A friend from my hometown visited civilization the other night. While here, he reminded me of a story of great social and political import from our youth.
We set our scene in a grade twelve English class, studying Aldous Huxley’s masterpiece, Brave New World. The class faced the task of developing an advertisement for one of the book’s many fictional products, thereby demonstrating comprehension of what the imaginary doohickey was supposed to be (remember being in high school, and thinking it was hard?).
As the assignment was handed down, a small group of hip, young geniuses decided to collaborate on production (though each individual hip, young genius would write his own material), allowing each to leverage the talents of all. This, in theory, would lead to four outstanding bits of entertainment, and roughly a sennight of making compulsory school work feel less boring. Having been, at that point, earmarked for a university program called “Radio and Television Arts,” I took on the task of making sure our chosen medium of video reflected everything the way each budding creative star imagined it. This meant handing in our projects on a single VHS tape, with finishing editing touches lovingly applied by yours truly on the eve of the deadline.
While others in the group took on relatively short-lived communal responsibilities, I was committed to be heavily involved before, during, and especially after each shoot. Considering I had already been accepted by my first choice university, and the project wasn’t being evaluated on its production values, the standard incentive for a high school student to put extra work into something – a better grade – did not apply. With this in mind, one may be puzzled as to why I volunteered to put in so much extra work.
At this point, we need some back-story.
Growing up in a rural environment means a lot of driving to get anywhere. My January birthday made me the first among my school friends to hit several milestones, including car ownership, and my 1989 Volvo 740 became a sort of mobile headquarters for our teenaged Friday nights. This was a pre-iPod era, and one CD always found in my car around the time of our story was Monty Python’s Contractual Obligation Album. For those unfamiliar, the album includes a perplexing ditty called “Here Comes Another One.” [Go and listen to that link, at least the a cappella version at the beginning, if you’re unfamiliar. It’s instructive to the rest of the story.]
The song’s lyrics leave plenty of room for interpretation, but for me, they’ve always painted a scene about someone taking a series of six-coiler shits. The kind you have the day after you enter a mission-style burrito eating contest, and wash it all down with Sriracha. The kind you spend twenty minutes squeezing out, then ride out a fierce natural high fueled in equal parts by pushing-related endorphins, and astonishment that so much of anything was ever wholly contained inside your body. The song’s speaker, in my mind, was lamenting the harshing of his expected post-fecal mellow by an intestinal encore.
You’re probably starting to wonder what this has to do with my grade twelve English project.
As I mentioned, the project didn’t offer me much in the way of typical academic incentives. What I did get, however, was a captive audience of classmates. Since our group was handing in consecutive videos on a good old-fashioned VHS tape, with no fancy title and chapter skipping, I deduced I could insert some of my youthful experimental film-making between the projects, and if it wasn’t excessively long, it wouldn’t be worth the teacher’s effort to skip over it and find the start of the next real submission. My cost-benefit projection proved correct, and this calculation allowed the debut of my roughly minute-and-a-half music video for “Here Comes Another One,” based on the above-described concept, during class time.
A toilet bowl containing three large human deposits filled the screen. They floated lazily while the a cappella edition of “Here Comes Another One” played to completion. As the song finished, a flush. And the whole class had to watch every frame, with barely a moment to digest it all before one of us began a bad impression of Ron Popeil trying to move Soma.
All these years later, I have somehow yet to secure a position as a producer at a major network or film studio.
Like all good-hearted football fans, I hate Brett Favre. I hate him for giving Packer fans a reason to be even more insufferable. I hate him for his bizzaro-LeBron act, in which he annually summons a media circus over his indecision. I hate him for the year he spent getting non-jokingly called the Jets’ MVP, despite being easily and consistently the worst starter the team had at any position. I hate him for every time I’ve heard an announcer drool about how much heart was in the latest Favre pass to hit the cornerback right in the numbers. I hate that he takes a minute and a half to say three words. I hate him for the fact that I can’t look at Tom Waits without thinking of Brett Favre anymore. I lament his successes, and swell with glee at his every professional shortcoming.
I’m secure enough in my masculinity to announce it online that I’m a pretty big fan of Prince. I haven’t loved everything he’s done, and I’d even go so far as to say some of his music flat-out stinks. Still, the good stuff is great, and even his lesser offerings almost always bring something new to the table. Few musicians can claim such a prolonged legacy of innovation. It’s because of this – not that he’s good, but the way in which he is good – that I’m astonished by the “Internet is over” 
The weekend before last, I used the approximately 27 minutes of free time I had to visit the 
