Dhole - A Red Colored Wild Dog

Sorry for the delay in posting today, but with the long weekend and everything I figured that I’d get a little cosmetic surgery and still have time for a cocktail before the weekly productivity meeting.

Unfortunately the ass lift was a bit of a failure. Sure, it looks great and feels just like the sweet, just barley furry ass of a sixteen year old boy, but some of the xanthum gum (that’s what they’re using in illegal Hanoi plastic chop shops these days, that and liquid polystyrene) became dislodged and re-lodged in the base of my spine. Now when I try to say good morning all that comes out of my mouth is, “fart fart, puncha’ Betty, jellyfish hammer guru”. This is completely involuntary and considerably better than the stream of profanity and racial epithets that usually serves as a morning greeting.

Now when I sneeze, I smell Windex, and it’s gotten to be that a man can’t even cry anymore without killing a large animal - no marsupials though - first. I got Botox shots in my fingers, because frankly these hands aren’t aging the way I had planned in third grade using elaborate flow charts on greenish graph paper. But Pfizer is working on a pill that will sublimate my worries about other people and subtly amplify my worries about what kind of wood will make the perfect medicine cabinet.

Say hello to the first of June for me, I’ll be in meetings most of the day. I hope May was a good one for y’all.

Smells Like Summer

It was 89 degrees here yesterday, and they’re predicting 92 today. This is hot for Seattle, especially for May. I don’t know if it’s the warmer air or what, but I’ve noticed these smells in the air the last couple of days that just mean summer for me.

Coconut scented sun tan lotion! It's like summer in a bottle. But then so is Goldschlager.

Yesterday I could smell somebody’s hair mousse, and that just brought me immediately back to high school. It smelled like the same brand I used when I still had a reason to use styling products. It smelled like prom. It smelled like piling into a car to drive to the beach, to drive to the canyon, to drive anywhere.

This morning I could smell orange blossoms. As far as I know there aren’t orange trees around anywhere, so I’m not sure if it was a scent somebody was wearing or if I was having a stroke – but again I was snapped back to those warm summer nights in Southern California. You could smell the orange groves as you were falling asleep, wrapped up in that warm air. Orange blossoms will always smell to me like spring spilling gracefully into summer, like excitement and freedom.

It’s a smell that will always remind me of rollerblading at night along a bike trail that ran through miles and miles of orange groves. One night we got crazy stoned on one of those mongo joints that Damon used to take pride in rolling and sat there on the side of the grove, talking and laughing, feeling relaxed. Pretty soon we realized we could hear something coming through the trees. I got a little paranoid, but calmly thought to myself (and told Damon) that it was probably just a possum or something. Then it turned towards us; and it for sure was not a possum, it was something big. We sat there paralyzed for a minute then bolted. I don’t think I’ve ever moved that fast without a vehicle before.

Aaah, summer. Good times.

C'mon! Take The Good With The Bad. Take It!

I’m feeling pretty failuriffic today. I blew an audition last night – really awful. This isn’t my normal picking apart what I do and finding the smallest thing wrong with it to dwell on. Oh no, this was classic scene of failure from a movie. I finished the scene and there was that LONG pregnant pause before one of the three auditors said, “Ok, thank you.”

It wasn’t a part I particularly wanted in a play I didn’t particularly want to do, but this doesn’t help. And sure, it’s good that at least I got out there and auditioned, but that’s also not doing it for me right now. I want to be perfect.

It’s one more thing that I’m really hyper obsessive about. Nothing that I do will ever be good enough. Even these freaking postings take some sort of leap of faith to throw out there. I beat myself up and I obviously like it or I wouldn’t do it.

Not looking for pity, just sort of a little character background for ya. I keep telling myself that this behavior drives me to do better work. But man, I hate this feeling of abject awfulness, that horrid taste of stage dust from falling flat on my face.

Oh, but I did get a full time, non temp gig. So there’s that silver lining that other people talk about.

