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I don’t even know where to start, bizarrely loyal commune fans.

Much like when you attempt to make a casserole, it’s tempting to try and trace the thread back and discover where exactly you went wrong. Was it when you added the pickles? Was it when you had the idea to make a casserole in the first place? Was it when the NSA kicked your front door down and dragged Ivan Nacutchacokov screaming and flailing out into the night?

Some pundits would surely argue that inviting Crochet! magazine to set up shop in my mother’s attic was asking for trouble. Due to simultaneous downturns in the publishing and Kleenex box cozy industries as well as rising insurance premiums, Crochet had lost their lease on their Assflush, New Jersey offices, which they’d moved to a few years ago without leaving a forwarding address after Omar Bricks somehow burnt down their office in Asslatch. Some mom’s-basement-dwelling conspiracy theorists (I don’t mean that as a dig, I mean they literally live in my mom’s basement and work for the commune) argued that Bricks couldn’t have burnt down the Asslatch offices since he was in jail in Panama at the time.

But all reliable witnesses tell the same story, that Crochet! received an anonymous package in the mail that turned out to be a huge box of annoying glitter that got absolutely everywhere, and that the glitter somehow combined with the seven gallons of elephant shit Bricks had previously mailed to Crochet!, forming some kind of prank napalm. All it took was a spark from the teddy bear Omar had delivered a week later that sang Happy Birthday to You in a loud, high pitched voice over and over nonstop for a week before melting down and catching on fire, igniting the napalm and Crochet!’s huge stash of crocheted shawls, baby hats, coasters and old lady slippers they were holding onto in case of a governmental crackdown or the endtimes. Needless to say, the resulting fire was huge and weird and didn’t smell very good.

As possibly the world’s only commune/Crochet! fandom dual-citizen, I couldn’t pass on the once-in-anyone’s-lifetime-ever chance to rescue both of my favorite publications and quickly dispatched a singing telegram to invite the Crochet! staffers to share space with my mom’s horrific doll collection in the attic. No one was more surprised than I was when they accepted, especially since it violated several restraining orders Crochet! themselves had filed. But the promise of free rent and Raoul Dunkin’s lawn pit BBQ proved to be too much to resist.

Some opinionated commenters have suggested that I upset the natural balance of things by having Crochet! in the attic and the commune in the basement, reversing the long-standing tradition of Crochet! being the commune’s "asshole downstairs neighbors" as the entire commune staff continued to call them even after months of them living and working two floors above. And I was constantly reminded of how this messed up Griswald Dreck’s famous rhyme "Crochet! on bottom and commune on top, fuck you Aesop!" which everyone loved even though nobody was sure which fable he was referencing. But, frankly this arrangement just made more sense since the commune staff were constantly burying their various mistakes in the crawlspace under my basement and I knew if I put the commune in the attic, all of those mail-order brides and dead Pomeranians would just get shoved out the window and end up on my lawn.

And besides, there was always the buffer of the main floor of the house between the two staffs, an air gap full of my mom and Doug having sex that even I hated to cross. I figured that would be enough, but of course it’s obvious now this was like stuffing a wolverine and a Kardashian in a sack and expecting things to work themselves out.

Honestly, things did go pretty smoothly for the first few months, a few driveway knife fights notwithstanding. It took a little while to get the Crochet! folks up to speed on how to deal with Ivana Folger-Balzac since they weren’t used to dealing with psychopaths, but before long they were dropping into the fetal position on the ground like pros the second she pulled into the driveway on one of her frequent visits in hopes of getting someone to slip up and give up Ivan’s whereabouts. They also adjusted well to the conga line of bill collectors and process servers constantly flowing up the front steps all day, and if you ask me in their time here they published some of their strongest special issues on potholders and cat diapers ever.

