The Irrationally Exuberant

Howdy do, fellow duuuuuuuude! You on druuuugs? I know I am. Are you tired of staring at the same old lava lamps and black light posters and other junk from Spencer's while you're on druuuuuugs? Do those things no longer seem toooooootally trippy? Well, maaan, have I got just the thing for you! Hi, I'm Jim Krakowski!

The first time my friends and I ate psychotropic mushrooms was terrible, as were the second and fifth time. Three was good and four was fine. The sixth was years later and I was very drunk, so I'm not sure they had any noticeable effect. But the first was truly terrible.

I, it turns out - and you may want to be sitting down for this - come from the same genetic line as Franz Xaver Messerschmidt!

Why don’t you pour yourself a drink, help yourself to a cigarette or two, and fold into that arm-chair under the portrait of Schlitzie the Pinhead Girl while I tell you what The Tom Waits Institute of Lucid Dreaming is all about.

Willis Carriers vision was not the first lucid dream recorded in history, but it very well may be the most significant, and is a fine introduction to the topic. The invention of the air conditioner ushered in the modern age, making life bearable for the first time in human history. How does a man discover something so consequential and practical in the non-dream world while in the dream world? How does he gain the ability to understand that he is dreaming and act proactively within the dream?

Bad news, friends. I died.

Parasites. They are horrifying. More than normal bugs, even. Like bugs for bugs, but with insane, almost supernatural powers of manipulation. They are also fascinating and, I suspect, much more important to our lives than most would imagine.

No script this time, because I wrote this a long time ago and don't know where it is. References and allusions include, but are not limited to: God, Jesus, Mork and Mindy, NASA, Armageddon (movie), Aerosmith, American Idol, the United Nations, Freemasons, Bill Nye, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Degrasse Tyson, the New World Order, Satan, New York, Lutherans, Facebook, YouTube, PIZZA HUT, Disney, Metallica, Isaac Newton, "God Bless the U.S.A.", Pokemon Go, Feminism, the Coriolis Effect, Admiral Byrd, Red Bull Stratos Felix, Apollo 8, Strawberry Kiwi Shasta, Carl Sagan, Albert Eistein, Apple, Reptilians, and Mole People.

about. Meeting girls. I want to meet girls. And I want to drink. Drink to meet girls, that's the goal.

Depression Hello, friend. Welcome back to The Irrationally Exuberant. I hope you're taking care of yourself in these troubled times. Which brings me to our topic: Self Care, specifically, dealing with depression. I have it, you, I assume, have it, since you're listening to this show. Your Mom's probably got it. Your Dad's in denial about his, has never done the work needed to overcome it and has instead repressed the deep sadness he feels intrinsically, but also about dreams unfulfilled, potential untapped, relationships irrevocably harmed, and maybe expressed that hurt as anger and resentment over some perceived change in the world that has left him behind, a victim of some ambiguous other. Little Timmy Messerschmidt: Dis isn't funny, Weid. Dis is pwetentious pwojection and not neewy as cweve as you fink it is. Why do you even botha? Does anybody even listen to this widiculous show? Oh, hello Little Timmy Messerschmidt. Ladies and gentleman and ungendered friends, this is Little Timmy Messerschmidt, a little boy/physical manifestation of my depression. Timmy, I thought you were sleeping? LTM: I don't neva sweep, I jus west. Isn't dis show just a futile attempt to mask the meaningless of wife wif artistic pwetensions wifout actuwawy physicawy exposing youself to the outside wold? Isn't dat just a wittle pafetic? Yo a gwown man doing goofy voices in his basement. God, Little Timmy, you're just awful, but also painfully insightful. You know, that may be somewhat true, but that's what everybody does, or just about everyone. I understand that life is meaningless, probably, but that's fine. There's literally nothing you can do to give it meaning, so why worry about it? Even if I were somehow performing this show in front of thousands of people and effusively praised and rewarded, you wouldn't go away, right? You'd still have negative things to say about it - probably something about selling out or being an imposter or whatever, right? LTM: Hey wememba all dose times wen you were wiwy dwunk and you cawed wike evwyone you know and just wambled on wike an asshole? You fink they forgot about dat? Or do they just constantly have in da back a der mind how widicuwous you weawy a? Uh. Timmy, I'm trying to do an episode here. I don't have time for this. Why are you a little boy, by the way? LTM: Dunno. I fink you jus had dis dumb voice and fot it would be funny to make it say depwessing fings. So owiginal. You know what? Since I've got you here, and this show's about depression, why don't you just plop down in that chair and I'll ask you some questions. You're going to be here whether I want you to be or not, so you may as well make yourself useful. LTM: Weawy? You wusuawy jus igno me. Wew . . . okay. Dis is all jus a finly veiwed and gimmicky pwemise dat you have aweady done befo wif Foam Chomsky. Great. How old are you? LTM: I'm dis many! He's flashed all ten fingers three times and then held up eight of them, so thirty-eight. Same as me. Makes sense. Let's try this another way. Can you think of any reason you might look like a little boy? LTM: Wew, maybe I'm da age you were when you stahted to wealize dat maybe wife wasn't pewfect and yo pawents wasn't pewfect and evewyfing didn't wevolve awound you. I assumed I was a bit older when that realization came. You seem like, three, maybe an immature four. LTM: Wew, I guess you assumed wong. You pwetty dense awot of da time, even do you fink yo soooooo smart, or act wike you do, anyway. Great. Okay. I feel like we're making progress. Hey! you spilled my water all over the desk! LTM: YOU spiwed yo watow aw ove the desk. God, you're impossible. Why is clumsiness seem to be such an intrinsic part of depression, for me anyway? LTM: Because you can't do anyfing wight! Yo not a gwown up you know. Yo basicallwy and ol child and a burden to dose awound you and evewything you fink is good about yoself is an iwussion.