Over The Fly Overs

Pilots hold this sort of mythic status I think. They’re kind of like lame super-heroes, they wear these special uniforms and can fly. They get locked away in special rooms, they speak in calm and soothing and slightly southern tinged voices, they seem vaguely untouchable.

And then there are freight pilots.

Freight pilots are the blue collar version of passenger plane pilots, they are the truck driver equivalent in the pilot world. They seem unkempt even in a snazzy uniform. They seem, I don’t know, seedy. It wouldn’t be surprising to learn that a freight plane crew had spent the evening before in a Bangkok brothel and will be breakfasting at Bill’s Rendezvous Room Bar and Grill that morning.

I used to work with freight, I got to know way more about moving pointless shit around the country by plane than I had ever hoped to know. I used to work closely with the flight crew of freight planes because I mapped out their load, making sure weight was distributed correctly throughout their airplane.

A mechanic took great delight in sharing a freight pilot’s dirty little secret with me. Porn. And not just magazines, which there were many hidden about those cockpits, but pictures cut out of magazines and pasted onto the undersides of panel parts of the cockpit.

Magazines I can understand, I mean those are long flights and once you get in the air those planes essentially fly themselves. It’s easy to slip into the cargo hold and take care of a little business… But these isolated money shots pasted into the plastic seat belt covers and ash tray lids just seemed a little too desperate, perverse and well, dumb. It’s like some guy could just flip a piece of plastic and get a quick glimpse of somebody taking it in the face; just for a quick pick me up on those long stretches over Kansas.

Summer Here Kids

I am not a sports guy. Not good at 'em, don't like watching 'em, basically bored by ‘em. I have been able to tolerate baseball in the past (playing and watching) so when dad invited me to a Mariner’s game, I figured I could deal with it.

I loved it.

I got so into it that it was a little bit weird. I at first got all intellectual about it; about how American baseball was, how it just somehow represented summer and drinking beer and clear, warm nights and peanuts. The hammy sound of the announcers voice was iconic, the sound of the cracking of a bat vibrated through some sort of national DNA chain.

But then as soon as the game started, I was hooked. I could not stop watching it, couldn’t stop rooting and clapping and man, I just got jazzed.

Dad had a long drive back to the burbs and kept suggesting we leave a few innings early. I said that was fine, but kept thinking that it was enormously ironic that as a kid I would bug him to leave early and here I was wanting to stay the whole game.

We ended up staying the whole game and it was a great one.

There was a guy sitting in from of me with his little boy who couldn’t have been much older than four, sitting there with his tiny little baseball mitt. I realized then that it was this sort of tradition, fathers taking their sons to baseball games. It made me a little bit sad that that tradition didn’t really work out for dad when I was a kid – something else to drive a spike between us for a lot of years. But I’m glad we got this one together. Plus I got to drink beer this go around.

Hot!

When I was a kid, I wanted her to be my girlfriend:



And Vicky Stubing wasn’t bad either…

Bathroom Etiquette (A Slight Return)

Yesterday, I was throwing a fairly powerful whiz that I had stored up for a few hours. Somebody sat in the stall next to me and I had the biggest urge to say; loudly and in high, childish voice: “Oooh, foamy!”

I wish I had, just for the sake of having “that” reputation. I wish I had.

Episode III - Action Figures and Halloween Customes

Okay seriously, this is the last about Star Wars for awhile – I promise next week I’ll talk about porn; hot, dirty, raunchy porn. But rolling around in the room up there that holds onto the Star Wars Trading Card memories, I was reminded of the characters that I was so heavy into when I saw that first movie –

TUSKEN RAIDERS!

Have no idea what I’m talking about? Here’s a picture:



The Tusken Raiders (also known as the Sand People) effing rule! They’re bad ass mummy wrapped freaks with like, robotic metal parts coming out of their faces. But are those their faces? Is there something underneath of that shit? I don’t know! There’s something about those eyeless, gun barrel “eyes” that freak me out and attract me at the same time.

