Bad news, friends. I died. I was trudging along the banks of the Red River, as you do during an unseasonably warm North Dakota Winter. With the trees gone and the prairie grass tamped down by deer, you can get much closer to the water than in the Summer, but usually it's colder 'n the heart of a Saskatoon Psychopath and there's liable to be a foot or two of snow on the ground, so you're mostly stuck indoors, gaining winter weight. Not this winter, though. This was a couple days after the anniversary of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and it was still in the high 40s. Heaven on earth. So, I was trudging along, tossing rocks and kicking out rotted stumps when I came upon a peculiar sight. There was something wedged between two bare elm trees not ten feet from where I stood. It was red and green and, this being the Holiday season, I assumed it was some kind of out of the way Christmas decoration. But I pushed on to investigate, and, to my surprise, saw three words printed in big block letters on the mystery object. The words were these: The Phoenix Lights. I was taken aback. Why, that very morning I'd cracked open a book on The Phoenix Lights, the most famous UFO sighting in the Americas, maybe the world. I whispered, "Synchronicity," because that's what UFO weirdos do. Convinced that I'd stumbled upon some sort of cache of secret information, finally, or, at the very least, some sort of incoherent message from The Phenomenon - I rushed toward whatever it was, and this is where I died. My foot caught on an exposed root. I put out my hands to grab hold of a branch, and the branch snapped like a box of angel hair pasta over a bubbling pot of water. I tumbled, foot over fedora, down the river bank and on to the icy surface of the mighty Red. Shaken but okay, I stood up, brushed the dirt and cockleburs from my body, lifted a foot to ascend the bank and heard another crack - too many cracks for one day, if you ask me - felt the ice give way below me, fell backward again, and crashed through the thin ice, into the frigid, mud dark water. I felt a jolt of unspeakable cold, gasped, filled myself with water that tasted of clay, and was sucked Northward and to the bottom of Fargo's preeminent body of water. Next thing I remember, I was completely dry, which struck me as odd. I was back on land, in a dense green wood, ominous in a way I couldn't quite put my finger on. Poetical, somehow. The ground was rocky and inclined. This wasn't North Dakota. What was it? I heard a low growl. Not good. Low growls are almost never good. Even high growls aren't great. I heard a low growl and saw an enormous black bear slowly approaching me, snout wet, eyes wild with malice or hunger or both. I looked about for somewhere to run. There was a clearing! I started in that direction, but - Alas!- coming through the clearing was a guy I went to high school with who I'd blocked on Facebook. REALLY didn't want to talk to him. But it was this guy or the bear. I was frozen in indecision. Then, from above, an urgent whisper. I looked up. There was a man in the branches of a large Sycamore Tree, partially obscured. He looked older. Well dressed. A stranger. Not ideal, but better than the other two options. I briefly hoped he wouldn't be the chatty kind of stranger and then ascended the tree as quickly as I could. There in the branches of the Sycamore was a man I immediately recognized. He was Kurt Vonnegut. "You're Kurt Vonnegut!" I whispered. "Guilty as charged," said he. "But your d-d-d-dead!" I hissed.

