Reverend Norb

column from MRR #175 - December 1997

STOP EVERYTHING!!! CUT DA MUSIC!!! CEASE!!! DESIST!!! GRINDING HALT!!! PENCILS IN THE TRAYS!!! I BRING THEE NEWS OF SHOCKING IMPORT AND HERETOFORE UNIMAGINABLE MAGNITUDE!!! First off, don't eat more than nine turkey nuggets at one sitting. I bought a two-and-a-half pound sack of no-name frozen turkey nuggets (i think they were turkey nuggets, i can't exactly remember. The fact they they are, indeed, nuggets of some sort cannot be disputed, but the label on the bag just says "Meat Department" [always a good sign] and i really couldn't make a decisive call on exactly what type of nuggetry they are at this point in time. They're kinda brownish and pulpy, that's turkey, right? Mmmm, just like the astronauts eat!!!) at Festival Foods two Fridays ago for $2.48, figuring, you know, fuck, 99¢ a pound for Marvel Mystery Nuggets is kind of a deal, and i was getting pretty sick of eating peanut butter crackers for supper anyway. So i get this huge plastic sack of Nuggets and a bunch of potatoes, and figure, you know, fuck, that's what i'm gonna eat this month (potatoes not coming with instructions notwithstanding), so i promptly go home and stick a plateful of nine nuggets & two spuds in the microwave (Rev. Nørb's rules of cooking: 1. Stick it in the microwave. 2. If it tastes like shit, stick it back in the microwave), and i repeat this process several nights a week. Tonight, i open the freezer, and can't help but think that goddamn, it STILL looks like i've got two and a half pounds o' Nug in there -- and, naturally, the best conjecture i can come up with as to why i would still appear to have the same two-and-a-half pounds of Delicious Nutritious Neil Armstrong Turkey Nuggets i started with in my freezer when it seems like i've eaten about 15 pounds worth in the last week and a half is that the Turkey Nuggets are actually sentient, asexually reproducing organisms like the Tribbles from Star Trek™, and the only thing keeping the Tribble Nugget population of my freezer from spiraling wackily out of control (and ravenously consuming my precious quadrotriticale) is the fact that the sub-freezing temperatures of my freezer are slowing down their abnormally rapid metabolisms and their reproductive rate. In other words, the nine Tribble Nuggets™ i consume daily are just enough to offset the nine new Tribble Nugget Babies (™, and now only $1.99 each with the purchase of a combo meal) born each day, hence i always find myself with what appears to be the same two-and-a-half pounds of Tribble McNuggets every time i look in the freezer. Well, anyway, i'm not as stupid as i look (but more on that later), and i eventually came to the conclusion that the only way to get the upper hand in a Man/Tribble cold war such as this was to began to consume the Tribble McGonads faster than they could reproduce; i.e., to eat ten  Tribble Nuggets in lieu of the customary nine  -- this way, i reckon that the Tribbles should be completely wiped out in six to eight months. So tonight, for Ma Earth, i eat ten Tribble Nibblers. As it happens, i had all of fifteen minutes to bask in the tranquil glow of slow genocide a-borning before i was suddenly prompted to dash from my dining quarters to the latrine, screaming something to the Science Officer about a huge payload of Black Tribble Stew needing to be immediately and forcefully ejected from the port cargo hatch. Open the Pod Bay door, Hal!!! Open the Pod Bay door!!! After a few violent blasts of Warp 8 Nugget-Plasma ejection, it is now my considered opinion that evolution has smiled upon the Nuggetary Tribble by rendering the species impossible for humans to digest at a rate greater than that of its ability to propagate (hence, my new Tribble Nugget Consumption Slogan "eat nine and you'll be fine; eat ten and you'll be running towards the door labeled "MEN") (well, okay, FINE, the meter's not there -- YOU try to write safety jingles when the Tribble Armada's blasting off from Uranus [Hey! "Uranus" kind of sounds like a butt part! I bet i'm the first person to think of that, ever! And watch out for those Kling-ons!]), and, as such, humankind will be completely unable to stave off the eventual overrunning of the planet by these deceptively fiendish organisms. We are, if you'll pardon the pun, "up shit creek." Not to put too fine a point on it, then, but the bottom line is this: EARTH IS DOOMED. KILL YOUR FAMILY, THEN YOURSELF. THANK YOU. And, in other, more important news, i bleached my hair blonde. You think about that for a while, whilst i take a Tribble Break. (pause) Okay. You heard that correctly. I, the Reverend Nørb, champion of various causes, none of which heretofore have included bleaching, dyeing, or other fruity manipulations of man-follicles, am now walking the planet (a doomed planet, yes, but the only one i've got since they shut the nude beaches down on Talos IV) looking