That’s easy.
Now, if I were in a Drog kind of mood, I’d have just stopped right there. Drog was our first and last Goon philosopher, and the blank space after “That’s easy” would be just his kind of answer. About the time Drog got Goon civilization started by discovering the rotating bar-b-que spit, he also solved most of the great philosophical questions that probably would have plagued Goons down through the ages if he hadn’t just gone ahead and solved them on the spot and gotten them out of the way. Like what happens to us when we die.
We have a copy of the Dhammapada in our library here on Goon Island. Like I said before, our library is pretty small…we don’t read for pleasure, so the reading material we do keep handy has to have something fairly extraordinary to offer. The Dhammapada is one of these books, and a lot of what it represents the Buddha as saying is remarkably similar to the things Drog came up with, except the Buddha probably didn’t come up with his stuff while delicately roasting a plump young groat on a newly invented rotating bar-b-que spit and stuffing a butt-load of crapkee.
Anyway, here’s what Drog came up with on the topic of being dead and what happens to Goons who are. He said, (and this isn’t written down anywhere – it’s just something we like to repeat around the fire at night when the conversation lags):
“When this groat is cooked the way I like it over this fire, I’m going to eat it. And after that I’m going to stuff another butt-load of crapkee and do a little singing and dancing around this fire. And if a good topic of conversation comes up, I’m going to lounge around this fire and talk about it. And when I’m ready to sleep, I’m going to lay down by this fire and sack out. And when I get up in the morning, this fire will be out. It won’t have gone anywhere, it won’t have run away to a foreign land, it won’t be burning in some other dimension. It will have done just what it looks like it did…it will have gone out. And we’ll have the ashes.
“By this time tomorrow, one of us Goons might croak. Chances are pretty good, actually. (When we get to this point in repeated Drog’s words around the fire, everybody looks around and points at everybody else and giggles. For some reason, we always get a laugh out of this part). Will that Goon have run away or be living in some other place or some other dimension? Nope. That Goon will have done just what it looks like he did…he will have gone out. And we’ll have a good bar-b-que.”
Actually, the Buddha said something very similar, but he left out the good parts about eating and dancing and stuffing crapkee and bar-b-que.
What Drog didn’t say that the Buddha seems to have implied is that it takes lots of lifetimes to get to the point where you just go out when you die. The Buddha seemed to think that you had to work pretty hard on yourself and get born over and over again to get to the point where your backlogged desires wouldn’t instantly shove you into another uterus of some kind when you croaked and force you to do it all over again.
Drog wouldn’t have bought that. He was a big one for sticking with the obvious. And since he had never met a Goon who had obviously and without a doubt lived more than one life, he wouldn’t have gone for the reincarnation thing, even if it had been around back when he did his philosophizing.
We all tend to agree.
We realize here on the Island that there are a lot of humans who seem to worry about things like “justice” and “karma” and can’t imagine someone not being duly punished or rewarded for the various outstanding and despicable things someone might do during their lives. They just don’t think it’s fair.
We might have thought that way at some point as well, because Drog had something to say about that, too. He talked about it when he talked about Fives, our favorite game that I described earlier on. We’re always playing Fives, and we think a lot about it, so it was probably natural for Drog to use it to illustrate his point about justice and fairness.
“A Goon can play a fair game of Fives, or he can cheat. Does Fives care? No, because it can’t. Fives can’t be fair or unfair, only the Goon who plays it can be. If a Goon cheats at Fives, is Fives going to smack him in the head as punishment somewhere down the line? I don’t think so. The Goon he’s playing might or might not, but Fives doesn’t care either way because it can’t.
Same with life.”
So, thanks to Drog, the idea of a place to go after death where Life settles all the old scores and makes everything hunky dory has never been a compelling one for us Goons.
Nope. For us, when you’re gone, you’re gone, and worrying about what it will be like when you’re gone is kind of like worrying about what silence sounds like. Silence is the absence of sound. Death is the absence of life. Duh.
Drog had another, more pragmatic, way to look at the idea of an afterlife, too. He was good like that…if he had a Goon who wasn’t following the philosophical thread, he’s just cut directly to the bone.
“Ever personally been dead? Ever personally met anybody who has been dead and lived to tell about it?
“I didn’t think so.”
Like I said, Drog was big on the obvious.
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
How Goons Get Up In The Morning
It’s pretty simple, really. It’s the farting that wakes us up.
The Goon diet is a good one. It’s been keeping us peppy and regular since Lulu lit the fire, as we say. It’s perfectly balanced…fruits, veggies, roots, nuts, fish, and bar-b-qued groat (mostly). All washed down with lots of fresh stream water. And like all good, balanced diets, it leads to intestinal gas. Long, melodious farts in the morning after a delicious dinner the night before are a Goon’s digestive system saying, “Hey! Let’s get up and do that again!”
And most of us Goons start farting just before sunrise. Perfect timing…it gets us down to the latrine just in time to hit the surf and haul in the daily catch.
I’ve heard that farting is considered rude in some human social groups. I don’t know why, unless there is something obnoxious or odious about human farts per se…something that sets them apart from the farts of other creatures. I can tell you that the German back packers we occasionally get on the Island fart relentlessly almost from the time they arrive, but we’ve always just assumed that it was a trait peculiar to German back packers having something to do with the terrible things they carry with them in their back packs to eat. We’ve tried to incorporate a few of those things into sauces for the back packers themselves (just a touch of something smelly and/or spicy often makes the difference between a good bar-b-que baste and a great one), but it’s never really worked out.
Anyway, we consider a fart in the morning a salute to life and a pledge to thoroughly enjoy the coming day with friends and family. And in my opinion, a hundred Goons all farting at once in the cool, pre-dawn stillness is as stirring an expression of solidarity and hope as any national anthem or imperial fanfare. In my opinion.
So a few years ago, somebody on the Island got wind of some kind of mainland scheme for harnessing the power of farts. I’m not kidding. Farts are apparently flammable (how humans discovered this I don’t even want to imagine) and the fart gas of cows is supposedly particularly loaded with combustibles. These gases captured and used for fuel allegedly represent a significant source of alternative energy.
This is the stuff of epic post-bar-b-que conversations, especially after a few butt-loads of crapkee. We ran with it.
I’ve spent a lot of time telling you how level-headed we Goons are. But believe me when I tell you that it took four or five days of sleepy Goons using hollow reeds and groat-skin bladders to capture our morning farts before we realized we had absolutely no use for an alternative energy source. None. We just barely have enough uses for our regular energy sources, which are basically us and cooking fires.
I’m also vaguely ashamed to admit that, even after we realized this, there were still several experiments around the evening fires with the flammability of captured Goon farts that resulted in some pretty seriously singed arm hairs.
I am, however, proud to say that none these experiments were carried out in front of the kids.
It only took us a few days to learn our lesson, though, and to regain our usual level-headedness. That’s the way it often goes around here. We’ll check out a new idea every so often, but novelty doesn’t have much appeal for us in and of itself. If something new improves something about our lives and relationships, that’s fine. But it’s been a long time since we’ve found anything that makes our daily routine any better than it already is.
And if all it takes is a couple of days sticking a tube up your butt and catching your morning farts in a groat-skin bladder to realize it, you’re ahead of the game.
The Goon diet is a good one. It’s been keeping us peppy and regular since Lulu lit the fire, as we say. It’s perfectly balanced…fruits, veggies, roots, nuts, fish, and bar-b-qued groat (mostly). All washed down with lots of fresh stream water. And like all good, balanced diets, it leads to intestinal gas. Long, melodious farts in the morning after a delicious dinner the night before are a Goon’s digestive system saying, “Hey! Let’s get up and do that again!”
And most of us Goons start farting just before sunrise. Perfect timing…it gets us down to the latrine just in time to hit the surf and haul in the daily catch.
I’ve heard that farting is considered rude in some human social groups. I don’t know why, unless there is something obnoxious or odious about human farts per se…something that sets them apart from the farts of other creatures. I can tell you that the German back packers we occasionally get on the Island fart relentlessly almost from the time they arrive, but we’ve always just assumed that it was a trait peculiar to German back packers having something to do with the terrible things they carry with them in their back packs to eat. We’ve tried to incorporate a few of those things into sauces for the back packers themselves (just a touch of something smelly and/or spicy often makes the difference between a good bar-b-que baste and a great one), but it’s never really worked out.
Anyway, we consider a fart in the morning a salute to life and a pledge to thoroughly enjoy the coming day with friends and family. And in my opinion, a hundred Goons all farting at once in the cool, pre-dawn stillness is as stirring an expression of solidarity and hope as any national anthem or imperial fanfare. In my opinion.
So a few years ago, somebody on the Island got wind of some kind of mainland scheme for harnessing the power of farts. I’m not kidding. Farts are apparently flammable (how humans discovered this I don’t even want to imagine) and the fart gas of cows is supposedly particularly loaded with combustibles. These gases captured and used for fuel allegedly represent a significant source of alternative energy.
This is the stuff of epic post-bar-b-que conversations, especially after a few butt-loads of crapkee. We ran with it.
I’ve spent a lot of time telling you how level-headed we Goons are. But believe me when I tell you that it took four or five days of sleepy Goons using hollow reeds and groat-skin bladders to capture our morning farts before we realized we had absolutely no use for an alternative energy source. None. We just barely have enough uses for our regular energy sources, which are basically us and cooking fires.
I’m also vaguely ashamed to admit that, even after we realized this, there were still several experiments around the evening fires with the flammability of captured Goon farts that resulted in some pretty seriously singed arm hairs.
I am, however, proud to say that none these experiments were carried out in front of the kids.
It only took us a few days to learn our lesson, though, and to regain our usual level-headedness. That’s the way it often goes around here. We’ll check out a new idea every so often, but novelty doesn’t have much appeal for us in and of itself. If something new improves something about our lives and relationships, that’s fine. But it’s been a long time since we’ve found anything that makes our daily routine any better than it already is.
And if all it takes is a couple of days sticking a tube up your butt and catching your morning farts in a groat-skin bladder to realize it, you’re ahead of the game.
Monday, July 03, 2006
How Goons Make Music
Goons love to sing.
We’ve been singing since Drog found the handle, as we say here on the Island, and it’s something we enjoy every night around the bar-b-que pit.
Well, technically, not around the pit itself. I should explain how the pit is laid out, since it makes a difference in how we sing.