Parasites 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. Some examples: There is a fungus that can infect an ant, make it leave its colony, crawl three feet up a tree at exactly solar noon, find a leaf on the Northeast side of the tree, crawl onto the leaf, and clamp its mandibles down on the thick stem running through it's middle. It then paralyzes the ant, waits four hours, and explodes its spores all over the ground below. This is a fungus, not even a creature, exactly. There is a wasp that can sting a specific type of spider, sedating it and filling its abdomen with wasp larvae. Already, this is unbearably grotesque, but there's more. The larvae then instruct the spider to build a web different from the beautiful, symmetrical one they'd normally be busy creating - something hideous and Lovecraftian, ropey and double stitched, suited to larval purposes. The web can be different depending on the location. If more protection is needed, it can be made in three dimensions, with a kind of ceiling hiding the gestating wasps. The larvae then devour the spider from the inside out and use the newly spun web to pupate and emerge as new, nightmarish adult wasps. Absolute degenerates. These are things scientists are only beginning to understand. There's the now semi-famous case of toxoplasmosis - a single celled monster that infects rats, decreasing their inhibition and making them more cat friendly. The cat eats the rat, and shits out the toxoplasmosis, where it waits for a human to clean up the shit. Then it gets into the human brain and, it is theorized, makes humans somehow love cats, inadvertently creating 70% of the internet culture of the 2010s. Studies show that fully one third of humans are infected with toxoplasmosis. There's a really good chance your brain is riddled with it right now. We know of but a minuscule percentage of a percentage of all existing parasites, but it has been estimated that these dastardly pests outnumber all other living things on Earth four to one. We are essentially living on their planet, at their behest. They live around us, in the food we eat, in the pets we keep. They live INSIDE of us, feasting on us and the horrific foods modern people engorge themselves upon. God knows what they're making us do. Our "free will" could very well be nothing more than the complicated intersecting commands of untold numbers of these wee, hideous beasts. Thousands upon thousands of times I have asked myself this question: What would make a sane human being - someone otherwise functional, perhaps even kind and good - become obsessed with donald trump, a man who looks like a used condom filled to busting with butterscotch pudding, a crude, too small caricature of Mussolini drawn near the top, topped with dog-shit flavored cotton candy, and a personality to match his looks? Could the answer be some nightmarish parasite? I think it might. I think the process may play out something like this: At a young age, a person without any defenses built into their system for such thoughts, feelings, and critters, ingests the parasite - we'll call it Magacepholis - perhaps through an undercooked fast food cheeseburger or some feral raccoon droppings or maybe it's passed down from their infected, reprehensible parents. Maybe the parents were playing with feral raccoon droppings or ate an undercooked McDonald's cheeseburger, or vice-versa, or their parents did.

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.

It's 2001, and I have just arrived on campus at the University of North Dakota in the city of Grand Forks for my first year of college. I am excited, slightly nervous. Grand Forks is only 81 miles North of my hometown, Fargo, and several of my friends are going to be here as well. This will be a lot like high school, only better, I assume, but I don't know, really. Most of my knowledge about college life comes from Saved By the Bell The College Years and I can't imagine that's very accurate. I'm excited to learn, I'm excited to party. I would very much like to lose my virginity. I am very typical. I've driven to Grand Forks in my Cobalt Blue 1994 Chevy Cavalier, a terrible plastic car. I wanted to, as a joke, get a personalized license plate that said FNKYDVA. I am now glad I didn't do that. My father has followed me to Grand Forks to help me get settled. He and my mother have just divorced. I am glad to not be in Fargo for all of that. We unload my stuff. Some books, clothes, a gorgeous blue iMac, fresh from Best Buy. We say some unsentimental goodbyes, and I sit on the curb to smoke my first cigarette as a free man and contemplate my new life. My prospects are good. I'm out of the house, finally. My parents are divorced, finally. That was a long time coming. This isn't the greatest college in the world, but it's fine. I'll maybe stay here for a couple of years and then transfer somewhere else. What do I want to be? A writer, mostly. Maybe a teacher. I think most writers also teach. Journalism? Maybe journalism. I'm not so concerned about any of that now. My social life is what I'm concerned about. Meeting girls. I want to meet girls. And I want to drink. Drink to meet girls, that's the goal. I am intelligent but not smart. I am perhaps the most free I have ever been or will ever be. I could get in my car and leave here. That option has always been in the back of my mind. I could, theoretically, walk up to any kid here, theoretically start a conversation, and begin a new life path. I don't do this. My friends begin to arrive. Brady, Jake, Jamie, Travis, Tony. I've known all of these guys since we were kids. I have not gone far outside of my comfort zone. Once we're moved in, we gather in Jake's dorm room to make plans for the night. Jake's dorm will become a central meeting point as he will soon have driven his roommate out with a plan of making himself impossible to live with and leaving dildos everywhere. Jake's room will soon become barely inhabitable. One night, ripped on whiskey, with whiskey left, but out of chaser, we will take some pudding cups out of his mini-fridge while he is in the bathroom and chase the whiskey with that. He will be furious that we have stolen his pudding. He will become more furious when he notices that we are getting cigarette ash all over his floor, as though he's not the worst offender. He will yell at us. Jaime, who is an asshole, will look him dead in the eye, drop his cigarette on the flour, and grind it into the rug with his foot. Jake will lose his mind and kick us all out. By the time I get back to my dorm, just down the hall, he will have left a message on my answering machine. It goes like this: "I'm sick and tired of you guys coming into my room, eating all my pudding cups, and putting out cigarettes on my floor!" He will then call my mother at 2 in the morning and make the same complaint to her. This quaint anecdote is my freshman year of college in miniature. This is a digression. Tonight,

