Inner Circle – "Bad Boys" (1987)

Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do?

Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?

I feel like I’ve been reading the late David Foster Wallace’s postmodern encyclopedic novel, Infinite Jest (which was published almost exactly 25 years ago) for years.  But I’ve actually only read about one quarter of the book’s 1079 pages and 388 footnotes.

Wallace’s book has been described as “a masterpiece” and “the central American novel of the past thirty years, a dense star for lesser work to orbit.”

But not everyone is a fan.  One reviewer called Infinite Jest “terrible” – also, “bloated, boring, gratuitous, and – perhaps especially – uncontrolled.”

Another critic said that Wallace’s writing was “impressive in the manner of a precocious child’s performance at a dinner party, and, in the same way, ultimately irritating.”  He concluded that the author (who committed suicide at age 46) “seem[ed] motivated, mostly, by a desire to show off.”

I suspect that Infinite Jest – similar to other 20th-century magna opera like Finnegan’s Wake and Gravity’s Rainbow – is so full of sh*t that its eyes are brown.  (Can you say, “The emperor has no clothes!”)

But I’m doing my best to get through it – I’m giving it the old college try.    

We’ll see if I’m successful or not.  Parts of Infinite Jest have been very readable, but other part have been a real slog. 

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In Infinite Jest, the calendar years are given names, not numbers.

The naming rights for each year are auctioned off to the highest-bidding corporate sponsor.  Most of the book’s action takes place during the “Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.”  Other sponsored years include the “Year of the Whopper” and the “Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad.”

As far as 2 or 3 lines goes, I’m tempted to name 2021 the “Year of the Eastern Shore Undercover Facebook Page” in honor of the social media-based news source for the good citizens of Wicomico and Worcester Counties, Maryland – which are located on the lower Eastern Shore of Maryland, smack dab between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean – because Eastern Shore Underground (“ESU” for short) has provided me with enough material to last the entire year.

Click here to visit ESU’s website, which has links you can use to follow Eastern Shore Undercover on Facebook, Twitter, and/or Instagram.

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The first ESU-inspired 2 or 3 lines post featured an ESU item concerning a female who was circumambulating the parking lot of an Irish bar in the nude one frigid Saturday evening  The second one was about a male who was described as “not in his right state of mind” because he was gallivanting around outside of a Days Inn hotel while en déshabillé – that is, nekkid as a jaybird.

Today’s 2 or 3 lines essentially regurgitates a bunch of miscellaneous Eastern Shore Undercover posts from the last two weeks.  As you’ll see, the citizen complaints to law enforcement that are the bread and butter of the ESU Facebook page run the gamut of low crimes and misdemeanors.

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The lower Eastern Shore of Maryland seems to be a pretty dangerous place.  E.g.:

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Drug use and panhandling seem to be major problems in the area:

(I love it that the suspect is described as a “frequent flyer” with the police department.)

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Many of the items that ESU shares with its subscribers are sui generis.  To wit:

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Here are a couple of bathroom-related items:

As you can imagine, that last item generated a LOT of comments:

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Did the police really needed to be called about the following two incidents? 

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And last but not least:

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“Bad Boys” was a top ten single for Inner Circle, a Jamaican reggae band, in 1987.

But the song is best known as the theme for Cops, a reality TV show that premiered in 1989 and ran on the Fox television network for 25 years.  (After Fox dropped the show, it ran on the Spike cable network for several more years.)

Click here to listen to “Bad Boys.”

Click on the link below to buy the record from Amazon: