Guest Outsider Poetry Blog: Dr. Millard Rausch

We're going to turn Zombie Logic over to the capable hands (and frontal lobe) of Dr. Millard Rausch tonight, who has a few words about dummies, Hamm's beer, and Outsider Poetry, in no particular order. 

Back in 1978 Dr. Millard Rausch was a second year professor at Penn, just trying to perfect his syllabus when the Zombie Outbreak of 1978 changed everything. Being one of the world's foremost experts on Xenobiology, Dr. Rausch was made an offer he could not refuse by the military to become a government spokesperson on zombie awareness. It was in the green room at WGON studios in Pittsburgh that he wrote this poem.

Dumb Questions

In every zombie movie 

From Zombie Lake to 

Children Shouldn’t Play 

With Dead Things, 

The living wonder 

What motivates the undead 

To clamor for human flesh, 

As if the undead are method 

Actors in a bad Fellini movie.

In one movie a coroner 

Asks the torso 

Of a bound zombie woman 

Why she lusts for brains.

Seems like a stupid question 

To ask someone 

Who wanted to eat your brains. 

Meanwhile, things had gone from bad to worse back at the WGON studio, and Dr. Rausch had just called 200 million Americans dummies. Americans are dummies, but they really don't like to be called dummies, so after the show Dr. Rausch found himself surrounded by a nation of angry dummies who were armed for a zombie Apocalypse. Second choice of enemies: Dr. Millard Rausch. Fortunately, the good doctor had prepared for just such an occasion, and repaired to Zombie Logic Ranch in Vermont where he wrote Outsider Poetry for the next decade, including this ditty...

True Romance

In the movie 

A zombie impaled 

Through the throat 

By a five iron gurgles 

“Must blend, 

Must pass for human,” 

To a woman he loves 

Too much to devour 

Until a shovel separates 

His head into two neat 

Hemispheres pretty much 

Ending his dream. 

Dr. Millard Rausch explaining zombie tribal behavior to dumb Americans in 1978

 

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Wooly Booly, an Outsider Poem By Millard Rausch

Back home at Zombie Logic after a couple of weeks of tending to other blogs. I find it interesting what you've been looking at while I was away. Ghouls, pennies, Elvira's boobs. Today is the last day of the kids' vacation in Texas, and while their mama is off to the airport to pick them up I have just these last couple of hours of to direct whatever rational thoughts I might have into words. Not much to say. Maybe a picture is called for. let me see what's on the old hard drive.

I've decided to go ahead and play fantasy football again this season. I really had ethical concerns about participating last year because of all the domestic abuse scandals and hypocrisy, but when the Women's World Cup team refused to address the domestic abuse case of their goaltender and just let her continue playing I knew Wanda Sykes was right and we've achieved real equality and I can just go ahead and take whatever guilty pleasure I can in watching people beat the hell out of each other on the field and off. That has nothing to do with Jack Soo or Barney Miller, but none of the other pictures on my hard drive make any more sense than this one.

I'm trying to talk Jenny into paneling for our basement. I'm also trying to avoid buying any beer collectibles. When I was a kid I remember the commercials for Hamm's. There was a bear. We had this big beach towel that must have been given away as a promotion. I think the best Hamm's sign is the one where the water seems to move. I think they had that one at the Cave Inn in Byron. Sometimes where we were young my dad would drag us in there late at night. I probably even bartended there when I was a kid. I don't think anybody thought anything of it. Stuff like that is probably why I never went into a bar again until I was thirty.

Now I'm mostly just thinking about Dawn of the Dead and waiting for the Cubs/White Sox game to start. Seems like the weather will never allow them to finish. I have been writing a lot about Dr. Millard Rausch lately and  hypothesizing about what might have happened to him after he appeared on the emergency broadcast at WGON studio. I see him getting into a very large automobile, calmly driving to a small airstrip, pulling the tarp off a small private plane he had readied for just this occasion, and flying off to Maine or some other remote location where he a fully-stocked ranch where he waited out the Zombie Apocalypse of 1978. I figured he had invited several of his brainiac friends there, all of whom were specialists in some field of study, and none of them really shed a tear or batted an eyelid as humanity slowly disappeared from the Earth.  Also, he wrote what could literally be considered Outsider Poetry and whittled a lot. I imagine this is one of the poems he wrote...

Wooly Bully

But what better way to enter this

Chamber of antiquity but ass-backwards,

Inviting the citizenry of Ohio to come in,

Take a look around, buy a souvenir

Made of cheap plastic?

Soon, disassembled and reassembled

Bone by bone, Conway the Mastadon

Will make the 10,000 year turn to the East

And greet visitors to the Ohio Historical Society

Face to face.

Forcing the sentimental among us to long

For the olden days when history was still

Showing us its wooly ass.

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Why Dr. Millard Rausch Went Into Seclusion

Millions and millions of American's saw Dr. Millard Rausch's appearances at WGON studios during the Zombie Apocalypse of 1978. The good doctor thought he was only addressing the people of Pittsburgh, but little did he know his words were being broadcast to every emergency broadcast affiliate in America. Millions and millions of people heard only the words "dummies, dummies," and completely tuned out advice from the doctor that could have saved millions of lives. 

When it became apparent to Dr. Rausch that he was now the most hated man in America he didn't have time to wait for zombies to eat the brains of every single person who remembered him calling them a dummy, so he did the next best thing: he changed his name to Dr. Henry Wolfsburg and assumed the alias of  the mild-mannered cultural anthropologist and zombie bikini contest judge. But he just couldn't quit calling people dummies, so he formed The Hall of Bad Dudes to draw the proper attention to several historical dummies. 

Eventually, virtually every human brain was either eaten or converted to zombieism due to utter ignorance and dummietood, yet Dr. Rausch had holed up at his ranch in Vermont waiting for the zombies to run out of food. 

Dr. Millard Rausch leaving Club 54 October 6, 1978 after partying with Mick Jagger and zombie Charo. Shortly after he was forced to go into hiding after calling millions of Americans dummies. 

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