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! Crow language educator, globe smasher, erotic author, and now, panderer to drug users! Ha-ha! If you crave new mass produced fake intellectual fake art to gaze upon, dead eyed and slack jawed, while you listen to terrible music, you need - NEED! - to come on down to Jim Krakowski's House of Mass Produced Trippy Shit for Stoned Teenagers! We've got it all! Black light posters featuring new stoner favorites, like cats and whatever! Lava lamps, but with a slightly different shape! Incense burners made of clay crudely sculpted into something resembling the hideous noggin of David Matthews or whoever is his modern day equivalent! Beads and junk! Clothes with labels that say they are made with locally, organically sourced hemp but are probably some type of burlap! Glass bongs so huge and elaborate that only Seth Rogan or a successful drug dealer can afford them! Legal drugs that might make you feel like you might maybe feel a little weird somehow! In candy form! You name it, we've got it! So, shake the Utz potato chips crumbs out of your terrible beard and come on down to Jim Krakowski's House of Mass Produced Trippy Shit for Stoned Teenagers, located in that building that used to be an ice cream place and then was a really sketchy looking daycare for a while before becoming a really sketchy looking car dealership and then was vacant for a decade and is now my store! Come on! Up you go! You can do it, you lazy post-zelleniall, depression ravaged internet borg! Pornhub will still be there when you get back! Thaaaaat's right, off your parents couch and right on over to Jim Krakowski's House of Mass Produced Trippy Shit for Stoned Teenagers! See you in a bit!

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. It was New Years Eve, the final day of the year 2000. I had just turned 17. Drugs were not new. My friends and I had been smoking weed multiple times a day for a year and some change by that time and I think we'd smoked opium, but that could have been in the months after the mushrooms, I can't recall. Once, in the absence of the stem and beaner riddled, Autumn ruffage swag we usually had access to at the time, Marshall and I had each drank a full bottle of children's allergy medicine before a showing of Yellow Submarine at the Fargo Theater. We both slept through the whole thing. I don't recall how we obtained the mushrooms, but I assume it was like how we obtained any such thing. Some semi-local old degenerate obtained a massive amount of a particular drug and sold it to the younger guys he always sold it to, word began to spread, and they sold it to every other aspiring drug dealer who sold it to his friends and eventually it trickled down to us. You'd hear a rumor of mushrooms or good weed or whatever and then hope you got there before it was all bought up, there generally being some little used parking lot, maybe behind the Mini Mart or Videoland or the bowling alley. You'd have gotten a number, and then you and your friends, packed into a 1987 Buick Celebrity Station Wagon with a v dent in the front from where it had hit a tree, pulled up to a lonely, street lit payphone in some other parking lot and called that number and maybe, if you were lucky, the guy would answer and, luckier still, he'd show up - the guy was always the third or fourth guy to have handled the drugs since the old degenerate - and who knows how many before that - and he always had on a baseball cap with a flat brim at some preposterous angle and a Doors or Sublime t-shirt or maybe just an implied Doors or Sublime t-shirt and drive a shitty car with a massive sub in the back absolutely mangling an already pretty shitty Eminem song almost beyond recognition and have prematurely too tightly drawn, dry skin - and you'd pool your fives and tens to buy whatever it was he was selling, and he'd look at the sad wad of too many bills you were handing him with disgust and maybe tell you to drive to yet another parking lot to make the handoff. So we had the mushrooms and we set a date to ingest them. New Year's Eve was a week away. Perfect. Momentous. Early evening New Years Eve, we gathered at Ben's house. His parents house, really. They were away, which was fairly rare. We gathered in the basement and ate some of the ultra-dry dregs of the batch, stems and a few caps and a lot of powder in each of our eight of a gram baggies. Then we waited. Here are the two most important things to know about mushrooms: First, their effects last far longer than you think they will. Like, eight hours, but time is weird on hallucinogens - it skips and drags and disappears - so those eight hours, if things are not going well, will feel like days. If you don't have a completely open schedule for the entire day and/or night, today is not a good day to eat a handful of mushrooms. You're not going to want to, say, go to work at a grocery store. You will not be an effective worker and everyone will notice and, even if they somehow don't, you will be positive that they do. Second, they take some time to kick in. At least an hour. Be patient. Don't, as I did, assume that you got a bad batch and just eat the rest of it after like 20 minutes.

