Long Live the Sun

Long Live the Sun

The Sun is dead!

Its subjects, now hapless,

we scour the Earth

for daybreak or twilight.

Long live the Sun.

Long live the people

who worshipped the sun,

foliage spoiled.

Long live the Sun.

Long live the seas,

the plants, the animals

cultivated by fools.

Long live the sun.

So live us, the Many,

blindly taking for granted

what is so freely given.

Long live the Sun.

Warmed, gifted, and bathed

in an unpromised light,

short, we are destined.

Long live the Sun!

The United States' Constitution, Section 1, Articles 1-7

WE THE PEASANTS OF THE UNTIED STATES, in order to form a more disjointed society, relinquish Justice, ensure Domestic Instability, ignore Common Sense, defeat the Welfare of Others, and secure the Blessings of Liberty all to ourselves and our Overblown Posteriors, do ordain this piece of worthless paper for the WHOO-WHOO-WHOO-U. S.-of-FlJckin’ A, dude!

ARTICLE I

SECTION 1

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a power-seeking, money hungry, pandering, slavelike Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a redistricted Senate and House of Purported Representatives.

SECTION 2

The Dump of Non-Representatives shall be composed of Know-Nothing Interlopers every second year by the People who believe anything they see on television, and the Electors in each state shall have the blah-diddy-blah and on and on until you just have to order in a FlJckin’ pizza.

Don’t run for election if you’re not from around here.

You and Your Non-Representatives DO NOT HAVE TO PAY INCOME TAXES.

A few of the Original States are very special, as consistent crybabies.

The people you vote in can kick someone THAT Y’ALL DON’T LIKE out of office, if they feel like it.

SECTION 3

You may vote for two senators to supposedly represent your so-called state. They are appointed to a six-year term to steal your money and misrepresent you, if you can even name them. They have, each, a vote, when they show up to do so.Their Chairs revolve around whatever their peers, also in The Senate, feel suits their needs and desires.

To be a Senator, you have to be at least thirty years-old, and again, don’t run for election if you ain’t from around here.

The VICE President of The Whoo-Whoo-Whoo-FlJcking U.S.A.! is the person in charge of the Senate. The Vice President doesn’t get to have a Senate Vote unless all the Senators can’t make up their Collective Minds, in which case, the VICE President Represents The Tie-Breaker.

The Senate is self-governing, when it comes to making their own decisions and the decisions of others.

In the event of various Impeachments, the Senate, if two thirds of the members feel like showing up, can vote upon impeachment, but has to follow what the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court thinks.

If the Senate decides somebody loses their job, corroborated by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, that Person may do whatever he or she chooses, until or if he or she faces criminal charges in a Court of Law.

SECTION 4

Individual States and Your Congress make up their own rules as to Senatorial elections. Congresspeople only have to show up to work once per year, the First Monday of December, unless they collectively decide not to do so.

SECTION 5

More than half of each the Congress and the Senate need to show up for any purported work to get done. It is up to the more responsible members of either Governing Body to tell the ones who consistently don’t show up for work that they, the irresponsible ones, should get their act together. Two thirds of either Governing Body can decide to expel a more flagrant screw-up.

Each of the two Lawmaking bodies are supposed to keep notes on what they do at their meetings, unless they decide that what they are doing is None of Their Constituents’ Business. One fifth of each Body has to approve whether or not their votes on any issue shall be revealed, Yea or Nay, to the people who elected them. Neither Body can take more than three days off without consent of the other Body, and they can’t have secret quorums apart from one another.

SECTION 6

The Senators and Cogresspeople will get paid from money that you put into the Treasury. They get to choose how much they earn for their Services. They cannot be arrested for Petit Crimes in their Sessions, nor on their way to or from. They can be arrested for really bad stuff, with which they cannot duck, Felonies, Treason, and Breaches of the Peace. Anything they say in either House, does not have to be answered by them outside those walls. Representatives cannot work for multiple Government Agencies while they are in office, even if new positions pop up while they are in office. If you have a Government Job, you must give that job up if you are elected to office.

SECTION 7 Either House may decide how your money, which they decide they will take from you, should be spent.

The Presidential Veto: A motion which has been passed by both Houses, Congress and Senate, is presented to the President of the United States upon which to agree or not. If the President does not agree with the motion passed, it gets sent back to its originating House for Debate, and then to the Second House, for the Article to be Debated and Amended again, for them to figure out how to make the President sign off on it. A two-thirds majority of “yeas” in both Houses is then necessary to out-vote the President’s original Opinion, to make that Bill a Law, without Presidential Approval.

Thinning

Okay, it’s thinning.

  Every day, there’s fewer and fewer, more of the grays than yesterday, and there’s the ones that keep on dying.

  You bet I look at myself in the mirror. It’s a big part of me, a big part of how I earn my living.

  My white jumpsuits are turning gray, and dry cleaning bills are getting higher, and so is the price of gas. An oil change too, but I ain’t using the car so much, since there ain’t been so many shows.

  I could use a couple of rhinestones that fell off, but my old lady ran out on me.

  Oh, they’re thinning and turning gray -- the hairs, the suits, and the folks at the hotel bars, but I got the rent paid through November, and the old Caddy, she runs.

  I may be trailer park Mikey Mancurro, but I’m hitting Vegas again this weekend, and I am Elvis, The King, for you, until the day I die.

