Parts 3 and 4 – Everybody blew their load all over Wally Brando before giving the ugly folks a chance to get off. Let’s piss ourselves over how funny it was, agreed, but to then jump on some theoretical bandwagon about how it’s this and that about nostalgia and a replica of an unconventional and historically poo pooed artist both fooling and appeasing his benefactors idealized projections – is just a bunch of horseshit. It was just funny. Period. You know how when somebody explains why a joke is funny and in so doing sucks all the life out of it. It’s kinda like that. To continue, it was a huge risk and huge payoff, but why wouldn’t they think they could pull off a left – of left field – move – in a world of time bending revolutions? I think the big surprise is how gleefully surprised we were. It’s like, can’t the sad man get some too?

Let’s talk about all the sweeties at the Bang Bang Bar. Granted these are some highly sculpted and talented artists doing their thing with aplomb. Chromatics, Cuter Everly Bros, and au revoir Simone have been a lot of fun. But these scenes are playing like misplaced thank yous to the X’ers and millennials who kept TP popular for all those years when their boomer contemporaries were shitting all over it in board meetings. Just look at all the adorbs scenesters somehow packing the dive bar in a little shitbird town on a weeknight, not desperate or sad (or drinking too much) despite living in a working-class town without opportunities. Instead they’re really enjoying themselves. And not only the magnanimity of their well-rounded friends but also the newly branded PBR for seven-fifty a glass. Oh, and up on stage their favorite extremely popular band indulges their most copycat song just to show how much TP influenced all these neato sights and sounds. Give me a break. Bring back the Roadhouse dude, and get Julee Cruise on the phone. She probably looks all good and fucked up by now. Or maybe she went the way of the Audrey and Donna. Too uptight, prude, and greedy to revisit the best role of their lives. I bet if Lara Boyle came back they’d probably pressure her into taking her clothes off just like last time, but she’d probably have a surprisingly nice body like Diane Keaton in Something’s Gotta Give. Gee Whiz.

Run of the litter and run of the land…

Sweet covetous Jesus. Now I sit beneath this thing. For 25 years a skin flap of wiry potency, lithe in my pursuit of everything between me and these green eyes. Now. Now it serves as a clue to the interlopers whose reaction is usually fear. Fear is what I want, and I want everything that can make them afraid. I can make them afraid when I stand at a coffee kiosk for ten minutes, ripping packet after packet after packet of white sugar into my coffee. But instead of ill-fitting jeans and a vile sweatshirt, framed by crude ink on all the wrong parts, I wear leather and puffy jowls.

“Phillip, what were you wearing when you landed on this country? I still have so much to show you little buddy. If you were to spring me loose, oh the times we could have. Don’t even think about wearing that dress with the hibiscus flower prints, the one they call the blasé homage to that which sops up what remains of the human menstrual cycle.”

“Garland, your little boy is still alive. I will come for him even as you at this very minute conspire with the heavens and arch demons of beyond to thwart my entrance. Nothing will remain of him just as nothing remained in Laura except the emptied remains of myself, Jacques, and Leo. Just as we remade Dougie to foil that pathetic plan to suck me back in, back to that place where we have such mild fun. We foiled that plan real quick, didn’t we? With the unexpected complication of my now admittedly unorthodox imprisonment. Not without its perks Major. I assure you.”

“Yes, Little Man, I can hear you knocking on that formica table. No room anymore for your kind. Always one to give away all our secrets and frolic in what has always been and always will be. Their paradise. Not ours. You knew this when you came but you spun your magic and played their game and became their fucking mascot. Now look at you chiming in. Why risk it when all I have to do to make you go away, non-ex-is-tent even, is just keep up this charade?

“No, Tall Man, I have not the ability to travel with you where you are, nor the chance to fucking savage that elongated skull neither. I can hear you, but unlike the others I can turn you off anytime.”

“Maybe my man, my One-Armed Man, you will prove yourself as my great adversary. The one that didn’t get away. You come from the place beyond the dimensions and pathways of this world. And mine. How confusing for us both. Who sent you and why don’t you want? More to the point, why can’t you want like I do? Perhaps I should consider popping in for a visit. What’s that you say friend? Oh. Coop is making some headway is he. Ok friend. Well so am I. So am I. So am I. So am I…”