Affluenza boy, he did not want to be on probation. Most people who are on probation, let's face it, don't want to be there. I certainly didn't. Though probation, it must be admitted, is better than prison.

Affluenza boy, he did not go to the prison. When one night, just past 16, he, like a conehead, drank mass quantities, and then, like a South Dakota governor, got in his car and drove until he crashed and killed some people. The prosecutors, they wanted to put him in the prison, and for many years. But his parents got some lawyers, and the lawyers got a brain doctor, and the brain doctor got up on the stand and testified that the boy suffered from "affluenza," a crippling condition wherein one is born and raised in such wealth and privilege one develops no understanding of what is conventionally meant by right or wrong. Because of this sorrowful sickness, the brain doctor urged, Affluenza boy should not be punished, but instead rehabilitated.

Previously, "affluenza" had been a joke malady, invented by that Jabba the Hutt who bestains the national airwaves as the Runt Limprod show. But now, it was Real.

The judge, he made it more Real, by abjuring the prison, and gifting upon Affluenza boy ten years of the judicial clemency of probation.

One of the terms and conditions of that probation was that Affluenza boy not drink like a conehead. But then, it is alleged, he did drink like a conehead. And, because it is apparently now impossible for anyone to say or do anything without it being photographed and/or filmed and then dumped onto the intertubes by oneself or one's "friends," footage of the conehead-drinking seeped into public view.

Affluenza boy, he did not want to listen to some judge lecture him about violating probation, with the conehead-drinking. So he and his mom, they went down to Mexico. Like all the good outlaws do. They had seen it on the television.

Everything was fine down there until they used a phone to order a Domino's pizza. As proof that They now listen to every phone call everywhere, this pizza-order was heard by Them, who then dispatched others of Them to go roust out Affluenza-boy and his mom and put them in the handcuffs.

Some will say that people who would order and consume a Domino's pizza deserve what they get. But generally what they get is so sick they go to a hospital. Not a jail.

It is also evident that anyone who in Mexico would eschew the actual food available there, for a Domino's pizza, is thereby sorely tempting some sort of Fate, to visit some sort of Wrath.

Affluenza boy, he has some lawyers, who are fighting extradition, and so he is still in Mexico. It is possible that the lawyers may argue he should not be extradited back to the United States, because that is not a civilized country. And it is possible they may prevail.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=310E1bNb9_w]

Affluenza boy and his mom, when they nestled into Mexico, nestled, like boneheads, into Puerto Vallarta. Which is a gringo tourist mecca. And therefore just the sort of place They would expect to find an on-the-lam gringo conehead-drinker who got the idea to flee to Mexico from the television.

Puerto Vallarta is today a gringo tourist mecca largely because in 1963 a big band of wildly bibulous gringos traveled there to make a film of The Night Of The Iguana. Which is itself about a tosspot gringo minister who desperately careens into a Mexican booze-wallow, when his life is falling apart.

Independent producer Ray Stark got his mitts on Iguana, the Tennessee Williams play, and brought it to director John Huston. Stark was an actual animal—he would soon become widely reviled among film artisans as "the hound from Hell"—but in 1963 he was still a newbie as a producer, and so on Iguana he was unable to inflict any real catastrophic damage.

For instance, Stark wanted to film in Acapulco. But Huston told him to pound sand. Back in 1929, while on a voyage off the coast of western Mexico, Huston had been struck by the splendid isolation and smothering atmosphere of an insect-infested promontory known as Mismaloya. Huston discovered that in 1963 this lonely spot on the Bay of Banderas was still the domain of mosquitoes and lizards—unmarked on any map, surrounded by thick rainforest, accessible only by dugout canoe, populated by less than 100 Tarascan people. Huston told Stark he would make the film there—shooting bits of early action in the nearby then-hamlet of Puerto Vallarta.

Huston learned that Mexican architect Guillermo Wulff held a lease, from the Tarascan, on a piece of Mismaloya. He then contracted with Wulff to build, under the supervision of set director Stephen Grimes, an exact replica of a weathered Mexico hotel at the very tip of Mismaloya, some 300 feet above the sea. Huston also ordered construction of 40 bungalows as living quarters for cast and crew; he and Wulff hoped after the film to turn this "temporary" housing into a profitable resort.