I mentioned before that there are always about a hundred of us Goons on the Island at any one time, give or take, and we like to get together of an evening in the big clearing. It’s a nice spot, the clearing. On one side, a hillside rises up gently and then kind of levels out into woodland and jungle that runs a couple of miles up to the lower slopes of Goon Volcano. Our caves are scattered along the hillside right above the clearing. Since the Volcano is usually fuming and puffing away and giving off a nice red glow at the top, it’s a nice view looking up the hill at night.
On the other side of the clearing, the hillside drops away in a long slope covered with more woodland until it reaches the beach. From the clearing, you can see the ocean on that side. If you spend the day in the clearing, you can watch the sun rise out of the ocean in the morning and set right into the mouth of the volcano at night.
It’s pretty spectacular, even after 30 or so years of seeing it, which is about how long individual Goons last.
So anyway, the clearing is large enough for a hundred Goons to hang out in and cook in and dance around in pretty comfortably, by which I mean it’s fairly large, because Goons are fairly large...about seven and a half feet tall on average.
Which means the bar-b-que pit is pretty large, too, but it’s not in the direct center of the clearing. It’s closer to the up-hill side, and it’s really two pits side by side to accommodate two large entrees. Most nights it’s four groats, two to a spit/pit, but every now and then we enjoy a change of pace in type of meat, as I’ve said before. Around the pits are the prep tables and some comfy stools for those that like to watch...and who doesn’t like to watch good bar-b-que being prepared?
Out by the down-hill side of the clearing is the main gathering place for us Goons where we actually eat and talk and stuff crapkee and dance and sing, like I started off talking about. There’s a larger fire pit here for the light and comfort and after-dinner bones and husks and such.
So now you have an idea of the layout, and it’s after a good evening meal and a butt load or two of crapkee that the singing starts around the fire...mostly around the fire, although there are several pieces we sing that use call and response from singers up in the caves or even farther up the slope.
It’s hard to describe Goon singing to someone who’s never heard it, but if you think of Old Regular Baptist shape singing with a mixed-meter Gregorian chant backbeat you’ll start closing in on it.(Our singing has affected shape singing and Gregorian chants a lot more than they’ve affected our style, but that’s another story or two.)
The thing that makes our singing different is that we don’t sing using words per se. We vocalize, of course, but what we vocalize are more like sound textures and feelings. You won’t hear Goons singing about their sweethearts or about a bad day at work or about anything in particular, really. But if you’re sensitive to Goon vocal styling, you’ll hear us sing about every emotion you’ve ever felt or are ever likely to feel...sometimes all in the same piece.
Here’s how it goes. After dinner and some conversation, a small group of Goons usually start up a tune in a particular rhythm, let’s say four beats to what you’d call a measure. That’s a pretty simple rhythm, and it’s perfect to warm up with. Then, when everybody is pretty sure what the mood and the texture of the intro is, another group of Goon will start up in the same mood space but on a counter rhythm, like three beats to a measure, which means that the two groups will synch up rhythmically when the first group goes through three measures and the second group goes through four. They meet at twelve, in other words. Twelve is where they’re back on everybody’s one, if you get what I mean. Adding six-beat measures does the same thing, and those usually show up eventually, so in a song like this, three rhythms are going at once, two of them meeting on the sixes and all three meeting on the twelves, in an attractively loping pattern.
Then another group might start up with a two-beat rhythm and accentuate the four-beat group while meeting the three-and six- beat group every six beats. And somewhere along the line, if the twos and threes get together and start singing five-beat measures, they meet the fours on 20 and the sixes on 30.
Depending on the mood, we also have pieces that work sevens, nines and elevens. Those are great, too, and the bongos really help with the accents.
These pieces can go on for hours, all night long sometimes, and Goons drop in and out whenever they need to lighten the load or hang another butt load of crapkee or have sex or whatever.
Back in the days of wind power, we used to get a lot more flotsam and jetsam on our beach than we do now from passing ships hearing us singing and coming in to see what the heck it was. I’ve heard a good Goon night song from a ways off, and even from a Goon point of view, it can be pretty spooky, especially if we’re using a lot of what you’d call minor or augmented intervals in the tones, which is just the way we like it if we’re in the mood. From a passing sailing ship, this has to sound pretty chilling. More than a few of these passing ships have come in to investigate over the years...usually the kind of ships manned by pretty chilling humans themselves.
The island has a shallow reef around it, and if you miss the gaps, it’s a back breaker as far as sailing ships go. We never had much use for the cargo on these ships, but the sailors and passengers were a treat, if you know what I mean. Probably one of the reasons for the Island’s less-than-convivial reputation.
We still get a sailing vessel every now and then...usually long-distance loners testing themselves against the sea or racing crews blown off course. But the main shipping lanes don’t come too close nowadays, and the local boat traffic from the mainland where the ferry boat originates learned a long time ago not to wander in too close. Which is the way we like it.
So groats it is on the bar-b-que most nights, which again suits us just fine.
And that’s the story on Goon singing. The fact that it also has a lot to do with Goon eating just demonstrates how closely related are food and almost everything else in Goon life. Eat to sing, sing to eat, you might say. Well, that's what we say, anyway.
We’ve been singing since Drog found the handle, as we say here on the Island, and it’s something we enjoy every night around the bar-b-que pit.
Well, technically, not around the pit itself. I should explain how the pit is laid out, since it makes a difference in how we sing.
I mentioned before that there are always about a hundred of us Goons on the Island at any one time, give or take, and we like to get together of an evening in the big clearing. It’s a nice spot, the clearing. On one side, a hillside rises up gently and then kind of levels out into woodland and jungle that runs a couple of miles up to the lower slopes of Goon Volcano. Our caves are scattered along the hillside right above the clearing. Since the Volcano is usually fuming and puffing away and giving off a nice red glow at the top, it’s a nice view looking up the hill at night.
On the other side of the clearing, the hillside drops away in a long slope covered with more woodland until it reaches the beach. From the clearing, you can see the ocean on that side. If you spend the day in the clearing, you can watch the sun rise out of the ocean in the morning and set right into the mouth of the volcano at night.
It’s pretty spectacular, even after 30 or so years of seeing it, which is about how long individual Goons last.
So anyway, the clearing is large enough for a hundred Goons to hang out in and cook in and dance around in pretty comfortably, by which I mean it’s fairly large, because Goons are fairly large...about seven and a half feet tall on average.
Which means the bar-b-que pit is pretty large, too, but it’s not in the direct center of the clearing. It’s closer to the up-hill side, and it’s really two pits side by side to accommodate two large entrees. Most nights it’s four groats, two to a spit/pit, but every now and then we enjoy a change of pace in type of meat, as I’ve said before. Around the pits are the prep tables and some comfy stools for those that like to watch...and who doesn’t like to watch good bar-b-que being prepared?
Out by the down-hill side of the clearing is the main gathering place for us Goons where we actually eat and talk and stuff crapkee and dance and sing, like I started off talking about. There’s a larger fire pit here for the light and comfort and after-dinner bones and husks and such.
So now you have an idea of the layout, and it’s after a good evening meal and a butt load or two of crapkee that the singing starts around the fire...mostly around the fire, although there are several pieces we sing that use call and response from singers up in the caves or even farther up the slope.
It’s hard to describe Goon singing to someone who’s never heard it, but if you think of Old Regular Baptist shape singing with a mixed-meter Gregorian chant backbeat you’ll start closing in on it.(Our singing has affected shape singing and Gregorian chants a lot more than they’ve affected our style, but that’s another story or two.)
The thing that makes our singing different is that we don’t sing using words per se. We vocalize, of course, but what we vocalize are more like sound textures and feelings. You won’t hear Goons singing about their sweethearts or about a bad day at work or about anything in particular, really. But if you’re sensitive to Goon vocal styling, you’ll hear us sing about every emotion you’ve ever felt or are ever likely to feel...sometimes all in the same piece.
Here’s how it goes. After dinner and some conversation, a small group of Goons usually start up a tune in a particular rhythm, let’s say four beats to what you’d call a measure. That’s a pretty simple rhythm, and it’s perfect to warm up with. Then, when everybody is pretty sure what the mood and the texture of the intro is, another group of Goon will start up in the same mood space but on a counter rhythm, like three beats to a measure, which means that the two groups will synch up rhythmically when the first group goes through three measures and the second group goes through four. They meet at twelve, in other words. Twelve is where they’re back on everybody’s one, if you get what I mean. Adding six-beat measures does the same thing, and those usually show up eventually, so in a song like this, three rhythms are going at once, two of them meeting on the sixes and all three meeting on the twelves, in an attractively loping pattern.
Then another group might start up with a two-beat rhythm and accentuate the four-beat group while meeting the three-and six- beat group every six beats. And somewhere along the line, if the twos and threes get together and start singing five-beat measures, they meet the fours on 20 and the sixes on 30.
Depending on the mood, we also have pieces that work sevens, nines and elevens. Those are great, too, and the bongos really help with the accents.
These pieces can go on for hours, all night long sometimes, and Goons drop in and out whenever they need to lighten the load or hang another butt load of crapkee or have sex or whatever.
Back in the days of wind power, we used to get a lot more flotsam and jetsam on our beach than we do now from passing ships hearing us singing and coming in to see what the heck it was. I’ve heard a good Goon night song from a ways off, and even from a Goon point of view, it can be pretty spooky, especially if we’re using a lot of what you’d call minor or augmented intervals in the tones, which is just the way we like it if we’re in the mood. From a passing sailing ship, this has to sound pretty chilling. More than a few of these passing ships have come in to investigate over the years...usually the kind of ships manned by pretty chilling humans themselves.
The island has a shallow reef around it, and if you miss the gaps, it’s a back breaker as far as sailing ships go. We never had much use for the cargo on these ships, but the sailors and passengers were a treat, if you know what I mean. Probably one of the reasons for the Island’s less-than-convivial reputation.
We still get a sailing vessel every now and then...usually long-distance loners testing themselves against the sea or racing crews blown off course. But the main shipping lanes don’t come too close nowadays, and the local boat traffic from the mainland where the ferry boat originates learned a long time ago not to wander in too close. Which is the way we like it.
So groats it is on the bar-b-que most nights, which again suits us just fine.
And that’s the story on Goon singing. The fact that it also has a lot to do with Goon eating just demonstrates how closely related are food and almost everything else in Goon life. Eat to sing, sing to eat, you might say. Well, that's what we say, anyway.
