The Post-Hoax Era

The head is REAL. The rest is a GAS. Go figure.

I had an Aunt Yeti, once. Nobody talked about her much. And her whereabouts were always just a bit too vague for discomfort. In my family, we say the person's first name and then the town where he or she resides. Because everyone is named the same darned name. For example, there's Abe Long Island, Abe Toronto, and Abe California. Abe California really lives on a vegetarian commune in Oregon, but he's always been Abe California -- as in, the man does not have a telephone, or a homing pigeon, or a blow-up doll. And there's another Abe, like, Abe North America, or something, or Abe Daylight Savings Time, or Abe Witness Relocation. Aunt Yeti, on the other hand, was an exception. You didn't have to say Yeti Himalayas or Yeti National Forest, because there was no other Yeti. She was Aunt Yeti. We had all kinds of terrible rhymes that we'd sing, running around the empty lot where we kids used to play that great old game, Missing Link. "Yeti spaghetti," we'd sing, for example. There was talk, for a time, of a Yeti/Teddy ticket, way back in 1980, just before the Miracle on Ice. Yep: Yeti and Ted Kennedy, although it was unclear whether America was ready, at the time, for a woman on the ticket.

I think the funniest possibility regarding the famous 1967 Patterson-Gimlin Film (frame 352 appears above) is that a dude who neither Patterson nor Gimlin knew dressed up like a Sasquatch and ran out in front of the camera. If you subscribe to that possibility, then, no, it wasn't a hoax, because suddenly, out of the forest, strode Aunt Yeti, as far as you knew. This film, by the way, probably inspired the disappointing, yes, disappointing "Blair Witch Project," which was not scary, because you knew it was a film. Had the BWP folks not told us it was a film, then it might've been scary. As a kid, Leonard Nimoy (aka Spock) scared the crap out of me because I didn't know he was a film. When I found out later that Leonard Nimoy was a film, I laughed it off by guzzling a 40 on the back stoop. That's how you celebrate the end of a Hoax: "Like a MAN// with a 40 in yr HAND." (Bumpa bumpa.) Anyhow. Let's get something straight: This era that we're in -- call it what you will -- but I'll call it The Post-Hoax Era -- sucks. We don't have true Hoaxes anymore. We have, what? Shoplifting? Grand Theft Auto? We have Theft. Our Hoaxes, meantime, cry the proud, stiff tears of a dying language.