Category Archives: Uncategorized

FOR SALE: BABY SHOES, NEVER WORN: UNABRIDGED AND UNCENSORED.

By Jason Edward Harrington

—-

For sale: baby shoes, never worn— the beginning of the great big goddamned dirty lie.

I was born in the mountains—Anytown, Appalachia—the son of a seamstress and a coal miner. The Depression was on and things were tough. Though I was just a baby, I still remember.

Sometimes, I think memory is my curse.

The first night it happened, Ma showed up drunk at suppertime again, eyes crazed and fixed on the only thing left to sell in our cabin: my baby shoes.  Pa had given up the bottle on account of the hard times, but Ma had taken a turn for the worse. This was before she started in on the Sterno; before the townsfolk had taken to calling her “Hellfire Martha.”

Pa rose from the table.

“Martha, no.”

“Goddamnit, Henry, I brought that baby into this world—made them baby booties myself—and I’ll sell ‘em downriver just the same.”

Thunder growled somewhere out over the mountains. Pa spat.

“His footsie wootsie’ll get cold, Mama. Cain’t get much for a pair of used baby shoes, no how.”

“We’ll put an ad up in the papers,” Ma said. “Claim the goddamned shoes are brand new. Never worn. I’ll figure somethin’ out. Now you jess get the fuck outta my way.”

—

The advertisements for never-worn baby shoes touched some kind of nerve with the people. It was right curious to Ma and Pa, but they never much stopped to question it, what with all the money coming in. After the first ad went up, Ma got a big check and a letter in the mail, blessing her soul and insisting she keep the baby shoes. Ma went on a three-day binge with the money, damn near drank herself to death— Pa couldn’t help but join in. When the whiskey ran dry, they came back for my brother’s shoes. Then our cousins’ shoes. Then the neighbors’ babies’ shoes.

Word soon got out, and the baby shoes boom set in. Those parents who would not sell had their babies’ shoes stolen by those who had. Quiet as silk they crept into our rooms, breezing in and out like the windblown curtains.

People tinkered with the words in the advertisements, trying to increase returns—For sale: baby shoes, brand spankin’ new and For sale: baby shoes, clean, stylish. For some reason, only the never worn version seemed to work.

Poet and writer folk were the most reliable sells. You could buy a pair of baby shoes from a Sears catalog for 35 cents, claim they’d never been worn in the classifieds of The New York Herald Tribune, and flip ‘em to a bleeding-heart playwright in uptown Manhattan for 5 bucks.

There were flowers, tear-stained condolences, expressions of admiration for optimized narrative compression. Ma and Pa couldn’t make heads or tails of what half the poet and writer folk were going on about. All they knew was that times were good.

“They kin talk all they want about suggestions of grief and weary resignation and all that kinda’ shit, long as they keep the fuckin’ fire goin’ in our bellies,” Ma and Pa would say. Once all of our feet were stripped, the town’s parents began crafting the baby shoes themselves.

Those ones really had never been worn, though not in any tragic sense.

Eventually, the townsfolk— worn out from all the carryin’ on, hands atremble from the liquor shakes— pressed us into labor: we were babies making baby shoes, and then not wearing them. Finally, Old Man Jenkins— out riding his jolt-wagon one night, drunk off the proceeds from his granddaughter’s slippers— crashed through the feed fence and lost us the whole mule team. It was official then: the coal business was dead.

The town’s livelihood clung to our naked soles.

—

As it started with the poets and writers, so it ended:  rumor had it some smug writer in a New York City restaurant copied our ad out on a napkin to win himself a wager; impressed all the poet and writer folk real special. Soon the ad was being printed and re-printed across the world. Cut the legs out from under the market.

Toward the end, it was mostly young people buying the baby shoes, in ironic fashion.

People have often asked me why our parents did not sell our toys and our clothes, too. Why not For sale: rocking horse, never used, for instance, or For sale: Onesies, never worn (which would have made for even greater concision).

Truth was, our clothes and toys made for better kindling.

We were a town of babies, stripped of shoes. We were mountain town toddlers with scraped feet. We were alive. Over time, the truth has been lost. But now, perhaps, the real story will live on, so that if ever they try it again—if they come once more for our shoes in the night— together, we will cry out.

