Industrious People

[Written circa 2002]

 Industrious people
          by dougie the doodoo man 

spittin image
wickan carnage 
hitting average
sicken die and
winslow castle 
farmers market
stellar formance 
nifty tightrope
buzzin bees lord
gifted poet
slippery slope and
when i die and
surly rimshot
knock em silly
cancer patient
outhouse antics

Industry is the one thing that sets humans apart from animals. I know two cases that are not to the point. Janet Jeeling and Bill (“Sniper”) Wallop. Both of these individuals did not know each other. Yet, they married in the end. Were married and lived together for six years and 3 1/2 months before the disolvement came through. William (Bill) was on the sex offenders registry. He procured a lobotomy and never again inappropriately touched a woman. More about him in a moment. Janet played for the Wasigaming symphony but after nine years of that she returned to smoking pot with great regularity and then she was just a pot smoker and no symphony orchestra would touch her. More about her after Bill.
     Bill received the nickname “Sniper” because he shot at cars. He had a treehouse built for himself by himself in what he considered quiet woods near Rosemark, Delaware in the early 1970s. He read much in magazines such as Utne and Harrowsmith. First he took a log-building course up in Florida, Michigan (odd name for a town). After that, with the tools that he had been required to purchase, he went back to his home state and county and built a log treehouse back in the woods. The only trouble with the treehouse was that it was not as immune to society and civilization as Bill had thought it would be. Delaware decided to build a highway linking Watchigizzi and the city of Drummock and a four-lane highway quickly appeared within half a mile of Bill’s abode. 
     He lashed out in his rage. Betrayed, he felt, he would betray. He began to shoot at cars from high up in the trees where he lived. Never thinking that he could shoot that distance, he planned the trajectory, he measured the distance with a hydrobader, he scaled the tallest trees to determine angles of descent and wind influences, and finally began, actually, to fire .303 bullets towards the road. He really had no idea that his estimations as correctly and as accurately fitted the nature of the movement of a bullet over distance. Cars were hit, people were injured, one was killed, and then the cops came and took Bill away, and now he languishes in prison in my hometown of Tulusee not many miles from the capital. He will never fire a gun again I have been told by those who know. 
     Janet, too, fired things, but these were of clay and earth. She made pottery. She got into designing pictures of famous people since she had a gift for portraiture. One of the drawings that turned to clay was of a Hells Angels associate accused of murdering a police officer and then tried in a secure courthouse. Janet threw him in the box for the accused, with just his head and torso showing. She had him (and the papers that printed a photo of the sculpture noted this detail duly and unnecessarily) hunched over in such a way that he appeared to be doing something shameful in the portion of the photo below the witness box ledge. Laughter. Nationwide laughter. 
     From then on, Janet focussed on portraying gangland biker men in ludicrous poses. She placed their names, in fact, near the bottom of the sculptures (Ma Bouchard, for instance), much as names are etched onto sports trophies. One sculpture looked as if the biker was in the painful act of peeing against an electric fence, his eyes bugging out in surprise and anguish. Another, with a satisfied grin on his upturned face, appeared to be squatting to defecate before a courthouse where his trial was about to begin, flanked by two offended policeman both four times his size. He resembled a monkey on a chain. Another, with the casual face of an idiot, befouled himself in public while simultaneously eating a Mr. Big chocolate bar with one hand and clawing at his backside with the other. One was busily engaged in an inappropriate public act with another man. Another ate garbage standing in a dumpster. He had an embarrassed “you’ve caught me at it“ grin on his baby face. Each and every biker in all 243 sculptures was diminutive, less than masculine, with thinnish, narrow shoulders, effectively effeminate and given to public defecation and onanism, looking like anything but the potent criminals they wished to be portrayed as. 
     One day Janet disappeared, and has never been heard of since. The sculptures survive. They may be viewed in the museum in the capital where all officially sanctioned art is displayed. The charge is free. Take the whole family to go see it. It will be well worth your while.