Talk About The Passion

After a Monday night pilgrimage for beer and tots, a few of us wound up at Gorgeous' place to help her get rid of the liquor in her cabinet. I'm always happy to help out a friend. Apparently the mixture of many stouts, cajunized tots, vermouth, gin and little green olives makes me want to tell some stories.

I can get all talky on your ass sometimes. I'm frankly surprised that more people don't tell me to shut the hell up. I was reminded today that I had told Brandon quite a lot about my Sedona trip so many years ago. And I remember quite clearly rambling on in the entryway while I drunkenly put my shoes back on about Van Gogh and Picasso and blindness.

See, we were looking at the Rothko-esque painting that Nikki 2 K's had made for Gorgeous and the space she had chosen to hang it up in. I remember when he first unveiled it for her and looking at it propped up against an crumbling, industrial, concrete building smack in the middle of a neighborhood smack in the middle of being forgotten and being rebuilt, our bellies full of beer and German food. Viewing the painting again, I was taken by the brush strokes and reminded of seeing those soul crushing Van Gogh's up close, and how you could see the frenzy and thickness of paint being used to produce a scene that needed to be recorded right then and there; you could see brilliant madness in those brushstrokes.

I remembered and told the scene of Greta May and myself deep in the Impressionists at the Guggenheim, the eve before a life changing trip to Europe. Chris and Bif were on their own somewhere, but Miss May and I were standing breathless in front of the Van Gogh's, he was a common ground that we collided over when we first met.

As we stood there, trying to take it all in, a blind man was led to a painting by his companion. The companion then did his best to describe the paintings to his blind friend.

I was already in an emotional state, but this made me openly weep. How do you even begin trying to explain Picasso to someone who cannot see it? And the need to have it told, the desire to do so... It not only drove it home again just how lucky I am, but it made me realize that it is my duty to look when there are others cannot, my duty to listen when others cannot, my duty to live and dive into the sheer ecstasy of living.

It was raining when I left Gorgeous' place, much as it had been raining when we left the Guggenheim. While we had run down the streets of New York as a fulfilled and playful foursome, I walked the streets of Seattle by myself, more than slightly drunk, but smiling at the wonder of it all.


Song Stuck In My Head Right Now: "Perfect Circle" by R.E.M.

Yin And Yang The St. Patty's Day Experience

So it was my big bachelor weekend; no wife, no kid, just me and the cats. I'm here to state that I may be growing up a little bit. Even with no rules, even though it was my weekend to run screaming through the streets with a bulging crotch, starting fires and singing badly, I kept it pretty in control.

I went out with the cast after rehearsal Friday night. I drank a couple of whiskies and was home by 1. I think I could kind of see where things were heading with the loud drunken babble rising and the sad illusion of self importance hiding behind the coats on the coat rack. I realized that I would rather enjoy my empty Saturday than curse my hangover. Plus, being at home, watching A Scanner Darkly and eating some frozen pizza sounded pretty good.

I woke up Saturday afternoon and went immediately to the couch where I flipped between watching movies and napping. I at first felt guilty for wasting a day in this fashion and then realized that I wasn't wasting a god damn thing. Who knew the next time I'd be able to spend a Saturday doing nothing. And so another nap I took. I considered shopping, but didn't. I considered going to the bookstore, but didn't. It wasn't until Saturday evening plans began to take form that I got moving.

I have to say that St. Patrick's Day is sort of amateurs night out. Every dickface from the suburbs crosses bridges to flood the urban bars and drink gallons of beer fortified with vitamin FD&C Green #3. I don't feel a need to put up with the sort of incompetence on display on St. Patrick's Day, and to celebrate the Irish in my blood, I will hunker down in a friendly corner, with others if they are available, and partake of the sacrament.

Saturday night was spent on a Guiness soaked nitrous cloud. Jason, Mandy and I started out at a pizza place packed with revelers in green and a middle aged cover band who only seemed to know songs by The Beatles and Neil Diamond (the occasional Van Morrison tune notwithstanding). Good pizza, nice manager who let us drink beer standing in his entryway and then helped us with a cut on our pitcher price.

