The Great Book of Meat, the Mahatma Gandhi, Rasputin, and Some Smelly Hippies

Bunny Lebowski: “Uli doesn’t care about anything. He’s a nihilist.”

The Dude: “Ah, that must be quite exhausting.”

“Hey man, can you dig it? It’s time to split this scene for something more happening with my old lady who is a real gas and the coolest, grooviest bird I’ve ever brought to my pad which is a bit of a drag with her crazy threads which are, like, so far out when she hangs loose and get’s real hip. Can you dig it? Far out!” - Sir Dennis Egan-DuBroville, Esq. III - The First Mayor of Cassells & MacIntyre

Hey, by complete accident I came across the official website for the Office of the Prime Minister of Canada - Stephen Harper (long story). Anyway, I was greeted with a truly epic picture of Mr. Harper who looks like a cross between Grigori Rasputin and some type of man-Barbie. Prime Minister Harper kept trying to hypnotize me with his piercing eyes that seemingly burned into my skull. Now, Conservatives, don’t take offense - don’t get all rattled as I am firmly apolitical. This is just an observation from a moron. My apathy is truly legendary, I can assure you. I carry deep within an equal disdain for all things political. I’m just saying that this picture really is kind of freaky. Okay, so off we go...

Books tell stories. Except cook books. Those are the dirty exceptions to the rule. Those things just tell you how to mix ingredients in mixing bowls of various sizes, while also offering up precise baking times for cobblers or roasts etc. Then there are manuals. Manuals don’t tell much of a story either, which is why they’re not referred to as ‘books’, but ‘manuals’. Then there are those sneaky hybrids meant to deceive the masses. A few years I bought a great hardcover copy of The Great Book of Meat. The dust jacket was blue featuring a glorious diagram of a quarter hind of beef. I found the book at a colossal roadside yard sale just north of Barrie. It was madness trying to turn off the 400 so suddenly, but the ramshackle house and collection of slanted sheds reminded me of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre homestead; too deliciously strange to pass up. Among a pile of hammers I discovered the book. I bought it along with three plastic toilet seats, a stuffed lemur, and a half-deck of jaundiced playing cards depicting naked women from the roaring twenties.

Now, the way I see it, the book was total bullshit on two levels - firstly, it was not ‘Great’, nor was it technically a ‘Book.’ In reality The Great Book of Meat was nothing short of a thinly veiled manual for butchers. Still, it certainly has to be the greatest title I’ve ever come across. Today I have my Great Book of Meat on my bookshelf right beside a Gandhi biography, which must be driving the poor Mahatma quite mad where ever he is in his afterlife.

Some books tell funny tales - tales of whimsy, and so forth. Some books purport to tell true stories that can often start out funny and whimsical, but end in a quite different manner. Some books claim to write the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but are nothing more than elaborate fairy tales. By the stuffy standards of certain groups of academics, some books are poorly written while others are touted often for reasons that are not uniformly agreed upon or relatable to the average reader. Some books age like wine, and can only be appreciated after the author has been dead and buried (typically in that order) for some time. Some authors enjoy a singular burst of brilliance, while others churn out novels every twenty minutes or so (mostly having to do with scary cars that become possessed, or scary clowns, or scary cell phones that possess the people talking on them, or scary fog fronts that possess small New England towns, or scary cemetery’s that possess scary cats and so forth).

I don’t have an expensive library fully stocked with first editions or anything like that, but I do have pretty well every book I’ve ever read. Some great. Some shitty. Many in that gray area between great and shitty (gritty?). Alas, I keep them all in case I want to read them again or lend them to others or have to burn them for heat after the apocalypse. I also keep them because each book - often more so than the actual words within - tell me a story. I usually write my name, date, where I bought the book and when, inscribed with a brief summary of the day’s events - a little context surrounding the purchase. Just a few words.

Picking through my books the other day, I came across Fargo Rock City. Inside the cover I read the date I bought the book and the circumstances, all of which would hold little interest for any reader of this column. Same goes with Long Time Gone - a biography of David Crosby - that quintessential hippie-turned-felon-drug-fiend with the voice of a bloated siren. My parents bought the book for me in 1988 - Christmas - at least that’s what the inscription says, although 1988 seems like a long time gone.

I began rereading Crosby’s biography, and got into a weird Woodstock mood. The best thing about Woodstock, for me at least, is that I was too young to go. I may have actually made the trek had I been older, but being one year old at the time, the thought never occurred to me, plus no friends my age would have had any good weed anyway, so it was just as well.

Other than watching Alvin Lee and Ten Years After rip through Goin Home, most of the split-screen footage of the festival is mediocre. Yes, Hendrix reinvented the Star Spangled Banner - but that doesn’t count because only a handful of smelly hippies scavenging through litter and mud on that grey Monday morning stuck around to hear him. Jimi did work some weird fret board voodoo with those crazy long fingers and that blue bobble ring, but it fell not only on deaf ears, but dirty ears as well. For an encore Jimi died in a bathtub.

I think Grigori Rasputin would have made for a better hippie than David Crosby or even Charles Manson, or maybe even a more interesting Prime Minister than Stephen Harper. Rasputin had kooky eyes and hair that had never known any kind of grooming (unlike Harper who has programmable hair). Poor Grigori. He rose from humble beginnings to become a bona fide Russian rock star with bona fide groupies, boozing it up huge while hanging out with local big wigs - specifically Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, the Tsarina Alexandra, and the extended Romanov crew, all legendary for their wicked six day keg parties. Rasputin would eventually be stabbed in the belly by an irate prostitute who pegged him as being the anti-Christ. He lived. Then he was poisoned with enough cyanide to kill five people, then shot once, then three more times, then clubbed repeatedly about the face, head and testicles, then castrated and bound before being wrapped in a carpet and tossed into the icy waters of the River Neva in St. Petersburg, where like Criss Angel, he freed himself from his bindings and the carpet, but in the end, unlike Criss Angel, did drown. Jesus! What a shitty afternoon for the Mad Monk - the Most Hated Man in Russia. I feel somehow responsible. Looking back, I now think that had I took the fraction of a second to accept him as a Facebook friend, maybe none of this would have happened.

I’ve just returned with my book entitled The Ten Most Evil Men and Women in History, and what do you know, poor Gregori is right up there. Sheesh! On the inside flap is the following the scribbled notes: “politics of violence....debauchery.....feb 27th 2003 from the most evil woman in history - Monique”

Then I opened a tan coloured Gideon Bible - of the many from my 'autographed hotel editions'. These are the scribbled notes:  “July 23rd, 1992 Las Vegas, Nevada... honeymoon - staying at the Dunes - last true shithole on the Strip - will be blown up soon I would imagine to make way for theme hotel...it’s like willingly walking into an inferno. I can smell Elvis farts and American tobacco everywhere.”

Books tell cool stories. Except that Great Book of Meat. That one is just ‘gritty’.