If I was king I'd wear a ring.
And never hurt my people.
I'd stay alert and dress to kill.
I might even slip you something.
– Ween, What Deaner Was Talkin' About
"They're going to have to make houses hurricane-proof," says a septugenarian with a long white beard as I sit down next to him on the C-Train.. He begins a serious civil planning discussion without even saying hello.
I'm on my way to the Ween concert at MacEwan Hall on the University of Calgary campus. Fronted by Dean and Gene Ween, these longtime college radio sweethearts crank out what should be novelty songs, but (with the exception of their country album) are instead brilliant, omnipotent and certainly surreal alt-pop anthems.
"Hurricanes?" I ask.
"They need to build stainless-steel, modular houses in hurricane areas. They could make a stainless-steel basement and drop that in. If they don't have a stainless-steel basement, they can't build a house."
"It sounds costly."
"Well, it wouldn't be. You see, once every home is required to be modular stainless-steel, the price will go down. Sure!"
Post-hurricane cleanup would also be a breeze: really big J-Cloths.
We discuss the finer points of this idea for a couple of stops – Ween has by no means cornered the market on the surreal – and then our conversation switches gears on a dime.
"They can now make robots that look just like human beings," he says. "And do you know where they should use them?"
"Where's that?" I ask gamely.
"The ghetto! And when they get attacked, those people should be charged as if they were attacking a real human being. After all, they thought it was a human being and you don't attack what you think is a human being. That's wrong!"
"Uh, yeah."
"These robots would patrol the ghetto, and do you know who'd run them?"
"The police?"
"Seniors! That would give seniors something to do and provide control in the ghettos."
Until Fridays at 8 p.m., when Royal Canadian Air Farce reruns plunge the Ghetto chin-deep once more in crack whores and tap dancing.
"Mmmm hmmm," I reply.
"These human-like robots should be used in the schools. Robots, controlled by seniors, would keep these kids in line. They would have cattle prods and when the kids got out of line they would use them. When one is bad, he would be put into a little cage on wheels with its own little bathroom in there. See how he likes that."
Trippy though it is, the conversation illustrates that the line between the senior citizen vote and buttocks-caning enthusiast Alliance Party MP Art Hangar is a short one.
"In the hospitals we could free up a lot of space and manpower if we made stainless-steel beds. Now these would be round like a hat and would hold three people. As they had bowel movements or passed water, the unit would just clean itself with water, you see, and drain into a grate at their feet. I mean people say, 'but what about bed sores?' Well, you could just rotate them with magnets – one on the head and one on the feet and just reverse the magnetic field and it flips them over."
The provincial government's Mazankowski Report on health care makes it clear that if the private sector can provide magnetic, stainless-steel, three-person toilet-beds at a competitive cost, well goshdarnit, it oughta be given a chance.
"These are my ideas," says the man as I exit the train, and our talk, at University Station. Though wildly entertaining, I don't take them seriously. "I'd like to hear what someone else has to offer," he concludes.
"The sun comes up and I'm all washed out. Is this what Deaner was talkin' about?" sings Gene Ween to a full house. Standing with friends two-thirds of the way back from the stage, we agree that the capacity crowd is ape-like. Two fratty guys just ahead blot out the music with loud conversation.
Ironically, one says to the other, "And I'm like, 'Fuck dude! Show some respect!'"
I'm knocked sideways just then by a guy who's grabbed his girlfriend by the arms and is using her to batter his way through the dense (in more than one sense) crowd. With an aching hip and a sudden urge to study corporal punishment in Singapore, I age 30 years.
"You know what MacEwan Hall needs?" I ask my companions rhetorically. "Well, it seems these days that they're able to make robots that look just like humans...." |
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