Category: Humor

The Inconsiderate, the Rude, and The Flying Fudds

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“The difference between rude and inconsiderate is that the inconsiderate often fail to consider those around them, but when you point that out to them, they’re shocked, embarrassed, and apologetic to those affected by their negligence,” Ms. Carnelia informed me. “The rude. They don’t give a Flying Fudd.”

I enjoyed her distinction, because I never thought of it quite that way before, but it lacked that almost mandatory third logical extension to pound the point home. If I taught a class on providing provocative rhetoric, I would focus on the power of threes. Musicians love three beats, writers love the point, comparison, and an exaggeration, or a little hyperbole, to pound a point home. As much as I loved Ms. Carnelia’s simple distinction, it didn’t have staying power. 

While in the supermarket section of a huge Super box store, Ms. Carnelia spotted something of interest, and she accidentally left her cart in the middle of the store at a diagonal angle to examine it. We’ve all done it. We’ve all left that shopping cart in the middle of an aisle to unintentionally block everyone’s attempt to pass through. We, the momentarily inconsiderate, don’t consider how leaving a shopping cart in the middle of an aisle might inconvenience others. When we hear, “Excuse me, but I cannot get around your cart,” we scramble and angle that cart parallel to one side, as close to one side of the aisle as possible. We apologize, and hope that everyone involved will forget about it soon after it happened. We won’t. We, the inconsiderate, are mortified by how inconsiderate we were. We ask ourselves if this could be classified as rude, but as Ms. Carnelia outlined we failed to consider other people, so we were just inconsiderate. The rude may not intentionally place that cart in the middle of the aisle, but they are defined by what they do after it becomes obvious that they failed to consider other people. When someone asks to get through, they are put off by it. They might huff, sigh, or even offer us a dirty look. “What?” our unspoken facial expression asks. “How am I to blame here?” The rude will move their cart, just not as fast as the momentarily inconsiderate, and the rude will begin shopping again without an apology or anything else that recognizes what they just did.

I flirted with the notion of making the third plank of Ms. Carnelia’s distinction those who would purposely placed their cart diagonal angle in the aisle to prevent passage, but I’ve never known, or heard of anyone doing such a thing. I struggled with it for months, until Ms. Carnelia, the author of this dinstinction, offered it to me months later when she left her shopping cart in the middle of the supermarket section of a huge Super box store aisle to read through the ingredients of the various cereal choices before her. Two customers silently waited for her to recognize her faux pas, but she was so immersed in her reading that she didn’t even notice those two customers, until I pointed it out to her. 

“Oh, if they’re in that big of a hurry,” she said. “They can just go around.” I moved her cart for her while she was saying that. I also apologized for her when I locked eyes with those customers, since being with her made me tangentially responsible her her actions. When she finished her shopping, and we sat in my car, I reminded her of her defintions of rude and inconsiderate. She didn’t get why I was bringing that up, until I reminder her what she just did in the store. 

“Fine, I’m a hypocrite!” she spat, and she said it in a manner that suggested I was being a real PIA (pain in the butt) for calling for consistency from her. This led to my final leg of the three-part distinction scale with her being The Flying Fudd exaggeration of her own distinction. We could even characterize such a character as a Flouting Fudd, or someone who purposely flouts the conventions of courtesies we extend to one another. We could add another level to characterize the openly hostile, extremely aggressive types who can be abusive, but that takes us out of realm of our discussion here. 

Ms. Carnelia is no different than anyone else. She formed her defintion of the human condition based on studying others. She recognized the faults of others without reflecting on her own. That is a universal condition, of course, but what do we do with her interesting distinction between inconsiderate and rude? Most of us attach the philosopher to the philosophy, and when the philosopher violates their philosophy, we forsake the philosophy. My contention is, who cares who broke it down for us, if it’s gold it’s gold. If we can use it, who cares who said it? We can all judge those with inconsistencies, but what are they talking about when they’re talking about it? They’re talking about idealism. They know who they want to be, and whether they can achieve it or not is on them, but that shouldn’t prevent us from using what they say to try to define our ideal self.

