The LC Takes a Late Spring Break/ Cl.thier Is Back With a Lupus Piece That Will Blow Your Mind!

Readers, we hate to interrupt your daily hipster news, but Richard is taking a late Spring Break vacation. See you again next week.

In the meantime, you should go hang out with Chip downtown at Quinton's and experience his wit and wisdom firsthand ("The only thing more embarrassing than women's basketball is Royals baseball"--Chip).

Until we return, we recommend you read and reread Cl.thier's newest Lupus episode, which should (finally) convince you of this series' cultural importance:


"N.ggle thought about werewolves. Cl.thier thought about werewolves. Dr. X thought about masturbating, and about urban legends, and about hairy hands. Indirectly, he thought about werewolves. Dr. C thought about [wererats] [Wererats] and boobs. “If I were a vampire, I’d go right for the heart.” Vampires and werewolves and Frankenstein and mummies. Outcasts and misfits. But only werewolves are caught between man and beast, man and monster.

I am two people.

I’ve never quite reconciled the dichotomy.

This book is a step toward understanding…

The sense that I comprise two people who aren’t always compatible never left me.

…at odds with my folks’ ideas and instructions on how to live life.

“Who am I?” Harry thought, the urges welling up again, the hairs bristling on the back of his neck as Muffy walked by. “Come on, Harry,” his mother called after him. “We’ll never get all of this shopping done if you keep wandering off like this. Kids and full moons, drive ‘em crazy.”

We get it almost every night

When that moon gets big and bright

It’s a supernatural delight

Everybody’s dancin’ in the moonlight

Where to take poor Harry? A morality tale? Soft-core porn? Graphic novel sans graphics? The nature of Harry’s text hangs in the balance. Meta-Harry? Werewolves hate Twitter, twitter, twittering, any word that seems to denote high-pitched squealing. They’ll rip the heart out of twitters, like Dr. C’s [wererats], ripping through corsets, brassieres, cutting through décolletage to get to the heart of the matter, but my will gets weak…

Harry’s mother continued to prattle on about how “out of it” Harry had been lately. Harry struggled to act like he was paying attention while ignoring her, but she was persistent today. He turned the radio station, off of his mother’s “Hits of the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s, and today” – some awful middle aged man singing about forgiveness – and she shot him a look. “What do you think you’re doing? You know that in my car the radio stays on KISS 100!” Harry didn’t hear. He almost couldn’t hear, the sound of his blood rushing through his veins was too loud, the smell of Muffy still too powerful in his nose. It was as if she were there in the car, there in his lap, there in his face. The smell was so powerful Harry couldn’t differentiate between smell and taste – it was as if he could taste Muffy. “I think you’re old enough now that we can talk about some things. You’re going to start getting erections in your pants. The kids call them ‘bonies.’ They’re natural, but I want you to ignore them. And whatever you do, don’t touch them. Don’t touch your erections.” Harry didn’t hear his mother. His senses were overwhelmed with Muffy. He had what his mother called a “boney”.

Squeeze my lemon, ‘til the juice runs down my leg

Squeeze it so hard I fall right out of my bed

Won’t you squeeze my lemon

‘Til the juice runs down my leg.

What is the werewolf model for Harry? What werewolf archetypes will be employed? What modern twists will he have? What werewolf literature will be slyly referenced and ironically employed? What will Harry’s “werewolfness” be a metaphor for? Can’t he just be a werewolf, and not a metaphor? It’s tiring always having to stand in for something else – seems deceitful too. If you want to represent how difficult it is to be something, don’t be something else and have us have to make the leap. Werewolves have it hard, without also having to stand in for the gay community, or immigrant cultures, or social straddlers.

For things are bad all over, etc. etc.

