Remiss

I've been remiss in posting today. I have been doing actual work type work, and the flu that I was pretty sure that I had kicked last week with that squinty-eyed near suspicion that the fucker's just hiding, has morphed into a head cold that is slowing the world down considerably.

I've been remiss in not having eaten brussel sprouts before this weekend. Oh hell yes. Thank you again Eric , you've shown me a light that I didn't know was not on.

I was remiss in not teaching Eric the A,E and G chords on the guitar. I did bust the guitar out to show you sleepy man, but you were sleeping. Next time...

I've been remiss in not collecting stories of Mercedes' and Eric's visit to our fair city for today’s posting. I'll revisit this thought tomorrow, but as I pointed out above - worky work and head cold tired.

I was remiss in not waking up early enough to see the two of them off this morning. I awoke to find the blankets and such in neatly folded piles atop the empty air mattress where once lay a tumble of bodies. There's not a lot more that can break your heart so quickly as that.

I already miss those kids…


No!vember song of the day: For No One by The Beatles

Been Caught Stealing

I was thinking of writing a diatribe on how I really hate it when people abuse systems set up to help people who legitimately need them; selfish fucks who insist that their accessory pets are service animals, selfish fucks who abuse work disability systems... This also brings to mind those who claim discrimination to get their way when they know it didn't happen. This horridly mocks those who actually have been discriminated against. There's a special death squad fantasy place for those folks, here in my heart.

But then, as I'm wont to do, I started thinking about porn.

My dad kept a small supply of dirty magazines in his bedroom - usually the sock or underwear drawer. When I was 11 or 12, my friend and neighbor David and I snuck one of my dad's Penthouse magazines into the small tract of woods behind my house. We sat there and looked at the lurid pictures.

I don't remember being particularly aroused by the soft focus pictures of heavily made up ladies with digits strategically placed. I think that it was really that faint thrill of flirting with the forbidden. It was knowing I wasn't supposed to be looking at the magazine, that I had snuck it from my dad's bedroom.

"What are you guys doing?" my dad yelled from the backyard.

The two of us, wide-eyed, quickly closed the magazine and rushed out of the woods. David, saying only a hurried goodbye, rushed past my dad and went back home across the street. My dad again asked what we had been doing and after making some lame excuse, he told me to take him where we had been. I began to lead him down one of the paths away from the clump of huckleberry bushes where we had left the Penthouse, but in that particular moment my father proved to be far slyer than I had given him credit for. He left my following and went directly to where we had been.

I don't remember any words he might have said, I'm sure he understood the curiosity of a prepubescent boy, I only remember him grabbing the magazine and pushing me before him out of the woods. I remember him making me clean the garage as a punishment, but I had the feeling it was more of an excuse to have someone clean the garage so he wouldn’t have to do it.

I do also remember him getting mad at David for leaving when he returned a couple hours later to play catch.

From what I understand, if donating sperm, the clinic will provide magazines such as these to get things going. I wonder how often the folks are asked if the donor can get something "a little raunchier" if the Playboy provided doesn't work out.


Because I feel that I have been remiss to dedicated readers who have asked for it... No!vember song of the day: No Depression by Uncle Tupelo.

Ketchup

Been out for a week, so a quick follow up on the going-ons around about here:

My beloved Jen Jen is now a married woman. With Beth being in the condition that she is (y'know, exasperatingly pregnant), we were unable to take the trip to the OC for the event, but I have mad love for those crazy kids. For some reason I imagine the four of us making popcorn balls in a kitchen somewhere, kids playing loudly in the background just underneath the sounds of some triumphantly indy band playing on a record player. Congratulations Jenny and Michael, I love you two something crazy.

