Jim Goad published his own magazine in the nineties called ANSWER Me! which is in the process of being reprinted. He is the author of The Redneck Manifesto and his autobiography, Shit Magnet. His style is a perfect combination of serious, soulful, human and blunt. Sometimes a comedian, sometimes a scholar, but always brutally honest.
Despite what you've heard, Jim Goad is a rather rational, amiable person. When we first became acquainted two years ago, he said something really profound that has since stuck in my mind. He said, "If you hate the world, the world will hate you back." I couldn't agree more. Jim is like a Zen Buddhist in disguise. He's always busting out with these levelheaded proverbs.
You can find Jim Goad at www.jimgoad.com
Buy The "Sweet Gene" Calls or any other Goad goodies at Jim's merchandise page.
Jamie: Let's talk about Trucker Fags in Denial. For those that are unaware, Trucker Fags in Denial originally appeared as a comic strip in one of the three Portland sex-industry magazines, Exotic. Now it is available through Fantagraphics as a comic book. What inspired the creation of Trucker Fags?
Jim Goad: I think homophobia is second only to racism as far as a goldmine of comic possibility. Also, I came up with the idea in prison. Where, God, it's amazing how frequently guys say, FAG! Look at you, you fag! I caught you fagging off! and just accusing one another of being fags. There was something playful about it. Kinda like these guys were fagging off, in the sense of accusing someone else of being a homosexual, when they are themselves.
This plays perfectly into everything I write about guilt-projection and the world being upside-down and things are never what they seem. These Butch and Petey characters, the Butch guy looks a lot like the guy that I worked with in chow hall. He was like this warthog in his sixties, "Walla Walla onions are served today, arrgghh," in this growling voice and the idea of him being a sexual creature was hilarious to me. And you know he is, you know he has sexual instincts, and how funny is that? I don't get turned on by regular pornographythere has to be something really damaged about it for it to appeal to me. So, I thought it was funny to weave all of these themes into a comic book about two aging, homosexualyet homophobictruckers, who find peace by killing homosexuals and having homosexual sex with one another and feeling fine about it. That continues a tradition from The Redneck Manifesto and Shit Magnet.
The Redneck Manifesto was about class scapegoating and I guess racial scapegoatingscapegoating poor whitesand Shit Magnet was about males being scapegoated for everything and there being disparities in the way people look at when men and women are violent. Shit Magnet was about the idea of female innocence, something I've never found, really, I've never found an innocent female. Is it sexist to say that? No. They're human. It's kind of unrealistic to say that they're just these wilting creatures who are eternally victimized, or even more crazy to say that they're empowered and yet victimized at the same time. Look, you're empowered and you're capable of hurting people, and that's something where I disagree with modern feminism. I'm straying all over the place with one question about Trucker Fags.
J: It's okay.
JG: I'm seeing connections here.
J: Yeah, go on.
JG: I'm not sure ANSWER Me! really had too much of a philosophical underpinning besides that we were very unhappy and angry at the time. But from the Redneck book on, it's always been about guilt-projection and the wrong person getting blamed. These Trucker Fags were perfect for that. Plus, homosexuality is very funny. Sexuality is funny in general; homosexuality is very, very funny. There was this porno director, I think that his name was Gregory Dark, he started doing these really bizarre porn movies. He'd be like, "Wow, this is just really weird. The sex act itself, if you were a Martian and came down, you'd be like, What the fuck is going on here? This is the weirdest thing I've ever seen. So, it's weird enough to begin with. And then when it 's same-sex, I guess that there are logistics that change and it becomes even funnier. Beyond that, the way people freak out about homosexuality, the gay-bashing.
J: People are either too sensitive about it or not sensitive enough.
JG: Somebody said that Trucker Fags managed to be homophobic and make fun of homophobia at the same time. That's the perfect review because I like to come off racist, while making fun of racism at the same time, all of it, because nobody is really sure about the way things are. I think that most peoples beliefs are really shallow. One or two traumatic experiences would change just about anything.
J: It is all so entirely relative and subject to change anyway.
JG: Yeah. I am just suspicious of the good people. To me, they're just all covering something up. There are a lot of genuinely good people, as I define it, but the ones that announce that they are good
J: They've got something to hide.
JG: Yeah, there's a reason why they're announcing they're good. They're trying to brush something aside.
J: How would you describe your illustrator, Jim Blanchard?