These guys carried around these killer sticks that had four blades and a spike on one end, and a metal spike that was sort of like those orange, rubber doohickeys at the end of toothbrushes on the other.

They’re a mystery! They have two names and no faces! They ride big furry dinosaur things on a desert planet (?). They made Luke go unconscious – and let’s face it, that whiney bitch deserved it.

Even the name “Tusken Raider” just flat out rules!

The Tusken Raider was the first Kenner Action Figure that I got when I was 6 or 7 (and I immediately lost the cool little plastic weapon stick). I was so enamored, that in third grade I dressed as a Tusken Raider for the costume parade through the school. And while I have to hand it to my mom for working with a kid on his film fixation, the costume kind of sucked. It was just one of those plastic masks that smell like new shower curtains, with the elastic string to go around the head, and a big ass sheet, died brown.

I kept tripping on my own sheet, but I figure this was an issue that the real Tusken Raiders probably dealt with all the time.

Revenge of the Billy

In honor of Episode III opening today:

I am not a Star Wars fanatic. I am definitely a fan, and I probably know more trivia about the series than is really necessary; but I am not one of the hard core, dress in costumes, wait days on-line, bust out my unopened action figures and replay the films kind of guy. Star Wars has been an important phenomenon in my life though.

Star Wars, before it was Episode IV, before it was A New Hope, came out when I was an impressionable child. Back in first grade, I was the only kid in my class who had not seen it. But even then I could tell by rushed breathing and wide-eyed looks of wonder in the other kid’s eyes that it was something special. My folks finally took me one night to this beautiful one screen film palace in downtown Seattle to see it. This was a huge deal at the time, a trip into the city to see a movie. I was knocked out, I was excited, I was obsessed for the next few years. As I said, I’m not hyper-obsessed, but I’ve put in nearly 30 years with this series, and as I’ve said many times before; I don’t care if Lucas put fucking Carrot Top in as Darth Vader, I’m seeing the movie.

…It’s interesting that I’m back in Seattle for the (apparently) final episode, wrapping it back around to where it all began for me.

But none of this is the point, the point is Star Wars Trading Cards.

Oh yes, this is where the beginning of my collecting obsession began. Feel the tingles… Hear the silent bells of meaningfulness… The older, cooler, more experienced kids – the second graders – had all seen the movie. And at recess they would gather at the domed monkey bar contraption and play X-Wing/TIE Fighter dogfight – oh but more than that, they would look at and trade their Star Wars cards.

I had no idea how the pictures on these cards related to the rest of the known universe, but I inferred their dire importance in the way the other kids related to them. By the time I was aware of Star Wars, there was already the red series cards. The blue series had already moved through its entire run.

As a brief aside here: my heart is beating a little faster just thinking about this. Seriously.

I didn’t start collecting cards until the yellow series. I could only get my hands on a few of the red cards that the other kids had doubles of, and the blue ones? Forget it. I have a fond memory of that yellow series, they were the first of a kind for me. The green series came next and my brother and I found it so easy to collect the entire set by that time that I think of them as pretty much garbage. The orange series? Pure shite, pure and simple.

But the blues, those beautiful blues. The ones I could never have. The thought of them still brings on this ridiculous feeling of unquenchable and deep reaching desire, of unhealthy obsession that I could soooooo easily fall into with complete abandon. It’s a black hole that I can get comfy in.

Collector, Collection, Collected

I’m a collector, I’m that guy. I understand the main character of High Fidelity in a way that is probably unhealthy. I’m starting to get better (the lack of funds definitely puts a damper on unnecessary purchasing) but that pull is something that can never be vanquished, only ignored; it’s like a werewolf and the full moon, it’s as sure as the tide, it’s in the DNA.

I have bought albums I will never listen to, films I will never watch. I have paid exorbitant amounts of money for song singles just for the previously unavailable B-Side. I have willingly searched out experimental albums that take near mechanical patience to listen to by splinter groups of splinter groups of groups I wasn’t crazy about to begin with.

