The truth about Randy is this: he doesn’t have a collection of butterfly droppings at all; it was cicada exoskeletons, but he was afraid that wouldn’t be interesting enough, but now even the cicadas are gone.  The whole collection was in a bag next to the couch and his brother-in-law Bruce was watching “Star
Wars: Phantom Menace” for the 70th time, in the dark, and mistook them for his bag of pork rinds, and this is too painful to write about.

It wasn’t Lisa Marie, it was actually Priscilla, and Elvis gave Randy the doughnut and asked him to . . .well, nevermind the details, but the spatula was strictly damage control by the time it came to that.  If you ever wondered why Priscilla went to Paris, well, there’s a special doctor there.  We all felt bad about this, but it gave her an appreciation for animals that really developed later on and led to the idea for that TV series.

It is true that the drummers for The Shakes performed covered in Crisco, but it was two different drummers, and they were scuffling over whether Paiste is better than Zildjian at the time the stick slipped.  Randy was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  The performance was at a Rest Home, so there were supposed to be medical people on duty, but no one could find them, so the stitches were done by the quilting ladies.  Randy still shows off his rocking-stitch scar if asked.

The truth is that Robert and Randy did have a tambourine that they used when doing the marathon sessions, but they were contacted by some lawyers claiming to represent Dylan who demanded that the tambourine be left out.  Randy and Robert decided to fight the suit and won on a technicality when a post-modernist literary critic was called as an expert witness.  He was trying to convince the jury that the song had no author when they all got up and left, except for two who had actually died of boredom.  The aftermath was complex, but by the time anyone knew what had happened, it came to light that the lawyers did not represent Dylan but were actually the last living practitioners of New Criticism.  At that point, Robert realized that Dylan left the tambourine on purpose, saw he could do stuff at least that profound, and began his solo career.  He said, “sometimes a tambourine is just a tambourine, but don’t bet the farm on it.”

The stuff about Oklahoma City is true, except for the part about the latte.  It was a full-caf-half-nelson.

Since the lying biography appeared on the web in 2003, some more untrue things have happened.  Elevated (against his will and over his own confessions of
incompetence) to full professor of philosophy with tenure, Randy responded by writing and recording a new CD, his third collaboration with engineering whiz-kid Bruce Chandler, entitled “Sp_r_t Gu_de.”  During the project, Bruce received an electronic message from the Buddha that said “there is no self, leave out the I’s.”  Bruce soon dedicated his life to the service of the self that is not, in hopes that it never will be, since evidently the self is still a possibility.  Hence, Bruce’s new production company handle: Buddha Joint (referring to the one remnant of the Buddha-self that yet remains, not a finger or finger bone, but the emptiness where the Enlightened One bent a finger when he tried to clap –it was shortly before he thought of a now famous coan).

So don’t believe anything you read.