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.

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,

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. * I'm strolling through the meat department on my way to the back of the store, undoubtedly to eat a "damaged" box of fruit snacks or take a brief nap behind a pallet of store brand soda, when a woman stops me. She's maybe 30 or 35. A white woman, no accent. Looks put together. No "this person is insane" alarm bells are going off. I tell you this because an unfamiliarity with the English language or severe mental illness would seem to be the only logical explanations for what happens next. She's holding a box of Suddenly Salad, a pasta salad starter kit. She's pointing to a word on the back. "What's this?" she asks. I look. "Um, pepperoni?" I say, reading the word. Perhaps she's dyslexic. "Yeah, what's that?" she replies. This woman did not know what a pepperoni was. Clearly she was an alien disguised as a human but missing a few key pieces of human information. I tried my best to explain that pepperoni is a slightly spicy meat commonly found on pizza. She seemed satisfied. I remain perplexed. * There is an old man named Pete. He is a regular. He pushes a cart around the store nearly every day, his breathing apparatus in the child's seat, griping about this and that, occasionally trying (unsuccessfully) to convert me to Conservatism by misquoting dumb lines from Winston Churchill, who, though a hero, was also an asshole, just like Pete. Today, he pushes his cart up to me, with a stern, unhappy look on his face, a bag of peanuts in the shell next to his breathing apparatus. "Your peanuts are stale!" he says. "Well, Pete," I say, observing the thick coat of peanut dust on his breathing apparatus, "that doesn't seem to have stopped you from stealing them." Pete goes on his way, eating more stolen, stale peanuts. * Another regular, whose name I don't know, pushes her cart up to me. She is Eastern European and very nice, but her accent is thick and communication is sometimes difficult. I'm happy to do it though, as she is very patient and appreciative. And she's doing exponentially better than I would if I were in her home country. "Where . . . is . . . karakas?" she asks? Thinking fast, despite a hangover, I reply, "Eastern Europe, I think?" I am wrong, of course. Caracas is a large city in South America. "No, no," she says. "CARACAS." She puts her hand to her mouth and kind of pantomimes munching. "Oh, CRACKERS!" I exclaim. "Aisle 9." * A co-worker approaches me. "There's an angry woman in the cheese section. Can you go talk to her?" I sigh, and head toward dairy. There is a woman standing by the cottage cheese looking furious. "You're out of 2% Cass Clay Cottage Cheese?! How is that even possible!" I think, "I don't know lady. Dairy shortage? Tipped over semi? Tainted batch? Other customers, hungry for delicious cottage cheese? The answers to your question are endless. Maybe try one of the other THREE BRANDS of the exact product you are looking for or go with the 1% version of the same brand!" I say, "I apologize. We should be getting more in tonight." She is unsatisfied. * There is a man who has been brazenly stealing from the store. His MO is as follows: He takes a cart,

