¡Viva la Revdogolución! Or: Chunk E. Shows His True Colors (those colors being red)

I know that I haven’t done one of these in a while. Life’s been good to old Chunk and I haven’t had much reason to complain, which is the source of all works in (or is it on?) the blogosphere. I’ve had no rants, no beef, no tangents to grace upon you, my three loyal readers and the long line of people who will accidentally find this post on a Google search as the result of the next sentence:

 

Titty, tit, boob, mouth, panther, cock, vagina, pussy, clitoris, fire marshal, bukkake, midget, big ol’, on my face.

 

I know it was a poorly constructed sentence, but our numbers are down and my boss, Bunny, thinks that I’ve been resting on my laurels (I don’t blame you, you have big old comfy laurels —Ed.). It’s strange that one day you can be totally tranquil and then the next day a small thing like, oh, I don’t know, your girlfriend leaving you and moving to California puts you right back in a mood to rant. So here we go, readineros, it’s time to let this long-dormant volcano of annoyance erupt.

 

Last night on TV I watched a Republican member of Congress condemn abortion. He claimed that every life was precious and had intrinsic value. This is a nice notion, but I don’t see how someone could have this point of view and belong to a group so vehemently against socialism. What other system allows for common respect of every member of the group? Social conservatives would love to see every baby born, but if they grow up poor then they’ll be sure to tell the youngster, “FUCK OFF AND GET A JOB.” Am I wrong for thinking that there’s a logical missed step here? No? Conservatives, put that in your pipe and smoke it…and I’ll charge you for the carbon emissions.

 

I do not believe that America would work as a socialist state. It’s too big and overpopulated to make it sustainable. However, limited social programs like those our wiser friends in Canada and the UK have, such as national healthcare, would greatly enhance the lives of every American man, woman, and child. For some reason those on the right think that national healthcare is the first sign of the end of days. Every baby has the right to live, but if the birth happens in some third rate clinic, well that’s her own fault, she should get a better job, is that what you’re telling me? Call me a dirty pinko but at least I look good in pink. The communist boogie man is long dead. Let’s do an autopsy of the corpse and see what worked and didn’t work. Keep the good and leave the rest for the vultures.

 

All I ask is that we be consistent in our thinking. If every life is valuable, shouldn’t we strive to make people’s lives better while they are alive and with us? My personal feelings about the abortion issue aside, hypocrisy for the sake of appealing to your base is not a platform a policy, or anything other than a heaping pile of poo. If you believe that every life is important, then you had better help the poor off of the streets and send aid to countries that need medicine and food, and not just to ready the place for a Nike factory but to raise the quality of life for everyone everywhere. To do otherwise certainly puts a big gap in your “values”-based standing as leaders of America.

Bunny Parties Like It’s 1999, Falls In Love with Dark Wave

This past weekend was a maelstrom of scary noises, gyrating hips, and out-of-tune basses. Oh bejesus. So Friday night, we all go down to hear my esteemed boss, Old McSullivan, perform with an experimental ambient/noise group over in Central Square. The show is in the basement of an Elks Lodge, and the band consists of two theremins, a cello, a hammer dulcimer, a synthesizer controlled by a MIDI wind controller, and Sully playing guitar through his cornucopia of effects pedals that cost more than his ‘05 Mustang GT.

We get to the joint, and walk in to the faintly creepy Lodge basement to the sound of chattering and chiming Underwoods and IBM Selectrics. The Boston Typewriter Orchestra is performing. The idea of typewriters used as musical instruments is a novel and interesting concept…for about ten minutes, then it’s like, okay, check please. Sully and his troupe take the stage, and between the roar and squeal of his guitar, the baleful howl of the theremins, the clang of the dulcimer, the bleat of the synthesizer, the moan of the cello, and the onslaught of the acid-flashback visuals being projected on the ceiling above the band all the while, I felt like I knew what 1969 was like for L.B. Then we went and got pizza.

