The Simpsons - Revisited

The following is a transcription of sorts of the snail mailing of the Saga of the Simpsons that was written March and May of 1994 and mailed to the media in early May. This story has undergone a few “revisions” as you can compare with the original.

Written by Bill Gunderson and Guy Owens

“Beauty and Sadness” (Smithereens) opening credits

The Samuelsons lived in Springfield, Mo and in the summer of 1989 they agreed to do a year long documentary on their family life. The whole family was excited. The filming commenced in the fall of 1989. At that time Bart Samuelson was ten and his sister Lisa was nine, and Maggie was a year old. The parents were Benjamin and Marge Samuelson. But it soon became apparent that is they were going to make this series every day and light hearted, there would be problems that they had to “work around”.

Back in those days Benjamin worked at a nuclear plant for Montgomary Bernes. He spent his spare time drinking beers at Moe’s Tavern with his drinking buddies, Homer, Carl and Lennie. Benjamin was seriously overweight and one day after a routine visit to Dr. Hibbert, Benjamin was diagnosed with the twin malodies of high blood pressure and diabetes. Benjamin was given medication for the high blood pressure but this played havoc with his sex life. His wife Marge complained but Benjamin appeared oafishly indifferent to his own state. Later on that winter after a period of wearing heavy snow boots, Benjamin developed a condition in several of his toes on his left foot, perhaps complicated by the diabetus. But one day Marge was shopping with her lady friends and one of them had heard a radio program on a Saturday morning where that specialist recommended massive doses of vitamin E for just this case of threatened amputations. Benjamin eagerly took the pills. Filming for the series was frequently interrupted because several times Benjamin would black out from a sugar overdose and have to be taken to the emergency hospital. But finally the Vitamin E worked on his toes. Benjamin regularly rated as the least safety conscious worker at the plant.

In the spring of 1990 the plot thickened when Marge found herself to be pregnant with her fourth child. The filmers of the series agreed then that they would not extend this documentary beyond the original first year, but it was calculated that if they ran all the film they had shot in this one year it would take them twenty years to air it. It was at this time around the summer of 1990 that Benjamin showed the first signs of going a little bonkers. He doubted whether he was the father of Marge’s child. He also at this time began obsessing on his family history. His grandfather, Ziek Samuelson looked like a Black man and had Black features. But Benjamin was convinced his family had no black blood. His father Abraham even had problems himself being on record as having a black father because they tried to put him in the Negro wing of the service, but he managed to convince the authorities he was really White. Benjamin was an avid watcher of StarTrek the next generation and in the final episode Piccard was taken over by the Borg. Later in the next season when Piccard was home at the vineyard with his brother, Benjamin kept saying “His brother ought to be court-martialed for disloyalty”. Then when his new son was born they decided to name him Earl, because it sounded like royalty. Earl was born just a few days into Gulf War II in January of 1991. Marge heard Benjamin saying some really strange things to the baby in his crib, such as “I hope there is a war going on when you grow up because that way you’ll get to fight in it and be a credit to your country”.

It was sometime in the spring of 1991 that some friends of Marge suggested that she and Benjamin attend an religious meeting of an offshoot of the Church of Christ. Marge thought maybe they would heal Benjamin of his health problems. Marge soon found these people at the meeting really weird and only went a few times. But Benjamin loved it and kept going. As the months and years progressed Benjamin became more and more restless and his work performance got even worse as numerous minor industrial accidents kept occurring. Benjamin was always a master at making excuses for himself and now was no different. Around the first of September 1992 Benjamin was fired from his job. Benjamin found employment at the Church of Christ cult offshoot. He later learned that they had more contacts in Phoenix, which interested him.

It was around March of 1993 that Marge was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She remembers the date because Benjamin was home with a hangover from celebrating St. Patrick’s too much at Moe’s bar. Of course Benjamin gave her sympathy and all and prayer vidgels were held for her. Bart though thought these prayers of his father were incencere. Kids pick up on these things. He said that Benjamin didn’t really love her and that he cared more about his work at the church than he did life with his family. Benjamin was among those who raged against President Clinton and listened to Rush Limbaugh constantly, echoing every line of invective that Rush spiewed out.