Friday, June 30, 2006
What Goons Do On Sunday
We don’t go to church on Goon Island.
The main reason is that we don’t have a church on Goon Island. Never have had one. We know what they are, but having one has always seemed an odd notion to us Goons.
For one thing, they take up a lot of space. And what are they for, really? They’re for providing a place where a bunch of like-minded folks can get together on a regular basis. Well, we have the bar-b-que pit for that. Heck, we have the whole of Goon Island for that. We’re pretty much always getting together, one way or another, and we’re naturally about as like-minded as you can get. So having something like a church standing around taking up space to facilitate that kind of thing would be redundant.
And then there’s the whole religious angle to churches. Houses of god, that kind of thing. I have to tell you, we don’t put much stock in the idea of gods here on the Island.
Don’t get me wrong – metaphysics is a hot topic around the fire on many a night. But for all the speculating we do about the nature or natures of the universe or universes and who or what if anything may or may not have been responsible for the whole deal, we’ve never seriously entertained the idea of anything that needed a house.
Goons need houses, or more accurately, caves, that’s for sure. Which, incidentally, have most types of houses beat by a long shot as far as we’re concerned. But if you took all the time and trouble to actually built a church, I can’t imagine you’d find anything in it when you went there except you and whoever you came with. Nobody home.
A church on Goon Island would just be another place filled with Goons, and like I said, the Island is pretty much that already.
Now, that’s not to say that Goons don’t have religion, sort of. It’s just that the connection between religion and churches has never been very clear to us.
I can see how the notion might have gotten started, though. Under different circumstances, it could have happened with out Sacred Clippers.
Here’s the story behind those, and I have to tell you up front, it’s pretty dull. Not the clippers, the story.
Anyway, for millions of years, Goons had been clipping their arm, leg, and pelvic fur with anything that came to hand…sharpened rocks or groat bones or whatever would take an edge. Goon fur grows pretty fast, and if you don’t keep it neatly trimmed, it gets matted and nasty and can become an impediment to walking or food gathering or having sex. Life just goes smoother all around when it’s kept to a reasonable length.
And the trimming of our fur has always been something we looked forward to getting together to do. That’s not saying much, because we like getting together to do just about everything, but you know what I mean. All our hair grows at about the same rate, and when it gets to a certain length, we just kind of decide that it’s time for Fur Day. There’s nothing quite like spending an entire day getting together, yakking and helping each other trim those hard-to-reach places.
And the benefits are two-fold – not only do you end up with a handsome group of well-trimmed Goons, but you also end up with a big batch of Goon hair that can be used to make just about anything from food gathering baskets to...well, food gathering baskets. That’s pretty much all we make out of Goon hair. We make lots of other stuff, like bongo drums and bar-b-que spits and basting bowls and dominos, but Goon hair isn’t much good for those.
Anyway, like I said, for millions of years all we had to use on Fur Day was whatever we found laying around that we could make reasonably sharp, and these items never got any special attention from us. It was the trimming that counted, not the trimmer.
But then, the Sacred Clippers arrived.
A hundred or so years back, we were down on the beach bringing in the daily fish catch when we found something washed up on shore. This happens from time to time, like when we found the Magnavox console television or the big bundle of I’m With Stupid tee shirts.
This time, though, it was something extraordinary from several points of view. It was a large wooden crate that had been tightly wrapped in thick, wax-impregnated burlap. We removed the burlap and cracked open the crate. Stu the Goon reached in and pulled out something wrapped in oil cloth. When the oil cloth came off, there is was.
A shiny new Sheffield #1 bow-spring hand-operated sheep sheer.
The crate was full of them, all individually wrapped in oil cloth.
Stu turned the shear over in his hands, getting the feel of them. He settled the handles in his palm and gave the shears a couple quick snicks. Then he just sort of looked at the hair on his other arm. He held up his arm and found a straggly bit of fur that had escaped the last trim, and before any of us could blink, he snicked it off with the shear.
It was kind of a magic moment.
We instantly bagged the usual routine and called a Fur Day on the spot. We carried the crate up to the caves and examined the entire contents. Row on row of clippers, all nestled neatly in their oil-cloth wraps. We took out one more – just one – and we stowed the crate and the remaining shears in a nearby cave. Then we luxuriantly trimmed each other with those incredible tools of efficient and highly satisfying personal grooming.
I tell you, when something like those shears wash up on your Island, you get a special feeling.
There were 224 shears in the crate in all, counting the original two we removed for the first Sacred Clippers Fur Day. We knew we’d go through them sooner or later and have to go back to stone and bone, and that made them all the sweeter to us. So we actually dedicated a corner of the empty cave we stowed them in as a special spot reserved just for the Sacred Clippers, and over the years it’s become sort of a shrine for us. A shrine to great things washing up on the beach.
And honestly, that’s our religion. We really like these sheep shears that came to us, and we’ll be really sad when we can no longer get a good cut out of the last one, so we savor our Fur Days and get a lot of enjoyment out of them while we can.
Which, long story short, is how I can understand how churches may have become popular in the rest of the world.
Let’s say you have something, like the Clippers or maybe a meteorite that fell from the sky or a shiny stone you fond in a fish’s stomach or a food item that looks like it has the face of somebody you know on it. You want to keep it safe, protect it, find a special storage place for it, because it’s something special to you and you’re amazed that it found its way into your hands.
And let’s say that you’re not a Goon and don’t have the benefit of a tight community of well-rounded, sensible individuals constantly around you, so you go way overboard with this. You’re prone to wild flights of fantasy and imagination, and you start making up stories about this special thing. Like it must have come from somewhere special. Like somebody special must have wanted you to have it. Like you are someone special because this special thing was sent to you. Maybe by god.
So you build the thing an even more special storage place, and more and more people, seeing how special this thing is getting treated, start to buy in to the notion that this thing really is important and might be from someplace special and could be charged with all kinds of mystical energy or something.
And, believe me, there are folks in the world who will happily buy in to something like this, even if the thing in question is actually a lump of iron or a fish bone or a moldy piece of bread. Don’t ask me why.
Pretty soon, you have to actually hide the thing itself because it’s become way, way too meaningful, important, and desirable to everybody to keep out in the open. But this ever-more-elaborate storage house you built for it starts to sort of stand in for the thing itself, and people come to the place just for the idea of the thing that used to be in it. Pretty soon you don’t even need the thing itself anymore. The building does the trick.
The church.
So like I say, I can see how the connection between religion and churches might have started.
Our Sacred Shears are in the same crate in which we found them, and we keep the crate in the same corner of the same cave where we originally stored them. We’ve used about 20 of them over the years, so nobody is getting too worried or excited yet about not having them any more.
And when they’re gone, they’ll just be gone.
But you never know what will wash up on shore. Sometimes you get Sacred Clippers, sometimes you get I’m With Stupid tee shirts, and sometimes you get dead squid. That’s life. The only thing you can be sure of is that something will inevitably be waiting for you on the beach sooner or later. The weird and the wonderful and the disgusting just keep on coming.
We haven’t found anything on the beach yet that we can reasonably say came from god, but we really don’t expect to, and that suits us fine. Most of us think that god would just complicate things…especially our religion.
The main reason is that we don’t have a church on Goon Island. Never have had one. We know what they are, but having one has always seemed an odd notion to us Goons.
For one thing, they take up a lot of space. And what are they for, really? They’re for providing a place where a bunch of like-minded folks can get together on a regular basis. Well, we have the bar-b-que pit for that. Heck, we have the whole of Goon Island for that. We’re pretty much always getting together, one way or another, and we’re naturally about as like-minded as you can get. So having something like a church standing around taking up space to facilitate that kind of thing would be redundant.
And then there’s the whole religious angle to churches. Houses of god, that kind of thing. I have to tell you, we don’t put much stock in the idea of gods here on the Island.
Don’t get me wrong – metaphysics is a hot topic around the fire on many a night. But for all the speculating we do about the nature or natures of the universe or universes and who or what if anything may or may not have been responsible for the whole deal, we’ve never seriously entertained the idea of anything that needed a house.
Goons need houses, or more accurately, caves, that’s for sure. Which, incidentally, have most types of houses beat by a long shot as far as we’re concerned. But if you took all the time and trouble to actually built a church, I can’t imagine you’d find anything in it when you went there except you and whoever you came with. Nobody home.
A church on Goon Island would just be another place filled with Goons, and like I said, the Island is pretty much that already.
Now, that’s not to say that Goons don’t have religion, sort of. It’s just that the connection between religion and churches has never been very clear to us.
I can see how the notion might have gotten started, though. Under different circumstances, it could have happened with out Sacred Clippers.
Here’s the story behind those, and I have to tell you up front, it’s pretty dull. Not the clippers, the story.
Anyway, for millions of years, Goons had been clipping their arm, leg, and pelvic fur with anything that came to hand…sharpened rocks or groat bones or whatever would take an edge. Goon fur grows pretty fast, and if you don’t keep it neatly trimmed, it gets matted and nasty and can become an impediment to walking or food gathering or having sex. Life just goes smoother all around when it’s kept to a reasonable length.
And the trimming of our fur has always been something we looked forward to getting together to do. That’s not saying much, because we like getting together to do just about everything, but you know what I mean. All our hair grows at about the same rate, and when it gets to a certain length, we just kind of decide that it’s time for Fur Day. There’s nothing quite like spending an entire day getting together, yakking and helping each other trim those hard-to-reach places.
And the benefits are two-fold – not only do you end up with a handsome group of well-trimmed Goons, but you also end up with a big batch of Goon hair that can be used to make just about anything from food gathering baskets to...well, food gathering baskets. That’s pretty much all we make out of Goon hair. We make lots of other stuff, like bongo drums and bar-b-que spits and basting bowls and dominos, but Goon hair isn’t much good for those.
Anyway, like I said, for millions of years all we had to use on Fur Day was whatever we found laying around that we could make reasonably sharp, and these items never got any special attention from us. It was the trimming that counted, not the trimmer.
But then, the Sacred Clippers arrived.
A hundred or so years back, we were down on the beach bringing in the daily fish catch when we found something washed up on shore. This happens from time to time, like when we found the Magnavox console television or the big bundle of I’m With Stupid tee shirts.
This time, though, it was something extraordinary from several points of view. It was a large wooden crate that had been tightly wrapped in thick, wax-impregnated burlap. We removed the burlap and cracked open the crate. Stu the Goon reached in and pulled out something wrapped in oil cloth. When the oil cloth came off, there is was.
