Come children, let me dandle you on my knee as I tell you savage tales of pot, porn, punk rock, and professional wrestling. Your ears may burn and your hearts will beat with the violence of untamed jungle drums, but I promise to never lie to you.

After three weeks of intense rehearsals in our Sound and Fury Laboratory, my collection of musical terrorists is finally ready for prime time, and it is all gonna go down tonight. In a circus tent.

Your author, wielding the Guitar of Truth: Don't be square — Read his book! See him live!

For those of you who have been living in a cave, tonight will be what has become known as simply The Big Show — my band, the Rocket Train Delta Science Arkestra, featuring Jon Spencer, will be backing me up as I twirl druggy adventures and filthy confessions from my book I Have Fun Everywhere I Go. Joining me will be superstars Jonathan Ames, Amanda Stern, and Jewcy.com’s very own Rachel Shukert, whose tales of heavy petting and teenage hijinks are going to knock you on your ass.

It’s a strange business trying to put on a show of groovy tunes and far-out storytelling. Let’s face it — literary events usually have all the dramatic impact of a stool-softening enema. We are changing that. Tonight, the revolution begins. We are the New Bohmemians, born in the wake of eight years of culture death and riding a wave of hope. This is your chance to be on the right side of history. Come on down — if you think you can handle it. There will be no punches pulled, no holds barred. It will truly be a Night of Champions. (Scroll down to see our super suave flyer and allthe 411.. for more info, check out www.rockettrain.com). See you all there!

* * *

And now let’s pick up the story of my poor, misguided mother.

In the last week I have received dozens of angry emails—maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised that calling her a “racist” and a “moron” was not going to make me any new friends?

Last week I called the Ancient One and told her I was making her my pet project.

"If you talk politics with me, I will hang up the phone," she told me. She has never been lauded for her open mind.

I made my usual pitch — the economy (she watches the stockmarket like a lion watching her cubs), the future reproductive rights of her granddaughter, and what I always think is going to be a clincher, "Why would you vote for someone who doesn’t think that all Americans should have the same rights?"

Silence.

"You would still love me if I were gay, right?"

"Michael, I am going to hang up the phone."

"Alright, just tell me this. Would you rather I dated a Jewish man, or a black woman?"

She hates it when I bust her like that. It is a low blow, I admit it, but there is only one acceptable answer and we both know it. ("As long as you are happy.")

Finally, though, she was engaged. For a moment.

"I am voting for McCain," she told me flatly. See? I told you she was a moron. "But it won’t matter, because I am voting in Florida."

"Huh? It will matter more there, don’t you think?"

"It will be a —," and here she used a Yiddish word I didn’t know, which frustrates me, because tossing Yiddish around and wading in my Jew roots is my shtick. "It means that it is a waste."

In the tank for Obama.

"But…"

"Everyone I know in Florida is voting for Obama."

And there you have it America, from a soldier with her boots on the ground. Forget all the polls. When a migrating Jew like my mother brings in fresh intelligence from the canasta playing hordes, you know you are getting the fresh dope.

And then she hung up on me, God bless her.

Mike Edison, author of I Have Fun Everywhere I Go, spent the past two weeks guest blogging on Jewcy. This is his parting post.  Want more?  Buy his book!

This post is continued from: BOOK CLUB: Pot, Porn, Palin, and Racist Jewish Mothers

It was a good Yom Kippur. My soul is clean. Now I can go back to swinging fists and dropping bombs. Being a bad guy makes me happy.

When I say “bad guy,” what I mean of course, is “heel,”which is what we call the bad guys in professional wrestling. We call the good guys “baby faces.”