In January of 1994 the Samuelsons moved to Phoenix. They said it was for Marge’s health and the warm, dry air would restore her to full health. That works for sinuses but not for pancreatic cancer. Nature took its course and in early May of 1994 Marge died. Earl would later say that it was the earliest memory he had as a child and he always marked the date. The years passed and Bart and Lisa graduated high school. Bart decided to become a cop on the Phoenix PD. Lisa became involved in journalism and folk singing, occasionally writing her own songs, and also worked with P E T A, people for the ethical treatement of animals. Bart married a girl named Melinda. But the marriage was over in just under three years because while Bart never committed physical adultery, that anybody can prove, he was emotionally unfaithful and would often fall for hard luck stories he met of women in bars, and secretly give them money. After Bart’s marriage ended he became involved as a Seventh Day Adventist. He loved all of that groovy stuff about the end of the world and monster-demons. He also gave up pork. This move in part pleased his sister Lisa since she was a vegetarian. He had read something about pigs being smarter than other barnyard animals. Bart eventually quit the police force because there were three dog shooting incidents in just over a month. Bart didn’t care if you treated people like scum, but he always hated mistreatment of animals. He then joined his sister Lisa at P E T A and also went to work as an accountant for the Seventh Day Adventists. Bart had a flair for math. His talents were also put to work as a salesman and money raiser, because Bart was known to spew a good line of bullshit over the phone. They all missed Marge and thinking about it was depressing.

When Maggie graduated high school at sixteen she got a full scholarship to Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she went and got stellar grades. She graduated with honors. Earl meanwhile was kind of a lazy, shiftless teenager who was heavily into drugs and pornography and treated women shabbily, and spent money like a drunken salor and was heavily into pornography. He was still living with his father and one day he said to his father, “Give me my share of the inheritance”. Benjamin’s will had stated that the males, Bart and Earl were to get one third of the estate, while the females were to each receive only half that or a sixth of the estate because they were women and would presumably marry a rich husband. This occurred about mid summer of 2009 when Earl was eighteen. He roamed the country spending his money on gambling (he usually lost) and booze and prostitutes and drugs.

His father, Benjamin meanwhile had become a Pastor of a large and growing church congregation in Phoenix. He preached an odd mixture of hellfire and brimstone fundamentalism with a lot of paranoia and spying on the activities of the congregation, mixed with a little Jim Jones style communism saying his goal was to move to a commune somewhere in the Caribbean Islands some day. Every time he sensed the congragation’s spirit was ebbing a little low with to much brow beating from the pulpit he would wow them with visions of this Island Paradise. Earl meanwhile was reduced to hitchhiking and the last driver had kicked him out of the car just a few miles from home when Earl made a homosexual advance at the driver. Earl said he was just “experimenting” with bi-sexuality but these adventures dated from his high school days. Now he was reduced to walking. On the day he returned home it was Martin Luther King day in January of 2010. There was a powerful earthquake in the Pnoenix area this day. This was in the middle of one of the worse droughts the West had ever seen, and the temperature this January day was in the nineties. Global warming was a clear and present reality. The quake occurred as Earl was taking a shortcut down a rocky river bank. The river was bone dry. He had a cell phone trying to contact people in town that he would be arriving soon, trying to hit them up for money. But the quake struck as Earl was hiking down the rocky bank and there was an avalanche of sorts. And one large rock hit his hand holding the phone and knocked it out of his hand and Earl didn’t know where it sent but now was being beaten and pummeled by other large rocks so that he was looking rather bloody and contusioned and now was in pain.

His father, Benjamin lived now in a large farm style mansion-estate. One thing that Earl noticed right away was that while all the grass around was dead, his father’s fields were lush and green. Even the cows mooed with contented expressions on their face. The shrubbery around the house was neatly groomed, and the house was freshly painted white decked out in trim of red, white and blue. There was a new gold knob on the door gleaming in the noon day sun. He tried his key but someone had changed the lock. Inside his father was busy with a bunch of blond bimbos and one of the house-keepers saw Earl’s wounds and used iodine on them, which hurt like hell. Bandages were applied. Earl saw that the furniture in his bedroom had been completely replaced. His father had filled this house with a bunch of expensive pictures on the walls and vases and antiques of every sort. He marveled that nothing had toppled. His father must have earthquake proofed everything. He made his way into the bathroom looking for some topical pain killer. But all he saw in the medicine cabinet were a lot of bottles of peroxide. For dinner that night they had fish, and Lima beans and parsnips and rhubarb pie for desert. He knew he was allergic to rhubarb but ate it anyhow and broke out in blotches all over. He later learned that his brother was now working for his father as his money manager. This made him jealous. He spent his time in the den with a lot of girls he called up to have sex orgies with, when they weren’t watching pornography.

