SxSW 2006: Day Two and The Book

Whoa, snap. I’ve been mad-behind on my updates, but that’s because my internal organs were crying foul, and there are portions of my brain which may be permanently deceased as a result of all that went down this past week.

My word, what a mess. Always.

Tuesday night marked the second day of my SxSW 2006 bender (man, there must be a better way to entertain myself, right?). But in reality, the prior Friday was the first day (where I attended a somewhat lame-ish poetry reading at Deville, where I spiraled into a drunken, confused oblivion by the time the third rhyme-mangler took the stage). Saturday was a clutch of events and parties, which caused me additional drunkitude. I never really got a break between the weekend and the week of SxSW. Sunday night was rather tame, but the dealings of Friday and Saturday were strong enough to keep me soused well through.

Tuesday hit with a relative calm. Still holding down the day jobby-job. So I had the great fortune of being allowed to plod through my absolutely crippling hang over from the night before whilst staring at endlessly linked spreadsheets, pained in a shitty swivel chair, under the humming lights of a fluorescent hell… wondering whether or not my misty perspiration was booze-scented. One never knows how long it takes to stop sweating out the prior night. Could take weeks.

After work, I actually went for a jog. To aid in getting the toxins out of my system. I believe it worked rather well, since I felt like a thrice-used prison condom before the jog, and about a five dollar bill after.

That makes absolutely no sense, whatsoever. Suffice to say, I felt much better after my jog.

After the jog, it was over to Allen Chen’s crib to bag shwag for the Austinist parties. Magazines, stickers, pins, hand-written notes of random sexual description, and other unnecessary budget-sucking marketing garbage which will necessitate the hiring of hundreds more street sweepers to clean off the cobbled tops of our downtown streets.

The notes were written, but only in my mind. And they were REALLY random. Like, bat-on-stryrofoam-duck-decoy sex. Screwdriver-in-light-socket-bucket-of-water type shit. Goat asphyxiation. And I don’t even know what that last one means.

Never got penned though, and that’s assured to be best for the population. Specifically for the individual shwag-grabber, if not the general population as a whole. Plus, there’s the whole Austinist rep to consider. I doubt Allen would appreciate the bat-on-decoy humor if some successful, unfortunately religious label exec were to have been the one to nab and read it along with the newest copy of Urbland Taist magawhatever. Might have been a tragedy.

Allen treated those of us there to stuff bags, by stuffing us with a couple of cocktails.

That sounds like some sort of sexual double-entendre, and if I meant it that way, it would be hilarious. But a blog is no place for inside jokery. It’s a place of mild embarrassment and platitude-laden navel gazing. So there’s no way I’d be talking about him here.

Back to me.

Few drinks into the evening, and I breezed out to meet up with Ceeplus (Eric) over at The Peacock for his pre-SxSW party. When I got in, Richard Henry was spinning.

Richard’s good people. He’s worked with Ceeplus before, and I definitely see him around town. We have a host of friends in common. That, and he’s a founding Feedback partner. Interesting to hear/see him on the decks. I knew he was known for spinning around town here and there, but I’d never run across it.

Starsign (Dave) got up on the tables after Richard, and dutifully did his thing. People weren’t drunk enough to really get down yet, so he was holding it all up on musical merit alone. There are songs that people WANT to dance to, there are songs that people WILL dance to (if: drunk, at a country wedding, or violently coerced), and there are songs people ONLY listen to (usually because they don’t dance at all, or they really, really, really love the song and prefer to kick back and dissolve whilst listening). It’s hard to nail that third variety without blowing straight past it into muzak/background music territory. Takes a delicate touch, and a mastery of music purpose. I could never manage to pull that off, but Dave’s pretty capable. I know he prefers to maneuver crowds that are up and moving, but admittedly, it’s much-much-much easier to keep an already-excited crowd than it is to build one. Them’s just facts.

Cee did his thing, and then Klassen showed up to finish off [my] night. I had to leave in the midst of Klassen’s set because I had reached a level of buzzed where I will talk almost incessantly about a single thing, and what I say about that singularity

Will

Not

Change,

Ever.

At some point in a night of hard drinking, I’d say hour 2, I usually make some unconscious and almost arbitrary decision concerning what pointless topic I will be beating the living shit out of for the remainder of the night. And on that Tuesday, it was my book. The book that I finished weeks ago, but have yet to do anything with.

And that’s what makes it so obnoxious. If the topic I had chosen had been something like “how brittle and useless those fucking apple crates from Fiesta are,” then I’d be alright with bothering strangers about it. But you can’t go around blabbing like a goddamn string-pull doll about shit you’ve either never done, are in all probability aren’t going to do. That’s just insincere bullshit. Unless you’re talking about being a ninja, becoming a wombat wrestler, or how you’d totally take a bulldozer through the drive-through at Popeye’s Chicken if you had a pink one, and that’s perfectly acceptable bullshit. Or, as in this case, if YOU’D NEVER WRITTEN A BOOK BEFORE.

If you’ve never written a book, well, then you’re just lying. And drunk people lie all the time. Comes with the territory. That’s why it’s best to only hang around other drunkards, because they won’t remember what ridiculous lies you slobbered out the night before. That, or they’ll confuse their lies with yours and just chalk it all up to hang over delirium, which is equally safe.

But I was actually chatting with people who actually READ what I write every now and again. They didn’t know it was me, necessarily, because it was out on the anonyrnets, but they had read my shit somewhere online. Then, I go and ramble on about how I’d finished a project which is still, clearly in the infant stages of development.

So now there’s added pressure and shit. Not much extra, but still. I mean, who needs extra pressure for purely creative endeavors, eh?

Goddamn alcohol. You’re supposed to hold me down and help me scuttle my potential, not whip me forward and force me to produce.

Not cool.

Tomorrow is the official beginning of the SxSW reporting thing. It may be here, it may be up on the Austinist site. Depends on my mood, and that of the editorial staff. They may pull what I write. Plus, the material’ll be a week old by tomorrow.

Meh.

Yeah, I’m late, but so fucking what? I haven’t taken a shit in two days. Being blackout drunk for a good three out of seven nights of binge drinking coupled with fevered bouts of half-sleep really, really fucks with the standard operation of even a healthy man’s colon. Whatchu got on that? Huh?

Nothing. You’ve got NOTHING.

My butt hurts.