***

The moment after I saw this Flying Fudd standing in the middle of the aisle, texting, I thought of Ms. Carnelia. I missed the opportunity for a more incriminating photo of him standing with one foot on the cart and the opposite cheek hanging lazily off to the left for those of us entering the store to enjoy. I wasn’t thinking quick enough to take that picture, but if I was, and a picture says a thousand words, I probably wouldn’t have needed this 1,000 word article to explain it. 

Mr. Fudd either didn’t care, or he didn’t care enough to know that he forced the store patrons who entered the store to snake their way around him. It wasn’t a huge hassle, as you can see in the second wide shot, there was plenty of room to snake, but the whole idea of a fella throwing his posterior up to force others to walk around him irked me so much that I ended up taking about a dozen photos of the man. He’s a large man, as you can see, so my guess is that he was a former high school sports star, probably an offensive lineman, whose job it was to force people to go around him.  

We all need to phone, text, or email people in stores at various times in our lives. Modern technology has made communication, via devices, almost mandatory at times, but this indulgence should come equipped with its own commandments, and that list should contain all the ways in which we inconvenience, confuse, bother, and ignore those around us when we’re on a device. When, not if, but when we need to text, we should all remember to move to a location in which we bother the least amount of people possible. We all make mistakes, and sometimes our adjustments are worse than the original situation, but the more effort we put into avoiding inconveniencing others, the better. I don’t know if Ms. Carnelia would consider Mr. Fudd a one on the Fudd scale, but it was one of those situations where we say, “This is one of those situations.”

As we can also see, in the second wide shot, this man’s stay in the aisle was something of a prolonged one, as he was so comfortable standing in everyone’s way that he switched legs. For the purpose of your entertainment, I waited and watched the man. Was he waiting for someone? It turned out, he wasn’t. My guess was that he was waiting for a text with the list of items he was to purchase. Once he received marching orders, the man proceeded to snake his way around the store solo. 

I probably should’ve dropped a big, old “Excuse me sir, but do you realize you’re standing in the middle of the aisle? Do you realize we all have to walk around you?” on him, but I’m not one of those people. If I dropped that on him, I’m quite sure I would’ve realized he was inconsiderate as opposed to rude, but we have to help these people consider more often, right? Or, is it just me?

***

Our subjective inclination is to think anyone who stands in the middle of any aisle, for any reason, knows what they’re doing. “They knew what they were doing,” we say with a level of impatience. “They knew exactly what they were doing!” I know they don’t, because I remember the times I didn’t. When Starbucks comes out with a new frappacino flavor, it takes us out of our element, and we go to the aisle to read the ingredients before we purchase. We don’t think about the cart, the aisle, or the people we’re inconveniencing with our actions, until they let us know. Some of the times, we get so caught up in our world that we aren’t conscious of our surroundings. Some of the times, we slip up and others write about us our worst day. 

When we’re forced to quick beep that guy who won’t go on a green light, we think they’re either slow learners, far too casual, or hooked on cough syrup. “We got all day here buddy!” we shout from the inner sanctum of our vehicles. “ALL DAY!” When someone offers us that same polite, wakeup beep it drives a proverbial spike into our spine, because we know that polite, quick beep. We’re polite, quick beepers. We’re the ones who are so impatient that we don’t give a guy three seconds to move his foot from brake to accelerator. We’re the impatient, so how can we get mad at quick, beeping impatient types? They’re our people.

“Who cares how fast you get there, as long as you get there,” someone said when they were talking. They emphasized the latter in foreboding tones to give it more profundity. We understand that speed kills and we’re not suggesting anyone speed, we’re just saying get out of the way so we can, while we still have the quick twitches necessary to avoid accidents. We realize we’re putting our lives on the line, and we know we’re more impatient than most, but we don’t want to waste one minute of our life waiting for those who are addicted to cough syrup to snap into the present tense.

