Predator Press Declares War On Big Twisty Tie

Predator Press

[LOBO]

The catastrophic failure of the once-glorified Twisty Tie continues to reverberate in the cavernous halls of Casa de LOBO. I figured I would get thicker screws for this chair yesterday instead, but they are not long enough.

So Big Twisty Tie continues to rake in their fat cash based on my ill-advised endorsement, mocking me as my chair lie crippled and broken.

Fuck you and your sweeping conspiracies, Big Twisty Tie! You people are sneaky frauds! And I am sitting on this chair anyway!

Do you hear me?!?

One Man Flash Mob

Predator Press

The guard completed a complex-seeming series of transactions with a set of keys, and the heavy doors slid back open; the armored elevator seemed to have moved at all, but the dungeon-like quality of the new floor was immediate and palpable.

Flandsa Ha’asasanba -familiar somewhat with the cellblock for his own reasons- proceeded to cellblock 'I' -ironically the location of LOBO's 'POD'- without an expected direction request.

In the center of a checkerboarded lancing of light, LOBO, in an orange jumpsuit, sat on a cot facing the opposite wall. He was not the pensive animal Flandsa was expecting. He seemed, well, serene.

“Flandsa Ha’asasanba,” said LOBO in a cool voice that unnerved Flandsa. Rubbing his wooly, unkempt facial growth in thought, LOBO didn’t turn to address him, but as Flandsa grew closer, he could see LOBO’s face -it was covered in a macabre splash of dripping red.

Flandsa stopped at the sliding cell door and steeled himself for anything. “I don’t know why I would be surprised to see you in here,” he joked.

“Yes,” LOBO replied coolly. He rose, slightly wobbly from the crutch, and made his way to his visitor. “I’m a con now. A hardened, dangerous man. Did you know I converted to Islam? I‘m also a Crip and a Blood.”

“You’ve only been in here two hours.”

“Two hours is plenty of time to get yourself killed when you’re on this side of the law,” whispered LOBO with authority. "Respect is everything in here. And do you know the best way to get the respect you need to survive when doing Hard Time?"

Flandsa shrugged patiently. LOBO was moving poorly, and only now arriving to lean on the cellbars.

“You have to make a name for yourself," said LOBO, squinting painfully. Fully in the sharp wedge of light, his eyes dilated wildly. "You have to pick out the biggest, meanest, toughest, ugliest guy in your POD and rape him.”

“You mean fight him,” Flandsa corrected helpfully.

“Fight him? Shit. Have you seen the biggest, meanest, toughest, ugliest guy in my POD? He’d kill me.”

“Well then how would you-?”

“I was thinking roofies or something. I don’t know. It’s complicated,” LOBO admitted. “Not to mention I don’t think I’ve ever even been drunk enough to rape a guy. I mean I guess I just close my eyes and pretend it’s only Sarah Palin.”

Brief shuffles of movement. From various directions just out of the stale, flickering overhead lights over Flandsa. The loneliness of this conversation is wholly illusion.

“What happened to your face?” Flandsa asked, changing the subject.

“It’s these fucking ketchup packets. They’re complicated enough as it is, but the lighting in here is terrible.”

“Why didn't you bail out?” Flandsa inquired. “It’s only six dollars.”

-Nervous, illusive titters spring like lightning bolts. LOBO, noticing, starts seeking them out. Speaking unnecessarily loudly, he asks, “So my boy, did you bring me the Viagra and rolls of duct tape I asked for?”

Silence.

“Yeah well, it’s been long enough. Post Cereal has agreed to drop all charges if you promise to-”

"Only now, too late, does Big Cereal realize it has wakened a sleeping giant," LOBO snarled. “I don’t negotiate with Big Cereal. Especially now that the juggernaut has rumbled to life. Their oppresive rule is coming to an end.”

The pause that ensued was punctuated dramatically by a fart from someone sleeping to Flandsa's left.

“But you have a broken ankle and boken wrist," Flandsa implored. "Don’t you want some medical attention? Some painkillers?”

“The pain merely helps burn in the memory,” LOBO scoffed proudly. “The memory of the beginning of the overthrow of Big Cereal. And we won‘t need painkillers in a post-Post world. With real food, our bones will be nigh indestructible.”

“You think Post Cereal is poisoning you?”

“Ever had Grape Nuts?”

“Well-” Flandsa stammered. “Yeah."

“I have no idea what that crap is either,” LOBO explained. “But I can tell you you would be hard pressed to find a grape or a nut in it. And it tastes like the spackle for holes in Noah’s Ark.”

“I think you’re supposed to add sugar and stuff-”

“Add stuff? Isn’t it pretty much a box of added stuff already?” LOBO is incredulous. “What is this, the Middle Ages? Well the Middle Ages are over buddy. I‘m ending this Middle Age just like Paul Revere ended the last one.”

“LOBO, the Sheriff has asked me to ask you to leave. They can’t keep you without some kind of reason.”

“Participate in a cover up? And end the Revolution? Never!” But after a thoughtful surveillance of his cell, LOBO relented.

“Only if they let me redo my mug shot.”

I Ate WHAT?

 Predator Press

[LOBO]

A ‘meat and potatoes’ guy myself, not a lot of foreign cuisine sneaks across my rather discriminating palette. But every once in a while there is a lapse in my security -otherwise airtight, I assure- and I feel I owe it to you O loyal reader, to complain about it in great, anguished, and excruciating detail.

