Product Rundown

We are consumers. We're the by-products of a lifestyle obsession.

What’s up America? I know it’s been a while since I rapped atcha but i’ve been busier than a coroner in Uvalde lately. And, in related news, shit’s been pretty dark here recently so I’m not gonna charge anyone for this edition and i’m not gonna make this heavy at all.

If you like what you read, please consider subscribing. It helps me get the daily meth for my children.

Anyway, let’s get started….

Products. They’re things that you purchase or acquire. They’re both the bane and the benefit of existence. Products are the next most American thing after shooting up the place. We love products. We need products. We are, some of us (cough) products. Without wasting anymore time, let’s get into my round up of products. Hopefully it will help salve your hurting heart after such a rough few days. This list contains all products ever. So strap in.

Let’s begin for real…

Mops (various)

these fucking guys. I wanna say they all look like Doc Brown from Back to the Future but I don’t even know if y’all are old enough to know who that is.

Here’s what’s up: We got shop vacs, we have swiffer wet and swiffer dry, we have a lot of cleaning solutions and this muppet Beethoven on a stick is still something that we’re fucking with for some reason? Nah dog.

In the world of mops you put the hair of the mop into a bucket and then put that wet ass hair all over the ground and it makes…oh, I dunno, ten times more of a mess?

The mop is a fucking fraud of a cleaning device. the only thing it’s good for is giving that pervert at the grade school something to do that’s not just ogling the 8th grade girls. So, in that sense I guess the mop does clean things up a little, but in the very literal sense, fuck a mop. Never met one I liked.

I mean, I guess they look like Einstein, which I do think is pretty okay, even with my preconceptions. Also, I guess the handle becomes a pretty handy weapon if you’re from Zamunda and working at McDowells. So mops are a grey area. Weird one to start with in hindsight. Let’s move on.

Pain relievers

These things are wild. Some people only take Tylenol, some are Aspirin people (the olds [even older than myself]), some are Aleve (holla!) and some folks are Advil (a completely useless drug).

In my opinion none of these usually do jack shit (with the exception of Aleve here and there which I’ll concede probably means that different bodies need different pain relievers even though if you’re a heavy drinker or pillhead, you really shouldn’t fuck with Tylenol. Please remember that. It’s a good lesson. I feel like a good dad).

But there are more. there are cooler ones that are probably um…look, don’t try these, but here’s what’s up:

Morphine: This is what you got when your legs got blown off in the pacific theater. It’s a drug that kinda sent a whole generation into a spiral of addiction and suicide. We talk about the numbers surrounding Oxy (more on that later) but the truth is that there just wasn’t the same kind of awareness, much less personal stocktaking back in those days so this could have been (and probably was) a similarly dire situation. But this shit must be cool as hell because:

A) our great grandfathers all kinda died because of it

B) We can’t just really get it anymore.

In closing, if you’re gonna be fucked up on pain killers, this one seems like the Cadillac of em. Let’s move on to…

Heroin

YO! so this shit was created as a non addictive ALTERNATIVE to morphine. I think I can speak for all of us when I say, “thank god for heroin, because I used to know a lot of morphine addicts and now I don’t know a single heroin junky”.

Listen, everyone loves the idea of the romance of this product but the big thing about it is that you end up being unable to shit or eat and then you steal your roommate’s record collection and end up selling it for (go ahead and guess) heroin. Oh, and invariably you die (though I am keenly aware that responsible heroin use doesn’t necessarily affect your health. Are you one of those people? Okay, wild. Good luck).

There’s nothing cool about getting a 4 foot long turd scoped out of your body by an EMT dude that doesn’t care about you at all with a fucking coat hangar just because you spent the last two months behind the Dominos leaning against the dumpster like a fucking corpse that got dropped off but not thrown away.

Can you imagine the feeling of relief/shame/Jesus Christ what did I do that floods into you when you wake up in (I’m assuming) a prison hospital with like 3 or 4 less pounds of shit inside you? I bet it’s pretty great.

But what do I know? Anyway, on to…

Oxy

A drug that exists. You may have heard of it due to its ubiquity Among our more “I live in West Virginia” citizens. Called ‘hillbilly heroin’ by some, it’s a wild trip, yo.

But! Here’s the thing about Oxy: in my experience, it doesn’t really mitigate pain at all, but it DOES make you go “yo I don’t give a shit about this pain anymore” which, yeah, in that sense it’s a good antidote to pain, but it doesn't really do shit nerve-wise I don’t think. So, with that in mind, it’s not a stretch to see that explanation and be like “Oh, that’s why people take it. They can just not care about their feelings (physical or soul style feelings). “Ah, so she’s gone and I’m fired? Fuck it. Who cares?” is the kind of thing I think someone on this drug might think or even say out loud.