When Grimes saw Wulff using beachsand to make cement, he demanded the architect desist, arguing the sand contained so much salt it would inevitably and prematurely weaken the concrete. Wulff and Grimes first quarreled, then compromised: beachsand would be used for the bungalows, less salty material would go into the actual set.

While 283 workers and 80 burros labored in Mismaloya, Huston and writer Anthony Veiller went to work on the script. In the play, the Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon, locked out of his church for fornicating with a young parishioner, finds himself adrift, awash in alcohol, reduced to escorting elderly churchwomen on fourth-rate bus tours through fifth-rate sites in Mexico and the southwest US. Shannon, in Huston's words a man "desperate and full of despair, at the end of his rope," desperately fleeing a swarm of interior "spooks," seeking to move his crumbling life from "the fantastic level to the realistic level," more or less hijacks his tour bus full of straightlaced females and strands it in an isolated out-of-season hotel run by the widow of an old friend. There he is set upon by Nazi tourists and plagued by a trio of rapacious women.

Huston and Veiller first jettisoned the Nazis, then transformed the women into humans. In this, they were wise.

Richard Burton was chosen to play Shannon; Ava Gardner signed on as Maxine, "the widow Faulk." Deborah Kerr would appear as the asexual itinerant sketch-artist Hannah, who arrives at the hotel with grandfather Nanno, "the world's oldest living and practicing poet." Sue Lyon, fresh from Lolita, was cast as Charlotte, the insistent nymphet whose presence after hours in Shannon's room precipitates the maddened minister's panicked flight to the sanctuary of Maxine's hotel.

Burton, his inamorata Elizabeth Taylor, Gardner, Kerr, and Lyon, as well as Huston and Williams, were then at or near their peak period of popular acclaim. The press slowly became aware that a clutch of filmdom's most fascinating personalities was inexplicably bound for some isolated place none of them had ever heard of. Surely bloodshed, or some other scandal, among these wild filmic beasts, must result. So, in newsrooms around the world, inkstained wretches began making plans to be there.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=od9U762vvpM]

The converging journalists soon found that even reaching Mismaloya from Puerto Vallarta qualified as a harrowing ordeal.

"There's no harbor at Vallarta," scribe Stephen Birmingham would report. "You climb into a native dugout canoe on the beach—which they call the Beach of the Dead—then wait for a wave big enough to carry your canoe into deep water. Then you are paddled out to a waiting motor launch. There you stand up and leap for the other boat—which is always tricky since the rim of the launch is considerably higher than the rim of the canoe. Next comes the eight-mile trip across the bay to the peninsula itself. Disembarking at Mismaloya is equally nervewracking. You must leap from the launch onto a floating pier, where you wait till a wave carries the pier close to shore. Then you literally fling yourself onto some rusted steps leading to a kind of wharf, which puts you on dry land. Catching your breath, you doggedly tackle the 134 earthen steps which have been carved into the mountainside—to the pinnacle where Huston has his hotel."

Most believed the trip worth the effort, however. For Huston had assembled in and around The Night of the Iguana one of the more incestuous groupings of Hollywood glitterati then extant. The prospects for disaster were so great that before filming began the director summoned Burton, Taylor, Gardner, Kerr, Lyon, and Stark to the bar of his newly completed Mismaloya hotel and presented each with a gold-plated derringer in a velvet box. Each of the six also received five golden bullets, engraved with the names of the other five.

Richard Burton, still legally wed to wife Sybil, arrived in Puerto Vallarta accompanied by lover Elizabeth Taylor, still legally wed to Eddie Fisher. Taylor was not in the film, but Gardner, Kerr, and Lyon were. Taylor was a-feared that, without her presence, Burton might feel compelled to insert his penis into Gardner, Kerr, and/or Lyon. Taylor was feeling proprietary about that penis, and did not want it to go into those places.

"I trust Richard completely" Taylor said. "It's just that I don't trust Fate. After all, Fate threw us together in Cleopatra."

Burton’s agent Hugh French brought his assistant Michael Wilding, better known as the second Mr. Taylor. As part of his official duties, Wilding publicized the romance between Burton and Taylor, rented the couple a yacht so they could glide in comfort from Puerto Vallarta to Mismaloya each day, and often thoughtfully packed picnic lunches for Burton and his own once-upon-a-time blushing bride.

