WORD: An Agitated A*S Monkey.

The Dangers of Honesty Pt. 1

2007-03-08T00:03:00.000-06:00

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a column about how SxSW is a festival which gets maligned far too often without good reason. Not that there’s no reason to malign the fest. There are PLENTY of reasons to bash it. It’s strayed far from its original purpose, which was to provide a venue for unsigned bands to play in front of suits with pens, blank contracts, and corporate accounts.

What could have been called a “talent convention”. Or “slave auction”. Whatever. Bottom line: the bands are only there for exposure. I don’t know if any of them get paid today, but in the beginning, NONE of them did. They tried out, sent demo tapes to the SxSW “talent scouts”, and hoped that they would be given the opportunity to play in front of whoever it is that “makes” the industry. It’s a privilege, not a right, to play SxSW. Even today.

But the spirit of it has changed significantly. And I don’t think that’s coincidence or random chaos which has led the fest to where it is today.

Now we get to hear The Stooges, Morrissey, and The Walkmen. Aren’t these bands signed? And if they aren’t, do they even care? Are The Stooges looking to pen a record deal, or are they just going to play some classics, collect a fat ass check, eat some Kirby Queso and fly on back to the home for wayward punk retirees?

Are these “headliners” here to appease the throngs of crybabies from years past who peered over the list of unsigned bands who were there to scratch out their name, and thoughtlessly bawled “I’ve never HEARD of any of these shitty bands! I want some of that Ramones, or maybe an underground act like Coldplay!”? Why the fuck did they do that if it’s supposed to be a festival to connect the unsigned with those of signing authority?

Ozomotli or Bloc Party about to be free agents or some shit? Panthers? Come on.

And then there’s the cost to get in, traffic, lines at eateries, and wha-whah-cry-blah-tears.

And it’s all legitimate, every complaint. But why bother? It isn’t going to change just because it’s incapable of being everything to everyone. It is what it is, and the majority loves it in its current form. So why not just find a way to enjoy that shit? For the love of god, if the festival pisses you off, then turn that urine into lemonade!

At least, that’s what I tried to write in my Austinist post, in a roundabout sort of way. Even if the other crybaby contingency, the throwers of the festival, cannot grasp the possibility that people like me who love the festival, but completely understand why others hate it, actually exist. And that unlike both extremes, we aim to be a reasonable middle ground of an island, poking out from a see of their obnoxious tears.

God Has Better Sense Than That

2007-01-03T15:38:00.000-06:00

God-fucking-damn this man. What the hell does he think he’s doing? What an incomprehensible ASSHOLE.

I’ve never been a big fan of Robertson, or his penchant for pouring the blood-soaked cash of his sheep-like followers all over our political process like the talentless wannabe entertainer he is. But to get all Chicken Little like this is beyond absurd. Worse yet, it’s criminally reckless. Why can’t his “god” explain THAT to him? Motherfucker.

We have enough fear mongering going on here in The States. Like a crazed wildfire that ends up consuming even the most honest and good-meaning citizenry. It’s a duping process, a psychological chain of events. Perhaps not coordinated, but certainly symbiotic in light of the results. Big Money provides the fuel. Big Political Influence lights it. And let’s face it, Big Religious Cults such as the 700 Club fan the living fuck out of it.

And then we all get burned.

So here’s Robertson, spewing even more of his “the sky’s fallin’! So better write me a check quick!” rhetoric, trying to promote his various religious and political machines on the ol’ boob toob. His own little show. His already-willing crew of followers. As he’s always doing. Why should I care, right?

Why? Because this time he’s stepped even further over the line than he has in the past. Now he’s fucking practically “guaranteed” some sort of attack JUST BECAUSE HE AND THOSE WHO INVEST IN HIS SMUG SMIRK WON’T WANT TO BE WRONG. And I get the feeling we’re all going to get burned here.

It’s flabbergasting the lengths to which some people will go to desperately maintain relevance. And it sucks that on some level, it works. I am, after all, discussing and considering this megalomaniac and his insane ramblings. Even when he’s obviously off his rocker. Damnit.

Dude is wrong ALL the time. On a daily, if not hourly basis, I would imagine. Pretty much constantly. That comes part-n-parcel with being pathological. And sure, he’s usually little more than a historical revisionist when he makes one of his myriad of incorrect predictions, selfishly invoking the emotionally-charged moniker by claiming some shit about how “god told” him all about it. But usually he’s prattling on about typhoons, earthquakes and “god-willed” diseases for gays. In other words: shit he has no understanding of and honestly has no influence over.

But murder and destruction by one man on another? Well that just makes me all kinds of paranoid. He’s suddenly more than just that kooky fool on the corner bellowing out nonsense about the “third coming” of the chupacabra wars or whatever. Now he’s making me nervous. And I’m not nervous about any terrorist attack.

I’m more nervous of him.

If he’s going to claim god spoke to him, which is his right (to be insane), then I’m going to go ahead and assert my right and claim that god (jabberwocky, Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man, or any other figment-ish creature) did no such stupid thing. And as a corollary to my claim, if there IS an attack of any substantial proportion on US soil that even RESEMBLES his obnoxiously vague description, then it had to have happened BECAUSE of Roberts’ self-serving “look at me! I talk to the baby jesus!” prediction.

Thanks Pat, you dick.

It Was Hard To Enjoy Today

2006-12-27T16:15:00.000-06:00

I’m going to go ahead and state that today was a death day. Lots and lots and lots of death happening. Seemingly all around me. From presidents to funk masters to people I’ve actually met and hung out with. It’s making the rounds. Sorry to sound so blasé, but a spade’s a spade. This particular spade is especially spade-y. It’s the final comeuppance, after all.

Final, final, final… I realize that this is an eventuality. Death is the lingering cymbal crash of a brutal symphony. It’s the deflating airbag of an explosive single-car accident. The finishing touch of icing on a horribly burnt cake.

Wait, no. Make that a BEAUTIFULLY burnt cake.

Regardless, it’s inevitable. Simultaneously catastrophic and wondrous beyond my comprehension, yet so easily grasped in its totality. And what’s funny is that everyone has already been there, we simply don’t remember.

Let me explain that last part, since it sounds hella-Haley’s Comet Clique and shit.

Wherever it is that we’re headed, if anywhere, is likely wherever the hell we were when we poofed-up in our mommas’ wombs. That was some variety of ether-spillage, and the return is logically some version of ether-return. Well, not logically. But potentially.

My point being: it is highly likely that we know exactly where we’re going when we die. We know, because in some sense, we’ve already been there. We’re subconsciously aware of exactly what’s in store for us. And like a vomit-nervous cat on its way to the vet, maybe, just maybe, it’s that deep-seated awareness which makes everyone so goddamn scared to go.

That, or you believe in hell.

That Girl Sucks, And I Just Don't Care How That Makes Her Feel.

2006-12-08T15:17:00.000-06:00

You know what’s funny? People’s feelings. They’re hilarious. Especially the delicate ones. Such as, when you tell someone that they’re being hypocritical or just plain left-fieldy.

And I’m not saying that because I have none of my own snowflakeishly-thin feelings, and I just revel in the smacking-down of others. Oh no. Not by a long shot.

I, myself, am quite the delicate peacock feather. I require constant care and petting. Never a nasty word can be directed toward me, lest I break down into a wave of inconsolable tears and face slaps. I can take criticism, sure. As long as its criticism directed at someone else. I especially hate being critiqued when I’m actually wrong.

That’s the WORST.

There is nothing more heart-wrenching and equally vile as someone explaining to me why I’m wrong when I’m actually wrong. Don’t people KNOW how devastating that kind of honesty can be? That the truth will not set me free? That it will actually become the shackles, cement boots, and shark-filled waters that will END ME? Does anyone out there have any idea how crippling it can be to learn that you’re a complete nimrod of a twatrocket? Anyone?

I didn’t think so. I’m the only one to have withstood undue torture-by-truth. You are all goody-do-nothings.

I mean, let’s say I was driving my car while trying to download some totally sweet ringtones for my brand new Razr Tronphone. And I’m not talking about some super gay Pac Man sounds. I’m talking Nickelback, off the NEW Nickelback album (totally new sound). So I’m driving and downloading some grand-tastic totally sweet NB soundbites to attach to my parole officer’s number. Multi-tasking because I’m trying to be efficient with my time. You know, conserving nature through efficient time-use and whatnot.

To help stop Al Gore’s global warming.

And I accidentally bump into some asshole on a bike who is riding near the CAR LANE. HELLO, it’s for CARS! All the signs are WRITTEN IN CAR, you shit.

And then he ends up seriously hurt or something stupid. I’m still not getting it, really. I mean, how far is a bike from the ground? So, how far could he have fallen anyway? Two feet? I told the cops that he should stop being such a little bitch and come out of his coma already. He’s seriously threatening to ruin my weekend plans with all this “intensive care” bullshit. Shouldn’t his wife and children be responsible for this? Or the orphans he cares for? Where were THEY when he got on a bike instead of a bullet-proof Hummer to get home from work, huh? Am I the only one who cares now?

Fuck!

Anyhow, so the judge is up there in his tent robe, telling me what a bad driver I am! OMG, WHAT AN ASSHOLE! I mean, I know I should have put the car in cruise control and steered properly with my knees instead of just “letting the wheel go” like that, but it’s so mean to say I’m a bad driver in front of other people! Especially in front of strangers. I mean, that judge is seriously endangering my future by ruining my reputation by saying things like that.

What if one of those people in the crowd is the manager for JC Penny and I don’t get that summer job! OMG! I’ll miss out on the Cancun trip!

I should sue him for “honesty of character”. What a dick.

Hello Garbage Truck Man

2006-12-07T16:29:00.000-06:00

Ever heard of some old dude get soaked in gasoline whilst trying to carjack an old lady at some backwoods Texas gas station? Like dude just said “fuck it, I’m taking this old bitch’s Tahoe back to my mobile home so the dogs can have something fancy to live under”?

Well now you have. (if that crazy link bothers to work) What a piece of work. Nobel winner, that guy.

My truck, quite fortunately, is not likely to ever be a target of such wanton thievery. No Denali trim package over here. Oh hell no. I just got my rear view mirror glued back on, and that’s got me pretty excited! Now I can see the urgent gestures of the people I accidentally cut off on the freeway because my steering is so damned loose! Alright! If only the windshield wipers, CD player, and differential would magically fix themselves, it’d be perfect *!

Red rocket, red rocket.

It entertains me to learn how people are judged by their car. If you drive a late model Lexus, you’re a posh asshole. If you drive an Eclipse convertible you’re a titty dancer. And if you drive an older, beat-up pickup truck with four cracks across the windshield, you’re a garbage man.

Apparently.

I gather this from the fact that every day there is new garbage that has been deposited in the bed of my truck. It just appears there, like magic! Trash sorcery! Beer cans, cigarette packs/butts, fast food packaging, dead birds, whole branches, and other unnamed, general detritus refuse. Stankin’ up the joint.

This is done because I obviously enjoy throwing other people’s trash away. I really do. I especially like throwing away food related items, like half-eaten hamburgers and apple cores. That’s awesome. Makes me delirious just thinking about it. In fact, I like dealing with other people’s shit so much, it might be comparable to how much Canada must loving dealing with ours.

Because I KNOW we toss shit in the back of their pickup bed like it was an abandoned apartment dumpster. Like, fuck it.

So, keep that in mind kids: anyone driving a pickup truck is a garbage man. Whether they like it or not. Feel free to drop trou’ right in there to help with the compost!

Fantastic.

*Safe and drivable.

Standards Are Awesome.

2006-12-05T13:49:00.000-06:00

Hey! Guess what’s really NOT important?! Readability Level Statistics!

It’s called the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Level, and it’s so awesome I want to commit violence on myself! You see, F—K system does this voo-doo on paragraphs of words and then applies a statistically wow-erific model to fit that set of words neatly into a categorization which (big shocker) correlates to grade school reading aptitude! As in: a score of 5 = 5th grade reading level. 4 = 4th, 3 = 3rd, and 12th = you get the picture.

Unless you, yourself, are a 1. In which case, you’re totally confused by now and wish that your mother/brother wasn’t your sister/grandmother. Or you’re just drooling and searching for horse pr0n.

Back to the F—K method.

Apparently, in the same voice, and while speaking ostensibly on the same level (I only have one level of intelligence, presumably), I can write at a 6th grade level AND an 11.5th grade level! Simultaneously! That makes ALL the sense in the world! I checked it myself using Microsoft Word! It’s so easy to judge nowadays!

I’m sooooo glad we have these rating systems in place to tell me that in order to bring a paragraph from a 6th grade level to a 12th grade level, all I need to do is add run-on sentences and long, multi-syllabic words! Even if I fuck the grammar all up, jumble all the paragraphs into one long-winded douche-wheez, and use big, fake words in all sorts of impracticalishnistical ways! Smartness!

Flesch-Kincaid grade level 1.6 (so, you don’t even need to know English really):

The dog ran very fast. But not fast for dad. I like it when the dog gets beat. My dad beats dogs with his hook hand. His hook is made of metal and rubber. Like my mom’s left leg.

They were in a combine fire together. Mom says they were making me. Two bums came by and found them on top of the other. The bums did their thing. Then burned the combine. Mom’s leg got ate by coyotes after she passed out from the pain.

I don’t like it when dad opens my coke with his hook. It sounds so bad. It makes me cry. Like he just used that hook to open my brain instead.

Shut up stupid dog or I will hit you. With my third leg.

Flesch-Kincaid grade level 7.4 (what almost SIX more years of education can guarantee! Apparently!)

The dog ran very fast, but not fast; for dad. Precociousness. I like it when the dog gets beat because my dad beats dogs with his hooktasticalfullness hand. His hook is made of posthumously metal and rubberfishnets, just like my mom’s left; leggoristicality-o. They were in a combine fire together where mom says they were making me; fistedpainfully when two bums came by and found them on fiddlesticks top of the other. The bums did their thingsteriousnicity; then burned the combine forcedinstitutionalization. Mom’s leg got aten by coyote politicians after she passed out from the painstaticness. I don’t like it when dad opens my coke embroidering with his hook because it sounds so bad that it makes me cry; like he just used that hook to open my brain instead. Shut up stupid dogmaticalstatistician or I will hit you with my third leg bombastic.

Standards are awesome. We need more.

I Came So Close To Respect. But No. Not Today.

2006-12-04T17:51:00.000-06:00

He tried to make sense. He really did.

You know, I just can’t get behind all this religious posturing. It ruins a potentially decent message. It’s utter shit to me, but a message as simple as “killing doesn’t seem to be solving any problems” just gets all kinds of RUINED when it’s mummified in the used toilet-paper of religion.