A shiny new Sheffield #1 bow-spring hand-operated sheep sheer.
The crate was full of them, all individually wrapped in oil cloth.
Stu turned the shear over in his hands, getting the feel of them. He settled the handles in his palm and gave the shears a couple quick snicks. Then he just sort of looked at the hair on his other arm. He held up his arm and found a straggly bit of fur that had escaped the last trim, and before any of us could blink, he snicked it off with the shear.
It was kind of a magic moment.
We instantly bagged the usual routine and called a Fur Day on the spot. We carried the crate up to the caves and examined the entire contents. Row on row of clippers, all nestled neatly in their oil-cloth wraps. We took out one more – just one – and we stowed the crate and the remaining shears in a nearby cave. Then we luxuriantly trimmed each other with those incredible tools of efficient and highly satisfying personal grooming.
I tell you, when something like those shears wash up on your Island, you get a special feeling.
There were 224 shears in the crate in all, counting the original two we removed for the first Sacred Clippers Fur Day. We knew we’d go through them sooner or later and have to go back to stone and bone, and that made them all the sweeter to us. So we actually dedicated a corner of the empty cave we stowed them in as a special spot reserved just for the Sacred Clippers, and over the years it’s become sort of a shrine for us. A shrine to great things washing up on the beach.
And honestly, that’s our religion. We really like these sheep shears that came to us, and we’ll be really sad when we can no longer get a good cut out of the last one, so we savor our Fur Days and get a lot of enjoyment out of them while we can.
Which, long story short, is how I can understand how churches may have become popular in the rest of the world.
Let’s say you have something, like the Clippers or maybe a meteorite that fell from the sky or a shiny stone you fond in a fish’s stomach or a food item that looks like it has the face of somebody you know on it. You want to keep it safe, protect it, find a special storage place for it, because it’s something special to you and you’re amazed that it found its way into your hands.
And let’s say that you’re not a Goon and don’t have the benefit of a tight community of well-rounded, sensible individuals constantly around you, so you go way overboard with this. You’re prone to wild flights of fantasy and imagination, and you start making up stories about this special thing. Like it must have come from somewhere special. Like somebody special must have wanted you to have it. Like you are someone special because this special thing was sent to you. Maybe by god.
So you build the thing an even more special storage place, and more and more people, seeing how special this thing is getting treated, start to buy in to the notion that this thing really is important and might be from someplace special and could be charged with all kinds of mystical energy or something.
And, believe me, there are folks in the world who will happily buy in to something like this, even if the thing in question is actually a lump of iron or a fish bone or a moldy piece of bread. Don’t ask me why.
Pretty soon, you have to actually hide the thing itself because it’s become way, way too meaningful, important, and desirable to everybody to keep out in the open. But this ever-more-elaborate storage house you built for it starts to sort of stand in for the thing itself, and people come to the place just for the idea of the thing that used to be in it. Pretty soon you don’t even need the thing itself anymore. The building does the trick.
The church.
So like I say, I can see how the connection between religion and churches might have started.
Our Sacred Shears are in the same crate in which we found them, and we keep the crate in the same corner of the same cave where we originally stored them. We’ve used about 20 of them over the years, so nobody is getting too worried or excited yet about not having them any more.
And when they’re gone, they’ll just be gone.
But you never know what will wash up on shore. Sometimes you get Sacred Clippers, sometimes you get I’m With Stupid tee shirts, and sometimes you get dead squid. That’s life. The only thing you can be sure of is that something will inevitably be waiting for you on the beach sooner or later. The weird and the wonderful and the disgusting just keep on coming.
We haven’t found anything on the beach yet that we can reasonably say came from god, but we really don’t expect to, and that suits us fine. Most of us think that god would just complicate things…especially our religion.
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
How Goons Settle Arguments
I’ve said before that all of us here on Goon Island are pretty much alike, so you’d think there wouldn’t be much discord in the ranks. And you’d be right. It’s hard to argue with somebody who generally looks, feels, acts and thinks the same way you do.
In fact, given the circumstances here on the Island, it’s hard just to come up with situations about which two Goons could even disagree. Let’s eat. Let’s have sex. Let’s do some crapkee. Let’s dance.
What’s to argue?
It happens, though, like the time we tried Government, or the time Sal the Goon tried to ban poodles from the Island. The Government thing was clearly one that called for the eating of a few wayward individuals, so it kind of took care of itself. Sal’s problem with the poodles was another matter, and it called for our traditional method of settling less clear-cut and more philosophical disputes…dominos.
The story of how we came to have poodles on the Island is a long one, and maybe I’ll tell it someday, but right now it’s just important to know that Goons love their poodles. They’re highly intelligent, cute as all getout, energetic in a twitchy, hyperactive kind of way that makes them fun to watch. And when trimmed properly, they sport attractive ankle/wrist/pelvic tufts that remind us of ourselves. We find this last quality especially endearing, and it causes us to project a lot of emotional content on our canine pals. Probably undeservedly so – they’re just cute dogs, after all. But we love them, and that’s about all there is to it.
Except for Sal, who was born allergic to poodles. (This all happened a long time ago, but you may have noticed that Goons talk about everything that ever happened on Goon Island as though it happened yesterday and they were there for it themselves. That’s because we love our evening conversation, and by the time we’re four or five years old, we’ve heard just about every story about anything that’s ever happened on the Island about ten times while sitting around the bar-b-que pit. We never get tired of these stories, and we retell them constantly, which is why we can tell the story about how Drog the Goon started modern Goon civilization several million years ago by discovering the rotary bar-b-que spit as though we helped him tie on the handle and set up the end stakes ourselves.)
Anyway, Sal was born allergic to poodles, like I said. And aside from the constant respiratory irritation, he also suffered from the irritation of being the only Goon on the island who couldn’t have a poodle. Not all Goons have poodles, but they could if they wanted to. Except for Sal, because of his allergy, and he thought it highly unjust.
Now, justice is something we spend a lot of time on here on the Island. Over the course of millions of years of bar-b-que pit conversation, we’ve pretty much determined that justice, like truth and beauty and every other abstract concept, is a cultural artifact with culturally relative definitions and parameters, and hence a topic you can talk about forever without reaching a conclusion, given the absence of an absolute reference point that stands up to reasonable scrutiny. And this suits us right down to the ground.
So we were all ears when Sal got everybody around the bar-b-que pit one night and raised the question: Is it fair for most Goons to engage in an activity (i.e., poodle owning) that causes the extreme physical and emotional discomfort of even one other Goon?
We live for stuff like this, and the pit fires burned until dawn for nights on end while we discussed it. Most of us had to admit that Sal had raised a valid point. Given our small population and our inherent similarities and cohesiveness, how were we to balance the right of the majority to engage in a pleasing yet nonessential pastime like poodle owning against the right of the minority to live their lives without constant sneezing and sniffling, especially if that sneezing and sniffling could be avoided relatively easily by getting rid of the poodles? And did it make a difference that, in this case, the allergy causing majority was everybody except Sal and the minority was a single wheezing, itchy eyed Goon?
We like our poodles. Oh, heck…we love our poodles. But we like each other, too, and we felt really sorry for Sal, who was suffering all day, every day from a condition we were causing by having our poodles. From a couple of valid philosophical viewpoints, it wasn’t his fault for being born with an allergy, and even if he were responsible from an existential point of view, the rest of us still had it in our power to alleviate his obvious suffering. But would our resultant suffering at being deprived of our poodles, while admittedly less physically disabling, be any less unjust or emotionally painful?
Well, a week went by, and we were deadlocked. That’s relativism for you. So one night after we’d all done a couple butt-loads of crapkee, we summarized our positions and asked ourselves if we’d reached a consensus. And we had not.
Time to get out the dominos.
Goons invented dominos about a million years ago, and it’s a game that has stood the test of time. It’s like bongo playing, bar-b-queing, and mutual back scratching to us…life would simply be unimaginable without it. We make our dominos from the flat parts of the pelvic bones of groats, and some of these sets have been handed down for countless generations.
Lots of domino games have evolved around the world since they made it off the island with one of our early ferry captains, but on Goon Island we play Fives with double six domino sets just about exclusively. The game goes by other names in other places, but it’s simple elegance remains the same no matter what the name.
Largest double starts. Subsequent dominos must match the number of the domino they’re played on in a line. First crossed double spins off two more arms to make a cross. Plays that result in sums at arm ends of five or multiples of five score the commensurate number of points. Winner of a round is the last Goon who can play. Winner of the game is the first Goon to 500. Winner of the night is the winner of the most games.
It’s like the rhythm of the spheres being marked by the gentle clack of groat-bone tiles against time-worn stone.
Or something.
Anyway, dominos are also an excellent way of resolving philosophical disputes that are otherwise irresolvable due to their inherent relativism. Here’s how it works.
We all divide into groups of four and start playing dominos. The winners of the first games advance to the next round. This proceeds until there are four winners left.
Straws are then drawn by these four players…two short and two long. Who has the short straws and who has the long straws isn’t revealed until the final game is over. In this particular game, the long straws were Sal. The short straws were poodles.
If one of the players who drew a long straw won the final game, Sal won, and the poodles left the Island. If one of the players who drew a short straw won, the rest of us won, and the poodles stayed.
At this point, someone might ask: “If you’re going to resolve intractable philosophical disputes this way, why not skip all the domino playing and just draw straws?”
That would be mistaking this whole process for a simple game of chance. A flip of a coin. A spin of the wheel.
It’s a mistake no Goon would make. I could say that we find it intrinsically satisfying to resolve important issues through a process that involves the initial participation of every adult Goon alive in an elegant manipulation of the most fundamental mathematical abstracts engraved on the most fundamental physical substance and culminates in an ultimate game of Fives at which Chaos sits in as the unseen yet decisive Fifth player.
Or not. In the end, you get it or you don’t.
And in the end, we got it, meaning the Goons with the poodles. Otto the Goon, a Fives player of sound skills yet not the best player on the Island by any means, won by 45 points and showed a short straw.
And that was that.
Sal took it in stride. Seeing that he was surrounded by poodles anyway and would be for the rest of his life, Sal wiped his runny nose and got himself a nice little cream-colored bitch who turned out to be a real charmer and kept him highly amused for many years despite his chronic sneezing.