Franz Xaver Messerschmidt Hello, friends. Welcome to another very special episode of The Irrationally Exuberant. So, three or four weeks ago I sat in my kitchen and, under the watchful, semi-mocking eyes of my wife and children, spit into a tube until I could spit no more, then mailed it off to the good folks at 23andMe to be tipped and toppled and spunned and broken down, analyzed and digitized and turned into data in an easy to read e-document detailing the very building blocks of the meat machine that is Reid Messerschmidt, as well as some information on the meat machines that proceeded me, my ancestors. It had never occurred to me to do this before. I'm an artist, goddamnit! A man of feelings and knowledge! What business of mine is my disgusting body? And god knows I love a good story, but my ancestors? I've known a good swath of them over the years and, while some of them are great and a few I really love, there's not a one whose kinship is a matter of personal pride. Gratitude, sure, but not pride. Still, my wife, understandably, I suppose, wanted to know what horrible syndromes and diseases would ultimately kill us and our children. "Listen," I said. "I know I've probably given my beloved offspring Clinical Depression and Alcoholism, do we really need to delve further? They're going to start resenting my building blocks." She believed we did, and I was not uncurious, so a kit was ordered. Everything that could be known about me would now be revealed for a paltry $125. I only hoped it wouldn't ruin my life, send me spiraling down a depressive, dissociative abyss, ultimately leading to madness. On the other hand, I'd heard of people finding out their father's were not really their father's, and that sounded appealing. Well, all of that information is now here, in front of me, in an email that I have printed out, because I am old fashioned, even at the expense of our fragile ecosystem. Some of the information - most of it - is unsurprising. The genetic scientists in their corporate laboratory have discovered that it is likely that I have dark brown hair, blue eyes, and a taste for sweets. Bullseye! These things are true. They also found it likely that I have a muscular, athletic build. This is slightly less true. They further determined that I am unlikely to transmit a propensity for any horrible syndrome or diseases to my kids. Aside from the Clinical Depression and Alcoholism, of course. Lucky them! The scientists have also discovered some relatives of mine who were also coerced into sending this deeply personal information through the mail to strangers. Some of them I am aware of. Others I am not, because they are third or fourth cousins and I could not care less about them or their building blocks. There was no conclusive information regarding my paternity. But, buried amid all of this semi depressing data about the fundamental makeup of myself - easily communicated in a medium length email and indicating no particular gifts or promise - is one surprising tidbit. A tidbit I had long suspected, and has now been confirmed. I, it turns out - and you may want to be sitting down for this - come from the same genetic line as Franz Xaver Messerschmidt! (dramatic sting) If this doesn't spin you into a tizzy of excitement and envy or even touch off a glint of recognition, allow me to tell you about my Uncle Franz: He was an eccentric 18th Century Austrian sculptor responsible for the famous "Character Heads", a series of 64 tin-lead alloy and alabaster busts of his own head, each displaying a different, peculiar, often extreme facial expression.

The piano has been drinking, the piano has been drinking, not me . . . Oh, hello. I didn’t hear you come in. I was busy writing a new hit song and preparing my brain for tonight’s, ah, lurid lucid dreams. Name’s Tom, by the way, Tom Waits – I’m the owner of this glistening institute. And you are? Uh-huh. Well, I’m pleased to make your acquaintance. You’re a comely one, aren’t you? 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. Well, you’re probably asking yourself why Tom Waits, the man responsible for such landmark albums as Swordfishtrombone and Mule Variations has any interest in opening a Lucid Dreaming Institute in the first place. A fair enough question. You’re very astute. The answer is simple as JoJo the Idiot Circus Clown. I’ve been a lucid dreamer since my parents left me at an abandoned bus depot in Atlantic City to live with the hobos and tramps when I was 7 years old. A tattered, one-legged bum on the lam from the law, name of Shitmouth Charlie, The Rail-yard Privateer, taught me how to do it. And I want to share the gift that Shitmouth Charlie, The Rail-yard Privateer gave me with as many folks as’d care to listen. So, when you’re here at the Tom Waits Institute of Lucid Dreaming you’ll learn how to slide into a deep, active sleep using the music of me, Tom Waits. I’ve been known as both a whiskey soaked beat troubadour and a rail riding industrial carnival barker, but all along the mission of my music has been to induce lucid dreams and there have been subliminal messages in these tunes starting with Closing Time. Like my song, The Earth Died Screaming, for instance. It may seem to the untrained ear like nothing more than your typical nightmare environmentalist