JG: Kind of a hunky, Christopher Reeves-looking, Okie acidhead. I remember hearing Adam Parfrey (proprietor of Feral House, etc.) saying, when I was still living in LA, that Blanchard was up in Seattle and getting all the tail up there. The chicks love Jim. I guess he settled down in Bellinghamwhich, ironically, is the town that prosecuted ANSWER Me! #4 with his wife and a house and a little dog and everything. So, he's off the market, ladies. Definitely second only to Nick Bougas as far as the quality of weird stuff he's sent me over the years. Nick Bougas is just the ultimate renaissance weirdo. Blanchard is a really close second.
J: What has been the most memorable response you have received from your fans thus far?
JG: With Trucker Fags? I think that somebody sent Blanchard some e-mail that said it helped him realize that he was a homosexual trucker. It actually helped!
J: You're lying.
JG: No, no. It had that ring of authenticity, it didn't sound like a prank or anything, which is funny.
J: That is incredible. It actually reached out to people and changed their lives.
JG: It had someone embrace his own homosexuality as a trucker. I just hope that he keeps safe, sucks all of the trucker cock he wants, makes his deliveries on time. Delivers his payload on time. I love the trucker voice: I'm a macho son of a gun. It's trucker music that got me into white-trash culture or just renewed an appreciation for it. Back in '93, '94 a friend, Phil Irwin, who played bass on my Big Red Goad album, started sending me all of this trucker music that I had never heard before.
I had been listening to hip-hop up until that point. It was so similar because the bass was just booming. It was all about dick sizemy truck is forty foot long and I haul twenty tons. It was almost like rappers, these truckers were bragging like rappers. Booming, macho, but they were white people. They were macho white guys. When in the hell has that appeared in music recently that hasn't been over-the-top hate music? Macho white guys who weren't ashamed of being macho white guys. I was down with that. The Redneck Manifesto was originally going to be a one-shot zine called Truckstud. It was an homage to white-trash culture. And the main essay, White Niggers Have Feelings, Too, I gave to a black friend, a writer friend named Darius James, and he said,"You need to turn this into a book." So, yeah, a black guy was responsible for The Redneck Manifesto. He sounds like Richard Pryor imitating white people: "You're quite hostile."
J: Your autobiography Shit Magnet was published in 2002. Currently, House Design-Films are working on Shit Magnet, the movie. Rumor has it that you might be acting as yourself. Pray tell.
JG: Yes, I get to be the older Jim. It would be a stretch to make me the twelve-year-old and twenty-year-old Jim. I wanted to act long before I wanted to write. I got accepted to study theater at NYU and my dad said no, we're not sending money to NY to turn you into a fag. Instead, I drove a cab in Philadelphia and went to journalism school. I'm not sure what stage the film is in. I just got a trailer together that you watched, but I couldn't bear to watch, 'cause I hate to see myself on film.
J: It was actually really good.
JG: Maybe. I couldn't tell ya.
J: You should watch it when you're solo, yo.
JG: Yeah. Jim Goad and the Jim Goad mannequin watching JG on TV. That would be a perfect Jim Goad moment.
J: What other projects are you presently working on?
JG: Just finished The Sweet Gene Calls, which are those prank-call tapes from the 1990s involving a female-to-male transsexual obsessed with Mick Jagger, who becomes convinced, got the wrong number and thought that it was a record company, and over five prank calls became convinced that Mick Jagger wanted to meet him and hang out with him. And when Mick hadn't called him back quickly enough, he tried committing suicide. He does on the phone and swallows a whole bottle of pills and you hear him fading out and then you hear this social worker call the next day saying that he got his stomach pumped and he doesn't want Mick to feel guilty.
Then, for years, come these calls about Mick Jagger's at the right hand of God and is not the Devil, that the Lord spoke to this Sweet Gene guy on the operating table and said that there will always be a tomorrow, and he wanted to know whether that tomorrow was going to be with Mick. It reminds me most of The King of Comedy, the Scorsese movie about Rupert Pupkin obsessed with Jerry Lewis's character. This person is obsessed with Mick Jagger to a pathological degree. I think that it's funny for the first half. It's also an unconscious comment on fandom. I think that being a fan is a developmental stage and you hopefully get over it when you reach your twenties or whatever, when you start doing your own shit. These people like Sweet Gene, who is a female-to-male transsexual, from the sounds of it, in his forties or fifties, will kill himself if Mick Jagger doesn't call. I think that is real, uh
J: It's really dramatic.