Ahmadinejad’s open letter to Americans is a fine, fine example of what’s wrong with allowing religious rhetoric to lay waste to sound concepts. Here’s a guy, who, best of intentions, simply wants the American people to know that he and his country are not just some gaggle of miscreant sand-dwellers, shooting dogs for sport and spending their every waking hour plotting to destroy the next Freedom Tower. I guess there are idiots, probably in my own neighborhood, who still labor under the delusion that the entire middle east operates that way. But they probably also think Destro and Cobra Commander are real too, as active but silent members of the Al Qaida network. So it's likely that his intended audience isn't into "reading long stuff that sounds all complicated". Like fire extinguisher instructions.

Regardless, dude’s letter is well intended. And for the record, I wanted to hate what he had to say. I intended to be fully biased, and have all my pre-notions of how small-minded a man had to be in order for his eyes to be so small and close together. Like two ear studs inserted a centimeter apart on a full-sized potato.

But for the most part, his sentiment is decent and appears to be an honest appeal to the good nature of the average tax-paying American Joe. But then he had to go fuck it all up with a slew of god talk. Man, what a shame.

My issues, with this specific letter of text, in the order in which they grated on my goddamn nerves:

1. Continually claiming that one’s audience should be “God-fearing, truth loving, and justice seeking” is blatantly disingenuous. Either one IS, or they ARE NOT “God-fearing”. Placing repeated reminders in the letter is little more than obnoxious prodding. He might as well have said “remember kids, God will fucking lightening your ass if you don’t side with me, a fellow God-fearer!” He was only talking to others of religious motivation. Not science. Not logic. Not fact-based reasoning. According to Ahmadinejad, only those of faith are capable of solving/not-starting issues such as modern day imperialism and wanton murder.

Ehhhh... What? That's some double-fucking-speak if I've ever encountered it.

It’s quite possibly the stupidest stretch of vacant common sense I’ve ever had to endure, but, okay then, I’ll pretend it makes sense for the sake of making fun of it. You know, since he went to the effort of writing it all down or whatever.

So… what about those of us who don’t “fear” whatever “God” is being tossed around so irreverently? Are we the problem? The non-fearers? Are we what’s wrong here? Are we the reason why everything is (pretty much always) all fucked up? Well, last time I checked, the only “Godless” leaders of ANY known nation, or any other set of murderous humans, incorporated or otherwise, for that matter, were Communists. The EXTREMELY RATIONAL reasoning behind removing religion from that socio-political structure, while wholly impractical and extremely oppressive, was to ensure that there would be no MURDER along religious lines (which is a guarantee as long as religions are allowed to practice competitively). But, as is human nature, if any communist did indeed shed their religion, then they simply picked up bureaucracy instead. But for the most part, they were all religious as hell anyway. Secretly. They simply played the part of non-theologians to keep from having their heads lopped-off by competing closet-theologians.

Now that the Soviet Union is gone, everyone is super-religious again. Shocker. And the Chinese are split between a return to their respective Eastern Philosophic routes and the coastal worship of an exploding Market Economy. And of course, violence along lines of delineation is beginning.

N. Korea is black hole of who-knows, so I'm not sticking anything in it here.

I don’t think it unfair, or a stretch to state that the injection of religion into a political text of any kind will be IMMEDIATELY POLARIZING. Until every living human being honestly and truly believes the exact same thing about everything (perhaps as programmed robots, made by programmed robots, which could only have come from some imagined universe somewhere far beyond current human comprehension?) any disputing of this polarization FACT, ironically, simply proves that it’s true.

Let’s face it, if a Muslim even says the word “Jew”, people get upset, regardless of the context. Like “don’t talk about my people! You aren’t allowed!” or “dude, I don’t think it’s appropriate that you be mentioning them. Ever.” It doesn't matter what they said about "the other" group. Just mentioning names ruffles feathers.

And don’t get me started on how atheists feel when they’re even MENTIONED by ANY other religious group. If the pope were to say “there’s nothing wrong with being an atheist,” which he would never say, but if he did, there’d be a large coalition of atheists who would react with “DON’T PATRONIZE ME YOU OPPRESSOR OF THE MIND AND FREE THOUGHT. I WILL PAY NO TITHE TO THE SPAGHETTI MONSTER! Ever.”

Fools get upset over beliefs. Even without provocation or reason. Maybe it’s the caffeine. I don’t really know. Regardless, the polarization occurs.

2. I’m tired of the over-misuse of the term “immoral” between cultures. Any staunch follower of Islam stating that a non-follower of Islam was acting “immorally” is ridiculous. They’re “immoral” because their “morals” are different than yours. Stop acting like morals are finite and carved in stone. They aren’t. They’re liquid, and can be VASTLY different from one population, group, gang, prison block to another.

You might as well be trying to tell a sea otter that it’s activities are “immoral”. It's ridiculous.

This will always bother me. The semantic arguments that surround morality. It’s the newest lazy-man’s approach to making any random-ass point into a touchstone argument. Telling someone who is far outside your culture that they should believe something because it is “moral” is just as ridiculous as someone from Mozambique telling Alaskans that drinking tap water in Anchorage will definitely result in African dysentery.

Morality is contextual. Locally and culturally so. There’s no definitive.

You realize that in some cultures, what we deam as "innappropriate" homosexuality between boys and older, married men is PART OF THEIR MORAL CODE? As fucked up as that sounds to me, they honestly believe knowledge surrounding what it means to “be a man” can only be passed on this way. So they have these rituals surrounding it. To an outsider, it’s all kinds of crazy pedophile-sounding. But to them, they’re like “whatever man. This is how we roll.” They might consider our preference to just let boys figure shit out on their own as “immoral” and “irresponsible” in terms of youth education. And based on their moral code, hey, guess what? They’d be right.

To be clear, I AM NOT ADVOCATING THIS. I’m just sayin’ it exists, and according to their own compasses, passes for “moral”.

So, Ahmadinejad’s tossing around of any “morality” related words is meaningless in the given context. Probability says that he’s not talking about the same “morals” as those held by his audience (but by pure coincidence, he could be, one never knows! Aha. Ha.).

Again, with religious folk, who are likely under the erroneous impression that only one set of morals exists, all one has to say is “doing ______ is immoral. Do you do ______?” and motherfuckers will be falling all over themselves to say “oh good lord no! NEVER! I’m a god-fearing moral person, I am!”

Touchstone arguments. Lazy shit.

3. Then, of course, there’s the ever-popular “justice and truth” claims. Wow. I figured by now, no politician, regardless of their revolutionary roots, would be so asinine as to claim this as an aim. Governments cannot guarantee this. You know why? Because statistically speaking, it would likely involve the removal of that same government which is supposed to be providing the guarantee. A government hand over authority/power? Oh, right. And understandably, that has never happened. Nor will it. How would a self-serving government honestly know when it was stepping beyond the bounds of "justice and truth"? I don’t think it’s a stretch to state that all governments, over their entire course of existence end up making sacrifices and compromises which amount to injustice and manipulation of SOMEONE/thing. It might be a stated “goal” in the bylaws, constitution, or whatever. But it’s the first lofty pipe-dream to get shelved as soon as real governing starts happening.

I won’t delve further into that one. It’s just so stupid it makes me want to cry.

Some sort of book or whatever

2006-11-20T14:34:00.000-06:00

No No No. I haven’t mentioned anything about my book on here yet. Why? Because I’m not trying to pimp it wide-scale. It needs to marinate for a minute. Incubate. Crouch before the pounce. Something else clichéd and milquetoast. I’m doing a reading-type thing at a bar, and then I’m going back home for Thanksgiving. I don’t want to be stressing this shit whilst vacationing in beautiful Houston, TX.

Man, what a shiiiiiiiithole.

Can’t WAIT.

So, until then, I’ll leave a link up here to the site that’s publishing it “on demand” which translates to “fucking expensive as hell per copy”. But, them’s the breaks when a writer doesn’t go to a large-scale publisher from the start.

That will have to come after some traction, by my own definition, is found.

Word and all that goodness. Happy Turkey Day to any/every.

Pants In The Mist.

2006-11-01T11:39:00.000-06:00

I used to be a HUGE fan of clothes shopping. Long ago. Back when I thought I could change the world simply by employing the perfect pair of corduroys. But times have changed. Drastically.

Now I almost LOATHE shopping. The racks full of chemical-scented brand-splayed single-stitched trashwear that must be thumbed through. The lines that must be stood in. The changing rooms with the pin-riddled floors. And then, of course, there’s the loads of cash required to fancify oneself, cash which could easily be poured into a glass and drank instead. Drank and drank and drank.

Until there is but change with which to exchange for whatever falls from the frothy tipped taps…

But today, I’m actually considering a clothing run. In my haste to be less late than I normally am, I neglected to note that the current pair of pantaloons on my person have a rather conspicuous hole in the crotch. And not at the seam, where it may only be seen when I’ve got my legs splayed-out like a Thai hooker about to blow out some birthday candles with cooch air. Oh no. This hole, about the size of a cigarette burn (uh heh-heh, heh) is more frontal. To the right. And pretty much visible when I’m standing straight up.

I know this because when I entered the parking garage elevator and looked in the mirror on the wall (I’m guessing the elevator has a mirrored wall to give the riders a sense that there is more space, magically, beyond the walls of the box they’re in) to see part of my boxers showing through.

Awesome.

Awesome, and rather professional.

So I’ve been gallivanting around the office, taking note of how many people stare at said hole. I’ve counted three so far. Two couldn’t take their eyes off it. The other simply grimaced after a brief glance, but she’d probably grimace at me even if I were wearing a three-piece with top hat. She’s just cup-half-empty like that.

We get along fantastic.

Based on the rather pathetic condition of said pants, I’ve decided that they must go the way of the free-ranging buffalo. That is to say: from the comfort of a railway car I will shoot them with a ridiculously large gun and then skin them for their valuable fur and horns. The local Comanche tribe will write me a nasty letter within a week of this event.

My reasoning for this is pretty much the same as that of the new Alpha Male Lion who has conquered a new den of Lion Bitches, and feels the need to kill off all the previous Alpha’s cubs. Sure, it’s messy business, but how else are the ladies going to get all hot and bothered for new relations if they’re still futzing with their previous babies’ daddy’s babies?

So I’m ousting these pants, assuming that their vacancy in my weekly pant-rotation will force my shopping hand. I’ll be self-pressured into getting back out there and finding another perfect pair of leg sleeves.

I’m just not so sure how I feel about those matchstick-legged Euro-jeans that are out now. How do they fit their feet through the leg holes on those things? Shit’s crazy in a Parachute Pants kind of way. Ooooooh... Parachute Pants...

Like the Corners of My Mind

2006-10-25T15:38:00.000-05:00

I just remembered a long-passed moment, this morning, as I was showering. As I’ve mentioned before, I get CRAZY flash backs of obnoxiously random shit whenever I allow the hot water to blast the back of my neck whilst getting my morning scrub on.

It’s like there’s a hot-water-activated random memory generator button on the back of my neck. Perhaps I’m some sort of mutant?

That’d be pretty nice, actually. I believe that knowing I was a mutant would make other life experiences that much more refreshing and new. But I’d need to know what I was a mutant FROM. From a duck? From a bowl of porridge? A bad racist joke?

So the hot water was beating the shit out of my neck when this vibrant scene blasted across my internal etch-a-sketch:

I was running from someone, although I can’t remember exactly who, and I broke into the street. Just as my feet hit the hot, evening pavement of my old Alief street, I was almost hit by some brown Japanese model car. A poorly-bleached blond yelled out her car window, something along the lines of “hey you stupid little boy, stay out the fuckin’ street! I don’t want to hit any damn kids!”

I kept running. My shoes were pretty new, so I felt like I could run fast. Dusk was coming. It was near Halloween, just like it is now, when kids get all excited about the coming of “the seasons”, where all the cool projects involving hand turkeys, baked Christmas ornaments, and costumes arrive in quick succession. Plus, even though the Houston heat was still stifling, there was a scent in the air that always preempted cooler weather and extended stays away from school.

I was happy, laughing even, when I almost got hit. I did a sort-of-hop over the front driver’s side quarter panel of the woman’s auto, and kept on truckin’. My pursuer stopped. The woman cursed and drove away.

I have no idea was happening that lead up to that event, or what followed it. Hopefully the hot water will remind me.

Shared Consciousness Sucks

2006-10-23T14:28:00.000-05:00

I’ve never been much for reading up on the exploits of others. Or the philosophical rantings of whoever. Most of the time, I feel like writers get all tangled up in their own pretexts that it just takes too damn long for them to make a point.

I realize how hypocritical this is, but it doesn’t change how I feel about the lot of it.

I remember in college, there were two instances where I felt almost robbed of my own intellectual radar strength. The first time was when a dear friend INSISTED that I read Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. It’s a pretty thick piece of politifiction, and I had never been interested in either politics nor fiction, so I shrugged Shrugged. But he continued to insist. At times, it felt like pestering. He felt very strongly about me reading that goddamn book. He kept claiming that I’d “really enjoy the concepts she expresses” about the form and operation of modern industrial civilization. The political ramifications of money votes. The “doers” versus the “critics”. All that anti-socialism jargon and whatnot.

So I cliff-noted that motherfucker. Just breezed through the little pamphlet in some bookstore I happened to be wasting time in.

Bitch took a huge sampling of my own observations, and had already molded them into a fiction template. Senseless entitlement. Relativism. The fair rule of the moneyed class. It was all there, amongst a trippy 1984ish plot. She stole my life philosophies right out from under me. Long before I was even born.

I never read her entire work. I was afraid to learn of what else I hadn’t actually thought up on my own.

I preferred to continue living under the delusion that I was capable of truly original conceptual constructs. Delusions are fantastic.

A couple of years down the line, and I had grown tired of my own conservatively righteous views concerning the purpose and meaning of civil society. After busting my ass for a couple of years, working for The Man while trying to play His Game with the whole College Thing, I started to turn proletariat. Never a Red Star, “kill the scientists!” variety of labor defender, but definitely more “progressive” in my thinking.

Coming from Alief in Houston, where there were very few, if any racial or socio-economic divides between peoples, I was not fully aware of how prevalent such divisions are in the rest of the US, and the world. In Austin, these divides were more apparent, and as I moved along through my little life, they made me increasingly upset.

Then I took an Econ course that revolved around Marxist theory. Motherfucker had already come to all the conclusions I was building in my head at that time, and synthesized those theories into several brick-like volumes: Das Kapital, over a hundred years before I was born, round about the time that slaves were being freed here in America.

And I was JUST finding my own way around to his theories. His 100 yr-old + theories, which were based on even OLDER theories that I hadn’t even come close to self-discovering yet.

As much as I enjoyed melding Marxist theory with modern-day capitalism, and all the philosophic snafus that pepper that process, I was highly miffed at the feeling that once again, I had been robbed of my own purely original experience.