The thrice-wed Ava Gardner had once been legally linked to Artie Shaw, who was currently married to Huston's most recent ex-wife, Evelyn Keyes. Years before, a bleary-eyed Huston had driven to Las Vegas to marry Keyes only hours after Gardner refused to conclude an inebriated pool party in the director's bed. Deborah Kerr was on set with current husband Peter Viertel, who had been Gardner's bedmate during the filming of The Sun Also Rises. Author Budd Schulberg dropped in for a week: first wife Virginia Ray had left him to marry Viertel. Viertel had written screenplays for Huston, and would do so again, but the two men were currently estranged over Viertel's searing portrait of the director in his "novel" White Hunter, Black Heart, an only occasionally fictionalized account of the pair's disgusting elephant-hunting during the making of The African Queen.

In Wulff's newly constructed bungalows Sue Lyon entertained her lover Hampton Fancher III, while a few doors down Fancher's wife roomed with Lyon's mother. Lyon also brought "companion" Eva Martine, a beautiful young opium aficionado. Back in the states, Skip Ward's wife was furious to learn the actor had arrived on location with inamorata Julia Payne. Tennessee Williams, who had never married anybody, flew down with lover Freddy in tow, as well as a poodle named Gigi, who proved pathetically susceptible to sunstroke.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDRKPFRjAHE]

Alcohol was a unifying force for many of the film's principals. The theme was sounded even before production began, when Huston and Stark flew to Madrid to convince Gardner to accept the role of Maxine.

"I knew damn well that Ava was going to do it," Huston recalled. "She did, too—but she wanted to be courted. So we went out with my beloved Ava two or three nights running. She lived a very rigorous existence, I must say. We'd meet late in the afternoon, have drinks, then go to dinner around ten o'clock. After dining, it was the clubs and the dancing, and this would go on all night. Ray was made of stronger stuff than I—not quite of the metal and fiber of Ava, who was quite capable of going on through that night and through the next day and the next night and the next. I presently dropped out and Ray went on as her escort for several nights until we left Madrid."

On location, when the likes of Taylor demanded daily doses of hamburgers slathered with onions, imported at great cost from the US, and the 17-year-old Lyon insisted she could not act unless supplied with gefilte fish and red horseradish flown in each morning from Cuernevaca, Gardner requested only that her icebox remain fully stocked at all times with bottles of Mexican beer.

Although she moved five times during production, Gardner would invariably awake each morning to find the Mexican beach boys Huston had hired to prance around Gardner, on-screen and off, "dead drunk on the patio. Once I had a house with no roof and a twenty-foot wall on the outside. They could scale it like monkeys." She eventually abandoned the abode because "you never knew in the morning when you woke up who would be lying there next to you." The pair consistently appeared on camera "high on pot and this cactus booze called raicilla, which kind of twists your mind."

Burton too was quite taken with raicilla, a paralyzing 180-proof blend of cactus brandy. "If you drink it straight down," he confided to one reporter, "you can feel it going into each individual intestine." Huston, who was also known to imbibe a glass or nine of the stuff, claimed this effect was due to the fact the distillery "left the needles in."

"They were all into the tequila," Zoe Sallis, Huston's then-lover, recalled. "Burton and Elizabeth had a lot of rows. Steve Grimes was with some weird German who kept dancing on the tables nude." One evening the usually mild-mannered Williams, controlled by tequila, felt compelled to batter an unconscionably slow Puerto Vallarta bartender. Cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, most often a quiet, sensitive man, became, when one with tequila, an opera singer of considerable lung power; only unconsciousness, could stop the music.

Shooting began each morning promptly at 7:30 a.m.; Burton usually popped his first beer of the day some time earlier. "It used to amaze me, seeing Burton at seven in the morning drinking beer," said assistant director Tom Shaw. "And he'd drink beer all morning long. By the time we finished he would have had a case of beer. And then he'd shift into high gear." One morning Burton experienced difficulty with his gearbox: while the cameras rolled, Burton poured out of a chair onto the cement, slashing his thigh. Stoically he waved away assistance and went on with the scene.