This, I think is the appeal of this drug, but what the fuck do I know. I took it for a few days 18 years ago when I broke my knee. I am no expert.

My close friend’s dad is an anesthesiologist and one day I was talking to him about this and he said “that drug is trash. It’s only marketed to create addicts.” So I said “well what’s the best painkiller?” and he said it was methadone. He didn’t hesitate at all and he is a top tier anesthesiologist so uh….take that, sackler family. Your shit’s worse than what my cousin’s baby mama takes when she’s in the alleyway behind the clinic (granted, probably right before she takes a handful of oxys, but the point stands: Oxys Ain’t shit). Don’t get caught up in that noose, friends.

Vicodin

Welp, this is, from what I know, a pill that hurts your stomach and does almost nothing else. Kill pain? This thing could be called “make me fly” for how accurate its assessment of what it thinks it does is. This is a bullshit drug that if you have you should give me a few of when you see me on my upcoming tour http://www.redscare.net/site/tours/

Okay, enough of painkillers. Let’s move on to good stuff. Like…

Rotisserie Chicken

Yeah, doing stuff is cool, but have you ever not done stuff and felt like you did something? If your answer is no, you’ve never had a rotisserie chicken. This shit is, according to the highly un-mathematical, what-i-heard-over-drinks stocktaking, a huge loss leader for Costco. I don’t know. and I definitely don’t care but that’s what I heard.

These things are like 5 bucks? It feeds your whole family? For probably 2 days? Please! These are the new things crackheads should be trying to sell along with the dicksucking and cheeseburgers.

good product. Do I LIKE them? Nah. But I dislike them less than I think literally 100% of the time when I’m faced with one. Chicken is just only ever fine. It’s never “good” and this version is a passable enough iteration of it that seems like it’s maybe a little healthier? I don’t know. I’m gross. What the fuck do I know? I know nothing. But yo, it’s not like it’s Grotesquerie chicken. It’s fully edible. Get on up there and have you some if you dare.

Switchblades

If you have one of these, you’ve been kicking it in Tijuana or Nogales or Belarus or something and you’re probably rocking a good scar or two. You’re stoked though, because you wanted a switchblade and you got one.

These are fun because you’re so so so so likely to cut the shit out of yourself if you have one, not only because you’re holding a blade that just flies around at the push of a button but also because you’re the kind of person that would want a switchblade and that immediately makes you the kind of person that will cut the shit out of yourself.

In closing, switchblades: Kinda cool in theory, but I don’t think anyone cool actually has one. Pull out a switchblade and anyone worth a shit is singing a song from Grease at you immediately thereby wrecking your attempted menace establishing vibe.

Those candles with the Virgin Mary on them

they do nothing. They kinda look cool but they really truly do nothing. there’s no god and if you have cancer you have it. Sorry. Try chemo, not candles with a lying woman on them.

Bullshit that women are into

Yeah, so this is a broad category that includes like, exfoliators and throw pillows and decorative soaps and vastly more stuff than I could even ever hope to catalogue. I guess Father John Misty is in this category too? He is.

Anyway, this shit is dope if you’re a woman and if you’re a dude it’s just kinda not. The best women on earth (or in the universe I suppose) recognize that this is just some shit that women are into and there’s not a straight man alive who wants to talk about a cool train that goes down the dining room table above the matching tablecloth, but the world is not full of just the best women on earth.

I have to say, I love my nice house with its array of pillows and blankets and shit. It makes me feel like I live somewhere. If I lived by myself, it would be in a car. There would be no pillows at all.

Laminators

YO! The Laminator. I was watching a show with my family and these two British comedians were talking about what the greatest “stationary” is (it’s my distinct impression based on this bit that stationary is the British term for ‘office supplies.’)

Anyway, both had a real strong opinion on what the best stationary was. And they somehow had this notion that they should say it at the same time. I’m sure you get where this is going.

they both said ‘laminator’ in unison.

SO, since I saw this with my whole family and know that my wife loves gadgets, I decided it was a no brainer birthday gift bc she’d never see it coming but she’d get the sentiment right away.

Turns out it is still in the box about 2-3 years later. You never know, y’all. You sincerely never know. And when you do, hold onto that for dear life no matter what. Laminate that shit. pi’m laminating the things that matter the most to me for the rest of my days once I get that thing out of the pbox and know it’s mine to care for or ruin.