The cogs in my head were simply churning out a reasonable facsimile of what someone else had already tired to produce, long before I became a genetic experiment. I was re-treading someone else’s tires. Following pre-marked trails. Inadvertently re-tracing the lines on someone else’s masterpiece.

It bothered me to the point where I stopped reading philosophy altogether (except for a handful of works on the theories of consciousness and dreams, because that shit’s badass) for fear that it would cause me to stop bothering with my own philosophizing. After all, what’s the point in trying to figure things out on your own if there’s a host of popular theorists who’ve already done it for you? Just read their ramblings and act like you thought that shit up all by your lonesome. Like every other book-smarty Psycholar out there.

But I couldn’t do that. Not to myself. Plus, I’m too lazy to read all that shit and again, it takes too goddamn long for any of them to break through their pretext fortresses to make a fucking point.

[again, hypocrisy observed]

I decided that it was the process that I was more interested in. The process of forming opinions is actually more interesting and important to me than the resulting opinion/theory. So I stopped reading other peoples’ opinions and theories and just set out to form my own. In its most vibrant mode: by way of life experience and reality warping.

And up until 15 hours ago, I was pretty pleased with my results thus far.

Last night, I watched the Bukowski documentary: Born Into This…

………

………

Motherfucker. Now I KNOW I don’t have an original bone in my goddamn body. But I’ve decided that I don’t care. I guess I can go ahead and read Johnny Cash’s autobiography now too. Fuck it.

2 For 10

2006-10-13T13:00:00.000-05:00

From my second writing project. Day 8.

-----------------------------

Noon. Time had come to leave Vegas, and all of its spicy vices. We packed up our things, and made our way out to the Mirage garage where The Beast had been hibernating.

She started right up. No fuss, no trickery, no threats. The sun was out, and the breeze was cool, so we wanted the top to be down as we rolled out of town. But no. No such luck. Somehow, somewhere between the strip and the gas station where we chose to gas up while on our way out of town, the convertible assembly shut down completely. Actuator failure, or something equally technical and unfixable with the tools we had on board.

So no more convertible top. No more hair blowing in the breeze. No more of the suave coolness that is exuded by a ’65 Lincoln convertible as it pimps its way along the highways and byways of America. On a lighter note, no more of my crap would be blowing out the back, and the trunk was then fully available for our luggage. No more compromises in the name of being badass.

The Beast had the deciding vote on our coolness, and we had been vetoed with a heavy fist.

I was far from worried about the lack of rag-top functionality, but it did manage to force me into cataloging the ongoing issues we seemed to be having with The Beast.

“So, let me get this straight. The top doesn’t work.”

Vance, with mild resignation, “yep.”

Me, with a brief gust of enthusiasm, counting on my fingers, “the dash lights, the fuel gauge, the speedometer, the drive indicator…” there were probably more issues than that, but those were the ones I could gather together and tally off on my digits.

Vance interjected, obviously hoping to curtail the list of his dream car’s failed components. “Right. None of them are functional.”

“Fucked. All of them, yes?”

“Yes. But the kicker is the top. As long as we don’t get pulled over for anything stupid, we should be fine without all that stuff. It’s such a beautiful day though. Too beautiful to have the top stuck up.”

It was a beautiful day. The sun was beaming down on us, only too happy to accompany us as we headed east to Arizona.

The longest most boringest post ever

2006-09-21T12:29:00.000-05:00

HOLY SHIT. I’m gonna rant about some BORING ASS SHIT. This is more for my own mental well-being than it is for you to bother reading. McSweeney’s is probably hilarious today. Go check that out instead.

Here in good ol’ Tejas, we don’t have state income tax. Most people cheer this, claiming that income tax is a socialist demon that needn’t exist in a state as independently great as ours. But really, we all hate the idea of income tax because if you added that to the exorbitant property tax and insurance rates here, we would magically OWE money for every day we slaved our lives away.

In that context: If you ever buy a home in Texas, there is something you will need to understand about that ownership:

DEDUCT EVERYTHING AGAINST YOUR INCOME THAT IS ALLOWED BY LAW FROM YOUR INCOME TAX. EVERY GODDAMN THING.

“Oh really?” You may be asking yourself. “Why bother with the headache of line items all over the place? I just Turbo-Tax that motherfucker and BAM! Done and DONE!”

Well, I’ll tell you why. Quite simple really: if you own property and you take the “standard deduction”, you are a sucker, a mark, an idiot, and there is a thick-as-thieves line forming at your doorstep to prove it.

DE-fucking-DUCT EVERYTHING YOU CAN.

It’s the ONLY way you’ll ever recoup all the fees, taxes and service charges associated with home ownership. The ONLY way. Because there are actual economic calculations involving the average amount of money that will be drained from an owner over the course of owning property in Texas. State/city/county/school taxes, Home Owners Insurance, utilities access (different from regular taxes), PMI, loan interest, various closing costs, appraisal fees, improvement application fees, re-construction application fees, and basic construction or recurring maintenance costs. The results of these calculations are extremely important to government and business alike (home sales and NEW home sales are two of the most watched measures of the domestic economy, and many believe they’ve been propping up our limping dollar for the past five years).

Not to impede anyone else’s campaign to purchase property, but there is a substantial vampire element that exists around every single inch of land ownership. The base assumption is that if you own land, you a) are responsible for all civic needs in all strata of civic need-dom wherever your property exists (theoretically, this responsibility translates to taxes based on your portion of “value owned” within whatever civic area). So, if the civic area decides that it needs some big-ass expensive shit that you don’t want, you’re pitching in regardless, for the greater good, whether you can actually afford to or not (roots of gentrification). And b) you are a willing teat for the throngs of little baby businesses that require your cash-laden milk. Just like death, it's coming. And you'll pay up goddamnit. One way, or another.

If you rented an apartment next door instead of owning your home, you would not be paying any of this directly, but your rent would probably go up proportionately to the owner’s increase in cost burden. So, in effect, whoever has the money to begin with, pays it in the end.

My current vampire element is PMI insurance. This is an obnoxious little fee which is borderline impossible to get around. The idea is this: if someone gets a loan to buy a domicile (not necessarily a house on land, could be a condo in space), the bank making the loan wants some reassurance that the buyer is serious about the purchase, and is responsible enough to take care of both the land and the loan payments. If the buyer can produce 20% of the cost of purchase (NOT 20% OF THE VALUE OF THE PROPERTY, because the bank will assume purchase price to be the “real value”, even if the price is WAY under market), then it will make the bank comfortable with the partnership, and it won’t require some loan service insurance, which is what PMI is. If you skip payments because you’re irresponsible or you keep losing jobs or develop a crack habit or whatever, the PMI bearer jumps in and covers the loan payment for you. Technically.

I’ve never known anyone who actually got to use this service because as soon as you cease making payments, your shit goes under lien, and is eventually repossessed, whether you have PMI or not. So it’s not an actual insurance.

It’s a fucking “you don’t gots enough cash up front for this shit” fee.

Now it used to be that once your principal payments (itty bitty portion of your initial interest-weighted mortgage payments) knocked that loan-to-purchase-price ratio to less than 80/20, the PMI would cease. Well, that 80/20 can move around based on all kinds of black-box factors, never in favor of the owner, to prolong the “necessity” of the fee. But IF you magically get the ratio in your favor, and IF you’ve owned your property for more than a year BUT NO MORE than five (five? How the fuck is someone going to pay 20% down on the principal of a mortgage when 90% of their mortgage payment goes to interest? Eh? Good scam), and you’ve had NO late payments in the last two years (basically: EVER), then you qualify to have a REAPPRAISAL (the fee doesn’t just “disappear”). And this reappraisal can ONLY be done through the bank’s “preferred” reappraisal service. “Preferred” makes it sound like there are options, with some being more “preferred” than others, but this is not the case. Here, “preferred” translates to “only”.

Lucky for you, according to the material sent to you by the bank, that reappraisal only costs $300 for an average single family home on an average size/shaped plot of land in an average area of town. If your property falls out of any of the those “averages” (80% of all properties in existence fall out of such averages) then it will likely cost more. But since they don’t specify what any of that means, you won’t know how much your reappraisal will cost until you request it, and then some dude comes out to wander around with a clipboard.

Oh, and you have to request it. Otherwise, it is likely that they will just continue charging the PMI fee forever, and you’ll never meet “Chuck” from Waco and his nifty, yet sometimes broken tape measurer (the only tool apparently necessary for granular property appraisal).

After the request, the bank sends you a fee notification which states that it will cost $350, not $300. You’ll likely ignore this, thinking “inflation’s a bitch!” but this dismissal is the start of your downfall. Forms accompany the fee notification. So you fill out the long forms with lots of information about you and your property, and then fax (fax? Seriously? Is this 1987 or what?) over payment information. BEFORE any reappraisal process begins.

They call a day later to set up a physical appraisal.

Then the dude shows up at your crib on the appointed date, and pokes around for a whopping five minutes. Scribbles shit on Xeroxed forms and doodles some floor plans. He’ll probably use your bathroom. Then he leaves.

A week later, you’ll get another letter telling you that it’s $500 instead of $350 because your property is outside one of many “averages”. Big surprise.

Defeated and deflated, because in the midst of the time that has already passed during this process, the cost for reappraisal has jumped 66%, AND you’ve paid yet another PMI. Awesome.

You go ahead with the hike in reappraisal fees because hey, they’ve probably already finished the damned thing and were just waiting to juice you for even MORE cash. Painfully evident.

Once you fax (again with the goddamn faxing) your agreement to the higher cost, you call the bank to get an e.t.a. on when the reappraisal will be done. They tell you 10 to 14 business days (two to three weeks) before they receive the report from their “preferred” appraiser. Then they’ll “process” that report between 7 and 10 business days (two more weeks) and get back to you. IF the reappraised amount puts you ABOVE the necessary value ratio, they will begin the process for the removal of PMI. If not, they’ll simply collect the $500 and tell you to go hate-fuck yourself. Sucker.

You won’t even ask how long the “process for the removal” might take, because you already know it’ll be “x to 10 business days”, pushing into at least two more PMI payments in the interim, and you just don’t give a shit anymore. But you do ask whether or not they would refund any PMI payments made between the actual DAY of the reappraisal (a good month or two before they decide on the fate of your PMI payment plan), which is the real day at which the new value was calculated, and the day they notify you that there is no longer a need for this fee.

They will tell you no. You will ask why not. They will tell you “because we already collected those payments before the decision was made.” To which you’ll respond “well then I don’t see your company’s motivation to expedite this process.” And they’ll reply, rather cheerily that “we don’t want you to be paying PMI any longer than you need to, so we would get rid of the payment as soon as possible.” Fried, and amazed at the ridiculousness of such a dumbass statement, you’ll retort “well, that doesn’t make any sense considering YOU decide when YOU get to stop collecting this fee from me, and you won’t be returning any you collect in the interim of this process.” Noting your sliding interest in the whole thing, they’ll craftily say “sir, we don’t want you to be paying anything you don’t have to, so we’ll stop collecting the fee as soon as we know that.”

With your mind wandering off to lunch land, tired of trying to figure out why it is that you must endure this bullshit graft, you decline further discussion of the matter.

And go take a long poop to cleanse your soul, realizing that you WILL pay up, one way or goddamn other. But you’ll keep trying. And collecting all those receipts and tax write-off notations for this year’s dance with the tax man.

Some people believe that getting what is called a 80/20 loan* will get you out of paying PMI. And it will. But it will replace that PMI fee with higher interest loan fee, which will be either equal or more than the PMI fee in the long run. And it will be paid to the same bank and its “preferred” coalition of fee collectors. Best case scenario for you, the budding real estate impresario: a wash. Worst case: you’ll pay MORE in the net, but think you’re so smart that your bigger brain got you around those pesky tricksters! But no. Not even close. Awesome.

*this is a two-part home purchase loan scheme where you put NO money down on a purchase, put 80% of the thing into a long-term regular mortgage loan, and then borrow the other 20% at a higher rate (because it’s technically a signature loan) to fill in for the 20% necessary to avoid paying PMI. Theoretically this might work, but it never actually does.

As I Do Every Year.

2006-09-11T09:53:00.000-05:00

Frozen

That’s what the Big Apple has become.

I am writing this email to let those who I have yet to verbally contact. I am alive, and well (other than a slight cough). As for the others in my midst:

Those who are definitely safe:
Allen
Chuck
Minna
Robert
Carolyne and John

Those that I'm not yet sure of:
Erik
Lisa
**If anyone has heard from these two, please let me know.

My cellular phone was barely of use before the one decent cell tower toppled to the Manhattan street-top (it sat upon the World Trade Center Tower 1, the first to be hit, second to fall), now it has become a paperweight. So, many of you have yet to speak with me. I'm writing an email instead.

I was nowhere near the towers as they were attacked. I just finished up my packing, preparing to catch my noon flight out of La Guardia Airport. I was making myself a nice, health-free egg, cheese, and raspberry jam sandwich as the news was announced.

For those of you unfamiliar with where I've been staying: Greenpoint, Brooklyn (Northern Brooklyn). Greenpoint is too far from the Financial District of Manhattan for me to hear any of the explosions. I watched the live film of the first hit: Tower 1 was on fire, when another plane appeared out of the corner of the screen. The newscasters became hysteric, and I had the misfortune of viewing the second hit on live TV. "Surreal" is a useless word to describe how it felt to watch that. Confused, shocked, confused, distressed, confused, angry, confused, doubting, confused as hell. While "WHAT THE FUCK??!!!" is not a proper, or acceptable way to describe a feeling, it fits best.

From there I ran outside to the Pulaski Bridge (a bridge between Northern Brooklyn and Queens, just across the east river from midtown Manhattan) to see if this was really happening.

The view was fabulous. What I was viewing was not.

The smoke from the fires stretched for miles. The bridge was packed with honking cars, and cursing or crying people. Strangers were hugging and praying, if they weren't too busy listening to radios.

After a few minutes, the mood of the crowd seemed to be turning a bit nasty. The traffic was thick, cellular phones weren't working, news was coming in that other strategic locations were under siege... it was an emotional pressure cooker. On top of all that, there were very few police on the bridge. It felt like the beginning of Bedlam. I left out of discomfort.
As soon as I returned to the house, reports came in that a third plane was in route for another Manhattan landing. I ran like hell back to the bridge to see if this was true. I don't know if another plane was indeed on its way, but upon reaching my viewing spot, there was a muffled BOOM and Tower 2 crumbled to the ground like a kicked sand castle. People began crying, praying, screaming, grabbing the chain-link fence that lined the bridge, and running around like lunatics. Cars were flying down the only open lane on the three-lane bridge, honking and careening as if suicidal. The sound of sirens, in every direction.

