Box-Traveling Moron Somehow News

hipping clerk Charles McKinley mailed himself from New York to Dallas in a shipping crate last week, as was reported by every major news outlet on Tuesday in the face of an apparent total lack of actual news.

Authorities believe McKinley had help from at least one co-worker at the New York warehouse where he is employed, since it is extremely difficult to nail yourself into a shipping crate from the inside. The homesick McKinley, too broke to afford an airline ticket, came up with the idea after a friend complimented him on his ability to avoid buying a car by stowing away in other drivers’ trunks in order to get around town. McKinley also remembered a similar idea working in a humorous MC 900 Ft. Jesus video he’d seen years before.

McKinley took neither food nor water along with him for the 15-hour journey, only a broken cell-phone and a Game Boy Advance for which he soon lamented not buying a backlight.

“I brought my cell phone, even though that piece of shit’s been broken for two weeks, just in case we got up in space and all of a sudden I had service again,� explained McKinley. “That’dve been sweet, because I could call up Charles and be like ‘Yo whatup dog, I’m calling you from a box in space and shit!’ There’s no way Charles would believe that, man, he’d think I was drunk or something. But he’dve been wrong. I wish I was drunk, that probably would’ve made the fifteen hours in the dark with knees all crammed up in my face go faster now that I think about it. But yeah, I brought my cell phone because I think it’s the battery that’s all jacked from the time I dropped it in that toilet at the bar, and I figure it might not have enough juice to pull down the phone calls from the satellites all the way to the ground, you know? But maybe it’ll work on the plane ‘cuz we’re closer to the satellites and all that. But no dice, piece of shit was still busted.�

Embarrassed federal officials are still trying to determine how McKinley made it through airport security, which presumably has some kind of dogs or something that check to make sure crates being shipped don’t smell like sweaty morons. Officials refused to speculate what security measures might be in place to prevent this kind of occurrence, though they neither confirmed nor denied that a funny way to test would be to drop all packages from a height of several feet to see if any of them screamed.

Upon arriving at his parents’ suburban Dallas home, McKinley busted out of the crate with a crowbar, scaring the holy shit out of a deliveryman who thought he was dropping off a huge shipment of Triscuits.

“I thought it was funny that the thing smelled like a big box of snack crackers and B.O., but I still didn’t expect some weirdo to bust out like a jackass-in the-box,� explained deliveryman Billy Ray Thomas. “And yeah, the rumors are true, I may have screamed kind of like a girl when he popped out. And then I called the cops on my cell phone because, hey man, fuck you!�

When the police arrived they arrested McKinley on an unrelated charge of passing bad checks and sneaking onto a train in a large duffel bag. Federal officials are also considering charges of “stowing away on a plane,� the violation of a law created in the 1940’s to give police characters more to do in Warner Bros. cartoons.

Asked how much he saved by traveling in the cargo hold, McKinley made it clear that his employer had unwittingly footed the bill for his low-budget odyssey. “Oh shit man, I couldn’t afford to mail a box that heavy. You have any idea what that must cost? Damn. I just traveled cross-country in a crate, Jack, do I look like I’m made of money?�

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All that writing about accidental TV nudity last column got me thinking about one thing: big hair, bare bottoms, and the Decade of the Streak. That's right, the 1970's. Actually, to be totally accurate, the 70's weren't really a historical decade, though they are often mistaken for such. In reality, the 1970's were actually just one giant fad. Sucks for those of us who were either born in the 70's or were the president then, but there are worse things that presiding over the biggest fad in the history of the world.

But back to the bare bottoms. Streaking was the third best thing to come out of the 70's, after Griswald Dreck and taking drugs at work. Random, naked people in public? Forget about it. People even went to baseball games in the 1970's, because that seemed to be as good a place as any to see streakers.

The 1978 film Animal House inspired the toga party, probably the lamest of the 70's fads. What might have been a fun trend and excuse to get fat was done in by the fact that nobody knew how to tie a toga right, and as a result there were more bare asses and exposed flab at your average toga party than there was at a streaker's convention. The toga party fad quickly and quietly died out when people realized "Hey, let's all get together and look like shit!" wasn't really as much fun as it sounded.

Every decade has its own dangerous fad designed to weed out the deficient from the population, it's nature's way. In the 70's, it was glass eating. Linebacker Greg Luzinski started the trend when he accidentally ate an entire beer mug while drunk, thinking it was a beer popsicle. The trend spread across the nation at the speed of stupid and before long college kids everywhere were eating light bulbs whenever they didn't have time for a sit-down meal. University facilities budgets went through the roof and Charmin released a new line of red toilet paper that hid evidence of inconvenient anal bleeding. Unfortunately, the fad proved short lived when Luzinski did, dropping dead of a glassasscopy in 1977.

Every decade, or pseudo-decade, also has its brilliant way to bilk doofuses out of their cash, and the 70's version was the pet rock. Created by a California inventor who dreamed of finding a way to turn the rocks on his front lawn into weed, and unleashed on a public tired of feeding freeloading animals and starving African children, the pet rock was an enormous hit among Americans who didn't know what to get their brother's kids for Christmas. The versatile pet rock also served a dual purpose, both as a gag gift and a weapon to be thrown at gag gifters.

No overview of 70's fads would be complete without a mention of disco, which was not so much a fad as aural wallpaper for the fad of the 1970's themselves. What more can be said about the most misguided musical idea since Mozart's tuba sonata? Not much, though in all fairness you could do worse if you want a soundtrack for doing cocaine and screwing your sister. What you couldn't do much worse than, however, is "Disco Duck," 1976's answer to New Age theories that there was no Satan.