JG: Well, it's dramatic, but it's also the amount of energy you invest in this idol sort of takes away from your own aura. You're magically transferring energy over to them. But, it has a million classic lines. It's 80 minutes and the guy repeats himself 100,000 times in it.
J: I listened to some of the Sweet Gene tapes earlier. Just the tone of his voice is really captivating because he sounds so sincerely desperate.
JG: I wondered at the end of the liner notes, what would happen if he were to become aware of the CD? Would it snap him into reality? Realizing not only will there be no tomorrows, but all of the yesterdays were all a lie. Would it crush this guy? Would it help him? Who's responsible? He wouldn't leave the prankster alone, he kept calling. It's a really gray ethical area there. I also wonder what Mick Jagger would do if he heard these calls.
J: What was the most annoying criticism offered to you concerning ANSWER Me!?
JG: At the time, consistently what drove me to attempt hunting down people and killing them was the intimation that we weren't sincere about death and violence, that we couldn't possibly be that angry. It almost became our religion, because the marriage was really unhappy by that point and we were seething with hatred and ready to lash out and kill, literally. So, anyone that accused us of not actually going through that sort of agony was targeted for special retribution. It was consistently: "Oh, they're really poseurs, they're not really violent." And then, of course, when I beat up my mistress and went to prison: "Oh my God, he's violent! What an asshole." And it's like, well, I fucking said I was violent the whole time. I meant every word. Why are you upset? It's not like I was a preacher or a congressman. I was a guy who claimed to be violent, does something violent and goes to prison, and you're upset? You should be more upset that he's not violent if he's claiming to be.
Zinedom, in general, is a pathetic, nerdy, talentless pool of individuals. And we stuck out like sore thumbs. We were generally worshipped by people who weren't zinesters, but the zinesters hated us. They were looking for any excuse. When Debbie went blabbing and found Jesus, went to anyone who would listen about how horrible I had been and even exaggerated it, it was just depressing to me because she wasn't pleasing anybody that liked usshe was giving a lot of pleasure to people that didn't like us in the first place. And she never got criticized for flipping. At least I stayed true to what I always talked about. Don't I get any bingo chips for that? Any credit? And she found Jesus, for God's sake.
J: Didn't she use a Ouija board to talk to El Duce of the Mentors?
JG: Yeah. It got really depressing, a combination of chemotherapy, heartbreak and another individual who got into her ear made her do some
J: Nutty stuff?
JG: Okay, let's be kind and say nutty, yeah. I think El Duce and GG Allin and Anton LaVey turned out to be her guardian angels and were all in heaven and the Ouija board told her that I was going to hell. Well, okay. It's like hey, honey, I've been to hell, I was married to you for ten years.
J: Your CD, Big Red Goad: Truck-Drivin' Psycho, has been re-released recently. It features you singing old trucker songs. Were there any songs that were particularly exciting for you to cover?
JG: Oh, all of them. At the time, like I said, truck-driving music was pretty much all I listened to for two straight years, before I got into country music more broadly. It didn't come close to any of the originals. I was excited in a fanboyish way, just to be covering them and maybe hipping a couple of people out there to this whole wealth of stuff. I mean, they used to have a whole truck-driving section in record stores. What other fucking profession had so much music dedicated to it? I mean, the greatest like Red Sovine, Red Simpson, Dave Dudley, and just these white guys with their balls hanging down to their knees. That's something to be, that's something to emulate. Who the fuck are these indie-emo boys with their slumped shoulders, whiny voices, self-pity? I can't identify with anything there. Kurt Cobain wearing dresses saying, "rape me," that is the only politically correct alternative for while males to be, is a masochistic, self-hating weakling? Hey, fine if it works for you, but it doesn't for me. Just listening to the trucking music awakened something burly, white and macho in me.
J: Just to prove that you're not entirely a hatemonger, tell me about your pug partner in crime, Cookie.
JG: The little Duchess of Cookwich. Talk about gaythere's no gayer sight than me talking to my dog. It's nauseating. Little baby talk and the songs that I come up with. And the way I raised those nine puppies, made up songs for each one of them and names for them and tracked their weight to make sure that they were doing okay. Please don't tell anybody that I have compassionit'll fuck things up for me. Cookie is my life partner. I realize that even with the mention of her name, there's a definite soft spot in there for her. Actually, I'm just using her as a kind of beard to soften myself so that I get more book deals. No, I'm just playing.