screed, shrieked by a drink and drug addled lunatic great grandpa, but listen closely. There’s a constant whisper behind all of that madness, telling you to be mindful and relax. (Earth Died Screaming) Did you here it? No? Your subconscious did. Try this one on for size. It’s called Singapore. It was on my platinum selling album, Rain Dogs. At first listen, all you’ll hear is a hell circus hosted by a blood spitting wino with post traumatic stress disorder. But there’s more to the song than meets the eardrum, so to speak. See if you can hear the underlying message that you are safe and secure and should feel free to fully enter your dreams and experience true beauty for the first time in you life. (Singapore) Yeeaaah. Now you’re getting it. Here at T-WILD we’ve created the perfect environment in which to tumble into slumber and finally know what it feels like to live without boundaries. To experience all of the enlightenment and serenity that lucid dreaming has to offer. You’ll nestle into a dusty bed of burlap and horse hair as you’re coaxed to sleep by the flashing of dozens of strobe lights and the perpetual spinning of our neverending Poe themed Merry-go-round, while my dream inducing music plays at deafening volumes. Or, if that doesn’t suit you, you can drift into your own unconsciousness in our room of carnival freaks and clowns, now stocked with 75% more clowns, who will jump about and groan encouragement over songs such as Tango Till They’re Sore and Cemetery Polka. It’s a real scene, let me tell you.

Intro: Dream It is light. It is dark. It is light again. It is very dark. Dusk settles - something like dusk - a queasy, night vision green, stamped with a throbbing amber moon. It is my backyard, but it isn’t. Josh is there and Ben and Ryan, but he’s very young, and then not Josh, and me, and Tony, and Brian Lauers, from high school, and Jake, and then Josh. They are golfing, and then not Josh, hitting balls, and it is light, silent, and I am watching, and it is dark, and I am not me, but I am watching me, and then Josh. And there are pigs in the yard - first the impression of pigs, followed by pulsing pig representations - and it is yellow dusk, and the pulsing pig representations are too big, and then Josh, and there is a baby that is not mine, that I need to take care of, that looks like me, and then not Josh, and then Josh, and then not Ben, and Josh is going into the neighbor’s house to take a piss and they aren’t home but the lights are on and I am furious, and then not Josh, and the pulsing pig representations are again just the impressions of pigs and they are many, and the pigs are in danger, I can feel it, and then Josh, and it is light, and the pigs are pigs now - tangible pigs - and have green eyes, and then Ben, and then not Josh, and Marshall is in the house, and I am in the house, and Josh is in the house, and then not Josh, and Kelly wafts through, blinking her eyes wildly, and it is very bright, and then Josh - and where is the baby? - and then not Josh, and I can hear an uncle in the other room, and it is very bright, and then Josh and Ben and Marshall and Tony and my brother and me and a pig and the baby and then not Josh and this doesn’t make sense, I realize this doesn’t make sense, and I realize I’m dreaming and then it is light and everything slows down, comes into focus. Everything is focused and still. Lucid. The house is mine and I am lucid. I am dreaming. I say this aloud and the words pulse through the air in concentric circles. I am in my kitchen. Everything is there. It is my kitchen, but more - ethereal, maybe. And Josh and Ben and Tony and Ryan and Jake and Marshall and Brian Lauers and the green eyed pig are just standing still, staring at me, waiting for me to do something. So I put a hat on the pig, with my mind. A beautiful deep brown bowler. Everyone smiles. I breath. This is my dream and I can do literally anything I want. The laws of physics and morality do not apply to me. I could fly through the air like a crow. I could make Josh do things to the pig. I could combine Josh with the pig to make a pig-Josh and have Ben do things with pig-Josh. I could punch pig-Josh into a billion smaller pigs with spaghetti knuckles. I don’t know what that means, exactly, but I could do it. I could make them all perform an elaborate three part very special episode of Charles In Charge, where the pig plays Charles and Tony plays Buddy, and Buddy is experimenting with PCP, and Charles has to help him and hide it from the kids. It could be brilliant and disgusting. And I could play Mr. Belvedere, hell, I could be Mr. Belvedere, even though he’s not even in Charles In Charge. I could make Mr. Belvedere a member of the Charles in charge universe with my mind. Anything. This world, as they say, is my oyster. I could literally make this world into an oyster. Instead, I retreat to my studio to record - this - podcast . . . Part I: Lucid DreamingIn 1902, Willis Carrier recorded a remarkable dream in his dream journal. Two dream descriptions in a row might be a bit much, but bare with me. July 16th, 1902 Dearest diary, Last night I dreamt the most remarkable dream. To call it a dream, in fact, does it no justice. It was more than a dream, I believe. Vision may be the word. Revelation, perhaps.

