Ketchup

I do not like the condiment ketchup, we’re not friends. I’m also not fond of catsup. I know that this, along with my complete ambivalence towards football, makes me somehow un-American. It astounded my former roommate Raf to the point of him stating, “you’re the only white boy I know who doesn’t like ketchup.” I was astounded by his ability to lure fifteen-year-old girls into his skeezy clutches.

Anywho, some things that have happened since we last spoke:

America got all kinds of better (California somehow took a giant step backwards – I’m looking at you Orange County).

In trying to write lyrics to a song, I realized I was re-writing “From A Whisper To A Scream”.

I taught Kickers the joys of the Eskimo Kiss. Or is it Inuit kissing? Whatever, he digs rubbing noses.

I had an almost perfect Seattle moment when waiting for a bus in some unincorporated part of the city, in the rain, Modest Mouse came on the headphones.

I saw the latest Bond girl naked. Okay, that one’s a lie. It was Chuck Hunt I saw naked.

I went to see a show that had a couple former cast mates performing their brains out. The director asked if I would come do her next show, and I said sure. She then sheepishly asked if I would consider doing it in drag and I quickly realized she didn’t know me that well.

I had a quick flashback to my bachelor party where the stripper made me wear her dress – and no one was surprised.

I realized that despite my best efforts, I might be growing up. A possible and serious life change did not throw me for a loop. I took a deep breath and said, “Okay, we’ll make it happen.”

I let loose that deep breath in relief when that possible and serious life change turned out to be nothing.

I annoyed my friends showing them how friggin sexy my new iPhone is. Seriously, that thing’s gotta lightsaber.

Today Is A Good Day

Emotional, tongue tied, proud.

Motorized Instinct

When it comes to zombie movies, and man I love some zombie movies, you have to go with George A. Romero. The guy started it with his shot on the weekends in black and white Night of the Living Dead. It’s a simple story – the dead mysteriously begin to return to life to eat the flesh of the living. They cannot be killed unless the brain is destroyed.

The original is a great, tight little horror movie and all of the sequels have something to offer. They’re not progressing any story necessarily, just taking the viewer further along in the days of the zombie apocalypse. Dawn of the Dead takes off a couple of days, maybe weeks, after the initial night; humans are scattering to survive, fleeing cities for the country. Day of the Dead shows a world mostly overrun, hope for survival pinned on pockets of underground installations of stir crazy military and scientists hoping to train the zombies. Land of the Dead extracts it even further; the world has lost hope of this ending, humans are exiled to scattered, fortified cities and special units sent out to small towns to gather supplies. But the zombies are starting to learn and don’t like being used as target practice. Diary of the Dead takes us back to the first days with a first person camera approach.

For my money, you cannot beat Dawn of the Dead; funny, scary, tense and gory as all get out. Four survivors flee the city and accidentally end up taking root in a shopping mall. As with all of his Dead movies, Romero makes a point about the times they were shot in. Here it’s not as heavy handed as in some of the others because it doesn’t need to be. Shots of zombies strolling a mall, aside from the rotting flesh, don’t look much different from any other day in any other mall.

But more than that, and the point that most everyone seems to miss when watching Romero’s zombie epics, is the idea that we as humans will rebuild in our own image when things get hairy, but refuse to learn from the past. Invariably in his films, we as people build the same society only to fuck it up for ourselves do to greed, jealousy, ignorance…

Why Dawn though? It moves at a good frenetic pace, like a horror comic brought to life, and there’s this lack of gloss to it that makes you feel like anything can happen. Plus these guys hole up in a mall, it’s like an adolescent fantasy mixed in a missive from the end of times. Oh, and the soundtrack kicks fucking ass; great, liberal use of mall music to underscore the action.

While I did enjoy the remake on some levels, it just doesn’t compare. Why? There was no need to remake it, for one. As it was a studio release it had that safe, well produced shine to it. The original unrated Dawn of the Dead got away with horrifying zombie carnage as it didn’t have to worry about a studio or the sensors. Plus the remake had running zombies. Cool for a bit, but there is something absolutely overwhelmingly dreadful in the fact that these shambling, slow moving messes are inevitably going to get you – and eat you.

A mini, gory epic – with zombies. Eight kinds of awesome.

Rocktober Song of the Day: “Tundra/Desert” by Modest Mouse.

Camp Blood

The good news of the situation is that my stomach probably can still hold up to a couple slices of pizza and some whisky; I feared that my age was catching up and this cannot happen. The bad news is that stomach flu was the culprit.

On the mend, but now behind by a couple of days. What I wanted to do this week, in celebration of the nearing of Halloween, was go over a handful of my favorite horror movies.

Caveat 1: My favorites lists tend to switch up on an almost daily basis.

Caveat 2: I’m cheating from the get go as I’m starting out with Friday the 13th, parts 1-4.

Wait! How can you pick 1-4 of a cheesy ass slasher series? Well, because it’s my game. Friday the 13th was nothing more than a way for some guys to make a quick buck; get some young actors in the woods, a small arsenal of sharp garden tools, some latex and fake blood and this sucker writes itself. The rundown (and okay spoiler alert):

Part 1 starts out with the mother of a deformed and drowned young Jason Voorhees taking her revenge on camp counselors at a reopening Camp Crystal lake. Virginal survivor hacks off her head with a machete. Part 2 finds us 5 years later where traumatized survivor is taken out by a mystery man who turns out to be none other than the not dead Jason Voorhees. He makes his way back to Crystal Lake and through a handful of counselors in training. Part 3 (in super 3-D on it’s original release) finds Jason going on strong the following day. He’s no longer necessarily seeking revenge, just inventive ways to slaughter teens who drink, smoke pot and screw. Some nice 3D effects include obligatory bodies thrown through windows and an eyeball being popped out. This also marks where Jason gets his hockey mask to cover his deformed face. Part 4 (named The Final Chapter) again picks up the following day and again shows our man hacking his way through horny teens and a not so great Jason hunter until he is confused by a young make up wiz and whacked on with a machete a number of times. Part 4 is a well directed little number with some impressive effects – one of those effects being Crispin Glover.

No, they’re not great, but I still can feel the unease I had when I thought of these movies as a child. They’re a morality tale people will say – bad people, people who do drugs and have sex get killed. That’s crap. They’re fairy tales and they speak to something primal within us. There’s a monster in the dark woods that we have to face to get out and see another day; an unstoppable monster that will hunt you down and eradicate all kinds of bad 80’s fashion. And much like the old fairy tales, these movies are grisly. They pushed the boundaries of makeup effects and sensor boards. They were a strange roller coaster, a dare to get scared and see if you could watch someone get an axe to the head and not peek through your fingers. Plus you got to see some tame sex scenes, again primal…

After Part 4, things got weird and silly and got away from that basic and effective monster in the woods story. But the first four, bad or good, still hold a place in my young heart as Halloween favorites.


Oh yeah, Rocktober Song of the Day: "Web in Front" by Archers of Loaf.

Get (Off) On The Bus

This has been a plain crappy Rocktober. Seriously Billy, what the hell? Let’s play a tiny bit of catch up.

Rocktober Song of the Day: “Third Uncle” by Brian Eno.

It’s been some rough times kids, he said with a solemn look to his eyes, a sly smile to offset it a little. But I’m tired of friggin’ talking about it. I seem to be better in my head, and I’m hoping that throwing those words out don’t come back to slap me on the ass.

Rocktober Song of the Day: “Strange” by Wire

Yesterday, I rode the bus into work, through the cold, through the dark, and not soaking in that rolling feeling in my stomach of desperation and hated anger. I was listening to some Virgil Shaw – so very nice. It wasn’t up terribly loud so I could hear the bus driver calling the stops. These calls usually begin with the amplified sound of the driver pulling over the flexi arm of the microphone, sounding like a metal Satan unfurling his metal penis. And yeah, after that you expect a bus stop called with some gusto: “California and Faunt – la – fuckin’ – roy bitches!” But the driver yesterday morning whispered out the stops.

Rocktober Song of the Day: “Serpentine Pad” by Pavement

I thought this was funny at first. Maybe the bus driver was just putting a little style into her routine. Then as it continued to happen I began to think that maybe she was coming on to us, as if the subtext to a hushed “28th and Thistle” was “hey babies, who wants a good time?” I continued to think this was funny. I mean in my mind, she wanted all of us, possibly particularly the girl who wears short skirts even when it’s October cold out. Seriously, she was gonna pull that rig over for some serious good times, I could hear it in the excited sigh that was “16th and Roxbury”. For some reason, this whispering was really catching me as funny. Not so much when I think back on it and realize the rational was probably laryngitis and that she was in pain.

Who am I kidding, still funny.

Rocktober Song of the Day: “Hang Me Out To Dry” by Cold War Kids

Southern Washington, Sunday Afternoon

Driving back from Portland, windshield wipers deliberately set a bit slow. It was the big drops falling, the ones that are so swollen that they seem to have somehow shifted past being mere rain. I watched them hit the window. I watched the seventy mile an hour air brush them out along the glass and reflect the surrounding gray and green in a still life impression for a short, short moment. Wipers come in, do their gig.

