The Squish Heard Underfoot Might Be Marco Polo: Adventures On Marrs

Ever since I was a kid and some old Greenbush sage told me cockroaches survived atomic explosions, I've had a fascination with insects of the order Blattaria. Of course, living in the Greenbush area afforded me many opportunities to see cockroaches up close and personal. There was the time one almost fell down my throat while I lay on the floor of an abandoned house, staring up at a ceiling full of them. As I grew older, the enthrallment to let them split the rent, eat at the same table, or even share my bed (no matter how drunk either I or the cockroaches were) dissipated to zero. Cockroaches as animated characters, now that's a whole other phylum.

Cockroaches have appeared as subordinates in such films as A Bug's Life, Twilight of the Cockroaches, An American Tale, Monsters and Aliens, WALL-E, and Men in Black, as well as dozens of television series, including one of my favorites, Oggie and the Cockroaches.

People sometimes ask me, "Greenbush Boy, where do you come up with your twisted concepts and are you featured on the Homeland Security Watch list because of them?"

"Beats me," I tell them; but my creative journey, much like removing oneself from the TSA Watch List, is circuitous and about as difficult to follow as footprints in water. I need a GPS system most of the time just to locate my shadow.



Take, for instance, Irwin, the cockroach star of Adventures on Marrs...Landfill. Around 1970, I first heard a song titled "Tennessee Bird Walk" performed by country western stars Jack Blanchard and Misty Morgan. I was still living at home on Mills Street, next to the James Bowen House, in the family basement by the broken water heater and the old chicken coop. I had three possessions in life, none linked to my dignity: a broken hot plate, a pre-war sofa bed, and a rabbit-eared black and white TV that broadcast only farm reports, tele-evangelists, and country music programming. I liked "Tennessee Bird Walk." It was the kind of twangy, down home music I could really get high listening to without feeling too guilty about leaving the haze of Deep Purple and Black Sabbath for a few minutes. Amazingly, these two heavy metal giants are still out there flailing away in the 2009 cardiac arrhythmia tours. But I digress.

Several years after "Tennessee Bird Walk", Blanchard and Morgan came out with a song that fit perfectly into the singalong world of Doctor Demento. The lyrics of "The Cockroach Stomp" were so perverse that they made my other favorite song on death, Jim Carroll's "People Who Die," sound like a nursery rhyme. Country western music had immortalized cockroach destruction.

Several years ago I ran across this nonsense:



This video reminded me of the afternoon I sat in Brittingham Park watching a homeless man try to fish what looked to be parts of a broken terrarium out of Lake Monona. The man refused to go anywhere near the water and was using, not to successfully, an iron bar to coax his obsession to the shore. I was about eight at the time and I had just come from a hard day at Longfellow Grade School.

I'm 25 years away from being in this picture.

Without any hesitation I jumped into the nutrient-filled, algae-clogged lake water, teeming with bloated fish skins. Only when the water circled my throat did I remember that I had yet to learn how to swim (never did) and I was wearing my Sunday go to meeting clothes from school. Thankfully I had just seen Lassie basically do the same thing with Little Timmy, so I dog paddled this piece of broken flotsam ashore .

As soon as the westerlies blew me ashore, the old man grabbed the terrarium. A bunch of slimy bugs fell from their watery hiding places and scattered in all directions. Picking it up high over his head, he yelled something that sounded like, "Get thee back into the water, demon witch,"and flung the terrarium back out into the lake. He then began the poking process all over again with his iron pole.

I sat there soaked, with a dead fish in my back pocket, while the homeless guy banged away at the water, wondering what excuse I would give my parents this time for my appearance. The guy suddenly stopped walloping the water and strode towards me, snarling that I had poisonous water beetles climbing all over me. I looked down. There was one struggling to climb out of my pant cuff. That was enough. I ran screaming out of the park almost becoming roadkill on West Washington Avenue. I spent the next day and a half submerged in a bathtub, ignoring that fact that I had abandoned my school books and the next day's assignments in the park. I guess the homeless guy tossed them into the lake. They washed ashore in Hannibal , Missouri several months later.

Then, about the same time as the above video, I read an article about a grade school science terrarium mistakenly carted off to the city dump during the summer recess. The kids, the school board, parents, the mayor went nuts at this costly mistake. The article mentioned how the kids had lovingly taken care of the plants and the water filtration system and the bugs, slugs, grubs and other creepy crawlies for years, and now had no reason to live or at least attend class. One precocious child was quoted as saying she felt very worried for the safety of her "friends" because, like her house pet "Fluffy," none of the "glass house" occupants had ever had to survive on their own.

"Terrarium." "Glass house." "Pampered insects." That night I began working on Adventures on Marrs...Landfill.

This story is a simple tale of a daydreamer: A cockroach named Irwin, who has lived a pampered existence in a science terrarium in Ms. Goff's sixth-grade class. While all his friends frolic, doing bug and insect party things, Irwin sits attentively listening to all of Ms. Goff's lectures on science and outer space travel -- especially about those unmanned explorations on the planet Mars.