When he first arrived on Mismaloya, Burton was horrified to hear Kerr and Lyon state their belief this would be a "dry" set. "Preposterous!" he bellowed. "Inconceivable! Whoever heard of a location site without a bar? In England, while working with Pete O'Toole on Becket, I was stoned for three entire days—and that was a much more religious role. I was the Archbishop of Canterbury! Why, a bar is absolutely ethnic to our culture."

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Bzdt31Zshk]

Huston's cotillion of libidinous, bibulous gringos attracted the wrath of Siempre, a local newspaper that editorially thundered "our children of 10 and 15 are being introduced to sex, drink, drugs, vice, and carnal bestiality by the garbage of the United States: gangsters, nymphomaniacs, heroin-taking blondes." The paper called for the prompt deportation of the Iguana troupe, vowing "it is not too late. Responsible Mexicans can still save Puerto Vallarta."

Huston's public response was a verbal shrug: "I am far too busy to spread any carnal bestiality." The finished film, however, contained a scene in which Emilio Fernandez, as the proprietor of a beachside boozeshack, upbraids Lyon for her sensual three-step with Garnder's beach boys. "No more!" he shouts. "Stop it, I say! Senorita, go home. Take your dollars with you. I am a rich man; I do not want your dollars. I do not want you dancing to my music. No more music! We do not want our sons to know that young girls can be like you."

In the end some 130 members of the world press descended on Puerto Vallarta for The Night of the Iguana. "They're giving us ten million bucks of free publicity," crowed producer Stark. "We've got more reporters up here than iguanas." The newshounds grew increasingly frustrated, however, as the expected offscreen orgy of sexfueled violence failed to materialize. In desperation, some members of the press tried to manufacture a romance between Fernandez and Gardner, a fantasy that intrigued the former and amused the latter. Gardner was in fact spending much of her time in the company of a local beach bum named Tony, but where they went and what they did remained a secret, for no reporter was ever able to follow long Gardner’s sleek new Ferrari.

At one point the shoot was plagued by rumors Fernandez had suddenly gone for his guns in a Puerto Vallarta cantina, wildly emptying his revolvers and killing two gringo tourists. (Fernandez was in Mexico legendary as a director who sometimes employed firearms in his craft: occasionally he would pistol-whip a particularly slow actor; on the set of his most recent film, he'd shot the producer.) When a persistent reporter for a Fleet Street rag demanded details of his alleged cantina gringo-killing, Fernandez claimed he'd only knocked the two unconscious. "I have not shot a tourist in seven years," he protested.

In truth, the biggest news on Iguana, as on many Huston films, was the cast and crew's daily battle with their own mortality. To begin with, Mismaloya was home to an astonishing variety of malevolent fauna—scorpions, midges, chiggers, mites, mosquitoes, fleas, flies, spiders, and snakes. "Turn on a light and your wall is covered with insects," moaned one principal. "Walk outside and a spider lands in your hair." Shooting was interrupted while Lyon recovered from a serious scorpion bite. When Taylor blithely strutted about in open-toed sandals, chiggers bored into her feet and had to be carved out with a knife. "They burrow under the skin until they find a vein," the chastened chiggerbearer explained, "then they enter your bloodstream. After that, the only time you can see them is when they’re passing across your eyeballs."

Burton, he was electrified, when it came time to shoot the film’s epiphany. The script had a now-becalmed Shannon, as an act of empathetic anthropomorphic mercy, cutting loose a tethered iguana bound for the stewpot, thereby freeing "one of God's creatures at the end of his rope." Problem was the iguana, a congenitally sluggish animal, refused to move. Shouting and stomping did no good; the thing also ignored brandished broom handles; turpentine applied to its tail produced only a slight twitch. Finally Huston instructed a technician to rig a charged wire to deliver 110 volts of electricity into the flesh of the recalcitrant beast. But when Huston gave the word it was Burton who did the dance of St. Vitus: he’d been stroking the reptile, and the current passed directly into his hand.

