ONE MORE THING:

Does anyone remember when Clinton Becker and I used to draw that comic strip Alpo and Eddie Bob on Mr. Effinger's white board way back in sixth grade? (Steiner and kenlow, you guys are my only readers, and you better remember. You just better.) Remember when Alpo told the pope to "bless this"? Remember how Mr. Effinger told us to tone it down?

Censorship is among the worst evils this sad world knows. Alpo and Eddie Bob were the Yossarians of their era, unafraid of organized religion, presidential inquiries or sell-out middle school social studies teachers. They defied the common-sensical logic of the sheep-like masses and their monomaniacal overlords, and dared to bear indignant witness.

I mourn the disappearance of those brave soldiers of the army of truth, and as I lay in bed each night, when I'm not wondering how many peak minutes I have left on my phone this month, and who it was that carved "Abe and Tucker 69" into the picnic table all those many years ago, and why I have two little patches on either side of my mouth where hair won't grow which prevents me from styling my beard in many more ways than I am able to do--when not thinking of any of these things, I wonder where Alpo and Eddie Bob are*.

Come back, boys. You were only cans of pet food but what cans you were.

What cans you were.

Cry with me,
TR

*It's a little known fact that when Che Guevara's body was released to his family after his murder by the CIA and the Bolivian army near Vallegrande on October 9, 1967, in his thickly matted beard, unbeknownst to his Western bourgeois capitalist assassins and their third-world pawns, was discovered a scrap of paper containing a diary scrawled in a near-microscopic script. It details his final days of flight and evasion from his eventual captors and killers. Near the end appears the following phrases: "El final ya se me acerca; ya estoy viendo el puesto de sol con que se acaba el dia de mi lucha. Ahora les toca a otros a continuar en mis pasos, en los mismos pasos de Fidel, de Lenin, y de tantos otros sin nombre que han bregado para liberar al pueblo y hacer que broten la paz y la justicia por toda la tierra como debe tambien brotar el trigo del cual hacemos el pan de cada dia--el pan que cada hombre merece como un derecho inherente. Me da pena tener que dejar esta vida--tantas cosas nos quedan por hacer--pero me consuela el pensamiento de que por algun lado, esas dos latitas tan fuertes, tan dedicadas, tan heroicas, siguen la revolucion."