But then, of course, Omar Bricks found us. Say what you will about him, but that guy’s Crochet!-dar is impeccable. He never actually finished a column while he was here, I think mostly because he was so busy making Crochet!’s life completely miserable, to the glee of the rest of the commune staff. Those few weeks are kind of a blur in my memory, I remember Omar replacing all the fruit roll-ups with fly paper, and replacing their toilet seat with a thin paper replica. At some point he’d got a whole case of tiny walkie talkies at Costco and proceeded to install them in all of my mom’s horrific dolls in the attic. You haven’t been woken up until you’ve been woken up by 57 deeply disturbing porcelain dolls singing Sex Dwarf at 4 in the morning. But the last straw was when Omar asked the Crochet! staffers to watch his dog Foghat while he went to Burning Man. I know that sounds kind of anti-climactic but trust me, that attic was uninhabitable within 48 hours and I had to call FEMA after the hardiest survivors from the Crochet! staff had cleared out.

I must apologize commune readers, but the thought of all those Crochet! staffers flocking to the bus stop with their little crocheted suitcases and beanies is a little too much for one Emil Zender to bear just this moment. Check back in next week, brave friends, and we’ll bring the rest of this tale home.

Zincerely,
Emil Zender

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I was really enjoying that new Adam Sandler movie until someone told me it was a cartoon. Maybe it's my lousy depth perception, but I couldn't tell. He had all the usual facial range, I just thought they air-brushed him in the film or something. But no, he was a cartoon in it.

I didn't really like cartoons until that. Cats and mice running around trying to destroy each other... so? All I can think about is how some talented actors are out of work because some stupid sidewalk artist worked cheaper. I work cheap, folks. And don't give me any of that crap about special effects or anything. Shoot at me, stick firecrackers in my mouth, drop me off a cliff and toss an anvil down after—you don't know how bad I want to work. And stupid cartoons are taking perfectly good jobs.

Well, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, that's what I say. Or somebody said it. I said if you can't beat 'em, hire someone bigger to do it, but that doesn't apply in this case. I got to thinking about the cartoon stuff, though, and decided I could do that—the voices, I mean.

I went to my agent, Dusty—I call him that because he's so old his skin has flaked into a fine layer of powder over his entire body—and told him to get me some voice work. He sent me to a telemarketing firm, so I obviously went back and had to straighten things out with him. He's ancient, people, he's scared of new-fangled technology, like telephone devices. But he did get me a voice audition at this big animated studio.

Let's just say we didn't get along. There's no room for improv in cartoons, it turns out, and their writers are complete crap, totally unrealistic dialogue. If someone was hitting you with a hammer, which would you say: "Hey, Telly! Ooch! Ooch! That stings!" or "Step off, motherfucker, or I'm a rip your head off and skull-fuck you!" The stupid director tries to tell me they can't say "skull-fuck" on Saturday morning cartoons, but everybody remembers that one Smurf used to say it all the time. I told him I'd clean it up but after a few rehearsals—well, you'd be surprised what you can't say on Saturday morning these days, or as I like to think of it, "Satur-Nazi morning."

I figured then I'd try to get on one of those night-time cartoons like The Simpsons, but they said they only hire celebrities to do voices. I know, ooch, that stings. Been on the air twelve years and they think they know showbiz better than me. I even called back, pretending to be Tracey Gold from Growing Pains, but they told me the same thing. I bet they wouldn't have said that if I told 'em I was Boner.

Well, if all that fails I can at least try pitching an idea for my own cartoon show. How hard can it be?

My idea is border collie, just like Lassie, and I'm always getting into funny jams week after week. Say like my owners have this baby and they're neglectful parents and shit, they leave me to watch the baby but the baby gets out and buys crack or something. Now I've got to get the baby to chill out and mellow before the parents get back. Oh, and I talk. I'm a talking border collie with a catchphrase, like, "Holy shit!" or something. More clever, maybe, I don't plan on writing it. Just pitching the idea and sitting back to collect those Creative Consultant checks. It doesn't have to be a border collie either. It could be a malamute or something funnier. I'll let the writers work on it.

What I'm saying is that I've got ideas, folks, big fat gold-shitting ideas. Somebody needs to ring me up and put me back on TV, even in two dimensions.

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