Saturday night, Timmy Boit and I decide to head on over to Heroes at TT the Bear’s Place. For those unaware, Heroes is TT’s semi-regular ’80s dance night. Normally, this would not be my bag. But so begins a new era. After a hearty dinner of Redbones’ delicious Memphis-style ribs, we set out for the club. I somewhat knew what to expect, as T. Boit had elaborately described to us what Heroes is like many a time previous. We enter around 11, and things are just starting to pick up. Just about every man in the room is either gay, or at the very least has sucked a penis just to know what it was like. There are 300-pound goth chicks, men wearing high-heeled boots jacked up higher than Grave Digger, and me, wearing blue jeans and a Heil Sound t-shirt. They probably thought I was the cops.

The music is bumping fiercely, and the stage is already sprinkled with a few queens getting their proverbial groove on. I myself begin to feel the jam. The music is a heady mixture of mostly ’80s New/Dark Wave classics and some modern dance favorites to keep the fags randy. Lots of Depeche Mode. As time goes on, I find myself enthralled by the music; I begin to realize what Timmy Boit was on about all this time regarding Wave. It’s the shit. Synthesizers like you read about. Straight-on rhythms. Epic melodies. Rock-solid hooks but with a certain mysterious edge, as if to suggest that Martin Gore knows something you don’t, and maybe you don’t want to know. I’m a total convert.

Then, he takes the stage. No, not Timmy Boit. He. Adonis. A beautiful young man with moves like a god damn panther. He bends and weaves his clearly-cocaine-influenced physique (I’m a sucker for the skinny boys) around the stage with more poise and confidence than anyone else. Definitely of the persuasion. I’m transfixed. He dances flirtatiously with the other boys, and I contemplate taking the stage. I think better of it, as doing that would surely see me eaten alive. Then he takes his shirt off, and I realize, I have to have sex with this man. I need him to have my phone number. So I dig out an old T pass from my wallet and scrawl “MAX: 508 xxx-xxxx” on it. The next step is the hard one. Unfortunately, for the rest of the night he’s either too far back on the stage, or when he passes by, I’m too much of a pussy, and I don’t give it to him. But according to Tim Boit, he’s there every Heroes night. So I will be back. With plenty of cocaine on my wiener for the taking.

Sunday night, Chunk E. Dog plays with his other band over at the All Asia. The group on before them is a rather depressing hip-hop act, the kind where the main dude said something like, “I wanna thank my parents for coming up from Connecticut, this one goes out to them. It’s called ‘Sit Dat Ass On Mah Junk.’” Chunk’s band takes the stage, and from the first song, his bass is woefully out of tune. They get about 30 seconds into the song before it sputters and dies like a lawnmower running too rich, and C. Dog retunes. And retunes. And retunes. It’s a nightmare. This continues for half the set, Chunky Dog clearly cursing the patron saint of electric basses. Poor kid. It’s obvious the tuning machines on his Epiphone Ibañez Peavey Squier are shot to shit. But they get through it quite admirably, and they even pulled off a cover of Britney Spears’ “Womanizer.” Unreal.

Ex-Boyfriend Watch #1: No Need to be Coy, Roy

To paraphrase Chunky Dog’s old man when we were at his house late one night shooting a film re-enactment of Elvis’s last moments and awoke him from his bear-like slumber with our multiple takes of falling off the toilet, I DON’T WANNA HEAR THIS SHIT. And by this shit, I mean my first kinda-sorta boyfriend from a couple years back (who dumped me) who decided to email me the other day.

So I was cruising the slag heap of wayward souls known as OKCupid.com, looking at what their electric robots decided were my best matches. And I see that he, let’s call him Dean, has a profile! And we’re an 83% match! Jesus. For a little back story, Dean and I met on craigslist back in the halcyon days of 2007, when I worked for Tweeter (R.I.P.) and lived in the verdant hills of Brighton. He answered an ad I’d placed looking for some sort of serious relationship. Dean seemed like the perfect guy for me: very intelligent (a Harvard type), musical, not too gay, quirky, cute, blond, could quote Homestar Runner and Steely Dan, the whole bit. I found it hard to believe someone like that would be looking on craigslist, but there we were. We really clicked. Yet as we got closer, he seemed less and less interested— breaking dates, et cetera— eventually, he said that school was consuming his life, and broke it off. Over email. Jesus.

