Future Bob Fails to Prevent Senator's Death

onfound it all!

Anger and severe frustration were the mood Monday, October 31—Halloween—2005 when Future Bob checked his notes for things to do and realized he had forgotten to prevent the death of Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone.

Wellstone, a passionate former college professor and left-leaning Democratic Senator from Minnesota, was killed in October, 2002 in some sort of plane crash that also claimed the lives of members of his family and those aboard the plane. The details are long since lost to the ravages of time to 2005-dwelling Future Bob.

Prevention of the plane crash was on Future Bob's "to-do" list in the year 2005, though like many other events of that year have been unfortunately forgotten in time to change the future. Future Bob, as you may or may not know in 2002, has extensive bills and has to work two regular jobs in addition to his charitable contributions to the commune.

Had Wellstone's death been prevented, as per Future Bob's plans, the key Senate race in Minnesota could have been won by the Democrat and prevented Republican control of Congress and the White House in 2003, which of course led to several dark moments in recent American history such as the revoking of the 4^th Amendment and the passage of the "Sell the Homeless into Slavery Act of 2004."

With Wellstone's survival, a better period was possible for those crucial years of American history. Wellstone could have won re-election and unmasked his Senate opponent former St. Paul mayor Norm Coleman as the evil KGB mole Dmitri Raszokoff. As it stands now, history is unchanged and Coleman will not be revealed until the great Soviet Reunion of 2005.

Among other items on Future Bob's long list of regretfully-unchanged history: The Sept. 11^th attacks, a reign of terror by a trio of snipers, Will Ferrell leaving the cast of Saturday Night Live, the election of George W. "Nightmare" Bush, the release of Britney Spears' Oops… I Did it Again album, and several type-Os in his last commune article that weren't corrected.

To Future Bob's credit, he did prevent the noxious gas attack of December, 2001; the death of celebrity Tom Cruise at the hands of a gay lover; and the publication of Oprah Winfrey's Sex book.

Future Bob extends his deepest sympathies and sorrows to Wellstone's family, friends, and constituents, and hopes he can do more in the past (your future) to change history for the better. Please do not bog him down with e-mails questioning why he cannot change the past at any point in time from where he is now, it is a miserable experience trying to explain how the timeline and time travel works and it costs a lot of money to keep his futuristic past-broadcasting ham radio operating.

Once again, Future Bob is called upon to report to Long John Silver's for his first shift. Until next time, guard the country like the future depends on it—mine does. Future Bob signing off.

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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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This column marks day three of my lawsuit with my neighbor Hamms over Guanica, the masterpiece I painted on his bathroom wall in axle grease, batshit and chicken blood. Before you start freaking out, let me explain that the chicken blood part was an accident, since the guy at the pet store never told me that chickens are stupid enough to run straight into a live fan just because they're excited you put "What a Feeling" from Flashdance on the stereo again.

I'd originally bought the chicken to make sure I wasn't going to get cancer from the grease fumes in Hamms' bathroom while I was painting, sort of like the canary in the coal mine idea, only with a bigger bird. I figured canaries are pussies so I wasn't real worried about canary-killing levels of fumes, but if it was enough to put a chicken down I'd probably have to install some ventilation or invest in some scuba gear or something. "Safety First" has always been my motto. But then I had trouble finding a pet store that carried chickens, turns out those places are lousy with canaries, I guess because of the demand from local coal miners and hungry cats, but you ask for a chicken and those pricks try to sell you a goddamned Lhasa apso or something. Like I'm going to take a dog's word on dangerous gas levels. I've already got a dog that puts out enough gas to drive the dodos into extinction, thanks.

That's when I had the bright idea to just go straight to the source and buy a chicken from KFC. I figure they're swimming in the birds and wouldn't mind cutting me a deal on one, since I'd be saving them the trouble of killing the stupid thing and shaving all the feathers off with a chainsaw or whatever they do in the back before the customers come in. But you know my luck, I get a real "by the book" type behind the counter and end up having to break into KFC at three in the morning, only to find that they must let the chickens out at night, or maybe each of the workers takes a couple home for entertainment, but they sure as hell weren't anywhere in the kitchen or coat closet.

I briefly considered sneaking into work and making off with the commune's own Mazie the chicken, but I didn't want to take a chance on getting roped into one of Red Bagel's lame after-hours adventures, plus I didn't want to risk any confusing voodoo bullshit as a result of stealing a mystical chicken.

Finally I found a pet store that had a chicken, though they only had one because some fast-talking traveling salesman had duped the owner into thinking it was a rare Polynesian dancing bird, and the guy was still pissed off that he'd traded a purebred Shar-Pei for a chicken and a handful of magic beans. I must have made the guy's day when I took the chicken and the beans off his hands, but it was all for a good cause since now I could get back to painting and had some magic beans to sell to Boris Utzov for lunch money this week.

The chicken only lasted about a half an hour in the end, since the fan I'd brought in to push out the grease fumes and Foghat's B.O. didn't come with any warnings about keeping it away from extremely stupid birds. It did do a remarkably efficient chicken-killing job, however, and I've considered trying to sell it to the guys over at KFC once I've determined that they don't have my fingerprints on file. And really, the random spray of chicken gore did nothing but good things for the bathroom wall painting, adding some interesting texture to the smeared grease and caked on batshit already there.

Truth be told, the batshit part was partially an accident as well, since I hadn't realized that leaving Hamms' bathroom window open all the time so I could get in and out was going to mean the place would become infested with bats in no time flat. But it did give me a name for the painting, and I hear guano is good for wallpaper, though I'm not sure where I heard that. Probably from the "cigarette ash is good for your carpet" school of home improvement, something dreamt up by a clever Deadhead who wanted to get out of cleaning up after his stanky ass.

But anyway, the painting turned out great, whatever the department of health or Hamms might think about it. As one local alcoholic art historian has observed, "it's like Picasso's Guernica, without all the crappy parts." Which was cool by me, since I was just trying to finger-paint Lynard Skynard rumbling with a gang of tough nuns. Now the question is just to determine who really owns that bathroom wall: Hamms, whose house it's attached to and surrounded by, or Omar Bricks, who provided the blood, sweat and tears that made it into a work of art that may or may not be dangerous to the public health. The courts will have their say, but I leave the true judgment up to the art fans, who I've been charging $10 a head to use my ladder to get into Hamms' bathroom.

Bricks out.

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