Birthday At The Baranof

I should maybe have known that the evening was going to get weird from the get go when we went to pick up Nicholas and I saw a picture of him and his older brother that looked EXACTLY like a picture of me and my little brother from years ago. I mean same sort of clothing, same coloring...

We went to this bar called the Baranof. The front of the place is this same sort of restaurant/diner that I remember from childhood in a town that didn't have a name so they just called it 4 Corners since two major "roads" intersected there. The back was the sort of dive bar where the regulars have their names on brass plates at their regular place, and they all leave for their league bowling game together - stumbling and still carrying drinks. It was my kind of place.

I don't know if it was the flashback aspect of the fake leather booths, or the whiskey or the fact that the roof of the back deck of the place was made with that same ridged, green plastic sheeting that my grandfather had used on the deck at his house, but at one point in the evening, I had this sudden realization that I was in Seattle. I know it sounds weird, but it was this profound, sudden "kick in the eye" sort of moment - like I had felt lost there for a bit and suddenly realized where I was.

I was having fun, I was drinking and singing Queen's Fat Bottom Girls to co-workers, so I wasn't really paying attention to the table of three that had sort of drifted away from the rest of the group - birthday boy Nicholas, his neighbor and Biffy. At about the point that I saw this twisted form of anger/envy coming from one of those in our group, the evening was ending and ending strangely.

The neighbor was leaving, but she was walking back home. She was walking from 85th and Greenwood back to the bottom of Capitol Hill. If you don't live in Seattle, you have no idea what that means, but it's far. It also involves crossing a lake. Nicholas was leaving as well as he didn't feel right about her walking that distance alone. And Biff had become that kind of inebriated where words stop working. The last time I had paid attention, she was drinking Bud Light in a bottle, so this was confusing.

Everyone else seemed a little shocked at the early departure and walking of the guest of honor, but I was focused on the well being of Biffy. I knew that sort of drunk, I have been that sort of drunk. It's the kind of drunk where you rely on your eyes to communicate as using words will create evil magic, but you can't see further than a blurry foot in front of you. It's the kind of drunk that borders on hallucinating. It's the sort of drunk that makes you realize that the god of drunks had his eyes elsewhere that evening, maybe a tavern in Akron.

I wrangled the non functioning Biffy and a remote controlled airplane gift (that had been left behind) home. And as I was fading into sleep on the couch, I had a thought that seemed totally plausible in that sleepy, free-form relaxed mind sort of way: somehow, I had brought this weirdness on myself...

Physician, Eat Thyself

So I have this minor obsession with cannibalism. Not performing it, but having it performed on me. I’ve written about my zombie plague paranoia, and one of my very first posts on this here site mentioned a fear of this guy I passed on my walk to work wanted to attack and eat me.

Perhaps file this under ‘creating your own reality’…

I’m walking home last night, Jimmy Page soloing away in my ears. I’m getting ready to make that final hill into the hood and see this guy across the intersection also waiting for the light. He caught my attention because he had the same sort of mustache that Billy Crudup had in Almost Famous. We pass each other, and I can sense that he’s sort of checking me out.

A minute later he comes running up behind me yelling, “Sir? Sir?” I remove my headphones and look at him with the best ‘if you have a real question fine, but if you’re gonna ask me something stupid I’m gonna be pissed’ look. I thought I recognized something about him, but I didn’t realize until later that it was that cold fire in his eyes that spoke of bad knowledge. The same empty passion lit in the dozens of street crazies I had spoken with in San Francisco.

He asks if I’m a doctor. I say no, wondering what about my Navy surplus coat and (I’m sure) surly demeanor made him think I was a doctor. He asks if I’m sure, and I tell him that I am pretty positive.

He then asks if I know anything about the Bible. Ah, here it comes, I think. I tell him ‘a little bit’, and wait semi-patiently for the moment to tell him I am a Hindu and walk away from him.

He starts talking about Luke coming from a land where people ate each other, and honestly I lost track of what he was saying because I was busy trying to think of where to punch this guy should he get itchy.

I think he could tell I wasn’t really digging his lecture, because he pushed through the rest of it like the ex-mental patient he probably was. But he then ended it with pantomiming taking a big hunk of leg or arm and chowing down. And in case I didn’t get it the first time, he did it again with those earnest, crazy eyes begging me over his clenched hands to understand what he was trying to get across.