The idea of sobriety, to a drunk, is terrifying, far off, and totally necessary. To maintain the delusion that you are a reasonable, functioning, GOOD person, you must always have it in the back of your mind – Someday. Someday I will get sober, of course. This isn’t forever, just for now. Sobriety is a fiction – like writing – you wield to keep yourself drinking. 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. When you do start the interrogation – if you do – the voice reveals itself as a serpent in the potential Garden of your mind. Not Satan – you’re not getting off that easy – but a great deceiver nonetheless. The interrogation begins with visibility. You have to shine the light on the voice, like a haggard detective teasing a confession from a smirking criminal. You have to admit to yourself that it is a problem, that it lives inside of you, and that it does not live inside most people. You have to see it. To identify it. To name it. Faced with the actual, impending, absolutely necessary reality of sobriety as opposed to the abstract idea of it you’ve lived with for years or decades, the serpent raises its voice, talks faster. “Turn off that fucking light! Let’s talk, in the dark, quietly, like we always do.” It doesn’t want you to know its name. It certainly doesn’t want you to speak it. It took me a while to say to myself that I was an alcoholic, and even longer to say it out loud. When I finally did, I was writing a story for a storytelling competition. I led with, “Hello, my name is Reid, and I’m an alcoholic,” knowing damn well that every other alcoholic in the audience would immediately chime in with, “Hi, Reid.” It was a joke. I had to make a joke of it to speak the truth. That’s almost always the case for me. The first time I said it to my wife – Said, “I am an alcoholic” – I was reading her this story, probably two years after I’d stopped drinking. That’s how stubborn the serpent is. Two years of being sober and I hadn’t summoned the strength to name him aloud. Until that time I acted as though I was doing it for Kelly. For us. She said she didn’t want to have a baby until I had a year of sobriety. That seemed reasonable. So, as the good folks in Alcoholics Anonymous say, I white knuckled it. I just didn’t drink. I wrestled the serpent, all the time, and there’s a reason snake wrestling isn’t a recognized sport. It’s hard and no fun to watch. When the serpent’s words aren’t working – “She’s gone for the weekend, she’ll never know. What harm could it cause? No one will know but you and it will be such a RELIEF”– it starts to squeeze. Some squeeze harder than others. Mine, like me, wasn’t particularly brawny. I didn’t have much for withdrawals. I didn't drink every day at the time I quit, just on weekends, so my body wasn’t relying on a daily intake, didn’t depend on it. But, for some people, there are major physical consequences to quitting cold turkey. There can be seizures. You can die. I got lucky, but don’t use my luck as inspiration. Talk to your doctor. Don’t dry out alone. So my serpent didn’t squeeze very hard, but goddamn can that thing keep talking in the face of scorn and resistance. And its memory is pristine.

I started to drink the way that a lot of kids do, I think. As a teenager, I climbed up a stool to carefully fill a thermos with a splash from every ancient bottle of booze on the top shelf of my parent’s closet. Peach Schnapps, brandy, rum, tequila, whiskey, vodka. It all went into the intoxicating, barely consumable witch’s brew. Toil and trouble awaited. There was alcoholism in my family, but not the immediate family. I can recall my father being drunk on just a few occasions and my mother not at all. Both of my grandfathers were alcoholics, but one died when I was very young and the other had stopped drinking by the time I was old enough to notice. Supposedly, his doctor told him, after some heart trouble, that he was allowed one beer a day, to which he replied, “Can I save them all up for Saturday?” So far as I know, that's the only funny thing he ever said, but maybe that's because I only new him sober. Alcoholism is endemic to my city and state, Fargo, North Dakota. It gets very cold here, and also very hot. Alcohol, theoretically, is a cold drink that can make you feel warm, so it’s perfect both ways. I can’t tell you what the bar to person ratio in this state is exactly, but it’s high, and, from my personal experience, we drink differently than people do in other places. We don’t do a thing AND drink. We don’t socialize AND drink. We don’t barbecue AND drink. We drink, and anything that happens alongside that is incidental. We drink to get drunk. That’s the point. Obliteration. But I suppose this may just be my personal experience. After I got sober, I heard a story from the great John Roderick that I found illuminating. To paraphrase, he says, when he was a drinker, he’d go to a baseball game and get drunk because of course you go to a baseball game and get drunk. That’s what baseball games are for. Everyone there is getting drunk. But when he got sober, he realized that like 10% of the people at the baseball game are getting drunk and the other 90% are just trying to have a nice time with their family and friends. They HATE the drunks. So, maybe that’s the case with this city, but I’ve been sober for a while now – 7 years – and that’s still not my experience. In high school I smoked pot much more than I drank. I don’t know why. Weed always inverted me even more than I already was, made me unsociable – outside of a tight group of fellow pot smoking friends – and withdrawn. In retrospect, I’m somewhat glad for that, but at the time it went against what I wanted – to be outgoing and confident and appealing to girls. The first time I can remember thinking that booze was an excellent way to attain these traits was a school dance. I and two friends got thoroughly drunk before the event. Two of us went unnoticed. We DANCED, confidently and without self-consciousness, the only way to successfully dance. People noticed. Girls noticed. I made the rounds, beloved, I felt, by everyone I spoke to, man and woman. Soon we began to get word that our compatriot, Jake, hadn’t been so lucky. “Jake’s in the principal’s office!” someone told me. Ten minutes later, “The police have been called!” Ten minutes after that, the police arrived, and Jake bolted from the principal’s office, past a police officer, shoved the door open so hard that the metal frame slapped against and shattered the plate glass window surrounding it, and fled, underdressed for the deeply cold North Dakota winter, into the night. He eventually sought refuge in the only safe space he could think of: the kitchen of the McDonald’s where he was employed, a mile from the school. He got a minor anyway, and had to pay for the window. It was so dramatic. One of the best nights of my life up to that point. My friends and I were bequeathed our drink of choice by a tradition handed down through the generations: North Dakota drunks drink Windsor Canadian Whiskey. That’s just the way it is. Sometimes a bottle of Canadian Mist or Black Velvet or some hideous vodka or rum ...