I used to fantasize about being able to go back in time to get albums that are now out of print.

Amoeba Records on Haight Street in San Francisco is my nirvana – as well as my Waterloo. For those who may not know, Amoeba stands on a site that used to be a bowling alley – a big fucking bowling alley – and it’s FILLED with used music and movies. It makes my palms itch just thinking about it. Do you want to know how bad my problem was? I used to get panicky thinking about not going to Amoeba on Mondays and Tuesdays and checking out all of the new arrivals that people had sold over the weekend. Seriously.

It’s a sickness, and as I said, I’m getting better. I only want to give you a little background for tomorrow’s post…

Kent

This weekend, Biff and I drove out to the area where I grew up. According to various stories on the news, Kent had become a sort of white trash capitol of the Pacific Northwest – drunken trailer park child abuse stories, guys accidentally killing themselves by putting their lava lamps on kitchen stoves, a city full of Walmart shoppers to say the least.

Okay, keep your smart ass comments to yourselves…

I was at first shocked by the ginormous extent of mini-malls where there were once fields and forest, I sort of wanted to cry. We got back away from the highway and closer to the house where I lived. While there was a whole new crop of housing developments, there was still quite a bit of wilderness around.

We went a little further out to a town called Black Diamond that I remembered from childhood. It’s a town that grew out of coal mining. They keep a little stretch of road all antiquey with an old timey jail and train car, and I was heartened to know that the Balck Diamond Bakery with its 100 year+ brick oven was still operating.

It was raining, and Biff and I walked outside a bit, eating cookies from the bakery, playing with a dog, checking out the meager but sort of fun things Black Diamond had to offer… I was a little lost in the hazy mesh of memory and present, but as I looked around the wooded valley out there, smelled the rain and fireplace smoke and the evergreens, I realized that I was pretty happy that I was able to grow up in the middle of nowhere, while the middle of nowhere was still there.

Lemurs Need Slurpee's Too

Reports are sketchy, but apparently a roving pack of lemurs have taken over a 7-11 in Costa Mesa, CA. Initial reports show that there are at least 112 of them scurrying around the unkempt aisles, seeming to keep mainly to the candy and automotive sections of the store.

“What the hell are these little fuckers doing off of Madagascar?” a 7-11 employee (who chose to remain nameless) asked. “It’s like some sort of crazy, lemur party.”

Crazy, lemur parties, while rare, are not unheard of. In February of 1969 there was an unsubstantiated report of a rowdy pack of lemurs swarming a library in Düsseldorf. Franz Von Hungrig stated at the time that it was, “really more a soiree than an out and out party”. Still, he apparently felt the need to drive out the lemurs with a rake in one gloved hand and a raving wombat in the other. “Once they get in, they take over. Mark my words,” he said.

One customer of the Costa Mesa store appears to be quite shaken. “Have you seen their eyes man? Spooky shit! I just came in to get some smokes, and the place is crawling with these little monkey rats!”

The animals in question do appear to be ring-tailed lemurs. As of now there have been no signs of any slow lorises. We will keep you posted as events unfold.

You Can Feel It All Over

Okay, listen. I love the song “Sir Duke” by Stevie Wonder. I LOVE IT!! It’s the first song that I remember falling in love with, the first song I remember wanting to hear over and over again and I was like 4 or 5 years old.

So today on my walk to work I was coming up on the super sax guy that I wrote about a few weeks back (First and Seneca – April 5). I was sort of scoping him out, just seeing what this guy at rest was all about. It looked like he was trying to come up with something to play, and just as I walked by… He played the first four notes of Sir Duke! I just started laughing. And on the headphones? P.J. Harvey singing “Perfect Day”.

She could be right. I’m not going to push it, but she could be right. Thanks Peej, thanks Stevie, thanks super sax hero down on 1st Ave.