Soda Stream

This is an item that I’ve had good experiences with but the thing about it is mostly that I don’t love the product it produces. We have so much great bubbly water out there and the soda stream’s plastic bottle is a very unappetizing way to exemplify that which water mit gas has to offer.

those cartridges are expensive as shit, they’re only sold in weird places like Staples and the whole thing, while democratizing, has a bit of a “we live in that slab city place in eastern California that’s completely bereft of municipality or order” vibe (nothing wrong with that, just to be clear).

Anyway, this is a product that is very much (I think?) an affordable alternative to big seltzer, but it’s just not cool. It’s some hungover divorcee dad shit at the end of the day.

So this gets the (hits the soda stream a few times) buzzer from me, dawg.

Living things (plants, pets)

Oh THIS shit. Don’t get me started on life. One time not too long ago (pre pandemic) I was with my friend in his hometown which is a farming community and we went to a livestock auction.

As we walked through, it was this crushing sensation in my brain. there are the sheep, there are the goats, there are the pigs, there are the cows, and we’re walking through this latticework maze to best examine them all and it hit me like a ton of bricks “HOLY SHIT, this entire setup, this matrix, it’s the result of the great evolutionary race. We won. The goats didn’t win. The sheep didn’t win. They’re just standing there. We are the mammals that came out on top (and yes, I’m aware that humans being the most hardy creature on earth is hardly a revolutionary concept. what other species else has porn and catheters?) but the revelation was just wild.

These were the evolutionary losers. You could see why. They were all dumb as shit. Not one of them could even say “yo, dog, sup with this pen situation?” which, probably they should have learned to say. Anyway…

Having both of these things (animals/plants) around the house probably makes you healthier and definitely makes you happier. I like some plants. I like some dogs. I could be convinced that a cat was cool if it was small enough when I met it.

Living things are cool. As far as we know, this is the only place in the universe with living shit on it, and even here, there’s a lot more shit that’s not alive. We living things need to stick together.

That’s probably not the whole explanation for why so many Scottish farmers fuck sheep but it’s totally why fucking a sheep is better than fucking a pumpkin (yes, I recognize a pumpkin was at one point alive. Only the sickest perverts would fuck a living pumpkin tho. get your mind out of the gutter).

Listen, there are levels of sentient beings. It goes us (hand up at the top), dolphins, (hand a bit of a ways down) then all the other shit and then down here (hand by knees) is the pumpkin. Not much relationship potential there.

Okay, good lord. just get a couple of aloe plants and two little dogs (not for fucking, just for kicking it with in your living room for fucksakes) and you’re chilling. What’s next?

Chips (potato or corn)

These motherfuckers tend to be pretty great. I can’t even pick a favorite between potato and corn but I can say that when I go into a gas station on tour or even on a non business road trip I’m most likely walking out with a bag of chips.

Love the weird quirky regional styles, and I have a real soft spot for Rap Snacks (who I think should do a flavor for me, but that’s neither here nor there).

The bottom line is chips are pretty cool. You get them FREE(!) at the beginning of your meal at the Mexican spot? Damn! Those things are the basis of every other thing you’re gonna eat tonight. Maybe it’s just flexing? If so, good flexing.

So the best chips…I like tortilla chips especially in nacho form, and I like the ruffles cheddar sour cream, I like sour cream and onion (just realized that this flavor was supposed to approximate a dressed baked potato after 40 years of knowing about those chips), I like plain Fritos, also chili cheese Fritos…but the thing I like the most is pretzels, which aren’t chips at all, so never mind that.

Are Pringles chips? According to every bit of research I’ve done, the answer is no. They’re particle board, but those mofos are good too. Um…I also want to reiterate that I love weird local shit. that’s always my favorite.

In closing, are chips good? No. They’re totally not good. But they seem good in the moment and they’ll give you something to do for a while and between the crunch and the boredom factor, they’re a pretty great way to while away that time.

And finally, all y’all thinking “yo! what about Doritos?” those just aren’t for me. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’ll eat em, but they’re nothing I’d ever pick out. that said, there’s a real funny thing out there about a guy who DM’d Ed Snowden and Doritos in a group chat (I have tried and tried and failed to find it, y'all…sorry) and homie did this long nuanced ethical political essay in question form for Ed Snowden to reply to and then at the bottom it said “and to Doritos, is the cool ranch a real place?”

There’s still good in the world.

Tiles

Tiles are cool. They’re under your feet while you shit, under your face while you pass out on the bathroom floor, on the wall of the subway, and so on.