He called her Sally, and when she died, Sal bar-b-qued her with an orange glaze that dazzled everybody he shared her with. She was a good dog.
So that’s how we do it, and like I said, you get it or you don’t, but we find it deeply satisfying on just about every level.
But we’re pretty easy to please when you come right down to it.
In fact, given the circumstances here on the Island, it’s hard just to come up with situations about which two Goons could even disagree. Let’s eat. Let’s have sex. Let’s do some crapkee. Let’s dance.
What’s to argue?
It happens, though, like the time we tried Government, or the time Sal the Goon tried to ban poodles from the Island. The Government thing was clearly one that called for the eating of a few wayward individuals, so it kind of took care of itself. Sal’s problem with the poodles was another matter, and it called for our traditional method of settling less clear-cut and more philosophical disputes…dominos.
The story of how we came to have poodles on the Island is a long one, and maybe I’ll tell it someday, but right now it’s just important to know that Goons love their poodles. They’re highly intelligent, cute as all getout, energetic in a twitchy, hyperactive kind of way that makes them fun to watch. And when trimmed properly, they sport attractive ankle/wrist/pelvic tufts that remind us of ourselves. We find this last quality especially endearing, and it causes us to project a lot of emotional content on our canine pals. Probably undeservedly so – they’re just cute dogs, after all. But we love them, and that’s about all there is to it.
Except for Sal, who was born allergic to poodles. (This all happened a long time ago, but you may have noticed that Goons talk about everything that ever happened on Goon Island as though it happened yesterday and they were there for it themselves. That’s because we love our evening conversation, and by the time we’re four or five years old, we’ve heard just about every story about anything that’s ever happened on the Island about ten times while sitting around the bar-b-que pit. We never get tired of these stories, and we retell them constantly, which is why we can tell the story about how Drog the Goon started modern Goon civilization several million years ago by discovering the rotary bar-b-que spit as though we helped him tie on the handle and set up the end stakes ourselves.)
Anyway, Sal was born allergic to poodles, like I said. And aside from the constant respiratory irritation, he also suffered from the irritation of being the only Goon on the island who couldn’t have a poodle. Not all Goons have poodles, but they could if they wanted to. Except for Sal, because of his allergy, and he thought it highly unjust.
Now, justice is something we spend a lot of time on here on the Island. Over the course of millions of years of bar-b-que pit conversation, we’ve pretty much determined that justice, like truth and beauty and every other abstract concept, is a cultural artifact with culturally relative definitions and parameters, and hence a topic you can talk about forever without reaching a conclusion, given the absence of an absolute reference point that stands up to reasonable scrutiny. And this suits us right down to the ground.
So we were all ears when Sal got everybody around the bar-b-que pit one night and raised the question: Is it fair for most Goons to engage in an activity (i.e., poodle owning) that causes the extreme physical and emotional discomfort of even one other Goon?
We live for stuff like this, and the pit fires burned until dawn for nights on end while we discussed it. Most of us had to admit that Sal had raised a valid point. Given our small population and our inherent similarities and cohesiveness, how were we to balance the right of the majority to engage in a pleasing yet nonessential pastime like poodle owning against the right of the minority to live their lives without constant sneezing and sniffling, especially if that sneezing and sniffling could be avoided relatively easily by getting rid of the poodles? And did it make a difference that, in this case, the allergy causing majority was everybody except Sal and the minority was a single wheezing, itchy eyed Goon?
We like our poodles. Oh, heck…we love our poodles. But we like each other, too, and we felt really sorry for Sal, who was suffering all day, every day from a condition we were causing by having our poodles. From a couple of valid philosophical viewpoints, it wasn’t his fault for being born with an allergy, and even if he were responsible from an existential point of view, the rest of us still had it in our power to alleviate his obvious suffering. But would our resultant suffering at being deprived of our poodles, while admittedly less physically disabling, be any less unjust or emotionally painful?
Well, a week went by, and we were deadlocked. That’s relativism for you. So one night after we’d all done a couple butt-loads of crapkee, we summarized our positions and asked ourselves if we’d reached a consensus. And we had not.
Time to get out the dominos.
Goons invented dominos about a million years ago, and it’s a game that has stood the test of time. It’s like bongo playing, bar-b-queing, and mutual back scratching to us…life would simply be unimaginable without it. We make our dominos from the flat parts of the pelvic bones of groats, and some of these sets have been handed down for countless generations.
Lots of domino games have evolved around the world since they made it off the island with one of our early ferry captains, but on Goon Island we play Fives with double six domino sets just about exclusively. The game goes by other names in other places, but it’s simple elegance remains the same no matter what the name.
Largest double starts. Subsequent dominos must match the number of the domino they’re played on in a line. First crossed double spins off two more arms to make a cross. Plays that result in sums at arm ends of five or multiples of five score the commensurate number of points. Winner of a round is the last Goon who can play. Winner of the game is the first Goon to 500. Winner of the night is the winner of the most games.
It’s like the rhythm of the spheres being marked by the gentle clack of groat-bone tiles against time-worn stone.
Or something.
Anyway, dominos are also an excellent way of resolving philosophical disputes that are otherwise irresolvable due to their inherent relativism. Here’s how it works.
We all divide into groups of four and start playing dominos. The winners of the first games advance to the next round. This proceeds until there are four winners left.
Straws are then drawn by these four players…two short and two long. Who has the short straws and who has the long straws isn’t revealed until the final game is over. In this particular game, the long straws were Sal. The short straws were poodles.
If one of the players who drew a long straw won the final game, Sal won, and the poodles left the Island. If one of the players who drew a short straw won, the rest of us won, and the poodles stayed.
At this point, someone might ask: “If you’re going to resolve intractable philosophical disputes this way, why not skip all the domino playing and just draw straws?”
That would be mistaking this whole process for a simple game of chance. A flip of a coin. A spin of the wheel.
It’s a mistake no Goon would make. I could say that we find it intrinsically satisfying to resolve important issues through a process that involves the initial participation of every adult Goon alive in an elegant manipulation of the most fundamental mathematical abstracts engraved on the most fundamental physical substance and culminates in an ultimate game of Fives at which Chaos sits in as the unseen yet decisive Fifth player.
Or not. In the end, you get it or you don’t.
And in the end, we got it, meaning the Goons with the poodles. Otto the Goon, a Fives player of sound skills yet not the best player on the Island by any means, won by 45 points and showed a short straw.
And that was that.
Sal took it in stride. Seeing that he was surrounded by poodles anyway and would be for the rest of his life, Sal wiped his runny nose and got himself a nice little cream-colored bitch who turned out to be a real charmer and kept him highly amused for many years despite his chronic sneezing.
He called her Sally, and when she died, Sal bar-b-qued her with an orange glaze that dazzled everybody he shared her with. She was a good dog.
So that’s how we do it, and like I said, you get it or you don’t, but we find it deeply satisfying on just about every level.
But we’re pretty easy to please when you come right down to it.
Friday, June 02, 2006
It's A Matter of Taste
We don’t eat every human that comes to Goon Island.
In fact, we don’t eat most of them. Most we just send back. And a couple we actually like having around for short periods of time.
One of them is an anthropologist. I know I previously lumped anthropologists in with salesmen, European backpackers, poll takers, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and a few other types that just automatically get invited to join us at the evening cookout, but this gal is different.
Leticia Janowski first came over a few years ago Here’s how it went.
Dr. Janowski showed up on the ferry one morning with a backpack and a notepad. We knew right off she was a researcher of some kind, and this earned her an automatic invitation to that night’s bar-b-que. She looked like she might go nicely with a honey glaze. She accepted, but she did it with a look in her eye that let us know we weren’t pulling anything she hadn’t expected. In fact, she smiled like we weren’t the only ones with something up our sleeves…although we don’t actually have sleeves. But you know what I mean. We don’t see that look very often, and it raised her notch in our estimation.
Once the ferry left and we knew we had another dish lined up for dinner, we tried to shock her with our morning sex. It’s silly, I know, but humans have the strangest reactions to Goon sex, and it’s often pretty funny. We had her follow us up to the clearing by the caves, which is where our morning sex takes place, and then we fell to.
She wasn’t exactly complacent as she watched us from the sidelines, but what she didn’t do was 1) run away, 2) try to join in, 3) tell us we were all going to Hail (whatever that is), or 4) take pictures or notes.
What she did do was quietly and unobtrusively try to mimic some of the trickier moves, which reminded us of what our kids do when they watch during the year before they’re actually ready to have sex. In fact, some of the kids were doing the same thing right next to her.
It was cute. Up another notch in our estimation.
The rest of the day went pretty much without incident, except Dr. Janowski made herself conspicuous by being inconspicuous. By lunch time, most human bar-b-que invitees are getting pretty nervous about when the ferry is coming back. Either that, or they’re getting really obnoxious trying to fit in by mimicking our walk and talk. The European backpackers never fail to do this, and it’s embarrassing for everybody…except them, of course.
But the doc just kind of hung out, tried her hand and nabbing groats, helped get the grill going for the fish for lunch, etc., without ever really calling much attention to herself, which is hard to do for a fully clothed human woman hanging out with a pack of Goons.
Click…up another notch. We were getting the feeling it was going to be hard to spit this gal, but we were pretty sure she’d do something stupid by the time the coals were ready that evening.
Well, you guessed it. When the time came to prep the eats, we just had to have a little meeting and decide what to do with her. She still hadn’t done anything inane, and although we’d plainly seen that she’d brought her notebook with her, she hadn’t taken one note. And she hadn’t even tried to buy any of our admittedly simple yet functional household items and handicrafts, which almost every human inevitably does at some point.
Nope. She was just sitting by the fire watching things progress. And she had that look in her eye again.
So we had to do it. We gathered around her, and we told her that we’d planned on spitting her up and having her for dinner with a nice honey glaze. We asked her what she thought of that.
Again, she wasn’t exactly complacent, but she didn’t freak. What she did was stand up and say, in a remarkably even voice, “Well, that would be a shame, because I was really looking forward to a little crapkee and groat.”
Twang. A hundred Goon heartstrings zinged all at once. How can you eat someone with poise like that? Even though crapkee makes most humans puke instantaneously and she really didn’t know what she was getting into with the groat.
Then she said, without missing a beat, “Besides, I haven’t gotten a blood sample yet.”
That one threw us.
The coals were almost ready. Everything for dinner except her was prepped. And she’d just asked for blood.