Sag Jinkins In 1972, Richard Nixon went to China and Neil Diamond recorded Hot August Night. Incredible. The Russians landed another unmanned craft on the moon, against all sense and reason, adding to their already substantial supply of rocks. Impressive, nonetheless. ABBA formed. There was a flood in the Black Hills and The Godfather was in theatres. Watergate. Bloody Sunday. Momentous occasions, all. Busta Rhymes and Shaquille O’Neal were born. Ezra Pound died. Carl Stalling died. Sag Jenkins didn’t know about any of this. 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. But for now he was drinking. For now he felt alright. Depressed but drunk, and that was as all right as he got these days. Sag – born Sagory Troyal Jinkins III on the 10th of March, 1938, in, maybe ironically, depending on how you choose to define that word, a filthy, makeshift outhouse behind a perilous shanty in the god-and-everyone-else-forsaken Plimsol County of Wyoming – a town called - get this – Trashton – to Sagory Troyal Jinkins II, who was not present for the event, was rarely present, not really – was, at the time, drinking somewhere, presumably – and his young wife, Artis Barbara-Anne Jinkins, who was, obviously. Present that is. Sag was, at this moment, the moment we started with, before the jump that would kill him, in the port-a-potty, wearing his leathers - the Evel Knievel, red white and blue knock offs sported by seemingly all daredevils of the time - each with its own arrangement of the colors. Sag's were a particularly heinous variation, with thin red and blue vertical stripes running from his red patent boots up to the increasingly doughy flesh of his neck - just starting to spill over the collar – even daredevils are forced to melt into oblivion if they don’t kill themselves first - with a single white star splayed across the back. He looked like a fucking clown, would have felt like a clown sober. But he hadn't found himself anywhere near that particular state – sobriety - for a substantial stretch in maybe six months - ever since his oldest son, Clinton Sagory Jinkins - a kid of thirteen, big for his age, with just enough sense to know that a man - even ones father, especially ones father - needs a punch in the nose every once in a while but not quite enough sense to always exactly know the right time to dole out that punch or hard enough fists, yet anyway, to make that punch say just what it needed to - had, despite of and because of these deficiencies, dealt him, Sag, a punch in the nose that, due to its lateness - or earliness, maybe, it's hard to say - did not a damn thing but send his already spiraling father on an unnglorious bender – a particularly notable bender in a long stretch of less notable ones in that it was a predominantly sad bender - that, frankly, didn't suit him any more than the leathers did. Those ill suited leathers were now unzipped and pulled down to the waist so that Sag Jinkins' growing paunch could expand to its full size, protruding from beneath his still thinnish, sunken, hair splotched chest like a loaf of uncooked bread on a warped, knife scarred,