A few years back I got the itch, as I often do, to start a new podcast. I mostly ignore these itches as scratching just makes it worse, but this time I could not. I began writing and planning a solo show called Reid Messerschmidt Gets Metal. I was going to start it like this: RMGM INTRO Hello. I'm Reid Messerschmidt - a 34 year old father and husband. I have a house and many things - four vintage globes, a vinyl collection, and a desk job among them. I'm a culture snob. An elitist. What's charmingly known these days as a libtard cuck. A low T Beta, as they say. A snowflake. I enjoy musical artists like Belle and Sebastian and Jimmy Scott and The Smiths and Edith Piaf and, sometimes - a lot, really - Neil Diamond. I think he's criminally under rated and I like to talk about that opinion as though it were objective and important. I’ve spent significant time with the Pet Sounds boxed set and I love documentaries, Ingmar Bergman films, calling movies films, feelings, books about feelings, bike rides, progressive (not prog) agendas, and quietness. I don't love injustice and toxic masculinity. I say things like toxic masculinity. I’ve been known to sport a cardigan. As such, I am not a metal guy. I like to think that I know good music when I hear it, regardless of genre, but metal is a blind spot. A big one. And I don’t just mean the music. Metal is more than a genre, it seems to me. It has a built in culture, and that culture feels impenetrable and scary. I've dabbled around its edges, sure. I went through the requisite Metallica phase in Junior High-school. I saw Corrosion of Conformity live once. Also, Korn. I liked the former and not the latter, though, to be honest, I went into the Korn show with a pretty bad attitude. Let’s see . . . That Roots album by Sepultura is pretty rad. I predictably kind of like Deafheaven, as they are the metal band that guys like me are supposed to kind of like. I enjoy what I’ve heard from Hawkwind, but I haven’t gone very deep with them and I'm not sure they’re very metal. I think occult stuff is fun, but I didn’t care for the Lord of the Rings movies and I’ve never read the books. I don’t care for dragons. I’m not particularly angry. Occasionally perturbed? Yes. Often annoyed? Sure. Riddled with angst? Less, in my old age. And not angry. To me, at this point, metal represents rage, a spectrum of masculinity that I find completely foreign, and a complete disregard for fashionably good taste that a big part of me admires. It’s a home to a lot of unrepresented folks in the ongoing culture wars, some that I get, many that I don't. So I want to get metal. And that’s what this podcast is all about. Getting metal. I’ve made a list of every metal band that I can come up with, From Sabbath to Cannibal Corpse to whatever the fuck is going on with metal right now. I honestly don’t know. Based on some cursory internet searches, it looks to consist mostly of skinny guys with neck tattoos and Hot Topic haircuts calling each other fags and arguing about absurdly specific genres designations. For the most part, I only know the band names. I’ve purposely tried not to really listen to any metal yet or find out too much about any one group. I’ve chopped that list up and put it in something very metal – a skull to which I've applied Norwegian Black Metal makeup – and each week I’ll draw a name out of the skull, deep dive into whatever band comes out, and let you know what I find and what I think. And guests. There might be some guests and whatever else comes up here. My goal is not just to understand the music. I want to understand the culture. To understand the anger and the dragons. The term metal is broad to the point of meaninglessness, but under its tent are generations of unsatisfied and angry white folks in all the styles that those people come in. Folks that feel persecuted even if the “mainstream” sees that as a delusion.

