By Elias Nebula

Sunday, July 21, 2019

"A New Bride for Dog Chapman."

Poor old Beth is dead and gone. I do not say "ding dong".

I honestly didn't say "ding dong". 
I didn't I didn't I didn't. 

On those occasions in society when people ask me my opinion on the sad subject, and as a sort of expert on Dog Chapman it happens a lot, I remark that if Dog had given up his ten packs a day habit she might still be among us. I don't say this to grind the metaphorical cigarette into an open wound for Duane Chapman Senior. I say it more as a cautionary tale for smokers everywhere.

It's gonna gitcha. It always does. 

Let us instead think of positive, better energies, as Dog has done. I read that he was back on the "hunt" soon enough after Beth's passing, nothing daunted, and that he was blundering about with honorable second son, Leland, when Leland tried a move he probably shouldn't have, a move he maybe hadn't made since the original show was dropped. Leland slipped a disc in multiple locations and was put "out of commission" for doing something he wouldn't have thought twice about in his kung-fu younger days of the Oughties.

It's gonna gitcha. It always does. 

Let me try this again. To matters more positive. To energies eternal! Let us find a new bride for Dog. He isn't apt to do well as a widower. It ain't his way. He must have a woman to his side and his hearth. He must have somebody close at hand to inhale all his second-hand smoke. He needs a woman to serve the role of a sort of hoover, which is funny since he was formerly a vacuum cleaner salesman. He didn't sell Hoovers, of course, he sold Kirbys.

The other day I was listening by chance to an old Fall track and I sheepishly recalled my crush on Brix Smith. A crush may I point out that is a recent revisionist alteration of my original attitude –– a silly, late-blooming crush, and all the worst for it. But dude she's hot in the "Hit the North" video, you ever see that?




Let us say aloud what everybody used to say in the late 1980s: "How'd Mark E. Smith do it?" It's like Laetitia Sadier and Tim Gane. English rock musicians getting away with brazen mass murder. There must be some mysterious hypnotism that is pulled off by the touring English indie band abroad.

In a moment of awful moral weakness I googled pictures of Brix Smith and boy was I surprised when pictures came up that seemed to be of Beth Chapman.



Is it Beth?

Someone should gently and generously forward this image to Dog Chapman and say, "Behold, Dog, regard it: Beth lives!" 

It'd be good for Brix too because Mark E. Smith is now dead as well. I am aware that she actually divorced Mark E. Smith a long time ago, but she subsequently knocked about with one of the most universally-agreed-upon-proponents-of-assholery and damtomfoolery in the English-speaking world, I won't stoop so low as to utter his name, so she presumably hasn't been doing so well since Mark E. and she split. She'd be knocked out by ex-vacuum salesman Dog Chapman.

Both Dog and the late Mark E. had a certain knackered cadaverous quality. Mark E. was after all turning into a cross between Alex Higgins and Stephen "Hawkins" Hawking, while Dog has the corpse of a goose atop his bright-red pate. Also, Mark E. used to work on the docks and I think I mentioned that Dog used to sell vacuum cleaners. Kirbys. They both worked with their hands. 

I feel like Cupid or one of those matchmakers. Can this thing be done? And if it can, might I possibly receive a commission, some remuneration shall we say, for initiating it? 

GIZZA A JOB [sic].