Butt Load of Gerbils, explained

Perhaps you've wondered why this blog is named Butt Load of Gerbils. Or, even more likely, you haven't wasted a moment's thought on why I named this blog Butt Load of Gerbils, and you could care less, and that's all right with me. Or else you think I'm one of the countless Richard Gere imitators out there (which is sad, because poor Richard is a good Buddhist who probably couldn't tell a gerbil from a chinchilla from his own rectum, and he got slagged with this horrible bit of urban mythology in the same way Rod Stewart reportedly inhaled several gallons of jizz, putatively donated by various members of members of the then-Los Angeles Rams, the UCLA Bruins and the USC Trojans, along with the members of John Wayne, Liberace, Siegfried & Roy, Paul Lynde, Charles Nelson Reilly and Merv Griffin, which was pumped out of the poor Scotsman's stomach mere moments before he might have expired from toxic splooge syndrome or something), and I named this blog Butt Load of Gerbils in reference to Gere's unfortunate victimization via urban myth. Whish isn't true, either, but if you want to believe it, that's also quite all right with me.

But I digress.

It was sometime in the late 1980s or very early 1990s, when desktop publishing was still rather primitive, and the music magazine where I was then toiling as an editor had purchased some whizbang new software that would allow us to do color composition of pages for publication. I'd been working late one night in our fabulous office suite in an industrial park out by the port, and our computer guy Phil and I got to talking about our mullet-headed national sales manager, who, we believed, was getting zigged to the eyebrows on nastyass Colombian nose candy, whereupon he would go into the publisher's office and scream his head off for up to an hour while the rest of us would cower in our cubicles and think, um, why doesn't the boss just fire this asshole?

The funny thing was that I'd known this sales-manager guy years before, when he ran a record store at a small private college in a northern California town, and I used to go there and buy promos for like 25 cents apiece and hang out with some friends and go burn some umbage occasionally behind the shrubbery before going back in to request some Little Feat or Bob Marley. It was one of those colleges you probably read about if you ever read the letters page (aka "Forum") in Penthouse magazine in the 1970s, which I happened to have read a lot — whenever I wasn't waxing the ol' telescoping bishop while looking at the pictures in said mag. You know what I'm talking about: "I'm a student at a small [Midwestern] [mid-Atlantic] [northern Californian] college, and until this past weekend I'd figured that all your letters were complete bullshit, but then something totally amazing happened to me involving two Swedish flight attendants, a bag of Michoacan's finest, a Barry White album and a family-sized bottle of Wesson salad oil, not to mention several small battery-powered vibrating objects and the neighbor's German shepherd ..."

Again, I digress.

He seemed cool then, and then a few years later I met him again when a woman I'd worked with— who was my good platonic friend even though I'd secretly harbored a massive crush on her — introduced me to this guy as her boyfriend, and I rather jealously noticed he'd morphed into a glad-handing car-salesman mutant. And then he got a job where I worked, and he started lining up all kinds of scummy quid pro quo trade-outs with all the other scummy sales weasels who work out quid pro quo deals from their jobs: "Here, I'll barter you whatever you can steal from your workplace that isn't nailed down for whatever I can beg, borrow or steal here." You know the type.

I think what broke the figurative camel's back was the Christmas party he secretly threw for the Active 20-30 Club in our office one night, which no one — the boss or anyone else at work — had any idea he was throwing, and Phil and I happened to be working late that night, so we got to be inundated by all these young adults who'd gone into culture shock once they'd graduated from college only to realize that there are no fraternities or sororities in the real world so they had to start some bullshit club where they could continue the crappy behavior patterns they'd perfected in college. It was one soupçon of assholes, or put more accurately it was an entire witches' cauldron of assholes, and we vowed we would get even.

Which we did, via the marvels of desktop publishing. The next night, a conversation about what a complete fuckstick the sales manager was soon morphed into a phony magazine cover using his smiling visage in full color, which we'd found because he'd conned one of our design staff into doing some kind of brochure for him for one of his side business ventures and said artist had stupidly left the photo in her in-basket. So we scanned it.

I named the phony magazine BLOG, which was festooned in elegant Bodoni caps over his coke-sweat-beaded forehead, and then over that type, in an italic Bodoni bold, I spelled out butt load of gerbils. As I recall, there were several headlines also, which related to various gerbil-stuffing techniques, making sales calls while having one or more gerbils surreptitiously stuffed up one's rectal cavity, and something else I can't remember now, because we'd been knocking back some brews and I think we may have roasted a bowl or three. It was the kind of lousy thing that you do when a) you've really grown to hate someone you work with because they've devolved into one unmanageably gauche motherfucker, b) you've paralyzed whatever social impulse you might have — which, ordinarily, should keep you from making up stuff like butt load of gerbils magazine — with polio weed and many beers and c) you have the technology to make your bad judgment a reality.

I kept the cover in my desk drawer with all the fake memos I'd made up and faxed to various record companies and trade magazines, most of which had to do with the idea that all the major record labels would eventually merge into one big company that I called MTV Omnivox (which prompted one of my label publicist friends to label me "psychic" years later, but I wasn't really psychic, I was merely kinda buzzed to the point where I could see the inevitability of one big monolithic company putting out nothing but shitty cookie-monster metal band and Ashlee Simpson records), and we would pull the memos and the fake magazine covers out once in a while and chuckle over them while igniting a pipeload.

Years later, when the pop-culture phenomenon "weblog" got shortened to "blog," and I decided to start my own so that I had a post-weekly paper outlet for writing, I remembered our little (actually, large and working on morbidly obese) sales buddy when I was looking for a name for my blog. Ergo, Butt Load of Gerbils.

And, um, as for those lovely ladies pictured above, they have nothing to do with buttloads or gerbils. Apparently they're members of a Byelorussian band called Omega that plays some hotel in Bahrain. If that's what women look like in Belarus, homina homina: I'm hopping on the next flight to Minsk. Yeah, Belarus supposedly has a bellicose dictator running the show there, but he can't be any worse than the one we've got here, right?