Bad news, friends. I died. I was trudging along the banks of the Red River, as you do during an unseasonably warm North Dakota Winter. With the trees gone and the prairie grass tamped down by deer, you can get much closer to the water than in the Summer, but usually it's colder 'n the heart of a Saskatoon Psychopath and there's liable to be a foot or two of snow on the ground, so you're mostly stuck indoors, gaining winter weight. Not this winter, though. This was a couple days after the anniversary of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and it was still in the high 40s. Heaven on earth. So, I was trudging along, tossing rocks and kicking out rotted stumps when I came upon a peculiar sight. There was something wedged between two bare elm trees not ten feet from where I stood. It was red and green and, this being the Holiday season, I assumed it was some kind of out of the way Christmas decoration. But I pushed on to investigate, and, to my surprise, saw three words printed in big block letters on the mystery object. The words were these: The Phoenix Lights. I was taken aback. Why, that very morning I'd cracked open a book on The Phoenix Lights, the most famous UFO sighting in the Americas, maybe the world. I whispered, "Synchronicity," because that's what UFO weirdos do. Convinced that I'd stumbled upon some sort of cache of secret information, finally, or, at the very least, some sort of incoherent message from The Phenomenon - I rushed toward whatever it was, and this is where I died. My foot caught on an exposed root. I put out my hands to grab hold of a branch, and the branch snapped like a box of angel hair pasta over a bubbling pot of water. I tumbled, foot over fedora, down the river bank and on to the icy surface of the mighty Red. Shaken but okay, I stood up, brushed the dirt and cockleburs from my body, lifted a foot to ascend the bank and heard another crack - too many cracks for one day, if you ask me - felt the ice give way below me, fell backward again, and crashed through the thin ice, into the frigid, mud dark water. I felt a jolt of unspeakable cold, gasped, filled myself with water that tasted of clay, and was sucked Northward and to the bottom of Fargo's preeminent body of water. Next thing I remember, I was completely dry, which struck me as odd. I was back on land, in a dense green wood, ominous in a way I couldn't quite put my finger on. Poetical, somehow. The ground was rocky and inclined. This wasn't North Dakota. What was it? I heard a low growl. Not good. Low growls are almost never good. Even high growls aren't great. I heard a low growl and saw an enormous black bear slowly approaching me, snout wet, eyes wild with malice or hunger or both. I looked about for somewhere to run. There was a clearing! I started in that direction, but - Alas!- coming through the clearing was a guy I went to high school with who I'd blocked on Facebook. REALLY didn't want to talk to him. But it was this guy or the bear. I was frozen in indecision. Then, from above, an urgent whisper. I looked up. There was a man in the branches of a large Sycamore Tree, partially obscured. He looked older. Well dressed. A stranger. Not ideal, but better than the other two options. I briefly hoped he wouldn't be the chatty kind of stranger and then ascended the tree as quickly as I could. There in the branches of the Sycamore was a man I immediately recognized. He was Kurt Vonnegut. "You're Kurt Vonnegut!" I whispered. "Guilty as charged," said he. "But your d-d-d-dead!" I hissed.