[video:[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO2bp3U3l4c]

The most serious accident to strike the set occurred early one morning when it became clear Gardner's big dramatic moment would have to wait until she had only 10 or 15 beers in her system, rather than the 40 or 50 she'd that eve consumed. Assistant director Tom Shaw retired to the balcony of his room, calling over to neighbor Terry Morris to come by so the two could discuss the next night's shoot. When Morris joined Shaw on his perch, some 18 feet above the ground, the entire balcony collapsed. The salty beachsand Wulff used to construct the bungalows had at last given way. Morris landed atop Shaw and limped off with minor injuries; Shaw's back was broken in two places. He was placed aboard a boat and floated to Puerto Vallarta, where he was flown the same morning back to the US.

A disgusted Huston walked into another bungalow and with a single kick knocked over the balustrade. As the stunned director gazed upon this latest manifestation of entropy, a panting crewmember dashed up to inform him the roof of a third structure had suddenly collapsed. "God alive!" Huston swore. "We'd better get this damn picture finished before we’re all covered with rubble."

"We had a sixty-day schedule and half the bungalows started to fall apart after sixty days," said Stark. In the end, only the set was left standing. "A nice twist," Grimes added. "Looks better now than when we shot it. Aged beautifully."

The press could expend only so many inches on chiggers and crumbling stone. What readers wanted was human dirt, and the Iguana people obdurately refused to provide it. None of the principals were even remotely close to resorting to their derringers, and, on Huston's orders, even Fernandez had been shorn of his six-guns ("It's like asking Samson to get a crewcut," Fernandez complained). So, inevitably, the 130 scribes, to justify their continued existence in sunny Mexico, began instead to file stories on the place, instead of the people. In a matter of months Puerto Vallarta was transformed from a small coastal village into one of the top ten "in" spots in the western hemisphere.

"The press gathered down there expecting something to happen with all these volatile personalities," Huston said years later. "They felt the lid would blow off and there would be fireworks. When there weren't any, they were reduced to writing about Puerto Vallarta. And, I'm afraid, that was the beginning of its popularity, which was a mixed blessing. The beaches became lined by hotels and condominiums. The natives have became waiters, chambermaids, or cops. There are traffic jams, burglaries, muggings. Most of the shops are tourist-oriented.

"But the water is potable. Nobody's face is pitted with smallpox anymore. Typhoid and typhus have almost ceased to exist. And children have as good a chance to be born alive here as anywhere in the world."

Huston lived for many years in a place he created just south of Mismaloya, in Las Caletas, also leased from the Tarascan, also accessible only by water; until, in the end, the emphysema took him, and he returned to the United States, to die.

Tennessee Williams, he had a sad life, and he met a sad end. But he knew what it was about. For, for instance, he Saw, and he Felt, and he wrote: "Nothing human, disgusts me, Mr. Shannon. Unless it's unkind, or violent."

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1L63wTfPzg]

Meanwhile, in other alcohols, a New York woman had drunk-driving charges lodged against her dismissed when it was determined her body is actually a full-time brewery.

The woman was arrested while driving with a blood-alcohol level more than four times the legal limit in New York state. She then discovered she had a rare condition called "auto-brewery syndrome", in which her digestive system converts ordinary food into alcohol, according to her lawyer, Joseph Marusak.

"At the end of the day, she had a blood-alcohol content of .36 without drinking any alcoholic beverages," [her lawyer] said. He added the woman also bought a Breathalyser and blew into it every night for 18 days, registering around .20 every time.

The legal threshold for drunkenness in New York is 0.08. Mr Marusak submitted medical evidence of his client's condition to the judge, who dismissed the drink-driving charges. The woman is now free to drive without restrictions.

And The Mad Bomber has released a campaign ad in which she brags about getting shit-faced on vodka with John McCain.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75x6nb5NqYM]

I haven't the faintest idea who the Bomber is trying to appeal to with this ad. Do you? Conehead-drinkers who flee with their moms to Mexico? Beats me.

I am, increasingly, a-feared, that I am, increasingly, unmoored, from what is supposed to be "acceptable," "normal," or even "real," on this planet.

Like, it seems to me, that Vladimir Putin, he is becoming—every day, in every way—a sort of Kardashian.

For, you can get yerself a calendar of him, in which he is ofttimes at least part-nekkid.

And there is a Putin perfume, so you can smell, all up in your every part, like his manly-manliness him.

