Black Crowes

OMG LOOK! I’M DRINKING OUT OF A SOLO CUP AT A HIGH SCHOOL KEG PARTY AND VOMITING! OMFG! FIRST PANEL! DON’T TELL THE F.B.I.! THEY MIGHT START CRYING ABOUT IT!

Yes, I drank to excess in high school. I started drinking when I was 8. Nobody bothered to introduce me to weed, because I was a freaking tyrant* about cigarette smoke, and I was clueless about why some kids smoked in the first place (to mask the smell of weed). So yes, I drank. So did literally all of my friends, and their parents. Almost my entire graduating class drank as much or more than I did. A girl I knew did a 75-second keg-stand. My high school friends and I had so much fun that my life felt exponentially shittier when I moved away, and I turned to drugs. I presently exist addicted to neither drugs nor alcohol, and I recreationally and regularly indulge in both. (American.)

(*I became more tolerant of the toxic shit out of respect for my friends, because passing judgment on them for smoking made me look like a huge hypocrite. Also the weed thing.)

If anything on this page compels you to question my character, then as they say, blame your parents because they raised a pussy. I am both a better and stronger person than you. If you think a good person comes only with a squeaky-clean adolescence, you are neither a good person yourself nor a smart one. You’re just a judgmental asshole. Blame “D.A.R.E.” and 1990s anti-drug hysteria for turning you into a loveless little pedant.

I drank and hosted keg parties at my family home while in high school because that was how you fucking made friends. I got my diploma 28 years ago and I’m still friends with the kids I got shitfaced with. Aside from art and drama, drinking alcohol was how I made friends. And it wasn’t even legal for us to do it. Our parents trusted us. Our parents were right. We learned how to become the people we are today.

Did every single thing go right? No, dude. We were teenagers. Shitheads routinely fucked up parties at my house and others. Sometimes I had to help clean up a literal inch of vomit covering an entire basement floor. Sometimes there were fights. Sometimes property was damaged. We did our best to handle our libacious business responsibly. Our parents continued to love and trust us. Even if they were blood-shittingly angry at us.

These are experiences I have drawn upon for creative inspiration since 1990. What do you use for material, that time you labeled someone a bigot on social media? Becoming rapidly out of shape from sitting in front of a computer monitor all day? Well, that’s why you’re a pussy, and I myself am not. You’re a fucking contemptible pussy, and not even half the man that I am. And I’m not even one of the tough ones. I’m a busted-up mutant blockhead of a man. I eat teeth. I hate for sport. 

I hope that’s not you in panel 2, so utterly programmed by paranoia and political correctness that you freak out at the sight of pubic hair. I still rankle at the thought of that stupid woman and her rotten (adult by now) child. People like her hate their own bodies and the bodies of anyone in better shape than themselves. They’re the reason I don’t want to include the original Amorica cover in this article. Not because I’m afraid of getting someone in trouble at work; because I just don’t want the fucking aggravation of dealing with another angry ignorant self-hating dunce. 

So here ya go, pussy. Take a good long look. Is it worth getting offended about? Really? If it is, then

1. You hate your body
2. You hate the natural female body
3. You’re a fucking pussy and a drain on society

That picture had all the pubic hair required to make some pastel-sweatered clam shriek at me in the music store in 1994. Because she felt that her precious child might see the same hair that presumably grows around the hole from which it plopped. That’s lunatic hypocrisy. Also some of the rap covers were way worse. Come to think of it, 1994 wasn’t a real barrel of laughs as far as album art went.

Here’s what I feel is the best track off of Amorica. YouTube was kind enough to use the censored cover, so you’re protected from seeing what is probably wreathing your own genitals as you read this.

Is that mons pubis too prominent? If it is, kill yourself. Seriously, I’m fed up with prudes like you. So is everyone else. Go back to your castrated and politically correct “Star Wars” movies. No vaginas will trouble you there. I mean you, specifically.

If you’re puzzled by the punch panel, don’t feel bad. It just means you never saw the last episode of Kids In The Hall. Chris Robinson gives the performance of a lifetime in the final “Rod Torfulson’s Armada featuring Herman Menderchuk” sketch, as a “rock ‘n roll angel”. His delivery of the two lines I quoted in the strip is nonpareil. When one of the members of Armada tells Robinson they played a gig with 60 people, he replies:

“Sixty people. That’s a salad bar.”

Oh, there’s another factor that people often forget when it comes to underage drinking.

The fucking climate, dude! Do you understand how motherfuckin’ cold some places are? Some people drink to deal with the cold!!!

And yeah, some people like to drink, okay?! Why don’t you get off my goddamn back about it?!?

Besides, it’s legal, and do you have any idea how much alcohol other countries consume? America’s not even in the top ten! We’re not even in the top twenty!

I’m not saying that drinking culture doesn’t have its downsides, some of which I have personally experienced. I’m saying it’s an ingrained part of almost every culture. It’s too gargantuan a windmill to tilt at. Just like tobacco and firearms, alcohol is something that every adult American has a complex relationship with, unless they abstain from it entirely. Which is still a relationship with alcohol.