All the Led Zeppelin III in the world wasn’t going to make me less paranoid the rest of the trip home.

Driving By Fate

My senior year in high school, I ditched a lot of school. When it all came down, after my English teacher (ironic, in a way) made the call that busted me, Mr. VanLeuvan, the Dean of Students, stated that I may have the record for number of days skipped.

While I enjoyed that little tidbit, the parents were less than thrilled.

Most of the days that I ditched I simply spent driving around Southern California; out by the beach, up to Hollywood, through the as of then undeveloped back canyons.

Damon - my compatriot, my comrade, my brother in arms - and I developed a little driving game called 'Fate Driving'. This came out of our inability to often think of something to do to entertain ourselves. I don't remember the exact rules, but depending on what the stoplight was doing when you reached it (color, green arrow showing, flashing, etc.); you made a left, a right or continued forward depending on the preset rules.

On ditching school one day, we went for a round of Fate Driving only to end up at the head offices for the school district. We realized that it might be a sign and headed back to school.

We also invented a game called "Hot Box the Bathroom with the Strobe Light in Full Effect"...

5 Degrees Of...

From cancer to where the Matrix sequels went wrong in 5 moves, are you ready?

So I saw this commercial for a Seattle area hospital that is specializing in brand new cancer research. And I got to thinking that nature throws out diseases as a way to keep our human population in check (as we don't seem responsible enough to do it ourselves), and the better we get at fighting these diseases, the more horrendous things start coming our way: flesh eating bacteria, zombie plagues... Just the science of organ transplant is pretty amazing when you think about it.

I met a guy who had a kidney transplant. It had been nearly a year to the day since the operation when I had met him. He had some mixed feelings about being alive, but having a part from someone inside him that had died a year ago. At least he said he had mixed feelings. He said that the discussion of cloning for the harvesting of organs was a big one in transplant circles, he said this in the middle of a discussion about that movie, The Island (which deals with this idea). I wanted to ask if most people in transplant circles were high.

I never saw The Island (well, I saw the pirate movie The Island back in the day - it was the first rated R movie that I ever saw. Thanks Drunk Uncle Paul), nor did I see Multiplicity with Michael Keaton, but I have seen Star Wars Episode II-Attack of the Clones. So I know a thing or two about cloning.

When I first heard of the "clone wars" back with that very first Star Wars movie when I was a kid, my mind spun trying to imagine what that must have been like. I imagined clones as the bad guys. I also imagined clones as these thin, pale-faced guys who all looked exactly like. For some reason I always saw them charging on our heroes by the thousands, over dusty and arid plains.

I think I was a little disappointed with the clone wars as they were finally realized in subsequent films because I liked what I had imagined better. This, for me, is much like the city of Zion in the Matrix sequels. Zion was the last stronghold of humans, a city buried far beneath the earth. When they mentioned it in the first Matrix, again my mind reeled in attempts to imagine this. There was no way that any footage they produced was going to match what was in the movie-goers minds...


Song Stuck In My Head Right Now: Where Is My Mind? by The Pixies

Snacktime!

It was snacktime! Snacktime everybody! I ran upstairs to the in-building restaurant/organic snack mart to get some chippies. I was excited, I was squirrel excited, I was squirrel all done up on squirrel meth excited. Why the hell was I so excited? Because it was snacktime people, pay attention!

I got me some cheddar beer Kettle chips. Now cheddar beer... I see that on a bottle and I'm staying the hell away from it, I see it as a soup and I may forego the French fries for a cup of it, I see it as a crispy potato chip and I'm ready to rip that bag open, rub those chips all over my naked flesh and then fuck the bag.

How were they? They were okay.

But, I saw this guy that looked exactly like Michael J. Pollard up there, exactly. Who the hell is Michael J. Pollard? He was in Bonnie & Clyde. He was in Scrooged. He has curly blond hair and sort of looks like a cherub, or the cartoon version of a man-boy brought to flesh and blood life. I don't know why I have a fixation with Michael J. Pollard, I assume it's because I have a fixation with the movie Scrooged.