It made me think of stolen moments in Northern California. Not really thinking of moments, it gave me the calm feeling of those moments, an all too brief moment of comfort. I tried to fit that feeling with actual memories the mind had stored; a wet walk up a windy and beautifully lonely road, roasting a chicken while the world outside was equally freezing and wet, the sound of a river full of itself.

None of them fit the feeling quite right, threatened to sully it, so I quit trying to make it work. I tried to just feel that comfort for a bit, watched the rain do its thing.

I wanted to sleep for a long time.


Rocktober Song of the Day: "I Turn My Camera On" by Spoon. Seriously, deny the sexiness. I dare you.

Gang Bands

I was running full long into a day that was not starting well. John on KEXP played “Where Is My Mind?” by Pixies, and I thought, “well all right.” He then did “Pictures of Matchstick Men” by Camper Van Beethoven. Not my top choice for a Camper Van Beethoven song, but I’ll take it.

This for some reason got me thinking about that radio show Loveline. Now back in the day, Loveline was a local show in LA on KROQ, it was not syndicated. In fact, for those of you out there who are fans of Heathers, the show that Veronica and green Heather rush to the room to listen to while yellow Heather talks of suicide is based on the old Loveline. The DJ in the movie is in fact the Poorman, who used to host Loveline.

And all of that for this…

One such back in the day show talked about gangs. As much as the news would have us believe differently, us kids in south Orange County didn’t have much to fear in the way of gangs, so this seemed an odd choice. But some guy calls up to defend the idea of gangs, that he was in a gang and they weren’t thugs and didn’t go out to hurt people; his gang was a group of guys who supported each other in their musical endeavors.

This, by the way, is not a gang. This is called a band.

But, in honor of this, the first day of Rocktober, I say unto thee that I want to start a band and act like it’s a gang.

We’ll have initiation rites where we pummel a new member with a C and E combo two chord jam. We’ll get into tussles with other bands where we spank each other with cables, twiddle the knobs on some other guy’s effects peddle and effectively whacking out the tone on the distortion they’d spent so much time crafting just right. Other bands would write songs about our lifestyle.

And then those bands would eventually get arrested for possession; of song books probably, or at least tablature sheets. We would eventually do public service tours, talk to youngsters about how they don’t want to join bands, live clean, praise Jebus.

It tastes like glory good people, and glory tastes like banana popsicles.


Rocktober Song of the Day: “Debaser” by Pixies.

These Dreams

I’m totally bogged down with work stuff that I have to do, but I’m taking a few minutes for me, right now.

Dig it.

I had this dream the other night, where I kept finding all of these extra rooms in the house I was living in. I found a door inside the washing machine, and when I went through it there was this huge room. The door off that room led to this short hallway where there was another door to this huge room.

I remember thinking in my dream, “man, I can put so much stuff in here.”

It was as if the former owner of the place had completely forgotten that these rooms were there – and no wonder, being you had go through the washing machine. There was a chest of drawers and a television; the random detritus of a quick move out where what’s not necessary gets left behind.

This dream left me feeling hopeful, I can’t say why. I also had the feeling that if I were to do some investigating into the meaning it might break that fragile little feeling of hope.

So you think that I would have known better than to go to work trying to hold onto that.

Yeah, blah blah work, blah blah you hate your job, blah blah some nimrod in another department did something incredibly stupid that will unfortunately effect you and your team badly, blah blah someone in charge, instead of going about fixing things rationally, is taxing you with fixing this problem in the most inefficient way possible as if you were the guy with the shovel made just to use when someone else poops. Blah blah…

So… I’m up and getting ready to head in at round abouts 5:30 this morning, already feeling the seething come in. It had rained last night, but was clear and cold. There was this sliver, this shaving of ice, this baby’s fingernail of moon hanging over a big, dark pine tree. It threw off enough light to just touch the clouds and excite ‘em a little bit. And a few bright stars, the light blending in with the cold air... It was shockingly beautiful. I could feel everyone asleep around me, and I began to wonder if wasn’t still sleeping as well, feeling the cold because I’d managed to kick off the blankets again.

Now, I don’t like to spend a lot of time up before the sun (and with the coming winter I don’t have a lot of choice), but if they could all feel like that, it wouldn’t be half bad. I put the seething away for a bit, tried to remember that early morning scene, and those extra rooms.


Zeptember Song of the Day: “Baby Come On Home”.

The Curse Of Lono

I was standing in the backyard, waiting impatiently for that moon, way too large and bright for its own good, to rise up over the trees. I could make it out between the branches, I could make it dance when I swayed myself, but the damn thing just wouldn’t get any higher. But oh, that PBR tasted good.

I got to thinking about the last time that I had a backyard. It was back in the early nineties, when grunge was ripping through the world, and I was slowly realizing that Santa Barbara was not the place I needed to be at that particular time.

The backyard wasn’t ours necessarily, and it was long drop from the back porch. The downstairs neighbor claimed that part of the yard, we got the scrabble of dirt and the occasional pop up of wildflowers that came from a drunken toss of seeds one fine afternoon.

There was the three of us in the house, and Raf. Raf was an older, womanizing, Social Security cheat that didn’t partake in the inebriating excess that we did. The three of us were trying to figure out what it was we were. Part of me loves that devil-may-care, try anything attitude – part of me desperately needed to travel the road to get where I am – but mostly I feel like we were trying too hard.

I was spending a lot of time drunk and writing truly stream of consciousness pages when I could. What little money I could scrounge went towards whiskey. I once, at the daring of one of the others in a moment of figuring out if I was a shoplifter, stole a bottle of Jack Daniels from the liquor store.

One thing that Corado and I decided to try being was dog owners. We went into this with the same amount of preparation that went into most everything else we did at the time; none. “We should get a dog,” one of us said stonily. “We totally should,” the other answered. And off we went to the pound.

We got ourselves a black lab/pit bull mix and we named him Lono after the Hunter S. Thompson book The Curse of Lono. We were all Thompson fans as he made being an inebriated smart ass seem like a logical career move.

Lono ate my hat. Lono spent about ninety-five percent of the evening hours barking his face off. When I took him on a walk one afternoon after class, he went apeshit and tried to attack a Hispanic gardener up the street, the dog literally dragged me across the asphalt while the man ran for his life. Lono welcomed one of Raf’s aggressively under aged girlfriends with wagging tail and doggy smile, only to corner her in the doorway with bared teeth and the sort of emanating growl that spoke of tearing out a throat when she attempted to leave.

I guess it would have been a good idea to pay attention to the Humane Society’s warning that Lono had attempted to maul a kid when he was the dog formerly known as Lightning, but we figured hey, we don’t have any kids. We didn’t take into account Raf’s proclivities.

We also didn’t take into account that we were irresponsible, drug addled, wannabes who had no business owning a dog.


Zeptember Song of the Day: “Heartbreaker” followed by “Living Loving Maid (She’s Just A Woman)”. I hate to seem them split up, it hurts a bit.

Dot Dot Dot

This poor blog, it’s like I’m in a depression and this blog is my general hygiene and appearance – ignored.

Truth be told, I am fighting a depression, but this has nothing to do with why I can’t get it together to post something, it’s the job.

Again with the job, I’m tired of talking and writing and bitching and moaning about this job.

The funny thing about this depression, is that I seem to be getting better at handling them. Instead of months of closing myself off in a room with cigarettes and Cure albums, I go through a few hours, half a day, of absolute despair and then clue in that I got some pretty good shit goin’ on. Positive movement, right?

You’d think so, but each time I’m able to crawl out of my boiling pot of self pity, I think it’s over, that I’ve concurred this demon depression. Then the next day I’m cock smacked in the face by it all over again

It feels like falling down a hill, limping back up said hill, just to have some hairy stranger pee in my mouth.

It’s not really like that at all. But then I start to think that I only see the negative of this situation because I’m fighting a depression, and then I get dizzy with the vortex my head begets.

And then I think I might need a haircut. But then I think I sort of like where my hair is now.

Then I think about those fish deep in the ocean, with the glowing dangly things that come off their heads and lure unsuspecting fish to their mealtime deaths.

Then I think about getting all done up on Ouzo, laying out in a field somewhere and laughing.

Then I think about the fact that with fewer postings here, I hesitate in typing out something just off the cuff and bizarre.

Then I think about how we should all be in Greece right now.

Then I think about how it’s Zeptember, and the Zeptember song of the day is “The Rain Song”.

Song

There’s a little ritual that I’ve been indulging in for quite awhile now that is pretty much my favorite part of the day - Oxycodone.

I kid of course. Seriously, I’m kidding.

No, it’s putting Kickers down for sleep every night. I’m sure this sounds dumb, and I’m way “kidding out”, so I apologize ahead of time.

The night will lead to dinner, and depending on the sauce quotient of said dinner, it may lead to a bath as well. There’s a diaper changing where we practice the alphabet or counting (it keeps him from getting upset with me for being all up in his junk), there’s the dressing in PJ’s which eventually itself leads a tickle fest of grand proportions. Afterwards, there’s usually some reading.

All of that’s fine and well, it’s the next step that’s the one. And understand, like most kids, this one is not one for just giving up the ghost and charging into sleep, he likes to fight, fight against the dying of the light. There have been some epic screaming fits, particularly when we rudely took the bottle away.

Like father, like son.

But the routine… We get the blanket, he wraps his little arm around my neck, sort of cocks his head on my shoulder, and man, if I have any say in it, that’s a feeling I want to take with me when I go. Then I start to sing.