And there is a book of his accumulated wisdoms, so you can strive to be—yeah!—just like he.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JDzlhW3XTM]

And, like all good Kardashians, he is just the bestest of friends, with The Hairball.

In fact, I am thinking, that after The Hairball doesn't get to be the president, and the tsar thing inevitably starts to go south for Putin, the two of them can go on the television, in a re-imagining of some Ole West TV show like Alias Smith And Jones.

Putin, he can be Hannibal Hayes, and The Hairball, he can be Kid Curry. And together, they can ride across the Western plains. Alternately committing, and solving, Crimes.

This sort of show, it is a natural for Putin. Who, as everyone knows, likes to ride. I do not know if The Hairball likes to ride. But it doesn't matter. Because Putin can ride the Hairball. And, since the show will be filmed in the US, this riding, shall not violate any Russian laws.

I trust everyone was properly circumcised yesterday. On January 1, that day set aside to honor the filleting of the foreskin of the Lord.

Heathens, we know, have alternative traditions, for January 1, when they should be cabined to reverently hacking off penis flesh.

In Venice, everybody kisses everybody. In Chile, they go to the graveyards, light candles, and talk to the dead. In Turkey, everyone dons red underpants. In Romania, the people become bears. Around these froot-loop California parts, just as in a crazed corner of Wales, people dive into ice-cold water, and try therein not to die of heart attacks. And, in a congenitally disturbed corner of North Carolina, they drop possums.

The lights are strung, the stage is set and Baby New Year is waiting in a cage, hissing.

Brasstown, once again, is ready for the Possum Drop.

Yes, the annual New Year's Eve Possum Drop, the one and only, inspired by the dropping of a certain illuminated ball 670 miles away.

On Thursday, at the stroke of midnight, at the exact moment that hundreds of thousands of people holler in the New Year at Times Square, with millions more tipping back champagne flutes and watching it on TV, a few hundred people will huddle at a Citgo station in this little Appalachian town, wearing hunting jackets and hats with dangling ear flaps, to cheer the descent of one confused marsupial . . . .

It started 13 years ago, when someone said to Clay Logan, owner of Brasstown’s only gas station and vendor of kitschy possum products, "If New York City can drop a ball, why can’t we drop a possum?"

Mr. Logan could think of no reason why not.

At midnight, as he lets a rope slip between his fingers, lowering a possum in a plexiglass cage from the roof of his gas station, Mr. Logan will call out, as he has every New Year’s Eve since 1990, "5, 4, 3, 2, 1!"

And then, as the crowd starts going bananas, "The possum has landed!"

Then come fireworks, and bear stew, the firing of muskets, a cross-dressing Miss Possum contest, and the singing of such bluegrass tunes as "down in the darkness/much to my delight/there's five pounds of possum/in my headlights tonight."

Heh. Humans. Pumped up kicks.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58NqTpUL2rw]

Now, I understand the impulse to distinguish oneself and one's neighbors from the denizens of New York City. And to have some goofy fun while doing so. But surely there is another way than pressganging some shivering, quivering possum, into the festivities.

The folks in Atlanta, for instance, host a Peach Drop for New Year's. While there is a Red Shoe Drop, down in Key West, wherein a six-foot-tall high-heel shoe, bearing a drag queen, is slowly lowered from a balcony.

I can tell you I have communed some with possums. And I know, for sure, from that, that they're spooked creatures. Just about anything can, and will, kill and eat them: and they know this. So, they live a life of Fear. Back at the Old Place, I was sitting out on the deck one night, having a smoke, when a tiny little possum came skittering onto the deck, hugging close to the wall. I softly said "hello." As I usually would to whatever rat, bat, skunk, deer, coon, snake, or fox might amble onto the deck. And this possum leapt high into the air; when it came down, it stood stock-still, frozen, shivering. I thought it would have a heart attack.

That possum there in Brasstown, I'm sure all that it is thinking, as the chortling celebrants cage it away in preparation for the drop, and then during the drop itself, is someone is killing me.

Clay Logan, in musing to the Times reporter about possibilities for the next year's Brasstown Possum Drop, unwittingly hit upon a much better substitute. Said Logan: "Next year, I'd love to get me an albino. They're rare. And hard to catch. But imagine that. An albino possum drop."