We will kick.

—-

And Twelve Others Have Tweets for You: Four Poems.

By Postmaster-Twitter Dotcom (PhD, University of California–Berkeley)

Chris Brown crashes

car on eve of Grammy’s

reut.rs/URLFqd

I guess Frank Ocean can have that parking space now.

~~~

Claudine Longet’s Snow

Captain Beefheart’s Steal

Softly Through Snow and

other snowy songs, at@NewYorker newyorker.com/online/blogs/c…

~~~

What happens when a live condor

gets loose at

a hockey game?

http:// usat.ly/WbwCoe

~~~

Boring,

but not boring,

Curiosity drills

on Mars: geekosystem.com/curiosity-dril…

Room for Rent,  Starting July.

By Jill and Ross.

“Jason,” she wrote, “you sound like a decent guy. The house is actually the house we live in.”

I was disappointed.

“But since we are a married couple and its a 3-bed, 2-bath, we have extra space, and we like to help out students.”

It was true. I would be a student again. She knew more about me than maybe even I knew.

“The rooms rent for $300 & $350, one larger than the other, priced to reflect such. The prices do include utilities and wireless internet.”

I couldn’t help but wonder what else was included.

“We are very laid back about sharing,” she wrote, and as I read it, something stirred in the room. Maybe a breeze.

“Kitchen and laundry facilities, and don’t mind sharing living room space either.”

“We do have a small dog, but she is house trained and friendly.”

“The house is a good size and the backyard and patio are nice for entertaining also. If this all sounds good, let me know.”

It sounded alright, but I needed more. There was something missing, ever since I’d decided to leave Chicago. She tossed me a few last words.

“We can send you the rental agreement to read over, if you like.”

—-

Anthropomorphised Cat Pictures as Precursor to the Modern Day Cat Meme: A Comparative Analysis of the Works of Louis Wain and Harry Whittier Frees. Or: For Make Silly Old-Timey Cat Happy Time Now.

Author’s note: What follows is the greatest, most historically accurate and comprehensively cat-pictured humor essay to ever fuse the great cat artists Louis Wain and Harry Whittier Frees, in all of human history.

It is also the only one.

—-

Anthropomorphised Cat Pictures as Precursor to the Modern Day Cat Meme: A Comparative Analysis of the Works of Louis Wain and Harry Whittier Frees.

or:

For Make Silly Old-Timey Cat Happy Time Now.

by Jason Harrington

Silly cat pictures.  After the internet really exploded onto the world scene, it didn’t take long for silly pictures of cats to come along and infect the entire thing, like a highly malicious, mind-controlling virus. Toxoplasmosis, perhaps. The primary culprits were “lolcats,” which were born somewhere in the bowels of  the 4chan forums, one ominous Saturday, or “Caturday,” morning circa 2005, best anyone can tell.

But did you know that extremely silly cat pictures have been around for a very long time? The infamous lolcat memes, with their patented, silly,  anthropomorphised pictures of cats aren’t nearly as new as you think. The man who really first nailed the nauseatingly cutesy formula as we now know it was a man named Harry Whittier Frees, an American photographer who lived from 1879-1953.

Frees dealt primarily in postcards and children’s books, wherein he dressed cats and other animals  in human clothes, posed them in human situations with props, and captioned the photos with old timey versions of things that passed for hilarious back then. Although he dealt with various species, for Frees, it all began and ended with cats.

He was sitting around the dinner table with his family in Audobon, Pennsylvania, back in 1906, when one of the family members passed a paper hat around the table. Each family member took turns wearing the hat, until the hat reached the family cat, at which point Frees rapturously cried “Eureka!”, assembled his old timey camera, and it was thus that silly cat photos were born, for the masses.

And it was Good.

Frees worked hard at his newfound calling in life, and ended up making quite a good living off of his silly animals- dressed-as-people photos. He borrowed his four legged subjects from friends and neighbors, and actually found them quite difficult to work with; for instance, flies were terribly distracting to cats,  making for especially difficult photo ops, so he had to make sure there were no flies in his studio when doing his old timey shoots. He  worked only 3 months out of the year. The rest of the year, he actually spent recuperating from  his epic cutesy animal shoots, and meticulously planning the details for his next shoots. As you can see, some of them were, apparently, extraordinarily involved, to the point that they likely did require 9 months of post-shoot recuperation.