I don’t know why, but “Ship of Fools” by the Grateful Dead has become the lullaby of choice. He doesn’t shout out requests, I don’t do encores. When I’m done, I tilt him down to get him into the crib and he’s usually either blinking long and slow as if the Baby Oxycodone has kicked in, or he’s smiling. I ask for a kiss, and get it. Then I say my goodnights and walk out to never a fuss since the singing started.

It’s nice that at least once a day I can do something that actually means something.

Rain

I can’t say that it’s longing for fall, being we haven’t had much of a summer, but we got a metric shit ton of rain in the last couple of days and I was digging it.

On Sunday, the day started out with some promise; mostly blue sky, a fine and fresh smell on the cool breeze. I opened the kitchen window to get some air in the place and was reminded of green things and sunshine, a subtle and slow vitality. Then at some point I heard the raindrops hitting the corrugated fiberglass of the carport.

I was reminded of other times and other memories that weren’t mine, but felt close enough to have been passed down through the blood. There was nothing concrete, nothing visual, just a feeling of calm of having literal shelter from a literal storm.

Kickers went down for a nap and I stood at the window watching all of that muted gray shining through running water. I thought that sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a book sounded like the best damn idea I’d had in a week. A damn fine idea it was, and the pot of red beans on the stove seemed like the perfect set piece.

A little later I was running errands, driving through washed out streets downtown, the wet and deserted, industrial and absolutely shining atmosphere kindly grabbed hands with the Tom Waits on the stereo with a smile and dragged it along for a great ride.

And yesterday there was more rain, heavy rain. There were lightening bolts that while attention getting, seemed almost ashamed to be here and so out of place.

The thing is, I don’t mind it, all this noise of a storm, all the compressed gloom of the clouds waiting to let loose their load, I'm kinda digging it. I know that summer’s leaving quick, that we’re probably in for a dark and wet and cold winter, but somehow my mind, my soul needed this.

I needed something to make me stop and stare the world for a minute, enjoy the quiet music already playing.

Home

Sitting in a sideways seat on the old 22, coming home, I’m struck suddenly by a combination of things.

First, there’s Tom Waits’ “Come On Up To The House” in my ears. It’s a song that’s held a special place from the first time I heard it, a song that really foots the bill at the moment, a song that reminds me that even when it’s rough out there, there’s always a place of solace.

“When the only thing that you can see is all that you lack, you gotta come on up to the house.”

So I got that going on, caught somewhere between a goofy smile and tears. And honestly, that’s one of my favorite places to get caught; way better than between the moon and New York City. I’m noticing the mists and low gray clouds that have come to town in a coach of unseasonable storm patterns. I’m watching all that West Seattle green fold itself inside the gray and can’t help but think that they were meant to be together the way it works so well. They’re like lovers. No, there’s something volatile and fragile about that. They’re like old fiends who have more than once gotten drunkenly naked together – unashamed and still digging each other’s company.

Then the bus passes right by this little house. Nothing fancy, probably four rooms up in there. The front door is open and there’s a boy of about 5 standing in the doorway. He’s looking out at the yard, I’m assuming at the rain gathering in the yard. The look on his face as I quickly passed him by caught for a long second. And I’m totally reading into it, but there wasn’t this look of annoyance at not being able to play in the yard, no sadness, just this serene look of being caught in a moment unguarded.

I caught him, though he’ll never know it. And I held onto those things the rest of the ride, through the walk in the strengthening rain, myself caught once again somewhere between a goofy smile and tears.

Grain Of Salt

The memories of my high school years get fuzzy as time continues to grow between then and now, as more drinks are consumed in that growing time, so I cannot remember if it was an ad hoc substitute Chemistry teacher, or Mr. Dempsey, the intrepid Physics teacher who barely let me skate by to graduate, who performed this experiment in class. The idea is that you have this salt water solution that is as packed with salt as it’s going to get and still be liquid. One more piece of salt will literally force all of the solid salt out of the liquid, it will change the physical composition. It’s a nifty parlor trick, it’s the idea of critical mass.

It’s also a great analogy for my work situation.

I can no longer keep up with the demand. I can rarely step away to go to the bathroom without trying make said trip more efficient by also printing up a document, possibly make a copy on the way to the john.

Here’s a funny thing, and when I say funny I actually mean bitterly sad; I’m a completely disposable and interchangeable middle management drone. As such, I’m subject to the whimsy of others. Let’s say that there’s a person I have to answer to that obsesses over details that should be invisible to someone at that height; oh, and is a friggin nutball made up of the worst kind of nuts – Brazil nuts, peanuts that are eight weeks old and found beneath a barstool, the elusive loco brain nut.

Here is a person who has a severe case of crazy eye, a person who I had to talk to when I went to work with a 104 fever and was pretty damn sure I was tripping balls because of the things they were saying, a person who will use this psychotic baby talk voice in business meetings, a person who says “right?” in a sentence roughly 27 times.

After said crazy face pointed out to me that they realized how busy I was at the moment, and even more so now that they were throwing a bunch more crap at me, decided to have me investigate a customer case that had gotten up to them.

Let’s say that I worked for a cookie company, and within the stores of this cookie company, along with cookies, the company also sold brightly colored sugar water. Let’s say a customer writes to this cookie company to let them know that when they went down to the ol’ cookie store, the store was out of their favorite colored sugar water. And this is not the first time this has happened, oh my no.

Now let’s extrapolate this a bit. Let’s say that’s one customer contact out of roughly 3000 that this cookie company gets daily – all contacts more or less playing on that same theme to varying degrees of “poor me”. Now, let’s say that after a couple of weeks this customer realizes that their colored sugar water (let’s say aqua blue, spicy cucumber flavor) is still out when they go to the cookie store. Being a the tricky bastard they are, the customer uses a friend to get a name higher up the food chain to contact. This customer bounces around the executive emails for a couple of weeks, like a .22 slug ricocheting off the inside of a skull and tearing apart the bubble gum upper management brain. Until Captain Baby Babble taps me to answer to why this customer wasn’t escalated correctly.

I feel that I shouldn’t have to explain that in the grand scheme things, there’s no reason that they should even be paying attention to something like this. I feel that I shouldn’t have to explain that sending a report to the store so they can adjust their ordering is the correct way to handle this pig fucker and not to send him on up to an executive (who should have way more important things to do) just because the customer has learned to whine more efficiently. I feel like I shouldn’t have to explain the reason why there’s a floor of disposable and interchangeable folks like me.

This person is Legion, and my job has become like a Captain Beefheart album; disturbing, surreal and in so many ways very wrong. It’s a little thing in the scheme of things, it’s my missing colored sugar water, but it’s enough to realize that a huge majority of my life’s energy is spent on it.

If this isn’t rock bottom, it’s a comin’ soon.

Today Is The Day Of The Day

Because I’m in need of a celebration, and because I did a bunch today but accomplished nothing – I dedicate this post to a variety of “things of the day”.

Song of the Day: “As Sure As The Sun” by The Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.

Ice Cream Flavor of the Day: Memphis King – Banana with peanut butter and chocolate covered bacon. This was actually the flavor of the day yesterday from my neighborhood ice cream vendor Full Tilt, but was good enough to slosh over into today. Thanks for coming along Mandy.

Everyday Word That Seems Like It Should Be A Dirty One of the Day: Proclivity.

Product That Should Be Ashamed To Be Around (Especially Because of the Commercial) of the Day: Pizza Hut Chocolate Dunkers with Chocolate Dunking Sauce - Some new desert that Pizza Hut is offering that involves a chocolate dipping sauce. The commercial features a delivery girl putting on a fake French accent to trick all these dumb white folks into thinking this Pizza Hut travesty is a French bakery travesty. Word to the wise: The French would never name something a "dunker". Fool me once...

Word To The Wise of the Day: If someone who is 8 kinds of high says to you, "seriously man, really think about Sesame Street for a minute" walk the fuck away without looking back.

Someone With A Case of the S'pose To's of the Day: Mark Spitz, former mustachioed Olympic swimmer, sounds like a friggin' child while talking about not being invited to the Olympics in these (admittedly out of context) quotes:

• "They voted me one of the top five Olympians in all time. Some of them are dead. But they invited the other ones to go to the Olympics, but not me. Yes, I am a bit upset about it." 
  
• "I won seven events. If they had the 50m freestyle back then, which they do now, I probably would have won that too"
  
• Speaking of visiting the Olympics in Athens – "They did not once put my face on television”
  
• Speaking of Michael Phelps – "He's almost identical to me. He's a world-record holder in all these events, so he is dominating the events just like I did. He reminds me of myself."
  

What a douche.

Douchebag Who Could Still Kick My Ass of the Day: Mark Spitz.

Weekend Celebrity Death That Seems Like A Real Drag of the Day: While Isaac Hayes is a bummer, I’m goin’ Bernie Mac. The man seemed like a funny guy and pneumonia is no way to go.

The Voids Of Summer

Today I felt another piece of my soul slide away for some chump change due to me on Friday. Whining about a job is a pretty ugly form of self-pity, duly noted. There are worse jobs out there to be sure, I’ve had some of them.

There’s just this cyclical destruction of the inner wall that I’m able to put up, that psychic masonry that doesn’t let me forget how this job is slowly making me into something I hate, but at least lets me ignore it for awhile. The wall cracked a bit today.