The Medical Examiners' Legend

The Medical Examiners

The Medical Examiners burst onto the American rock ‘n’ roll scene in 1956, with their first single, “Let’s Go to the Autopsy” (AutoPlay 5601). The song raced to the top of nearly all the charts in the band’s native Spelunk, New Jersey and found another hot market on the radio stations and dancefloors of Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Their follow-up hit, “With You on My Table,” this time credited as The Five Medical Instruments (Gasp 3102), gained them a major label record deal. They retook their original name, and as The Medical Examiners, were bankable stars and toured the nascent rock ‘n’ roll world incessantly. Their debut LP, the breakthrough Teenage Autopsy sold 8 million copies, unheard of at the time. The dark Crime Scene Bigshots fared just as well. Their fame, however, waned, and their 1961 release, a weak, instrumental “cocktail” album entitled An Autopsy for Two failed in the record stores.

The Medical Examiners were not deterred. They followed musical trends, with 1963’s Autopsy Surfin’, and their folk album, My Son, the Medical Examiner, enormous hits. With “the five aut-tops’” 1964 smashes, Music to Watch Autopsies By and Autopsy á Go-Go, the boys from Spelunk were back on top again. The “Autopsy” craze was defined by their appearance on the Jackie Gleason Show, when “The Vivisect” became a nationwide dance sensation. They continued in 1965 with Having a Wild Autopsy (with its own dance hit, “Do the Microscopic”), but later that year, Autopsy Rave-Up and its ill-received “butcher cover” found them again in a downturn of popularity. They became angry with themselves, their public, and their management and descended into seclusion and narcotics.

In 1968, their money had run out.

Their lead singer, Frank Offerman says, “I was just sick of being idle. We still had some gas in the Medical Examiner tank.”

Tommy Persicchiola, the band’s lead guitarist agrees. “Frankie is a f-----g jackass, but I had to get out of my mom’s garage. She pretty much told me that.”

Musical trends had been changing in the boys’ time off. They moved to upstate New York and over the next two years constructed their opus, the double album, The Rest of Your Life. It helped define FM radio and what became known as “album-oriented rock.” Arenas were ablaze with the plaintive strains of “Dead Inside,” and their rocker, “Cutter.” They followed in 1974 with Cold and Blue, and their final studio release, 1977’s Saturday Night Autopsy, earning them two Grammy nominations and an Australian Golden Globe win for Middle-aged Group of the Year.

The decade turned, and in 1981, bassist Charlie Davidsen left the band, forming his own, The Quincys, who had a string of AOR hits. His departure spelled the death knell for the band; however, a comeback LP entitled Culture on the Slide is purportedly in the works.

Michael Chandler

Rock-O-Motion Magazine - 1992

Lie In Bed

Lie In Bed

These days,

it is for sure,

that is all I do.

I long,

somehow,

for the other days,

when that is what we did

together.

"What Means 'Raunch?"

“What Means ‘Raunch?'"

The Raunch Hands van rolls along a postcard-perfect two-lane road in Austria. The drive began after last night’s final encore. The band have brought with them a large cache of that town’s local spirits and have left behind a nightclub janitor’s nightmare, a restaurateur who is now questioning his career choice, various bodily secretions, a cymbal stand which will catch up to the band four nations from today, a very happy drug dealer, and a whole bunch of people who will be calling in sick to work today. Within the van are the five band members, chattering, smoking, thoughtlessly, incessantly drinking, their driver/roadie/soundman/entertainment coordinator/day nurse, and an investment banker from Bonn, Germany who quit the firm to go on the road with these guys and sell t-shirts. He is curled up in a corner of the van, unconscious. He sports the same Armani suit that he wore to the Bonn gig, a single Italian wing-tip, and a five-day growth of beard. Crumpled in his hand is a recent article from a Frankfurt newspaper reporting his sudden disappearance. He is very pale and will probably have to be dumped off at a clinic in a few days, but he has a huge smile on his face and carries with him a very handy VISA Gold card. The van approaches tonight’s venue, a youth center housed in a 19th Century women’s prison, which lords over a high, verdant hill.The band is a half-hour early as the van winds its way upward. A few youth center volunteers lounge by the entrance, turning in unison when they hear the too-loud music emanating from the van, which is still 300 meters away. The van pulls up, and its doors spring open. “That’s Life,” by Frank Sinatra, is insanely blaring. As the band emerges, about twenty wine and beer bottles clatter down onto the drive. The Raunch Hands have a stretch, adjust their shades, and survey the ex-prison as though they have just arrived home after a long trip and want to see if the place looks the same. One of the youth center people has run inside to tell her co-workers about the spectacle by the door. The entire staff now fills the entrance, gaping. The band, oblivious, wordlessly thread through them and split up inside the club for the dressing room, the bar, the crapper. The bartender returns to his post and asks the band members seated there, “What means ‘raunch’?”

It’s time to do it all over again.

Kangaroo Politics

It was graduation day, and we formed two parallel lines, just like grammar school. Governor Joe Brennan, a Cheverus High School alumnus, as we were about to become, was the keynote speaker. While we waited to make our entrance to the City Hall auditorium, Governor Joe came down our lines. He was glad-handing each of us, quickly asking our names and giving a cursory, “Congratulations Tony,” or “...Chris,” or “...Ted,” or whatever. He was so full of shit. As he approached me, I thought fast. He got to me, and I identified myself.

  “Bob, sir, Bob Keeshan.”

  “Congratulations Bob,” he said, shook my hand and passed by.

 On my graduation day, I had told the state governor that I was Captain Kangaroo, and he bought it.