like goddamn Sting or somebody. It's a sad day for the planet, sure -- but, then again, holy fuck, we're not even gonna live to see the next millennium before we're all skwushed to a pulp underneath a quivering, miles-thick, planet-wide blanket of softly purring turkey nuggets and/or scalding oceans of our own liquid excrement, so, like, holy fuck, live it up. I blame it all on my fucking barber, anyway. I need a haircut, right, so i go to the fat dude on North Broadway at 9:30 Friday morning. Get to the barber shop, and where's the fucking fat dude? Oh, he's out to lunch . Boy, couldn'ta seen that one coming. I gotta be to work at ten, so i have no time to piss around waiting for him nor to go to someone who might actually take longer than three minutes to cut all my hair off, so i go to work uncut (follicly speaking), pissing and moaning all day about how i won't be able to get a haircut til next week, therefore hate the world and wish i was dead. That night, i wind up crying in my non-alcoholic beer-flavored beverage to a hair stylist friend about my inability to secure a properly flattened top and the attendant despair this sort of thing engenders (not that i would ever consent to actually have my hair cut by a -- hiss! spit! -- HAIR STYLIST in lieu of a real barber or anything [as a general rule of thumb, if there is no taxidermy visible on the premises, i ain't getting my hair cut there], i just thought she'd understand my woe); one thing leads to another, and next thing ya know, it's 10 AM Saturday morning and i'm sittin' in a goddamn HAIR SALON with a pound of radioactive glop on my head. 32 YEARS i've been walking the planet; never once have i felt the urge to fuck with my hair color. I must be in the clutches of some kinda weird mid-life crisis; i think a normal person woulda just bought a Mazda Miata or something. Anyway, i sit with this shit on my head for three hours. I read the latest issues of The Creeper, Starman, The Invisibles and Astro City while my skull merrily sizzles away and i ponder what exactly has driven me to this inexplicable act of wanton self-abasement. Eventually, i decide that the whole escapade can be written off as a desperate attempt to strike a productive vein of subject matter for this month's column; up til The Great Nørb Bleaching, the only flimsy ideas i had for columnar fodder revolved around how a) as of 10:48 PM CDT 10.14.97, Me First & the Gimme Gimmes are the worst band in the world; and b) this girl i know said some guy asked her to pee on his head for his birthday, so she did. I voted down proposition a due to the fact that, well, in all honesty, i haven't heard the Bouncing Souls in quite a while; and i couldn't see writing about b without it somehow leading to me wanting to get my own head peed on by an underage girl someday, which, somehow, seems like the type of thing one might very well wish to avoid cultivating undue desire for, for reasons i think we need not get into (i was finally reading the hardcover copy of Please Kill Me my brother got me for Christmas, and this guy, i forget his name, some minor player in the early Max's Kansas City days, told how Lou Reed tried to pick him up once by asking him if he wanted to come back to his apartment and shit in his mouth. And -- get this -- the guy didn't do it. Now, i dunno about you, but there are few things in this world that i'd find more edifying than taking a fucking hefty dump in Lou Reed's mouth [realistically, it's just too bad nobody was shitting in his mouth when he was trying to record the vocals for that dopey "New York" album. Ah well, hindsight is a wonderful thing] -- i'd just go up to his apartment with him, whip down my drawers, crap in his mouth, jump up, pull my pants up, toss him a fucking Certs™  and be out the door in like ten seconds, yelling "thanks for the good time, sailor!" from the stairwell while he was still lying there on his living room floor totally confused, with his aviator sunglasses on and a hunk of my poop in his mouth, making sounds like "whhihh, cuhb blachhh" and so forth. Then i'd run back in, go "Oh, wait! Can you autograph my copy of 'Metal Machine Music'?" and he'd still be like "auuwarrhgh nohhg thihhng shhuhh" and i'd get him to autograph it while he still had a mouthful of my shit, then i'd go "thanks, Lou! You're the best!", kiss him on the cheek, and run. Christ, there's so many recreational opportunities in Manhattan that you wonder how the youth turn to such vile habits as major league baseball [FUCK baseball!!! FUCK baseball!!! Major League Baseball is just some sort of will-sapping plot cooked up by the Communists™ and the Tribbles™ to weaken America's moral fiber! Look at the evidence: The American League playoffs pre-empted both "King Of The Hill" and "The Simpsons!" TWICE!!! That's fucking HIGH TREASON in MY book, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis!!! What the fuck is "American" about a sport that pre-empts a show about a man who sells propane and propane accessories??? Odds botkins, the audacity to even televise a baseball game on an NFL-football Sunday buggers description! Ship this shit to the Pacific Rim and LEAVE it there! Baseball is Un-American!!! You have been warned!!!]!). Now that i've been bleached, i've been dyed, i've made fashion suicide, i've found that, as anticipated, i actually can wring a column out of acquiring my newly-bozo hair color (of course, had i realized before today that The Tribbles Were Coming, i wouldn'tve needed to go to such drastic measures to get a story), so here goes:
REV. NØRB'S TOP TEN REASONS WHY BLEACHING MY HAIR WAS A GOOD IDEA
 1) PUSSY. Commonly known empirical data supports the known evidence that indicates that if a single female is placed in a room with ten eligible males, she will, without fail, leave with the most worthless, lying, arrogant, superficial, two-faced, jerk-off, pretentious asswipe swine scoundrel of the lot. If, following the severing of ties with the #1 Asswipe Swine Scoundrel, the test female is re-introduced into the same environment, she will, predictably, leave with the next most Asswipe Swine Scoundrel of the lot, and so forth. Speaking as a guy who has spent his life as like, usually about only the fifth or sixth highest ranking Asswipe Swine Scoundrel in any given ten-Asswipe demographic, i've spent way too much time looking at my watch and waiting for Da Chicks to work their way through Asswipes one thru five; my biological clock's ticking and i am in need of some serious action. The sheer, unabated-to-the-quarterback lameness of some 32-year-old guy thinking he's sexy because he bleached his hair blonde is the exact type of idiocy that chicks dig -- or, more correctly, the type of idiocy that chicks dig you in spite of. See, girls always fall for guys who are like 90% wife-beating axe-murderer and 10% nice guy, 'cause they really get into extracting the 10% of Dr. Jekyll from the 90% of Mr. Hyde. If you're, like, 75% nice, forget it, they don't want anything to do with you. I figure my quasi-Monroe blondeness makes me a good 20 to 25% lamer, which should be enough to catapult me up through the ranks of Asswipe Swine Scoundrels to about the #2 or #3 position, which means that it should take nothing short of an alien invasion by sentient turkey nuggets to curtail what i expect to be a raging flood tide of poontang headed my way shortly.
 2) PUSSY. First thing out of my mouth after i look in the mirror and see some joker has pasted Billy Idol's hair on my head is, understandably, "Yikes!" Amusing thing is, "Yikes!" is also the name of the salon (9th & 12th, Green Bay. Tell 'em Billy sent ya). The really funny thing is that that didn't even occur to me, i was just going "yikes!" because, well, fuck, screaming "holy fucking SHIT, what have i BECOME???" in the middle of a hair styling place on Saturday afternoon is generally regarded as uncouth. It was an honest "yikes!" -- and everybody thought it was just like, you know, the cutest thing that i went "yikes!"  in Yikes! -- whereas, had i said "yikes!" in Yikes! after receiving some type of non-blondeness-oriented modification to my standard issue dark brown hair, all the hair stylists woulda groaned and thrown tongue depressors and cotton balls at me and said stuff like "BAH! Enough with your inane punnery, Rev. Nørb! We loathe your self-important and condescending plays on words! We cringe at the mere thought of your hackneyed vocal inflections and your self-serving attempts at promulgating a pre-fabricated 'geek aesthetic!' Your condescending, pseudo-intellectual schtick has worn out its welcome with the hard-working proletarian chicks! Begone, tri-cowlicked one, begone!!!" When i had dark hair, my attempts at humor were, apparently, annoying. Now i'm cute. Chicks dig cute.  Only mass hysteria caused by the onset of a pulpy brown alien invasion could deter the bucketloads of trim surely aimed my way due to my indisputable cuteness.
 3) PUSSY. Chicks dig guys who are dumber than they are (luckily for them, it's pretty much a buyer's market in that respect), they don't go for jerks like me who compulsively berate people over the proper usage of the words "lend" and "borrow" and suchlike...now that i'm a blonde, i should be, you know, more dumber, and things should work out better for me. I mean, i look dumber. I feel dumber. Hopefully, i am dumber. In point of fact, i gotta wonder if i'm even smart enough to get jokes i thought up whilst i was still a brunette? Let's try it: ME: Knock knock. ME: Who's there? ME: Randy Bachman Was In The Guess. ME: Randy Bachman Was In The Guess Who? ME: No he wasn't. ...hmm, nope, isn't working, i still get that one. Well, chicks will still dig me anyway, 'cause i'm such a crack-up. Again, only the fucking Tribbles stand between me and an avalanche of action.