While how we got the Grape Nuts cereal remains a mystery, I strongly suspect Terri: we’ve been married six years now, and I’m virtually positive it isn’t the first time poisoning me would have crossed her mind.

It has the texture you would guess human brains mixed with tiny skull fragments might feel like. And how do Grape Nuts taste?  For a toxic gash in the fabric of culinary history, it's surprisingly not very subtle or apologetic: imagine eating pulverized mulch, soil and tree bark dogs have peed on for years.  Mix that with a generous sprinkling of rabbit turds, and eating it out of a corrugated box with only a spade and a rake. Okay, are you picturing that?  Now imagine eating only the box.  Grape Nuts -utterly bereft of grapes or nuts, I should add- should be called ‘Rape Guts.’

Worse, it makes your poop unsinkable, unflushable battleship girders that circle around the whirlpool defiantly, bending the laws of physics and thermodynamics at will -some are so brazen, they swim against the Coreolis Effect! The larger ones exert a gravitational pull over the smaller ones, and they are drawn together -often into skirmishes for control of the tiny blue sea; the clanging and shrieking metal-on-metal sounds become extremely audible as armadas collide in angry, bobbing counter-orbits, and people are soon banging on the bathroom door. “LOBO are you okay?” and ”Where the hell are all those sparks coming from?”

-I would warn them to run for their lives, but I’m far too embarrassed.  In fact I'm sorry but if weeds start growing out of my ass, we’re all going to die and that’s that.

Grape Nuts scores impressively, however, in practical secondary applications. It makes a great spackle for instance. The stucco patterns one can achieve are fantastic. Has a tree in your neighborhood recently been felled by a storm? A box of Grape Nuts, some water and fertilizer, and you can just stick that sucker right back on the stump.

Another high-scoring secondary feature is how it elevates the art of farting: it’s analogous to going from mere garden-variety ma an pa sticks of dynamite to military shaped charges.  Terri had some friends over from work, and I didn’t even have to enter the room: from the top of the stairs, I cut a 'Silent But Deadly' [SBD] that felt like I passed a hot light bulb.

As you can guess, hilarity ensues.  I think they heard the palpable thump as it detonated on the living room floor below ... and what followed was ten seconds of erie silence, four minutes or so of shrill mayhem (choking, weeping, and the opening of windows and doors and such), and then five minutes of watery-eyed fingerpointing.

The next time Terri makes me go to church, I’m gonna choke down a whole box of this crap.

***

There is some good news on the foreign food front. We ate at a place called “Panda Express” the other day. Who knew panda was so delicious?  Judging from the number of customers, I'll bet they were serving up four or five pandas a day!  This is Entrepreneurialism at it's finest. And what better way to raise awareness of the plight of the mighty panda, nearly extinct, than to remind Americans how mouth-wateringly good they are when nuggettized and in a honey glaze -just like you would get them in Nature?

And they're only extinct because they won't have sex, right?  How nappy must those panda bitches and hos be if a male panda -born in a zoo and never had no sex before- don't want to toss 'em good an proper on top of the plastic habitat that looks like a rock?  Maybe the male panda is looking for something a little more upscale and refined, sensitive to his needs -like a panda in a cheerleader outfit.  Would it kill her to wear a cheerleader outfit every once in a while?

Maybe he’s a gay panda.  Or what if he's got, like a racist sex-fetish and wants a grizzly -or a polar- bear?  Hm?  Are the female pandas, like, real fat, or otherwise stricken with infirmities? Try not reminding him of Oreo cookies or Loa Tzu; maybe this bear is just such a hard-core fucking nihilist, he’s trying to end the species. This planet is a dump if you think about it.

Anyway, I can’t say enough about Panda Express, nor their fine work and noble commitment to save the lazy and otherwise worthless panda.

-And maybe they have a card I can get stamped for a free panda in the future!

Diary of a Scapegoat Herder

Predator Press

[LOBO]

I had a feeling I shouldn’t have used the orphanage’s food budget for a line of credit in Vegas.

-But we're in the middle of an unexplained recession. And did you ever think maybe this was a better country when addled with snortable cocaine, fun-loving alcoholics, unbridled sexual harassment, and wave after endless wave of citizens suffering from yet-undiagnosed Attention Deficit Disorder? I'm not letting the Rainbow Coalition off the hook either: it seems like as soon as the world got gay people -the 1990s or so- pow, the entire damn nation went into the crapper.

As far as the orphan food, don't give me some 'Holier 'n Thou' crap: I should first point out that the imitation gruel is really popular. Christ it’s not like I’m making them eat ‘Grape Nuts,’ right? And speaking of horrible crap, people are forced to hang out with Sally Struthers starving to death in other countries -meanwhile you people eat a bran yogurt tofu muffin only to purposely burn it off on a treadmill later while watching Jersey Shore.

And again speaking of horrible crap, what is the fascination with Jersey Shore? Those people look like the CPR dummies at a cosmetology school. (No, I am not a cosmetologist. But if something is going to enable me to give Martians mudpacks and facials, it ain't going to be the goddamn Russian space program. Those people don't even make a car.)

We have a saying in the orphanage business: “One never runs out of orphan food, just orphans.” Over time, I think my new taco franchise will offset the Vegas losses entirely.

-And I defy you to find any orphan taste whatsoever.