Wild Blue Donder

So last Thursday, an old friend asked me to write something about his upcoming book. I grumbled that I wasn’t sure when I’d have time to sit down with it, idly clicked on the Google Doc, and a few minutes later was scrolling through pages with a big, dumb smile plastered across my face.

I’ve written about (and full disclosure, worked with) Michael Shaeffer before – he’s a dynamic, pop-culture heavy slam poet who occasionally ascends (descends? Slides sideways NordicTrack style?) from the stage to the page.

There’s always a little element of anxiety in approaching something new by an old favorite, particularly when their work is so tied to the culture, but I shouldn’t have worried – he’s still tied to it, naturally, and it’s dragging him along the same as the rest of us, and his references to George Carlin and Bruce Campbell are now punctuated by bemusement with Letterkenny, flat-earthers, and The Mandalorian. California sunlight, sweet Calcutta rain, Honolulu starbright, the song remains the same, ooh, ooh, oh, oh…

It’s been a while since I’ve done this, so let me take a moment to free-associate incoherently about comic theory.

One of my (many) comedy sins is that I often chafe at two of the staples – the Onion and Saturday Night Live – and for largely the same reason: they have a tendency to introduce an amusing premise, then hammer it into the ground by repeating the same punchline so many times that it becomes retroactively unfunny. I’m trying to put my finger on what makes Mike’s approach different. When he titles a poem “Wherein Michael Scott’s Plasma TV Pines for a Monogamous Technosexual Relationship With Michael’s George Foreman Grill”, I laugh – but he then proceeds to actually explore the premise, unfolding detail after absurd detail, verse after verse, heightening the situation until I’m reduced to helpless schoolboy giggling.

There’s much of the affable stand-up here – he seems temperamentally incapable of resisting the urge to deflate his own lyrics with a quip, or a startling out-of-left-field pop-culture reference – but this collection has almost a spirit of giddy gonzo surrealism. The wordplay’s still there (and underpinning everything), but there’s an unrestrained delight I haven’t seen fully indulged before in leaping from ludicrous image to ludicrous image.

Nor are all the pleasures comic. I’m a geek, and I consume more than my fair share of poetry, of media, of theatre and movies and lit, and here’s the highest praise I think I can drunkenly lob – in reading his stuff, I am consistently surprised. Each poem ends up in a wildly different place than it began, and I usually fail to predict this. This is a cross-section of the dude’s brain, and a little bit of everything bubbles forth, almost always in unexpected ways. To quote his closing poem:

I want to become your everything bagel
with cream cheese
minced garlic and onion and poppy seeds

Complete with sea salt flakes
body aches
and dogshit brakes
Haphazardly made with hot-dog fingers and googly eyes…

…after all, an everything bagel is the choice for the anxiety-ridden neurotic. It’s there for you when you want something, but you don’t know what you want, and the kids are having a meltdown in the back seat, and you just need someone who knows what they’re doing to make a decision for you.

Which is all a way of saying that Mike knows what he’s doing. Like a game of Civilization IV, this has both breadth and depth – at a glance, it’ll amuse and hit the spot, and there’s a lot more there if you’re thirsty for it.