I didn’t flood out in a wash of anger as is typical, there was just this quiet and sad moment that I realized that our breaths are numbered, and I’m spending a good chunk of mine fighting pathetic battles against enemies that could care less in a war that means nothing.

So yeah, there’s a bit of an existential funk brewing; no sexy bass line, but I can hear some vibraphones trying to get through back there somewhere…

And this is precisely the mood one should be in to hear the two bits of news I did when I got home, both revolving around the baseball stadium downtown.

First, the city is planning on spending something like 5 mil to build an over-street walkway over the train tracks that run near the stadium, this will take the place of the typical sidewalk with traffic lights and those easily ignored crossing arms with flashing red lights and bells that you can hear two towns away. And I definitely see the need, as a handful of people – strike that – a handful of drunk dumbasses, have tried to beat the train getting back to their cars after a game. I gotta say, point blank and without clever, if you’re dumb enough to try to run across the tracks as the above mentioned arms of obvious are warning you not to, than you deserve to be someone’s sick fuck fodder on youtube.

Moving on….

There will now also be a “no peanut” zone at this stadium so people with peanut allergies can go catch a game. This will surely increase those flagging ticket sales. I know there are folks out there with life threatening allergies, and a drag that is, but having dealt with a number of allergy claims at the above mentioned job, and after listening to a middle aged woman the other night go on and on to a number of wait staff about how she was allergic to coconut which was apparently in the Pan Asian soup that she ordered (go figure), I feel like about 85% of people with food allergies just talk about them so that they can, in some sick way, show how “special” they are. It’s like vegetarians who can’t wait to tell you all about how they’re vegetarians. Shut up and eat already. I might need a special zone at work as I think I’m deathly allergic to my job.

Isn’t this where we came in?

One Flu Over The Low Budget Sci-Fi Movie

I want you to think of a man sized sandwich.

Did you go Manwich? Did you go sloppy joe in a can - an idea that seems more dangerous than a methed out whore with a gun – a gun with a real loose trigger? I’m thinking 6 foot turkey and swiss on whole wheat, with arms and legs, but that’s me.

Moving on, seriously…

Since last I wrote, a flu invaded the house and ripped through it like the above mentioned tweaker looking for hidden cash. Riley fell victim, and while I was busy feeling sorry for him and freaking out about a crazy high fever (enough so that I had a shrieking, sick baby in a cold bath trying to break this fever) that it didn’t dawn on me that I would probably be fighting this off as well.

Two numbered points of interest about bodily functions that you might want to skip over (which is why I’m numbering them – for your convenience) if you’re easily bothered by that sort of thing, or eating over your computer.

1) Diarrhea is not fun - period. Add to that the idea of changing diapers full of it. No, yeah, I totally almost threw up too. Which brings me to number

2) Watching a baby throw up for real for the first time is both horrifying and humorous – much like the idea of Paris Hilton (i.e. methed out whore from above). While there is this unbelievable amount of juice and water plummeting from the baby’s mouth, there’s also this wide-eyed look of, “what the fuck is happening right now” that almost made it worth mopping up the living room floor.

Anywho, things are back to relative normalness. I remember thinking as I was coming down off my fever high, that I’m glad that flu hit when it did and not when I had the audition set up.

Yeah, that would have been a drag.

Some people overcome great hardships to attempt to do things they love, I overcome ridiculously mundane ones that pile up and become more annoyances than the sort of things people make movies about.

Here are some things that were trying to stop me from getting to Capital Hill for a film audition: I couldn’t find my shoes, I couldn’t find the resume I printed out, when I found said resume and tried to staple it to my headshot I realized the stapler was out of staples, couldn’t find staples, got on the freeway to find it was completely backed for no good reason, the Capital Hill Block Party attempted to thwart my secret squirrel back way in…

I persevered, I made it through the wilderness, somehow I made it through. I did not however get the part. And aside from the massive layoffs at work, that pretty much catches you up.

Who needs a drink?

Wild Ride

Again, am I creating my own reality?

I walked to the bus stop this morning only to find that the empty field that sits serenely behind a chain link fence that the 22 line drives along, a field that is typically shrouded in early morning mists and visited a inquiring crow or two, is now filled with carnival rides. I saw The Octopus, The Scrambler, The Tilt-A-Whirl… The oft locked away emotional memories of childhood ran rampant for half a second. And then the logistics of getting down to this carnival fair shenanigan with a child at home not yet old enough to suffer possible soft tissue damage at the hands of traveling machines set in.

And that’s about as exciting as that story gets. There’s also the story of my panic when I discovered Kickers had a high fever last night and I was stuck at home with no phone, car, or sense at where the Baby Tylenol might be hiding. It ends fine, with a cold bath that was very much unwanted, the triumphant discovery of the Baby Tylenol hiding place, and the breaking of a fever. Honestly though, I can’t imagine the details being all that interesting to many outside of the house. Consider yourself spared for once.

What else do I got? I got Dick.

Speaking of feverish and wild rides, it appears Andy Dick was busted for being inebriated and mauling a minor. There are times when I think that Andy Dick is playing the role of Andy Dick. Sometimes I think he’s unaware of any social boundaries of good taste – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing unless you’re the minor being mauled. Now I don’t know Andy Dick, and I’m not sure that I want to necessarily, but that being said – I’m voting for bat shit crazy.

I was reminded of a fine time in the past with Mercedes and Buddy in New Orleans. There was drunkenness to be sure, but also a couple minutes of viewing the “Tom Green Show”. On this episode, Tom Green began impersonating Andy Dick and Andy Dick began impersonating Tom Green. All this involved was the two of them walking into unsuspecting offices, crawling all over desks and file cabinets, and saying in loud, nasally voices, “I’m Andy Dick, I’m Andy Dick” (or “I’m Tom Green” if it was Andy Dick) over and over again.

I laughed and laughed... I can’t remember if that was the same trip as the shoelace story; never mind, really boring and uneccesary.

Anyway, here the mighty have fallen (again):

Don’t look too hard, this picture is trying to steal your soul.

You Wanna Go For A Ride

The computer died this weekend and with it went my sense of place within the world. That’s not at all true, it actually took away any sort of guilt I had at the lack of attention I have paid to the blog, or emailing friends. I was absolved, Macbook died for my sins.

My brother-in-law, sister-in-law and their two young daughters were staying with us this weekend. It was great to see Rog and Reena again (it had literally been years) and to finally meet my beautiful nieces and watch my son manhandle said nieces. There was a lot of talk about Southern California life over beers and bourbon and a chilled bottle of limoncello. And while none of this talk revolved around amusement parks, that is what had come out after I let thoughts and conversations steep in a steaming cup of sleep deprivation sweaty summer evenings.

So that’s what you get…

Also, side note, side bar, hush hush side to side… I am remembering at this very moment an idea for a short novel about an amusement park. I should really get on that. Moving on…

Knott’s Berry Farm filled my mind this morning. Knott’s Berry Farm is an Orange County institution. Knott’s Berry Farm is like the malformed and socially inept younger sibling to Disneyland that should be locked away in a basement room, but is instead let out into the general public by well meaning parents. If the world were right, there would be a made for TV movie where Knott’s Berry Farm escaped from its home prison cell to murder the pretty amusement parks like Disneyland and Magic Mountain; maybe the cops would arrive to some dingy torture pit just in time to save a shapely water park…

Knott’s Berry Farm is, as I remember it, much like a county fair that never packs up. There is an infestation of gaming booths where you can win stuffed Snoopy dolls, there are shops to buy jellies and jams, and there was one major ride; Montezooma’s Revenge! Montezooma’s Revenge was a roller coaster that shot you through one (count it, one) loop before sending you back through said loop backwards. It was probably king shit of roller coasters back in the day, but pretty lame when you take a minute to compare the mild amusement to the hour plus in line.

This also got me thinking about other misguided uses for the misguided term “amusement park”. Up in this neck of the woods, where fairly inclement weather keeps most Disney knock offs at bay, there was and is the Enchanted Village. The Enchanted Village is now connected to a waterslide park to make for a fun summer day jaunt, but when my brother and I were children it was as if someone had set up carnival rides and giant plywood figurines in their sizable backyard, started charging admission. The whole thing revolved around a big fiberglass slide that you rode while sitting on burlap bags. Not at all trailer trashy in the slightest…

I looked at the website to see how things had changed at the ol’ EV as the kids are calling it (they’re not). It looks like they have added some “exciting” new rides, and have written into their website exciting new description of said rides. I got the impression that EV’s web guru got sick of wading through delusion when describing The Scrambler.

The Scrambler by the way is one of those rides that you can find at most county fair/carnivals. It looks like:

The description of the ride on the EV website asks us to:
Enjoy the exciting thrills on this circular motion, back-and-forth journey.

Back and forth journey… There’s a “your mom” joke in there dying to get out.

I have to get back to work, and as I don’t have a good or clever way to end this, I want to share a quick thought about the Zipper ride.

I have never actually been on this ride, and not for any sort of fear for life or limb, but because this thing is apparently a vomit manufacturer. Anytime that I have been to a county fair or carnival and there is one of these, invariably, some irritated attendant is hosing down one of the cars and ridding it of the pungent combination of cotton candy and bile.