It would be a while before I got another boyfriend. In that intervening time, I wondered if I would ever find someone like him again. Though time went on, I found someone else, and Dean faded into the cobwebs of my mind. Until this.

So I click on Dean’s profile. He’s still using the picture he sent me two years ago when he answered my ad. I read some of his profile BS, and remember some of the things I liked about him. I even briefly consider sending him a message, but figure that would be way out of line. Yet lo and behold, I wake up the next morning and there in my inbox is a message from Dean. See, on OKStupid, you can see when someone views your profile. He saw that I’d looked at his. Jesus.

In a nutshell, he felt the need to apologize to me again for his “flakiness,” and said that he’d like to talk about it. I was more than a little surprised, to say the least. Okay, I thought, I’ll throw him a bone. Who knows, maybe we’ll re-connect? So I let it simmer for the day until I got home from work, and wrote him back. I was very magnanimous about the whole thing. Said I’d like to talk. Gave him my email and IM. This was on Monday the 30th. As of this writing it is Thursday the 2nd. Not a word.

This reminds me of the time I was fired from The Boston Pedal Party for pretending I was stuck in Woods Hole. The manager shit-canned me over text message, then called me back the next morning groveling for my return. It’s like, if you’re gonna do it, do it. Don’t play games. Make a commitment. Don’t say something if you don’t mean it. Just hop on the bus, Gus…don’t need to discuss much. Jesus.

Stay tuned for further updates.

Why You Should Really Buy the Extended Warranty

Times are shitty. There’s no two ways about that. The purse strings are tight, the wallets thin, the pickings slim. Chrysler’s among the walking dead, jobs are dropping like flies. Frivolous spending is looked upon with scorn nowadays. Yet televisions still break, computers crash, hell, you might even want to pick up the guitar again now that you’ve got 40 more hours a week of free time. However, when you walk into Best Buy, the Apple Store, or Guitar Center and find that gee-whiz new toy you’re going to finance the shit out of/put on layaway, you’re faced with man’s oldest and most dreaded adversary: The Extended Warranty.

The Extended Warranty is the biggest god damn rip-off since Charles Ponzi took Boston by storm. I won’t go into every minute detail, but basically, most items that can be had with The Extended Warranty experience warranty-covered failures either within most manufacturers’ warranties, or well after any Extended Warranty would expire. Some plans cover shipping costs to/from the manufacturer or repair center; a savings offset by the cost of the plan, unless of course it happens multiple times, but then it’s clear you’ve wasted your money on something bigger: a shitty product to begin with. A lot of people are smart enough to realize the above. However, they don’t know that now more than ever, you need to buy the warranty.

Because the livelihoods of so many minimum-wage, commission-earning salespeople depend on you doing so. I see it every day. It’s horrifying. Retailers force their sales staff to pitch the warranty as if the customers were their drunk aunt and the warranty were detox, because oh how sweet that 100% gross profit margin is. However, people don’t buy it, because it’s straight snake oil and people don’t like being bullshitted. It goes right up the chain and back down again; the salespeople get in deep bukkake from their managers for not selling enough plans, and the managers get it from the corporate office for not training their staff on how to bludgeon customers over the head with sell the warranty. So the managers crack down even more on their staff, who then bludgeon sell it even more aggressively, which turns the customers off even more, and the vicious cycle feeds itself on and on until someone gets fired for “unsatisfactory performance.”

The buck stops with you, O Consumer! Buy the warranty, and inject some sorely-needed money into the working class. Be their bailout. Make that mopey sales oaf’s paycheck a little fatter that week so he can buy chicken wings/pay last month’s utilities/keep his Big Black Butts subscription current. By doing your part, you can pull us out of these economic irons. Then you can feel better about yourself as you watch Kim Kardashian on your 90-inch Indonesian-made plasma screen for thirty-nine straight hours wallowing in a pit of self-doubt and Cheeto dust.