We went back to rock M&J's place with some Black and Tans, some Irish Car Bombs, and some Whip It's. King Cracker was in effect, and I could feel the spirits of Mercedes and Hellby floating nearby and laughing. I was on a double balloon rush, listening to a song by The Smashing Pumpkins, when some sort of deep thought in regards to sex and death and drugs came floating up, but I promptly forgot it.

I again slept in Sunday, did some laundry, finally went shopping and to the bookstore. There was no hangover to fight, no party scars to ponder over, and I even attempted to counteract all the pizza devouring by having a salad and blueberry juice for lunch. That's when the whole grown up thing entered my mind.

While I love to get out for a little drunken nihilism, it's getting to a point where it's more a fun idea than a necessity. While I love spending time with my friends and that heady chance of getting into some sort of trouble, I'm also a fan of just sitting still for a minute and trying to catch up with the mad whirl of the world. And while I like to dip into a little irresponsibility from time to time, ultimately I miss Bif and I miss Riley and I'm okay with trading off a few drunken nights to spend an evening on the couch with my lady, to watch that kid smile his smile.

An Infant Stole It From Me, I'm Stealing It Back

I'm going to catch up on some sleep this weekend, but right now I'm special tired. I'm so tired it almost feels like being drunk. My tired eyes misread an internet news fact and for a minute there I was pretty sure that a new leopard species had been found in Bono.

"Wow," I thought. "Is there anything that mad bastard cannot do?" The guy already fronts U2, is single handedly saving the world, had the balls to release an awful version of "Helter Skelter" in a major motion picture, and is apparently harboring a brand new species of large, predatory cat inside of him. I have apparently been a little hard on the guy.

But no, the new leopard was found in Borneo; Bono's still a douche.

Bif took the little man away for a little while, and while I'm sorry that the horrors of the OC are being pushed on him at such an early age, I'm glad that that side of the family is getting a chance to see him. I have to say that for such a little guy, he leaves a big old hole in the place when he's not around.

You would think that with Riley being gone, I would be getting more sleep. Wouldn't you? Well wouldn't you?!? Why does no one ever answer my questions? I am hoping that is the case this weekend.

There's a problem that I have when I'm in a play, or doing rehearsals for one as I am now. Getting onto the stage and playing around fills me with an energy that typically takes 8 kinds of pharmaceuticals, a coffee bean omelet and a heavy electric shock to my anus to procure. I can be dragging throughout the day, but once I hit the theater I'm ready to invade Idaho. This energy tends to stick around for awhile after rehearsals and it often becomes difficult to drop off to sleep.

So taking last night as an example, there's a lot of me wandering the apartment and talking to myself, or to the cats, or to the shambling freaks I spy walking the sidewalks outside my apartment. I don't expect any answers, typically filling in their side of the conversation with an enjoyably comic voice anyway. After awhile, I will eventually look at a clock and say to my imaginary counterpart, "man, I gotta hit the sack." After hitting said sack I will lay wide eyed and tossing until I eventually slow my brain down enough to drop off, or I rub one out. I will then come to work the following morning punchy, delusional, and somewhat abusive on the phone to the poor bastards who push me.

But this weekend, I'm making sleep my bitch. I'm going to eat sleep like it was a pizza, drink it like a pitcher of beer. I'm going to run my fingers through sleeps silky hair and then punch it repeatedly in the face.

St. Ides Of March

After a fairly disastrous senior year in high school, where all my proverbial chickens came home to roost, I was coerced into spending another year under my parent's care and tutelage as I was not deemed trustworthy enough to be out there on my own yet. They were in the midst of moving to Gig Harbor, Washington, which at that time was the LAST effing place I wanted to be. But be there I was.

That last cannot be a real sentence...