About 15 minutes after that, Tower 1 dropped in much the same manner as its "twin". Most of us just sat there, staring at rising clouds of dust which ruthlessly pushed north from ground zero. The insanity ended. Everyone tried to comprehend that the World Trade Center had instantly become nothing but a memory, right in front of our eyes. The only noise was the continued sound of sirens. Everyone slowly dispersed. I walked home, looking only at the ground. I didn't want to cry. I didn't want to see anyone else cry.

We don't have cable, so we only watch the local CBS station. They constantly talk about how well the city is pulling together to get through this. They aren't kidding. Based on my previous experiences here, that bridge should have erupted in raw violence. Instead, everyone prayed for each other's loved ones, asked where they could go to donate blood, and discussed the ramifications this event will have on US relations, worldwide. For once, I was impressed with the intellectual side, and capacity for compassion shown by New Yorkers.

The Polish inhabitants of my neighborhood are in "WAR MODE". The neighborhood is pitch-black. Not a single light was on after 9:30pm. Quiet... Our neighborhood is playing night-time hide-and-go-seek with terrorists, holding our breath and remaining perfectly still, so as to not give away our position. I suppose they are worried about another air attack. I don't blame them. But I'm more worried about the potential for certain elements in this city to take advantage of the fact that most authorities have their attentions on Manhattan, leaving the outer boroughs vulnerable. This city was built, maintained, and will proceed through the acts of opportunists.

If Brooklyn survives itself the next two nights, along with the possibility of subsequent attacks, I'll be thoroughly impressed by the strength of those living in New York on September 11, 2001.

The only memories of this that I would like to purge are those of the desperate souls who found it more fitting to plummet 100 stories to the pavement rather than succumb to the inferno. It was reported that some were jumping in pairs, man and woman, holding hands, all the way down. I hope CNN chose to leave that footage out of their reports. It will visit me in my dreams, to be sure. I'll be back in Austin, soon. I'm just glad I booked a flight for noon out of La Guardia today, instead of earlier out of Newark.

>> Craig

Tribute to the [Original] Jack Black

2006-09-07T16:43:00.000-05:00

This time the lights will shine on to him like the gods themselves aimed wildernessed lanterns to catch him, the snipe. The drifter from days of rail riding, scripts, and bonfires fueled by gallons of confusing gin. In and out of the houses, property under arm, talking of clouds and the wherewithal to transcend those filthy walls, built around himself with more robusted gusto than the prison cells he has squared off against on so many occasions.

The constructed confines of the confused mind.

Six bucks and a pocket watch need to be stowed for future times where hunger will be his most common bedfellow. The broad expanses that exist between track lines are the gaps where his life takes its cues. These are the places where the beggar becomes king. These are the places where property is but a concept used only to describe their means to their ends. Other people’s property. Other people’s available property. The trade for the means, the gin, the opiates, the soup, and the rope. That’s what the concept boils down to out there. And those are the only measures which require thought. Those are the points he works to make. At least until yesterday.

This morning is different, and he knows it. There has never been a real sense that the beginnings of his days have ever been the beginning of anything really significant. Just another short-lived opportunity to build a short-term opportunity.

Or to shoot it into his veins.

But today has its very own feel. Something different. Something about the lights, those lights that will find him and show him for what he knows he really is. The ‘him’ he’s been running from for so long. The ‘him’ that will not be understood when they come calling with their incessant “who”s and “how”s and “why”s. He knows he will be lost in their attack. Their push for answers to questions he has never bothered to ask himself. How can a man answer questions they’ve never posed to themselves? How can this be done? How did it come to this?

Worse than that, they’ll ask about the stains on his hands. And he’ll have to ask himself about those stains on those hands. The hammed hands of a man who has spanned his time with no damned plans.

Now They Done Fucked With My Freedoms

2006-08-11T12:58:00.000-05:00

GODDAMNIT. Fucking terrorists have seriously ruined life for the rest of us this time. When they were just bombing buildings and randomly murdering whoever they felt would forward their shitheadedly self-absorbed “Me-me-me! Look at me! I’m being repressed!” cause, I honestly felt comfortable ignoring them. Sure, my card could get drawn at any old time, and I could be killed by some chick whose family needed the cash, or she was developmentally disabled and easily convinced, or perhaps she even met me one time at a Burger King back in 1995 and didn’t like the cut of my jib.

Whatever.

I was cool knowing that there are (still) random assholes out there who have nothing better to do than complain about their plight with explosives as their voice. Humans are really, really stupid that way. Plus, we’re extremely self-destructive, even without the whole “martyr”, “I’M THE VICTIM HERE”, “by any means necessary”, “jihad, bitches!”, or “Operation ____-ing _____” as a catch phrase.

But this whole no-carry-on-luggage thing is total bullshit. Total. Bullshit.

The “terrorists” have crossed the line now. Shit’s gotten personal. Mad-personal, yo. [That’s ghetto-speak, only used when one is “fittin’ to RAISE UP!”.] Do these terroristas have any idea how often the jackass companies, who own the planes their trying to destroy, LOSE my goddamn luggage? Once is too often. But anyone who has traveled would be ecstatic if they had only ONCE experienced the maddening dealings with douche-balloon airline carrier agents over how exactly one’s luggage could manage to end up in a more interesting destination than the owner did.

Having had some important shit get re-routed on a couple of occasions, I started carrying anything of actual value (if you actually GET your luggage back, and find it has been pillaged, you’re pretty much shit out of luck unless you complain for fifteen years and the value of your crap is below their pain threshold: the approximate value of a used Timex Ironman watch) in a carry-on so as to avoid getting stuck in a foreign country with NOTHING but my dick in my hand.

This is solely because airlines LOSE luggage. It’s somewhere in their Corporate By-Laws. Their charter with Federal Aviation. It probably has a well-known and well-worn term in their industry: “Baggage Attrition”, "Cyclical Mishandling", "Fuck It Man, Reading Isn't Fundamental" or some such nonsense.

Shit. And now the foreign “terrorists” are in cahoots with the domestic "air carriers", combining forces like the Wonder Twins of Fucktard Evolutionomics in a concerted effort to send my shit to Trinidad every time I fly to Chicago. And I can't even bring a fifth of bourbon onto the flight anymore? Have you ever tried to drink enough of those $5 thimble-sized bottles to ENJOY a shit-stank flight on Northwest Airlines? Have you? That's easily four million dollars in cash you'll need to be carrying with you, and you can no longer carry it in a goddamn bag.

Thank your Allah, Baby Jesus, Fred Flinstone or whoever you cry to every night, for me.

Fuckers.

I Don't Know. I Just Ran With It.

2006-08-09T14:16:00.000-05:00

The following is a story I wrote for a contest. A McSweeney's contest. The point was to utilize a writing prompt to build a little short story. There were 13 prompts from which to choose, and I have no idea how many winners will be involved. I assume 1 from each prompt will be chosen as a finalist, and then the best of those 13 will get all the beans.

Actually, I have no idea what their plan is. I just liked the idea of the prompts. So I ran with it.

Here was my chosen writing prompt:

Write a story that begins with a man throwing handfuls of $100 bills from a speeding car, and ends with a young girl urinating into a tin bucket.

Here is the story that won for that prompt:

A Day in the Life of R. Kelly.
By Jenny R. Thomas
- - - -

"See, girl? Those bills ain't nothin' to me, plenty more where that came from— No, no, not in the bucket; I got people to dry-clean the upholstery! Shit."

My WORD. Honestly, I REALLY like it. It's one of those stories that you read and you're like "it says so much with so little, or the other way around or whatever. Damn, I wish I wrote that."

Here is what I wrote (I was a tad more wordy, and far less witty. And that's awesome.) Ignore the formatting, as it is for a much more narrow column layout.

----------------------

Puffs of greened paper shot out of the passenger
window of Shelly’s ’82 Le Sabre. Understandably, she
was extremely upset at the loss. “Damnit, Charles!”
She only called him ‘Charles’ when she wanted to fry
his scrotum. In calmer moments she referred to him as
‘Upchuck’. But not this day.

“You’re just on a bad trip, thas’ all! NOW ROLL THE
GODDAMN WINDOW UP!”

No response from Upchuck, who continued his mission to
evacuate the cash.

Shelly fell to her most common state of being:
resignation, ingrained from her playground days of
defending her questionably retarded sibling. Watching
with continued resignation as the money went out the
window, “you got to be fuckin’ kiddin’ me here.”

But this time he seemed far worse than normal.

Shelly was never the sharpest of shed tools, but
certainly more capable than those with Upchuck’s list
of afflictions. Her hair was post-wrestling-match
ratty. Skin marbled like strawberry ice cream. A
wardrobe that consisted chiefly of beer
advertisements. Her twenty-six years on earth took
double that from her body. But she was a survivor,
and whatever she was: she meant it.

Upchuck, two years her minor, was little better. He
too suffered from lack of proper pruning and the mats
in his curly dark hair were sure signs that he had
never worried about floss or voting. Whatever limited
possibilities were once in his grasp had been swept
away by a healthy diet of corner store liquor.

The car swerved its way along a rural highway to the
house of a cagey chemist of particularly ruthless repute,
Thomas Landry. His confidants and associates referred
to him as ‘Paul’. No one knew why, and no one seemed
to care about the incongruity.

People owed Paul money for various reasons. Shelly
and Upchuck were two of those people. The money, and
the reasons.

“Snakes! The snakes! SNAYYYYYKES!” Chuck repeated
as he feverishly shoveled the currency from the
floorboard to the passing outdoors. Pointlessly
scattering the small fortune into nearby stalks of
poorly tended wheat. An empty bottle of Mad Dog 20/20
slid in and amongst the dwindling pile of cash by his
feet, periodically getting caught up in Upchuck’s
handfuls, but always finding its way back to the
floorboard.

The money would soon be lost to the wheat.

An hour prior, things were looking much better for the
pair. Decidedly better.

They were near the end of a broad-daylight robbery of
the peeling-paint, dirt-lot, outskirts-of-town
laundromat where Shelly usually earned minimum wage
night-managing illegal immigrant labor. She figured
it to be the easiest target in town. That, and she
knew the hotel accounts paid their monthly bills in
cash earlier that morning.

Ignacio, the day manager who accomplished little more
in his life than time for pedophilia in neighboring
states, was on duty. His small gut hung over the line
of separation between a pair of brown pleat-less
corduroy slacks and a tan Western short sleeve shirt.
A brushed cowboy hat topped his head, its brim
mirroring the lines of his mustache. He always talked
about getting spurs for his boots, though he’d never
ridden a horse.

Even though Shelly had no real weapon for the holdup,
she did have her wildly unpredictable brother in tow.
To their desired end, Upchuck was wielding an ancient
stapler like a hand grenade in his left hand, and with
his right he was swinging a clutch of detached metal
coat hangers with furious menace.

While fairly unimpressed with their efforts, Ignacio
was doing his best to comply with the demands. “Are
you sure you want to do this Shelly? I mean, your job
is gone now.”

Shelly, somewhat shocked at the stupidity of his
statement, “well, yeah Ignacio. I kinda figured
that’d be the case.”

Upchuck suddenly ceased his curious offensive, and
without a single effort at a smooth transition of
mood, began to whine pathetically. “Hey, Shell, I got
uh awful headache an’ I need some Bayer or somethin’.”

“Damnit Charles. You get drunk and you get hung over.
No surprise, so shut up.”

Quietly, “but my face hurts, Shell.”

“Christ. Ignacio, you got any Tylenol or whatever in
yer desk?”

“Uh, no.”

The three of them, swimming in their own frustrations,
stared at each other for a few muted seconds. Then
Upchuck started threatening to cry. Shelly and
Ignacio shared a brief exchange of agreed annoyance,
until Upchuck dropped the stapler and put his hand to
his face. The right hand, still armed with a dozen
strips of cheap wire, began swinging wildly, knocking
items off of the counter near the already opened
register.

Ignacio, more out of frustration than a desire to
help, cut in. “But I hear coffee helps with those
hang-over tremors.”

Before Shelly had a chance to respond, Upchuck broke
in with authority, “well then go make me some of that,
then!”

Ignacio turned to Shelly, “can I?”

“Well, shit. But don’t think about callin’ anyone or
nothin’ because we ain’t leaving without the money.
Got it, you per-vert?”

Ignacio lazily walked back to the rear office,
curiously without chaperone. On his way, he picked up
a box of individual rat bait packets. When he opened
the door to a dreary, un-air-conditioned room that
contained a desk, small bookcase, and dented filing
cabinet, Andrea was sitting shyly at his desk.

Barely twelve with a makeup job befitting a circus
entertainer, light acne, and retro-80s garb, Andrea
wore more the mood of a captive than a welcomed
visitor. She was obviously uncomfortable with his
entrance, and though rather timid, she spoke almost
immediately.

“Your myspace page said you were eighteen. But you’re
not. You’re old.”

With hand-waving dismissal, Ignacio grabbed a small
can of Maxwell House off the bookshelf next to his
coffee maker, and poured the packet of rat poison in.
He shook the can with calm vigor, opened it, and
handed it to Andrea.

“Yeah, eighteen. Whatever. And you’re not sixteen.
Now piss in this.”

Enough with the quiting already.

2006-07-20T15:59:00.000-05:00

I’m not saying that I want to “quit”. That’s far too final. Claiming to “quit” something when deep in your colon of colons you KNOW that isn’t the honest case, is akin to steeling. Steeling nerve, if nothing else.

So I’m stopping for a bit. For a spell. Some time.

I haven’t had a smoke since June 20th. Maybe the 21st. I forget.

Damn, that totally takes the steam out of it, doesn’t it? Like a wedding anniversary where they’re both like “well, let’s just go to The Radisson for a weekend the first week of November, because I remember it was sort-of cold when we got married, brisk and breezy, but the leaves were still pretty much on the trees. Pretty much.”

Almost, or exactly a month to the day.

It happened rather easily, to be quite honest. I simply didn’t want a smoke for two whole days, and on the third day I HAD TO HAVE ONE. A rather violent desire to stick a burning fag of dried tobacky into my maw. It was beyond compulsive. It was obligatory and I honestly didn’t feel like I would enjoy the smoke as much as I NEEDED it.

And that’s where the desire to smoke is now lost on me. Now that I realize the form of my addiction, which is more humorous than anything else, it pisses me off. Irony lives there somewhere, but I don’t care to dig for it.

It pisses me off because not but a month and a week ago, I smoked for the pure pleasure of it. I FELT like those magazine ads for Newports LOOK. Alive with goddamn pleasure. I smoked because it tasted good, and that flavor happily complimented the sweet tints of my coffee, beer, or absinthe. Because I felt it benefited my soul to partake. Just like one might periodically enjoy a truffle, hang gliding, or rough ass-play. I considered myself a dabbler, rather than a mechanical addict to the thing.

