“The guy who played bass on The Knack’s 1979 hit song ‘My Sharona’ was also the first lawyer to represent Dr. Jack Kevorkian.”

I don’t know where I picked up that bit of information, but it was something I’d tell people at parties or in bars or coffee shops or wherever, just dropping it randomly into a conversational lull – or even using it as an exit line, like, “Hey, lemme leave you with a piece of trivia before I hit the road.”

For years, I’d tell people this thing. I was like Scott Pilgrim always telling people about the origin of the name Pac-Man in Bryan Lee O'Malley’s comic-book masterpiece Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World (a series that was later made into a movie – a vastly underrated movie, please note – by Edgar Wright).

And why not tell people such a thing? The factoid was nigh on irresistible, triviawise: The sudden combination of “My Sharona,” the debut single from The Knack, a song with a killer guitar riff, a catchy little pop number about lusty young love, a perennial banger that’s enjoyed even by those who weren’t alive or old enough to be young & lusting when it hit the airwaves and instantly shot up the Billboard charts to Number One …

… and good ol’ Jack “Dr. Death” Kevorkian, the macabre celebrity pathologist who assisted so many desperate people (130, he once claimed) in killing themselves, until he was convicted of second-degree murder for it and spent eight years in prison.

That's a combination made to incite attention and stick deep in a person’s memory.

Unfortunately, my own memory was being a mite, ah, recalcitrant.

The last time I told someone that bit of trivia, I thought to fact-check myself via Wikipedia immediately afterward, maybe even glean a little extra quotable information, especially since doing that would help me procrastinate on whatever five most imminent Austin Chronicle deadlines were looming like angry shoggoths in the day-job background.

“Fuck you, angry shoggoths,” I may have muttered over my shoulder as I clicked the link to Jimmy Wales’s text-heavy online wunderkammer. And promptly discovered how wrong I’d been.

Oh jeez.

Listen: The guy who played bass on The Knack’s 1979 hit song “My Sharona” was not also the first lawyer to represent Dr. Jack Kevorkian. The guy who played bass is named Prescott Niles – and he had nothing to do with Kevorkian. It was Doug Fieger, the guy who played rhythm guitar for The Knack, who was …

… the brother of the Kevorkian-repping attorney Geoffrey Fieger. And it’s not mentioned exactly where that legal-eagle Geoffrey fits into the chronological line-up of Kevorkian lawyers over the years.

Got all that?

And it’s a bit less compelling of a trivia item now, too, isn’t it?

Ah, the shoggoths are coming, fuck my life.

POSTER: TWO-COLOR SCREENPRINT

And so to bed

Zentai Love

Options

Former home of Austin’s Rude Mechs,
the most consistently, relentlessly brilliant theatre company
in the history of Texas. They’re still very much around, those Rudes,
still tearing up the performative landscape in compelling fashion
in a variety of venues; but this old epicenter of creation will be missed.

The Old Girlfriend

The old girlfriend who still has your copy of The Crying of Lot 49.

The old girlfriend who had a cat that was like thirteen pounds of half-reptilian bitterness & hairy spite.

The old girlfriend who you helped to hobble around when she was on crutches with a badly sprained ankle.

The old girlfriend who you still think about whenever you're looking up at the stars in a clear night sky.

The old girlfriend who eventually moved in with your other old girlfriend & now they're married and both, somehow, pregnant.

And didn't invite you to the baby shower.

Cousin pissed off one of those fuckers from the Unseelie Court

Cousin pissed off one of those fuckers from the Unseelie Court, now he's got a sapling for an arm & talks incessantly of dust.

"The dust of this world," he says, waving the young tree that extends from his left shoulder, "it fills my lungs, it drowns them in dust."

"Everywhere the dust comes in," says my cousin, trembling. "It comes in and it suffocates the light. Do you see the dust, Brenner? Do you?"

He looks at me, his eyes imploring empathy, his flesh hand twitching at his side.

Don't know what to say to the guy, my favorite aunt's son.

Don't like to stand there, pretending not to look at the bright lichens on his sapling arm.

DON'T LIKE TO THINK ABOUT THE DUST