This Is Not A Test - Books, Music, Movies, Art, Culture And Truth

It's raining in Los Angeles, so we may as well talk about formative years, Bangladesh, mittens, waterlogged La-Z-Boys, Blue Mountain coffee, English muffins, Bordeaux, procrastination, what it means to be human, Facebook and other modern afflictions, Alex Jones, conspiracy, shirtless weeping, the Roman Empire, truth and science, Jesus himself, Nixon himself, Woodrow Wilson, selling candles door to door, and pear trees.

What is it about beer, or any alcohol, really, that makes us so...I don't know, wonderful? Okay, it doesn't make all of us wonderful, I'll give you that. Some people shouldn't be allowed to drink. I certainly shouldn't have been allowed to drink when I was a young man, but no one stopped me, so some things happened, as they will. Here is the story of one (or two) of those things. Also, don't forget to vote! I'm supposed to say that, right?

Join me, won't you, on an action-packed cross country bicycle trip that I undertook a few short decades ago, in the America of the late 1980s. Weren't those glorious times? What with the Cold War, the Reagan presidency gracefully pirouetting into the Bush presidency, Iran-Contra, Oliver North, revered statesman Dan Quayle, precious baby Jessica falling into that darn well, the "War on Drugs," Exxon Valdez, Lyle and Erik Menendez, that kooky Berlin Wall. We'll talk about none of that, but perhaps we'll see what we're made of, all of us. Or, you know, not. Anything can happen.

And a one and a two and a here we go, off into the wild blue yonder of the Malibu coastline, with wine, exes, freeway traffic, sophistication, $10 couches, real money, dog catchers, Thomas Brothers maps, helicopters, Elizabeth Shue in a leather skirt, bacterial infections, hard boiled eggs, sweat, darkness, garbage, shrubbery, pregnancy, hospitality, Cheech and Chong, George Carlin, Bill Cosby, pop life, and a friendly admonition to keep on truckin'.

Okay, this one is all over the place, but that has its own charm, doesn't it? I mean, don't you want to talk about dogs, crushing heat, megastorms, science (and the ignorance thereof), Gwyneth Paltrow, Jesus, geniuses, the home schooled, Lil Wayne, AA meetings, limp escapism, rock stars, resistance, complacency, Sam Kinnison, Roseanne, Woody Allen, Ariana Grande and GG Allin, marching, Anubis, Siddhartha, John Updike, James Baldwin, Frank Herbert, printing presses and Walmart? Sure you do.

Tune in to our interview with artist and author Carol Es and hear what she has to say about her recently completed memoir, "Shrapnel in the San Fernando Valley," and turn on to a strongbox full of gold, Yahweh Ben Yahweh, the Kardashians, hyphens and en dashes, the evils of Scientology, bad luck and stupid mistakes, survival, triumph and getting the first slice of the pie.

What the hell, let's take a chainsaw to royalty, the desert, aliens with oversized heads, crazy glue, usenet, Airstream trailers, diplomas, fat and lazy cover bands, crushing and demoralizing your enemy, pig flesh, pigskin, loving it or leaving it, Amnesty International, smokescreens and the rise of the machines. We'll talk about 14 of those 15 things, see if you can guess which ones.

Here, how about some Jade Bird, some signs of life, some Bob Dylan, some...country music? No. Some Shakespeare, Jimmy Fallon, Arrow de Wilde, cesspools, how art and culture are really life itself, Stephen Hines' "the late season" book, undercurrents and undercutting, Jackson Pollock, Prince, 5 Hour Energy Drink, Western society, Victorian days, Leaving Las Vegas, Oxycodone and Fentanyl lollipops, the devil and the lord, Joe Strummer, male groupies, reminiscing, and sky cars.

In which and wherein I proceed to speak on subjects as confounding and diverse as particles, time, unemployment, maximizing one's potential, training chickens, meaning and purpose, milk trucks, the pervasive mystery of Atlassian Confluence, rhythm, mojo, management philosophies, buying and selling, Joe Strummer, Lake Woebegone and the End of the Road in Homer Alaska, Craigslist, fear and loathing in the grocery store, yard sales, Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, the dark apocalypse, seven-and-a-half billion handbags, and Hootie and the Blowfish.

This one may sound a little weird because it's the first episode recorded in the new studio (a.k.a. the spare bedroom of the house we just moved in to). Try to ignore the echo and instead just revel in the hilarity of bronchitis, 768 Kbps Internet, rain on cardboard boxes, hustlers and con artists, Sylvester Stallone and Ariana Grande, landlines, landlords, lunatics, putting an 'i' or an 'e' in front of every name or service in the 90s, Pringles, silence, power outages, gorillas, roller coasters and getting fired from your job.

Oh Canada, the San Gabriel Valley, LSD, white bread, the Oscar race (pretty sure he's white - har har), the wonderful and marvelous (and now dead) Joe Frank, the proximity effect, Craigslist again because apparently I'm a masochist, and last but not least on this abbreviated episode for an abbreviated month: how I became a Bitcoin millionaire!

This episode is two days late for reasons which may reveal themselves when you listen. And who wouldn't want to listen to a scintillating discussion about deviled ham, touring Prince's home and recording studio Paisley Park - a cotton candy Barbie dream condo if ever there was one, landlords, looking for a new job, minimalism, money, security as a trap, pots and pans and music, and remaining civilized.

Over the river and through the woods, to Bukowski's house we go. This is just me talking about what it was like there, and how I wound up there. It's a brief tale that I thought you'd like to hear. But don't let it inspire you to go to Bukowski's house uninvited. That wouldn't be cool. Don't be that person. In California you can shoot someone through your front door and never see the inside of a police station for doing it, keep that in mind as you go about your day. It's probably a good thing to keep in mind in general, as a rule for a happy life.

Getting an email from Gene Simmons, why young boys must rock, spending fifty thousand dollars on a collection of outtakes, getting onto a cruise ship with really old rock stars, spending $250 on a collection that is basically The Beatles dicking around for 80 hours while being filmed, Ektachrome 500, the miracle of HAP (again), metadata, When The Saints Go Marching In, tediously listing things like some kind of idiot, Beatle harmonies, the Wailers, little record stores in little lake towns, and a few thousand other words or debatable wisdom.