Long live carnival rides! And thanks for stopping by R&R, I miss you guys. It was good seeing you!


Confidential to Mo Money Mandy: Happy Birthday, you’re 8 kinds of sexy – mostly because you were eight when I saw Depeche Mode live at the Rose Bowl.

Childish Questions

I had other ideas to write about; the battle at work with a coworker, camping, the nonstop barrage of illegal Chinese fireworks outside my house on Friday night… There’s even this Kenneth Anger piece I’m tossing around for kc!. But…

Round abouts 11 on Saturday night, Kickers woke up screaming his face off. This one wasn’t that sort of exploratory, “hey I’m crying – sorta” sound that he will occasionally make before dropping off again, something was not working out well for him. I went in his room, and on entering he quieted down a bit. I put my hand on his back and he seemed to drop off, but as soon as I started to leave he would kick up his screaming fit again.

I finally picked him up and took him out to the dark living room to lie on the couch together. He immediately poked his head up to check the street for passing busses, but I whispered for him to lay down and he did. He whispered “dada”, grabbed gently at my face and slowly sank back into sleep.

I laid there with him, listening to him mumble his musical language as he faded, feeling those impossibly little fingers stroke my face slower and slower, and suddenly the lack of importance in most anything else shone like a neon X-Ray.

How do you hold onto that feeling of peace, that clarity of calm? How is it that anyone who has held a child can forget it? How is there still this unending drive for power, for destruction of ANYONE? How does the president sleep? How is it that the only interaction I’ve heard with the neighbor woman and her beautiful little girls is through yelling?

How is it that anyone who has held a child can forget it?

Sure, words are easy and clumsy and dangerous. How is it that sitting here at my desk I’m 8 kinds of wrapped up in work bullshit? How is it that I have to close my eyes and block out the sounds around me to even have a slight impression of those fingers on my face, the sound of his language of the universe, the smell of his hair? It’s because everything beautiful and magical is fragile.

I want to lock it inside of myself like some biological compass, some blinding legend. I wonder if my father remembers this…

Words Like Violence

A voice from the past has recently risen through the mists of the internet and called me out, bringing with it the sounds of tumultuous teenage days made harmoniously beautiful and epic with the addition of so many years.

I've had mixed feelings about my past come calling with folks I knew in high school. I have no interest in revisiting my high school days, curiosity can't even fan the flames of interest that would tear a path to a high school reunion (number 20 coming soon). There aren't regrets or juvenile hatreds that I harbor, it all just seems like a really extended run of a not particularly enjoyable show that I would like to go ahead and put behind me, look ahead to what's coming next.

But my grade school and junior high days... that's sort of different. I know that there were large sections of junior high that made me miserable, I remember it clearly, but there's still this heartfelt feeling of love towards them. I start to think that it's because the child wonder and wholesale innocence that marched around with very thin masks of adulthood on was suddenly torn away with the move to California. So much was abruptly ended that I am constantly left wondering how the years treated those that are perpetually 13 or 14 in my mind.

Anyway, Danny found me online. Danny was without a doubt, one of the sweetest and most positive people I have ever known. He constantly made me laugh and had an impish little smile that could make you forget you were locked away in the penitentiary of junior high, a prison full of the collected hormonally challenged, a concentration of humans during their most awkward years.

Danny and I were good friends, I think mostly because there was this shared non-fear of baring our weirdness. Somewhere in the middle of those years, Danny's family moved to Sequim (a pronunciation of this town is on the applicant's test to move to Washington). Sequim was only a couple of hours away, but to a 13 year old without a car, or parents willing to drive to Sequim, it may has well have been Botswana. Not long after, Dad's career whisked us away to Orange County and my pre-fifteen life was left to gather rosy color in my memory.

Interestingly enough, I met a girl in high school who knew Danny, heard news of him through her.

Now we have tossed a couple of emails back and forth and there's talk of a reunion of sorts with a handful of people I left behind about 25 years ago. And I'm down, I'm in.

I was heading to the store yesterday, and as it's clear and hot in this part of the world at the moment, I got a glorious view of the Olympic mountains out on the other side of Puget Sound (not a bad trip to Safeway, I'm just saying). I said to myself, "it looks like a good day over on the Olympic Peninsula, I hope people are enjoying it." And then I thought, "Danny is over on the Olympic Peninsula, I'm sure he's enjoying it." And as my mind is wont to do, it started making connections. I thought of our last email conversation where I had jokingly mentioned Depeche Mode, and he had answered back saying that later that day some Depeche Mode had popped up on his iPod. I began to wonder about what music had sort of spun his head as a teenager, as a young man in his twenties.

And then I thought about chocolate chip pancakes. I can't control what happens up in my head.

I cruised around the nifty Freon smells of the air conditioned Safeway, checked out the cornucopia of salad dressing options that I had before me, when I felt this little tickling in my mind. I stopped, I imagine with my head sort of cocked to one side like a confused dog, and tried to figure out what it was, and I realized that I knew the song playing overhead.

Depeche Mode's "Enjoy The Silence".

I laughed that sort of loose laugh you get when you realize that the universe is talking right to you; I laughed because I realized I'm not quite fluent enough to understand what it's saying.

Never Let Me Down Again

Today marks the anniversary of a concert that, though it may not hold a high position on favorite shows of all time, has left a deep dent in the memory.

Depeche Mode was ending their “Music for the Masses” tour at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California. It coincided with the birthday of Captain MIA, and he wanted to go bad. Dave and I had convinced him though that we had already made other plans. We had in fact convinced him that we were going down to Tijuana, but eventually surprised him with the tickets on the drive up to the show.

The line up was Wire, Thomas Dolby, OMD and, the impossible at the time to stop, Depeche Mode. Wire left little of an impression, which is a shame as I’ve become quite fond of their first album in the years since. Thomas Dolby left a bit more of an impression, but not enough of one to make me go buy a tape; OMD, still a little more – and I did buy a “best of” afterwards. Depeche Mode could have done no wrong, and did. No wrong that is.

There are two specific events that I remember quite clearly from this show. First, at some point during the day, between bands, I began to see the random cardboard food tray flying through the air. Sometimes there was an empty cup, or a popcorn container. Suddenly en masse, the air was filled with flying trash. There was a point where I couldn’t see across the stadium because there was so much shit in the air. I laughed and laughed…

Second thing was the rain.

June 18th of that year was a fairly standard June 18th for Southern California, it was clear and it was hot. That night, midway through the Depeche Mode set, it began to cloud over. As they began to play “Blasphemous Rumors” the rain started to fall. Partway through the song, lightning actually flashed as if these guys had the direct connection to the universe’s best lighting guy – and that connection was made by insulting him. I’m not a religious man, and if possible even less so at that time, but I remember freaking a little bit and wishing those guys would cut the song short. They finished though, and as they did, the rain stopped.

Even then, coming home from the show, that rain seemed unreal in some way, part of the show.

Here’s the kicker to this whole little trip down concert memory lane (at least for me): This Depeche Mode “Concert For The Masses” took place exactly 20 years ago.

Let me go ahead and repeat that, it was 20 frigging years ago. That does not seem at all possible, it seems like more stage magic, like some hypnotic trick of the light they played on me while “Everything Counts” blasted out over the Rose Bowl. It’s a number that’s way too big.

Anyway… Happy Birthday Captain MIA, wherever you are.

Change It's Gonna Do You Good

Okay, you keep hearing about how bad things are going right now; the economy is like a Rob Schneider movie – terrible to behold, gas prices have jumped to an amount that seemed like a ridiculous impossibility not that long ago, and as a result the cost of every good and foodstuff that’s delivered by truck is jumping in cost too. We’re still in a war that seems impossible to get out of, the super wealthy still seem hell bent on screwing anyone within dickshot for a couple more bucks, and hatred and ignorance still seem to run rampant throughout this country.

And this little laundry list doesn’t help anyone feel better. I start to feel glad that I already know how to drink heavily.

But - and here’s the big, bright, shiny but – there’s some good out there folks, for real. Obama got the nomination. I sat watching Hillary’s succession speech awhile back and started crying. I was here to witness this remarkable force of change; my son, who was busy trying to eat the D string on my guitar at the time, would grow up in a world where it would seem ridiculous that a woman or an African American wouldn’t be taken seriously as a presidential candidate. I cried hard and happy.

And today folks, gay marriage is happening in California. Not that there isn’t a battle ahead I’m sure, but it gives you some hope doesn’t it? Don’t you feel like we might turn some things around, start celebrating love and the power of good?

And here’s where I make a sharp turn, poop on this big plate of happy.

George Takei, “Star Trek’s” own Mr. Sulu, got hitched today and his quotable response to this joyous day for him was.

"May equality live long and prosper."

And I guess this isn’t so much a happy poop plate as it is a personal note to Sulu: Dude, not everything you say needs to reference “Star Trek” in some way. Seriously. We know you were on the show, we know this because aside from a time or two doing a voice on “The Simpsons”, you haven’t done anything else. And anyway, that’s Spock’s line. Dude.

Audition Allergies

I was starting to feel cocky. I was walking down to a theater audition a couple of weeks ago and thinking about how I had gotten a part in everything I had auditioned for in the last year or so. I was heading down to audition for a show I didn’t particularly want to do, in a theater that I didn’t want to particularly do it in. The director had asked me to come down, and I like her, I respect her, I’ve had a good time working with her in the past.

