpenters - Chicken Little has grown into a Frankenstein and no need to have him hitting his head on the landscape while he kisses the sky.

People are crying so many vicious tears that their eyeballs are turning inside out.  The Hillbilly Virus - the name just conjures the images.  First people are losing the ability to count on their toes and then they are losing their toes.  Compulsive whittling is rampant. If you see some contaminated geeznislaw stumbling in the street - knock off his strawberry hat, and two more will menacingly arise to take its place.  Just like that.

Have you ever seen a shirtless bearded man with no teeth, hoeing in his back yard and at the same time he suffers a Gran Mal seizure?  If he happens to be wearing old denim bib overalls they will invariably spontaneously combust.  As he stands flaming and dying, the recalcitrant hick finds that the only song going through his head, over and over, is "Feelin' Groovy" - his scorched brain keeps asking "Is it Simon? Is It Garfunkel? Is it Harper's Bizarre? Should I throw myself off the 59th Street Bridge?" and other similar dilemmas.  Foraging squirrels have a better chance of living to see the next sunrise.  So goes the legacy of the dreaded Hillbilly Virus.