In all of my years in wrestling, I have never worked as a “face.” Always a rulebreaker. It is much more satisfying getting “heat,” as we call it in the biz, than earning approval, which these days almost always means waving an American flag and preaching clean living. In fact, my book I HAVE FUN EVERYWHERE I GO begins with me stomping on my boss (he was one of those Hulk Hogan-loving, flag-waving, self-righteous do-gooders… yuck!) and chasing him out of his job so I could take over. Here’s an excerpt for the unenlightened:

I earned my first Big Time Magazine Gig thrashing king hell out of my boss in the middle of the ring. It was not pretty, a bloody no-holds-barred Loser Leaves Town match in Gleason’s gym. The bell rang at midnight. I squashed the bastard with my signature Heart Punch, smiled for the cameras, and sent him packing. Then I took my rightful place atop the masthead of Wrestling’s Main Event (“The No. 1 Magazine for Mat Fans Today!”) and moved into his vacant office on the 82^ndfloor of the Empire State Building. I was twenty-two years old.

Edison, at right, with his hero, former World Wrestling Champion, The Iron Sheik, from Iran.Wrestling is an odd beast. Even roller derby fans and Republicans look down on it. When I announced to my father that I was going to be working for a wrestling magazine, it so chafed his Ivy League sensibility that he seized up and began frothing like a man in the throes of a major neurological event. He made it clear that for the sake of everyone involved we were never to discuss it again. Oddly, he always considered my career in professional wrestling a much greater shande than my gutter-born livelihood as a filth-peddling pornographer. It cast a darker shadow than when I was the publisher of the notorious doper rag High Times. It made him sick to the point of trauma, and still, twenty years later, if I mention that I have been writing, watching, or working wrestling, he pretends he doesn’t hear me and asks how the Yankees are doing, even in the dead of winter.

The existential Truth about professional wrestling, it has been said, is much like Dostoyevsky’s aphorism for Faith: If you get it, no explanation is necessary, and if you don’t, no explanation will do.

I was always astonished at how many otherwise hip people, especially my extended posse of supposedly open-minded punk rockers, potheads, and pornographers — people who loved all sorts of crap, culture vultures who worshipped whoopee cushions and women-in-chains prison movies — perpetually poo-pooed professional wrestling. 

What, were they afraid they’d get hooked? That wrestling was a gateway to harder sports? Feh.

But those of us in on the joke were having a blast.

And there’s the rub. Those of us in on the joke…

How many of you can say that?

Since I started scribbling this blog a week ago, I have been amazed at the amount of right wing idiots who lurk on the Jewcy site, and how easy it is to push their “hot buttons.” Just look at the comments! You pencil-neck geeks are a heel’s dream — you react to every cheap shot, and turn beet red every time I take the brass knuckles out of my shorts to K.O. the good guy. You think I am angry? Take a look in the mirror and tell me what you see. Never mind, let me tell you: misfits and trolls who keep pictures of Joe Lieberman in their wallets, right next to the condom they have been carrying around since being kicked out of Zeta Beta Tau for creating an “uncomfortable environment.”

Let me tell you something else: I am not a self-loathing Jew. Me, I like. It is you I hate. And apparently, you do, too.

Which is not to say that I have not met many wonderful, thoughtful, intellectually liberated people here, as well. The Jewcy staff is about as smart and nice and funny and open-minded as it gets. They are all frightfully good-looking and smell like clean laundry.

My new favorite Jew, though, is Rachel Shukert, whom you may have seen around these parts. She has posted many blogs, all of which reward the reader.

Rachel is part of my Big Show this Thursday (see below) —she’ll be reading with my band, and has chosen a typically perverse tale of growing up.

After meeting Rachel, I ran out and got her book, which is called Have You No Shame? It is incredibly funny, and I loved every page, even if I was shocked — shocked! — at the torrent of handjobs and blowjobs that peppered her high school experience.

Some of you will like it, too.

COMING SOON: POT, PORN and PALIN, PART II: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE MORONS WHO SPAWNED ME.

Mike Edison, author of I Have Fun Everywhere I Go, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he'll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

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Mike will be performing with his band, featuring Jon Spencer, in a very special evening of "Literary Mayhem and Rock'n'Roll," with special guests Jonathan Ames, Rachel Shukert, and Amanda Stern, Thursday, October 16^th,atthe incredible Spiegelworld tent at the South Street SeaportinManhattan. For info, free MP3s and videos (including the infamousBongGuitar video) and much more, please visit www.rockettrain.com

Literary Mayhem!

