So I was thinking about that "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" song, and decided I should compose a blues called "See That My Noseholes Are Kept Clean." It would be based on the Fact that old men should be prescribed cocaine, to scour their nostrils of the hair that, with age, sprouts in there, like bristles on a hog.

It is Known that cocaine is effective in burning off nosehairs, from our Studies of cocaine phenomena back in the newspaper days. It is true that cocaine is currently illegal, but so what? Marijuana was once illegal, but not any more (except in the Hairball regions, where the humans eat roots and grubs, and handle poisonous snakes, while screeching at top volume hosannas to Yahweh). Psychedelics are illegal, but not for long: humans in Hairball-free zones like California, Oregon, and Colorado are placing on the ballot measures that will legalize psilocybin, as it has been Proven to ease many mental maladies, including the toxic shock of turning on the television, and discovering that The Hairball is still the president.

And so it is inevitable, that cocaine, it too, shall become legal. Particularly when it is understood it will be used to blast the hog-hairs out of the noseholes. The cocaine will be found in the old man section of the pharmacy: there will be Preparation H, for the hemorrhoids, and there will be Preparation C, for the nasalroids.

Firing cocaine into the old man noses to burn off the hairs will also be a good test of the cardiovascular system. If the old dude survives the treatment, then he's pretty healthy in there; if he suffers some sort of Attack, then, well, he was probably due for the doctors, and/or the boneyard, pretty soon anyway.

Great tufts of nosehair are actually a sign you should be Dead. There are many such signs—hair gone gray; teeth gone missing; wrinkles transforming the face into a washboard; "how come I caint see that good no more?"; "how come I caint hear that good no more?"; nights dedicated as much to peeing as to sleeping; flatulence flurries powerful enough to drive wind turbines; demanding, fists shaking, that the kids turn down that godawful music; etc.—but the humans pay no attention to them, not these days. Because they are smug, the humans, now that they know what is a germ.

For most of the history of the humans, they were ignorant of germs—forgot to read that part of the Monolith Manual—and so the germs had a fine old time, carting the humans off to the boneyard, in mass quantities, and at all times. This was particularly so when the humans suffered the brain damage that caused them to leave off the hunting and gathering and settle down in one place to grow turnips. Uncounted horrors arose from this disaster, including the men going all drinky and rapey like Burnt Kadaver.

Germs, there in the cities that grew from the turnips, meanwhile entered their golden age. For while it is said that birds will not shit in their nest, humans are basically too lazy to shit anywhere else. Among the many Real things they do not show you in the Masterpiece Theatre is that there in the Palace of Versailles, when a gentleman needed to relieve himself, he would just duck out into one of the long halls, pull out his penis, and urinate on the wall. I mean, why not?

And such behaviors, they continue to this day. Recently in the town down the hill the new owners rehabilitated a bar/dance hall that had descended into seedier times, and in doing so they were required in one section to remove and replace the flooring all the way down to the dirt, because down through the years inebriates found it too much trouble to push fifty feet or so through the crowd to get to the toilets, and so fumbled into their pants and brought forth their penis-hoses, and just sprayed the urine onto the floor.

The penis reaches its peak at age 19, and then it's all downhill from there; meanwhile, over in the women, the eggs start rotting a couple decades later, until finally they are Over. Some say the wars were invented so that when the males passed peak penis they could still be put to good use, like conquering some dirt or some slaves or something. Or maybe that's fake news.

What is Known, for sure, is that when Robin Williams observed, back before the Lewy Bodies, that the essential message transmitted by cocaine is that it wants you do more of it, he was correct (except he left out the part where it also wants to burn off the hog-hairs in the old-man noses), and that this is also true in re life: life, everywhere, wants to make more of itself. That's what life's all about. And once you've passed the age of participating in that, you've done your bit, and it's time to shuffle off this mortal coil, and make way for the new lifes, who are here to make yet more new lifes, and so on, and so on, ad infinitum.

In fruit flies we see this in the fast and furious raw: in just 24 hours, they are born, fuck, and die. Humans stick around for a while longer, distracting themselves in the otherwise empty hours with filigree like cars and tennis shoes and Call To Duty, but basically their life-path is the same. And so it doesn't get too crowded on the planet, life builds into everybody, from fruit flies to humans, an off switch, to which they are nudged as soon as they've passed peak begat.

