and the pills that mother gives you...

Back in my Kent State days, I was a library shelver who later moved up to the circulation desk, which enabled me to read all day, get my homework done, and pick up 30 hours a week on top of going to school full-time, most of those hours being between 11pm and 1am involving watching clips of Kids in the Hall and The Young Ones and listening to the Red House Painters and the Talking Heads with my boss at the time, making weird collages on the copy machine, and getting hooked up with day-old muffins from the kid working the coffee stand.

I will never have a job like that again and I knew that at the time. I was allowed to wear whatever I wanted to work which was mostly old band t-shirts and hoodies and I had a cassette walkman and a stash of early 90's thrift store cassettes and mixtapes full of Sonic Youth and the Buzzcocks.

"Your job looks like it's so boring," people would say, but I loved it.

Most of the other students hated the 10th floor where the Government Documents were. They were classified differently, and it was isolated and creepy with the blinking florescent bulbs and row after row of paper copies of congressional hearings including the PMRC ones with Zappa and Twisted Sister, and volumes with titles like "The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report" "Wool Production in New England," and "School Bus Rollover Fatalities."

Oh, and Fat Albert and the Cosby gang don't want you to be a commie.



So I've been hooked on Bibliodyssey for a bit now, and their links are pretty fabulous too. Here's a collection of more guvvermint propagandism via comic book. All sorts of good stuff about the War on Drugs, the Invasion of Grenada, a Europe without Borders, and a bunch of 80's teens learning about the banks.

I've never even fooled around with drugs in my life but I had a lot of friends who did, and I think that along with heavy metal, horror movies, and Big Chuck and Little John, stoner humor was part of growing up in the working class burbs. Having very long hair and a love for Led Zeppelin and the Seattle bands meant that a lot of my high school teachers thought I was one of those smart kids on drugs anyway.



Since then, those "Mexicanized dishes" might be sending me down the road to perdition. That and the caffeinated beverages and the stoner rock. I've seen these guys below three times, (opening for both the Icarus Line and Sleater Kinney and then headlining) and the whole trippy shoegaze meets Sabbath thing rocks my world. It's a shame that I have yet to pick up any of their records. Might do that this weekend.