The Irrationally Exuberant

Howdy do, fellow duuuuuuuude! You on druuuugs? I know I am. Are you tired of staring at the same old lava lamps and black light posters and other junk from Spencer's while you're on druuuuuugs? Do those things no longer seem toooooootally trippy? Well, maaan, have I got just the thing for you! Hi, I'm Jim Krakowski!

The first time my friends and I ate psychotropic mushrooms was terrible, as were the second and fifth time. Three was good and four was fine. The sixth was years later and I was very drunk, so I'm not sure they had any noticeable effect. But the first was truly terrible.

I, it turns out - and you may want to be sitting down for this - come from the same genetic line as Franz Xaver Messerschmidt!

Why don’t you pour yourself a drink, help yourself to a cigarette or two, and fold into that arm-chair under the portrait of Schlitzie the Pinhead Girl while I tell you what The Tom Waits Institute of Lucid Dreaming is all about.

Willis Carriers vision was not the first lucid dream recorded in history, but it very well may be the most significant, and is a fine introduction to the topic. The invention of the air conditioner ushered in the modern age, making life bearable for the first time in human history. How does a man discover something so consequential and practical in the non-dream world while in the dream world? How does he gain the ability to understand that he is dreaming and act proactively within the dream?

Bad news, friends. I died.

Parasites. They are horrifying. More than normal bugs, even. Like bugs for bugs, but with insane, almost supernatural powers of manipulation. They are also fascinating and, I suspect, much more important to our lives than most would imagine.

No script this time, because I wrote this a long time ago and don’t know where it is. References and allusions include, but are not limited to: God, Jesus, Mork and Mindy, NASA, Armageddon (movie), Aerosmith, American Idol, the United Nations, Freemasons, Bill Nye, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Degrasse Tyson, the New World Order, Satan, New … Continue reading "Flat Earth"

about. Meeting girls. I want to meet girls. And I want to drink. Drink to meet girls, that's the goal.

Depression Hello, friend. Welcome back to The Irrationally Exuberant. I hope you’re taking care of yourself in these troubled times. Which brings me to our topic: Self Care, specifically, dealing with depression. I have it, you, I assume, have it, since you’re listening to this show. Your Mom’s probably got it. Your Dad’s in denial … Continue reading "Depression"

A few years back I got the itch, as I often do, to start a new podcast. I mostly ignore these itches as scratching just makes it worse, but this time I could not. I began writing and planning a solo show called Reid Messerschmidt Gets Metal. I was going to start it like this: … Continue reading "Metal"

The last two episodes of the show were heavy, so this episode is just a compendium of weird things that people said to me when I worked at a grocery store.

Someday I will stop. Of course. The voice that whispers this is the same voice that says fuck it, and it says them both with utter conviction, utterly convincing, so long as you don’t stay sane long enough to really interrogate it.

The reason I’d started doing this in the first place – to make myself an extrovert – had lost to my strong, innate introversion. Drinking became 20% a means of being social and 80% a means of obliterating my ego to let my unrestrained Id have its time on the stage, free to act out its horrific, primal, sparsely attended one man show.

He was sitting, pants-on, in an overheated fiberglass port-a-potty, soaked in sweat, breathing the thick stink of 200 shits, swigging from an old glass liter vodka bottle filled with new cheap whiskey, now three-fourths gone. In twenty minutes, Sag Jenkins was supposed to jump thirty-five cars on his motorbike, and there was no way he’d make it. In twenty minutes, 227 attendees of the Argus County Speedway in Golgotha, South Dakota would watch Sag Jenkins die.

Listen. I’m well aware that the last thing the world needs is another biography of Klaus Nomi. He’s already a household name on par with James Polk, young John Cusack, and the Andrews Sisters. What could I – a humble podcast magnate - possibly add to the reams upon reams of information already available to you via your home library, public library, magazine subscriptions, nightly newscasts, corner newsstand, and pocket super computer?

Gorgeous George was the most prominent and important figure in wrestling’s ascent into the American zeitgeist, largely due to his gimmick. But he wasn’t the first or, most assuredly the last, wrestler to adopt a unique persona for the ring. The history of wrestling is littered with characters. Some have been wildly successful -Hulk Hogan, Rowdy Roddy Piper, The Big Boss Man - who became household names and can illicit the most bittersweet of remembrances in vast armies of doughy diabetics, nerds, and toothless, bigoted human trash.

Gorgeous George nee George Wagner, a flamboyant, hulking, blond bombshell of a man who fancied ornate, lacy robes, liquor, and prostitutes, and made his bones faux-grappling with various and sundry half-nude, oil soaked brutes to the delight of shrieking rubes in stadiums and on unaccountably massive early televisions.

Apparitions. Ghosts. Spooks. Haints. Whatever you want to call them, you haven’t seen spirits like this before. Hello. I’m world renowned palm reader and séance professional Madame Esperanza Lechuga, owner of Madame Lechuga’s Celebrity Haunted Apartment, and boy, have we got dead celebrities. My place is lousy with ‘em.

Naturally I was intrigued. Who was Dick Moss? As the inheritor of his library I wanted to know the man and his work, if he’d done any, in the field of UFOlogy. I assumed he was dead, as that’s how most collections come to live in thrift stores. I once found about 30 snap button cowboy shirts each with the name Herman written in blue marker on the tag – a truly wonderful old man habit that doesn’t seem to be done much anymore - starting in the Medium section and going all the way to XXL. I figured Herman had either eaten himself into oblivion or wasted away from cancer or a Romanian curse like that guy in Stephen King’s book, Thinner.