My dad trained me to be conscientious, and while I’ll never be as conscientious as he was, my scorecard is filled with plusses. If you’re anything like the yeahbuts of consistency that yip at the ankles of those who try to make a point, you’ll “Yeah, but aren’t you the guy who put a cart out to block people when you saw a new flavor of frappacino?” to dismiss me. Do the yeahbuts do this to intellectually defeat a point, do they want to pull down to their level, even though no one is applying for a level, or do we just enjoy dismissing people. The third point, for those of us who need that third beat, is a question sent to the yeahbuts who seek to expose the inconsistencies and hypocrisies inherent in philosophers, because they exhibit human frailty. The annoying thing about philosophy is that an overwhelming majority of it, outside deities, comes from humans, and humans are so flawed that they usually end up ruining their own philosophies. The yeahbuts wear us down, until they clear the deck of all philosophers and their philosophies, but they have no end game. They just want us to join them in their desert of decay, and the veritable wasteland of idea.  

“It’s Hell Getting Old”

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“It’s hell getting old,” was my dad’s answer to questions about how he was doing. “How you doing Hank?” they would ask. “It’s hell getting old.” He wasn’t trying to be funny, and he wasn’t changing the subject. He believed this was the answer to questions about his well-being. If age is a state of mind, my dad was old his whole life, or at least as long as I knew him. He was old in his eighties, but I remember him saying, “It’s hell getting old,” in his forties. We believed him too, because we were kids, and anyone who is older is old when you’re a kid. This response was the end of the discussion for him. It was his ‘learn it, live it, love it’ meaning of life. If he wrote an autobiography, he would’ve titled it It’s Hell Getting Old. 

I met a person his age, later, and she was quick, fiery, and alive. She was the type you just knew wouldn’t be put down for eons. When we broke down the borders of our co-worker relationship and became friends, I violated the rules of social decorum and asked her how old she was. When she told me that she was the same age as my dad, I was stunned. How could she act so young? When I gained a different perspective, as I neared my fifties, I realized the forties aren’t hell or even old, and I asked him about it. “Well it’s hell now,” he said, in his eighties.

Friends and family were sympathetic to my dad’s “It’s hell getting old!” rants … in his eighties. They would nod, sympathize, and back up and give him the room necessary to develop his rant. I write the word develop, because he talked about his advanced age so often that it almost seemed like he was working out material for an act. He’d repeat lines and phrases so often that I could say them with him, as he delivered them to friends and relatives. I heard him provide different emphasis and strategic subtlety to his pleas, over the years, and I heard him employ different ways and means of convincing them of his plight. I don’t think there was anything artificial about my dad’s pitch, as I know he believed every word of it, but he did get better at it after practicing this presentation over the course of forty years.

When I told he might be able to defy the aging process, by some measure, with physical exercise, he dismissed me before I could finish the sentence. “I own a weight set,” he would say.

“I know you own it, Dad, but you have to use it.”

“Ok, Mr. Smarty Pants.” He often switched between Mr. Smarty Pants and wise guy to anyone stating the obvious, but no matter what he called us, he always concluded his argument with something about his age. “Old people aren’t supposed to work out with weights.”

“How about a walk then?” we said, and he silently gave us some points here, but what does a person do on a walk? My dad walked when he had a specific destination in mind. The idea of walking just to walk seemed dumb to him. What if someone saw him doing it? “Where you heading Hank?” 

“Nowhere. Just walking for the exercise.” My dad would never subject himself to such a revealing and vulnerable Q&A. 

Some cherish their youth, and the telltale signs that it’s slipping away freak them out. Some of us look forward to getting old, because while we know that while the physical side will falter, greater levels of clarity, sanity, and stability await us on the other side. I suspect my dad couldn’t wait to get old for all of those reasons, but he also knew that getting old grants one the freedom to talk about their “gross” and “funny” bodily functions without being called out for violating societal norms. When my dad would attempt to enjoy his newfound freedom, over the course of forty years, with our friends and family, we would try to rein him in. “No one wants to hear about your bodily functions.”