Bunny’s Sense Of Humor Will Be the Death of Him

I’m a man of many and sundry skills and gifts. I can make the honeys orgasm by playing merely a single note of a Hammond organ. I can rev-match on a manual transmission like there’s no next week. And I serve up a bodacious grilled cheese.

However, the gift that is both my greatest blessing and most odious curse is my sense of humor. I can find humor in the most mundane/strange/depressing shit you’ve ever seen, often at inappropriate times. When I was but a lad, and as you’ll see even to this day, it put me under the bus more than once. I fear that one day, it may do me in.

I once received a severely embarrassing, extremely loud, in-front-of-the-whole-cafeteria chastisement and a written conduct referral in 6th grade for calling a fellow student’s mama a llama. I didn’t have the cojones to bring up the fact that said student had been pulling the old open-your-mouth-with-food-in-it bit, which had elicited my anti-maternal response. O, if only I could go back.

Then there was the time my mother and I went downtown to take in a high-class chamber music concert. Before they had even finished tuning up, my ten-year-old mind had somehow conjured up an image of Ernie (of Bert & Ernie) tilting his head from side to side and making a sound that can only be described as, “oowee oowee oowee oowee oowee.” Don’t ask me how I managed to get this in my brain. Naturally, I became very antsy and giggly in my seat. My mother did not take too kindly to this, and scolded me repeatedly to quit it. However, soon the bug bit her, and we both found ourselves laughing uncontrollably like fools. We had to leave the show halfway through.

As anyone who’s ever spent the night with me knows, I laugh in bed. This doesn’t often happen when I’m by myself, but when someone’s there with me, I can’t help it. I think of funny shit. Most of my bedmates have found it cute, except one. My first long-term significant other, the brutal C2, was on Martha’s Vineyard after my high school graduation. Sure as saltpeter, I got a case of the chuckles one night, probably thinking about the time Haboob beefed it in the supermarket parking lot while carrying a box of popsicles, and she kicked me out of bed. Disallowed me from being in the bed. I had to sleep on the other side of the room. What a dragon-whore. She probably made me gay. Or perhaps it was portending things to come.

So there I was, last weekend, on the conjugal bed, about to give the business to a certain gentleman. I was on the approach, the landing lights were on, gear down, call the ball. And I start thinking about Jimmy O. Jesus Christ. For those who are unaware, Jimmy O is the lovable, loudmouthed repair tech at my place of employment. He’s done a station ID for the show before. He’s a fat little rough-and-tumble old stack of flapjacks from Revere, with a mouth as dirty as the Charles River and the kind of mullet that came free with every 1987 IROC-Z. What I was really thinking about was the song that the band is currently writing, entitled “Jimmy O,” about a man who shoots his own adult films, based on the true story. He’s done some fucked-up shit, son; shit you’d get arrested for back in the ’50s. For some reason, this is all I could think about as I was about to consummate this tender moment. Perhaps I envisioned myself as Jimmy O, about to do the dirty deed. Except I probably wouldn’t include a dog or an eggbeater. Who knows. But the image of his Ron Jeremy-esque physique would not leave my head. I quickly went limper than overcooked pasta, but golly Moses it was funny. There would be no sex that night.

At Long Last: Poutine It In The Tasso Ham

Lewis and Clark. Shackleton. Apollo 11. The Donner Party. And now, this. The boys take their place in the annals of the great journeys of yore, and start Season Two of the Electric Variety Hour off with a bang. In this episode, The Reverend, Chunky Dog, and Timmy Boit head to for the Great White North to Toronto with a fire in their loins and a plastic toy skeleton (the infamous Russ T. Blunt) strapped to the grille. Visions of waterfalls and titty bars danced in their heads as they careened northward with the recorder rolling. Will their thirsts be quenched? To you, this episode is presented.

