Local Profile: Joe Six-Pack

The award-winning Asheville Disclaimer recently caught up with a local man who perhaps is best known for constantly receiving praise and pandering from politicians on both sides of the aisle, as well as being frequently name-checked in the media by pundits who otherwise are content to allow this individual to fade into obscurity. Stranger still, these same politicos and pollsters boldly speak of Joe Six-Pack’s fears and desires, claiming that Mr. Six-Pack is sick of politicos and pollsters while somehow excluding themselves from his projected blue-collar cone of malice.

Joseph Six-Pack descends from a long line of Packs, and an even longer line of Eights. (Many Eights pragmatically changed the spelling of their names to the more American “Six” upon arriving in the United States in the 19th century from the Old Country, where “Eight” was spelled “douche.”)

The consummate everyman, Joe, as he is known by his fawning admirers in Washington, New York and in dope-smoke-enshrouded Ivory Towers across this great nation, grew up in a nearby working-class neighborhood where he and other local urchins played stickball, because their laid-off fathers could not afford real baseball equipment.

On the walls of his room growing up hung three posters: one of Joe DiMaggio, one of a large socket wrench, and one poster of an American flag mid-flap, with the word “freedom” in italic Helvetica with shadow outline superimposed along the bottom three stripes.

Joe took nothing but welding classes in high school, before dropping out and going through a troubled white-T-shirt phase. He met a local gal down at the bowling alley, and knocked her up at the bowling alley. Frightened of God, because Joe was God-fearing, when Joe needed advice, he wisely did not mention the matter to God, but instead turned to his friend Tommy, who used to work on the docks and was down on his luck and was living on a prayer. (Later in life, Tommy turned his life around and landed a pretty sweet gig as a drum tech for Bon Jovi, before successfully suing the band for song-writing royalties and slander six months later.)

“Marry that girl,” Joe’s friend advised him, “because it’s the right thing to do and also because the villagers will tar and feather you if you don’t. Also, somebody needs to tell her to stop bowling pregnant.”

So Joe Six-Pack got married and got a job at the Skyland Budweiser distributorship, first as a lowly delivery driver, and later as an Account Distribution Specialist in Charge of Driving. Joe had more kids. On weekends, he still bowled. Older and wiser, he no longer knocked up shoe-rental girls between the Galaga game and the wall.

It was, by any measure, a pretty humble and simple life.

Mr. Six-Pack was as surprised as anyone when Ronald Reagan launched a national analytical obsession with the trivialities of Joe’s life by stating, during a televised address to the nation, that Joe Six-Pack, of all people, supported Reagan’s policies and that Reagan’s policies supported Joe Six-Pack.

Stunned, Joe stared in silence at the black-and-white television in the corner of the Burger Bar for several minutes.

Up until then, Joe had been a Geraldine Ferraro kind of guy.

Still to come: Joe’s shocking interview in which he admits to sitting and talking at the kitchen table with his wife about his fears of how the troubled economy will affect regular schmoes like him, but only as a way of deflecting her questions about nano-technology.

Mars Hill, 2008 — The 1950s suddenly and without warning arrived recently at Mars Hill College, the insular Baptist institution of adjacent learning in Mars Hill, North Carolina.

The epoch was ushered in by wizardry, according to newly updated textbooks at the college.

It is not the first time the 1950s have appeared at Mars Hill College, according to historians. The decade showed its face briefly in the mid-1980s when a student clad himself in a black leather jacket for Halloween and presented himself as Young Franklin Graham, who is legendary among students at MHC for having once gotten drunk in a corn field with a half-negro, and, in doing so, provided young Baptists the world over with a riveting tale of rebellion and redemption that Franklin has testified to ever since waking up hungover in a corn field with a half-negro.

The latest appearance of the troublesome decade occurred when male students in Gibson Hall, on Men’s Hill, attempted to sneak up Women’s Hill and infiltrate Edna Moore Residence Hall, where they planned to infiltrate dorm rooms and execute a brazen “bloomers raid.” As they neared Edna Moore, the students espied two naked co-eds under a glorious magnolia tree. When they approached, it became apparent that the two were under the influence of Elvis Presley. The would-be saboteurs double-timed it to the chaplain’s office and reported their sighting of the decade.

The timing of this latest report couldn’t have been worse for either the college, still reeling from the discovery of a tattered paperback novel about speakeasies and flappers in a bathroom in Wren Student Union, or for the chaplain, still reeling from a toe-curling, self-induced, Calvinist-style orgasm achieved just seconds before “those bastard students busted into my office without knocking first, little sons-of-bitches.”

• Ride the bus, even if you don’t have to go anywhere, to show your support
for fuel conservation.
• Instead of getting drunk and driving your riding lawn mower to the ABC store, take your electric weed eater instead.
• If you’re going to run someone out of town by burning their house down in a “lightning strike,” use wind energy
instead of gas-soaked rags to start the lightning.
• When trolling for hookers, carpool with other Johns and share the first hooker you find.
• Put gasoline barrels beneath

your home’s gutter spouts, so you’ll be ready when we start drilling offshore and cheap gasoline starts magically falling from the sky.
• Instead of gasoline, huff clean, green paint thinner.