“Oh, grow up!” he’d say.

***

“What comes out of the rectum can be used an indicator of health, but it’s not the indicator,” I said when he provided me a particularly detailed update on the state of his health. “It shouldn’t be used in place of a handheld pulse oximeter, an ECG monitor, or a glucose monitoring device.” Unless his daughter-in-law, a nurse, administered these in-home tests, the devices his doctor sent home with him were never used. My dad thought that what came out of the rectum was a better indicator of health than all of those medical devices combined. Either that or he just enjoyed talking about them.

Knowing that his diet consisted of baked beans, Oscar Mayer Bologna, butter brickle ice cream, and Swanson’s Mexican TV dinners, it was no surprise to us that he began to face gastrointestinal issues, but knowing inevitability doesn’t make hearing about it any easier. 

“How you doing today Dad?”

“It was like pounding concrete today.” That was his favorite analogy. He’d replace the word “concrete” with “bricks” at times, just to keep it fresh. I don’t know where he picked it up, or what it meant, but I didn’t waste any calories trying to uncover the true meaning of his analogy. I understood what I needed, and more than I wanted.

My dad was a former military man who spent most of his life in a factory. I write that to note that he didn’t waste his time or effort in life on creative pursuits. Creative descriptions of his daily doody, to my knowledge, were his only forays into artistic expression, and he displayed such a rich, provocative vocabulary in this arena that the imagery was almost impossible to block. I write almost impossible, because my mind has chosen to forget the trauma of many of his vivid descriptions, but the “pounding of concrete” stubbornly clings to a place to my soft tissue. I thought of jackhammers destroying concrete.

When we hear people talk about jackhammers destroying concrete, or bricks, in an analogy to what happened that day in their alimentary canal, we might say, “I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.” We say such things, some of the times, because we hear others use it to describe their uncomfortable moments of confusion. There are moments when we mean it. I saw this on the faces of those who heard Dad’s prognosis of the day. Few cried, of course, though I suspect that some of the third parties he and I sat with in diners may have considered it to try to get him to stop. I stepped in to solve their dilemma by saying, “Dad, that’s gross.” I’m quite sure he wanted to tell me to grow up, but whatever he saw on our third party’s face told him they agreed. Our third party companions didn’t know him like I did, of course, so they’d laugh uncomfortably. I suspect that they laughed, because they enjoyed our father-son interplay, and they might have falsely believed that he was tweaking me in some way for their entertainment. 

He tried his hand at more conventional ways of entertaining people, and it didn’t go well, but those of us who struggle in this arena learned a lot about what not to do from him. That isn’t to say that he wasn’t entertaining, because he was one of the funniest people I’ve ever met, unintentionally and in his natural state. Friends and family found him just as entertaining as we did, and we flirted with taking our show on the road, but we knew it would be impossible for him to maintain a natural state. Anytime he thought he was funny or entertaining, he put forth effort, and he subsequently lost his audience. Smiles turned to confusion and confusion turned to polite laughter when they saw how hard he was trying.

The difference between an occasionally humorous person and an entertaining person is complicated and multi-faceted. One way to achieve short-term laughs is to repeat a joke. Achieving the vaunted title “entertaining”, requires the subject to know what everyone else knows so well that it challenges our understanding, our foundation, and everything we believe in. It requires us to examine ourselves, others, and others’ views of us so well that we briefly imagine an alternative universe if just for the moment it takes us to find laughter. We could even say that attempting to be entertaining asks us to be a little phony for as long as it takes to get a laugh. We might have certain beliefs, certain hard-core, concretized beliefs, but it’s considered entertaining to let our hair down and analyze from a partially fictitious, self-deprecating angle to challenge those beliefs.  