Entropy

I’m tired. I’m wrapped in a fuzzy carpet of sleepy-time tired. I’m dog (and tired cat) tired. I’m John Lennon singing one of my favorite Beatles songs, “I’m So Tired”, tired.

I feel like my nose is 112 pounds and dragging my head down. If I focus too long on one thing, I start to nod off.

It could be because I ate enough sugar to run three 5 year old soccer teams through all day weekend games before I went to bed last night, but that would be admitting fault of my own. Let’s blame the weather – it’s overcast and gray, sure to make me feel sleepy.

This kind of tired totally reminds me of being in second period Physics class senior year (when I bothered to show up). My head would bob so often I’m sure Mr. Dempsey assumed that I was emphatically agreeing with him. To stay awake I would doodle on the desk – usually the Bauhaus logo of the square face inside the circle – and dream about the bag of skunky Humboldt buds waiting in a coffee can in the trunk of my car.

Pioneer Square (A Brief Glimpse)

Every morning I walk through the Pioneer Square area of Seattle. Pioneer Square is where the city of Seattle started (sort of); and to celebrate that, it is filled with high priced boutiques and bars. On weekends, Pioneer Square becomes the Pacific Northwest’s version of the French Quarter with rowdy drunks bar hopping from place to place (but no open containers and no tits).

Pioneer Square also has old buildings. Not like Europe old, hell not even like America old, but I gotta admit that I dig those old(er) brick and stone buildings. There’s one brick building I spy every morning through the opening of an alley that is half overtaken by ivy. I LOVE IT! I makes me want to sing a song.

Maybe Neil Young’s “Needle and the Damage Done”, but I doubt it.

Anyway, this morning as I passed this building I heart so much, the sun shot out from the overcast and lit up the ivy like some kind of neon. All this green fire all over old red brick just made me kind of hard.

Seriously, it was great. I wish you would have been there.

I Wanna Be A Kid Again

I had a rough grandparent weekend.

My recently widowed grandmother was getting constant reminders of the loss of her husband throughout the evening, and a few times broke down and cried. This is of course completely understandable, but not easy to watch her go through. This was a marriage that I hold up as one of the greats, it lasted long and was filled with love and respect. Les was a great man; sharp and funny and loving, and I miss him terribly. I cannot (and probably do not want to) imagine the void left in my grandmother’s life.

My other grandfather is suffering from Alzheimer’s, and I’m pretty sure he had no idea of who I was. This is certainly a drag, but the worst part was at one point of the evening he went into some sort of convulsion. The image of this will probably never quite leave my mind, it was one of the scariest moments of my life thus far.

I have been told by numerous people, “don’t get old, it’s no fun”. I don’t have a lot of options here.

Saturday Grab Bag

I’m tired, so, so tired. And I have one of those headaches that 15 little 2 lozenge packages of extra strength PAIN CRUSHER™ can’t help.

I’ll tell you this: The new Mountain Goats album “The Sunset Tree” is a heartbreaker. It’s exactly what you’re looking for, trust me on this.

If you never checked out the Almodovar film “Talk To Her” from a couple years back, do it. It’s good.

Apparently Jagermeister and Red Bull is a real thing, but for the love of god, if you ever see me drinking one, do what you can to stop me.

Also, there is apparently a knitting craze hitting young Americans. These are sort of things I learn about late in the game when my subscription to Teen People falls by the wayside.

Random Film Quote: “That Buford’s a sly one, already know his ABC’s. Hit the deck boy!”

Just A Pyromania!

A few years back, in San Francisco, I was awakened by yelling voices. I attempted to sleep through it, except the panicky shrieking of, “get out of the house, there’s a fire!” got me a little bit motivated.

I bolted out to the porch (with no thought of the cats, by the way) and could see smoke pouring out of one of the Victorians up on Page Street. Okay, not my house, but bummer for those guys. Soon there were firemen scurrying around back of the house, and in what seemed like seconds after that, fire.