I think that Michael's look-alike felt a little uncomfortable with me staring at him, my bag of cheddar beer chips shaking furiously in my hand.

Outside the store where I bought my snacks stood one of those Coinstar machines where you feed it in all your loose change and you get most of that money back in paper form. The side of the machine said, "Turning your change into cash!" I actually pulled to a stop and said aloud to whoever could hear, "correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't change already cash?"

Seriously, inconvenient cash, but cash nonetheless. Where's the machine that turns my change into anti-matter, or lava contained in Plexiglas, or blowjobs, or Michael J. Pollard?

By The Way,

I'm feeling remarkably fuckalicious today. I have no idea what the hell that means, but I'm running with it.

I have the sort of rapid heartbeat that comes with a crush, with realizing that love can in fact save you. I want to run all up down that undulating coast, doing summersaults every thirty feet or so. I want to laugh until the tears stream down my face.

I remember being a teenager and being radicalized by the rockabilly-cum-punk of The Cramps, being radicalized by the glam-cum-goth, that sheer distortion jacked, T. Rex hip-thrusting drenched in theatrical menace of Bauhaus. I remember being high at night; hiding from everyone and learning my own language, my own dance steps. I remember the thrill of hearing new music, of seeing low budget films where there was that delicious threat where anything at all could happen.

I remember a seething life in shadows.

I remember pulling off of Highway 32, somewhere between Hamilton City and Orland to look at a lone oak tree in a barren field, an impossibly red sun setting behind it. I remember remembering a conversation with Colin in the cab of his Datsun truck, where he threw out his theory of lone trees, that hot and dry afternoon wind blowing through the window and tossing his curly mop of hair all over the place.

I can't knock this smile off of my face - no matter how much anger seethes from those around me. I'm trying to hold onto it.


Song Stuck In My Head Right Now: Goin' Against Your Mind by Built to Spill. By the way, it's the best fucking thing ever!

Below the Surface

I once had this dream where I was at this deserted lake house. I walked down to the lake, thick and purple storm clouds hanging heavy overhead, and jumped in. As dreams don’t necessarily take a linear path, I don’t remember the actual swimming out, but I do remember realizing I was way out in the water.

I was swimming hard, an almost flailing crawl stroke, and when my hand came down to cut through the water it struck something. I stopped swimming, treading water and trying to look through the surface to see what I had hit. Floating about two feet below the surface was a corpse staring up at me with eyes like full moons.

There was a desperate feeling of panic and I began swinging around in the water when I realized that I was completely surrounded by underwater corpses at various depths and states of decay. Looking out over the surface, towards the horizon, I could see water logged hands reaching for anything, the curves of skulls partially hidden by soaking hair and water snakes.

I was freaking out, but saw a motor boat coming my way, loaded with smiling and laughing friends. I frantically waved at them, screaming for them to come pick me up, but they kept motoring on their way. There was a gleam of perverse delight in their eyes as they knowingly left me floating among hundreds of bodies.

This is a dream that disturbed me for many weeks. In fact, the core of it still manages to bother me a bit. I attributed it to my fear and fascination of things hidden below water; thoughts of whole towns flooded by reservoirs throughout California.

I told a friend about this dream and he mentioned that it probably deals with some issue I’m keeping hidden, and even my friends cannot help me deal with it.

Well, I’m ready to spill the secret: I really want to fuck a bear before I die.

Summer, '81

Do you remember that day when I showed up at your house with the 3/4 full bottle of root beer schnapps that I'd stolen from my parents? We attached those Salvation Army roller skates to our shoes and took off down to the drug store. You lifted an Archie comic, I stole a bottle of cold and flu pills...

We sat in that vacant lot behind the supermarket, all done up on bad booze and medicine, feeling that wiry grass beneath our hands and watching those long clouds go. You said my mom looked like Veronica in the comic book and I punched you square in the mouth.

We hitched a ride with that guy in the maroon El Camino down to the fishing village. On getting out of the car, you beat him senseless and I stole his wallet. With the money, we bought all of that cheese and cookie dough - I stole a roll of double-sided tape just for kicks. We went down to the boat rental shack and while I distracted the owner with my story of taking down and butchering an elk when I was 6 (leaving out the part that it was in the zoo), you got that aluminum fishing boat in the water and we took off.