I went to a fathering class on Saturday. One of the other fathers made a joke about having to be out at a certain time to get to a bar and watch the Seahawks with the guys. Oh boy, was that funny. In fact, I'm pretty sure that it was the diaphragm shattering laughter that ensued which made way for the illness that put me down for the last couple of days. We learned about how to pick a baby up without damaging their fragile little heads and necks (fuckin' babies), we learned about diapering and swaddling, we learned about having a plan for those times when the baby starts crying uncontrollably for hours on end and you have the urge to induce some sort of brain damage just to shut it up. My plan is to put baby in a separate room, close the door, open a beer (which will from here on out be in steady supply) and watch a couple minutes of Jaws, or The Big Lebowski.

On Sunday we visited the hospital and the "birthing suites" where the child shall enter the world. They're nice, a lot of wood trim everywhere. They seem very Scandinavian somehow, which is apropos for a hospital named Swedish. I imagined myself floating around the "baby entering the world" floor for hours, Biffy apparently imagined for the first time how real this all is going to become. She began to get worried about being able to do this, and tried in vain to reassure her that she'd be fine.

My beer supply is diminishing quickly.

I spent Monday rearranging the office which once held bookshelves and a desk and my amps and guitars so that it could now hold baby things. Things like a crib and changing table and all of these things that I would not know about, or realize that I would need to know about, two years ago. I am still holding out hopes of one day having a house with a basement where the amps can make a triumphant return in all their loud, feedbacky glory.

Tuesday I awoke to a flu that felt like it had taken a playpen to my joints and whacked unmercifully. Things have been pretty fuzzy since then. I tried to watch some Star Wars movies, but ended up sleeping through them in a feverish state instead. But I can say that even a fever does not make Ewoks palatable.

Ewoks still suck...

Not Quite Heaven, Not Quite Hell, But There's A Sharper Image

I just awoke from a flu-filled sleep where there lived a fever-induced dream of what purgatory is like.

It’s not that bad.

Purgatory is a ginormous river front shopping pavilion. Oh the shops that are there, my stars. I actually don’t remember what shops were there, except that they stretched on as far as the eye could see. Oh, there was a Safeway, a great big Safeway with generic looking produce. But this Safeway always seemed to be playing the Best of the Cure over the loudspeakers, but it was the latter, less enjoyable, post-Disintegration era Best of the Cure.

Everyone there was dressed fairly nicely; everyone had sunglasses. It was sunny and hot on the sidewalk, but the lazy river that curved around the shops was constantly in the shade, and cold from what I could gather.

I believe that there was a zoo somewhere in purgatory, and I believe there was also some sort of experimental lab on the premises. Which naturally brought a gaggle of protestors.

People wandered around shopping, girls were stealing the boys that their best friends were interested in. kc! and I sat on a bench singing What Is And What Should Never Be, discussing Jimmy Page’s slide playing.

I’m hoping to be back to normal tomorrow everyone – lots of rest and apple juice.

But I Won't

I could tell you someone else's story about their roommate's immense porn collection which apparently contained a tape of amateurish, black and white and quite raunchy gay porn inside a straight porn cover which had been found accidentally...

Or I could tell you about the flash of a movie scene that came to me this morning: A man crosses a freeway overpass as monstrous squid tentacles begin to wrap over the safety railing from below. A young woman who had been walking about twenty yards ahead, suddenly turns, clutching what appears to be a box of Hostess Ding Dongs to her chest. She throws out the sort of snarl one would imagine a cornered mother badger would, clutches the box tighter to her chest, turns and runs. There has been a sort of aural mix of Angelo Badalamenti score and seedy bar, honky-tonk piano through this, but now a distortion heavy guitar picks up. The man looks over to his left to see a fairly conventional looking rock band playing on a makeshift stage made of plastic milk crates. The crowd surrounding them dance in a pagan frenzy, somehow setting concrete pillars on fire...

Or I could tell you about the odd, calm, but melancholy feeling I have after the raging frustration that had built with the man period I had been experiencing the last couple of days, and how it feels made and built by the odd combination of things; excitement for the unknown and being tired of looking for things to be angry at, the inane chatter around and the lonely wail of the train whistle outside...

Or I could tell you that I really want to be at home on this rainy and cold day, wrapped up and watching a movie, drinking coffee and eating a chicken pot pie...

Madonna And The Whore

So I was watching a network "news" program, which admittedly was my problem, and it got me to loudly and aggressively ponder some things.

And I was feeling good, I'd gone out and gotten some beer and tots, I was cuddled up on a couch. But apparently, my bullshit acceptance valve has been broken by the lack of television watching.

First there was Madonna. She was doing an interview in response to the ghastly media attacks in regards to her adoption. Shhhh, did you hear that? That was the exploding sound of me giving a fuck. There was a brief teaser trailer for the upcoming chat with Madonna that the grave voiced announcer promised would be coming right up. Commercials quickly followed, and one of them was for the network's showing of Madonna's concert.

Coincidence? I think not.

I'm sure Madonna is a great lady, I'm sure she loves her children and I certainly hope that she has the best intentions with raising what I'm sure was an expensive African child, but using this non-fascinating hoopla to pimp her show is a little tasteless. "No! You're wrong! Madge would never do that!" I can hear legions of her fans saying. No, she has certainly never been a publicity whore before.

See, stars have publicists who earn their paychecks making sure their client's names are kept in the public consciousness. And then there are celebrities that don't use a publicist, or don't use it to the extent that the Jessica Simpsons and Paris Hiltons do. How often do hear about Robert Deniro's kids? Is the name of Johnny Depp's child more of a household name than some of our best writers?

So avoiding Madonna's oddly disturbing British affectation, the channel was turned to the local news. One of the news stories, I shit you not, was telling us that if you rent Blockbuster movies online, you can return those movies at a store.

How the fuck is that news? That my friends, is a commercial for perks to having an account with Blockbuster online. Did Blockbuster have to pay money to get that onto the local 10 O'clock news? Viacom owned Blockbuster, Blockbuster which bowed to the Religious Right and refused to carry The Last Temptation of Christ and carries edited versions of other films for their "family" demographic, had a commercial in the guise of a news report.

It's 7 degrees of awesome that Blockbuster is righteously indignant at the thought of carrying a film rated NC-17, but has no problem turning the "news" into a whore for their services.

Long Live The New Flesh

I'm in this strange head space. You can taste transition on the air - it tastes like slightly overcooked caramel by the way; you can feel it pressing in. It could get to be a paranoid downer if I didn't feel good about this, if I didn't feel, if not ready, at least ready to face changes.

On the walk in to work today, I stopped at least three times realizing that the prior five minutes or so had gone by as if in a blackout. No memory of buildings passed, no memory of the music in the headphones, no memory of the thoughts I had been thinking. This is not normal mental behavior on my walk, I may become uber focused on something and lose myself, but I can always ask the inner stenographer to read back the inner dialogue. Not today...

I feel my mind trying to adjust itself to the change.

Everything right now sort of feels like driving over a bridge with someone who is afraid of driving over a bridge. The passenger takes in sort of a hurried, nervous breath on leaving solid city ground, holds that breath as best as possible while driving over, only to let loose a sigh when safely on the other side. I didn't realize at the time, but all of that rush of fear and excitement was the long pull of breath in.

We're in the held breath section right now, a place where every action seems to hold far more responsibility than it does, a place where it seems every superstition is necessity and is only held together by this supreme force of will.

I have this memory that I'm not sure is mine - someone getting their tarot cards read and getting this panic stricken look when the Death card is dealt. The reader very calmly explains that death is not a negative thing, it only represents transition, change. I feel like I'm preparing for the death of everything that has come before - and I'm realizing that this is not a negative thing in the least. My life is about to change to the very core of things, and I think my mind is trying to give me a reassuring hand on the back while it ushers me to a whole new focus.

I've always had a tumultuous relationship with change, but I'm even excited by the change that will come to that as well.