Despite what you've heard, Jim Goad is a rather rational, amiable person. When we first became acquainted two years ago, he said something really profound that has since stuck in my mind. He said, "If you hate the world, the world will hate you back." I couldn't agree more. Jim is like a Zen Buddhist in disguise. He's always busting out with these levelheaded proverbs.
You can find Jim Goad at www.jimgoad.com
Buy The "Sweet Gene" Calls or any other Goad goodies at Jim's merchandise page.
Jamie: Let's talk about Trucker Fags in Denial. For those that are unaware, Trucker Fags in Denial originally appeared as a comic strip in one of the three Portland sex-industry magazines, Exotic. Now it is available through Fantagraphics as a comic book. What inspired the creation of Trucker Fags?
Jim Goad: I think homophobia is second only to racism as far as a goldmine of comic possibility. Also, I came up with the idea in prison. Where, God, it's amazing how frequently guys say, FAG! Look at you, you fag! I caught you fagging off! and just accusing one another of being fags. There was something playful about it. Kinda like these guys were fagging off, in the sense of accusing someone else of being a homosexual, when they are themselves.
This plays perfectly into everything I write about guilt-projection and the world being upside-down and things are never what they seem. These Butch and Petey characters, the Butch guy looks a lot like the guy that I worked with in chow hall. He was like this warthog in his sixties, "Walla Walla onions are served today, arrgghh," in this growling voice and the idea of him being a sexual creature was hilarious to me. And you know he is, you know he has sexual instincts, and how funny is that? I don't get turned on by regular pornographythere has to be something really damaged about it for it to appeal to me. So, I thought it was funny to weave all of these themes into a comic book about two aging, homosexualyet homophobictruckers, who find peace by killing homosexuals and having homosexual sex with one another and feeling fine about it. That continues a tradition from The Redneck Manifesto and Shit Magnet.
The Redneck Manifesto was about class scapegoating and I guess racial scapegoatingscapegoating poor whitesand Shit Magnet was about males being scapegoated for everything and there being disparities in the way people look at when men and women are violent. Shit Magnet was about the idea of female innocence, something I've never found, really, I've never found an innocent female. Is it sexist to say that? No. They're human. It's kind of unrealistic to say that they're just these wilting creatures who are eternally victimized, or even more crazy to say that they're empowered and yet victimized at the same time. Look, you're empowered and you're capable of hurting people, and that's something where I disagree with modern feminism. I'm straying all over the place with one question about Trucker Fags.
J: It's okay.
JG: I'm seeing connections here.
J: Yeah, go on.
JG: I'm not sure ANSWER Me! really had too much of a philosophical underpinning besides that we were very unhappy and angry at the time. But from the Redneck book on, it's always been about guilt-projection and the wrong person getting blamed. These Trucker Fags were perfect for that. Plus, homosexuality is very funny. Sexuality is funny in general; homosexuality is very, very funny. There was this porno director, I think that his name was Gregory Dark, he started doing these really bizarre porn movies. He'd be like, "Wow, this is just really weird. The sex act itself, if you were a Martian and came down, you'd be like, What the fuck is going on here? This is the weirdest thing I've ever seen. So, it's weird enough to begin with. And then when it 's same-sex, I guess that there are logistics that change and it becomes even funnier. Beyond that, the way people freak out about homosexuality, the gay-bashing.
J: People are either too sensitive about it or not sensitive enough.
JG: Somebody said that Trucker Fags managed to be homophobic and make fun of homophobia at the same time. That's the perfect review because I like to come off racist, while making fun of racism at the same time, all of it, because nobody is really sure about the way things are. I think that most peoples beliefs are really shallow. One or two traumatic experiences would change just about anything.
J: It is all so entirely relative and subject to change anyway.
JG: Yeah. I am just suspicious of the good people. To me, they're just all covering something up. There are a lot of genuinely good people, as I define it, but the ones that announce that they are good
J: They've got something to hide.
JG: Yeah, there's a reason why they're announcing they're good. They're trying to brush something aside.
J: How would you describe your illustrator, Jim Blanchard?
JG: Kind of a hunky, Christopher Reeves-looking, Okie acidhead. I remember hearing Adam Parfrey (proprietor of Feral House, etc.) saying, when I was still living in LA, that Blanchard was up in Seattle and getting all the tail up there. The chicks love Jim. I guess he settled down in Bellinghamwhich, ironically, is the town that prosecuted ANSWER Me! #4 with his wife and a house and a little dog and everything. So, he's off the market, ladies. Definitely second only to Nick Bougas as far as the quality of weird stuff he's sent me over the years. Nick Bougas is just the ultimate renaissance weirdo. Blanchard is a really close second.
