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Rant #426
(published March 19, 2009)
Sock Puppets
by Doug Mathewson
This story isn't about good and evil, it's about evil and stupid. But it has good in it, so what I said's not right. Good and evil are the angel duck and the devil duck on Daffy's shoulders.

Did he have shoulders?

I can picture his arms and hands (how did he fly?) (did he fly?). But it couldn't be Bugs because then it would be two devil rabbits, Bugs being basically just evil and all. And certainly not Elmer since he didn't have enough imagination to conjure up a conflicting point of view. But it's like that because it has a sock puppet and they are evil. Evil, evil, evil!

Anyway maybe because the Restaurant Placemat Zodiac says it was the year of the sock puppet, but things when on for about thirty months, but then maybe that's how long a solar year is on the sock puppet planet. OMG! How incredibly horrible their home world must be! Ok, ok now before I get too far, these are sock puppets, not sock monkeys that are even more grotesque, and too demented and perverse to even think about. So, ok, stay on track, you know sock puppets. One big heavy sock, two button eyes that by some secret rule are never allowed to match. Well, I mean the buttons can't match, like maybe there is a sock puppet with identical button eyes to the first sock puppet off fucking with somebody else, I'm just saying the left one can't match the right one is all, but that doesn't even matter because they're telepathic and only use their eyes to intimidate people. A trick, a visual pre-womb implied memory thing we all carry maybe, you know, collectively on a cellular level, or maybe even a sub-cellular species-wide memory of Oliver Twist. No, not that one. Oliver the dragon friend of little Kukla, and Kukla, to me anyway, came across as what Jesus might have been like as a kid, only he'd probably have like archangels and all to play with and watch over him and not a dragon puppet. But I'm just guessing really.

So about this sock puppet, but really to get it right there were two of them, or two aspects of one, except they looked different and had different voices and like they would talk to me, well not to me, but they had these conversations in my headspace, cordial debates, that were pure evil lies and they pretended this was all rational discourse and debate but it wasn't, it was poison they were pumping into my brains and my body, ruining my emotional and physical health. Just running their pretend mouths, (I know, they don't really have mouths, that would be completely a comic manifestation of evil, like a circus sock puppet, yes, definitely like that. Clowns might have then. You know, tragic clowns like Emmet Kelly or somebody, but ok, back to the point. On and on with poison, poison, poison they went. Stuff written with deep secret code, tailored real specific to my DNA, just for me and nobody else down to a sub-sub-atomic level, tuned in real fine like. It was a brain murderer's fav-o-rite little tool. But then, I mean, we're back to Bugs! These two loser laundry orphans were both vile and villainous! Nothing like the Daffy scenario of pointy-counter-pointy stuff I was talking about. They came into my brain with the deck already stacked, and like an idiot I, yeah me, I believed these characters! Believed them and all their shit to the point I started breaking down. Like the witch who melts, I became frightened, getting smaller, and mean. Bleak unstable days, and long anguished nights were mine. My entire diet was their toxic trash, and like, as things got darker and colder, even colder than that time when the big meteor hit Earth and killed the dinosaurs who were doing ok because they had brains too small for any damned sock puppet to mess with. If our pre human ancestors saw one of these evil little bastards, they would have eaten it, problem solved, leaving behind nothing but a fossil record of really really old button eyes. So ok, my point. I was crazy by then, brain poisoned, emotions in ruins, just bloody tatters hanging, body going bad, shutting down—can't eat, can't sleep, can't tell reality from putrid mind—trash, everything' a blur. People I don't know saying they are "worried" about me, me lying—"Naw, I'm good, it's ok. Honest!"—them not believing, me not caring that they didn't, and inside it's all like screaming and shit, and yelling, falling down and breaking shit and picking fights and crying till I puke. Writing stories in my head, horrible poison stories the sock puppets told me were so obviously true. Stories I couldn't let myself write down because that would make them real. If I wrote it, I knew it would become my truth verified and final. No longer able to tell what was true, I was getting way worse. Starting fights, being a jerk, and, and like . . . ok,ok, SHIT!!!—stick to the point! So things were bad. Worse than bad, badder than worse, if that makes sense. So fight fire with fire or starve a cold and feed a fever, but finally I came to it:

