I mean I guess the big news in Fort Hook this week was the Mayor* giving a press conference where she admitted/bragged that she has a different wife in each district (there are fifteen) and how that was her way of “celebrating the entire city.” But I feel like we kind of already knew that? In our hearts? It’s sort of like when you first heard that if you die in a dream then you die in real life. It’s just like well yeah of course, that makes sense.

Anyway I’m more interested in what happened last night at Naga Square, where my favorite band The Lash put on an impromptu show. They were blazing through the hits and the crowd was eating up their sweet sound (the sound of a woolly mammoth belching an electrical storm).

I personally was inspired to unveil my new dance move called the Hot Sloth which was not well received. Then, to make matters worse, Kit Kombat (vox/guitar/vibraslap) made the troubling announcement that they’d be “trying out some new material tonight.”

You could feel a cold wave of dismay radiate through the crowd.

The Lash didn’t care. The Lash is whatever. The Lash is all about following their vision wherever it takes them, and that is what I love about them, although I much more love when they play the hits.

The drummer (I forget his name) (to be honest I only have eyes for Kit) counted it off and the band definitely looked like they were playing something pretty heavy, but I couldn’t hear a thing. I thought maybe the amps had shorted out and I was about to step up and offer some inexpensive technical advice (not to brag but I’ve been known to replace a thermionic valve or two in my day) when my chest caved in and my guts were twisted in a direction they weren’t designed for.

I found myself sprawled out on the flagstones of the plaza, flat on my back, the stars smearing into long icy trails. My bones vibrated into a mealy paste. My bowels…you know what, this is the first issue of this newsletter, we don’t know each other very well yet, I’m just going to redact what happen with my bowels. I know in time we’ll become very close but I don’t want to rush things.

Anyway eventually my brain reset and I relearned basic functions like seeing and thinking and distinguishing human faces from other shapes. And this morning I went to see Dr. Manz (an unlicensed physician who hangs his shingle over in a very sketchy part of town called the Crater) and evidently he’d seen a dozen concert attendees already and had surmised that The Lash played some kind of infrasound tone that messed with everyones vestibular system.

And as I limped out of his office into the bracing autumn air of Fort Hook, I breathed in the salty air and thought: The Lash fucking rule.

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*I should probably clarify that I’m talking about the False Mayor, the public-facing puppet of the Real Mayor fka The Fisherman. Maybe I’ll get into that whole deal in a future issue, if there’s interest.