Jujy?

Random memory brought to the front today…

I think because going to the movies was such a major event when I was a kid, the nearest theater was 30 minutes away, not only did I get my greasy popcorn and my carbonated sugar water, but I also got one of those mega-ginormous, movie size boxes of candy.

Even though I don’t really eat candy much anymore, when I think of movie snacks, it’s still there in the li’l Billy dictionary in the back of my head. Popcorn and candy… Typically Jujyfruits are the candy that pop to mind first.

I know that I often got Junior Mints, which I would probably have listed as my favorite candy as a kid if were pressed. And pressed hard… And I know that Red Vines and black licorice were often a movie staple, but Jujyfruit are defined as movie candy to me.

I might be that I never ate them anywhere but the movies. It might be that I equate getting that occasional magical lime flavor with those occasional movie moments that shock and surprise you. It might be that I’m enamored of the image of my seven year old self holding this odd, fruit-like shape up in a darkened theater, trying to catch enough projector light to tell which flavor it was…

Deep Bluey-Gooey Sea

I have fish on the brain. Not literally, that would be weird, but today is one of those days where my mind keeps returning to the idea of fish; live ones, not necessarily swimming, but not battered and fried either.

I’m not going to try to pretend that I know what that’s about, but a possible explanation may be the “ooze tube”

This is the “ooze tube” as it’s properly called, but we here refer to it as the Bluey-Gooey.

Heavy into the Bluey-Gooey am I. What is now an “office toy” was what we affectionately called a “trip toy” back in the day. It’s the sort of thing that I would have spent hallucinatory hours watching as slow moving ooze and bubbles percolate.

As hallucinogens are frowned upon at work, I watch it sober, but it still has the same power to draw me in and slow down and ease my mind. There’s constant shifting, constant subtle changes, and occasional big changes like a giant bubble floating to the top of a sludgy sea.

I’m also a little obsessed lately with getting the correct earphone in the correct ear; making sure the one with the little “R” goes into the right ear. This is not so I am assured the correct aural experience, but that I am worried about a time/space rift opening in my mind if the left ear is filled with what was meant for the right. For some reason, I think this would happen while listening to the band Phish.

I’m so high right now…

We Love You Bib, Oh Yes We Do

So, I was doing shroomies… I love starting out a sentence in this way. I was doing shroomies with my roommate and we climbed to the top of the Escher-esque Student Union building at San Francisco State University where there is a little fenced in seating area.

We’d been up there for awhile when I began to notice what I thought were voices yelling up to us. It is difficult to tell these things when you’re tripping balls by the way. I looked over the side, and sure enough, there was a cop down below. He could have been doing a medley of songs from Bye Bye Birdy for all I knew, but I figured it was best to go down and face said music.

I managed to make it straight down to where he was, but ol’ roommate of mine got lost along the way. While he was wandering the geometric oddity that is the outside of the SFSU Student Union, I stood in front of the cop and smiled politely.

“I didn’t read that,” his shoulder patched radio crackled. “Did you need backup or not?”

I put my hands out in a placating fashion and tried to reassure him in my calm, fuzzy, head full of psychedelic mushrooms voice that, no he did not need backup; we were not going to cause him any problems.

The roommate finally tumbled over and the cop asked if we were students here. We were. He asked if we knew we weren’t supposed to be up on top of the Student Union at some wee hour in the morning. We probably did, but feigned ignorance. He proceeded to ask us for our personal info, addresses and phone numbers and stuff.

I did fine, but here’s a little secret about me: Shroomies are about the only drug that I have taken where I can deal perfectly well with the straight world. Your face may be pulsating slightly, but I can carry on a conversation with you and even smile doing it.

Roommate was not faring so well. He was spiraling into a bad trip and I was trying to mediate in hopes of appeasing the cop as well as keeping my friend from some god awful hallucinatory freak out. When the poor guy couldn’t come up with his own home number, the cop got suspicious. I told him it was the same as mine, that we lived together, but the cop was upset that he couldn’t come up with it himself.

“How many times do you call yourself?” I asked the cop. This miraculously seemed to work for him and he eventually let us go, telling us not to come back after hours.

But it was too late for the roomie, he was bad tripping something fierce. I tried to rap him in blankets and put on mellow music and Fantasia, but nothing was working. The kid had an evening of working over his own demons and fears that all the normal reindeer games were not going to fix.

Thinking back, I probably should have known it was going to end in tears. A few months prior, under very similar circumstances, my roommate managed to lose my Bib Fortuna action figure up on the Student Union.

I miss him…

$1000

I don’t normally like to do this, bring one of my work cases kicking and screaming onto the screen here at Billy Cleans His Plate, but this one has me so urked that I need to vent a little bit…

Okay, first, one of my biggest pet peeves is the inability for a lot of people to take responsibility for their own actions. Couple that with the repulsive greed that seems to plague this country and you have, in my eyes, justification for hunting humans.

A customer writes us to let us know that she burned her tongue on some hot, green tea. She equates the tea to lava. She is seeking compensation for the dinner she couldn’t taste as her tongue was badly scalded. She is seeking compensation for the items she bought at out location – no reason provided, so I guess she assumes it must be obvious why they should be free. She is also seeking compensation for the “painful experience”.