J: What has been the most memorable response you have received from your fans thus far?
JG: With Trucker Fags? I think that somebody sent Blanchard some e-mail that said it helped him realize that he was a homosexual trucker. It actually helped!
J: You're lying.
JG: No, no. It had that ring of authenticity, it didn't sound like a prank or anything, which is funny.
J: That is incredible. It actually reached out to people and changed their lives.
JG: It had someone embrace his own homosexuality as a trucker. I just hope that he keeps safe, sucks all of the trucker cock he wants, makes his deliveries on time. Delivers his payload on time. I love the trucker voice: I'm a macho son of a gun. It's trucker music that got me into white-trash culture or just renewed an appreciation for it. Back in '93, '94 a friend, Phil Irwin, who played bass on my Big Red Goad album, started sending me all of this trucker music that I had never heard before.
I had been listening to hip-hop up until that point. It was so similar because the bass was just booming. It was all about dick sizemy truck is forty foot long and I haul twenty tons. It was almost like rappers, these truckers were bragging like rappers. Booming, macho, but they were white people. They were macho white guys. When in the hell has that appeared in music recently that hasn't been over-the-top hate music? Macho white guys who weren't ashamed of being macho white guys. I was down with that. The Redneck Manifesto was originally going to be a one-shot zine called Truckstud. It was an homage to white-trash culture. And the main essay, White Niggers Have Feelings, Too, I gave to a black friend, a writer friend named Darius James, and he said,"You need to turn this into a book." So, yeah, a black guy was responsible for The Redneck Manifesto. He sounds like Richard Pryor imitating white people: "You're quite hostile."
J: Your autobiography Shit Magnet was published in 2002. Currently, House Design-Films are working on Shit Magnet, the movie. Rumor has it that you might be acting as yourself. Pray tell.
JG: Yes, I get to be the older Jim. It would be a stretch to make me the twelve-year-old and twenty-year-old Jim. I wanted to act long before I wanted to write. I got accepted to study theater at NYU and my dad said no, we're not sending money to NY to turn you into a fag. Instead, I drove a cab in Philadelphia and went to journalism school. I'm not sure what stage the film is in. I just got a trailer together that you watched, but I couldn't bear to watch, 'cause I hate to see myself on film.
J: It was actually really good.
JG: Maybe. I couldn't tell ya.
J: You should watch it when you're solo, yo.
JG: Yeah. Jim Goad and the Jim Goad mannequin watching JG on TV. That would be a perfect Jim Goad moment.
J: What other projects are you presently working on?
JG: Just finished The Sweet Gene Calls, which are those prank-call tapes from the 1990s involving a female-to-male transsexual obsessed with Mick Jagger, who becomes convinced, got the wrong number and thought that it was a record company, and over five prank calls became convinced that Mick Jagger wanted to meet him and hang out with him. And when Mick hadn't called him back quickly enough, he tried committing suicide. He does on the phone and swallows a whole bottle of pills and you hear him fading out and then you hear this social worker call the next day saying that he got his stomach pumped and he doesn't want Mick to feel guilty.
Then, for years, come these calls about Mick Jagger's at the right hand of God and is not the Devil, that the Lord spoke to this Sweet Gene guy on the operating table and said that there will always be a tomorrow, and he wanted to know whether that tomorrow was going to be with Mick. It reminds me most of The King of Comedy, the Scorsese movie about Rupert Pupkin obsessed with Jerry Lewis's character. This person is obsessed with Mick Jagger to a pathological degree. I think that it's funny for the first half. It's also an unconscious comment on fandom. I think that being a fan is a developmental stage and you hopefully get over it when you reach your twenties or whatever, when you start doing your own shit. These people like Sweet Gene, who is a female-to-male transsexual, from the sounds of it, in his forties or fifties, will kill himself if Mick Jagger doesn't call. I think that is real, uh
J: It's really dramatic.
JG: Well, it's dramatic, but it's also the amount of energy you invest in this idol sort of takes away from your own aura. You're magically transferring energy over to them. But, it has a million classic lines. It's 80 minutes and the guy repeats himself 100,000 times in it.
J: I listened to some of the Sweet Gene tapes earlier. Just the tone of his voice is really captivating because he sounds so sincerely desperate.