Since When Are Nerds Cool?

In today’s apocalyptic caricature of a world, where misguided hipsters and shallow arrogant middle-management types run the show, and the national pastime is no longer baseball but arguing on internet forums and posting reviews of the ShamWow on Amazon, there’s yet another disturbing trend. It is now cool to be a nerd.

Now that it is no longer acceptable to have an identity of your own lest you not fit into one of today’s convenient social strata that Pepsi and Apple can target, people are co-opting and diluting that utmost in heretofore pure and unsullied castes, the nerd. You know what I mean. Boring assholes that want to seem more deep and intelligent than they actually are. So some shiftless douchebag who otherwise brings nothing to the table puts on the thick-rimmed glasses, reads an Isaac Asimov book, listens to some Stereolab, and calls it a day. Maybe they want to make music, but instead of actually learning an instrument, they buy a Casio keyboard off eBay and do some “circuit bending” on it, because they read about it on Wikipedia. He writes on his Facebook profile how hopelessly nerdy he is. Among his twelve hundred friends that probably don’t like him anyway, he has now built the identity.

The suburban sluts that hang nebulously around his social circle take notice and see that he’s “creative,” but not in any kind of meaningful or genuine way that would challenge or threaten their fragile, house-of-cards, Oscars-watching world view, so they decide they want to blow him. And blow him they do. Word travels ’round. And suddenly, wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am, nerds are cool.

Yet a true, greasy, dyed-in-the-wool, raised-on-David-Macaulay, acne-ridden nerd would scoff at such awful nonsense. The true nerd grew up with few friends, but they were true. His nights were spent not at the party or even playing videogames; they were spent listening to the WWV atomic time signal out of Boulder, CO, or maybe the Voice of Russia, on shortwave radio. For a childhood birthday, he specifically asked for a Fisher-Price “Help Dad Do The Lawn” set. His favorite toys as a kid were vacuum cleaners and tape recorders. He was analog before analog was cool. His parents’ friends had a nickname for him: Fan Belt. In high school, he got government grants to build weather stations. He concocted a basic automotive exhaust-gas recirculation emission control system— in the third grade. He never owned a car, but he could explain the intricacies of internal combustion as if his name were Karl Benz. He learned to play an instrument the hard way, by sitting in front of the piano and getting yelled at for not practicing. He did it because he loved it, not to be cool. He never felt the need to label himself; he showed, he never told.

You are not forgotten, ye true nerds of old.

The Coffeemaker Situation

Chunky and I, surprisingly enough, do not live just the two of us in an apartment. We have two other roommates, a heterosexual couple. They hate us and never read this website so it’s okay to write about them.

There’s a serious problem with this living situation. Actually, there are many, but we won’t discuss them all here. First and foremost, these roommates are dangerously bougie. Bourgeois. When the girl moved in, suddenly our walls were plastered with framed New Yorker covers and our cupboards were filled with twelve different kinds of salt. Who the hell needs eight cheese graters? She even brought in a salt mill. A god damn grinder for SALT. Sleeping Jesus. This isn’t the fuckin gated community in Burlington. It’s a drafty three-bedroom apartment in the most run-down house in all of Brookline, and you live with the two biggest slobs this side of the Monongahela.

But after many months of such nonsense, this weekend was the last straw. We woke up Saturday morning, and the coffeemaker of Chunk’s that worked perfectly fine for years and would have continued to do so had been replaced by a machine of unprecedented bougieness. It was a sleek, brushed-steel piece of Chinese-made faux-Industrialist Crate & Barrel horse hockey that had absolutely no capabilities beyond the simple white plastic one that they so presumptuously tucked away in the pantry, as if it were theirs to dispose of. The old one had a programmable timer and everything. The only difference is that when their Prada-bag-and-Ugg-boot-wearing, Desperate Housewives-watching, Lexus-wishing-they-had, backstabbing, shallow friends come over, they can look good. “DID YOU SEE THE NEW COFFEEMAKER? AAHEHEHEHEHEHE” she shrieked. Chunks and I took one look at it and left the room. We then made a solemn vow to rid the house of them once the lease is up.

