Depending on the execution, this could be “art” but it could also just be “a thing on the internet.”

When I admit that I wasn’t allowed to watch much television — except for Benson, which my uncle was on, and the evening news, which was educational/nightmare-inducing, in the Reagan years — people always ask what I was allowed to do. Well, I was allowed to watch movies, for one thing, even R-rated movies provided they possessed sufficient artistic merit. By this logic The Godfather was okay (Coppola), but Night Court was not (?). Lest you think I was raised in some hoity-toity high-brow cultural surroundings, let me assure you, Monty Python also passed muster, as did Kenny Rogers records — and, later, Kokomo-era Beach Boys, Murphy Brown (Candice Bergen) and the YM subscription that my grandparents bought me for Christmas. At the time it seemed to make sense.

I read, too. There were no limits regarding reading material. Violence? War? Adult themes? Fine, on paper. My father collected the Doonesbury books and I spent the better part of 1986 parsing Death of a Party Animal, trying to understand the jokes. I was nine. There was probably something good on TV. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I went through a snobbish phase where I measured a book’s value by its word count; this led to the Year of the Russians, in which I told anyone who’d listen that I was slogging through War and Peace (although I’m sure I put it in loftier terms). Finally, after turning the last triumphant page, I told my mother that I’d liked the epic well enough, but felt the ending was weak — too abrupt, too many plot lines left unresolved. That’s when she pointed out the Vol. I in small print on my paperback’s spine. I never mustered the energy to tackle volume two.

As an adult this is fascinating to me, the cultural references we amass and the ones that pass by us like sheep in the night, how they frame the way we write and talk and think and regard the world. Which brings me to the title of this post, Neon Spaghetti. That was the name of my first zine. It consisted of twelve xeroxed pages, no name or attribution, and I made twenty copies. I don’t remember everything it contained, but I know my friend D. and I had reworked many of our gripes about the pettiness of public high school into anonymous screeds — scathing satire, we thought. I did the bulk of the writing but D. helped me linger after the final bell in order to slip copies into lockers chosen at random. The plan was for the recipients to discover the zine the next morning, read it, be blown away by its daring wit/fiery truths, and spread the word to everyone else in the hallway. We wanted it to go viral, even though such a phrase did not exist back then.

Morning came, lockers opened, and Neon Spaghetti got the same response I got at Waterville High: most people ignored it, several made fun of it, a few people said it was interesting or at least well-intentioned. The following year I abandoned the anonymous classroom ranting approach and began a proper zine, one that had my name on it and was distributed just about everywhere except my high school, and that worked out well for a number of years. All of this happened because the Mister Paperback bookstore on Upper Main Street received two copies of Sassy each month, and I’d buy one and Leslie would buy the other, and that is how I learned what a zine was, courtesy of Christina Kelly’s Zine-O-the-Month feature.

Anyway, sometimes I wonder what might have happened if I hadn’t picked up that magazine, or if I’d been watching something on television instead, or if my parents had cracked down on my mail-order habit when the envelopes and manila packages began piling up. What if, instead of knowing the Cometbus tagline, I knew the theme song to Who’s the Boss? What if I could make jokes about Gary Coleman without having to Wikipedia him? What if I’d gone to parties where everyone was singing along to the new Michael Jackson album? What if I’d gotten invited to parties?

Sometimes I think all our differences are differences in place — cultural place as well as geographical place, the way my Texan cousins said “crown” instead of “crayon” and wore wind shorts before anyone I knew in Maine. And whenever I bring this up in conversation someone inevitably says something along the lines of, The internet is erasing all these interesting differences, everyone exists in the same cultural place, the internet has made the entire concept of place virtually (ha!) meaningless. Etc.

Maybe. I’m not prepared to believe that quite yet. Right now I think the nice thing about the internet is the fact that it gives us an efficient way of telling other people what it’s like where we are and finding out what it’s like where they are.

For example, I just told you about publishing an anonymous, carob-stained, G.B. Trudeau-fueled zine in central Maine. I did that right here on the internet.

Here you go.

I have already told him that they need to move this business to Tumblr and get a book deal, stat.

The task: Turn this spam headline into something entertaining: Police end funereal striptease acts.
The format: Short story, comic, photo essay, pop tune, whatever, as long as it is bloggable
The prize: A box of awesome from tryharderland sent straight to your door!
The deadline: Friday, July 3

Want to enter? Of course you do. Go here.

Item! Tri-named virtuoso John Dermot Woods has a sweet offer for those who pre-order his forthcoming novel by July 15.
Details go a little something like this:

My novel (with drawings), The Complete Collection of people, places & things, is being published by BlazeVOX Books next month. To celebrate we’re offering the book for $12 with free shipping (that’s 25% off) to everyone who pre-orders by July 15. AND, the first 50 people who order will also receive:
- a signed and numbered silkscreen print, to commemorate the book’s release
- a personalized copy with a signed, limited edition book plate

Take advantage of John’s generosity right here.

Item! I once played a newsboy in a production of Irwin Shaw’s Bury the Dead. My only line was “Extry, extry, read all about it!”
Delivered with gusto, and a little tweed cap.

This peninsula is five miles square. It is not densely populated. We have passed each other on Congress Street a dozen times at least.

*I hearby renounce the practice of adding the qualifier “Maine, that is” or using the shorthand “PWM,” which no one understands anyway, in order to differentiate between this Portland and that Portland, the westerly one, PDX. Why should we be the ones who always have to clarify? Weren’t we here first? Yes, we were. Pac Northwesterners, get used to it: “I live in Portland.” [Pause for misunderstanding.] “Oregon, that is.”

**Not that this is a blog about Portland, per se, except sometimes.

Click here for details and to listen.

Yes, I realize that’s 11 p.m. on a Saturday night (or 8 p.m. on a Saturday night, West Coast friends). Either bring a laptop to the bar or bring your iPhone to a quiet corner, or, I don’t know, maybe you should stay in and rest up for the Memorial Day parties.

I did not click any further, for fear of rending the space-time continuum.

Speaking of which, have you noticed what happens if you visit PalinBachmann2012.com?