I watched in shocked amazement as that fire grew out of control. Minutes, this took. It took minutes for the fire to move to the house next door and start gutting that. Merely a few more minutes before the fire moved onto a third house and started working. It is shocking how fast a fire can move and how quickly it can destroy something.

I’ve watched a Ford Aerostar burn to the ground. It goes faster than you might think. This is a car that I set on fire – long story, I’ll tell it again later I’m sure. The thing is, for something that destroys so utterly, and so damn fast, I cannot help playing with fire like the dumb 5 year old I am…

Here Kitty, Kitty, Kitty...

I’ve got cats on the brain today.

I can’t stop thinking about the fact that cats crawl up in the engines of parked cars to warm themselves and then get all fucked up when the car owner starts up for their morning commute. What a crappy way to start the day, with a screaming and bleeding cat flying out from underneath your car. Not such a great morning for the cat either. Of course if you really can’t stand cats, then it’s actually probably a great way to start your day. Sicko…

And the musical Cats… Seriously, dude! I’ve seen it, I’ll admit it, but this sure seems like a primo-freakin-A-number-one example of how easily people are led by the nose. How did this become a hit musical for fuck’s sake? People dressed in cat suits – CAT SUITS! – doing a fake opera for the masses about which cat will go to kitty heaven. Andrew Lloyd Webber can lick my balls.

And while sometimes our cats drive me absolutely bat shit, I gotta admit that I really dig it when one of them crawls up on me and goes to sleep. That’s super nice.

Anger Is Not A Four Letter Word (But Maybe We Should Look Into It)

I gotta warn you all, I’m in that sort of mood today. That mood where I am annoyed with the people around me, especially the people that already sort of annoy me, and I want to hurt them a little. The guy who’s eating a bag of Frito’s, but being none too careful with the rattling of the bag, not to mention eating with his mouth wide open so every crunchy corn-fried bite can be heard loud and clear.. He’s asking for a bitch slapping, pure and simple.

The girl with the loud and nasal, sort of Minnesota-ish voice, who can normally spend six and a half consecutive hours talking about her freaking upcoming wedding, is boring the roaches with a pointless story of her father moving furniture around. Even her friends, who offer opinions on whether a bag of only red M&M’s is a decent gift for her wedding guests, are giving her the short, perfunctory answers as a clue to shut the fuck up. Which she’s ignoring! I want to scream in her ear, “you’re boring and not very bright” in a Scottish accent until she falls down in convulsions.

The one guy (who I’ll call 40 Year Old Fan Boy) is arguing with the other (who I’ll call Special Army Man) about which of them is correct in their assumptions as to the true goal of Islamic Fundamentalists. I can only wish that Islamic Fundamentalists would lock these two in a cage with rabid koalas who would then rip out and eat their bleeding rectums. I’m pretty sure the Islamic Fundamentalists would then mutter, “we do it for the nooky”.

None of this bodes well for the rest of the day…

I'm Sixteen All Over Again

I had big plans, big plans I tell you. I was going to get up early and get my hair cut and spend a large chunk of the day at the computer working on the novel that is floating around like a fragile little embryo in my head. But…

I woke up feeling a little not so well. I crashed out on the couch for awhile, just resting, but then I ended up side tracking myself by going crazy about the state of the living room. I mean how did I go this long without sweeping the floor for Christ’s sake? Well a cleaning frenzy ensued. The next thing I knew it was late afternoon and Biffy was asking when the hell I was going to get my hair cut.

So the thing is, I had spent all day in the apartment and when I went outside for the first time at 4ish I felt so weird and out of place. I felt like everybody was watching me and shouting with their eyes, “get thee back inside, you do not belong here”. I don’t know what my problem was, but I hate that feeling. It reminded me of being back in high school and being way hyper obsessed with what everybody can possibly be thinking about me, and how I look, and what I’m wearing, and the way that I am walking, and the pace of my breathing. I sat down in the barber chair and let some strange man’s hands rubbing my head calm me down.

I’m okay now, it’s cool.