Last night I traveled back in time in order to predict my future. Sometime in the late ’90s, Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion advertised for a comedy writer. Guess who applied? We had to write three skits. This commercial for Ed’s House of Big Pants was one of mine. In theory, I can do a better GK impression than I do here, but I think it gives the general idea.
(The awful whining in the background is the hard drive of the ancient computer that holds the text.)
A nod to Kierkegaard and Walker Percy: existentialist tomfoolery, political satire, literary homage, word mongering, a year-round summer reading club, Dylanesque music bits, apocalyptic marianism, poetry, fiction, meta-porn, a prisoner work-release program.
Søren Kierkegaard
Walker Percy
Bob Dylan
Good Country People
Labora / Editions
Sutter's Casebook
Betty Duffy
Bitkin
By Way of Beauty
Charlotte was Both
I Have to Sit Down
The Onion
From Empty Hands
The Fine Delight
First Things
Dappled Things
All Manner of Thing
Gerasene Writers Conference
Scrutinies
Transcendental Musings
The Ironic Catholic
DarwinCatholic
Inside Catholic
Catholic and Enjoying It
Catholic Radio International
Bad Catholic
Universalis
Is My Phylactery Showing?
Quotidian Quintilian
The Lion & The Cardinal (Daniel Mitsui)
Babes in Babylon
Fort o' Tude
Ellen Finnigan
En pocas palabras
William Wilson, Guitarist Extraordinaire
Signposts in a Strange Land
Godspy
Godsbody
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I hear that old computer
From down the avenue….
I smell the dumplings
I look around for you…
Seriously, though, this is the Prairie Home skit to end all Prairie Home skits. Which is precisely why it’s ‘the skit Garrison Keillor doesn’t want you to hear!’
Because then he would have nothing but Writer’s Almanac.
And I’m already gunning for that one. It’s the birthday today of Matthew Lickona, blogger and failed cartoonist…
His first book, Swimming with Scapulars, became a lightning rod for personal abuse among friends and acqaintances. At the age of eleventy-nine he committed suicide, realizing he could never write a song as beautiful as R.E.M’s “Perfect Circle.” “I realize I could never write a song as -” he said in his suicide note, which like so much of his work, was also left unfinished and unpublished – that is, until one of his literary executors discovered the note while fishing around in one of the boxes his widow tucked away in the garage for a pair of Wild Turkey cuff links, the coveting of which formed the basis of his utilitarian friendship with Lickona. The associate, Pulitzer, Nobel Prize and National Book Award winning poet J.L. Tyrrell, never found the links but he did find a blood-smudged, sweat-stained and tear-splotched page of sheet music for REM’s “Everyone Hurts,” which is, Tyrrell pointed out in his memoir, “I Swam Too!”, the backmasked melody for “Perfect Circle.” “It was his dream,” Tyrrell writes, “to do REM one better – but toward the end of his highly fruitless and fructose-ingested life, it was clear that Matthew Lickona was indeed coming to the end of his rope.”
It’s also the birthday of the much more successful Reema Major, Canadian poet and rapper…
Poor Tyrrell. All that power, and he never did get published in the New Yorker. As a result, he was never able to read his own work aloud to himself whilst in the Temple of His Familiar, a ritual he had long dubbed The Perfect Circle.
Dude,
No! You have to wait until Jan. 19 to do that!
So please, be patient – or forget – in the meantime.
JOB
And anyway, he’d probably have amassed enough Chronicles appearances at that point that it would have soothed his lower GI irritations sufficiently…
JOB
Agreed. Good stuff.
I thought the background noise was a whistling teakettle (it’s exactly the same timbre), which seemed to me perfectly apt.
No ruminations on death from me; just happy birthday.
Aw, you.
All’s I’m saying is – would you rathe be famous and dead or unfamous and who cares if you’re alive or dead?
JOB
I’d rather hang on to my Wild Turkey cufflinks.
Damn.
JOB
You need to send him the recording, not just the text. Are you ready to become GK’s successor? This kills. It’s marvelous.
Oh, and happy birthday. Thirty-nine is the new ninety-nine.
Thanks, and thanks! You got an email for him, Mr. Famous Poet?
Look, I know you have dreams of being a funny guy, and you ARE a funny guy, and I know funny.
But, you also gotta want a steady gig….
Nostalgia. It’s delicate, but potent. In Greek, ‘nostalgia’ literally means ‘the pain from an old wound’. It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.
This device isn’t a word processor; it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards…. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again….
Happy birthday indeed. Tip one back for all of us.
All? Or each?
I got it covered.
A bowling league refugee.