I wish Sarah Palin would stop beaming telepathic messages to me. I can't stand having her voice in my head. Please, would somebody make it stop?

This time you can't blame the drugs. Oh, yes, back in the day when we were driving around Spain on three-day coke jags and self-medicating with brandy of a despicable vintage, we'd often get The Voices. Everyone did. They sounded like the chorus from one of the Electric Light Orchestra's early hits, and while they weren't entirely unpleasant, they could be very annoying when you were trying to go to sleep after 72-hours of rock'n'roll stupidity.

"Hey Honey, looking for a date?"

Lately I haven't had the time for any drug adventures. Too busy writing blogs and hustling and getting ready for next week's big show. I had to learn the entire "Jews for Jesus" bit again (which recounts my days going undercover to their Bible meetings for a magazine story, and explains why Beneath the Planet of the Apes makes more sense than the Bible), and believe me, you don't need any voices in your head when you have Mr. Blues Explosion playing fuzz guitar behind you. Sarah Palin's high-pitched twang is not helping, not at all.

Ever since she winked at me during the Vice-Presidential debate, I keep hearing her voice, like a mentally-challenged Siren beckoning me across the Bering Strait. I don't know what is worse - her insipid whine or her thin grasp of the English language. 

Ya wanna fuck a shiksa, dontcha? Well, doggone it, come on out to Wasilla! We've got lots of young girls who would love to meet a real live Jew! Come on, Mike. You can see Jerusalem from my window!

Hot, hot, hot!I can't handle it anymore. I need to purge these demons.

Luckily, my old friend Larry Flynt has just the perscription I need - A Sarah Palin porno!

The maverick Hustler magnate is currently in production of a new film, called Nailin' Palin. And given the rigorous shooting schedule of your average fuck flick these days, it should be out any second now. According to Radar magazine, here's a few things we can all look forward to: Sarah riding a rocket from Russia when those nasty commies come a-knockin' on her back door; a flashback sequence wherein "young Palin's creationist college professor will explain a big bang theory even she can't deny!"; and of course, the obligatory late-night visit from the tanning bed repairman.

A more perfect Union.

Pornography, of course, is not a sin. But I have a feeling that pretty soon I am going to be feeling very guilty. 

Mike Edison, author of I Have Fun Everywhere I Go, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he'll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

***********************************

Mike will be performing with his band, featuring Jon Spencer, in a very special evening of "Literary Mayhem and Rock'n'Roll," with special guests Jonathan Ames, Rachel Shukert, and Amanda Stern, Thursday, October 16^th,at the incredible Spiegelworld tent at the South Street Seaport inManhattan. For info, free MP3s and videos (including the infamous BongGuitar video) and much more, please visit www.rockettrain.com

Literary Mayhem!

My Grandmother was terribly funny and I spent as much time with her as she would tolerate, usually three or four hours per visit, after which she would declare that she didn’t spend that much time with anyone, and that she was going to lie down.

But we could cover a lot of ground in an afternoon — first she would take me to a roadside clam shack, the kind of white-clapboard treyf-palace that only exists in New England, where she lived, and insist I order anything and everything I wanted. One giant pile of fried clams (the kind with the bellies intact, the whole clams, like you can Food porn for Jews.never get in New York, served on a piece of white bread, which is not for eating, but just for absorbing the grease) and a buttery lobster role later, she would tell me I eat too much, that I am putting on weight, and then insist I have a milkshake. After that we’d go back to her apartment and sit at her kitchen table and drink coffee and make fun of everyone we knew.

A couple of years ago, before she died and when she was still on fire, we began having our first conversations about politics, something we had never talked about before. I honestly had no idea what she thought about the President — mostly we spent our time making fun of my mother, who is weight-obsessed, and works out all the time and eats only steamed vegetables and melba toast. She is also hugely judgmental, my mother that is, which is not the only reason why I never introduce her to the women I date, but is one of the best. She invariably gives them the once-over, and then makes a face like the cat just pissed on her Gucci bag. No one can be thin enough for my mother. She could make a Pepperidge Farm goldfish feel fat. 