Irwin watches all the educational movies shown in class, and every night he studies all the forgotten homework left on top of his glass home. He hopes one day to be called by a Mr. Houston to rocket off into space and do some exploring of his own. He keeps a diary of his life in the glass house, which all the inhabitants call affectionately Casa a Pupae. Like every visionary, he doodles faces in his book.

One day Irwin and his friends wake up and discover they are no longer in Ms. Goff's class, but some place called Marrs which, as Irwin notes, was always spelled incorrectly on the blackboard. Unfortunately, the "Landfill" part of the sign had long since disintegrated; but to Irwin, his wish had come true. Obviously, Mr. Houston wanted his and his friends to explore the planet really badly because no advance warning had been given and certainly there were no NASA training sessions. He didn't even have to spin around in circles.

What Irwin and his crew are about to explore on Marrs

Irwin observes in his diary of the similarities between the Marrtian landscape and Ms. Goff's classroom floor. Perhaps being an astronaut will not be as challenging as it is made out to be. Perhaps Marrs and Earth are not that dissimilar after all.

Irwin's diary begins here.

Bathroom Backflips

I have a very blustery cockroach living in my bathroom, and the big brute blames me for his continued lackadaisical love life. I call him Langer because I first saw him high-diving Greg Louganis style into my morning mango-nectar drink shortly after breaking up with FANG, a bi-polar example of femininity if ever there was one. Diving in head first, he would paddle around as if he were a disgraced bank executive taking in his indoor Olympic size pool. Langer would then crawl back out, shake himself off like an Afghan and dive back in, with no regard for the backwash spilling onto the floor. If truth be told, Langer thrives on slippery surfaces. Every morning he greets me when I first walk into the bathroom. He waits for me to miss the rim then begins to freshen up for the day. It would have been easy for me to call him Archy, but given his foul language and surly disposition, I saw no intellectual resemblance to his more famous literary predecessor. Langer neither bangs out poetry on an Underwood nor does he hang around all night long with crusty stogy-smoking newspaper reporters covering the police beat while reading Krazy Kat.

For years Langer has demanded I remove the above circa 1930's Scott Tissue advertising poster from my bathroom. According to him, it frightens away all his lady friends. The man's scowl apparently gives his female companions a most delirious form of the vapors; most come from well-to-do Republican homes in the southland, so any inference that Bolshevism exists on my bathroom floor, hidden among old pizza crumbs and scraps of toilet paper freaks the honeys out. I tell him that he can always use the line, "Come upstairs and see my etchings." He reminds me that quaint remark has never worked for me; the poster in question is merely a dime store copy and tastes like it as well.

Langer pays no rent, and he rarely turns off the lights after he leaves a room, therefore the poster stays. Anyway, I have nothing more appropriate to cover the earthquake cracks that creep further and further upwards with every Southern California temblor. I tell him, "There's the crack, leave anytime you want and don't let the dry wall hit anyone of your eighteen kneecaps." He laughs like a Saturday morning villain and then threatens me with some Ninja moves if I don't pour him another mango smoothie. He has also taken a fancy to the weight-watchers "cure for cancer" fungus growing under my sink. He's not leaving anytime soon.

So this morning I wake up to the sound of Mondo Grosso coming from my bathroom. This is odd for I only listen to bottleneck blues and Cajun music before I start my day. Only one character I know hates my music and would dare change the pre-sets. Inside the bathroom Langer stands half drunkenly, listing from side to side, humming to himself, celebrating life, in a pile of old shaving cream suds. Intoxicated once again on that week old spilt virgin olive oil on the kitchen floor. How he finds his way back to the bathroom is anyone's guess. I should finally clean that mess up near the encrusted raisin bran pile, but Langer is funny when drunk. He can't play gin worth a hoot then.

This morning Langer is not alone. He has company, plenty of company, yet no one pays any attention to him. All stare up at the wall, more entranced by what they see there than Langer's slurred come hither gyrations. That damn free loading roommate of mine had changed the poster. I'm mortified and red faced as I read along with the others, our mouths slowly moving in unison over every shocking word. Who knew such stuff even existed? I excuse myself and go outside. I feel faint. I believe I do have the vapors, Miss Scarlett. But it is sunrise and certain needs must be performed because I am a still healthy male. Thank goodness for the knotty pine across the street, but damn if I didn't miss the rim again.

Stepping on a Fox's Tail

I fell asleep reading Kafka and so...

I spent a good part of yesterday afternoon at various hardware stores, battling with members of Beverly Hills gangs of liberals and progressives -- punching and screaming and carrying on as if we were all after the same plasma television at a Circuit City liquidation marathon. I don't remember being in so many cat fights since I stopped to ask for directions at a local trucking establishment east of Reno several nights ago. That was a great dream as well.

The Inauguration was less than 24 hours away. Therapists had been notified; prescriptions filled; my heart monitor was at the ready, but there was so much more to do. Still, I was not truly prepared for the upcoming event. I knew the dangers that lay ahead. Prepare sloppily and my entire neighborhood was at risk -- pets would never poop properly again, and apartments and homes within a three mile radius of where I lived would be uninhabitable for weeks. Hence the need to visit hardware stores. It all made so much sense to me. I could hear myself snoring.