The audition went well, I ended up having more fun with it than I thought I would. The director gave me some kind words about how I’d done (and our relationship being what it was, she didn’t need to). She called the next day and let me know that she was going to cast the part in a “different way”. This is pretty standard theater let down lingo, but also true to a point – there are times when an actor (because of look, inflection, the way they hold themselves, whatever) is just not right for the part or for the show itself.

My first thought was, “drag dude – that sucks.” This was quickly followed up with my more reasonable side saying, “uh dude? You didn’t even want that part.” True enough, the offstage drama involved with trying to get a show done that I wasn’t that into was reason enough to be happy about not getting in. But still, you might not want to go to the prom, but you still wanna be asked.

About a week after that, I went in for a film audition. I went to the greeter and let him know I was here ahead of my scheduled audition time. The director came out and asked the greeter about me and what part I was to be reading for. “Bennet,” the greeter said, receiving only a look of absolute confusion from the director. “Who’s Bennet?” the director asked.

This does not bode well, thought I.

The director brought me a reading script, told me to read for Donovan, and about a minute and a half later asked if I was ready. Being a can do sort of guy, I said I was.

The director sat me down in front of a camera and began to tell me all sorts of things about seemingly every other character in the movie (except for mystery man Bennet), and very little about the one I was about to read for. I said okay, stated my name to the camera and began reading.

Before going in for a second read, I asked the standard, “is there anything that you’re looking for?”

Only to receive the standard, “I just want to see what you bring to it.”

It went well, the director began to tell me how I would be good for this other character and he would set up a “warm read” in the next week for me to come in and do. I received an email with a list of days they were possibly going to be doing the reading, a request for conflicts with this proposed schedule, and a list of actors who would be reading for which parts – I was listed as reading for Douglas Bennet. Again, a little knot of worry began to form in the back of my mind.

After about a week of not hearing anything back about my conflicts, I emailed the director and asked if there was any update as to the time for this “warm read.” About another week went by before I got a very template-like reply of a sort of “thanks for your time, but no thanks”.

It was as if I had been asked to the prom, but then watched the limo drive right on by.

I feel that I’ve gotten to a point with auditions where I am generally okay with not getting something. I understand that, as I said above, I’m not always going to be right for a part, or that I might perform poorly during an audition and sometimes I just gotta let it go. This one though was like being told, in a sexy whisper, that I’m gonna get blown. I sort of shrug my shoulders and say, “awesome, if you want to, I like a good blow job.” It gets more promising as the blower sinks closer and closer to my groin, I undo my pants (‘cause I like to help) and close my eyes, and then I’m told, “no, I’m allergic to your cock.”

So, I’m okay with not getting the gig, as I’m really not digging how tings were handled, but still… I like me a good blowjob.

Adventures In Bus Riding

Hello Good People, I miss you.

As a walk to work would probably be a 2-3 hour endeavor, I’m back to taking the bus. I haven’t been in a public transit place since the San Francisco salad days. And I was good man, I had my routes down. I knew how to get to some places. I had hopped on the 23 Monterey a number of times, I had made friends with the 43 Masonic.

More than once, Mercedes and I have tried to drunkenly recount all the SF Muni bus lines in numerical order. Sure it sounds boring, and is for anyone else listening while we try, but it beats the crap out of drunkenly singing “American Pie.” I’m not sure who is drunkenly singing “American Pie,” but they should stop.

My first day of riding the coaches was frustrating, mostly because of the familiarity of previous bus routes. The King County Metro website trip planner advised a convoluted path to work that included a wet transfer it some sparsely populated, unincorporated part of the county – where I wouldn’t been surprised to witness the slaying of a number of pretty, but poorly acted, teenagers at the hands of an inbred and deformed killer in a mask. It took an hour to get someplace that is maybe six miles away.

“I call bullshit,” I said to the King County Metro website trip planner. No response to that, but I did find a route that didn’t take me through the boonies. After the end of a Mariner’s game, said route began to flaunt its scheduled arrival time like a president denying responsibility – aggressively. 45 minutes after I was to leave work, I was finally standing towards the back of one of those extra long busses with the accordion section in the middle.

I like busses with an accordion section in the middle, partly because I like accordions. I also like circular stairways and revolving doors, I’m not sure why those things were linked together in my mind, but they were. Anyway, I like buses with an accordion section in the middle because these busses seem to defy physics sometimes. The bus may be making a turn and suddenly the back half is at a right angle to the front half. It’s like a horrible accident without the carnage, it’s like a pretty boring amusement park ride.

So I was on this bus, angry and frustrated that I was now going to be way late in getting home. I was standing there, with what I must assume was a scowl on my face, when the ol’ Deuce Deuce made one of those mind bending right turns. This girl that had been sitting on a seat that faced the walls of the bus, this girl that had a punkish hairdo and accoutrements but wore some nice slacks and a sweater, she was suddenly spun around so she was facing me directly.

Our eyes met for a split second and she smiled sort of slyly before my half of the bus caught the drift of the situation and swung around the corner as well. Sometimes those small little moments of connection can make up for some bad trip planner advice and a couple thousand drunken baseball fans – some of whom may have been singing “American Pie”.


Song Stuck In My Head Right Now: “I’ve Seen All Good People” by Yes. But I have this live version stuck there that I heard once when I was flooded by classic rock in college where between the sung line of “I’ve seen all good people turn their heads each day so satisfied I’m on my way”, the lead singer would wail out a band members name – I always hear the falsetto cry of “Christopher Squier!” in my mind.

The Journey

All right, so here we go…

We bid farewell to Capitol Hill and to apartment dwelling on Saturday, with an unceremonious loading of truck and friends’ cars. No more neon cat, no more drunken yelling or BB gun firing at 3 in the morning, no more drug deals from the apartment building across the street, no more police preparing a triangulation of cross fire just outside the building.

At least one would hope…

The whole thing is still a bit overwhelming. It’s overwhelming and surreal. And yeah, I know, oh poor you, living in a house must be such a heartache. But seriously, I’m out of sorts and waiting for things to sort of fall into place with a resounding, but reassuring, thud.

At one point on Saturday, Dougie Wagner came over with his son. He and his wife had just moved to a place not terribly far from our place. We stood in the back yard, drinking a beer and listening to kids running and crying and I looked at the reflection of my tired face in his tired face. “How did this happen?” I asked him. “We used to be drunken idiots, we used to go play video games in a North Beach arcade during our lunch break… I did not see this coming.”

And I think some of the fuzzy, this doesn’t feel real aspect of this whole thing is tied to this sense that I’m in a show. There’s this moment that happens in my mind before I come onto a stage that I sort of visualize as jumping onto the back of a tiger. It’s this idea that you’re about to throw yourself into a situation and the only chance you have is to just ride it to the end with everything you’ve got.

And so the journey continues, on a new trail I didn’t see back where I was – there’s so many of these new trails poppin’ my way lately. Always a tiger to ride, always riding with everything I got.

And super special thanks to the rock stars who came on force to help with the move, we owe you more than that pizza and beer. We can talk about forms of reimbursement later…

I’m hoping some normality will return to the proceedings when there’s a computer to use, or I can find things like my pants.


Song Stuck In My Head Right Now: The theme from “All In The Family” has been floating around up there for days, and I cannot say why; creepy and annoying.

Fraction Of The Sun Doesn't Even Make Sense

Yesterday, a coworker asked how I was doing. And while I don’t remember the exact, sarcastic reply, it was a fairly common bumper stickerism. I realized this as I was saying it and pointed out that I do in fact gauge myself by information that bumper stickers give me. I told her that I was also imagining whirled peas, that not all who wander are lost, and that my other car was a broom.

I almost told her that my child was an honor student at Grass Lake Elementary, but she would not have bought that, knowing that my child has a vocabulary of about 5 words (6 if you count when he leaves the “L” sound out of “clock”).

It made me sort of focus on bumper stickers for the last twenty-four hours; which in itself is strange, as I start to lose interest in most things after about 3 ½ minutes. But on my way in to work this morning, I was taken for a moment by a license plate frame. The top portion said “Yea I’m A Bitch” and the bottom portion I skipped on as I figured the cleverness quotient wasn’t going to rank high enough to stop my stride. I’m under the assumption that this witticism ended with something along the lines of “So Deal With It” or “But I’m Super Fine” or “But So Is Your Mom”.

I’m also under the assumption that this particular bitch meant for the engraver to put “yeah” and not “yea”. I’m assuming there was no grand bitch vote and that the yea’s took it.

Which then reminded me of something kc! had sent to me. He sent a link that had a picture of Built To Spill lyrics tattooed on a young woman’s body. Again, they’re being thrown around all willy-nilly here, assumptions that is, but I’m assuming it was a young woman – the young part that is, the shape of the body made it fairly certain it was a woman. Now I love me some Built To Spill, I mean I do, if it were legal for me to marry Built To Spill and settle down and have a whole mess of children (that I would name Bill To Spill) then I would do it. What I would not do is have a line of lyrics tattooed to my body – but that’s me.