Man, it felt like we were a mile out in that water. You ate so much cookie dough that you booted over the side like a geyser. I ate so much Velveeta I didn't shit right for a week and a half. Sometime around noon you busted out that flask of homemade hooch your dad used to distill before he went up to the penitentiary. Even though you were ten and a boy, I could have kissed you you magnificent bastard.

Gawd, those were good times. Sorry about setting you up for the fall on that whole grand theft auto/double murder thing, but I'm too soft for hard time.

My Two Dads?

I don't know why, but the TV show 'My Two Dads' floats around loosely in my conscience to wreak havoc every couple of years. I was never really a fan of the show, nor do I remember much about it. But still it's there, rearing its ugly sitcom head to grin its death grin from the blackest parts of my soul.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, 'My Two Dads' was a show which dealt with the trials and tribulations of a pre-teen girl being thrown into the whacky world of living with two adoptive fathers, only one of which is her biological parent. See, apparently her mother slept around a bit and when mom kicks the bucket, it gets disclosed that the girl's father not only doesn't know anything about his daughter, but it is one of two possible men. It is then deemed natural for these two cats, who don't really like each other, to live together (in a soundstage sized artist's loft) and raise this poor, grieving child.

That bitch was manipulating people from beyond the grave!

In a completely original move, the male characters (only one of which remember, is the biological father, but they don't know which one) are adversaries of sorts. One is a carefree artist, one is a tightass obsessed with finances. That is clever.

I shouldn't knock it too hard. According to comments I read while doing a little investigation, people who had a difficult adolescence, people who grew up in adoptive homes or with two homosexual fathers, were able to feel normal and accepted watching this show.

What? People looking to fucking sitcoms for lessons on living their lives? I've said it before and I'll say it again: I agree with David Bowie, I too am afraid of Americans.

One dad was played by Paul Reiser who went on to do Aliens and "Mad About You", and the other was played by none other than Greg "BJ and the Bear" Evigan.

Now that is a show that I can fucking get behind; "BJ and the Bear"! A guitar playing truck driver who cruises the country with his chimpanzee buddy Bear and gets under the skin of that testy Sheriff Lobo! Did you read what I just wrote?! For fuck's sake, where is the DVD boxset on this one?

Wednesday Hodge Podge

Apologies, I’ve been busy today – and still am. My thoughts are not coherent at the moment…

I have a hankering for pickled ginger – fistfuls of pickled ginger.

For the last week or so, I have had this constant desire to sparge my mash.

One day I hope to be fired from a job for shitting on somebody’s desk. Yeah it’s repulsive, yeah it’s nasty, but think of the legend I would be.

Question: If you were to fuck a food, what would it be?

Talk Talk had a song Talk Talk on the album Talk Talk.

Mix Chinese 5 spice powder, ground cumin, paprika, salt, pepper, cayenne pepper, cardamom, coriander, minced garlic and ginger and you’ve got yourself a hell of a spice rub.

Wouldn’t it be cool if a really bitter midget hosted Family Feud without any sense of that coked up, grandiose happiness that most game show hosts have. Plus the contestants would have to bend down to kiss him ala Richard Dawson.

Here’s a picture of a beef enchilada


The movie, The Cutting Edge? Awful… really… stay away. Directed by Starsky and/or Hutch.


Song Stuck In My Head Right Now: Goo Goo Muck by The Cramps

Santa Barbara

Because, whether I subscribe to it or not, our society has deep, twisted and gnarled Puritan roots that mean I have to pay for my sins (and the sooner the better), my day is extremely busy. I am apparently paying for the relaxation time this weekend.

I got to take a short little trip to Santa Barbara this weekend and got to see some great people that I don’t get to see too often anymore.

I have this weird relationship with Santa Barbara though. I went to school there for a whole of 6 months. This was at a particularly volatile time in my life and I was unhappy with UCSB and I was unhappy with Santa Barbara as a place. It wasn’t SB’s fault, it was me. I mean Santa Barbara is one of the most beautiful places in California, but something didn’t work for me.

Which is weird, because I was heavy into the soap opera Santa Barbara.