How long did it take to get that uncanny school teacher expression on the kitty on the left? Frees, you magnificent bastard.

His exposures were taken at 1/5th of a second, and two-thirds of the negatives had to be discarded. Over the course of his career, Frees became quite the expert in anthropomorphised animal photography. Noting that:

“Rabbits are the easiest to photograph in costume, but incapable ot taking  many ‘human’ parts.  Puppies are tractable when rightly understood, but the kitten is the most versatile animal actor, and possesses the greatest variety of appeal.”

Two kittens on the left are clearly repulsed by the rabbit. One on the right wants a piece of that casserole. Bad.

(Note that the above caption is Frees’, not mine. Apparently, pigs really are extraordinarily difficult to work with, when it comes to playing dress up.  A hard, cold fact that Frees, along with all my ex-girlfriends, certainly came to find out.)

Yes, back in the olden days, a photo such as this one—

–most likely had people laughing out loud, since back then all it took to elicit uproarious laughter from children and simple-minded adults was a picture of a cat dressed as a human asking an amusing question. These days, of course, humor has taken on  a much more sophisticated nature and-

–OK, actually, disregard that last part. Some things never change, it seems, and while Frees is commonly known as the first one to do the nauseating cutesy Lolcat thing in his own, very artistic…

…unquestionably quaint…

…sometimes eerie-

–way, there was one man who was doing something  very similar even before Frees. And in a much more profound, intensely batshit insane manner. The Cat Master. The Godfather of Cutesy Cat Pictures…

Louis Wain- The Cat Guy

(1860-1939)

If Louis Wain were around today, he would probably be an internet meme superstar. Born in 1860, Wain was far ahead of his time in realizing one thing: people like absurd pictures of cats.

At the age of 23,  after dabbling in landscape and various animal-themed paintings,  Wain kicked off his career in cats by marrying a cougar, Emily Richardson, a woman ten years his senior.

The two lived together in a cozy little home in Hampsted, north London. Sadly, Emily soon began to suffer from cancer, dying just three years after they had tied the knot. It was during this period that Wain discovered the subject that would define his career.

During her illness, Emily was comforted by their pet cat, Peter. Wain taught him tricks such as wearing spectacles and pretending to read in order to amuse Emily. He began to draw extensive sketches of the large black and white cat. He later wrote of Peter:

“To him properly belongs the foundation of my career, the developments of my initial efforts, and the establishing of my work.” (Many of Wain’s early cat paintings are, in fact, portraits of Peter.)

By that point, it was all over. Wain had zeroed in on his forte, and that was it: he painted nothing but cats for the rest of his life, descending into a monomaniacal feline obsession.

Yes, Wain went on to paint cats, all kinds of cats: asshole bourgeois cats-

Everycat soldiers in the trenches of war cats–

-cats going Paginini on a violin-

-cats going  Tiny Tim on a banjo-

-cats smoking blunts-

Yes, it was just cats on top of cats for lil’ Wain, and his cat pictures were all the rage in Victorian England, often being used in prints, greeting cards and satirical illustrations.

Wain was a prolific  with an easel and a cat, producing as many as several hundred drawings a year. He illustrated about one hundred children’s books, his pussies appearing in papers, journals, and magazines, including the Louis Wain Annual, which ran from 1901 to 1915. His work was also regularly reproduced on picture postcards which are highly sought after by collectors today.

In 1898 and 1911 he was chairman, not surprisingly, of the National Cat Club, and was also an active member of  the Society for the Protection of Cats. Toward the end of his life, he claimed that he had “helped to wipe out the contempt in which the cat has been held” in England. Indeed, Wain was quite the cat crusader, walking around England with kitty-tinted glasses. As Wain himself put it:

“I take a sketch-book to a restaurant, or other public place, and draw the people in their different positions as cats, getting as near to their human characteristics as possible. This gives me doubly nature, and these studies I think to be my best humorous work.”