Well, there was nothing for it but to get on with the bar-b-que, not eat her, and find out what she had in mind while we enjoyed a good meal. Evening conversation is precious to Goons, and we were intrigued by the prospect of hearing what this was all about…as she knew we would be.
Over the course of a delightful evening. Dr. Janowski informed us that, in her opinion, humans descended from Goons. According to her observations, Goons have many of the same traits as Bonobo Chimps, which are genetically about as close to humans as you can get without being human. Bonobos use sex as a kind of currency and social lubricant (no pun intended) that effectively short-circuits the need for conflict and displays of anger and dominance.
Well, Goons enjoy sex, and lots of it, and in her estimation, that’s why Goon society is so peaceful and egalitarian. We make love, not war. And that, she said, is a social survival strategy that she believed humans once had but had lost when they separated from Goons, and possibly Bonobos, way back when.
She wanted a Goon blood sample so she could do genetic tests and see if her theory was right.
What a charmer.
What she didn’t know was that we have Bonobos on the Island. It’s a colony that started from a troupe being shipped to a mainland zoo that we “liberated” when we heard them yelling for help as their ship passed the Island. We were going to eat them at first, but darned if the same thing didn’t happen with them that happened with Dr. Janowski. After hanging around with them for the day and hearing their story, we frankly fell in love with them. We told them that the back half of the Island was theirs if they wanted to settle in, and they did. They left for the other side the same day we met them, just before we held a bar-que for the sailors on the Bonobo transport ship.
They may still be over there for all we know, but we respect their need for privacy. Heck, we’re pretty private ourselves.
We never gave Dr. Janowski any blood, of course. But the doc said she was actually all right with that and would respect our need for privacy. She said it with that look in her eye, and by that time we knew that she’d been picking up shed Goon hair on the sly all day and didn’t really need the blood, but we didn’t eat her anyway.
The good doctor wisely passed on the crapkee, sang a few songs around the fire with us, and bid us all a tasteful goodnight before the sex started again. The next day, she caught the ferry back, which raised her a few notches in the estimation of the ferry captain as well, since he never expected to see her again.
She stops by every couple of months, and she never talks about the results of her research, if any, and we don’t ask. She just hangs out and has a good time.
That’s the way we like it.
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Where Baby Goons Come From
Here’s how Goons are born.
Since all of us have sex twice a day on a fairly regular basis, you’d think Goon Island would be wall-to-wall Goons. However, there have always been about a hundred Goons on the Island as long as anyone can remember. In don’t know how this works exactly, but Goons don’t get pregnant unless we’re short handed for some reason.
Like the time we had to eat some of the kids. They somehow got infected with the idea that they had a right to express their individuality by cutting their arm and leg and pelvic hair in odd ways. Things like this happen, and most of the kids came around eventually, but a couple of them actually said they’d rather die than give up their individuality. Well, sometimes you get what you ask for.
So we were suddenly short a few Goons, and presto, a few of the gals got pregnant. It just seems to work that way.
Goons have a gestation period of three months more or less, and when little Goons pop out, they’re up and running around in about an hour. Man, they can run around. And they’re born with healthy appetites and a full set of teeth, so they don’t require much looking after. They’re pretty much just miniature versions of adult Goons, but with twice the energy. It only takes them a couple of days to catch on to the routine here on the Island, and they start puling their weight right away, catching fish, gathering fruits and greens, etc.
What they don’t do is have sex right away. That takes about a year. By the time they’re a year old, they’re at full size and they’ve watched everybody else having sex twice a day for quite a while. So when they’re finally interested and able, they know the routine.
Since we have sex so much and the kids set up so quickly, we don’t really have much parental bonding. It’s just about impossible to tell who is responsible for siring whom in any case, and a female’s job is pretty much over when the kid gets up and starts running around.
So, once we’re back up to full strength again, nobody gets pregnant until we need some more Goons.
Your average Goon has a lifespan of about 30 years, which is plenty of time to enjoy yourself considering we’re basically adults from the time we’re one year old. And we don’t really age much…at 30, we’re in about the same shape as we were in when we were one, so there isn’t much forewarning before we check out. I guess it’s like the pregnancy thing – when it’s time, it’s time, and 30 seems to be the time for checking out.
So depending on where we’re all at age- and population-wise, we might sometimes go a year or two without a birth on the Island, but there are usually at least a couple of kids running around to liven things up.
So there you go – more than you wanted to know about Goon reproduction.
If you want the specifics of how we have sex…well, just come on out to the Island and spend the night. There might be some dishes at the bar-b-que you’ll want to pass up (assuming you’re not one yourself), but once the singing and dancing and sex starts up, you’ll find out all about it.
Since all of us have sex twice a day on a fairly regular basis, you’d think Goon Island would be wall-to-wall Goons. However, there have always been about a hundred Goons on the Island as long as anyone can remember. In don’t know how this works exactly, but Goons don’t get pregnant unless we’re short handed for some reason.
Like the time we had to eat some of the kids. They somehow got infected with the idea that they had a right to express their individuality by cutting their arm and leg and pelvic hair in odd ways. Things like this happen, and most of the kids came around eventually, but a couple of them actually said they’d rather die than give up their individuality. Well, sometimes you get what you ask for.
So we were suddenly short a few Goons, and presto, a few of the gals got pregnant. It just seems to work that way.
Goons have a gestation period of three months more or less, and when little Goons pop out, they’re up and running around in about an hour. Man, they can run around. And they’re born with healthy appetites and a full set of teeth, so they don’t require much looking after. They’re pretty much just miniature versions of adult Goons, but with twice the energy. It only takes them a couple of days to catch on to the routine here on the Island, and they start puling their weight right away, catching fish, gathering fruits and greens, etc.
What they don’t do is have sex right away. That takes about a year. By the time they’re a year old, they’re at full size and they’ve watched everybody else having sex twice a day for quite a while. So when they’re finally interested and able, they know the routine.
Since we have sex so much and the kids set up so quickly, we don’t really have much parental bonding. It’s just about impossible to tell who is responsible for siring whom in any case, and a female’s job is pretty much over when the kid gets up and starts running around.
So, once we’re back up to full strength again, nobody gets pregnant until we need some more Goons.
Your average Goon has a lifespan of about 30 years, which is plenty of time to enjoy yourself considering we’re basically adults from the time we’re one year old. And we don’t really age much…at 30, we’re in about the same shape as we were in when we were one, so there isn’t much forewarning before we check out. I guess it’s like the pregnancy thing – when it’s time, it’s time, and 30 seems to be the time for checking out.
So depending on where we’re all at age- and population-wise, we might sometimes go a year or two without a birth on the Island, but there are usually at least a couple of kids running around to liven things up.
So there you go – more than you wanted to know about Goon reproduction.
If you want the specifics of how we have sex…well, just come on out to the Island and spend the night. There might be some dishes at the bar-b-que you’ll want to pass up (assuming you’re not one yourself), but once the singing and dancing and sex starts up, you’ll find out all about it.
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
A Day In The Life
There have been some questions recently about Goon life. Folks seem to be interested in how we do the day to day stuff here on the Island. I guess the best way to handle that is to describe a typical day for a Goon. We all look and act pretty much the same, so describing one Goon’s day describes them all. Which is how we like it.
A Goon usually rolls out of the sack about daybreak. We don’t actually sleep in sacks…Goons go to sleep wherever they end up the night before, usually stretched out on the ground around the bar-b-que pit or in one of the caves. Then it’s down to the beach for a wash. A Goon can’t start the day without a wash at the beach. Well, he can, but it makes for a less satisfactory day, and there is nothing that keeps us from going to the beach in the morning, so it rarely happens that a Goon doesn’t start the day clean.
When the wash is done (we don’t really have anything on the Island to wash except ourselves) we move down the beach a ways and net the fish for the day. The sea around Goon Island is lousy with fish, and a couple casts of the net produces about enough for all of us for the day. There is a little white fish called a peeq that we eat right out of the net for breakfast – gets the old plumbing working almost instantly, so the next thing we do is head for the edge of the forest to make a morning deposit.
That would be the Goon idea of a great way to start the day if we didn’t start every day like that. Rain or shine, doesn’t matter. Wash, breakfast, dump. What can go wrong with a day that starts like that? There are only about a hundred of us, and by the time we’re all hunkered down lightening our loads while the morning sun glints off the blue-green ocean, we’ve just about solved the world’s problems for the day. It’s all gravy from then on out.
That’s when we head for the ferry dock to see what came across from the mainland that day. Anything inanimate, we don’t allow off the boat out of principle, ever since that personal hair clipper fiasco. I think I mentioned that before – we all use the same pair of Holy Clippers to trim our hair, but one day we let some clown come ashore with a bunch of personal clippers and all hell broke loose. Had to eat a few of the kids. Now, if it doesn’t breath, it doesn’t come ashore.
If it does breath, we size it up for possible bar-b-que material. The word got out a long time ago about how much we like to bar-b-que, but you’d be amazed at the things that insist on coming over anyway. Like salesmen. Man, they’re good eating, and they never seem to learn. They think that because we don’t wear clothes or have electricity that we must really want whatever garbage they have to peddle. We don’t disabuse them of that notion until we’ve invited them to spend the night on the island and join us for a cook-out.
Just a side note: it takes a bit of work to get the faint bullshit taste out of a salesman, but a short boil in salt water with a little crapkee and ginger in a cheesecloth spice bag usually does the trick.
There are folks we don’t invite to bar-b-ques as the main course, of course…humans we like for one reason or another. But they usually don’t like to hang out much, and none of them have ever stayed for a bar-b-que. And they don’t seem to like sex much. At least not with Goons.
That’s what we do after we check out the ferry dock. We have morning sex. Everybody has sex with whomever. It doesn’t make that much difference, since like I said, we all pretty much look and act alike, so what’s the point in being choosy? We do come in male and female varieties, but what does that have to do with sex?
After a short nap, we head up into the forests that surround Goon Volcano to gather fruit, nuts, roots, leafy greens, and groats. Groats are a cross between a rat and a goat. Think of a really large rat. Or a really small goat. Groats are the main bar-b-que fare on Goon Island, and for good reason. They breed like…well, like groats, so they’re always around. They’re incredibly easy to catch since they’re not very smart. And they take a red pepper and cumin rub like a fish takes to water.