Was it because the people I was spending my time with there had already had their awkward and rambunctious first getting to know you days there years before me? Was it because that sort Spanish Romanticism that is seen in all of the architecture and in all of that Mediterranean flora had not been imprinted on me in my youth as an ideal? Was it because it seemed a little too much like the Southern California I had run away from to begin with?

Whatever it was, I was extremely unhappy and ran full bore and blind into the wilds of San Francisco. But now, seeing Santa Barbara again, sort of felt like running into a guy on the bus that you used to work with, but never really talked to. While I met and got to know people there that would be important to me to this day, I did not allow for Santa Barbara to get a hold on me in any way – there’s a strange sort of detached familiarity, but it simply does not feel like it was ever home.

And something about seeing the full moon last night, glowing off the Cascades and shining in reflection from above Puget Sound felt right. And something about returning to the cold winter from 70-80 degree weather felt right. And being shaken awake by Biff this morning to show me the fragile snow falling outside, felt right – that felt like home.

Happy V-Day everyone, I hope y’all get some tonight…

Mr. Orange

I'm gonna miss Saturday, so here's a late afternoon Friday post...

For some reason, I've become a guy who saves food on his cubicle shelf until it is way past the point of healthy. It started with an apple that I just never really got hungry for, so I kept it sitting there. Six weeks later, Pimpin' Joe asked if it was real. I told him it was, and that I should probably get rid of it. He convinced me to keep though, until it was a consistency that he could blow apart with his Nerf gun.

It finally got too wicked nasty to keep around.

I then held onto a bagel, but I don't remember why. It didn't mold, it just petrified, and as it got more of a stone-like texture, the slice in the middle opened up like a mouth. I then inserted a picture of a woman dressed like a belly dancer dangling out of the "mouth", complete with blood stains, so that it was now the killer, man-eating bagel.

Someone recently threw away the bagel, leaving the bloodied cut out of the belly dancer.

Now someone gave me an orange that they didn't want, and left it on my desk. I was going to ask how I became this guy, but I suppose I brought it on myself. Someone decided to draw a face on the orange, and it looks like this:

Say hello to Mr. Orange.

Some people say that Mr. Orange looks sad, or angry, or depressed. It reminds me of an experiment conducted by Eisenstein - the Russian father of montage editing. He took footage of an old man with a completely blank expression and edited it in with footage of a baby, or a bowl of soup among other things. People watching stated that when "responding" to the baby, the old man looked happy. The same exact footage next to the soup made the old man look hungry according to the audience.

Mr. Orange is a screen for others' feelings, Mr. Orange is a mad man and a wizard, Mr. Orange is a sign of the times.

Good Morning

This morning was one of my favorite kinds of mornings; cold and absolutely clear. It's mornings like this that make me resent having to get out of bed a little less. I remember a number of years ago in San Francisco, I was growing tired of my tiny apartment and my job and was generally feeling like SF was losing its charm for me, but that absolutely clear winter light just wrapped around everything in a way that made me fall in love with the city all over again.

And, to derail myself for a moment, I have this mild obsession with running into people here in Seattle that I went to grade school with. I keep looking into strangers faces and trying to find the child in there, searching for a glimmer of recognition in myself. I'm weaving these threads together, hang on...

While I was walking out of the front door this morning, the cold making me wince a little, my eyes widened again at the sight of the pale blue sky just tinged with yellow and pink. And Chris walked by. Well someone that I imagine Chris would look like in his thirties walked by. I turned my head west to follow him, to get a clear look, when I got a glimpse of Puget Sound.

Not only was the sound glassy and reflecting all that soft, early morning light, but the Olympic Mountains were clear and sharply defined, pink glowing off of all of that snow. It had felt like months since I had seen those mountains, and they were glorious.

And then, like the morning was saying, "man, I'm so proud of you for getting up early and walking around", I saw Mount Rainier, to the east, shining in low, red, morning radiance.

The ipod this morning had a hard on esoteric instrumentals, perfect for a long walk and just letting your mind go. Just a great, great morning.

Spring Succeeds

It was a strange coworker day yesterday. There was this thick, metallic sort of feel in the air, like if you tried connecting with anyone you were going to throw off sparks. And me, I think that I can help everyone, but this was dangerous weather...