My dad was many things, but he was not phony. I’m not sure if he had that code in his DNA necessary to be a little phony even on those rare occasions when he probably should’ve been. If he did have the code the rest of the human population does, he didn’t use it often enough to hone its capabilities. I called him many awful, mean, and regrettable things in my tumultuous teens, but phony was not one of them. If one of my friends suggested that I might want to try the name out on him, I would’ve rejected them. He was a man of simple truths that he developed in life, and he could not waver on them, even to poke holes in them for comedic effect. 

He spent his whole life believing he was inferior, and he might have done some things in life to prove that he was not, but my definition of phony involves someone who acts in an artificial manner to convince others that he is superior. To those who stubbornly insist that the term phony refers to someone who tries to be something they’re not, then perhaps he acted in artificial ways in some instances, but my dad did everything he could to fit in so he didn’t stand out. 

When he got older and sicker, I suggested I interview him to provide his legacy a transcript. I suggested that his young nephews might never know who he was otherwise. He rejected me saying, “When I die, I want to be forgotten.” It’s illustrative, a little funny, and very frustrating to those of us who wanted others to remember him, but it’s not phony. Try to dissect that sentence for a trace of phoniness. To me, that sounds like a genuinely strange character who felt he was not fit for our world. 

He was a fundamentally flawed human being, stubborn, and one of the weirdest human beings I’ve ever met, but he did not put on airs to impress anyone. Anyone who suggests otherwise need only look to the shoes and socks he wore in life. They were not what a man, built to impress, wears.

*** 

“I don’t understand how you and your brother view the world so clearly,” he once said. “It’s always been so cloudy to me.” He was skeptical to the point of denigrating, regarding his abilities in life. Driving, for example, was such an “awful responsibility” to him. In many instances, Dad talked about the difficulties of life, the “horrible responsibilities” the “accountabilities” and the “misery of life” that he said we’d fully understand once we became responsible adults who were responsible for others. Some of it involved lessons he used to lift our eyebrows and prepare us for the “awful responsibilities” that awaited us, but the anxiety he experienced while driving was very real to him. 

We couldn’t play turn on his car stereo, for example, because that would’ve distracted him from his concentration on the road before him. We could talk and stuff, on most trips, but we didn’t have to “get so carried away” with it. If we laughed too hard, he put the kybosh on that, because it diverted his attention from the road too much. He didn’t care for uproarious laughter, in general, because he thought it made the laugher look foolish. 

Whenever we tried to divert him from 90-degree angled driving, my dad rejected that outright, as he feared he wouldn’t make it to our proposed destination. “You could take A street to 130th and take a right, but if you take Stonybrook, it cuts straight through.” Dad did not care for bisecting an angle. He was a tried and true 90-degree man. 

“We could get lost,” he said with tones that asked us to appreciate his predilection. We didn’t. “We could get so lost that we don’t know where we are,” he added in a fearful tone that suggested there is a point of getting lost that could lead a traveler to never being able to return to the existence they once knew. We didn’t understand the severity of our dad’s anxiety, until someone relayed a story to us of Dad being so lost one time that one of his commanders informed him that his actions could’ve started World War III.  

He was in charge of the map for a tank battalion. We all suspect that one of the great attributes of a military’s boot camp is to determine a soldier’s strengths and weaknesses. Why else would the military put a person through six weeks of intense physical and mental challenges. They want to see what we’re made of, and they want to how they can use our natural talents and gifts. How the military could put a man who lived his whole life in one city and didn’t know his way around it, in charge of leading a tank battalion with a map challenges my perception of the men in charge of the military at the time. Whatever the case, they obviously didn’t know my dad’s preference for neat and tidy 90-degree turns, because they put him in a position to fail, and fail he did. He led the tank battalion into enemy space, Russian enemy space, and he could’ve, in the words of his sergeant, started WWIII. 

I didn’t know any of that as a kid, of course, but I knew that the only time I saw my parents’ fights devolve to screaming matches occurred soon after the map was unfolded. Thanks to GPS apps, I no longer experience the deep seated anxiety I used to when someone pulled a map out. 