Another side note: salesmen, anthropologists, European backpackers, real estate developers, and other humans that end up on the business end of a bar-b-que spit are the spice that makes a good groat bar-b-que even better, but they’re not essential parts of Goon diet. We commonly go months without human in our diet, and we don’t miss it. It’s just a nice change of pace every now and then, though, like when we eat our dead or our unruly children.
We usually get back from the forest about mid-afternoon, and then it’s time for lunch, and we munch most of the fresh produce while we grill up the rest of the morning’s fish. This is really our big meal of the day, and a Goon can pack away a surprising amount of fresh roughage and grilled fish. Which almost cries out for a nap, so that’s what we do – sleep until sundown.
Just before it gets dark, a few of us will inevitably wake up and get the fire going for the evening bar-b-que. There is nothing like waking up from a nice afternoon nap to the smell of wood smoke coming from the pit. Out comes the crapkee (or in goes the crapkee, if you prefer) and we begin the prep for the evening’s festivities. Whatever needs slaughtering gets slaughtered, whatever needs parboiling gets parboiled, whatever needs soaking gets soaked, whatever needs a rub gets rubbed. It all happens around the fire as it burns down to a beautiful bed of coals, and while we prep the meal, we solve the world’s problems again, just like we did in the morning. Solve the world’s problems twice a day, and things go pretty smoothly for everybody.
There’s not much to tell after that. We eat. We do a little more crapkee. We sing and dance. We have sex again. We sleep.
We wake up in the morning and do it all again.
Any questions?
A Goon usually rolls out of the sack about daybreak. We don’t actually sleep in sacks…Goons go to sleep wherever they end up the night before, usually stretched out on the ground around the bar-b-que pit or in one of the caves. Then it’s down to the beach for a wash. A Goon can’t start the day without a wash at the beach. Well, he can, but it makes for a less satisfactory day, and there is nothing that keeps us from going to the beach in the morning, so it rarely happens that a Goon doesn’t start the day clean.
When the wash is done (we don’t really have anything on the Island to wash except ourselves) we move down the beach a ways and net the fish for the day. The sea around Goon Island is lousy with fish, and a couple casts of the net produces about enough for all of us for the day. There is a little white fish called a peeq that we eat right out of the net for breakfast – gets the old plumbing working almost instantly, so the next thing we do is head for the edge of the forest to make a morning deposit.
That would be the Goon idea of a great way to start the day if we didn’t start every day like that. Rain or shine, doesn’t matter. Wash, breakfast, dump. What can go wrong with a day that starts like that? There are only about a hundred of us, and by the time we’re all hunkered down lightening our loads while the morning sun glints off the blue-green ocean, we’ve just about solved the world’s problems for the day. It’s all gravy from then on out.
That’s when we head for the ferry dock to see what came across from the mainland that day. Anything inanimate, we don’t allow off the boat out of principle, ever since that personal hair clipper fiasco. I think I mentioned that before – we all use the same pair of Holy Clippers to trim our hair, but one day we let some clown come ashore with a bunch of personal clippers and all hell broke loose. Had to eat a few of the kids. Now, if it doesn’t breath, it doesn’t come ashore.
If it does breath, we size it up for possible bar-b-que material. The word got out a long time ago about how much we like to bar-b-que, but you’d be amazed at the things that insist on coming over anyway. Like salesmen. Man, they’re good eating, and they never seem to learn. They think that because we don’t wear clothes or have electricity that we must really want whatever garbage they have to peddle. We don’t disabuse them of that notion until we’ve invited them to spend the night on the island and join us for a cook-out.
Just a side note: it takes a bit of work to get the faint bullshit taste out of a salesman, but a short boil in salt water with a little crapkee and ginger in a cheesecloth spice bag usually does the trick.
There are folks we don’t invite to bar-b-ques as the main course, of course…humans we like for one reason or another. But they usually don’t like to hang out much, and none of them have ever stayed for a bar-b-que. And they don’t seem to like sex much. At least not with Goons.
That’s what we do after we check out the ferry dock. We have morning sex. Everybody has sex with whomever. It doesn’t make that much difference, since like I said, we all pretty much look and act alike, so what’s the point in being choosy? We do come in male and female varieties, but what does that have to do with sex?
After a short nap, we head up into the forests that surround Goon Volcano to gather fruit, nuts, roots, leafy greens, and groats. Groats are a cross between a rat and a goat. Think of a really large rat. Or a really small goat. Groats are the main bar-b-que fare on Goon Island, and for good reason. They breed like…well, like groats, so they’re always around. They’re incredibly easy to catch since they’re not very smart. And they take a red pepper and cumin rub like a fish takes to water.
Another side note: salesmen, anthropologists, European backpackers, real estate developers, and other humans that end up on the business end of a bar-b-que spit are the spice that makes a good groat bar-b-que even better, but they’re not essential parts of Goon diet. We commonly go months without human in our diet, and we don’t miss it. It’s just a nice change of pace every now and then, though, like when we eat our dead or our unruly children.
We usually get back from the forest about mid-afternoon, and then it’s time for lunch, and we munch most of the fresh produce while we grill up the rest of the morning’s fish. This is really our big meal of the day, and a Goon can pack away a surprising amount of fresh roughage and grilled fish. Which almost cries out for a nap, so that’s what we do – sleep until sundown.
Just before it gets dark, a few of us will inevitably wake up and get the fire going for the evening bar-b-que. There is nothing like waking up from a nice afternoon nap to the smell of wood smoke coming from the pit. Out comes the crapkee (or in goes the crapkee, if you prefer) and we begin the prep for the evening’s festivities. Whatever needs slaughtering gets slaughtered, whatever needs parboiling gets parboiled, whatever needs soaking gets soaked, whatever needs a rub gets rubbed. It all happens around the fire as it burns down to a beautiful bed of coals, and while we prep the meal, we solve the world’s problems again, just like we did in the morning. Solve the world’s problems twice a day, and things go pretty smoothly for everybody.
There’s not much to tell after that. We eat. We do a little more crapkee. We sing and dance. We have sex again. We sleep.
We wake up in the morning and do it all again.
Any questions?
Monday, May 29, 2006
Don't Touch That Dial!
We don’t have television on Goon Island.
Well, I take that back. We have a television on Goon Island. It’s a 30-year-old Magnavox console that washed up from a container load that fell off a cargo ship during a big storm back in 1,738,480. (I think our calendar is a little different from most – we use the same years everyone else does, but we start counting from the year Goons first learned to bar-b-que using a rotating spit.)
Anyway, our TV is currently being used as a plant stand in our Goon Island Welcome Center. Nobody watches it because 1) it’s broken (it fell off a ship and washed ashore after all), 2) we don’t have electricity, and 3) we care about our mental health.
Number three was brought home pretty clearly when Carl the Goon did some time on the mainland as a meat inspector for a local packing house. Carl didn’t go looking for the job, but one of Alice the Goon’s babysitting gals got to know the parents of one of her mainland clients while that ill-fated operation was still in business. The guy was a meat inspector with a short-handed crew, and he got wind from the babysitter that Goons are meat experts. Which we are. So the babysitter hooked Carl up with the job. Not that he needed a job, but Goons like to help out when folks are short-handed.
Carl didn’t last long at the packing plant, though, because he failed to pass even one piece of meat that came his way. We Goons are fairly particular about our meat, and apparently the stuff coming down the line at this particular packing plant was pretty foul. It was all moomeat, which is barely edible under the best of circumstances, but these moos must have been living some exceptionally bleak lives, because Carl said he could smell a stench coming off them…something like piss and mold. The foreman told him it was just “normal hormones and antibiotics”, whatever those are, but Carl said he couldn’t in good conscience ask anybody to eat something that smelled like that, so after a couple of days, he got fired.
But during the few days he was on the mainland, Carl stayed in a rooming house that had a television. And against his better judgment, Carl watched it one night just to see what it had to offer.
The next day, they brought him back to Goon Island on a stretcher. He was pretty incoherent for a while, but with some decent food and a butt-load of crapkee or two he settled down. But he never could really talk about what he saw in any detail.
He’d begin to relate stories about odd things, bizarre things…beatings, fights, people yelling at one another, odd sexual encounters that never got around to actual sex, flying automobiles, gun fire, people performing ritual songs and dances in front of other people and being laughed at, people going in groups to deserted places and playing games that made them cry if they lost. And interspersed with it all, lots and lots of human females caressing themselves with various oils and medications and tossing their hair around in slow motion. He even mentioned lizards standing on their hind feet and talking about something called Guy Koe and men with strange, stiff hair holding black books and screaming about going to Hail.
Carl would try to relate these things, but he didn’t really have any context for them, so it was hard for us to understand. When we said so, Carl said that that was exactly what TV was like. These scenes would appear and disappear on the screen, and there would be no way to tell if the things it showed had actually happened, or were happening, or were being staged by somebody, or were the completely random visions of some insane person that somehow got turned into pictures and put on the screen.
Carl said that the humans he watched TV with that night on the mainland didn’t seem to be bothered by this at all. He said that, instead of getting agitated by TV, they seemed to go into some kind of trance – during the fights and gunfire and beatings and yelling, they would grow very still, and sometimes their bodies would go slack and their mouths would hang open.
At least until Carl got so upset with what he was seeing that he head-butted the TV. Then, Carl said, things got out of hand. The last thing he remembered was running around with the broken TV on his head feeling like lightening was continuously hitting him and the humans chasing him and yelling like he’s just killed someone.
Well, thankfully Carl made it back to the Island, He won’t go near the Magnavox now, even though it’s just a plant stand, but otherwise he seems to have recovered nicely. We don’t talk about television in front of him. In fact, we don’t talk about television at all here. It’s one of those things, like stinky moomeat, that we figure we can get along without.
We don’t mind the salesmen showing up every now and then, though. It doesn’t matter what they’re selling…televisions, cell phones, computers, anything electronic…they all taste good.
Well, I take that back. We have a television on Goon Island. It’s a 30-year-old Magnavox console that washed up from a container load that fell off a cargo ship during a big storm back in 1,738,480. (I think our calendar is a little different from most – we use the same years everyone else does, but we start counting from the year Goons first learned to bar-b-que using a rotating spit.)
Anyway, our TV is currently being used as a plant stand in our Goon Island Welcome Center. Nobody watches it because 1) it’s broken (it fell off a ship and washed ashore after all), 2) we don’t have electricity, and 3) we care about our mental health.