Parasites 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. Some examples: There is a fungus that can infect an ant, make it leave its colony, crawl three feet up a tree at exactly solar noon, find a leaf on the Northeast side of the tree, crawl onto the leaf, and clamp its mandibles down on the thick stem running through it's middle. It then paralyzes the ant, waits four hours, and explodes its spores all over the ground below. This is a fungus, not even a creature, exactly. There is a wasp that can sting a specific type of spider, sedating it and filling its abdomen with wasp larvae. Already, this is unbearably grotesque, but there's more. The larvae then instruct the spider to build a web different from the beautiful, symmetrical one they'd normally be busy creating - something hideous and Lovecraftian, ropey and double stitched, suited to larval purposes. The web can be different depending on the location. If more protection is needed, it can be made in three dimensions, with a kind of ceiling hiding the gestating wasps. The larvae then devour the spider from the inside out and use the newly spun web to pupate and emerge as new, nightmarish adult wasps. Absolute degenerates. These are things scientists are only beginning to understand. There's the now semi-famous case of toxoplasmosis - a single celled monster that infects rats, decreasing their inhibition and making them more cat friendly. The cat eats the rat, and shits out the toxoplasmosis, where it waits for a human to clean up the shit. Then it gets into the human brain and, it is theorized, makes humans somehow love cats, inadvertently creating 70% of the internet culture of the 2010s. Studies show that fully one third of humans are infected with toxoplasmosis. There's a really good chance your brain is riddled with it right now. We know of but a minuscule percentage of a percentage of all existing parasites, but it has been estimated that these dastardly pests outnumber all other living things on Earth four to one. We are essentially living on their planet, at their behest. They live around us, in the food we eat, in the pets we keep. They live INSIDE of us, feasting on us and the horrific foods modern people engorge themselves upon. God knows what they're making us do. Our "free will" could very well be nothing more than the complicated intersecting commands of untold numbers of these wee, hideous beasts. Thousands upon thousands of times I have asked myself this question: What would make a sane human being - someone otherwise functional, perhaps even kind and good - become obsessed with donald trump, a man who looks like a used condom filled to busting with butterscotch pudding, a crude, too small caricature of Mussolini drawn near the top, topped with dog-shit flavored cotton candy, and a personality to match his looks? Could the answer be some nightmarish parasite? I think it might. I think the process may play out something like this: At a young age, a person without any defenses built into their system for such thoughts, feelings, and critters, ingests the parasite - we'll call it Magacepholis - perhaps through an undercooked fast food cheeseburger or some feral raccoon droppings or maybe it's passed down from their infected, reprehensible parents. Maybe the parents were playing with feral raccoon droppings or ate an undercooked McDonald's cheeseburger, or vice-versa, or their parents did.

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 York, Lutherans, Facebook, YouTube, PIZZA HUT, Disney, Metallica, Isaac Newton, "God Bless the U.S.A.", Pokemon Go, Feminism, the Coriolis Effect, Admiral Byrd, Red Bull Stratos Felix, Apollo 8, Strawberry Kiwi Shasta, Carl Sagan, Albert Eistein, Apple, Reptilians, and Mole People.

It's 2001, and I have just arrived on campus at the University of North Dakota in the city of Grand Forks for my first year of college. I am excited, slightly nervous. Grand Forks is only 81 miles North of my hometown, Fargo, and several of my friends are going to be here as well. This will be a lot like high school, only better, I assume, but I don't know, really. Most of my knowledge about college life comes from Saved By the Bell The College Years and I can't imagine that's very accurate. I'm excited to learn, I'm excited to party. I would very much like to lose my virginity. I am very typical. I've driven to Grand Forks in my Cobalt Blue 1994 Chevy Cavalier, a terrible plastic car. I wanted to, as a joke, get a personalized license plate that said FNKYDVA. I am now glad I didn't do that. My father has followed me to Grand Forks to help me get settled. He and my mother have just divorced. I am glad to not be in Fargo for all of that. We unload my stuff. Some books, clothes, a gorgeous blue iMac, fresh from Best Buy. We say some unsentimental goodbyes, and I sit on the curb to smoke my first cigarette as a free man and contemplate my new life. My prospects are good. I'm out of the house, finally. My parents are divorced, finally. That was a long time coming. This isn't the greatest college in the world, but it's fine. I'll maybe stay here for a couple of years and then transfer somewhere else. What do I want to be? A writer, mostly. Maybe a teacher. I think most writers also teach. Journalism? Maybe journalism. I'm not so concerned about any of that now. My social life is what I'm concerned about. Meeting girls. I want to meet girls. And I want to