Having obtained his doubly (emphasis his, not mine– yes, he was losing it) nature, as well as having established cat studies as an official humor category well over a century before lolcats was even an annoying twinkle in some asshole’s eye, Wain somehow managed to  descend even further into cat-based insanity, by actually going insane himself and being admitted to a squalid mental institute in London. (Mental illness  ran in his family; his sister had been admitted when Wain was 30.)

Luckily for Wain, he had built quite a high powered fanbase by that point; he had developed Cat Powers that came with kitty strings– strings that no less than H.G. Wells and the Prime Minister of England pulled to  bail him out of  there (no, I’m not making this up ).

Wain’s high profile benefactors had him transferred to a much more pleasant crazy house, the Napsbury Hospital, just north of London, which came replete with -–you guessed it-– a colony of cats. It was there that Wain lived out the rest of his life, presumably in bliss, because really, what more can one ask for than a mental institute to call home, a paint brush and easel, and a colony of cats. Today, his paintings are actually used in psychology classes to illustrate an artist’s descent into schizophrenia.

Many modern day medical experts speculate that Wain’s schizophrenia  may have been brought on by toxoplasmosis, a parasitic infection often carried and transmitted by warm blooded animals, but most often by…must I even say it? (Cats.)

See his descent into madness, captured, oil on canvas, below…

“During the onset of his disease at 57, Wain continued to paint, draw and sketch cats, but the focus changed from fanciful situations, to focus on the cats themselves.”

Hearing voices at this point.

OK, who gave the cat acid?

“Characteristic changes in the art began to occur, changes common to schizophrenic artists. Jagged lines of bright color began emanating from his feline subjects. The outlines of the cats became severe and spiky, and their outlines persisted well throughout the sketches, as if they were throwing off energy.”

“Soon the cats became abstracted, seeming now to be made up of hundreds of small repetitive shapes, coming together in a clashing jangles of color that transform the cat into something resembling an Eastern deity.”

“The abstraction continued, the cats now being seen as made up by small repeating patterns, almost fractal in nature. Until finally they ceased to resemble cats at all, and became the ultimate abstraction, an indistinct form made up by near symmetrical repeating patterns.”

And finally, all together now, this is the official progression that many psychologists use in classes to illustrate an artist’s descent  into schizophrenia:

And that, my friends, concludes this field trip.

Psycho-critique from Cornell University.

The News of the Amish World

THE NEWS OF THE AMISH WORLD.

The County’s Greatest Newsletter, 1843-2011 (1843)

We are sorry.

For myriad generations, The News of the Amish World had been at the heart of Holmes County’s Amish news hub. Today, our hearts are saddled with great sorrow in light of the recent evidence that reporter Samuel Yoder, under the watch of editor Ruth Edna Brookstetler, and in order to obtain details pertaining to certain stories, had used a device.

Over the past 168 years, the various developments of our ever-changing world–  the buggy, the grey-painted buggy, the charcoal grey buggy, the Davy’s grey buggy, and, of course, the printing press– have been faithfully recorded by this letter of record. Many defining moments graced the headlines of This Old Letter. Who could forget, for instance, our classic coverage of such seminal events as:

-The Suspender Rebellion.

-Jacob Hochstetler’s installation of a pedal on his bicycle, and subsequent excommunication.

-Martha Ellen Schwartz’s under-the-table dealings with the Arts and Crafts industry.

-The series of investigations into the Lengacher subprime barley trading scandal. 

- The exposé on Silo Tom’s refusal to shave his mustache, and subsequent excommunication.

And of course:

-Paintedgate.

When I, Rufus Merdberger, first took the reins of this newsletter in 1969, it was copied out by hand and saw a distribution of approximately 7 households. After my introduction of the diesel-powered printer press to the Swartzendruber’s barn in 1973, those numbers jumped to 58 households, spanning 3 counties.