It was one Saturday morning Earl remembers, almost the anniversary of his mother’s death in early May, when he woke to the news that his father Benjamin was dead and that he had been knifed repeatedly, OJ Simpson style by his brother Bart. When they questioned Bart on the murder and compared notes it seemed that Benjamin would pit the boys against each other. He would tell Earl that he was a bastard and a nobody but he was “willing to overlook that”. And he would taunt Bart with the idea that Earl still had another third of the Estate coming when Benjamin died. Benjamin would constantly play mind games on Bart. The two had gotten into numerous religious arguments over various Doctrines. They argued about the Sabbath, with Bart insisting that it was to be observed on Saturday while Benjamin insisted it was Sunday. Bart regarded Benjamin as kind of a pig who didn’t really care about either his congregation or his family and that all he was in it for was the glory and the greed. He would often make reference to his sainted mother, Marge, and how if she were alive she would be shocked at the state of moral depravity to which her husband had sunk. He was now in a jail cell and lay down for a night’s sleep. Bart dreamed that he bribed a guard by promising him sex with his ex wife Melinda but he had to make a phone call, and he wanted privacy “because it’s kind of personal” so while the guard was just around the corner he slipped into a heater vent and made his escape from the prison, but then they discovered he was missing and so sounded the alarms and the lights and there was a car chase- - and then the breaks on Bart’s car went out and he was headed right for an oak tree- - and then he woke up. And then the next morning his sisters Maggie and Lisa visited him and he talked about how he couldn’t help it but his father drove him to it, and his attorney showed up and the sisters left and they sat down and prepared the Court strategy for Bart’s defense.

Round-Up Of Recent News Stories

There are enough news stories over the past three days to choke a horse and we are going to do those now. Debby Roe has reached a deal with Mrs. Jackson where Debby promises to let Mrs. Jackson have uncontested custody of the kids, but she still is to retain her “rights as a parent” and hopes to build some sort of relationship with the two older children, who are here, with appropriate visitation rights.

Governor Swartzenegger has signed the new State Budget Bill into law over the past few days. But the bill was still a billion dollars short of a balanced budget, and so the governor took out his blue pencil and began lining things out. And the things which suffer most are education and child care bills and services for the poor. This to me doesn’t seem a very Christian thing to do. Isn’t he concerned about his image before the voters? Apparently it’s the whacko voters who are cheering him on!

There is paranoia afresh about androids taking over the world. Scientists are again concerned that machines may get the better of us in the future because they were already getting so intelligent and pro-active. Still the adage holds true that no machine will ever perform any action that wasn’t programmed into it by a human being. The idea of a computer going rogue like the HAL 9000 on “2001” is still Science Fiction. No computer is ever going to “develop an ego” or “become sentient” like Star Trek.

Judy is all upset about this euthanasia provision of Obama’s health bill. I must say I was not encouraged by this press conference video of Obama’s where he was grilled about a 104 year old woman who loved life wanting to get a pace-maker. But the President wasn’t all that hot on the idea and suggested that she perhaps just take a pill if she’s having heart pains. The liberals on the radio have said that this five year “reassessment” period they have with old people is to “share information with them” and discuss their hospital care in the future and whether they want extra-ordinary measures taken to prevent death. Judy says this is a clear code word for euthanasia. I must say that I am a whole lot less keen on any plan of the President now than I was two weeks ago. The bureaucracy and lack of accountability is rather bewildering. Now it comes out that Medi-Care itself will be cut itself, and that old people will be increasingly encouraged to euthanize themselves. Also despite the money pinch in government all around, nowhere is it ever broached that illegal aliens won’t have the same full-care health coverage as the rest of us, no matter if it breaks the budget.

Michael Jackson was regularly given Deprovan intravenously in his last days on this earth. Everyone agrees it is the only way Mr. Jackson could sleep, and everyone agrees that Michael was desperate for sleep in his last days. They would set up an intervenous drip for him, hospital style, and he would be “out” akin to someone undergoing surgery, and then as an automatic “alarm clock” the drip would be halted at a set point and Jackson would immediately wake up. It seems that sleep was so tenuous with Mr. Jackson that the slightest halting of any drug would cause a waking. Now they are saying that there were no hospital heart monitors or anything, which everyone agrees is necessary, if this drug Deprovan is going to be administered safely.

There is some law called the Arissi law (?) which makes the single payer health plan illegal for any individual state to adopt. This is pretty insane but I agree that we do some insane things. There is also a provision in our government that those Banks who were given all those hundreds of Billions last fall- - don’t have to lend the money out because the US government will PAY them six percent NOT to lend the money out but just to sit on it. We really don’t know who our congressmen are. There are a lot of blue dog democrats, which on some issues- is just like having republicans in office.