The first time I saw Shrek I enjoyed it with a strange sense of familiarity that I couldn’t put my finger on. Shrek was a lovable loser with huge ears, a large belly, and he could be unintentionally and habitually gross in ways he didn’t understand, because he spent too much time in solitude. Shrek also had a strange yet simple philosophy of life that could prove humorously wise at times. I couldn’t shake the sense of familiarity during the movie, and I couldn’t pinpoint it for many years, until someone said, “Shrek’s your dad.” I didn’t laugh, and I found it a little insulting at the time, but when I watched the movie again, in that frame, I realized that the writers of Shrek might owe my dad a  royalty for at least some tangential influence.

Think: Useless and Trivial

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@) If we could talk to the animals, my guess is that we’d find that, among others things, we’re the only being that finds flatulence and bowel movements funny.

“Why do you find them funny?” Dabbi the deer might ask.

“Because we find them disgusting,” we’d answer.

“What?”

“It’s complicated, but it’s further complicated by the fact that you don’t have a sense of humor.”

“I don’t have a sense of humor?” she asked. “I don’t? I’ll have you know that I share the same sense of humor with the rest of the human population. Our sense of humor generates ratings, box office sales, and album sales. You’re the freak of nature.”

&) We never call out dystopian productions from their all-too-near future predictions for being wrong. Young up-and-coming lyricists are forever in search of meaningful and important lyrics. They can’t write about Lord of the Rings anymore. Led Zeppelin been there done that. Silly Love Songs were Paul McCartney’s domain, and we can no longer write ‘baby’ lyrics, because the 70’s and 80’s bands drained that vestibule. The only avenue left is war, anti-war, and anti-military, but there hasn’t been a real war by first world countries in about 50 years. So, while all of the lyrics written in the interim are meaningful and important lyric, they’ve also been false, so far. “True, but they weren’t talking about today, they were talking the all-too-near future.” So, when do we say they’re wrong. “You don’t!”

$) So, how do young, inexperienced artists craft “meaningful and important” lyrics and dialogue when they know nothing about the real world? Is it more important to be meaningful and idealistic or knowledgeable and realistic?

#) If you’ve ever met a truly tough guy, you know they’ve already done it. They wear a “nothing left to prove” garb for the rest of their lives. We know how tough they are, when we meet the other guys, those who talk tough to show it.

*) If we ever catch up to Alien technology, will medical professionals finally learn that the key to physical and mental health lies in the anus?

^) Too much sports knowledge is trivial and useless. Watching sports on TV is supposed to be fun, but some of us get so tied up in good guys vs. bad guys that we forget this is basically a reality show. It’s the best one we’ve ever invented, but it’s still just a show. The next time we meet that guy who knows so much about sports that we’re slightly intimidated by his fact-based opinions, we should liberate him by saying, “Who cares?”

!) You’ll know you’re one of these guys if a lighthearted disagreement over useless and trivial information boils over into you deciding that you’re never speak to the other ever again. At that point, someone needs to step in and say, “Clark, no one cares. You think you’re right, and she thinks you’re wrong, but no one here really cares. We just want to go back to eating our turkey, watching football, and talking about Mary’s Jell-O. That’s all we want to do today.

?) What if she says that your favorite sports star is actually a pretty awful human being? We defend him, because we’re nerds who sit in an audience of millions, and he’s the good-looking, athlete who wouldn’t talk to us in high school. If we pick the right one (he who wins) we want everyone to know our vicarious association. “I’ve followed that guy since he was a five-star recruit. I know his high school stats and college stats by heart.”

“No one cares, Clark!”