Okay…

Lady, hot tea, just so you know, is fucking hot! You might realize this as the word “hot” is right there in the beverage’s name. While most of us learned at an early age – 2ish – that if something is hot, you let it cool down before ingesting it. What you do not do is swallow it full force like the fat, greedy whorepig you are. Oh, also, when you see steam coming off something you are about to consume, that means that thing is hot and you might give it a little minute. We really should post that inside all of our stores, but that’s unfortunately too many words for most customers to read before they lose their battle with attention deficit.

I would by the way, really like to see a paper cup that could hold lava. And, by the by, if you swallowed lava, your mouth, neck and chest would be evaporated in fiery agony. Just so you know ahead of time not to drink lava.

And the $1,085 you are looking for us to give to you, apparently to award you for the fact that you have the intelligence of… what? A corpse? Most living things at least have enough survival instinct to know that something called hot, something steaming hot, something that comes double cupped and with a fun little cardboard sleeve to protect your fat, grubby fingers from being burned will fucking hurt you if you put it in your mouth right away.

Grow the fuck up!

This I cannot say however. The prevailing thought is that freeloading retards such as this are worth keeping as customers.

12

I am not a big football fan. I’m not into it. I can try to feign interest in it, but I usually fail miserably. The truth is that football bores the piss out of me. I’ve noted that to football fans and have been treated to impromptu lectures that usually involve –

1) How can it bore you? (In a shouting, incredulous and angry tone)
2) The beauty and ballet of battle.
3) Being accused of being un-American and gay.

As a child, my father regularly dragged me to football games, and I have to hand it to him for his dogged perseverance. I dreaded these days as they were HOURS of mind numbing boredom for me, but he never understood this because he loved football. One time, I brought a book with me to read during a game.

I have never heard the end of this. Even to this day. In fact, my non-football watching was brought up at my wedding reception…

All of that being said, The Seahawks, the Seattle football team, the team that I “rooted for” as a kid (due simply to my geographic location), is going to the Superbowl.

While I didn’t watch the entire game, I did tune in to watch the last 10 minutes or so. And I have to say that I got a little emotional watching this team win the game. I was suddenly flooded with Seahawks knowledge that I had picked up and forgotten as a child. I remembered quarterback Jim Zorn coming to visit my first grade class because he knew my teacher somehow. I remember it being a big deal that Steve Largent was featured on a bag of chips or something. I was amazed that I remembered all of this despite my inherent dislike of the game.

I felt proud for this team, proud for the fans that had waited so many years to see this team go far. I felt excited for the coach, taking this team to the Superbowl for the first time in the team’s history.

Who knows, I might even watch me some Superbowl this year. My dad would be so proud…

The Ocean

At the moment, I’m sort of at a loss for words – in a weird sort of in between space which reminds me of floating in a huge expanse of water.

Okay and that’s weird, because that feeling came to me as I was typing that, and I’m being haunted, or inundated, or deluged (the right word just doesn’t seem available to me right now – it’s not threatening, but persistent) with images of water.

I try to let go with my mind, to get gears moving, and when the doors start to dissolve, the water pours in. I see myself up and looking out over an ocean, a dark and calm ocean. I start to get that panicky feeling that I associate with people who have a fear of heights when I consider how deep that water really is.

I see myself swimming out in the middle of it, no land in sight, but calm nonetheless.

And like a lightening bolt across a dark sky that I hadn’t realized was stormy, completely removed but somehow still part of it all, I realize that there’s an amazing and blurry magic in the creation of anything, but I feel it especially true of music.

I feel a flurry of something inside myself when I think of a group of musicians starting at silence and working together and building something out of sounds, something you can’t even see, building something that has the power to move you.

That magic is pure and it’s holy somehow. It shouldn’t be judged, I know this, but there is still no fucking reason to go out and buy a Kelly Clarkson CD.

Boom Chicka Boom.

"We Did Dance Though..."

At the moment I’m having these strange coincidences bouncing around with bad 80’s bands. I’m apparently also having a stroke as it took me no less than five times to type that first sentence correctly.

Okay, we were at Chez Gaudy the other night and somebody brought up the band Shalamar. Yup, Shalamar. They were doing a nice Dennis Miller, obscure reference thing, and I knew exactly who they were talking about. Wait for it, I’ll come back…

Skip ahead to me researching the band Re-Flex (not just a flex people, a RE-flex), that one hit wonder that wrote “The Politics of Dancing”. Their song was going to go into Footloose, but do you know what the producers went with instead?

That’s right, Shalamar’s Dancing in the Sheets. See it’s clever cause it’s like “Dancing in the Streets”, but it’s sheets instead. It’s a double entendre for sex. It’s so fucking clever…

For those of you not familiar with Footloose, for fuck’s sake do not pollute your mind with it now, Kevin Bacon or no, fun and boppy Kenny Loggins theme or no. It’s too late for the rest of us.

And for the rest of us: The scene where bad girl and preacher’s daughter Lori Singer sneaks an elicit “rock” tape into the drive thru and all the kids start dancing to the groovy tune, especially the guy that looks like he’s having some sort of relations with the Pac-Man machine, the song playing on the soundtrack is Shalamar’s Dancing in the Sheets.

I’m not sure what the point of this is, only that I can only assume that KajaGooGoo will turn up in a conversation soon…