What I really wouldn’t do, is have the incorrect lyrics tattooed to my body. I mean I know that “sum” and “sun” sound a lot alike, but I would recommend that before going in under the needle for a few hours and having something permanently added to your body, you go over the lyric sheet once or twice just to make sure you’ve got it right.

Number Nine

Nine years ago, coming off a Lebowski fueled session of late night bowling complete with Caucasians, we stumbled around the world’s biggest little town. Exhaustion, booze and years have left me with fairly hazy memories. There was the crazy lady a couple of lanes over who chucked her ball halfway down the lane with a thundering crash every time she rolled. There was scotch, Highland Park. “See, I told you!” (Or was that the next trip?) A walk down to the river that runs through town. Not being able to actually bowl inside the National Bowling Stadium. Was there an artificial limb in the party ahead of us? More scotch in the parking lot.

And now nine years of laughter and some frustration and excitement and fear and most of all mad love, all of it just seeming like an extension of everything that came before; that line of demarcation just another crazy scene as funny as water wings, as soul stirring as blowing cottonwoods accenting guitar notes reaching for heaven…

Till the wheels come off.


Life Lesson For Today: There is little that a bad mood can do against the mighty power of a little T. Rex.

Videobeard

Hi everyone, once again my job keeps me from the regular sort of posting I would like. Therefore, I will be going into my next job with the expectation that I am allowed blog time.

But hey, how about this weather? I had something on my mind about the preview of summer we received this last weekend, but the return of standard papier-mâché colored skies have driven that out of me. So I will talk about a beard.

I enjoy having a beard, I feel that it adds something to my face – mainly hair. On top of this though, I’m a lazy shaver, so a beard helps to fulfill that laziness quotient. But, as with anything good and mighty, there are drawbacks:

• Sometimes things get caught in a beard. Fallen bits of lasagna, pieces of fluff from the flannel sheets you were just getting ready to put away for the season until the muddled newspaper sky returned, homeless people covered in Velcro:
• People make assumptions about you like you’re more threatening than your non-bearded contemporaries, you’re hiding something, you’re a lumberjack… And well honestly, carrying a double bladed axe around town doesn’t help this last assumption out.
• On those hot, summer (or preview of summer) days, your face will sweat more than normal.
• I occasionally end up with the stray beard hair in my mouth.
  

On this last point; I expect this to happen. I mean, I have a bunch of extra hair right around my ol’ mouth hole, sometimes it’s gonna wind up inside. Sometimes, and more often than one would think would be normal, I end up with a beard hair lodged in my gums. I’m unclear how the hell this happens. Sometimes, I think that I may actually be growing beard hair in my mouth. And then I stop and tell myself, “Hey you, you’re being crazy, knock it off.” But still, the thought persists.

What if I’m actually growing all kinds of hair inside my body? What if I become some oddly discomforting David Cronenberg movie?

Seriously, how about this weather…


Song Stuck In My Head Right Now: “Cowboy Dan” by Modest Mouse. Extra nice as it has sufficiently driven out “Welcome To The Pleasuredome” by Frankie Goes To Hollywood.

Signs

This is the ballyhooed neon sign outside my window:

The cat's tail wags.

As I was trying to take a picture of the sign I noticed a cop car pulling up onto the sidewalk across the street. I moved over to the desk and there's another cop car on the second street our apartment building sits on. I am in the middle of a triangulation of cop activity.

I watched two officers walk up the sidewalk, hands on utility belts. They entered into the apartment complex across the street.

And just now, a pizza delivery guy walked to the same front door. It smells like a set up to me. "Get out of there pizza guy!" I yelled. "The cops are waiting."

He looked around for my voice, double checked the address, and yelled, "Did you order a large Hawaiian?"

I did not. Pizza guy's on his own, I can't look out for everyone.

And this is the sort of thing that starts to happen when neon moves into the neighborhood.

They Typically Come In Threes

I left work on Friday at about 7. Bif picked me up, which meant that drinking could get started all that sooner; yeah me. As we got near the apartment I noticed that a Jeep was parked in the spot in front that, because of the yellow zone painting but lack of sign, most people don’t realize they can park there without incurring the wrath of the parking gods.

“That looks like Manboy’s Jeep,” I thought to myself as I continued up on the hill to another spot.

It turns out it looked like Manboy’s Jeep because it was Manboy’s Jeep. As I neared the apartment, there was High Five Hickman waving hello, Manboy talking in low tones on his cell phone. I tried to quickly remember if I had made plans with them and then forgotten, but that seemed pretty unlikely as I rarely make plans with anyone anymore.

Nope, there was an accident. A car full of uninsured chumps had rolled back into the near brand new Jeep and dented the door. It was simply coincidence that brought them right to my front door. The chumps were occasionally coming back to Manboy with a new total of promised money to keep him from getting the police involved but he was holding steady. If he were a band, he’d be the Hold Steady.

I dropped my stuff off upstairs and come back outside to wait with them until the cops showed. It was four, tall, uninsured guys and the only defense Manboy and Hickman had going for them was Hickman’s rape whistle, which I poo-pooed at the time, but I don’t know what those guys had in mind. I mean I’m not any sort of badass, and am more likely to hurt myself than anyone else were we to get in the shit, but these guys don’t know that. I’m big and can scowl with the best of them.

The cops came and I left to get crazy drunk on whisky and Rainier. At some point I poured a mess of Cholula Hot Sauce into my mouth. These are the things that are bound to happen when grandma watches the baby for the weekend.

Saturday night (which is alright for fighting), there was another accident right in front of the apartment again. I awoke round abouts 1:30 in the morning to the sound of a serious collision and people yelling. I had passed out watching a movie on the couch and my first thought was, “what the hell did Riley do?” Then it was, “Do we have any ice cream?” Then it was, “Oooh, I bet that was an accident.”

I got up and looked out the living room window to see one car attached to another. First car was completely facing the wrong way in that lane, second car had a good portion of its front wrapped around the light pole on the corner. I took another look at the clock, realized that closing time was fast upon us and had probably had something to do with this here incident. “Bummer,” I believe I mumbled to myself.

Moments later, sirens came a calling. I laid down on the living room floor (which ironically is where I had found myself earlier that afternoon, pounding headache and uncontrollable sweating that I tacked up to chugging hot sauce) and watched the patterns that the red and blue lights made on the ceiling as they bent themselves around the light pole, pushed through the curtains, danced along the molding.

I’m beginning to believe that the newly placed neon sign outside the building is responsible for this mini rash of bad car karma.

Know Your Audience

It’s an important lesson to learn, to know your audience. One of the benefits of tailoring your delivery to the audience is knowing you have a better shot of having your message listened to.

Yeah, knowing you audience… For instance, I don’t want to walk into a meeting with my manager, HR generalist, directors and VP’s and let loose with a barrage of dick and fart jokes. It works here at Billy Cleans His Plate (I feel I know this audience), but in the confines of the business world, it ain’t gonna fly.

Another for instance for ya, you might not want to, in a same sort of meeting as above, pretend to French kiss a coworker on a stage in front the entire group. As I did. “That’s how I roll, now they know that,” I said, a little cavalier to be sure. But in the back of everyone’s mind I will forever be the guy who practically dry humped a coworker in a meeting. Which isn’t necessarily the guy I DON’T want to be, but it might make me a questionable candidate later down the road.
Again, depending on the audience.

And here’s my point, well one point that I’m sharing with this audience; I feel Coors does not know their audience.

I was walking to work and spied a billboard designed to advertise Coors Light. Apparently, the good people at Coors have developed some sort of contraption on the top of their Coors Light cans that provide a “smooth pour”. Now I gotta say that the majority of Coors Light drinkers aren’t going to give two flying fucks alongside a bullfrog blowing an anteater whether or not they get a “smooth pour” from their can of beer water. It seems to me that the majority of Coors Light drinkers don’t much care about beer period; if they did, they wouldn’t be drinking Coors Light. It seems to me that there are only four reasons to be drinking Coors Light.

1) You don’t know any better.
2) You’re sixteen and it’s what your over 21 year old acquaintance, or friend with a fake ID, got.
3) It’s free.
4) You plan on steady drinking can after can of beer for an extended period of time and are still concerned with your girlish figure.

I might go so far as to say that anyone drinking a can of beer (and man, I like me a can of beer from time to time) aren’t concerned with how that beer comes out the can, except to make sure a majority of it gets down the gullet and not all over the ground.

Coors, know your audience.

Town Without Pity

I’m trying to find a witty/entertaining/caustic/non-whiney way of stating that I’m feeling sorry for myself, but I’m failing.

The pisser is, I have nothing to feel bad about. It’s just one of those weird days where I can’t really cope with anything. I can make it look good from the outside, like I got it going on, but everything just seems to knock another piece off inside me.

Pity party? You bet. A bad, bad lame one, with no keg or chips. Not even a veggie platter.

I kinda want my brother to poke his head around the corner, Tecate Light in his hand and a smile while he says, “You’re doing it buddy.” I kinda want someone to call, tell me they’re coming with a sixer. I kinda want a hug.

I kinda wanna get over myself, I kinda wanna stop ending words with the letter “a”.

I’m upset for and by friends that I love.

I’m upset my favorite song by that little band Grandaddy, “AM 180”, is in a car commercial.

I’m upset to learn, this late in life, that the dream I had of living in an apartment above a store with a neon sign, is not that awesome. The brand new sign that the bookstore put up today shines right into the living room window, and the fact that the neon cat has a neon tail that wags ain’t making it better.