And for that, dear lungs, I apologize.

However, I would like to make it clear that I am not QUITING. Far from it. My intentions are to wait it out. I will hold off on smoking until such time as I feel I will be capable of having a smoke without NEEDING another. Because I want to ENJOY smoking again. I want it to compliment my morning coffee. My evening nightcap. My long-distance car ride.

It might be years before I have that confidence though. Maybe decades. In fact, I may never, ever-ever-ever feel that I can honestly handle a cig without desperately demanding another. And if that’s the case, then I’ll wait all the way to my grave. So be it.

I’m no prisoner, except to myself. I willingly jump for no entity outside of my own whim (many times at my own folly). And I just can’t stomach the idea of some inanimate object bullying me around like that. Not when we used to be so affectionately intimate.

Tobacco and I have been through much together. Many hard times. Good times. And hopefully we’ll meet again someday under better circumstances. Until then, well, fuck it.

[Emotional mania has been the raving flagship of my life-fleet for the past month. And that’s awesome.]

And Then I Toast You Out.

2006-07-12T12:37:00.000-05:00

Between our times and the most recent chimes-
Such a bevy of levity marches and declines-
To a beat I grew to live by,
to breathe, sack-buy,
grown gun-shy,
ever cheek-dry.

Now I’m dressed of the less blessed and I’m manning my stool.
Head caressed by my messed skin cap and I’m lapping my cesspool.

The tones hum, then break, when I shift, they’ll start to shout…

And then, AND THEN:

And then I toast you out.

Blackout Shmackout: The Big "Calm Down"

2006-07-09T21:24:00.000-05:00

Man-o-man. This “blackout” post got some interesting personal responses. None of them really made their way into the comments section, and that’s okay. It’s strange, but I’m not quite sure where to draw the line on it. Wide spread on the variety of reaction. Some people are honest with themselves, some people have exceptional reading comprehension skills, and some people are both honest and perceptive. Some are neither, and that scares me more than any blackout I may have experienced.

But, I won’t dedicate any more type space to that discussion, as the only real interesting result was my own mother calling me after reading and before even saying “hello”, she immediately butted in with “are you DRUNK right now?”

And then she waited for a sincere answer. It was around 4pm on a Saturday. I was writing at the time.

Am I drunk? Shit, I wish. Are you fucking KIDDING me over here?

She gets this idea from four areas:

1. Whenever I visit my hometown, Houston, for holidays and whatnot, I always catch up with my friends who live there. These are people who are still very much involved in the social scenes, which are heavily doused in booze. I always get home long after last call, and I am usually stinking drunk because that’s how revelers get when they only see each other three or four times a year (if that). So whenever I visit home for a weekend, I am absolutely uselessly hung over for at least one of the days there.

2. Whenever I tell stories, and I enjoy telling stories, there is almost always an element of alcohol involved. This is because the probability of something noteworthy occurring increases significantly with the addition of alcohol. It’s fucking science for christ’s sake. It’s not ridiculous to understand that if I love to tell stories where I end up looking like an idiot, that those stories will involve consumption. It is also necessary to point out that I tell the same four goddamn stories over, and over, and over again. It’s not like I have a new one every three drunken days.

3. On my last, and hopefully final family vacation, taken last March, I got absolutely shit-housed in Brussels. Long story short, I got lost in the streets of Brussels after 5am, stumbling drunk and making friends with everyone I came in contact with (except for a really creepy car that followed me for a ways, but I lost it by ducking through creepy-ass dark alleys, which kinda sucked). My brother was with me for the first half of the night, but decided to retire when he deemed himself too drunk to enjoy himself. I was not that drunk yet, so I kept on it, along with another fellow whom we met at a bar, who also happened to be from Austin. Strange coincidence indeed. Short story long, I got home smelling of various bar trays and talking nonsense, totally out of sorts. Everyone but my brother and I went on a goddamn 7am morning tour of some Belgian something-or-other, because neither of us were fit to tour. My mother repeatedly referred to her disappointment for the remainder of the trip, every goddamn time I threatened to order a delicious Belgian beer, as if a single drop of the stuff would send me on an immediate werewolf-like train of destruction and drunken mayhem. I got to hear “you aren’t going to go out and do THAT again, are you?” A-lot. Far more often than any rational person deserves.

4. She reads my writing out here on the interweb. For this, I take full responsibility. I’m not yet good at portraying myself in an even light. I don’t talk about my investment strategies, much of my efforts at health improvement, charity donation schedules, or my moves to obtain higher degrees of education. I consider these things to be important to me, and of no benefit to anyone else. I discuss what a douche (typically under the influence, sure) I can be for the sake of a) anyone reading who unwittingly feels the same and needs some reassurance that there is nothing wrong with them, and b) everyone else out there who is so self-righteous as to believe that they AREN’T a douche, when they so obviously ARE. I know, it isn’t the most efficient means of helping to explain to the population that we’re all hopelessly flawed but infinitely fascinating characters who shouldn’t be so goddamned paranoid about what the other douches think of our douchey selves. But, it’s all I got right now. And until I get my own weekly talk show with international distribution, I’m rolling with this right here. For better or worse.

So, well, I don’t really know where this leaves me. I mean, I honestly don’t know if I’m a drunk or not. No one can know that. Just like no one can know if they’ve got AIDS, cancer, or type II diabetes until symptoms lead to tests, and tests lead to absolute results. All you can do is consider the empirical evidence and work with the results. And me drinking WHILE ON VACATION (Houston, Brussels, NYC, wherever) hardly supports alcoholism. Neither do the distantly linked collection of drink stories I have otherwise.

All I’ve learned is that I am not safe from the stabbing and obnoxious rulings from highly biased sources of judgmental vitriol. Which sucks dick because it’s my own family.

My word, I have dedicated FAR too much effort to this discussion. It’s like a real blog entry or some shit. You know, the ones where the writer just babbles on and on about some really personal shit that no one else probably cares about.

Out of Bounds

2006-06-25T21:19:00.000-05:00

“NAR!!—NAR!! NAR!!—NAR!! NAR!!—NAR!! NAR!!—NAR!!”

He just kept repeating this alarm in my face, swinging his arms around as if he was trying to ward off a bear in the wild. It was working, I could tell, because I was frazzled and backing up. I backed all the way to half court, and crossed the half-hash, soliciting a whistle and eventual turnover call from the referee. After I crossed the line three times.

“NAR!!—NAR!! NAR!!—NAR!! NAR!!—NAR!! NAR!!—NAR!!”

I could smell his sweaty breath as the waves of his mouth-heat violated my face. He had freckles, which was relatively rare for a black man in our neighborhood, and one extra-yellow front tooth. Not gold, mind you. Just yellow. Like butter. I assumed it was a replacement of some sort. Possibly carved from driveway stones.

“NAR!!—NAR!! NAR!!—NAR!! NAR!!—NAR!! NAR!!—NAR!!”

Coach was less than impressed with my complete absence of skill under pressure. After all, my opponent was merely barking at me. He wasn’t making much of an effort to actually TAKE the ball. I was simply being yelled off the court. A weakness of character which would eventually have to be ferreted out and killed, if I were to ever be able to accomplish even the slightest of goals, later in life. A life which ever since, has been full of bellowing, unskilled side-liners who just want to see someone else run away. To ALSO run away.

They wanted me to score points. That’s where the whole “point guard” name came from. I was to bring the bouncing orange ball from one end of the court, to the opposing end, with the intent of a) setting up plays, and b) helping to avoid making everyone else look hopelessly pathetic and incapable of playing organized basketball by single-handedly scoring a shitload of points. Pretty straight-forward job description.

But I was a seventh grader of questionable mental capacity. Plus, I was harboring a previously unknown but crippling fear of public competition.

Being involved in any competitive stage, no matter how peripheral the part, is horrifying in and of itself. Because you aren’t dealing with the standard Man v. Man trial that everyone assumes it to be. Oh no. If that were the case, everyone would be involved. Everyone would compete. Because there would be no mystery to competition beyond the combination of practice and inborn skill. The only thing that might preclude one from participating in EVERY available competition (under these idealized conditions) would have to be overlapping schedules. Otherwise, all games would include everyone. It would be math. It would be robotic. It would be predictable.

But most importantly: it would be a theatre of the bored.

In reality, everyone on a competitive stage, whether alone (platform diver) or on a team (gang-bang porn-off), must do battle with themselves as well. Multi-tasking. It’s about confidence, courage, perseverance, “heart”, and all those other obnoxious words that headline shitty inspirational posters. In order to beat any other person, one must be able to beat themselves. We all have to find some way to overcome our overwhelming sense of incapability. No matter how trivial the contest.

And in seventh grade, there is nothing trivial about a basketball game. Watch Teen Wolf. Again. The final sequence of that movie sums up quite nicely, just how much pressure can be brought down on little dudes who have probably named all eight of their newfound ball hairs.

To make matters worse, I grew up in a relatively ghetto-ass part of Houston where my Middle School basketball team contained guys who could dunk, dudes who would later go on to college football as lineman, and really ambitious fellas who sold crack during class. Imagine being thirteen and playing Our competition was similar in form to my teammates.

I, on the other hand, had the look and build of your average toe-headed teen who still played with Hotwheels and probably continued to clutch the erroneous belief that his dad was a real goddamn superhero. To say I was physically overpowered by my (sort of) contemporaries would be a gross understatement. I wasn't in some of their age, let alone size bracket(s).

I just wanted to survive the end of the game. The humiliation. The dropping of the balls.

Fourth quarter, and my third-string, bench-warming ass was called in to finish off the game. We were down by several hundred thousand points, which was really the only time I ever got to play, but I was somehow “needed” in order to multiply our bigboard standing.

“NAR!!—NAR!! NAR!!—NAR!! NAR!!—NAR!! NAR!!—NAR!!”

Surprise, surprise. I went out of bounds instead.

As Usual, No Cups.

2006-06-08T17:09:00.000-05:00

My guess is that he was actually brought in for this exact purpose by the investors. They knew this time would come. And they knew they wouldn’t be interested in first-handing such things. They would need a vehicle. A vessel. A wretched harbinger of truth: that no man is above any known reckoning. They needed him to utilize his methods. His “cures”. To find a way to usher us into oblivion. We needed to be out of their way.

In his most previous life, they called him “The Hatchet Man” due to his disturbingly amoral ability to dissolve entities into sellable splinters with deft and swift swings of hardened greed. The fucker was good at it. He liked it. It made him feel useful and important. Fed his rampant vanity like nothing else. Such the vulture.

Some enjoy soaking their hands in pools of warm blood like that.

So there we were, the three of us, sitting in the open-air atrium of the Renaissance Hotel in the Arboretum. A dozen or so floors of vacuous space above our heads. At a predetermined, toy-ish and absolutely empty café table. Public place. Folded arms. Negotiating our way out of each other’s lives.

It was two against one, and he was visibly drunk from the nearby happy hour that I was unwittingly footing the $1,000+ bill for. It was also, not so coincidentally, a premature celebration of our ousting. The others, drinking themselves silly but blocks away, were wholly unaware of our collective decrepit state of composure. Oblivious to the face-punching reality that we were no longer the combined force that they had been soothed into taking checks from. That we were all, in fact, getting a big-ass divorce from each other. That in all honesty, we were never really a cohesive group to begin with. The deathbed-truth of it was that none of us really liked each other much to begin with.

Knifing each other over the imaginary deck chairs of a ship that we supposedly manned, but only existed in the minds of those who simply wished it to exist in the minds of everyone else, except bigger and more valuable.

So he was drunk. His hair gave it all away. Shocks of separated bang-chunks falling down to sharply-yet-lightly touch his grainy-orange forehead like spider legs cradling the hollowed remains of a bronzed fly. His eyes wouldn’t stay trained. They wandered when he spoke. And he kept readjusting himself in his little tube-steel bistro chair as he threw out ultimatum after ultimatum, trying to cross his legs in different respect-demanding patterns, but never quite able to get comfortable. Never a full threat, but always the promise of producing one if pushed. A solid summary of our entire relationship, this interaction.

We two, his paying-problem/reason-to-be, had no idea what to expect from this man. Nothing beyond his typical inebriation. We also knew that he was quite the clever negotiator, even when hunched-swearing drunk. He often played the part just to seem vulnerable. Begging the unwary to assume him in Achilles position, taunting them to try and make a move on him. Quick stricken. The wounded rarely figured out how stuck they were until far too late. Until they were incapable of escape.

The slow bleed seemed to please him.

Lots of cash talk. Who would owe who and under what circumstances it would be most advantageous for all involved. Scenarios on top of scenarios. As if he were but a mere mediator in a process which was beyond his control, yet left to his discretion. “The wheels are already in motion. I’m just trying to help you help yourselves off the ride before you’re thrown off. I’m not your enemy here, this is just how things are. If I were you, I’d cut a deal and avoid any nasty business.”

Bag-man tactics, with the cookie-tossing of every first round. Motherfucker.

We weren’t prepared to play this kind of ball and he knew it. No cups. He’d had us sized-up the first day we’d met, over a year prior. He had been testing us for the entire period between, knowing that this moment was inevitable. He didn’t even need to be sober for it. To him, this was like spreading warm butter over a toasted muffin. A mindless tableside activity which he was capable of executing without the aide of a clear mind or legal support. Try as we might, he had our balls firmly gripped in his wine-stained palm.

And as usual, we had no cups.

1000 Robots Totally Kicks Your Ass

2006-04-24T12:10:00.000-05:00

I got a book in the mail earlier this week from Brother Nick. It is BAD ASS. It’s called 1,000 Robots, and it’s a book that catalogues tin toys from the WWII era-forward. I’m into mostly the 50s – 70s stuff myself, and Ava loves all things Robot.

THANKS A BILLION BRUTHA NICK!

The thing about these toys is that the recently produced ones are designed to evoke some sense of nostalgia. Oddly enough, I feel that nostalgia for them even though I never had any when growing up. Odd that I would link myself, my childhood, and my free-wheeling dipstick days to variety of toy which came and went several years before my life was sparked.

Is this marketing at its best? Or is it that some crap (like, say, some really simple and not-very-fun-to-play-with painted-tin toys) actually taps into some shared-consciousness that transcends generations? Shared memory? Collective nostalgia for a “simpler time” which never, never-ever existed in the first place?

If so, it would help to explain why these things are both "collectible" and really only of interest to grown folk. Beyond the pretty colors and possible antiquated wind-up "movement" any these tin-cans might have, children seem pretty unaffected. Good thing, too. 'Cause even the replicas aren't cheap, and I don't know if you're aware, but kids BREAK shit. Constantly. Especially if its not theirs.

We kids are cool like that.

Regardless, the toys are mad-cool, and this book is mad-cooler.