JG: I wondered at the end of the liner notes, what would happen if he were to become aware of the CD? Would it snap him into reality? Realizing not only will there be no tomorrows, but all of the yesterdays were all a lie. Would it crush this guy? Would it help him? Who's responsible? He wouldn't leave the prankster alone, he kept calling. It's a really gray ethical area there. I also wonder what Mick Jagger would do if he heard these calls.
J: What was the most annoying criticism offered to you concerning ANSWER Me!?
JG: At the time, consistently what drove me to attempt hunting down people and killing them was the intimation that we weren't sincere about death and violence, that we couldn't possibly be that angry. It almost became our religion, because the marriage was really unhappy by that point and we were seething with hatred and ready to lash out and kill, literally. So, anyone that accused us of not actually going through that sort of agony was targeted for special retribution. It was consistently: "Oh, they're really poseurs, they're not really violent." And then, of course, when I beat up my mistress and went to prison: "Oh my God, he's violent! What an asshole." And it's like, well, I fucking said I was violent the whole time. I meant every word. Why are you upset? It's not like I was a preacher or a congressman. I was a guy who claimed to be violent, does something violent and goes to prison, and you're upset? You should be more upset that he's not violent if he's claiming to be.
Zinedom, in general, is a pathetic, nerdy, talentless pool of individuals. And we stuck out like sore thumbs. We were generally worshipped by people who weren't zinesters, but the zinesters hated us. They were looking for any excuse. When Debbie went blabbing and found Jesus, went to anyone who would listen about how horrible I had been and even exaggerated it, it was just depressing to me because she wasn't pleasing anybody that liked usshe was giving a lot of pleasure to people that didn't like us in the first place. And she never got criticized for flipping. At least I stayed true to what I always talked about. Don't I get any bingo chips for that? Any credit? And she found Jesus, for God's sake.
J: Didn't she use a Ouija board to talk to El Duce of the Mentors?
JG: Yeah. It got really depressing, a combination of chemotherapy, heartbreak and another individual who got into her ear made her do some
J: Nutty stuff?
JG: Okay, let's be kind and say nutty, yeah. I think El Duce and GG Allin and Anton LaVey turned out to be her guardian angels and were all in heaven and the Ouija board told her that I was going to hell. Well, okay. It's like hey, honey, I've been to hell, I was married to you for ten years.
J: Your CD, Big Red Goad: Truck-Drivin' Psycho, has been re-released recently. It features you singing old trucker songs. Were there any songs that were particularly exciting for you to cover?
JG: Oh, all of them. At the time, like I said, truck-driving music was pretty much all I listened to for two straight years, before I got into country music more broadly. It didn't come close to any of the originals. I was excited in a fanboyish way, just to be covering them and maybe hipping a couple of people out there to this whole wealth of stuff. I mean, they used to have a whole truck-driving section in record stores. What other fucking profession had so much music dedicated to it? I mean, the greatest like Red Sovine, Red Simpson, Dave Dudley, and just these white guys with their balls hanging down to their knees. That's something to be, that's something to emulate. Who the fuck are these indie-emo boys with their slumped shoulders, whiny voices, self-pity? I can't identify with anything there. Kurt Cobain wearing dresses saying, "rape me," that is the only politically correct alternative for while males to be, is a masochistic, self-hating weakling? Hey, fine if it works for you, but it doesn't for me. Just listening to the trucking music awakened something burly, white and macho in me.
J: Just to prove that you're not entirely a hatemonger, tell me about your pug partner in crime, Cookie.
JG: The little Duchess of Cookwich. Talk about gaythere's no gayer sight than me talking to my dog. It's nauseating. Little baby talk and the songs that I come up with. And the way I raised those nine puppies, made up songs for each one of them and names for them and tracked their weight to make sure that they were doing okay. Please don't tell anybody that I have compassionit'll fuck things up for me. Cookie is my life partner. I realize that even with the mention of her name, there's a definite soft spot in there for her. Actually, I'm just using her as a kind of beard to soften myself so that I get more book deals. No, I'm just playing.
VIEW 25 of 51 COMMENTS
The cartoonist Dan Clowes, with regard to Hustler, said in an interview way back that the magazaine had created an archetype. These are our fake rednecks, and perhaps our good fake rednecks. This archetype began as a fiction, but was too awesome an identity to let go to waste. The Hustler manufactured person is a libertarian, anti-gun control, and probably into Toby Keith but is actually literate, against prejudicial thinking and minimally somewhat politically aware. I consider myself a good fake redneck and I hope to live up to the moniker.