Dolly

“Debuting Friday, September 18th 2020
The 1-800-Funk-Sauce.com Show
Runtime: 11.5 minutes
It’s an animated “late night” talk show!“

WARNING: 1-800-FUNK-SAUCE is not a working number!

Do not call it, expecting any kind of an answer! I do not know what would happen if somebody actually picked up that phone, but I suspect you’d be worse off than if they hadn’t.

“With new episodes appearing on www.1-800-Funk-Sauce.com every Friday night, starting 9/18, The 1-800-Funk-Sauce.com Show will feature interviews with guests from all walks of life, musical performances from bands from all over the country/world, and various other adult comedy elements. 
The pilot episode will feature an interview with Malcolm J. Brenner and his former lover, Dolly the dolphin, to discuss their love affair. Musical guest Billy Summer will perform afterwards.
“Find your comfortable spot, relax, get into the zone, and tune into The 1-800-Funk-Sauce.com Show, on Fridays starting on 9/18, on 1-800-Funk-Sauce.com.” — Press Release, Joe Seul

Let me explain. Joe Seul is a good guy I met through a bad public-relations contact. At the time, about mid-2017, he was a New College student majoring in music who proved very friendly and helpful in getting the audio book of Mel-Khyor: An Interstellar Affair ready for publication by equalizing the sound and adding a little reverb to my flat, nasal voice, so I sound less like Boris Karloff and more like Morgan Freeman. And it worked out really well, so I was grateful to him, because he didn’t ask for any payment.

“What a swell guy!” I thought. Little did I know what EVIL lurks in the hearts of men!

Well, a couple of years went by when I didn’t hear a lot from Joe. He finished up his work at New College, moved out of the roach-infested hovel that passed for off-campus student housing there and upward and onward to better things in St. Petersburg (the Florida one, not the one in Russia, you know). And then came The Great Covid-19 Lockdown of 2020, and, like a lot of musicians, poor Joe didn’t know what to do with himself.

Not having anybody to jam with drove young Joe nearly insane (am I hitting too hard on this, Joe?) and he began experimenting with new programs, new apps. One of them, he told me, was a rudimentary computer graphics app that allowed him to make 3D animation that looked like an Amiga game in 1990, only not quite that good.

And then, like the skilled lurker, he is, he sprang the question: “I’m using it to do a short interview podcast, a different topic each week and some music, and I’d like you to be the first guest. What do you say?”

What could I say? Joe had me eating out of the palm of his paw, er, hand. I agreed, and since I haven’t had much success lately giving a recording of an interview that’s worth listening to, I was glad hear it would be recorded on regular old cell phone (I’m sure I’ll be able to get that Blue Yeti from my daughter to work right the next time).

It was late on a July afternoon, I think, when the westering sun shines into the house and the central AC struggles to keep it at 83ºF/28ºC against the greater heat outside, but I turned the fan off so the background noise wouldn’t interfere with Joe’s recording. A little hasty, I called him up, but there was some glitch and he called me back a little after 5 p.m.

There were a lot of things I want to talk about. The two other books I’ve written. My telepathic experiences with Dolly, which ended up on the floor of the Dolphin Lover cutting room (except these days they’d be taking up space in your Trash). My thoughts about the venerable age of the bottlenose dolphin species, 12 million years as compared to our +/- 250,000 years. What that means to the evolution of their sonic communications. How their predictive theory of mind abilities, which let them second-guess other dolphins and ourselves, evolved. And so on.

But Joe just launched right in. After a brief introduction, he said “Tell me what happened with you and Dolly at Floridaland.”

Well…

Ya know, Joe, it’s like this: You have an extraordinary experience, and you decide to let others know about it, so you spend 37 years writing, editing, printing and publishing a book about it so you won’t have to repeat it over and over and over. And then you go to distribute the book, and what do interviewers ask you?

“Tell me what happened!”

But, gentle reader, I didn’t do that. Instead I sat back and I spent the next little while telling Joe the story of my experience with Dolly, but this time trying to work in as much of my non-dolphin experience, and recent conclusions regarding us, the dolphins and whatever the fuck causes the UFOs as I could while still threading back to the occasional sweaty-palms narrative.

Forty-five heatstroked minutes later, Joe finished up by asking a few questions. “How did you get consent from the dolphin?” was the one I remember.

I didn’t give him my flip answer, either, which is “When was the last time you got a pig’s consent to turn it into a ham sandwich?” That’s flip because most of us do it without giving it a second thought, and also because it begs the question, Why is getting consent from a non-human partner only important when the human’s sexual pleasure is involved?

Because, not to put too fine a point on it, animals are chattel under most laws, and I can do what I want with chattel, provided if it’s an animal covered under the law (I don’t think many of us are going to lose a lot of sleep about the fates of mosquitoes, bedbugs or fire ants) I treat it humanely, even to the point of killing it humanely. And the law spells out how you do this.

I can breed that animal to another animal that may not be its natural choice, and I can, if necessary, hobble an unwilling female animal so that she cannot injure an unwanted male who rapes her. So it’s not whether the female animal (and, BTW, I submit that, in the eyes of the public, ONLY female animals can be the true “victims” of a bestialist) is enjoying it, or really even whether her body is her own, she is going to be used by her owner as a reproductive vehicle! The choice of a mate isn’t hers and her owner’s interest in her pleasure from the act can be accurately measured in micro-give-a-shits.

But suddenly, if I want to step in, and, knowing what I know about the animal’s species, characteristics and habits, not harm the animal, not hurt the animal, not even rape the animal, but just have sex with the animal — “normal” interspecies sex, for want of a better term, you know, the old in-and-out — for our mutual pleasure, THAT IS A HORRENDOUS, UNSPEAKABLE “CRIME AGAINST NATURE” AND WE MUST DO EVERYTHING IN OUR POWER TO PREVENT IT, OR PUNISH THE BESTIALIST IF IT HAPPENS!

To which I answer, “Where’s the harm?”

Harm. The concept of injury or damage, usually to someone else. Remember that? HARM? In Harm’s Way, famous WWII book & movie? “Evidence of harm,” legal concept? Self-harm, disturbing behavior? Armie Hammer, star of the disastrous 2013 Lone Ranger remake?

But I digress.

Joe did ask one memorable question, which was “How did you get consent from her?”

To which I answered, “Are you kidding? She had to get consent from me!” Which is true, and she spent most of the preceding five months figuring out how to do it! Was there a need to elaborate? Maybe another time.

We concluded the interview and Joe went back to his lair for a couple of weeks to edit. Then he sent me an email with a Vimeo address and a password. And what to my wondering eyes should appear…

Let it never be said (by me anyway) that I lack a sense of humor about myself. I acknowledge the many funny actualities in my relationship with Dolly, and point some of them out in the novel, including a photo of her mashing her snout into my would-be girlfriend’s face, while staring straight into the camera. It’s a wonderfully funny picture now, 50 years later, and I’m glad I still have it!

In this regard, let me say that I think Joe has exploited the humorous aspects of my relationship with Dolly in a way that nobody else has done before, and for this I congratulate him! He has also speeded up my voice by about 15-20% to make more of my interview available but doesn’t advise you of this before the interview begins, so I sound a little bit like a lost member of the band Alvin & The Chipmunks, but I mean, hell, Brenner, what do you expect for free? I didn’t really mean to insinuate that Joe was EVIL, just that I was a little… uh… SURPRISED by his… IMAGINATIVE PORTRAIT of myself and the dolphin together, VERY together, in the altogether.

Please check out the 1-800-FUNK-SAUCE.com website starting Friday evening, September 18 and let Joe and me know what you think, if you choose to. Thanks!