Milk shakes make me poop nowadays. And that’s splendid.

Phone Doody

2006-04-21T14:36:00.000-05:00

I used to work for this non-profit profiteering company when I was in college. They had this truly dreadful “mission statement” that read something along the lines of

Our mission [brilliant opener] is to deliver the best-of-breed services to our clients and their families in order to maximize their efficiency as productive members of society, and to fight for their rights to establish themselves as such.

Or some shit like that.

The main problem with this organization, as good-intentioned as it might have been, lay squarely in the management of the “mission”. To begin, it was a weak concept, full of emotional potholes, pointless vagaries, wispy platitudes, and hair-trigger issues. And the controllers of the inflows/outflows of resources weren’t down with the cause. They weren’t terribly interested in actually making good on any promises, because those shifty promises were not only fraught with plan-less loftiness, but executing on them would surely spell out the outright financial demise of the organization itself.

Non-profits are nothing if they aren’t self-perpetuating.

So the books went into full-on profit-hording mode. Fuck the “clients”, as they were pretty much screwed no matter how you viewed it. Might as well shelve as much cash as possible and treat the non-profit like a real business: invest long-term, buy property, start other satellite for-profit businesses, and keep up a good face for the donating public.

Actually DOING any good is just too fucking hard, apparently.

I knew all this because I worked in the accounting department. I saw all the money movement. Sure, it was all fair and legal, but none of it matched the true spirit of the organization, or the intent of its “mission”. Out of the thirty or so employees, I would estimate that only three, maybe four were actually dedicated to resolving anything remotely related to the stated purpose of the organization. The rest of us were there to either bring in revenue, or count it as it came in. Our contact with the “clients” was limited, if not non-existent.

Except when you worked the phones at the front desk. And man, how I fucking hated doing that.

Customer service has never been an interest of mine. “Sales” and the “customer service” that go along with it directly equate to “bullshitting” and “defending the bullshitting” in my mind. For some reason, answering phones in any scenario, whether it be in a call center, midnight message service, or acting as a receptionist, is all “customer service” to me.

Man, fuck that noise.

Answering people’s rambling-ass questions about whatever-it-is-that-they’re-senselessly-confused-about is not my deal. I don’t have the patience for that nonsense. Oh, but I’m highly hypocritical about it. I have no qualms about being on the OTHER end of that phone, calling up my cellular provider to ask shit like “so, my plan says I get 100 text messages free, which is fine. But I’d like 1,000 text messages free, for free. Is there like, a button you can just push to do that? ‘Cause like Easter candy, I’m both cheap and stupid.”

While I was counting beans in that job, as a lowly bookkeeper, I would get assigned this “rolling” receptionist duty. The full time receptionist, bless her heart, would want to eat lunch at some point during the day, which inevitably left the front desk, along with the phone lines, abandoned. So three or four of us lowly workers would have to take turns covering phones over that period.

Understandably, none of us had any interest in the activity. First of all, we would have to have our lunches extra-early or extra-late on those days to accommodate. Second, it fucking sucks to sit retard-prone by a crappy fax machine and sketchy-internet-connection computer terminal for an hour, praying some half-wit from bum-fucking West Texas doesn’t call in to make you miserable with wandering questions about shit you aren’t equipped to answer questions on. Third, and most important, to sub for the receptionist is to pretty much admit that your position is actually LESS important than theirs (your job can wait, you need to go do some truly important work like answer phones or paint your nails).

What made it even worse was that we didn’t have a full five low-lifers to simply pick up a day of the week for phone duty. At most there were four of us. So we had a goddamn schedule… it was like scheduling lemon-juice enemas. The weeks where you KNEW you’d be working the phones on Monday AND Friday were destroyed well before they actually arrived. You knew those weeks would suck something awful. They were scheduled that way.

After a few weeks of suffering through the same five douche-balloons calling in with questions about services we had promised to deliver, but (surprise!) hadn’t gotten around to, I was seriously contemplating cutting my hands off to avoid further phone duty. The experience, for me, was excruciating. No one else there liked doing it, but I don’t believe they loathed it like I did. I would have preferred to throw myself down a flight of cement stairs, repeatedly, over that very same hour, rather than answer those blinking, crying, chat-chat-chattering phones. Man, FUCK those phones.

So I set myself to finding ways out of doing the work. In life, it’s important to figure out what you like, what you don’t like, what your fetishes are, and how to avoid doing any sort of god-awful bullshit that you hate more than the poetry of lame teens.

Lucky for me, I was in the accounting department, where the money got counted and organized. And like I explained a bit earlier, we weren’t an organization that focused much energy on shit like “justice”, “fair work environment”, or “equality”. In the accounting department specifically, under the direction of our most-frightening CFO, such quaint phrases or concepts were more of a hindrance in our march to amassing the wealth of the free world in a “building fund”. And since I was counting the beans that would eventually add up to the girth of that stalk, I received some special treatment.

Short story long: by explaining to the CFO that working the receptionist desk over lunch was impairing my bean-counting abilities, I not only got out of slaving away in that wretched desk, I also got more smoke breaks.

This, understandably, made me a target for many complaints from my fellow low-lifers, as it was obvious what had gone down. But I like to think that in reality, they were just hating on my self-made fortune because I no longer had to smell the stankin’ ass mouthpiece of that phone while desperately trying to explain to some Prime-Number-Of-Chromosomes from Tyler that “even if we did receive your request for reimbursement of expenses for the last Director’s Retreat, it wouldn’t matter because you aren’t a Director, and you weren’t supposed to be there, so we won’t be sending you or your four cousins a check. So fuck off.”

And I will read this post as a reminder to myself of what has passed, so that I may again respect what I have at present…

Hollabackcaucasian!

2006-03-29T20:35:00.000-06:00

Alright. So my blog was dead for a week.

It happens. Sometimes, the blog gods look down and say: “man, fuck you and your bullshit navel-gazing. We’re letting this crappy online word-vomit get caught up in your work’s firewall, so that someone in upper management can spend an hour cruising through your stories of covering yourself in various human humors and materials. And they’ll read about how you almost seem proud of it, you idiot.”

And then the gods will add, quite obnoxiously, “Ha. Plus you’re a dick.”

And if you happen to be on your way out of town as you receive notice that your place of paycheck has banned your blog site, specifically, by the admin’s own hand-coding into the firewall/gateway software… well, you might go ahead and cloak your ramblings for a minute or two as well.

Now, well, I just don’t see how it matters.

I just got back from Guanajuato today, and went straight into work, wondering whether or not some sort of shit was going to end up hitting some other sort of fan. Instead, I got hit with a rather tremendous project, which my direct boss, quite understandably, is not interested in tackling alone.

Keep in mind that in my job, rarely am I given truly interesting problems to solve. This problem, however, is fascinating. So it appears that me and my little online graffiti board here, are in no danger of being asked to put together a box. Not anytime soon, anyhow.

Honestly, I try very hard to avoid being fired for anything I do outside of work. My place of business is rather conservative, as it should be, so I do my best to keep the brightest and most blinding (read: obnoxious and offensive) parts of my personality in check.

But I don’t check them here. So, as long as they read this with a sense of humor, then I’m cucumber. Otherwise, I’ll be dialing Houston and shit.

Lot’s of insider commentary there. Like Navajo code. But not even close.

Travel journal to come in the next few days. Lots to ramble about. Word be bond.

SxSW 2006: Day Two and The Book

2006-03-20T16:08:00.000-06:00

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.

SxSW 2006: Day One and The Rock

2006-03-15T12:16:00.000-06:00

So, the yearly disaster that is SxSW started on Monday, really. Last year was a beautiful accident, which I documented here, for anyone interested/willing to read. This year, I’ll be doing the meat of my daily journal-type-shit on Austinist because, quite frankly, I really enjoy it when all the anonymous dickhole commenters crawl out and say really ridiculous shit like “hey asshole, this writing is really stupid, plus you’re a dumb gay”. They’re so brilliantly witty, that it makes my clenched fists tighten yet further.

But the first two days so far, Monday and yesterday, I’m gonna fuckin’ write here because this is where I like to spill my guts to no one in particular. Into the void, one might say.

Plus, my hit count on this blog went abysmal since I’ve seized-up on posting here, so I feel totally comfortable with the resultant anonymity. The ten of you who read this won’t judge. Except you, mom. But you were always a hater, so we’re cool like that.

Let’s do this shit. Right? Right.

On Monday night I was a bit intimidated by the whole thought of doing what I did last year, again. It really is abusive to the system. Drowning useful lucidity with waves of liquor, for hours on end, only to eat some really awful food at four in the morning before drifting into a booze-hammered five-hour nap, for three…

-- Fucking cell phone. Man, I’ve been trying to type this for four hours now. FOUR HOURS and I’ve got FOUR measly paragraphs done, and there’s no fucking story yet. Phone. Keeps ringing. But I’ll stop answering. Fucking cell phone. --

So Monday was the Consumating party. If you’ve never heard of Consumating, that would be because it’s fairly new and is overshadowed something serious by the myspace disease. That, and it’s been a word-of-mouth sorta viral marketing campaign to date. Like, links on blogs (ahem, even lame blogs). Ben Brown, ½ of the Consumating creation team threw a party in honor of Consumating at The Velvet Spade. My favorite word coupling was involved: open bar.

So I intended to get sweaty fucked up, while my girlfriend intended on going home early so she could do real, productive work. Such is the ironic way of relationships.

And we both achieved our private goals. The open bar did me well, as I stayed double fisted the entire night, up until the open-bar tab was closed out. Then I was single fisted, and missing more cash than expected.

There was lots of drunken conversation between strangers, and strange conversation between drunkards. I got to see lots of people that I don’t normally run into, which can be almost awkward. Especially if I haven’t seen them in a while and I’ve managed to drink myself into the “pretty tossed” stage of boozery. Because I get all huggy and shit. Not that I don’t want to hug people all the time, because I do, but because when I’m stone sober, I understand how uncomfortable it makes some people, so I keep the hugs to a minimum.

But when I’m drunk, I just don’t fucking care what everyone else is crying about. If I’m down to hug, then hugging is what fucking happens, damnit.

So some of these people hadn’t seen me in a year or so. They were obviously unsure as to whether or not we’re even friends anymore, really. Which is ridiculous in my mind, but I understand how some people can get touchy about not being contacted on an hourly basis. Better yet, that they think I hate them because I don’t “reach out” and “make an effort” to contact them more often. Again: utterly ridiculous, with an added element of silly hypocrisy. Anyway, all friendship-fires got rekindled, and hugs got distributed.

Did I mention that I was pretty fucked up? Because I was.

Ben Reed sent me a text from next door at Deville: “Frodo’s here”. That’s all it said. Fucking Frodo is back for some SxSW action! I ran into him a couple of times last year, at the Fader parties. Never said a word to him, because a) I don’t know the guy, b) he was usually asking me to get out of his way so he could get past, and c) he’s a really, really fascinatingly tiny fellow. Like, nymph tiny. Like… a fucking hobbit. Dude’s mad petite.

Plus, I knew if I talked to him that I’d call him Frodo, and that’s really lame. He’s heard it a billion times, and it was never funny to begin with. But I just know I’d be “that asshole” who’d say it anyway, just because I can’t seem to wrangle my id.

Moving on.

So the open bar at Velvet Spade closed out, and Ben Reed came over from Deville and offered that we join him for drinks instead. So we did.

Halfway through my beer, Ben mentions that earlier in the day he had seen a n’er-do-well in the parking lot beneath I35 and 8th Street, writing on a rock with a marker. What was fascinating about the whole thing was that the bum was laying down to do this, in broad daylight, and he had a fake leg. The idea of this was completely insane to me. What would posses a one-legged homeless man to lay down in a parking lot and wax poetic on a chunk of rock? What could possibly be that important or interesting? Would it have to be interesting, if the circumstance in which it was written was so fascinating?

I had to see whether or not Ben was bullshitting me, so we went looking for said bummetta stone. We walked from Deville to the freeway, to the exact spot where Ben claimed to have seen the stone.

And there it was. A triangle of crumbling concrete, presumably lifted from a curb somewhere, with a paragraph of nonsensical bum-scribblings which concerned some confusing story about a frog and a scorpion. I kept referring to it as a proverb, while Ben gave it the fable label. In retrospect, the term “fable” is much more fitting, in the Aesop tradition.

Whatever it is, Ben intends to photograph it and pass the physical rock on to me. I want that rock. It’s quite possibly the most interesting thing I’ve come across in the past year. I don’t why I picked a year, but it seems like a safe bet.

Fuck I’m much more hung over from last night than I thought. And I barely even described what went on Monday night… but, fuck it. Next, is the Tuesday breakdown…

Gotta get that rock.

Life Liquid Makes Me Want to Blow Chunks

2006-03-03T16:41:00.000-06:00

Giving blood has always scared the living hell out of me. Actually, it’s the blood part that bothers me. I don’t care if it ends up in bags or on a Luby’s restroom floor. The idea of bleeding profusely, whether controlled or not, makes me want to vomit.

But it goes even further than that. Back in my fourth-grade days, we used to sit on the floor, in a big mass, with our health books splayed out in our laps, and read about health-type shit. Disease. Bones. Internal organs. Vaginas and penises.

Not that last one. But that’s what we really wanted to learn about.

Anyhow, we would be chosen, individually to read sections of that day’s chapter, aloud. Well, whoever wrote/edited/published those evil goddamn health books must have been some sort of gothic Satanist, because every fifth fucking word was “blood”. It was as if they were making a concerted effort to squeeze it into any and every place they could. Almost autistically so. Sentences would go something like:

“The human blood is blood red and the blood flows through blood veins to get the blood into the organs which need blood because blood is the bloodline of all blood using blood creatures of blood-dom. Blood is really bloody when it bloods out of the blood system. I love blood. Bloody, bloody, blood-blood.” And then I’d vomit all over some girl with pigtails sitting in front of me.

Perhaps not that ridiculous. Take off the last sentence and I bet I’d be damn close though.

So I had the great pleasure of going to give blood the other day. It was for a very worthy cause, so I would never complain about why I was at the blood bank. But shit, it wasn’t cool.

The entire drive there was nauseating. I felt like I was about to go on stage to sing in an arena concert. For a band I didn’t actually sing for. With words to songs I’d never heard of.

So my stomach was doing all varieties of acrobatics, threatening to push material out of every orifice about my person, as I drove my fevered-self to the vampire cave.

When I walked in, they greeted me, had me sign in, and then handed me some laminated sheets with a bunch of “if you do heroine with aids patients while getting fucked in the ass by Australian spider monkeys on your weekly sex-trips to Nigeria, then your blood might be compromised” type shit on them. Actually, speculating on that, because every fifth word of the text was BLOOD. For fuck’s sake, these assholes need a thesaurus, as there HAS to be alternate ways of describing the system of red shit which courses through our veins. Alternate languages, or something. Anything.