Harry walked through the lunchroom feeling as if every eye in school was on him. His skin tingled with shame and nervousness. His legs felt like they would give out at any moment. He no longer knew who he was. He was scared to look in the mirror. He felt completely alone, and completely strange. Even the school outcasts, the misfits, the weirdos and freaks and geeks seemed to look at him with a look of disgust. Harry looked at his tray of food – vegetable medley – and almost threw up. He wanted some meat, but got only soggy carrots, peas, and broccoli. Harry suddenly felt how hard the world would be to him hereafter. Of course, Harry was being melodramatic. None of the other teens were really paying Harry any attention – the cool kids were too wrapped up in their coolness and how to stay cool, the dorky kids wrapped up in their dorkiness, and how to get cool, the misfits and outcasts at once thinking how they could fit in and how they could stand out, and the rest of the students, all basically concerned with the monumental task facing all teens – growing up as unawkwardly and as quickly as possible. The only person in the lunch hall who gave Harry any mind was Muffy. Muffy always paid attention to Harry. Alas, Harry, like most boys, was too stupid to notice.

Cl.thier wonders what N.ggle and Dr. X and Dr. C think about werewolves. It is late while Cl.thier wonders this. A storm has just passed, and he thinks that most smart werewolves would have spent the storm as humans, wrapped up in their beds, worried about human things and not ripping the flesh from some poor rabbit or squirrel. But then, it’s not really up to the werewolf when they transform, is it? Michael J. Fox seemed to have no choice. Nor Jack Nicholson, or Michael Landon. Michael Landon as werewolf? He was a teenage werewolf.

Harry turned the television off, after finding nothing on but infomercials and “Highway to Heaven” reruns. He had hoped to catch a dirty movie on one of the cable movie channels, but with no luck, only watching a bit of some dumb movie about kooky vampires. He went up to his room and got on his computer, wondering if he should chance looking at porn on the internet. His parents kept a sharp eye on his computer, and his father, being in IT, knew all of the tricks to hide where he had browsed. But Harry suddenly found himself extremely horny, and was getting more aroused thinking about the pages upon pages of pornography at his fingertips. He decided to hell with his dad.

Harry settled down to his search when he heard, from what seemed like right outside his window, the long howl of a coyote or wolf. Harry jumped out of his seat, his hair standing on end. Though he had heard coyotes and wolves before, there had never been one so close to the house; they usually stayed up in the forest. Harry realized that every muscle in his body was tight and ready to spring. He caught a glance of himself in the mirror and barely recognized what he saw: his eyes were almost black, yet seemed to glow in the dim computer-lit haze of his bedroom. His muscles stood out from his body like they never had before, and his stance looked as if he were about to pounce on an enemy. Then, there was a small tap at Harry’s window. He leapt to it in an instant, throwing the sash up. There, a story below, was Muffy Sinclair, throwing small rocks at his window. “Feel like coming for a walk?” she whispered. Harry could not believe his luck. He forgot about his strange appearance, and almost leapt from the window.

Muffy thought about N.ggle and Cl.thier and the good Doctors and wondered why they were obsessed with some teenage weregirl. She thought it flattering, but kind of creepy, especially since everything they wrote about seemed to end up going all perverted and sexual. Not that Muffy minded that, it was just that there were other things to think about in the world, like love, and romance, and being swept away by someone. She thought about Edward from Twilight and wondered why none of the wereboys she knew were as exotic as he was. She would let him do anything he wanted to her, because she knew he’d be good, not like the wereboys who were always pawing and groping and talking about asses and tits and beer. They were like regular boys on super steroids. It was tiresome. “It’s a shame vampires don’t exist,” she thought, then thought about the quiet boy from her English class, Harry, and what it might be like to date him. Muffy hadn’t dated many humans, as it was mostly frowned upon by other werewolves, but she had gone on a few dates. She found them boring, and most of the boys just wanted to talk about World of Warcraft, or football, or action movies. But Harry was different. Harry read books and had his own blog and played guitar. “Maybe she could try and date Harry,” she thought. “Or I’d tear him apart.”

Oh oh here she comes

Watch out boy, she’ll chew you up

Oh oh here she comes

She’s a maneater.

N.ggle thinks about Muffy. Cl.thier thinks about Muffy. Dr. C thinks about breasts. Dr. X thinks about muff. But what about Harry? Poor Harry. Watch out boy, she’ll chew you up."