The last two episodes of the show were heavy, so this episode is just a compendium of weird things that people said to me when I worked at a grocery store.

Someday I will stop. Of course. The voice that whispers this is the same voice that says fuck it, and it says them both with utter conviction, utterly convincing, so long as you don’t stay sane long enough to really interrogate it.

The reason I’d started doing this in the first place – to make myself an extrovert – had lost to my strong, innate introversion. Drinking became 20% a means of being social and 80% a means of obliterating my ego to let my unrestrained Id have its time on the stage, free to act out its horrific, primal, sparsely attended one man show.

He was sitting, pants-on, in an overheated fiberglass port-a-potty, soaked in sweat, breathing the thick stink of 200 shits, swigging from an old glass liter vodka bottle filled with new cheap whiskey, now three-fourths gone. In twenty minutes, Sag Jenkins was supposed to jump thirty-five cars on his motorbike, and there was no way he’d make it. In twenty minutes, 227 attendees of the Argus County Speedway in Golgotha, South Dakota would watch Sag Jenkins die.

Listen. I’m well aware that the last thing the world needs is another biography of Klaus Nomi. He’s already a household name on par with James Polk, young John Cusack, and the Andrews Sisters. What could I – a humble podcast magnate - possibly add to the reams upon reams of information already available to you via your home library, public library, magazine subscriptions, nightly newscasts, corner newsstand, and pocket super computer?

Gorgeous George was the most prominent and important figure in wrestling’s ascent into the American zeitgeist, largely due to his gimmick. But he wasn’t the first or, most assuredly the last, wrestler to adopt a unique persona for the ring. The history of wrestling is littered with characters. Some have been wildly successful -Hulk Hogan, Rowdy Roddy Piper, The Big Boss Man - who became household names and can illicit the most bittersweet of remembrances in vast armies of doughy diabetics, nerds, and toothless, bigoted human trash.

Gorgeous George nee George Wagner, a flamboyant, hulking, blond bombshell of a man who fancied ornate, lacy robes, liquor, and prostitutes, and made his bones faux-grappling with various and sundry half-nude, oil soaked brutes to the delight of shrieking rubes in stadiums and on unaccountably massive early televisions.

Apparitions. Ghosts. Spooks. Haints. Whatever you want to call them, you haven’t seen spirits like this before. Hello. I’m world renowned palm reader and séance professional Madame Esperanza Lechuga, owner of Madame Lechuga’s Celebrity Haunted Apartment, and boy, have we got dead celebrities. My place is lousy with ‘em.

Naturally I was intrigued. Who was Dick Moss? As the inheritor of his library I wanted to know the man and his work, if he’d done any, in the field of UFOlogy. I assumed he was dead, as that’s how most collections come to live in thrift stores. I once found about 30 snap button cowboy shirts each with the name Herman written in blue marker on the tag – a truly wonderful old man habit that doesn’t seem to be done much anymore - starting in the Medium section and going all the way to XXL. I figured Herman had either eaten himself into oblivion or wasted away from cancer or a Romanian curse like that guy in Stephen King’s book, Thinner.