Who are these clowns anyway? They're no friends of mine, no way, no how, not then, not ever. I wasn't strong enough anymore to just bounce their asses out of my head, just too beat-up by now to fight fair, but I can be sneaky, pretty damn sly if that's what it takes. Depends on stuff, different stuff, but I played those chumps, those argyle brain assassins, Shanghaied them but good. Now to survive I had to get them out of Dodge extra-pronto. Introducing a third sock puppet, a Judas Goat, booby-trapped, Trojan Horse of a sock puppet was way easier than I thought. The bigger the fish the bigger the bait and my life actually depended on this working. His name was "Rico" (Rico!, can you believe that? Rico, you know, as in "rich") and he was the sleaziest cheesiest character ever, so bad those two mopes would buy into his witless patter. A mens' vertically banded dress sheer sock with a big ugly rhinestone Playboy Bunny on it, and the kicker, matching mother-fucking of pearl button eyes! The kind of sock you'd could only imagined complimenting a pair of two-tone Cuban stacked-heeled wing-tips. He told my boys, he was famous, used to hang with Heff, had a falling-out, not his fault, honest! A purposefully vague innuendo soaked, ego driven hyper-drama monologue about a woman, some diamonds, and money was patiently unwound to support to this clichéd vignette. Who in the world would ever believe such crap? You know who. My boys, that's who. He wanted to take them to the coast, Hollywood! TV! Out to meet with "his people." He's gonna hook-them-up, they were naturals for talk shows, he'd front the money for a little place in Beverly Hills, till they got on their feet, well maybe not "feet" exactly—but that's what I meant, or he meant, or what ever, so best, the best was "Celebrity Sock Puppet Make-Overs", just like on TV, only different! A memoir? A book-deal? Famous TV Book-Club endorsement??? They would be RICH!!! Richer than any sock puppet had ever dreamed . .. but . . . it was up to them to get to California on their own. Rico seemed to have misplaced his wallet. I mean, fair right? Makes sense right? Happens to everybody right? They'd all have a good laugh about it over drinks at Rico's beach house in Santa Monica! Right??? They left without even packing, not like they had a security deposit on space in my head to worry about. Just tagged my fridge in hot-red-florescent-cherry lipstick "Goodbye, asshole, sure-as-shit don't need YOU anymore!" and some bogus pseudo-sock puppet gang sign stuff that totally, did not impress. So ok, you ask, "How do they travel these hosiery hucksters, of yours?"

Well, don't know don't care, gone is gone is what I'm talking, and so maybe they made it and maybe they didn't, don't mean nothin' to me. Hope they're whoring for small change, pimping each other out, in a bus-station, or a space-port or what ever they have out in California, maybe trying to talk their way out of some "Lost and Found" big tupperware thing between here and there. Don't care, let 'em rot.

With all the windows, skylights, hatches, doors, portholes, and sliders in my head open wide, I let my girl Mother Nature in, with her long low slanting sunlight and her autumn leaf smoke breeze. My cartoon-sized push-broom finally came in handy when I pushed every thing they told me, everything they planted, everything they left behind out and over the edge. Swept it clean, washed it down, and aired it all out. I'm better now, I think, few flashes chew at me, but I'll put them in their place. Guess I scared myself, scared myself real good. Learned how crazy you get when you let evil and stupid move right into your head.

Rico? He's long gone. Gave him a couple of bucks and a ride into town. Told him thanks and all, but now, really, we're all the way back. Back to our man Daffy. Seems to me (now that my brain works ok again) that we need both those shoulder ducks (did we say Daffy had shoulders? I can't remember) the good duck and the bad. Just gotta hear both sides to sort out what's right. Probably, I guess, that's why we got two ears.


Doug Mathewson notes that "this is a true story that directly related to my mental health a year or so back. I am not a friend of sock puppets or monkeys."

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