Number three was brought home pretty clearly when Carl the Goon did some time on the mainland as a meat inspector for a local packing house. Carl didn’t go looking for the job, but one of Alice the Goon’s babysitting gals got to know the parents of one of her mainland clients while that ill-fated operation was still in business. The guy was a meat inspector with a short-handed crew, and he got wind from the babysitter that Goons are meat experts. Which we are. So the babysitter hooked Carl up with the job. Not that he needed a job, but Goons like to help out when folks are short-handed.
Carl didn’t last long at the packing plant, though, because he failed to pass even one piece of meat that came his way. We Goons are fairly particular about our meat, and apparently the stuff coming down the line at this particular packing plant was pretty foul. It was all moomeat, which is barely edible under the best of circumstances, but these moos must have been living some exceptionally bleak lives, because Carl said he could smell a stench coming off them…something like piss and mold. The foreman told him it was just “normal hormones and antibiotics”, whatever those are, but Carl said he couldn’t in good conscience ask anybody to eat something that smelled like that, so after a couple of days, he got fired.
But during the few days he was on the mainland, Carl stayed in a rooming house that had a television. And against his better judgment, Carl watched it one night just to see what it had to offer.
The next day, they brought him back to Goon Island on a stretcher. He was pretty incoherent for a while, but with some decent food and a butt-load of crapkee or two he settled down. But he never could really talk about what he saw in any detail.
He’d begin to relate stories about odd things, bizarre things…beatings, fights, people yelling at one another, odd sexual encounters that never got around to actual sex, flying automobiles, gun fire, people performing ritual songs and dances in front of other people and being laughed at, people going in groups to deserted places and playing games that made them cry if they lost. And interspersed with it all, lots and lots of human females caressing themselves with various oils and medications and tossing their hair around in slow motion. He even mentioned lizards standing on their hind feet and talking about something called Guy Koe and men with strange, stiff hair holding black books and screaming about going to Hail.
Carl would try to relate these things, but he didn’t really have any context for them, so it was hard for us to understand. When we said so, Carl said that that was exactly what TV was like. These scenes would appear and disappear on the screen, and there would be no way to tell if the things it showed had actually happened, or were happening, or were being staged by somebody, or were the completely random visions of some insane person that somehow got turned into pictures and put on the screen.
Carl said that the humans he watched TV with that night on the mainland didn’t seem to be bothered by this at all. He said that, instead of getting agitated by TV, they seemed to go into some kind of trance – during the fights and gunfire and beatings and yelling, they would grow very still, and sometimes their bodies would go slack and their mouths would hang open.
At least until Carl got so upset with what he was seeing that he head-butted the TV. Then, Carl said, things got out of hand. The last thing he remembered was running around with the broken TV on his head feeling like lightening was continuously hitting him and the humans chasing him and yelling like he’s just killed someone.
Well, thankfully Carl made it back to the Island, He won’t go near the Magnavox now, even though it’s just a plant stand, but otherwise he seems to have recovered nicely. We don’t talk about television in front of him. In fact, we don’t talk about television at all here. It’s one of those things, like stinky moomeat, that we figure we can get along without.
We don’t mind the salesmen showing up every now and then, though. It doesn’t matter what they’re selling…televisions, cell phones, computers, anything electronic…they all taste good.
Saturday, May 06, 2006
Requiem for Arnie
Here on Goon Island, we eat our dead.
I think of this because we ate Arnie the Goon the other day. And it occurs to me that some folks don’t treat their dead this way.
We don’t eat our dead because it tastes good…it doesn’t. Well, I take that back. It doesn’t unless you use the right bar-b-que rub. There is an inherent gaminess to Goon that just cries out for a little extra lemon pepper and ginger in the mix, and although we mostly prefer dry rubs, a bit of molasses binds everything nicely and contributes a bit of welcome sweetness.
But I digress. I started to say that we don’t eat our dead because they taste good. We do it out of respect. Arnie deserved respect. He was a likeable, honest, hard-working Goon, and he deserved to get eaten. The nice thing about Goon Island is that, for the most part, we’re all likeable, honest, and hard working, and we all taste good with a rub that’s a bit heavy on the lemon pepper and ginger and has a sweet back beat.
We’ve heard that, in other parts of the world, they treat their dead in some odd ways – ways that to us seem pretty disrespectful. In some places for example, the dead are hooked up to a pump of some kind and all their blood is removed and replaced with a liquid meant to keep the body from decomposing. Then they are…get this…buried in the ground. Preserve a corpse for later, then bury it? Isn’t that kind of like smoking a ham and then hiding it from yourself? What’s the point?
In other places, corpses are intentionally left out to molder until only the bones are left, and then the bones are put in niches in walls or wrapped in cloth and saved for…who knows what? At least the bones are where you can get to them if you need them later on, but who needs them, and for what? If anybody can figure that one out, let me know.
And in some places, or so we’ve heard, corpses are at least cooked, but they’re cooked until they’re burnt to a crisp and nothing is left…intentionally! I mean, who’s minding the grill? You can stuff a Goon full of crapkee and keep him up all night with the touchiest cut of meat on the planet and he’ll still come back with something at least edible, if not a little dry. But burnt to cinders? A Goon couldn’t do it.
There’s an old book called the Rig Veda. Arnie liked that one. We have a copy in the Goon Island Library, and everybody has read it, which I guess isn’t saying much, because we only have a few dozen books all told. But we like to think we have the important ones, and somewhere in the Rig Veda is says that everything is food. Everything alive stays that way by eating something else, and everything eventually gets eaten by something else. It doesn’t take much looking around at real life to confirm this.
The folks who try to preserve and bury their dead or burn them to nothing or reduce them to bones may be trying to get around this fact of life for some reason. Why, I don’t know.
But a Goon couldn’t consign the body of someone they knew, lived with, and possibly loved, to such treatment. Especially when, with a properly banked pit of coals and a decent molasses rub, they could honor them by making them the tender and juicy main course at a well-attended island cookout under the stars.
With a few decent side dishes and a couple of butt-loads of crapkee, these events will always elicit hours of heartfelt and often hilarious reminiscences about the dear departed. These are bar-b-ques that no Goon would want to miss participating in, from either end of the skewer.
And by morning, it’s as though the dear departed isn’t even gone…because they’re not. They’re a real part of each and every one of us. And as an added bonus, it’s also not long before they’re part of the Goon Island compost pile. Which makes Goon Island vegetables the absolute tastiest around.
We all look forward to our last bar-b-que. I know Arnie did. That’s why Goons don’t travel much. If something happened and we croaked while abroad and couldn’t make it back to Goon Island before going rancid…well, we like an aged cut of meat as much as anyone, but there are limits. We’re not French, after all.
So we stick close to home and enjoy each other as much as possible in life. Then we enjoy each other as much as possible in death. I enjoyed Arnie, and I hope my last bar-b-que goes off as well.
Because in the end, all that really matters is good taste.
I think of this because we ate Arnie the Goon the other day. And it occurs to me that some folks don’t treat their dead this way.
We don’t eat our dead because it tastes good…it doesn’t. Well, I take that back. It doesn’t unless you use the right bar-b-que rub. There is an inherent gaminess to Goon that just cries out for a little extra lemon pepper and ginger in the mix, and although we mostly prefer dry rubs, a bit of molasses binds everything nicely and contributes a bit of welcome sweetness.
But I digress. I started to say that we don’t eat our dead because they taste good. We do it out of respect. Arnie deserved respect. He was a likeable, honest, hard-working Goon, and he deserved to get eaten. The nice thing about Goon Island is that, for the most part, we’re all likeable, honest, and hard working, and we all taste good with a rub that’s a bit heavy on the lemon pepper and ginger and has a sweet back beat.
We’ve heard that, in other parts of the world, they treat their dead in some odd ways – ways that to us seem pretty disrespectful. In some places for example, the dead are hooked up to a pump of some kind and all their blood is removed and replaced with a liquid meant to keep the body from decomposing. Then they are…get this…buried in the ground. Preserve a corpse for later, then bury it? Isn’t that kind of like smoking a ham and then hiding it from yourself? What’s the point?
In other places, corpses are intentionally left out to molder until only the bones are left, and then the bones are put in niches in walls or wrapped in cloth and saved for…who knows what? At least the bones are where you can get to them if you need them later on, but who needs them, and for what? If anybody can figure that one out, let me know.
And in some places, or so we’ve heard, corpses are at least cooked, but they’re cooked until they’re burnt to a crisp and nothing is left…intentionally! I mean, who’s minding the grill? You can stuff a Goon full of crapkee and keep him up all night with the touchiest cut of meat on the planet and he’ll still come back with something at least edible, if not a little dry. But burnt to cinders? A Goon couldn’t do it.
There’s an old book called the Rig Veda. Arnie liked that one. We have a copy in the Goon Island Library, and everybody has read it, which I guess isn’t saying much, because we only have a few dozen books all told. But we like to think we have the important ones, and somewhere in the Rig Veda is says that everything is food. Everything alive stays that way by eating something else, and everything eventually gets eaten by something else. It doesn’t take much looking around at real life to confirm this.
The folks who try to preserve and bury their dead or burn them to nothing or reduce them to bones may be trying to get around this fact of life for some reason. Why, I don’t know.
But a Goon couldn’t consign the body of someone they knew, lived with, and possibly loved, to such treatment. Especially when, with a properly banked pit of coals and a decent molasses rub, they could honor them by making them the tender and juicy main course at a well-attended island cookout under the stars.
With a few decent side dishes and a couple of butt-loads of crapkee, these events will always elicit hours of heartfelt and often hilarious reminiscences about the dear departed. These are bar-b-ques that no Goon would want to miss participating in, from either end of the skewer.
And by morning, it’s as though the dear departed isn’t even gone…because they’re not. They’re a real part of each and every one of us. And as an added bonus, it’s also not long before they’re part of the Goon Island compost pile. Which makes Goon Island vegetables the absolute tastiest around.
We all look forward to our last bar-b-que. I know Arnie did. That’s why Goons don’t travel much. If something happened and we croaked while abroad and couldn’t make it back to Goon Island before going rancid…well, we like an aged cut of meat as much as anyone, but there are limits. We’re not French, after all.
So we stick close to home and enjoy each other as much as possible in life. Then we enjoy each other as much as possible in death. I enjoyed Arnie, and I hope my last bar-b-que goes off as well.
Because in the end, all that really matters is good taste.
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