Though some accused The News of becoming excessively proud under my ownership– pointing to the letter’s somewhat “sensational” stories of our youths’ activities during their rumspringa–  and myself of being shameless and exploitative, I know in my heart of hearts that I am just a harness maker, first and foremost, and a populist, market-attuned newsletter man, second, who is simply in the business of giving the people what they want.

And the Hershbergers, Troyers, Schrocks, Grabers, Hiltys and the Wittmers want what the Hershbergers, Troyers, Schrocks, Grabers, Hiltys and the Wittmers want.

It was during some of the more recent rumspringa stories that , entirely unbeknownst to me or my son at the time, Samuel Yoder, with the explicit approval of his editor, began wearing a hearing aid in order to better listen through bedroom doors and report back on the exploits of our youths during their running around.  This breach of Ordnung trust and ethical conduct (and, to be fair, common practice among competing newsletters jostling for coverage concerning running-around) once uncovered, was, of course, brought before the bi-annual meeting of our elders (of which I myself am a part of), and Yoder was duly shunned. We considered the matter settled, until the revelations of yesterday forenoon, in which it was revealed that Yoder had continued to use a hearing aid in order to listen in on conversations among the family members of those injured in the recent buggy flipping. While I personally found that these unsavory tactics could perhaps be overlooked in regards to youth in rumspringa, this most recent turn of events has brought a dark stain upon this newsletter’s reputation, one which can never be laved.  

At this point, there is unfortunately no other option than to shut the letter down.

As to the unfolding allegations of Panasonic H.264 Pan/Tilt Network Surveillance cameras  being hidden by other News reporters (who, it should be noted, all received and were required to read a copy of our Standards of Business Conduct pamphlet) in the bedrooms of our womenfolk in exchange for paid compensation from the Englisher website “Amish Amateurs,” you may be rest assured, further shunnings are imminent, and that the full brunt of our law will be brought to bear upon them, so that they may be harshly punished and wholeheartedly forgiven.

For the record, my son and I knew nothing of the above activities, any profits derived from them, or, for that matter, what they even mean, for we are, after all, just simple, humble, Amish folk.

Thank you, and goodbye. 

-Rufus Merdberger, Keeper of the Printing Press

Bad Lieutenant: St. Petersburg

8 a.m.

Day 1 heading up the Saint Petersburg division of the LAPD Sister City Exchange Program, and already, I had a stiff one.

Whadda’ we got here, I ask, cuppa’ Joe in hand.

2 murdered females. Names: Alyona and Lizaveta Ivanovna. Definitely an axe job.

This fat bastard of a local detective– Porfiry– is pacing around the blood-splattered room, stroking his beard, trampling all over my goddamned crime scene, muttering some shit about an open flat and painters.

Beat it, Chubs, I says.

And who might you be, addressing me in such queer and insolent fashion? he asks.

I’m Detective Superstar, come to show you St. P boys how homicide investigation is done, or maybe I’m Mickey fucking Mouse, (I flash him my badge) or could be I’m the Pink Panther, see.  Now get the fuck outa’ here with that deduction shit.

Takes me about 5 minutes to see where the killer messed up: a blood-stained bar of soap over by the kitchen bucket. Ironic. I pull the new fingerprint analysis app up on my smartphone. Takes about 1 minute to get a scan on a print. Another minute to run that against the Petersburg fingerprint database. A minute later, and I got a match:

Rodion Romanych Raskolnikov. Fingerprinted just earlier that day after fainting in a police station.

Booyah. Crime solved. With plenty of time to drink breakfast.

8:30 a.m.

A crazy thing happens as I’m working on my fourth Vodka and Herring at a quaint little joint off X—- : turns out I’m sitting right next to the mother and sister of this Raskolnikov bastard. His sister– Dounia– was hot. My heart breaks when I overhear them talking about her engagement to some guy named Luzhin. I take a chance– turn around and lay it all on her.

Pardon me, I says, but your brother’s a murderer and this Luzhin guy you’re set to marry? Fuck him, along with the rest of these yokels.

I point to my ride, which by now is encircled by a crowd, drawing a lot of shouts of “marriage carriage” and “devilment.” I decide to run with it.

See that magic carriage out there? That’s s an Aston Martin DB9 with a 6.0-liter V12 engine, (her eyes glazed over at this information, but I continued) I think it looks sexy with a crowd around it, but you know what’d be even sexier? A hot little Russian doll in it. Whaddya’ think?