 4) PUSSY. Chicks dig tragic, oppressed figures. That's me all over, man. Used to be they weren't so keen on me, 'cause i was just another heterosexual white male oppressor, like Milhouse from the Simpsons and other arch-fiends. Now that i'm a blonde, i'm part of an oppressed minority! It's true! A guy walked into work today, took one look at my hair, and pulled out this multi-page printout of "dumb blonde" jokes he downloaded from the Internet! "How do you drown a blonde? Put a scratch'n'sniff sticker on the bottom of a swimming pool!" I mean, i don't get it, of course, but i'm sure it's very hurtful stuff. You think it's easy being a blonde??? That anybody we don't like, we can just stick in an oven and that's the end of it??? Listen up, folks, we've been TRYING it with the Tribbles, and it AIN'T WORKING anymore!!! We're cut off from our prime source of cultural expression! The end times are at hand! (of course, it's still better than being one of those godforsaken white male heterosexual oppressor types, where you have to spend all day thinking of answers to stupid questions like "why are white heterosexual males so well-represented in the punk rock scene?" ...it's like...uh, gee, i dunno -- 'cause we like INVENTED it or something??? Ya THINK??? Who's the blonde around here, anyway? And ya know why white heterosexual males invented punk rock??? 'CAUSE WE WERE THE MOST FUCKING BORED, THAT'S WHY!!! High-five! We win! We win! Plus that was the day they were re-sodding the polo field, so we really didn't have much else to do. Mumsy! Another 7&7 s'il vous plait! [by no means should anyone infer from this that i think it is the manifest destiny-slash-divine right of white hetero males to dominate the punk scene; not at all. However, the reason for any real or imagined preponderance of white male heteros in the scene is not that fucking difficult to figure out -- unless, of course, you adhere to the theory that Lou Reed is the godfather of Punk. I tried asking him about it once, but i couldn't understand what he was saying -- he seemed to have something in his mouth]). Remember, sex with me equals another nail in the coffin of The Man!!! Rainbow Coalition, bay-bee!!!
 5 thru 9) Oh, i don't remember what five thru nine were. Look, i broke another nail!
 10) PUSSY. As a blonde, i have found that i can now GET AWAY WITH ANYTHING. Two weeks ago, i stopped at the SA on West Mason Street to get a gallon of milk, whereupon a carload of youths of caucasian descent called me a "faggot." Okay, fine, it was skim milk, they got me dead to rights (that same night, i was walking to a punk show, when a carload of gentlemen of African-American descent called me a "motherfucker" [i think that's what they called me; they were employing Doppler Shift technology and other highly technical stuff {as befit their great intellect} which made it difficult for me to catch the entire insult]). Anyway, after i got my hair done, i decided, okay, i'm gonna walk to that goddamn SA on West Mason Street and just see how much verbal abuse i can wring outta the natives. I walk to the SA. I buy some decaf, since i don't need any milk, and figure, you know, that's gotta provoke a couple catcalls in and of itself. I walk all around the neighborhood, waiting for somebody to call me something (i figure "faggot-squared" would be the logical insult), just to make me happy. Nobody calls me anything (i assume if the black guys woulda driven by this time, they woulda yelled "right on, fellow disenfranchised member of society!", but i didn't see 'em). I get home, and notice that the black sweatshirt with the red Monkees logo i was wore to the salon (over my Furious George t-shirt, natch) and was still wearing had this HUGE bleach stain all down the back, where virtually the whole thing was turning that bleachy-kinda brown color -- so, in essence, i had been walking around town with my hair totally bleached, with all that spunk they put in it at the salon to make it stand up still in there, with this HUGE bleach stain across my back, 'cause i was just TOO FUCKING EXCITED to show the world my new hairdo to bother to take off my wet, bleachy clothes -- and nobody said a goddamn thing to me. Fuck, i would've yelled something at me!!! And yet, when i had normal hair, and was just mindin' my own business, buying fucking MILK, i was a faggot. As far as i can tell, i can pretty much do whatever the fuck i want right now and no one will say anything about it. For all i know, when i meet girls, instead of giving 'em the Secret Handshake (as you may or may not know, this is where the hand stays stationary but the geek moves up and down), i can just stick my hand up their skirt and commence jumping. Of course, i might have to jump more than the traditional three times in that case, but, you know, duty calls. Again: as far as i can tell, the only thing that's gonna come between me and wall-to-wall, uh, "muff," apart from a bleach-maker's strike, is the relentless, unstoppable onslaught of my rapidly multiplying sack of Turkey McTribbles. I'm tellin' ya, there's simply NO WAY i'm gonna eat more than nine of those things at a time again -- unless, of course, somebody out there can get Lou Reed over here, in which case i'll eat the whole damn two and a half pounds of 'em and Lou can have the time of his life. Bon appetit!

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