I originally heard the Crepitation Contest on a 78 and reel to reel tape, so I'm guessing it happened in Julio's basement and Artie's basement in The Barracks. Artie and I were milk monitors at P.S. 84, and he was a little older, moving on to junior high and a job with 20th Century Fox as a runner before I got to 141 (go Fighting Tanagers!) and then quickly moved on to Brooklyn Tech.
You can buy an MP3 of the old Canadian recording from Amazon.com or you can find several free downloads on the InterWeb, one of which is available at Wanker's Paradise. I'm pretty sure that exposure to this recording (as well as purloined out takes of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis's radio ads for The Caddy) helped shape my philosophical explorations of reality and coming to the obvious conclusion that what does not kill me makes me fart.
What does this have to do with anything? some of you are probably wondering, to which I can only say: Nothing. Nothing has everything to do with anything. Nothing is not the absence of something. It is not a vacuum waiting for substance to fill it. Nothing matters, and matter is an inert form of energy which can be neither created nor destroyed. I don't see why so many people have a problem with that.
So while fiddling around preparing to deploy Projectile Dysfunction, Penis Dementia, and Lock and Load to the information frontage road, I realized the work I've posted electronically during the past quarter century represents more than 90% of my surviving work.
The reason for this is simple. I used to destroy most of what I had written every spring in a celebration akin to a potlatch. I would empty the file cabinet and take everything out to the burn barrel, drink a fifth of grain alcohol and wash it down with a couple quarts of beer, do some drugs, and bid adieu to another pile of ashes that represented the past. The only thing that survived were those pieces accepted and published in little magazines or collected in chapbooks or circulated among the anti-cognoscenti with access to copy machines at work.
But then that pesky Al Gore invented the Internet and suddenly I stopped typing things on paper and sending them out in the mail. I just posted them online. I had already stopped using my real name in the early 70s when submitting work to prove a point about the pervasiveness of prejudicial thinking and how no one could really know the difference between fact and fancy, but that's a subject for another post.
This one is about farting and the completeness of nothing in explaining God's ways to Man. It is about realizing that I don't really imagine things or make them up. I know the future because it has already happened and it continues to happen whenever I sit at a keyboard and type about current events.
I updated Uncommon Sense this morning with posts spanning a mere decade. From Maggie's Farm, I resurrected a piece about the Obama bailout that Repugnicants keep screaming about that I wrote to celebrate Thanksgiving, 2008, during the end of former First Idiot George Fubar Bush's grueling 8-year vacation schedule. In it, I was randomly substituting Fs for PHs and vice verse because fuck was being censored out of my posts by the host. I corrected some of that subversive spelling now that my host doesn't read my shit. I am my host. The post is more valid today than it was more than a year ago and still means nothing.
Next, I found a piece I posted at ZNet Interactive on September 12, 2001, the day after the day that changed absolutely nothing. It showcases some of the trademark tendencies in my pataphysical ouevre: the use of celebrity names applied to imaginary people who seem more real than you or your family, friends, and acquaintances. This is a holdover from a decade where I refused to publish anything under a pseudonym I'd already used. I used to like editors telling me they would accept my poetry if it was a little bit more like that written by somebody else who was also me. I also added some links to the piece to help support how meaningless the universe is.
Finally, I recycled a post from 2004 using my new calendar where 9/11 replaced the birth of Christ as our divine designator and report what anyone with eyes and ears and a functioning brain that was capable of processing sensory input in a sane manner should have been writing and publishing in the liberal media at the time. Sure, it's easy for people to say this shit is funny in hindsight, but at the time I was thinking it was really funny, and I should have been worried about being hunted down, rounded up, and subjected to harsh interrogation techniques like normal people, but I wasn't worried then, and I still have nothing to worry about now.
Not only does nothing matter, people. No one is in charge. No one cares. And no one is to blame. So go get drunk and do something reproductive.