3 p.m.

Between the Magic Carriage and a demonstration of my smartphone, Dounia and her mother quickly realized the future was with me– Avdotya Romanovna was now set to be mine. If only Raskolnikov could see this. Together, the three of us cruised the cobblestone streets of St. P, parting crowds, buggies and carriages like a preppy boy’s hairstyle.

I busted a left onto K—- Street.  L, M, N and O were under construction. Figures. I made a right on Q—- Ave. and brought Magic bumping down alongside the Neva on Z—-. Good old Magic: she handled like a champ. It was there that I saw it: outside a tavern, a group of festive drunks had gathered, one of them lashing a dying mare over the eyes with a whip. Fucking animals.

I swung Magic around and rode up on the crowd, blasting my Glock skyward out the window like a goddamned cowboy.  Yee fucking haw.  The crowd broke fast, screaming.  Only the guy beating the horse stuck around, shouting about it being “his property!”

I popped a cap in his leg and sent him hobbling away. You’re my property now, motherfucker. Then I put the poor mare out of her misery.

It was like something straight out of a nightmare.

9 p.m.

After dropping my new fiancé and her mother off at some shitty motel, I happened to notice a hooker strolling down S—-. I slapped on the flasher and rolled up slow.

What’s your name, sweetheart?

Sonya. Sonya Semyonovna Marmeladova.

The terror in her eyes. The shame. The fucking names on these people.

Out here being a bad girl, huh? Trying to get yourself run over by a carriage? That your game? Make a libelous claim against a Gentleman of good standing? That what you’re all about? Trying to fake a carriage accident?

Heavens, no!

She was religious, I could tell.

You know, I could have you sent to Siberia for this. Godless country, I hear…

Sir, please, perhaps you could issue me a warning, and consider the matter settled? I beg of you…

You want a warning? Here’s a warning: you do something for me and I’ll do something for you. How ‘bout that. Get in. I’m Christian, too, you know. Now start by reading the story of Lazarus…

11 P.M.

Turned out my perp was basically just a kid, living in a single room in a rundown building. More like a cupboard than a room. Wait. Back that up. That’s not a good way of describing it. The room was…small.

The room was small as shit.

Tell me where you hid the fucking goods, Raskolnikov, the old lady’s goods. Don’t make me do this.

You have no facts.

Bullshit!

I brought the blue-hot flame closer; it was mirrored in his eyes now.

Fact: I got your sister. Fact: I got you on murder one.

He’d been unconscious when I walked in the room (fever, supposedly) coming in and out, and so I slapped the cuffs on him, splashed a glass of vodka in his face and fired up the blow torch.

So you think you’re someone to whom everything is permitted? You murdering bastard, I say what is and isn’t permitted. It’s my call. Now we can either have a Russian-style barbecue, or you can tell me where the goods are!

He quickly decided to play ball. Heaving a 60 pound rock aside in an abandoned lot that night– penlight clenched in my teeth, illuminating dirt and hollow– I saw I’d made out alright: gold watches, bracelets, chains, earrings, pins … enough to settle things with my bookie in Moscow.

Capital.

Next morning at the Petersburg train station, I thought for one moment that Raskolnikov would throw himself on the tracks. He looked to be right on the edge– kept mumbling something about Napoleon and the “novel being over too early.”

No way in hell you’re gonna’ miss this train, Rodya. Make your way to America. Start over. Whatever. But you ain’t staying here.  Your life ain’t worth shit in this town, now.

As the train pulled away, for just one moment, I swore I heard his tormented cry interwoven with the shriek of the train’s whistle. Dounia agreed, between sobs.  Oh well. That’s what you get when you commit murder without putting any thought into it, first.

Welcome to homicide investigation– American style.

Scumbagskya.

—-

On McSweeney’s Going Web 2.0

I think it’s great that the site was finally given a major update, recently. But I wonder what effect the media sharing buttons at the bottom of the articles will have on the pieces that are submitted there, now? Will a popularity contest dynamic come into play? To some degree– even if only subconsciously– yes, I believe, of course it will. But I don’t think it will be a bad thing. All in all, I think the main effect it’ll have for them is strictly the intended one: it’ll nicely boost traffic– McSweeney’s integrity well intact.