There was a particularly nasty instance of someone in a bad mood, which is fine, we all get them, but when you purposefully attempt to pull your coworkers down into your quagmire, that's asinine and immature.

I want to start a production company called 'Asinine and Immature'.

Anyway, I was well on my way to a foul mood when I was leaving for my walk home, but I managed to catch that last magic bit of deep glowing blue setting sun sky as the downtown buildings were caught between shining from the outside and from within. The Wrens were playing in my ear, She Sends Kisses breaking my heart. You could feel the shift happening, you could sense that soul cracking, optimistic rush of spring coming.

It's still bitter cold, but for a moment anyway there's a break to the rain that seems to have driven everyone a little crazy this winter. And now there seems to be a tension riding the waves; people perhaps made nervous by the potential that lays ahead, that sky blown open feeling that spring can afford.

The late fall/winter has been a difficult one, as far performing goes, for me. There was a general sense of few parts out there, but also not getting the few auditions that I went out for made me want to curl up a little bit. I've had a couple of auditions in the last couple of weeks that have bolstered that wounded pride a little bit. The first one earned a callback, the second landed me a part.

I'm back on a stage y'all. Dig it.

Wednesday Morning Meltdown

As Lux Interior of The Cramps (covering a band called The Sonics (from Tacoma, WA of all places)) said: "Some folks like water, some folks like wine, but I like the taste of straight strychnine"

I'm not sure what that means except that today I feel like my head is a camera, and everywhere I go involves a big, Kubrik-ian wide-angled, tracking shot. I don't feel high necessarily, but if 40 year old fan boy came up on me with his creepy smile and whispered that he dosed my cup of Kenyan coffee with really low grade acid, I would believe him.

I feel like I keep slowly looking over my shoulder to see if people are watching, or trying to get my attention. I feel like talking to coworkers will lead to some sort of fracas. I feel like I should be injecting aloe vera gel intravenously. I feel like rubbing a fistful of risotto into the face of the sole "dude" in our row; I mean not very well made risotto, why waste a fistful of risotto. I feel like I should never again be allowed to use the word fracas.

While I was walking into the work kitchen to fill my coffee mug, I saw a young lady walking out with a Big Grab bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos. She was looking down at that bag like she'd won some sort of snack food prize. She looked at those Doritos like they were gold; shitty, trans-fatty gold. I nearly collapsed to my knees, weeping tears of joy at the sheer beauty what she saw there.

Dude, I am going to ride this crazy train to the end of the effing line!

Yet Another Reason, In A Long Line of Them, Not To Live In The Suburbs

I went to the Redhook Brewery with some coworkers this weekend to once again take their tour. Redhook is now in a town called Woodinville which is north-east of Seattle, about 30 miles away. It used to be in Ballard, here in Seattle, but they had to move when they got bigger.

I gotta tell you, this tour is great! It costs a dollar, you get information in varying degrees of usefulness, you get a souvenir glass, and you get a shitload of Redhook beer. For a dollar!

Okay, yeah, we'll take you there next time you're here. Sorry, thought you were into the Ballard locks. Jeez...

Anyway, I learned that at some point during the beer making process they do something called "sparging the mash". How fast did this become new terminology for masturbation? About as quickly as the tour guide got through the 'h' in mash. So, all done up on inexpensive beer and liberally using the words, 'sparge my mash', we convened on the good people of Woodinville down in the brewery's restaurant.

Now, I have behaved inappropriately in public domains before, I am sure I have embarrassed friends and compatriots with this sort of behavior, but I was ill prepared for the sort of vehemence displayed by these Eastside folk when they overheard sentiments like, "gayer than 8 guys blowing 9 guys" and "I need to go sparge my mash".

You would think that folks from a place called Woodinville would tolerate a dick joke or two.

Our table of 7 drunkards was getting looks from surrounding tables that seemed to say we had suggested having sex with each of their deceased grandparents. The table behind us threw faces and gasps as if we had actually dug up the corpses of their relatives and fucked them doggie style right there on the table in front of them.