It was a chance worth taking. I needed to witness the destruction myself. Without it, January 20th would simply be another 24 hours in our nation’s history.Anyway, I like looking at new brands of cyclone fencing.

At 3 a.m. this morning, the police arrived at my door. Some irate loser in my building reported I was making too much noise during my pre-celebration festivities: Something to do with hammering so early in the morning and off-key whistling of Disney songs.

I greeted the officers with a nail gun in one hand and a moderately sized beach umbrella in the other. I don't know where that other hand came from, but it held a very large whisk broom. I was wearing a hurricane slicker, size ten hip boot waders, and a welder’s helmet -- the exact outfit I used to wear whenever I went quail hunting with the vice president.

I looked around. I had covered my entire apartment, walls, ceiling, carpeting, and furniture with the two-ply, heavy duty, water-proof plastic, the sort Dexter uses to wrap his victims after he fillets them. Was I expecting Jackson Pollack for breakfast? one of the cops asked. Pretty amusing I thought: A police officer who has David Kelley writing his dialogue.

But the boys in blue knew exactly why my apartment was one big drop cloth. They showed me memos alerting Interpol of potential early morning rowdiness by a certain select troublemaker. They warned me if my activities became to grandiose, I would be arrested under some Homeland Security proviso and sent to a castle as a lifelong juror. They did fine me, however, for using a brad nailer rather than a framing nailer when putting up the plastics.

It was 5 a.m.. Everything was ready around me. My herbal teas, pop tarts, and two day-old pizza were all under heavy plastic bags ready for consumption. I turned on my television to That Network, the very same one I watch only when I want a quick cardiovascular work out. My head exploded so often watching That Network that I could now look up in the middle of my living room and see constellations.

Today would be different. What could anyone on That Network say? Would the news readers keep their cool? Disappearing quickly, eight years of preaching an alternative reality, officials scurrying away like cockroaches in sunlight. Would any of the punditry last the day or would they self-detonate or melt before my eyes. Unharnessed kinetic energy can be a real mess to clean up. I've read the X-Men. I hoped I had enough plastic.

Fulminations. Blasts. Diatribes. Harangues. Jeremiads screamed from the TV set. For the next ten hours I witnessed with awe and near reverence the violent effects of No Drama Obama on this wandering herd of confused and lost pundits, commentators, and experts. Funny but none could recall ever saying that Obama was too black, not black enough, a secret Muslim, a jihadist, far too cerebral, much too elitist, not really Middle American, valueless, un-American, not American, a lousy bowler. January 20, 2009 was not the start of a new mandate, but one in which celebrity crazy America, ever ready for the next sparkling info product, had, hypnotically cast their ballot for the new guy. History would one day judge the previous administration differently, much like the way the crew of the Titanic would eventually reevaluate the role of the iceberg.

I dreamt of heads exploding outward, limbs twitching and flying away, and teeth shooting forth like missiles. I was ducking and covering. My television morphed into a Gatling gun, rapid firing canines and molars towards me. The floors and ceiling melted away into rivers of brainstems and eyeballs.

Wow! This is what happens after eight years of regurgitated miscalculations, misjudgments, guesstimates, broken promises and asinine justifications! I was swimming in bits and pieces of Charles Krauthammer, Fred Barnes, Neil Cavuto, Morton Kondracke, Ben Stein, and dozens more who had taken money for sitting on their brains and getting everything wrong. Were they too asleep when we thought they were awake? All that was missing from this carnage was Charlton Heston and a burning bush.

But the dream continued. After some commercial breaks all the Beltway boys and girls returned as verbally dense as before, ready to blow apart like mini Vesuvius mannikans. So many befuddled individuals twisting into yoga pretzels, emphasizing their relevancy and denying they were still part of the James Buchanan administration. They talk lovingly of Kumbaya moments, bipartisan appeals, and Congressional checks and balances. These guys were backtracking so quickly from their previous words that GPS units later found them on Jupiter.

"The Fox Hunt" by Winslow Homer

I laughed. I cried. I fell in love. I wake up. The Network is running for its life. Barack Obama is about to give his speech. Unlike Marley and Me and Seven, this day will have a happy ending.

I’m now sweeping out the apartment and doing some dusting as well. Now I know I'm back to dreaming because I would never do either action fully awake. My television appears ruined as is my Hummel collection of weird looking gnomes. I also discover that Easy Off does not work on carpets. I see so much viscera left on the walls and floors that I think I'll make sausage tonight.

How will That Network survive? Well there are still gays, guns, God, and the assault on Christmas so I guess they'll do just fine. My quick cardio workouts will continue.

Life is good. It's morning in America again. Actually it is late evening. Most of all, I am happy that Obama mentioned the word “science” in his Inaugural Address. Once more it is safe to believe the earth rotates around the sun rather than the other way around. And that ain't no dream.

The Gates of Eden