drink. Drink to meet girls, that's the goal. I am intelligent but not smart. I am perhaps the most free I have ever been or will ever be. I could get in my car and leave here. That option has always been in the back of my mind. I could, theoretically, walk up to any kid here, theoretically start a conversation, and begin a new life path. I don't do this. My friends begin to arrive. Brady, Jake, Jamie, Travis, Tony. I've known all of these guys since we were kids. I have not gone far outside of my comfort zone. Once we're moved in, we gather in Jake's dorm room to make plans for the night. Jake's dorm will become a central meeting point as he will soon have driven his roommate out with a plan of making himself impossible to live with and leaving dildos everywhere. Jake's room will soon become barely inhabitable. One night, ripped on whiskey, with whiskey left, but out of chaser, we will take some pudding cups out of his mini-fridge while he is in the bathroom and chase the whiskey with that. He will be furious that we have stolen his pudding. He will become more furious when he notices that we are getting cigarette ash all over his floor, as though he's not the worst offender. He will yell at us. Jaime, who is an asshole, will look him dead in the eye, drop his cigarette on the flour, and grind it into the rug with his foot. Jake will lose his mind and kick us all out. By the time I get back to my dorm, just down the hall, he will have left a message on my answering machine. It goes like this: "I'm sick and tired of you guys coming into my room, eating all my pudding cups, and putting out cigarettes on my floor!" He will then call my mother at 2 in the morning and make the same complaint to her. This quaint anecdote is my freshman year of college in miniature. This is a digression. Tonight,

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 about his, has never done the work needed to overcome it and has instead repressed the deep sadness he feels intrinsically, but also about dreams unfulfilled, potential untapped, relationships irrevocably harmed, and maybe expressed that hurt as anger and resentment over some perceived change in the world that has left him behind, a victim of some ambiguous other. Little Timmy Messerschmidt: Dis isn't funny, Weid. Dis is pwetentious pwojection and not neewy as cweve as you fink it is. Why do you even botha? Does anybody even listen to this widiculous show? Oh, hello Little Timmy Messerschmidt. Ladies and gentleman and ungendered friends, this is Little Timmy Messerschmidt, a little boy/physical manifestation of my depression. Timmy, I thought you were sleeping? LTM: I don't neva sweep, I jus west. Isn't dis show just a futile attempt to mask the meaningless of wife wif artistic pwetensions wifout actuwawy physicawy exposing youself to the outside wold? Isn't dat just a wittle pafetic? Yo a gwown man doing goofy voices in his basement. God, Little Timmy, you're just awful, but also painfully insightful. You know, that may be somewhat true, but that's what everybody does, or just about everyone. I understand that life is meaningless, probably, but that's fine. There's literally nothing you can do to give it meaning, so why worry about it? Even if I were somehow performing this show in front of thousands of people and effusively praised and rewarded, you wouldn't go away, right? You'd still have negative things to say about it - probably something about selling out or being an imposter or whatever, right? LTM: Hey wememba all dose times wen you were wiwy dwunk and you cawed wike evwyone you know and just wambled on wike an asshole? You fink they forgot about dat? Or do they just constantly have in da back a der mind how widicuwous you weawy a? Uh. Timmy, I'm trying to do an episode here. I don't have time for this. Why are you a little boy, by the way? LTM: Dunno. I fink you jus had dis dumb voice and fot it would be funny to make it say depwessing fings. So owiginal. You know what? Since I've got you here, and this show's about depression, why don't you just plop down in that chair and I'll ask you some questions. You're going to be here whether I want you to be or not, so you may as well make yourself useful. LTM: Weawy? You wusuawy jus igno me. Wew . . . okay. Dis is all jus a finly veiwed and gimmicky pwemise dat you have aweady done befo wif Foam Chomsky. Great. How old are you? LTM: I'm dis many! He's flashed all ten fingers three times and then held up eight of them, so thirty-eight. Same as me. Makes sense. Let's try this another way. Can you think of any reason you might look like a little boy? LTM: Wew, maybe I'm da age you were when you stahted to wealize dat maybe wife wasn't pewfect and yo pawents wasn't pewfect and evewyfing didn't wevolve awound you. I assumed I was a bit older when that realization came. You seem like, three, maybe an immature four. LTM: Wew, I guess you assumed wong. You pwetty dense awot of da time, even do you fink yo soooooo smart, or act wike you do, anyway. Great. Okay. I feel like we're making progress. Hey! you spilled my water all over the desk! LTM: YOU spiwed yo watow aw ove the desk. God, you're impossible. Why is clumsiness seem to be such an intrinsic part of depression, for me anyway? LTM: Because you can't do anyfing wight! Yo not a gwown up you know. Yo basicallwy and ol child and a burden to dose awound you and evewything you fink is good about yoself is an iwussion.