And I gotta tell you, this night was like a 3 on a 10 point scale of inappropriateness. When the ladies began sticking cameras in their shirts to photograph their breasts, the family behind us had had enough. The parents got up from the table with audible huffs and looks on their faces as if they had just swallowed rancid dog semen. Scotty gave an apology which was received with a spewed out, "whatever floats your boat".

As it turns out, the thing that keeps my boat floating is making soulless suburbanites in loveless marriages feel violated. If they don't leave a microbrewery feeling as though their sense of decency and taste have been ass raped, then the Titanic goes down - so to speak.

However, their teenage daughter... Loved us! I have hopes that she'll break out of the Eastside, attend a liberal arts college and occasionally sleep with a woman.

Fortune Smiles

Gary Tremaine took the last swig of his Samporo, he fished up the last savory piece of General Tsu's Chicken with his chopsticks and sat back looking across the table at his date. She sat there with that daunting but beautiful smile that drove him crazy. He reached over and took one of the two fortune cookies which sat atop the check and cracked it open.

"Read it aloud," she said softly. "And add 'in bed' to the end of it."

Gary nearly shat out his spicy eggplant when he read the small strip of paper that he had pulled from within the fragments of cookie.

Marcy will try to kill you tonight

Gary swallowed some tea in an attempt to quell the coughing fit that he was having. Marcy looked at him questioningly from across the table.

"Are you okay?" She asked.

He nodded emphatically, trying to hide the look of panic on his face.

"So what does it say?" She asked with that smile.

"You will go on a happy journey," he said.

"In bed," she purred.

Gary was trying to play it cool. He reached into his wallet and placed money on the fortune cookie plate. While there, he grabbed the other cookie.

"You mind if I take this one? I don't really like mine?"

Marcy shook her head, still smiling. Gary cracked this thin cookie apart and extracted the fortune.

With a small machete

Gary's eyes got wide as he remembered the shopping trip to the lawn and garden section of the hardware store that they had taken just that afternoon. He could practically see that small, sharp blade that was only now leaning against the wall in his garage.

The waiter came to claim the bill, he threw out his hand in a spread fingered, Elvis-like flash of flair before turning on his heel and walking back towards the kitchen. Robert Johnson’s Drunken Hearted Man began to play from a sound system that Gary hadn’t noticed before. Marcy began to stand and Gary followed her lead. Trying not to let on that he suspected something, Gary smiled and grabbed her hand. Together, they walked out of the place, the red of the restaurant's neon sign catching in Marcy's hair. Gary watched that light dance and thought intently about the small incendiary device that he kept behind the toilet paper in his bathroom.

He'd get the jump on her yet...

Imagine

We had this big gully, this big ditch in our yard when I was growing up. It was called simply, The Drainage. I assume this was because it would be a reservoir for drainage if there was ever some sort of biblical flooding in our neighborhood. It was just a rock filled hole in the ground, roughly the size of a football field, with plants and weeds at one end that could grow to the size of a tall boy.

One of my favorite things in the world to do when I was a kid was to spend hours pacing around down in the drainage, lost in my head within some fantasy. I would literally spend hours down there just making wide circles.

One fantasy that I clearly remember was that a friend had a full sized Sarlacc pit from Return of the Jedi in his back yard:

The pit was filled with a trampoline and tons of pillows so that you could jump from a great height, straight in to the Sarlacc's gaping maw, and land safely. This, I thought, would be about the coolest fucking thing ever.

I would also quite often make up action or horror movies and would act out scenes from them. I don't really remember much of any of them. I remember one about the Devil moving through the forest behind a house, but only because I have the memory of seeing the woods behind our house grow suddenly dark as the sun set.

Many of these movies must have involved sword fighting of some sort, because as my brother has mentioned when he has mocked me for this activity, I would be down there swinging a stick around like I was having a battle of some sort.

And I have gotten a fair amount of mocking for spending huge amounts of time fantasizing about stupid stuff. I remember getting embarrassed as my brother sarcastically reinterpreted the movements he had spied me making; I remember wanting to get away when hearing my parents point out the amount of time I spent "walking around in circles down there".

I'm not sure if embarrassment of my imagination was thrust upon me, or it was something that I personally felt weird about. But I do find it interesting that even in the face of questions and derision, I still went down there and indulged this force that bubbled over.