The biggest development in the Health Care saga is that now they want to wipe out public funding of Health Care entirely, so you don’t have that needed competition from the insurance companies. Apparently there is a “gang of six” senators from rural states like Montana, North Dakota and New Mexico and Maine- - and these six are drafting the whole current bill before congress. These six states combined are represented by twelve senators, but only comprise 2.5% of the population of the entire country yet they are dictating the fate of the rest of us. I’ll tell you this. If I had doubts about the Health Care bill before- - this latest development is a deal breaker for me causing me to vote “No”. My whole goal is not to see how much additional money I wan spend or of instituting some gigantic maze and schematic of beaurocracies- - - , No. My goal is purely and simply to get rid of HMO insurance companies. Any bill that facilitates this is a good bill. Any bill that ignores this problem is a bad bill.

People are so concerned about President Obama’s birth certificate, that they have forgotten about John Mc Cain. Because Mc Cain was born in the Panama Canal territory in 1936, which is a year before they were retroactively given citizenship in a bill passed in 1937. It all comes back to the wording of the Constitution and just what do the words “natural born citizen” mean? If citizenship was conferred upon you retro-actively, just now “natural” can it be? Also there is much controversy now about a “Certificate of Live Birth” verses an official hospital “Birth Certificate” like the one in my baby book, which nobody can find now. The “Life Birth” short form lacks vital details such as the signature of the attending physician, and height and weight information at birth- - and the baby’s foot print and the mother’s thumb print. Etcetra.

Now there is new hysteria about tanning beds. I guess these alarmists haven’t heard that we need at least five thousand units of Vitamin D every day, or else we will suffer symptoms of unwell-ness, and that vitamin D actually acts to prevent a whole host of cancers of various organs. Of curse then generally just use the UV A and not the more potent UV B, but don’t confuse the alarmists with the facts. I know, you’re all saying I don’t have normal Caucasian skin anyhow so I don’t count. I’m just saying that fifty years ago being darker was a whole lot more fashionable than it is now.

Well- - as if to make my Mom look even stupider than she already looks, they have now announced that home prices beginning with the month of May, have been trending higher. As you know home sales are up eleven percent in the past week or so and now are at the highest levels since last November. One would think surely it is only a matter of time before this whole housing crisis is in our rear view mirror.

Pregnant woman are at risk with the H1 N1 Swine Flu virus. Not only is the virus bad for the baby, but it seems you are six times as likely to contract the virus if you’re pregnant. Six percent of pregnant women have the virus in this country and in Brazil the figure is up to twenty percent of pregnant women. But so far other than inconveniencing kids at summer camp, this virus doesn’t seem all that dangerous at all- - yet.

Well now those new bathing suits are in the news again that Olympic swimmers use now. New records are being set with them all the time in “too” impressive numbers such that starting in 2010 they are going to ban these new body suits. I guess. But then there are all the bogus records that have already been set this year and last.

Congress is going on vacation next week and the people will let congressmen know just how they feel about the sort of bills they are contemplating. To be frank I haven’t decided about the Health Bill. There are so many roomers among the conservatives about how President Obama wants to take away this or that cherished right. Thom Hartman said that congress still retains the right to override Executive Orders. That is, until some Court gets a hold of a case. Because I get the distinct impression the Justices are so in the grip of Presidents they will go along with about what any President wants from strange executive orders, to these bill signing statements.

What Else I've Been Doing

OK we are back after an enforced three day hiatus with the computer in the shop. My computer was at Staples getting viruses removed and Norton 360 being installed. I had been told in a Tuesday phone call that “Well he won’t be working today because it’s the salesman’s birthday” (?) I was led to believe if they found any viruses it would be at least three days more. They said over twenty files were affected. When we got there I was told they found over twenty viruses but most of them were spyware and data miners, but there were a few Trojans, which can hijack your computer.