This is why, when their bougie friends do come over, Chunky Dog purposefully leaves his copy of Lord Of The G-Strings lying out on the coffee table. Suck it down.

L.B. Discovers the Internet

Some of you may not know that L.B. is my father. This may come as quite a shock when you consider it; not only does he condone the retarded lifestyle of his son, but he actively participates in it by having a segment on the show. It’s a wonder he hasn’t disowned me. But such is the caliber of man that L.B. is.

Yet even he has his weaknesses. One is the internet. Since taking possession of a company computer a few years back, he’s been determinedly merging onto the information superhighway— though perhaps missing a few shifts along the way. On his island home, dialup is still the connection of choice. So now that iTunes and the subsequent downloading of oodles of Jimi Hendrix songs is a factor, he stays up for countless hours at night just to buy “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return).”

Then Facebook, that treacherous siren of the internet sea, creeped into the picture. The truth is, I signed him up for it last year in a moment of perhaps bad judgment. His account sat mostly idle, with no photo or information on his profile, for months. Unlike most of today’s yuppie douchebags and grad students, L.B. has a real job and shit to do that doesn’t involve impressing people he never talks to in person with pictures of his trip to Cancún or writing notes about last night’s disappointing episode of Lost. However, of late, scores of his newly-computer-literate contemporaries and relatives have succumbed to Facebook’s cancerous grip, so aboard the train he jumped like a hobo of yore.

As such, L.B. and my dear mother are now privy to all sorts of shit. I can just see the two of them gathered around the old iBook like a modern-day Crosley console radio, keeping up on my every status update and photo of me kissing boys.

Yet it was the “25 Things” meme that threw me under the bus. One of the things on my list was the fact that I fainted at a Whole Foods a while back. My old man was aware of this, but I had not told my mother for fear of sending her into a worry-spiral. It wasn’t anything serious, I had been riding my bike hard with little fluid intake that day and had what the doctor referred to as a “vasovagal syncope.” Essentially, fainting. However, my mother saw this on the list, and called me all afluster. “Why didn’t you tell me about this?” I told her I didn’t want her to worry. She asked if I was feeling okay. I told her that it happened over two years ago, I think I’m fine. She asked if it was drug-related. No, mom, it wasn’t. Bless my mother’s heart, and I love hear dearly, but this is why I didn’t tell her. And it seems that every time some sort of issue comes up, her first question is if it’s drug-related. “My bike got a flat tire this morning.” “Were you on drugs?”

Damn you, the internet.

Coming Soon: The Reverend and Chunky Dog return to form

Listeneros, those of you who still call yourself that, we apologize. The past few months have seen trials and tribulations aplenty. For one, Bunny lost the mobile recording unit which had all sorts of material on it. For two, the band has been hitting its stride and the boys have been devoting lots of their time to that. For three, Chunky Dog died. No, just kidding. But to make it up to you, we promise an epic not seen since the days of Big Red, the Penske truck, or the Donner Party.

The Reverend, Chunky Dog, and Timmy Boit will soon be venturing northward to Toronto, Ontario, Canada. For those of you who aren’t aware, Toronto is the largest city in Canada, which puts it in the same league with such global cities as New York, Paris, Milan, and South Hadley, MA. It will be four days of unbridled revdog-brand rigamarole, replete with titty bars, poutine, and asking Canadians if they would ever consider naming their penis Percy.

Our journey will take place in the final weekend of February and will span four nights total, including one on the road. We will travel via Timmy’s Subaru Impreza WRX, a scrappy, turbocharged car forged in the crucible of rally racing, which ensures that at some point we will have to deal with Johnny Law. Especially when it’s Bunny’s turn to drive. The bets are already on: which one will end up in prison, which one married, and which one dead? Only time will tell, Listeneros. We promise, you will not be disappointed. Stay tuned.