After a particularly dark year of the soul, I hopped in my trusted Honda Prelude for the sunnier climes of Orange County. What I found when I arrived there was that my brother in arms, Damon, had fallen in with a pretty disreputable crowd. They were ruffians and layabouts, they stole and drank and did drugs, they made it a point of pride to run afoul of societies nicer corners. What seems fairly ridiculous about the whole thing though is that these were kids that grew up in the same area I had gone to high school in, almost all of them with well educated parents far richer than mine. The scruffiest, scroungiest, laziest one in fact still lived with his parents (they all did) in the same upper most upper class housing development that Tom Cruise once owned a house in.

I began to hang out with them as well, learning things like the art of the perfect bud deal and how to break in to your parent's sail boat. But the most useful thing I took away from them was the drinking of malt liquor.

I had no idea what malt liquor was at that point except for hazy memories of something called Schlitz Malt Liquor which apparently caused a wild bull to come through and trash a bar when you busted one open. But here I was, sitting around a small, man-made lake in a subdivision in Mission Viejo (pick one, for all intents and purposes they are the same), and chugging 1-2 bottles of St. Ides. It tasted like ass, but for about 4 of my hard earned dollars, placed in the untrustworthy hands of the member of the group who had a fake ID, I could get two bottles of this ass tasting beverage.

Getting through a bottle and a half left me effing drunk, left me frunk...

I finally got fed up with the Laguna Hills version of the Crips and stopped hanging out with them. This also stopped my ingesting of Malt Liquor for a few years. In those early San Francisco days when I was so poor I was stealing toilet paper from work, Corado and I would occasionally pick up some Mickey's for a quick and super cheap drunk. Mickey's didn't taste any better than St. Ides, but it seemed marketed more towards frat boys than towards gangsta rappers and the homeless. While I didn't fit into either group, I guess I felt more at home within the Mickey's demographic.

I guess I would typically end this sort of thing with a wistfully nostalgic tag about missing my St. Ides days - but I don't. Thinking back on it actually reminds me of the free floating anxiety I felt when contemplating the sort of societal cancer that Orange County child rearing created, and the awful, rotting sweet taste of that malt liquor.


Song Stuck In My Head Right Now: "I Am The Resurrection" by The Stone Roses.

Some Of These Days

Some people might say that if Bif and I were meant to be together and I had ended up living in the 1st Avenue house, we would have met anyway further on down the road; probably in San Francisco, maybe at the Tart to Tart on Irving. Some people are funny. Some people seem to think feeding chemical sugar substitutes to kids is a good idea - go ahead Chuckles, spread that shit on your grapefruit.

Some things that I'm not a fan of right now:
1) The amazing amount of sleep I did not get last night.
2) Being hailed on during my walk to work; that shit stings after awhile.
3) The complete lack of bears in the downtown area. I would like to see them wandering around from time to time. Not like Grizzlies or Kodiaks, not bears that effing take your head off, but some personable brown or black bears ambling along Second and James would be cool.

I was living 6 to a house in Mill Valley for a short while with some folks forcing this neo-hippie idea on themselves. I have no problem with hippies, but when you're forcing the lifestyle because it doesn't quite match your innate beliefs, well you're trying too hard. And trying too hard seems to fly in the face of all that being a hippie is, and that sort of makes you like one of those Escher optical illusions - impossibly twisted and makes me feel sort of nauseous when I look too long. But that is not the point at all. The folks in this house used a clear, glycerin based soap that smelled of ruby red grapefruit. I liked the soap, but after a couple of days I realized that something about the tangy smell of that grapefruit reminded me of B.O.

B.O. soap... yup, right next to the tuna flavored tooth paste.

It's gonna be a weird one today y'all...

Where Will They Live (Part 2)

So Alexi and I cruised the town that we would soon call home, listening to Joy Division and savoring the tastes of the Woodstock’s Pizza we had for dinner. We spent that night at the place where Jeanette would be living the next year, this guest house directly behind the landlord's house. I personally think that it was a shed that the guy transfixed with a bathroom and cheap kitchen set up. Janny Sue was sharing it with her professional ice skating sorority sister; her name escapes me, but her over-enthusiastic and fake smile and her tight blond curls made me think of what happens to those child beauty pageant contestants when they get to college age. She seemed like she would crack that happy facade at any time and would be taking out whoever happened to be nearby.