The blood guy woke me up but this time he didn’t come for me but for bill. I endeavored to get back to sleep and looked at my watch and it was only twenty to five. So I decided to get dressed and go out on the patio for a cigarette. All the chairs in the corner were about taken. People get up early here. After a while I thought of going back to bed but decided I would just take a long shower. It’s still dark now at 5:25, so we are already seeing shortening days. Then I watched TV. There was this “brain” guy on KCOE. He says if you have anxiety or depression to ask yourself four questions. Is this negative thought true? Is it true to a “metaphysical certainty”? What would life be like if I never had this thought? And what if I asked myself the opposite question- would that be true? There is one question he avoids in all this, which is “Would anything in reality change even if I were successful at pushing this thought out of my mind?” He doesn’t want to touch that one. He says that if you have ever had attention deficit disorder, then you still have it as an adult. As you may know I was on Ritalan. But Ritalan lowered my overall tolerance to the drug as it built up in my system. Supposedly, frontal lobe activity is less in ADD sufferers so that giving a stimulant is a counter intuitive measure that restores activity to this part of the brain. But the drug lowered my math performance, and screwed me up in a mid semester audition for concert band in January 1966. I had Keith Moon’s disorder. I got goofed up sight reading with 6/8 time, the same thing Keith Moon had trouble with strung out on drugs and trying to drum to “the music must change”.

Of course these educational TV stations have their money breaks so they suffer from their own peculiar “short attention span”, and it seems these stations are raising money almost all the time now, not to mention the commercial marathons they have before a long program such as “the news hour”. This guy plugged Omega 3 fish oil and said to avoid red dye and don’t drink or smoke, and how caffeine constricts blood vessles cutting off nourishment to the brain. I took my medication before breakfast. We had corn flakes, just like yesterday. We had pancakes and bacon, and what’s his name gave me his orange juice. This is going to be such a long entry that we should get two whole blog postings out of it. It’s overcast outside for the third day in a row.

I have always believed that the “Real” John Lennon wrote all of his solo songs but evidence has come to light about one of his songs, “Cold Turkey” which leads me to believe the “Fake” John Lennon inspired this one. If you listen to the original Live Peace version of this song- - suddenly it hit me that it had the same riff and structure as a piece popular in the fall of 1967 by - - - a London based rock group doing a song about an event in California. This group had four- - count them- - hits in 1967 and two in 1968 and none of them get played on the oldies stations or anywhere else. Lennon endeavored to disguise the similarity to this 1967 song in subsequent renditions of “Cold Turkey” so this is why I want you to go back and listen to the “Live Peace” original.

You’ve heard Cory Hennisee’s statement from “Eight Simple Rules” about this “Friend” who shows up – often unwelcome - - and you can’t tell this friend to go away because he has no ears. I wonder, does God have ears or even need them? You see he created this Universe, and in his mind he did a perfect job. Or let’s just say, with infinite possibilities at his disposal, which none of us have, “This is the best God could do” and he couldn’t have done any better. That’s what they want us to believe. I had a dream last night I was listening to that guy on channel 28 about the nature of “God” and religions and various religions. One religious type is the Presbyterian type, where you believe a lot of rigid rules and theological bullshit nobody understands or cares about. Ronald Reagan was a Presbyterian. They are proud of their Scottish origins and all. Another type of religion involves Passion. These are the Crusades of the Middle Ages and people who believed tales of untold riches in Africa or wherever. This is the religion of Joan of Arc, who heard the voices. In this dream I was romantically attracted to Janet. I liked her mind and her vast literary knowledge. But didn’t they say that “Janet” in French means “Never”? I think. It struck me how similar religion was to puberty and hormones. They are at times unwelcome but they’re going to happen regardless- - even if they have adverse effects on your judgement and emotional maturety. In another part of this dream, there was a teacher lecturing little kids- - and there were various sized pails on the floor and the teacher asks a little kid “Are you a little or a big bucket”? He wanted the kid to answer “big bucket” because in Christianity we are supposed to see ourselves as “Big Buckets”. But I happened to think, and I told the kid (I think) “We don’t have control often over how big we are but we can determine WHAT we are. For instance a bucket can be used to fetch water. Or a bucket can be used to put dirt in for a potted plant. Or you can fill it with cement and you can let the cement harden and use the thing as a big paper weight- - or to swing around and hit somebody else in the head”.

They say if you talk to God well that’s good. But if God talks to you- - then you have a major mental health problem. We are told- - and I have been told- - that mental illness interferes with your ability to be a successful Christian. Then you ask why doesn’t God heal your mind so he can have the Glory and you can become a better Christian. That sounds logical to me. But not to Jesus of KFI. No- - he virtually never admits to the possibility of healing- -or even acknowledging reports of its having occurred already in others. And this same Jesus who says mental illness is the scourge of Christian faith, will also say out of the other corner of his mouth that “Mental illness isn’t any “real problem” in becoming a Christian, but it’s just another obstacle to be overcome”. (Selah)