%) To counter those who say, “Today’s music ain’t got the same soul,” I would like to introduce you to the noise coming out of Britain. black midi (lower case for whatever reason), Black Country, New Road (one band), Squid, and a band named Famous. These bands are genuinely creative and innovative souls coming out with music that might be as brilliant as the music of past decades, and my guess is they’re only going to get better. Other bands that are also making great noise are Thee Oh Osees (or Osees), and just about everything Ty Segall puts his name on. As with all innovative music, we shouldn’t expect the noise to grab in one blow, and we shouldn’t expect one song to deliver the knockout blow either. Although I think the music from black midi’s Welcome to Hell (not the 23-year-old’s definition of meaningful and important lyrics) might change your interiority by about the tenth listen.

Pitchfork has a few nuggets from black midi’s lead singer Gordie Greep to dispel the notion we have that he wants us to view him as deep, meaningful, and important.

“It’s just fun man,” Greep said. “We’re doing this this stupid thing and somehow making the semblance of a living.” This might be false modesty, as we can be sure he hopes we take his stupid stuff seriously.

Greep also drops a fascinating description of his writing style. “When you want to do something original…use something as a model or inspiration that you know you definitely can’t do,” Greep has said. “Your failure will be interesting.” He talks about Clint Eastwood’s failure to act like Marilyn Monroe, and Tom Waits attempt at the blues. He says they both failed by relative measures, but he says we found their attempts interesting. I found a similar attempt to write like James Joyce interesting.

So, he writes what he doesn’t know, just to see what falls out? What an interesting and perplexing method of writing. My guess, and I have a pretty decent track record in this regard, is that Gordie Greep (whether with black midi or not) is a craftsman who has a relatively bright future.

() I got off on Queen when I was younger. Queen almost single-handedly introduced me to the concept that different can be so beautiful in the right hands, and then I discovered David Bowie. Once I got passed Bowie’s pop songs, I thought he was the most experimental artist in the mainstream, until I discovered Mike Patton. Mike Patton did things I never heard before, and I thought he was the most adventurous artist I ever heard, and I still think that in many ways, but Omar Rodríguez-López (ORL) is just as adventurous in different ways.

Omar Rodríguez-López (ORL) is one of the most gifted artists and musicians on the scene today, and he has played some role, most often leading it in some creative manner, in over fifty albums. I purchased an At the Drive-In album, and I purchased a couple of Mars Volta albums, but for some reason they never appealed to me. If it hadn’t been for Ipecac Records releasing his solo recordings, I never would’ve discovered the genius (and I do not use that term lightly) behind the music of those previously mentioned bands.

AllMusic.com tries to succinctly capture this genius writing, “His multivalent body of work derives inspiration from punk rock, prog, metal, funk, traditional Latin music, blues, jazz, film music, and avant-garde composition.”

As with any mercurial genius, much of ORL’s solo albums will not appeal to most palettes, but the true music fan will probably go nuts over about twenty-four of the fifty albums. When I approached Omar Rodríguez-López music, I had no idea what to expect, but he violated those expectations in the most obscene manner possible. Such violations are not immediate, as they rarely are. My first love was Roman Lips. Anytime a friend invites me to listen to complicated, difficult music, I suggest he do so by starting their most accessible album. Roman Lips is probably the most accessible ORL album, followed by Blind Worms, Pious Swine. Beyond that, the ORL solo albums are impossible to categorize, list, or breakdown by category. Suffice it to say that I was wary that the genius behind At the Drive-In and Mars Volta would appeal to me. I was also wary of the Ipecac Recordings, as they release a lot of material that major recording studios won’t, and a number of their albums don’t appeal to me, but ORL.

As with all of the artists listed above, it’s difficult to believe that these individual artists, and Queen, are capable of such wide-ranging music. I love some of the more major, mainstream pop acts, but there is a comfortable thread that runs through most of them. Their fifth album might sound more advanced than their first in production value and matured writing, but we all know what kind of music they prefer. Listening to the albums put out by Bowie, Patton, and Omar Rodríguez-López, it’s hard to believe the same artist created all these incredible albums. ORL is definitely the most prolific of the three, and he’s not even fifty-years-old at the time of this article.