Alexi and I spent that night brazenly breaking the no smoking rule and lamely attempting to hide it by sitting beneath the open window and blowing the smoke out. It was one of those delirious evenings where you spend a number of hours in the dark and laughing so hard that it feels like you've eaten a live bear the next morning. We mainly stuck to four words that entire night, but they consistently made us laugh like special needs kids - "naughty little puss puss".

I think it was riding that giddy line between being a child and pretending to be an adult.

The next day we had breakfast at what used to be a phenomenal breakfast place downtown and went out looking for an apartment. What we had actually found was an adorable house on 1st Avenue. I fell in love with it from the point we walked in the door. The rental agency robot pointed out the "swamp cooler", a term I had never heard before but has been sitting in the active, front portion of my mind ever since. There was also the basement that ran the entire length of the place where, Alexi and I agreed, Damon would be perfectly comfortable shutting out what little light actually made it down there.

We ended up not getting the place because of Damon, which is ironic when you consider that he ended up never coming up there to live anyway. I used to often think that if we had actually lived in that house, would Damon have come and not disappeared off the face of the earth? Would Alexi and Amy Lou have worked things out and stayed engaged? Would we have met Rob and Colin who took their turns at gently shaping who I was to become in those formative years?

The answer is probably not, any of them, but more important than any of that, I probably would not have found my amazing and beautiful Bif.

Wow Joy Division, you cracked open a big messy chapter of my life for my perusal. Thanks for that.

Where Will They Live

Wow, today has been crazy busy. And I barely remember this weekend - and not because of any sort of self abuse. I think that I'm just tired and all the play rehearsal puts me in a weird sort of mind space.

On the way into work I was fed a nice, hot portion of "Day Of The Lords" by Joy Division. I was also nearly hit in the face with the aluminum crutch of a rotund man standing on the sidewalk of Cherry Street, bag of god knows what gathered at his leg. I sort jerked my face away from the worn rubber knobbie at the bottom of the crutch and tried to throw him my "look dude, I'll mess your shit up" look, which admittedly is probably not that strong; few people I think tend to believe that I will mess their shit up. But Old Roundy kept shaking his crutch and bunching his bag. I was about to let fly some choice but derogatory words, soaking his face with my vitriol and saliva, when I realized that he was attempting to hail the bus coming down the street behind me from what was decidedly not a bus stop.

And that's about the time that "Day Of The Lords" came on. Man, the tuberculosis ward aspect of the endless coughing here at work is making me feel a bit put out. Man, I derail myself way too easily.

The Joy Division immediately brought me back to a summer night in Chico, before I lived there, before I started planting the seeds of drama and depression that would be harvested a couple of years later. Alexi and I were driving down Main Street through the quaint downtown area of this college town - quaint meaning it was about 7 or 8 blocks by 3 or 4 blocks, depending on how loose you wanted to play with the "downtown" definition of things.

We were going to move there, Alexi and me. Damon was coming as well and eventually Amy Lou would be joining us. But for now it was just Alexi and I, looking for a place to live and admiring all the brick buildings and the heat and young, beautiful people. The drive north through the hellish section of I5 was taken up with Bauhaus and Bowie and The Cure's Staring At The Sea cassette (with the awesome side two chock full of B sides), but I specifically remember driving down Main Street, fully loving the heat that would soon become a dreaded monster and listening to “Day Of The Lords”.

There was so much excitement flying around the air then. Alexi was breaking away from his parents, both of us were breaking away from the creeping evil of Orange County and we were going to be in an honest to goodness college town. And if coming of age movies had taught us nothing, it was that college towns are where the BIG trials and tribulations would take place. Compared to the cultural wasteland of OC, we were in a town that had coffee shops and a serious lack of chain restaurants, a place where the bookstores readily sold Henry Miller and William Burroughs, a place where the video store carried a much sought after copy of Eraserhead.

And crap, I need to go back to work. My apologies, but I’ll continue this tomorrow.