Still to this day, I can catch myself talking to myself while I'm walking down the street, deep in thought. I still feel impelled to walk around in wide circles if there is something I'm trying to sort out in my mind. And yeah, people give me that wary look that tells tales of trying to decide if I'm raving lunatic or not, but shit man, I wouldn't be happy unless I was throwing people off balance.

Emotion Lotion

Much as Grace Jones is a slave to the rhythm

I am a slave to my emotions.

I've always been an emotional person. It's a drag when I'm irrationally angry about something and friends have to bare the brunt of that, but after a long road and some Meisner training, I am mostly cool with my emotions.

There are quite a few folks that are freaked out by other people’s emotions. My guess is that emotions don't necessarily play by societal rules and so there is this fear of being out of control. Or there is a fear of not having a pat response and answer when someone near suddenly lets their emotions flood through a crack in their default personality.

There is certainly also an embarrassment involved with letting emotions fly free (which, honestly, is just another extension of fear). My father, who is ironically just as emotional as me, was so uncomfortable with my being emotional that he would yell at me if he saw it happening. He taught me, much as Robert Smith of The Cure would re-teach me, that boys don't cry.

This unfortunately caused a lot of friction in my little head. I was emotional to begin with, I couldn't help my expressing of sadness or frustration or fear through tears, but now there was the stigma of being a girly boy on top of it to really fuck me up. And as I already had a girly boy reputation, man...

I remember specifically a day back in about fourth grade. I was convinced that this guy Steve was trying to steal away my best friend Chris from me. I was upset and I was scared and I was honestly feeling a little sorry for myself. I sat by myself under a tree and drew sharks in the dirt with a stick. Some friends came, they could tell something was going on, and asked me what was wrong (they were girls by the way. God, I love you ladies). As has always happened, as happens now, when I began to put into words what I was feeling, the emotions came flooding out. I could feel myself starting to cry and I put my head down and tried to control my voice to hide it. But those damn tears ruined my already shoddy ruse, spilling from my eyes and blurring the carefully drawn lines of a great white in the dirt. I remember feeling embarrassed, which is apparently not an emotion that others have a problem with you feeling.

It still occurs today, that little voice that sounds like my dad but now sounds more and more like myself, calling me a pansy at the first detection of tears. My first impulse is to hide them, but luckily most of the time now I can give out a royal, 'fuck that' and let it go.

In fact, I'll just tell you, when Napoleon and Deb high-five after their tetherball game, I get a little teary eyed.

Death Don't Have No Mercy

If I remember correctly, we were talking about the chances of getting the actual ashes of your recently departed loved one when they are cremated and it moved on from there.

I mentioned that there are definitely things that our culture is uncomfortable dealing with: death, emotions and imagination.

Death I get, I understand that. Death is this big, frightening, unknown and it sparks off of the selfish core that sits inside us all; that big and important you will one day be gone forever. And I'm certainly not knocking that selfish core, it's necessary to our survival. Ultimately though, I think we sort of collectively look at death as a society in the same way that I look at my student loan - I know that at some point I'm going to have to pay that fucker off, but I'm going to worry about it later.

In our culture, someone dies and within days the body is "processed" for it's send off, and the ugly truth of a body is hidden away forever, and all that fuss and muss about death is dealt with within a weeks time. There's always a tombstone or an urn full of ashes to give us that sense of permanence, and a place to get emotional later when it's less embarrassing and no one is looking.

There are some cultures that keep a corpse in the house for an extended period of time and allows for people to deal with their grief and sorrow. Not only is it uncomfortable for many of us to bare witness to other people's grief and sorrow, but the idea of being a corpse is almost somehow like a failure of some sort - like you lost the race.

Kids, we're all going to lose that race. And if you're like me, you logically know this, but denial has a strong grip. A huge part of me still believes that I will live forever. A huge part of me still believes that I'm 19 and will one day be a rock star...

I apologize if all this talk of death has brought your day down, but there is a shining spot in the darkness here guys. A British company called LifeGem can turn your ashes into a diamond.

It's another shot at immortality y'all! Hooray!


Song Stuck In My Head Right Now: Can’t Fight This Feeling by REO Speedwagon. Seriously, it’s killing me…