That’s not nice of me, actually. In reality, I understand that this is my issue, not theirs. I haven’t googled it yet, but I doubt there’s a name for my particular phobia. There’s all sorts of blood phobias, but probably not ones related to passing out like death just from reading the word. But then again: whatever.

They “interview” me by asking exactly 53 questions (they tell you the number before they start, so you can prep yourself, or something) about my sex life (HELLO!), illicit drug use (hello?), and a shit-load of true/false questions about my contracting (or having “contact” with someone who might have contracted) of various diseases and maladies that the Cambodian nurse could not pronounce. And she had no idea what the diseases were.

I should have said TRUE. To everything. Hell, I might have “stifhlectimicoidal anotrophelia” or whatever.

We have a few laughs at the 53 question quiz, as I tend to crack jokes when I’m pants-pissing frightened. Then she ushers me into the bleeding room. A circle of pleather lounge-y chaise things is the focus of the fluorescent-lit room. Two other nurses are stealing blood from two other dudes. One of the guys, probably in his late forties, is looking pale and cross-eyed, while the other is a recent high school grad who may very well be afflicted with Downs, if not a social-interaction disorder of some sort. The older fellow complains that he feels really sick and he needs a cold compress for his forehead. The kid rambles on about how often he gives blood (way often), and that he doesn’t particularly like soda.

I really wanted to leave. The act was already scaring me, but the participants weren’t making the deal any easier to seal. But I decided to stop acting like such a pussy about it, and I sat obligingly, in a plastic-tough lounge-y chair.

Finger pricked, vein found, needle stuck, one pound of blood removed.

I stared at the ceiling tiles, opposite of my left arm where the robbery was taking place. So I never actually saw anything of the heist. But I did feel a little light-headed, and my exit from the establishment is a bit hazy. So I assume that they took whatever they needed.

And I got what I needed.

I got to mark that little deed from my “list of shit Craig fucking hates/fears but everyone else does all the time so he needs to suck it up and do it already”. Awesome kickasstastic sweet.

Last Week On Other Internets...

2006-02-15T10:11:00.000-06:00

Good ol’ Truesdays…

I get all upset about that crazy fucker up in New England who went apeshit in a gay bar, and then went off to kill his online girlfriend and whatever. Dude needed some serious help, but found the internet instead.

Last week I kinda poked some good fun at the SxSW debacle that’s heading our way. The disaster that is… The Austin’s Lifeblood Festival… it’s a tempered disdain though. I always have a good time when the douche-balloon circus rolls into town. Always!

This week’s Truesday focused on that good-time holiday that we just breezed through. The most Hallmarkish of all Hallmark Holidays: You’re A Shitty Boyfriend Day! And that's AWESOME!

I swear I'll write up more on the Birthday Bender, but I'm behind on other shit. So there's that.

2006 Birthday Bender Pt 2

2006-02-09T15:21:00.000-06:00

By the time people started showing up, my trail to buzzdom was seeing some giddy-up. Yes, I hate cowboy references too, but the restaurant, Guero’s, is dressed entirely in caballero fashion. That’s “Mexican cowboy” to anyone without the knowin’.

After a few more cans of Tecate, it was time to head to The Alamo South to see The Matador. It’s a happy little tale of how a seemingly washed-up killer-for-hire ends up befriending a seemingly goody-goody salesman-for-who-cares at a hotel bar in Mexico. They have a couple days of semi-homoerotic fun together and then part ways in such a fashion as to leave the viewer wondering whether or not their friendly tryst got physical.

Or maybe that’s just my take on it.

Months pass, seasons change, the nerdy fellow is back in The States doing the “normal life” thing, while the killer botch-fucks a job in Budapest so badly that he himself becomes a mark. Doorstep: killer, middle of the night, “hello, killer! Meet the wife”, “oh, hey, let’s have a drink, it’s been a bad year, they want me dead” sort of thing.

I won’t give away the ending, because it really isn’t worth spoiling, but they go on a kill together. Now who would a heartless killer want to kill if there was a price on his head? Fuck if I know. Just let that deep plot unfold before your eyes.

That Remington Steel guy was fucking brilliant in the role though. Kinnear was a good straight man, but he definitely plays better in subtly gay roles. I have no idea why I’m so obsessed with his potential homosexuality. Must be something latent. Like a herpes secret.

No comment.

When we left the movie, I was, in a word, drunk. But not a funny, boisterous, ambitious, complimentary, or angry drunk. I was a tired drunk. After several beers and the tequila, sitting down for a movie in a dark theatre with comfort food is not the best of choices. Better to keep on your feet, better to keep off the beer, better to have eaten a goddamn meal BEFORE the nexus of what was supposed to be a three day drunk-a-thon.

Fucking Bush league. That’s what it was. BUSH LEAGUE.

But I wasn’t so tired that I wanted to go home. I was in a lazy frame of mind, and just needed some environmental stimulation to get my gears to fire back up. I needed some moving lights. Some loud music. Some refreshingly unknown faces. And definitely some more hard liquor.

Beer just sits on me like that one asshole golden retriever that acts like a lap dog, even though the fucker weighs a hundred goddamn pounds. But he’s just sooooo happy to be on top of you! Look at him there! With his tongue in your mouth! Awwwww! He chews his butt with that tongue.

Onward to The Peacock where ceeplus and Starsign were to be spinning. Their sets were good, really good. But I spent the vast majority of my time there out on the patio, where I could smoke. It wasn’t packed, but the quality of booze-finders was top notch. I ran into several people who run in the same circles, who only know me as a drunk, and not as “that guy who does whatever”, because I’d rather be known for what I enjoy doing than for what others might enjoy me doing.

I realize that sounds dickish, but whatever. All too often, people make judgments about other people without bothering to gather much intelligence. They simply categorize based upon their own sense of personality. It’s as natural as taking a shit, but much, much nastier when examined. Take the following “invented” erroneous assumptions:

Hair products = pretentious douche in a house of mirrors
Republican = asshole kitten-kicker
Chick with cleavage = wants sex but can’t use mouth to ask for it
Cool shoes = future best friend for life
Dude with earrings = understands deep irony
Writer = unpredictable liar who sleeps around
Salesman = loves to visit whorehouses
Drunk = probably going to sell newspapers at an intersection

I’d rather take the Drunk association. There are no expectations associated with it, and there’s nothing worse than having expectations leveled on you by a stranger. Fucking weird.

Regardless, I know that the people I ran into at The Peacock are highly driven, intelligent, and capable characters. They really are. I don’t know this because I’ve spent day after day with them, and have cataloged their every intent and action. I don’t even know what they DO for a living, specifically. I can just tell by their personality. In and amongst the moments that I have interacted with them.

And I’ve been borderline falling-down-drunk on almost all those occasions. So much so, that it has become standard for me to greet them with “man, every time I see you, I’m so fucked up I don’t even remember what we talked about. Let’s do that again!”

Bygones, bygones, bygones.

I am getting better with names though. Much better. I made a point of trying to remember names that night. In fact, I logged six new names which I have successfully remembered and used since. That’s a big feat for me. Especially when I’m as drunk as I was.

Shots got tossed, shit got talked, and by the end of the night, ceeplus had become fast friends with the owner, Jason. Well, I can’t actually say that they were friends, but Jason and cee are both extremely friendly people, so they seemed to enjoy each other’s company.

I wasn’t aware at the time, but I had actually dealt with Jason on another occasion. A few months back I had been in The Peacock for some magazine party launch, and several tumblers of McCall’s ended up landing on my tab. I would guess that my tabs get padded, lifted, appended, and hijacked with pretty sound regularity (as everyone’s do), but the abuser(s) are usually smart enough to keep the dollar amount below my radar. Whatever my radar may be, it’s a damn sight below the cost of three goddamn McCall’s, that’s for sure.

So I got into it with the bartender, trying to explain that I didn’t even know what McCall’s was (I don’t drink scotchy-scotch), so I certainly wasn’t interested in paying off someone else’s leaching tab of boozery. Well, the bartenders that night weren’t interested in justice, they just wanted my cash. Not having a sober leg to stand on, I paid it, but left in a cloud of resolute fury. I was determined to get my fucking cash back, the bastards.

The next day, I myspaced their profile thing and explained how I was victimized and how I don’t appreciate being made out to be a thief in front of a shitload of pissed off drink-orderers (the bartender obviously thought I was trying to get away with having my high-class boozing comp’d by the tenders, which is, well, whatever man). Whoever was running the profile messaged me back and apologized for the mishap, and let me know that there would be a $25 comp at the bar under my name. I could go claim it at any time.

Well, I never found the time. I’d like to say I never made it back out there because I was morally opposed to how I was treated, or something equally shitty sounding. At least it wouldn’t be as lame an excuse as “I just… never bothered. ???” Laaaahhhaaaaaame.

Anyhow, immediately after cee introduced me to Jason as the owner, I coughed up that entire story, assuming that all had been forgotten, water under the bridge and whatnot. He actually remembered the whole thing. He ran the fucking profile. My comp was still at the bar. He was honestly sorry about the mix-up.

Fuck. I can’t even be wronged without managing to put myself in a situation that will end with ME feeling guilty about it. For the love of…

About an hour after they closed up the bar, cee is still drinking with Jason and the other bartenders. This is a common occurrence with cee, as he has a certain “just keep your bar open past last call so we can all drink together” Jedi mind-shit thing going. Many years of practice, I’m guessing.

Bill, Brother Nick and I had to pack up cee’s equipment while he hung on to the bar, trying to give records away to the owner and his “let’s fucking leave already” staff. Lucky for me, the combination of heavy lifting, not drinking for a good while, and the cool night air gave me the clarity to get home safely.

Where I slept like the dead because I had the following Friday off. Word to that.

2006 Birthday Bender Pt 1

2006-02-09T09:41:00.000-06:00

Last Thursday marked the start of the three-day birthday bender. I am somewhat hesitant to write this up at the moment because I am receiving some heavy traffic in relation to last year’s SxSW five-day bender. The birthday bender pales in comparison to the SxSW one, and to anyone who found my writing by way of googling “SxSW booze alcohol free party shit-on-foot”, there may appear to be an inordinate number of benders represented, digitally, here.

But, fuck it. I said I’d write it out, and so it shall be done.

So, Thursday it all began. The first Thursday of each month here in Austin is odd cause for celebration on South Congress. Makes no difference who started the thing. It has become an institution here.

The thing about “First Thursday” for me, is that five years back it was more rag-tag. And I prefer it that way. The stores would have kegs of beer, or bottles of wine, and if you wandered in, they’d just hand you a glass. Bands would play in the street or in a back-patio of some fucked-up little curio shop. It was hokey. It was a bit confused.

It had free beer.

Nowadays, it has become another festival-type thing where the blatant focus is on selling people shit. All festivals are designed to make money. On the inside, everyone realizes that currency is the point of the thing. If they run the red, they disappear because no one is willing to pay for the good time of strangers. That’s how the evil wheels of capitalism roll. But no one likes it to be written all on the OUTSIDE of the event. At least make an effort to give the thing a haze of altruism.

If our current presidency can pull this trick off, so can a clutch of merchants. I mean, fuck.

First Thursday is no different. In the beginning the businesses on Congress were hungry, and willing to make sacrifices for the sake of community approval and the promise of better foot traffic in years to come. So they busted out the free booze, called up their friends in bands, set up some basic sound systems, passed out fliers, kissed stranger’s babies, and kapow. A few years later, they get a regular festival going on the first of every month to drum up some community business.

Too bad those pioneers did such a good job. So good that after they worked so hard to clean up South Congress’s reputation, they got shoo’d off by less community-interested businesses. Businesses that took advantage of all the groundwork lain down by those they replaced, but didn’t feel the need to bother continuing the spirit. Why try? All those asshole consumers are going to show up anyway, right? Right. Fuck it.

There’s no more free beer, and other than the music in the patio outside of Guero’s, there’s very little going on that’s free. Some side shows here and there, some makeshift “galleries”, and perhaps that same no-tooth dude from 7th and Congress has wandered down with his guitar to sing some shit I can never understand. But they’re all there for money, because culture, even if half-assed, ain’t free.

Regardless, Brother Nick and I made sure to start things off right with some beer and tequila shots.

I have no idea why tequila rang true as a good idea, because it never is, unless you’re requesting it from a firing squad. Nothing good ever comes of tequila. Just headaches, lost teeth, auto insurance claims, and unwanted pregnancies. That’s all tequila has to offer anyone. Life disruption and horrific discomfort.

So we had to have some…

Yes, You Are Reading Correctly

2006-02-06T15:07:00.000-06:00

When you mouth through the words "Craig sucks, and hasn't written anything original in weeks here, and that's, well, that's just plain shitty of him."

I know. And my mind has suffered through the truth of it all. Ammends are in order. Something is in order, anyhow.

In my defense, it's been a busy couple of weeks. Just finished off the birthday. Three-day bender. And I plan to chronicle that one because I vaguely remember some things that I found particularly entertaining.

No one else has to care, right? Right.

I want to say that I've been dedicating more time to alternate projects, because that sounds better than "hung over, watching shit movies like The Crow and Blue Velvet". It makes me look like I've got irons in fires, lines in lakes, buns in ovens.

But not that last one. I just liked the way it sounded in the context, that's all.

So, soon, I will have a document of what I can piece together from my little birthday bender. The word that immediately comes to mind is "pain"...

Vaguely Reminiscent... Yes.

2006-01-26T14:46:00.000-06:00

I was invited by my roommate (and trusted, best friend) to attend a birthday happy-hour for one of his workmates, Maury. There was no mystery behind the fact that Maury was firmly gay. Now when I say “firmly”, I am being very specific about the mold of gay which Maury fit neatly into. He never came across as someone who was unsure about his gayness, or worried about how others, gay or otherwise, would consider his sexual preference. Firmly. Comfortably. Gay.

Being straight, I do not have a true idea of how difficult it may or may not be for a gay man (or woman, for that matter) to function in this hetero-driven society. So much is my ignorance, that periodically, I can be blissfully callous. Sometimes, I manage to catch my callous comments. I used to piss myself off whenever I would refer to a gay friend, and felt compelled to add: “but he’s cool” after pre-announcing their sexual preference. As in: “I was eating with a bunch of friends last night, and one of them, Daryl – who is gay, but he’s cool – told this funny joke…” As if the baseline for all homosexuals is that they are, at their core, by default “un” cool. BUT, lookey here! I found one who is particularly cool! So particularly cool, that I feel compelled to append his description with an announcement that the listener should not worry about me having to hang around one of those standard, garden-variety uncool gay men! Because fear not: THIS one, against all odds, is cool!

Fucking ridiculous.