My Grandma, like most Jewish grandmothers, liked to see people eat. “You can’t go out to a restaurant with her!” she would complain about my mom. “It’s no fun!” She wasn’t too keen on my mom’s husband, either, whom she called “Mr. Personality.”

But what really put a bee in the Old Trout’s bonnet was George Bush. She HATED him.

Not Grandma's kind of people.

And she was appalled that her children — my mother and my uncle — were voting for him.

“WHY??” she wanted to know. “He’s an idiot. Why is your mother voting for him?? Is it because Mr. Personality told her to??” My mother’s new husband is a right-wing kook.  “She has a mind of her own. You better talk to her.” I tried to talk to my Mom, but it was pretty useless. You can’t argue with someone who only eats broccoli and low-fat snacks — there is not enough fatty tissue stored up in their brains, which is where the reasoning takes place. Socrates, or so I have been told, lived on pork ribs and chocolate pudding.

Like a lot of old people, Grandma had just seen too much war in her life, and she was sick of it. I know she cried for all the  young Americans who were killed in Iraq, and God Bless her, she wept for the Iraqis, too. She knew their kids were dying, and that they all had mothers and children of their own, and that it was just a horrible thing that didn’t make any sense. Besides all of the ugly wars she had seen in her life, she had also heard far too much bullshit, and she was fed up.

And then she died. Well, not so suddenly, she got very sick, and pretty soon after that it was lights out. She was 93 years old and she had seen most of her friends die, and she was very tired.

I miss her terribly. Sometimes I get the urge to call her, but never, ever when I am stoned, because she could always bust me, even long distance. When I was a teenager I could be around my mother when I was tripping on acid and she would say, “Wow! You are in such a good mood!” As an adult, one bong hit, and Grandma would call me on the phone and tell me that I was “out of it.”

I guess kids never listen to their parents, I certainly never did. Then again, even in retrospect, their advice was always shit. Actually, they didn’t offer much of the stuff. 

One reason I found the Democratic National Convention so moving was all that talk about “Americans wanting the same thing — for their children to have it better than they did, that their children would know that they could do anything and be anything if they worked hard enough, that in America their were no limits, blah blah.” It moved me because that was never my experience at all. I was always told, “You’ll never make it. Writing isn’t a job.”

Feh.

I guess it is ridiculous to think that Grandma would have been able to talk her kids out of voting for John McCain and his imbecile running mate. I don’t even know for sure that she would have voted for the black guy. She is a first generation American who grew up in a very segregated town where Jews and blacks lived quite literally on different sides of the tracks, in deep suspicion of each other. She didn’t go to college. She was superstitious.

But she read the paper every day. She was very up on current events. As long as I knew her, it was the one constant in her life. That, and coffee brewing in an electric percolator that was probably the best of its type when she got it in the late 50s. After she died I looked for it in her house but didn’t find it. I got her chopped-liver grinder, though. I am looking at it now, as I write this. It is really heavy and looks like it was hand-tooled at the birth of the Industrial Revolution. Like my Grandma, there is no bullshit about it.

Mike Edison, author of I Have Fun Everywhere I Go, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he'll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

***********************************

Mike will be performing with his band, featuring Jon Spencer, in a very special evening of "Literary Mayhem and Rock'n'Roll," with special guests Jonathan Ames, Rachel Shukert, and Amanda Stern, Thursday, October 16^th,at the incredible Spiegelworld tent at the South Street Seaport inManhattan. For info, free MP3s and videos (including the infamous BongGuitar video) and much more, please visit www.rockettrain.com

Literary Mayhem!

I was so happy to hear that meth-amphetamine had its own day! 