I think that, for the writer-type, having 4 Facebook shares on a piece at McSweeney’s compared to, say, Jesse Eisenberg’s (a purposely loaded and generic example) 10,000 shares on that one piece the other month, just means: “so, only 4 people in the world really get it. Their problem, not mine.”

I have to say, the pieces that make me most jealous on McSweeney’s are the really personal little pieces that people manage to get published, the ones that are not at all “pandering to the masses.” This Open Letter To An Entity is a perfect example.

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-open-letter-to-the-guys-who-kicked-the-soccer-ball-over-the-fence-and-asked-me-to-toss-it-back-to-them-thus-scarring-me-for-life

It’s like she just sat down one morning, knocked out a one thousand word humor piece about what had happened to her the night before (simply involving her lack of sports skills) and it just turned out to be this thoroughly hilarious, irresistibly charming, gracefully self-deprecatory genuine little ruby.

Also, the Snake Fighting Portion Of Your Thesis Defense makes me jealous. And The Killer Clown Consortium Price Guide.

EDIT: And A Professor’s Introduction To Intermediate Shark Cinema Studies. And True Blue: Lie Detecting Software.

And Toto’s Africa: By Ernest Hemingway.

The K2 Rush

The K2 Rush

Chicago head shops brace for the impending synthetic marijuana ban, while an unlikely group of smokers places orders to stock up.

by Jason Edward Harrington

“Gimme’ 10 Blondes,” says the hoary man in a knit cap, as the employee behind the counter unlocks the glass cabinet in Secrets, a smoke shop in Lakeview, “Time’s running out!” the man says to the employee, his manner as vibrant as the varicolored paraphernalia which decks the walls like psychedelic Christmas ornaments. “Better enjoy it while we got it, right?”

The kids call it spice. Older users give it the more dignified and literal moniker, “synthetic.” It’s sold in 3 gram packets at 30 bucks a pop. The label on the packet says “For fragrance purposes only. Not for consumption.” The label is sarcastic: it’s an herbal blend sprayed with a chemical compound designed to, when smoked, mimic the effects of THC. In fact, it’s much more powerful than THC. It may be “fake weed” but it will really get you high.

K2 has been on smoke shop shelves in Chicago since 2006. On January 1st it will become illegal in Illinois, officially categorized as a controlled substance. It’s the first such ban on a substance since the state outlawed pure-form powdered Dextromethorphan (DXM, the ingredient in cough syrup that can make having a cold kind of fun) in 2007, and, most recently, in 2008, salvia divinorum, a plant with hallucinogenic properties. It’s not a new story: too many kids getting high on something, so state and local governments outlaw it. But the little-known secret about K2 is that it isn’t just kids using; in fact, most of its users are adults– many of them even government employees, themselves.

“Before I got hired on, I smoked weed from time to time,” said one CTA employee, wishing to remain anonymous. “But with the random drops they give us, smoking weed…too risky. Once I tried K2, I realized it was the next best thing. You piss clean with it, too. I’m just going to stock up before the ban.”

In these weeks preceding the ban, “stocking up” seems to be the key phrase for Chicagoans who, for one reason or another, have turned to K2 as their marijuana substitute.

“I warned all my customers to start placing their orders in November. There’s a lot of interest in buying in bulk,” said one employee at Pipes and Stuff– a smoke shop with locations in Wicker Park and Lakeview– where the K2 is displayed front and center, right next to the register, as it is in most head shops where K2 is sold. “There’s definitely going to be a big rush leading up to the ban.” 

Another employee at a popular smoke shop in Uptown acknowledged that his customers run the full gamut of adult professionals.

“We get nurses, army guys, government employees…anyone who gets drug-tested, really.”