The funny thing about tiles is that actually procuring them is a literal hell on earth. I’ve never had such trouble just giving someone money for something that they have.

I can’t totally explain where the breakdown is, but I can tell you this, there is one and if I was FORCED to guess I’d say it’s in the management process bc the people that they hire that are on the floor don’t give a FUCK and the shit you want was supposed to be shipped from Sheboygan the other day but SOMEHOW no one gives a fuck and fuck you. That’s the short version.

Here’s MY short version: fuck tiles. Fuck them completely. I don’t mind the actual artifact that is a tile, but I will set myself on fire to protest the tile store consortia that makes it all needlessly impossible in terms of tile acquisition.

You know what it’s a little like? Know how you go to the hotel, and it’s a mid level shitbox (super 8 etc) and you’ve paid, you’ve got a reservation, everything is done, and you show up and then you have to STILL stand there while this lady types for 20 minutes?

that shit should be taken care of by now, yo. You waited til now to do the 20 minutes of typing? But what’s the typing? Is it like “Brendan is here and we have a record of his credit card” and on and on like that? Because whatever. Fuck that entire experience.

That’s still about a million times better than trying to buy tiles though

Sexual intercourse

You can buy this. You can buy it from any type of person you can imagine, although not always the specific ones you want to buy it from.

Intercourse is wild because it is quite literally either your best or worst ever experience, and sometimes it’s both.

Okay, I guess if you’re just some dude that works at a gas station that has bad sex with his bucktoothed coworker back by the mountain dews when no one’s in the Sunoco, maybe it’s neither that great nor terrible, but for the rest of us, either you’ve had terrible trauma related to sex or you’ve met your GOAT and you’ve been completely melted by the experience, and that’s the most significant thing that’s ever happened to you.

Buying intercourse? I don’t totally know about that but I do think it should be overtly stated that sex work is real and good work and there is no shame in being a sex worker or employing a sex worker.

Unless you’re like me because my penis is just so brutally huge and I feel like it would maybe make for an awkward and uncomfortable situation sometimes for the other person, what with the hugeness and all.

In closing, good product, sexual intercourse. As long as you want it. Otherwise, very very bad…can’t stress this enough, VERY BAD product.

Shirts

Holy shirts! These motherfuckers cover your torso like nobody’s business. Whether you’re rocking a blouse, a tank top or I dunno, some kinda shitty…what’s that called…the shit they wear in South Carolina? the button up with the, what is it? Gingham pattern? Whatever. Even if you’re wearing that complete horseshit, you’re not shirtless if you’re wearing a shirt, friends.

Shirts are cool because back in the days when young folks identified by the music they listened to, you could just throw on a Metallica shirt and everyone knew that they could find you out behind the pet store smoking cigarettes during morning announcements. If you were wearing some other kind of genre of shirt, like a madonna shirt for example, people either knew you were super ironic or they knew you were really gay and into Madonna (I mean this purely, by the way. Name a better way to be like “yo, I’m gay” in the late 80’s without having to make a scene then to just kinda quietly wear a madonna shirt. You can’t. You just can’t).

Now I don’t know. We old folks should keep our shirts on. You young people don’t have the same allegiance to specific cultural verticals that we used to have, so shirts occupy a different space, in terms of identity.

I still wear punk rock shirts (even though I am currently wearing a Taylor Swift shirt) and I think that the societal shorthand there is something along the lines of “Hey, I’m an old man desperately clinging to a bunch of things that no longer exist, starting with my youth and also including punk rock” but whatever. Say what you will about shirts, if you’re wearing one you’re not shirtless and if you’re ending up shirtless, you’d better be a specific kind of person, which includes big fat guys who don’t give a fuck (big fan!), a beautiful angel or one of those greasy sumbitches outside the 711 just trying to get that $11.37 to get back to Schaumburg, maaaaan.

Otherwise, to use the colloquial phrase, keep yer shirt on.

Magic set

Very hard to use, actually. I love magic and I want to be able to do it and I straight up have bought and then dumpstered probably 7 magic sets in my time. I’m not the guy.

Or am I? (Magic laugh)

The thing about magic sets is you’re getting a box made by a hack for children and even then it’s too hard to figure out OR (and this is more what’s up in my experience) the tricks are so obvious and the props so shitty that you’re just like “oh. fuck this.”

that shit’s made by magicians. they don’t want us in their ranks. the Magic Set is in and of itself a magic trick: it convinces you that magic is so hard and/or impossible to not make look like shit that you don’t take the time to just figure out how to really cultivate illusions and situational magic on your own. You pick up the box, it sucks, you quit, the magicians get to live in their weird world without you.