Crystal meth — not that shitty sulphate powder that has been popular in the UK since the 70s, or the crap that the American Tattooed Neck Society distills from over-the-counter cold medicine, you know, that caustic weasel dust that burns like drain cleaner and is featured every week on Cops and cheaply-produced MSNBC special reports — I mean the real deal, the shiny, sparkling-clean zoom-drug of my youth, the stuff that kept America great, winning wars and hauling ass from coast to coast.

Goddamn, I miss that.

Meth has such a bad rep these days. And it is sooooo undeserved.

Here is the Truth: the drug is not the problem, the real problem is DAYTIME TELEVISON.

Dig it - if you spend your days tweaking at home watching Oprah and Jerry Springer, then NO SHIT, you are going to age twenty years in six months and your teeth are gonna fall out. That is not what the drug is designed for.

Speed, or crank, or whatever the kids are calling it these days, is a wonderful thing. Trust me. It'll keep you up all night dancing, or making love, or studying for the bar exam. A couple of lines of the good stuff and you can drink with God himself. BUT TWEAKING — or SPEEDING, as it used to be known by hep rock'n'roll cats, bikers, and thrill jockeys —WAS NEVER SUPPOSED TO BE THE ACTIVITY ITSELF.

Barbara Walters did this to me.If you are doing it right, snorting a few lines before the big Mötörhead concert, or before playing guitar in the Stooges, or driving a truck across the country, or storming Normandy, then you will have no problem. But if you keep shoveling that crap into your head and think that watching The View is a good way to spend your time high and wired, well, then we have all seen the results, and they ain't pretty.

Which is why I was so happy to hear about Meth-Amphetamine Appreciation Day!

Connoisseurs always knew it was better than coke — it was cheaper and lasted ten times longer! This was our day! I was going to wear a white linen suit.

Then I realized that I had read the press release wrong, and it was Meth-Amphetamine AWARENESS Day, and it was being thrown by Alberto Gonzales, who was the United States Attorney General for a few minutes, and there wasn't going to be a parade, or even a reception.

I was thinking about this because I was musing on all the great people whom I have met since my book came out - drug dealers and strippers and professional wrestlers  and the usual assortment of stoners, freaks, book geeks, gangstas, and literary groupies - but I keep coming back to the couple from Oklahoma I met in a very swank hotel bar in Los Angeles.

They were in Hollywood because they were going to be on The Price Is Right, which as I understand it, is a favorite among mid-western housewives and toothless meth-heads.

Speed kills.What I didn't know was that Bob Barker had retired and it was now being hosted by Drew Carey, whom I knew from nighttime television.

The couple from Oklahoma knew the prices of EVERYTHING — Kraft Mac and Cheese, Rice-a-Roni, Gatorade, and most importantly, a Ski-Doo, which is a kind of snowmobile, and the very reason they were in California.

"We're going to win a Ski-Doo!" they told me over some sort of boutique Tequila cocktail that probably cost as much as the damn snowmobile.

Oklahoma?? I dunno. But you need one in Wasilla: That's the Meth Capital of the World!"What people don't understand," the woman told me, "is that the whole point of The Price Is Right is so people can find out what the Ski-Doo costs so they are not afraid to go out and buy one! They really aren't as expensive as you think." 

I admit that I don't know a lot about Oklahoma, or snowmobiles. I knew a guy from Norman, Oklahoma, who used to steal cars and race them at an abandoned Air Force base. He is now a successful pornographer. I was in Oklahoma City once and it was very dusty, so I have no idea why anyone would need a snow-anything there, or travel to all the way to Hollywood to win one.

These were, without a doubt, the most optimistic people I have ever met.

Mike Edison, author of I Have Fun Everywhere I Go, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he'll be here all week.  Stay tuned.

***********************************

Mike will be performing with his band, featuring Jon Spencer, in a very special evening of "Literary Mayhem and Rock'n'Roll," with special guests Jonathan Ames, Rachel Shukert, and Amanda Stern, Thursday, October 16^th, at the incredible Spiegelworld tent at the South Street Seaport in Manhattan. For info, free MP3s and videos (including the infamous Bong Guitar video) and much more, please visit www.rockettrain.com

Literary Mayhem!