The main draw for these unlikely users is the money-shot substance drizzled on the K2 herbal mix, the chemical JWH-018, named after John W. Huffman, the organic chemistry researcher who developed JWH-018– along with hundreds of other syntheticcannabinoid compounds– during the 1990s to aid in medical research. It didn’t take long for people to pick up on the recreational drug-use potential of Dr. Huffman’s work, and it was JWH-018 that was honed in on as the compound of choice for best replicating the THC high. For users, the most attractive quality of JWH-018 and other similar compounds is the fact that it will notshow up on any standard drug test. Among the first groups of people to realize the urinalysis-circumventing potential for such a drug were members of our very own armed forces. The military is now screening for the compounds commonly found in K2. Government and private institutions, thus far, are not, meaning that for now, K2 and its many variations are considered by many to be the closest substitutes for individuals who wish to enjoy a marijuana-like high, sans the risk of termination.

Short term, the most commonly-reported effects of K2 Summit (the most powerful blend in the K2 lineup, which includes Blonde, Standard, and Citron) include increased heart rate, paranoia, mild hallucination, and an enhanced appreciation of music (seriously). Sounds pretty familiar. The only thing missing are reports of increased appetite. The high is much shorter-lasting than your typical marijuana buzz, but much more intense: many users report heavy trips well outside and beyond the realm of any marijuana high.

The long term effects, on the other hand, are the biggest problem with K2: namely, the fact that nobody has any real idea what they may be.

“People are taking a huge risk when they smoke this stuff,” Dr. Huffman said, when asked about people’s abuse of the chemical compounds created in his lab. “We really don’t know what the health effects might be.”

Scrolling through the K2-related posts on Bluelight.com, a forum of often-times freakishly knowledgeable recreational drug users, one comes across an alarming 13 page mega-thread, devoted entirely to one undesirable lingering K2 side effect in particular: severe, chronic headaches.

“I smoked it on only about 5 occasions total, the last two it totally took me to a bad place. The feeling is indescribable, but I remember I could only sit there with my hands on my face, my brain in intense pain, feeling as though it was just melting into itself. About a week later I started getting horrible headaches. They got worse and worse and worse, “ one user writes.  A deluge of sympathetic user comments follows.

It is for this reason that a few smoke shops will go unaffected by the ban, having ceased selling K2 long ago, or having never sold it to begin with.

“We miss out on a lot of money by not selling it, definitely. We’ve gotten 10-15 calls per day asking for it, especially in the past few weeks. ” said Seth Fox, an employee at Adam’s Apple in West Rogers Park, a smoke shop that refuses to sell K2 or any similar products.

“We’re just not willing to sell a drug that has never been scientifically tested on humans.”

Whether K2 is a relatively harmless marijuana substitute, or a yet-to-be-uncovered highly toxic death herb, worthy of the government’s reefer-madness-like condemnation, one thing is certain: it sells in Chicago, especially right now. Come January 1st, Chicago smoke shops will be taking a big hit.

“The owners of other smoke shops tell us they’re profiting ten to thirty thousand dollars per month off K2 alone,” said Fox. “After the ban, they’re all going to be scrambling for the next JHW-018 substitute. But even after JHW-018 goes illegal, it’ll just go underground, anyway.”

As the dusty Prohibition-era tunnels crisscrossed beneath it attest, Chicago has always been somewhat of an underground city– a city with no shortage of opportunistic spirit– and so, of course, the synthetic marijuana trade will go on, black market. Every K2-selling head shop is already inundated with bulk orders from users eager to exploit K2′s upcoming scarcity, and even non-selling shops are assailed by offers from enterprising individuals shopping homemade K2: JWH-018 can be easily ordered online.

“We get people coming in from the neighborhood sometimes, trying to sell us pounds of synthetic marijuana they made in their basements ,” said Fox. “That’s another problem with people getting high off this stuff: it’s unregulated, so people have no idea what’s giving them that rush.”

The rush is on indeed, and, every day, as the ban deadline approaches, a search of “K2” on Craigslist’s for sale “general” forum brings up more and more ads such as this one: 

“I noticed the news of the banning of synthetic marijuana in your state as of Jan 1. 2011.
I have about 60 packs of 3gs a piece I am willing to sell for a low price. I have too much!
Please contact me email or txt phone. Go Cubs!”

Alienation of her Sox fan market aside, one must admire the entrepreneurial instinct.