Well, Clay, I say you're halfway there. For you should indeed get yourself an albino. But not an albino possum. What you need, hoss, is an albino human being.

Because lowering from your gas-station roof there in Brasstown an albino banjo-player would transmit the same message—"we are different from New York City"—and would be regionally quite appropriate. As Brasstown abuts the Chattahoochee National Forest, where the boys of Deliverance did play. And the famous pigment-less banjo-plucker in that film, he did indeed, wail away, from atop a platform, at a gas station.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myhnAZFR1po]

Brasstown briefly attained 15 minutes of fame when the folks thereabouts were suspected of sheltering the crazed Christianist terrorist Eric Rudolph, who bombed the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, various and sundry abortion clinics, and a lesbian bar. Rudolph grew up around Brasstown, and comes from interesting stock: while Rudolph was on the run, his brother, David, videotaped himself cutting off his own hand with a radial saw, to "send a message to the FBI and the media."

Once the Rudolphs were put away, Brasstown withdrew again into obscurity: the Possum Drop was contrived, says Logan, because the town "desperately needed something."

Now, I understand all about "desperately needing something." For surely there comes a time when we all "desperately need something." I myself have been there. Many times. But never did I feel that what I "needed" involved stuffing a small marsupial into a cage and lowering it from the roof of a gas station while chanting a descending series of numbers.

Might I suggest that what Brasstown may really "need" is some black people?

The town is located in the smallest county in North Carolina, Clay County, named for Henry Clay, a howling racist, and a man credited with bringing the mint julep to Washington DC, thereby introducing to the already legendarily bibulous residents of that city, a new way to get wacky.

Some 98.01% of the county’s population is white, as compared to an infinitesimal 0.8% for black folk. Since there are only 8,775 people in the whole county, with but 240 in Brasstown, that means that the entire black population of the latter, would fit into my bedroom.

Get some black people into the county, I say. And then, some years later, the New Year's fun and festivities can be all about putting a white man in a cage, and lowering him slowly down, as black people clap and chant and sing "5-4-3-2-1."

Happy new year, white man. Pressure drop: pressure gonna—how you now like it?—drop on you.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGMnOHqSbiI]

In the local weekly newspaper they have a thing where a reporter goes out on the street and asks of random people a question, and the people answer the question, and then the paper prints, with photos of the people, their answers.

Most recently the question was "2016 will be . . . " And an answer, from one man, came back: "It will be another nice, calm, peaceful year. I'm a teacher, I like what I do, I'll be teaching all through the years. I'll be happy."

I like that. A lot. For Reality is what you make of it. There is therefore absolutely no reason why this year cannot be nice, calm, peaceful, happy, not only for this man, but for everyone.

For, similarly, when Kenneth Patchen wrote: "I write along a single line: I never get off it. I said that you were never to kill anyone, and I meant it." That was a chance at the same sort of Reality. And when John Lennon said: "War is over if you want it." That was a chance at the same sort of Reality.

That Reality's gonna get here, someday, anyway. As the Right Reverend Jerome J. Garcia, he saw and he said:

The information we’re plugged into is the universe itself, and everybody knows that on a cellular level. It's built in. Just superficial stuff like what happened to you in your lifetime is nothing compared to the container which holds all your information. And there's a similarity in all our containers. We are all one organism, we are all the universe, we are all doing the same thing. That's the sort of thing that everybody knows, and I think that it's only weird little differences that are making it difficult. The thing is that we're all earthlings. The earthling consciousness is the one that's really trying to happen at this juncture and so far it's only a tiny little glint, but it's already over. The change has already happened, and it’s a matter of swirling out. It has already happened. We're living after the fact. It's a postrevolutionary age. The change is over. The rest of it is a cleanup action. Unfortunately its very slow. Amazingly slow and amazingly difficult.

So, some year, it will get here. I say: why not this year? Why not this year—everyone, all, as the man do say, be nice, calm, peaceful, happy? Why not this year—as the man do say, be all earthling consciousness, all united, and swirling on out? Why not now? Why not here? Why not this year? I say. As I say: our name is G.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvJnlLMJ1Rw]