As you're probably starting to catch on, everything in the 1970's was a fad, and thank God. One of the more embarrassing was the practice of talking to plants, originated by hard-up stoners chanting "Grow, weed, grow!" to their closet garden creations and crossing over to the flakiest strata of the mainstream, who took the April 1st edition of Scientific American at face value. Other notable fads originated in this "April Fool's" issue include aromatherapy and cancer research.

Nixon brought acupuncture back with him from China like a rat in his suitcase, and this fad spread faster than you could stick a sewing needle into a yuppie's ass. While certainly high on unintentional humor factor, acupuncture sacrificed some of its usefulness as a fad by looking really uncomfortable and causing people to cringe at the same time as they were laughing at the yoyos being stuck with the needles.

The 70's fad that probably least deserved to die was EST therapy, a revolutionarily hilarious idea based on putting the patient into a room full of assholes and yelling at them. The suicide rate during treatment was 100%, and as a result the fragile members of the species were weeded out of the herd in time for the alpha dog orgy known as the 1980's. The psychiatric profession has seldom known a treatment so efficient or fun to watch, and EST will be sorely missed.

The 70's also saw the invention of the hacky sack, which finally gave American teens something to do while they were in college. George Abrams, the inventor of the sack, was inspired by watching a Massachusetts mental patient who would compulsively kick himself in the nuts as if he were playing one of those ball-string-and-paddle games. Abrams was struck with the idea of how fun this might be if in didn't involve getting kicked in the balls so much, and something sort of like a sport was born.

While 8-tracks, CB radios and hideous string art creations all held their own as ridiculous 70's time-wasters, the moped really takes the cake as the defining piece of 1970's crap. With all the danger and inconvenience of a bicycle, but none of the exercise, the moped captured the cheap-assed imaginations of a country that thought gas was expensive. Hundreds of thousands of mopeds were sold during the Mideast oil embargo in 1973, with every last one of them being traded away for pocket fuzz and spare buttons at garage sales or pushed off a cliff six months later when the Arabs turned the gas tap back on. Which, if you've ever tried to ride a bike in bellbottoms, you know was probably the best thing that happened during the 70's.

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There's been a lot of fuss around the commune offices lately about the upcoming presidential election, and it's high time Omar Bricks weighed in on the action: I say Lil Duncan takes Ivana Folger-Balzac in four rounds. That's a controversial wager, I realize, but I hear Balzac's been betting heavily against herself under the assumed name of Flora Wackser and I've got it on good authority that she's going to take a dive in the fourth.

Even if the upcoming breakroom fight weren't fixed, I'd still be wondering if Balzac was going to be her usual invincible, dirty-fighting self, since she only started the "commune Republicans Club" to piss off the rest of the staff and isn't likely to put it all on the line defending the club's honor. Plus, the only other commune Republican who could get her back if Duncan pulled a knife would be Ted Ted, who's mad enough for a man twice his size but still remains listed as a generous three-foot four on his trading card.

Have you seen these things? Emil Zender's been printing them out on his home computer, a collectable set of the entire commune staff. They're like Garbage Pail Kids, only ugly.

Seriously though, If you haven't seen them yet, the cards are pretty sharp. They've all got pretty awesome embarrassing pics of commune staffers on the front with their vital stats on the back. Ted Ted's is hilarious since somebody somehow had a camera ready when they caught him humping that baby-CPR doll in the closet last month.

I'm in the deck too, of course, but the picture on my card's just an out-of-focus shot of me building a Loch Ness Monster decoy in my garage for that hoax last year, when I was planning on riding it across the East River and into the city like I'd made Nessie my bitch. They should have got a photo of that fuckin' thing sinking into the river like a lead weight with an asscramp and me getting that helicopter ride back to land, but I guess the technology's not quite there to have a whole video clip from the news playing on a baseball card.

Anyway, while we're on the subject, I might as well weigh in on the lame-assed presidential election itself. You know Omar Bricks doesn't waste a lot of time thinking about politics, but when I do I think this: It's time we elected Evel Knievel as the President of the United States. I'll wait a second for the reasoning behind this to become obvious to you.

First and most obviously, I can't vote for Bush. Bush is like the guy you knew in the fourth grade who would light his farts on fire, until he came across a set of flammable drapes and ended up burning half the house down. Maybe when Bush grows up he'll turn out to have real presidential potential, but for now I think we need to protect the White House drapes.

And I'm pretty sure I pantsed John Kerry in the seventh grade. According to office dickwad Raoul Dunkin, that's mathematically impossible, but I'd remember that sour mug anywhere. So no way I can vote for that guy.

Ralph Nader? Sounds too much like Darth Vader. No way I'm voting for some Star Wars geek, he'd probably blow half the budget funding research on the Force. Though I have to admit, I would pay good money to see a presidential debate where Nader does that little throat-pinchy gesture and the other guy drops dead. That would be pretty decisive.

But if Nader could pull that shit off, he probably would have done it last election so he wouldn't have had to spend the last four years working at that organic grocery out in Portland. So really, when you stop and think about it, Evel Knievel's our only good choice.

How hard would the vote be rocked if we had a debate where all the candidates had to out-stunt each other on live TV? I guarantee you some voter turnout for that shit. Let's see Bush or Kerry jump a motorcycle over a dozen school buses or a tank full of starving sharks. No need to take polls over who won the debate when the runner-up ran over his own pelvis or shattered his spine on national television.

And you can forget all this bullshit about purple hearts and who's got the balls to fight the war on terror, let one of those other guys strap a rocket to his ass and try to jump across the Colorado River. Not going to happen. So Knievel wins in a landslide, and he gets sworn in while surfing down a real landslide on a TV tray. Shit yeah.

The only thing that can stop him now is if he's already dead. I need to look that up.

Bricks out.

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