But magic is cool as shit. You think David Blaine ACTUALLY stuck cigarettes through a quarter? They have a vast infrastructure of very cool magic technicians out there who are doing shit I can’t even imagine.

My friend Mike is a great magician and one time he played before me at a show. He called me up on stage as a volunteer and asked me to think of a word and say it to the audience.

Now, I’m sure he probably had seeded the word already in my head (i’m dumb) but here’s the thing: the word was something like “erratically,” (I think it actually was a word that started with a D. This is just an example, I’m also sure Mike still knows what the word was), but it wasn’t like ‘dog’ or ‘felching’ or some word that you all see and say every day…

So ANYWAYS, he pulls out a book and hands me a knife and asks me to stab it hard, so I do. then, with the knife still in the book, he sets it on fire and the whole book burns away entirely except for one page and on that page, guess what word the knife was dead center in?

Fuck a magic kit. Make your own dreams, kids.

Live Laugh Love

All that shit with Live Laugh Love on it is funny because it’s totally unironic or it’s totally ironic and there’s also kinda no way to tell what the person displaying it is all about.

The second you see the LLL sign or the decorative plate or the apron, no matter what, you’re kinda like “word?” unless it’s some older mom and you know she’s legit with it or it’s like a crusty gutter punk in which case why the fuck are you wearing an apron and how do you have walls to hang shit on?

Anyway, the vibe is nice. the vibe is also cloying and lame but you can’t shit on the general notion of wanting people to do those three things. You CAN shit on the notion of being a completely cynical ad exec who just puts that garbage out there for margarita moms to soak up and you can also shit on the notion of someone putting that bullshit on their wall and feeling that they’ve done something to help the world (demonstrably, there has never been a single bit of rejuvenated life, laughter or love that has been made by one of those fucking dumb signs). But yo. It’s better than like, a nazi flag or a NAMBLA poster or something. Let these ladies have their shit already, I guess.

Chia Pet

Y’all even know what this is? It’s like a clay pig that you smear with pesto and then shit grows out of it and people care about it for some reason. I guess the thing is it’s like an easy houseplant and it’s a little bit fun and quirky. You pour the water into the neck (which, weird!) and just, that’s kinda it. then your pesto pig grows an afro of sorts and then you feel like you’ve done your duty then the plants die and the chia pet goes into the landfill.

I don’t hate these. They remind me of sea monkeys which were basically bags of dust that you bought and dumped in water and pretended were a colony of little creatures.

OH SHIT! but somehow when we were getting stuff of this nature for our son, (good stuff for little kids) we ended up getting him a gang of little dustlike creatures called triops. And these things…well, they grew to be rather large and they ate each other and grew more and were clear and looked like they were from the lower Cambrian era and they were….not to put too fine a point on it, fucking REVOLTING. I think we flushed them while the boy was taking a nap. I mean, Barf.

But yeah. Chia pets are all right. Okay. Last one:

a place in heaven

There are two ways to come at this one, maybe three. Don’t hold me to my math. First, if you think you can buy your way into heaven you’re so fucking wrongheaded about how spirituality and the ideas about souls and what heaven is works at all that if they let you in, they’re letting you into a gambling hall for shithead grifters who take no responsibility whatsoever for their actions, but that’s also assuming that there IS a heaven, which, no. There isn’t. Thee’s only a hell and we’re in it now. But anyway. Moving on.

Let’s pretend that heaven DOES in fact exist. How do you buy your way in? Love your kids and be kind to people. Have sympathy for the lonely and the isolated and do your best to just be a good person. Let other people know you love them because that’s something none of us tell each other enough. have courage in the face of shit that’s not sitting right with you. Buy me a drink. Plant some trees, bring your neighbors some pie, don’t beat the shit out of your spouse (or anyone for that matter). Make sure to be happy with yourself. That’s heaven anyway. When you can love you in a pure, non asshole way, you won’t need a heaven to exist. That’s how you buy the product of a place in heaven.

That said, good luck. When we’re done we turn off like an iPhone dropped in the toilet. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

Okay, that’s been product roundup. I hope to see you all on the US/Canada tour I’m about to go on with A Wilhelm Scream and Make War. I will be both the best and quietest act on the tour, by a long way, by either metric.

If you’d like to subscribe, I’d love if you did. If you think someone else you like would like a subscription, fuck it, hook em up for their birthday or Fourth of July or whatever.

Regardless. Thanks so much for reading. Love you all. and that’s true. Safe travels, wherever you do or don’t go. xoxo