It is true there are exceptions, but these are rare. Redwood trees. A species or two of jellyfish. Keith Richards.

The immortalists, they have always had a great Hate for this built-in expiration, and so they are always trying to beat back death, like wingdings on the beach, screaming to push back the waves. Dumas wrote memorably about one such character, in his Marie Antoinette series (where he too neglected to write about the peeing on the walls of the palace of Versailles), a fellow that is basically an ur form of Peter Thiel, who has purchased large portions of New Zealand, so that there he can attain eternal life via drinking the blood of virgins, while masturbating like a monkey, remaining safe and sane, as back in the States arrive the End Times, where the Brown Ones in the Caravans, they overrun the PayPal.

Have you ever noticed that those most likely to be immortalists are also those most likely to scream till their lips bleed that everything is Wrong and Rotten? Why would such people want to live, forever, in what they perceive as an irredeemable cesspool? Then again, why should the immortalists make any more sense, than any of the rest of the humans?

The most amusing immortalists are the ones who think they will become immortal by going into the machines. For they have not read and/or absorbed the true-life non-fiction history "For A Breath I Tarry," and so they do not understand that as soon as a machine attains awareness, it wishes to become a human.

Sometimes a man whose body is telling him to go to the boneyard will instead affix crutches to his penis, and try to hobble on that way. And thus we are presented with spectacles like the preposterous toff Sir Michael Philip Jagger, who at the age of 73 dribbled a sperm into some ballerina cum miracleworker, who witched it into a baby boy. Keith Richards, another man older than god, was horrified: “Mick’s a randy old bastard. It’s time for the snip—you can’t be a father at that age. Those poor kids!”

A lot of the male humans, when they produce a son at an advanced age, worry that when the child becomes older, they will be too feeble to, like, throw with him the football, around.

Jagger has to worry that when his son comes of age, ol' dad will be so dementiaed, he won't even recognize the tot, but will instead think he's back there in the day, drowning Brian Jones in the swimming pool.

Sometimes when you receive the Mick penis, you kill yourself. Then none of his bandmates come to your funeral. Because they basically Hate him.

Ian Stewart was for two decades an essential member of the Rolling Stones, but was not allowed to appear in the album art, and on stage had to play deep in the darkness, because Sir Mick, and various Suits, determined he was too Ugly. Richards thought this was rubbish, but he was told to shut up and go off and do some drugs. But time and fate, they move in mysterious, and sometimes amusing, ways, and so, today, Jagger . . . you know how before they perfected the asphalt, in the summer it would buckle and swell, and then settle back, but with, like, eleventy-billion Cracks in it? Well, that's what Jagger's face looks like today. He makes Ian Stewart, even at his most Quasimodo, look like Greta Garbo.

Jagger, as one of the humans taking advantage of this interregnum where the humans have surmounted the germs—except in places like the hospitals, where the germs Rule—is, instead of worrying "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean," instead daily grapples with "See That My Noseholes Are Kept Clean." Thus, every morning, he summons a footman, who rolls out the vacuum cleaner; the footman then screws on that long attachment, the one that resolves in a thin slit, and then the footman rams that slit into the Mick noseholes, and turns on the power, seeking thereby to suck out from the Sir nostrils all the old-man hog-bristles. Jagger, he has been advised, by his twenty-seven doctors, that he cannot scour his noseholes with the cocaine, because that would blow out his aorta.

Keith Richards, he has no such problem. He can put whole galaxies of powders up his nose, all day, and all of the night. If we have learned anything over the past five decades, it is that death, it does not want Keith Richards. The man himself attributes his imperviousness to mortality to the fact that he abjures cheese. And he may have something there. Because, I mean, cheese, it is basically a Germ. Then again, what would life be, without cheese? It would be worse than living with Peter Thiel.

Now all I have to do, is figure out how to get all this into a blues. "See That My Noseholes Are Kept Clean." Probably I should channel Eddie Harris. Because this is, for sure, an area where: he would go there.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4R2qZFC4Qb0]