I’m upset with the reaction I got when walking down the street in this:

Kids these days have just seen everything.

Ooooh, and Jim Jarmusch Movies Too

So it’s mid-year review time around work. These are the good times, the grand times, these are the days. I have written and delivered a number of reviews recently, and more importantly to me, received a review from my boss.

One bit of feedback that I received on my review was that during supervisor meetings there have been times where I appear angry and have outbursts. “Outbursts?!?” I screamed as I jumped up on the desk and slapped the man with my cock. “What the flippin’ F are you talking Jack?”

Actually, I said quite calmly, “Outbursts? Really? Do you have specifics on this? Because I honestly do not know what you’re talking about.” He didn’t. As it turns out, he compiled my review from information he had gathered from my reps and other sups. And I know which sup had these sort of things to say. I equate this with the guy going, “Hey boss, hey look, hey look at that bus that’s coming! Do you know who would fit right underneath that?” Anyway, I was told that I should focus on how I carry myself and how people might perceive this.

Well, I call bullshit. But for the sake of getting out of that room I nodded and carried myself in a way that would allow him to perceive that I was ready to move on. But I started thinking that maybe I do come across as angry and complainy, particularly here at Billy Cleans His Plate. So I wanted to go ahead and publish a list of some things I like. I will call it:

A List Of Some Things I Like:

1) Beer. And whisky. Typically they’re mutually exclusive (having learned the evil power they hold when combined), but I will occasionally go for a bourbon neat with a beer back.
2) Kickers’ smile, particularly when I do something that seems to amaze and humor him all at once. That kid will be the death of me.
3) A drunken feast of General Tsu’s Chicken, Szechuan Hot Sauce Noodles, Steamed Chicken Dumplings and laughter, so much god damned laughter.
4) The way the sun can sometimes sneak out and hit something just the right way, something that you see on a daily basis even, and make you hold your breath at the wonder of it all.
5) Being reminded of how much love I have in my life.
6) This.
7) Bodies of water.
8) A long drive, even with nothing to think about. Oh, and talking shit about a pretty sunset.
9) Doing twosies on number one up there.
10) The idea of a room filled with the folks I love, and music, and how everything else is would pretty much be frosting.

Here comes May everyone, hope you're ready.

Hostest With The Mostest

They say that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. And while I do enjoy me some breakfast – particularly a nice lazy weekend morning breakfast at a great neighborhood breakfast spot with lots of coffee – I have to say, “Screw you most important breakfast people!” I feel the 2:30 AM meal of frozen pizza or Triscuits or an order of Nacho Bell Grande, whatever you use to soak up the alcohol you’ve inundated yourself with, is way more important than breakfast.

I have a knee jerk reaction to people telling me one thing is the best, or most important.

There was a moment in film school when one of my Film History teachers was about to say that Citizen Kane was often regarded as the greatest film made, when I groaned aloud. She asked if I disagreed, and I told her that one, best movie ever is subjective depending on who’s considering it and two, I get tired of people just repeating that it’s the greatest film ever without backing it up. She sort of gave me a sideways smile before saying, “Make a film that’s better and we’ll talk about yours.”

Touche. She did go on to say that she felt Touch of Evil was a superior Orson Welles film. I have recently been pulled into talks about Citizen Kane and how people who watch it for the first time, now nearly seventy years after it was made, are left wondering how it could possibly be considered the best film ever. A lot of that rating is based on the context of what had come before Citizen Kane and how revolutionary it was at the time in regards to story telling, camera work, scope, you name it. Without a fairly well versed knowledge of film history, you’re not going to get that. And if you’re now used to seeing films that have built on, and expanded on, what Citizen Kane brought to the table, you’re bound to be fairly under-whelmed.* I do personally feel that even without that knowledge, it’s a fascinating film and great epic story about the rise and fall of a man. Is it the best film ever? Not to me, but again that’s completely subjective.

I didn’t intend for this to be a mini film school lecture, sorry. I think that there are words and sayings and phrases that get thrown around so often, that just the sheer amount of times you hear them makes them become fact. That’s a shortcut to thinking, and it annoys me.

What I would like, what I’m tasking you good readers to do, is to repeat that “Reading “Billy Cleans His Plate” gives you amazing sexual prowess.” Say it enough so that it becomes fact. I mean hell, y’all know it’s true…


Song Stuck In My Head Right Now: “Space Is Gonna Do Me Good” by Frank Black. I’ve been doing a little digging into the Frank Black catalogue with the recent Black Francis album Svn Fngrs, which by the way is eight kinds of awesome laid out on a tray made of awesome.

*If’n a little more film school jive is what you’re looking for: I had the same sort of reaction to viewing French New Wave films at first, particularly Godard’s films. It was difficult to put myself into the heads of viewers in the 60’s who had yet to see the sort of ways in which these directors were messing with form. Plus I was coming up in the grand Tarantino days, who was at the time basically standing on the shoulders of Godard.

"And Over Here Is Where I Compile My Expense Reports"

There is a “Take Your Kid To Work Day” thing going on here at the Death Star. This always seems like way more of a Sitcom convention than something that actually happens in real life. Ah, but no, people do in fact bring their young ones here for a taste of the corporate Kool Aid. There may be those who thrill in sharing with their kids something that they love doing, but I have to believe that a greater number drag them in to show what sort of soul crushing hell they’re in for when the days of recess and summer vacation have faded.

Either that or they show off their offspring to coworkers, which smacks of some weird competition through children thing that is but one small step from toddler gladiators dueling away in the playgrounds of America.

People have asked a number of times when I’m going to bring my son into the office and, depending on the discretion needed with the person, I will answer with variation of the same sentiment: Why would I bring him into this place when I can’t stand being here myself.

I always tend to feel a bit jumpy when suddenly confronted by concentrations of kids where they don’t seem like they should be. I remember going into a short of breath panic attack when 30 grade school children suddenly poured onto the 24 Divisadero as I made my way to work down in the delightful Bayview/Hunter’s Point section of San Francisco. “What the hell are all of these kids doing on this bus?” I thought. It felt as though there were an invasion of sorts, an alien invasion. I felt claustrophobic, and I suddenly quivered with the understanding that I was going to have to wade through all of these 7 and 8 year olds just to get off the bus.

So today, when I walk into the restroom to find a young man, perhaps 11 or so, on his knees in the doorway of one of the stalls, something in my mind started screaming that there was something very wrong here. At once I felt that there really shouldn’t be a reason for this kid to be doing whatever he was about to do – again, he was on his knees in a men’s room stall. I just as quickly realized that my first instinct to ask if I could help him with something was going to sound simply awful were someone to walk in behind me.

I managed to throw an uno, I know you were worried, but I couldn’t help wondering just what the hell he was doing over there.


Song Stuck In My Head Right Now: It’s not really stuck, but “We’re Gonna Rise” off the new Breeders album is something pretty.

So Many Have Paid To See

We finished up the show this weekend with a Sunday matinee, which is really the way you want to close out a show that has broken your heart a little bit in a big celebratory explosion of joy and booze fueled nudity.

It’s not by the way, Sunday afternoon just does not lend itself to the sort of debauchery I’ve come to expect from myself. We tried to jump in and F some shiznit up Saturday night, but it turned out to be far too sedate, a little melancholy. There was a moment of excitement when I got dragged into a conversation with crazy alcoholic stream-of-consciousness guy on the back porch. Example of conversation:

“Speaking of sports cars {no one was by the by}, on my last day of real estate school, I’m coming across the 520 and I see this guy pulled over in a Viper. Why do I pull over? It’s a freaking Viper! The guy’s test driving it and I take him to a shop. This gray daddy drops in with a rocket on his hip, and a leather NASCAR coat. I’m down in Daytona in a rental with this hotty who’s like I can’t drive on the sand, and I’m like, Yankee fucking blue, you can drive on the sand…”

Let those 3 little dots carry the burden of near twenty minutes of rambling, almost poetic, monologue. But aside from this, our show ended with a whimper, not the bang this cast is accustomed to. Which seems fine in a way, being it felt like it never fully belonged to us. I think we certainly did justice by this show, that we went out there and made some magic, but ultimately this is a tight and talented cast led by a talented director waiting for a show we love. It was like a dry run of sorts.

Almost as if it weren’t ready to completely let go, the show came back to haunt me today, a mere two days after the close.

One of the actors in the boy’s dressing room brought his laptop in nightly. Some nights we would entertain ourselves by watching heinous videos from the 80’s. Some of these included 3 different Hall & Oates videos. “She’s Gone” is disturbing in ways I was unprepared for, like vicodin mixing really poorly with pot brownies, watch it and share in the suffering. “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)” was disturbing in that “shit I lived through the 80’s and all this seemed like a good idea” plus the added benefit of choreographed head turns to each call and response of “no no – no can do.” “Maneater?” all kinds of scary – again mostly for the 80’s pop video trappings but there was also the wandering panther to contend with.

How does that go step more scary? I was informed today that during a Vashon Island crafts fair sort of thingy, a coworker was accosted by a man selling his CD full of pan pipe renditions of pop songs – including, but not limited to, a pan pipe version of “Maneater” by Hall and Oates.

Fuck yes I want a piece of that.