Needless to say, I stopped that. Now I just say “I was having dinner with friends, and one of them, Daryl – who would willingly ream a tutu-clad circus bear, if it were male- told this funny joke…” Kidding!

Bygones.

Back to Maury’s birthday.

At that time, I had not met Maury yet, but my roommate was going to a birthday happy hour for him. I, never being one to pass up a happy hour, took the invitation to show up. But I had never heard of the bar, even though I used to work three blocks away from the intersection where the place lived, right next to the state capital. Very strange, but probably not coincidental that this particular bar existed less than a block from the capital building.

The hour of happiness arrived, so I went and picked up a work-buddy named Mark (a fellow bender-taker) and we headed to the rendezvous spot. When we arrived, it was raining, so we had to run from the car, up to the door. It was a shoddy looking establishment, with the tattered remnants of a once-proud patio area out front, which had apparently been hit by a localized party-tornado of some sort.

Five years back.

There were no windows. The landscaping was left for nature to sort out, and the exterior had probably begged for a fresh coat of paint since the Nixon administration. Flatly, the place looked like it needed to be torn down. “Charlie’s” it read, happily across a torn banner out front. Nice and friendly. Anyone named Charlie is automatically your bestest of friends from WAY back. The name has lots of positive ju-ju.

We pushed through the entrance into the front room. This bar was designed as a three-segment bar. There was the front lounge, full of ratty and mismatched furniture pieces. Then there was a middle room with a couple of pool tables in it. And in the rear was a much larger, darker room. We edged our way through the lounge, and as we were passing through the brief pool table room, Mark started tapping my right shoulder, with a slightly urgent whisper.

“Dude, dude, dude.”

Mark was never one to pester me like that, so I should have taken heed, but I was busy trying to locate my roommate. I had my priorities. After all, it was an unfamiliar establishment, and I needed a friendly face to help me with the drinking thing.

“Dude, dude, DUDE!”

Mark kept at it, but I kept pushing forward, ignoring him, past the pool cues and into the threshold that lead to the big room. There was a large bar in the center, a dance floor waaaaaaay in the back, rickety café table sets to the left, and runways with the shaved, t-backed asses of naked men prancing up and down on the right.

Hold up. How strange is that? What kind of bar is this again?

“DUDE. What. The. Fuck?” Mark was pointing at one of the runway wanderers, with a slightly trembling finger. “That guy is naked and shit…”

Mark was whispering, almost paranoid. Like we had wandered into a cave full of hibernating bears. Suddenly, I became very sensitive to using the word “gay”. I was not, and am not, completely sure why this bothered me. But it felt like everyone was staring at us, spotlighted, so nothing we could say would go unheard by strangers’ ears. He continued anyway, in a hushed voice, gritting his teeth.

“This place is totally gay. This isn’t the kind of happy hour I thought you were talking about.”

Mark was rather displeased at this accidental bait-and-switch. So was I.

“I, I, I didn’t know either.”

Honestly, I would not have cared if I had been told up front. But this was too much to be springing on me. Not cool. I did my best to quell Mark’s growing irritation.

“You grab that pool table and I’ll find my roommate. He better fucking be here.”

Mark, reluctantly took the pool table furthest from the crowd. To my knowledge, he was not homophobic, but he could feel the vibe. He agreed to come along under the impression that he would be rewarded with half-off margaritas, but somehow ended up dry and surrounded by an army of creepy, middle-aged, middle school “theatre arts” teachers. To say he was pissed would be a rude understatement.

I made my way around the bar in the big room, searching for my deceiving roommate. I was half the average age in the place, and I was not the only one who made that notation. I found my roommate sitting amongst his coworkers, all the way in the back, next to the dance floor. I do not believe there were any standard light fixtures back there, only candles and the spotting movement of reflected lasers off of an obnoxiously large disco ball. It took me a minute to adjust and hunt him down. I approached with dead-panned sincerity.

“Hey man, when you got a minute, Mark and I are in the front playing pool. Head up there.”

I did not even bother to properly introduce myself to his group, or the birthday boy. I was a little miffed that due to an obvious and egregious miscommunication, MY coworker was suddenly under the impression that a) I was suddenly gay and b) more disturbingly, that I had tricked him into going to a gay bar so I could plow him full of bottom shelf tequila, no doubt so that I could take advantage of him. I was more than miffed. I was livid. My roommate obviously made no note of my heightened irritation.

“Sure. Let’s go. Did you bring Mark?”

I was a bit stunned that he missed my cues.

“Yeah, I brought him. Let’s go talk to him. Right now”

I wanted this little communication error explained. I wanted to be exonerated, and I wanted my roommate to smooth it all over as some sort of prank. Whatever was necessary to get me out of the sling.

Mark was visibly shaken when I finally dragged my roommate over. There was a small pack of middle-aged ex-hippies who had moved in on him after I left. I later learned that the night we were there was considered a “trade” night. That is to say, younger men showed up with the intention of hooking up with the older fellows. Good times for all involved, to be sure. But Mark was feeling somewhat intimidated by the situation, and just wanted to be left alone.

“Shit man, these guys just walked right up and started hitting on me like I was supposed to fuck ‘em right here! I mean, I was in theatre arts in high school, so I never bought into that whole “predatory gay” thing. But shit, man. Shit! This place is CRAZY, and not “good” crazy. BAD CRAZY.”

I did not believe him, and ignored his paranoia.

“You’re not gay, Mark. Look at you. You’re sweating. They can tell that. No one is hitting on you, so calm down.”

To my roommate, “dude, this is kinda fucked up, actually. You should have said something. We walked in here like it was TGI Friday’s or some shit, and it’s the goddamn Blue Oyster Bar from Police Academy.”

I tried to be stern, but it was not working. My roommate just shrugged it off.

“Sorry man, I thought I said something. You probably forgot.”
“Forgot? No, no, no. No fucking way I would forget that kind of warning.” Me to Mark, “no. Fucking. Way. There’s no way I would not have dragged you here if I had known.”

Mark remained in skeptical shock.

My roommate, always a fair diplomat, was determined to help us be comfortable. “It’s no big deal. Oh, and the margarita special ends in like thirty minutes, and it’s buy one: get the second half-off. You don’t get a free one like I said earlier. AND, they’re in these little-ass cups, so you’ll probably want to get a few at a time.”

Fuck me. This was disappointing news. Horrific, when combined with the greasy, dancing weight-lifters all over the place.

“Are you serious? That’s not a happy hour, man. And look at this shit.” I pointed to a nearby dancer who had started to wag his please-touchables around like a meat tassel. “Just for having to see that, you’re buying. Man, shit.”

Against our better judgment, we followed my roommate to the table by the dance floor and sat down. Introductions were made, and I got to know the coworker crew. Turns out, all the dancers there were “straight”. Most of them were dating women my roommate worked with. Apparently, men pay men a hell of a lot more to dance than women will. Big surprise. Women do not want to pay to see dudes strip? Why’s that? Oh yeah, men do that willingly, for free. Got it.

I sat with my back to the whole of the place, facing the group. I figured it best if I eased myself into this environment. No sense in overdosing, I guessed. And that includes “eye contact” with the wolves out in the crowd.

So there I was, knocking back the half-dozen piss-cups of gut-rot margarita, grumbling to myself about the awful “drink specials”, when this huge paw of a hand grabs my left shoulder from behind. I looked at the thick, veiny hand, and then fearfully followed the attached arm, up to my right to greet the owner.

The turning of my head caused the tip of my nose to graze a rainbow-striped banana-hammocked nut-sack. I almost had a seizure. No one likes a surprise dick-in-the-face. Even if you like dick in your face, it is never a welcomed surprise. Damnit.

“I hear it’s your birthday,” said the hammock man, with his left hand firming up on my shoulder. I wanted to cry. It was quite possibly the most awkward feeling I have ever had toward a strange man. I was in repelling shock, but he took it as me being coy. I felt like he was trying to pull my face into his nether-regions, and that my resistance was just me “playing hard to get”.

Welcome to Oz, bitch.

Everyone at the table, including Maury, began shouting “NO, NO, NO! He’s not GAY! It’s Maury’s birthday, not Craig’s! Maury is over here!” Pointing at Maury, who had gotten out of his chair, quite jealous of the treatment I was receiving, and was demanding that the dancer give him his birthday spanking. Without missing a beat, the jiggling birthday gift and his package sauntered over to the birthday boy. No apologies to me from the dancer, for the future therapy I would need as a result of his mistake.

Maury proceeded to get his dance, and I flew to the bar for more sippy-cups of bucket-mixed booze. I figured another two hundred “specials” and I would be able to forget the last ten minutes of my life.

Bartender: “What can I get you?”
Me: “Four specials. The margarita things, in the test tubes or whatever.”
B: “You got it.”
Me: [not even letting them hit the bar top]: “Keep ‘em coming.”

While the bartender poured me more foggy-mind juice from a warm plastic pitcher, I looked to my right and noticed an old man perched on a stool, pushing four strands of white-sauced pasta around on a Styrofoam salad plate, staring right at me. He had a creepish smile, which revealed the only four operable teeth in his quivering pie-hole. They were molars, and they had black caps on them. I do not believe the caps were intentional.

Unless deep-rooted tooth decay was the “look” he was aiming for.

He probably weighed in under a buck. 105 tops. His hair was crap-patchy and pathetically wispy, as is the case with most alcoholic men in their late sixties. It was too dark near the bar to note his attire, but I feel sure it was on par with the rest of his appearance: all kinds of fucked up.

The way he kept staring at me, made me begin to wonder whether or not he was operating with some sort of brain deficiency. Some sort of Adult Onset variety of retardation perhaps. His movements were almost slow-motion. His eyelids opened and closed at roughly half the speed of a normal person’s. And when he finally wrangled a piece of luke-warm pasta into his toothless mouth, he gummed it with the speed and urgency of a growing toe nail. It was quite a show.

“So,” he drooled. “You come here often?”

I replied, almost appalled, “Pardon?”

Him, trying to look less creepy, “I mean, do you live around here? Can I buy you a drink? [drawn out pause] I like your style.”

Me, fully appalled, “uh, no thanks buddy. I’m cool.” [pointing to bartender] “He’s got me. Just… eat that uh… pasta. Or whatever…” Which caused him to scare me with a “you sure are cute when you’re intimidated!” smile.

As creepy as he was, the old fellow was right. I was most certainly intimidated. Scared. Frightened. I wanted to duck out, but I felt that I owed myself another armful of those margaritas first, before the happy hour eclipsed. “HELLO, bartender! For the love of god, where are those fucking drinks, I’m dying over here!”

I abandoned the bar and went back to the table, with a small army of shots to dull the shock of it all. Dude would not let up. He was unstoppable. Worse yet, he was not even listening to me. His lines did not require any cues. As if they were pulled from a mental list of some sort, and he was just blabbering his way down the line. A list of busted-ass come-ons that he was throwing out there, like a set of jailer’s keys would be trial-and-errored to get through a single lock. It was as if he was under the impression that somewhere, buried in his pickled mind, there was one poorly turned phrase which would get his denture-needing ass some play. He just needed to happen upon it, and all would be golden.

I could have been a cigar store Indian, and he would never have noticed.

Through that treatment, I believe I received a small taste of what it is like to be a woman, at any random bar in bar-town USA. While she is trying to deflect unwanted advances from some persistent dick head who: Just. Does. Not. Get it. It was surreal.

And there it was. The first time a guy ever hit on me. And his lines were the absolute worst. I mean, who the hell asks that shit anymore? I know those bullshit lines did not work in 1972, and they sure as hell were not going to fly with me.

They say that such attention, even if unsolicited, should flatter the subject. Not that I have the right to shrug off such nonsense, because in a very strange way, it was flattering, but I was not flattered at all by the man’s advances. Further more, the whole thing frightened me. Horrified me.

Educated me.

Back at the table, Maury was critiquing his birthday dance. Apparently, gay men such as he, have a real issue with pimples on butt cheeks. Enough so, that one might consider not tipping a dancer who (sadly, I guess) needs some Oxy 10 briefs. Gay men, sensitive about the toosh? Who knew?

Truesday and the Techniculties

2006-01-24T14:29:00.000-06:00

Today's Truesday. Man, this Tuesday's column felt fuckin' winded. But at the same time, I had to edit out a-lot in order to trim it down to the point I wanted to make. In turn, the words lose much of their depth and interest. Like shaving the deep-red peel of an apple to get to the part you really want: the white and bland looking center.

And to top it off, there were some rather lengthy technical difficulties with austinist this morning. The site was unfindable. Lost out in the vast reaches of the interweb. Eaten, or something. There were a couple of vague explanations given, but I decided not to bother trying to figure any of it out.

It's good to write, for better or for worse. Good times!

Fuckin' LAZY.

2006-01-20T13:43:00.000-06:00

When I'm not working on private projects, I'm working my money-job, or watching SCRUBS on DVD (which is the best thing to enter my life this month).

So if you give two shits, here's some other writing I've done elsewhere:

I watched Underworld: Evolution, and was highly unimpressed.

James Frey: who the hell cares?

Intelligent Design: whatever.

And here's an older Drunk Story just for the hell of it.

Don't hate, emasculate. Have a great weekend.

I'm So Close, I Can FEEL IT.

2006-01-13T12:08:00.000-06:00

This story is the first chapter in the book I've been knocking around for the past couple of months. I don't know why I'm posting it here, since I intend to print the fucker, so I guess I'm looking for feedback of some sort.

I really don't know what I'm doing here, and I suppose that would be the over-riding concept of the book itself.

Leading the Blind

Back in my diaper years, our family of five lived a modest life in a little town called Alief, which had, around that time, just recently been swallowed up by the ever-expanding tax-base monster of a city named Houston. We were a lower middle class, Caucasian family, which was doing well to keep ahead of the bills. My father worked as an Offshore Structural Engineer, which anywhere near Houston during the late seventies and early eighties meant that he worked designing oil platforms, docks, piers, or anything else that touched water and dealt with petroleum of any sort.

In the early eighties, after the oil crunch hit and dried Houston to straw, that market lost its footing and floated overseas. That meant that my father had to follow it in order to earn the money our family needed to make those meager ends meet. My memory of that time is certainly not unpleasant by any stretch, but it is spotted with threats that we may have to uproot and move to strange places with names like Australia, Norway, or San Francisco.

Whenever a threat was not looming, my father was working in even stranger sounding places like Korea, Japan, and India. He would be gone for long stretches of months at a time. Upon returning from said places, my father would always bring back toys, wondrous photographs, and tastes for ever-weirder foods like sushi, curry, or kimchi.

In all honesty, it did not bother me a whole lot that my father was not around. I do not mean this in a cruel, “I never really liked the man” sort of way. Far from it. It simply never occurred to me that he was gone, or that he may not return. Lucky for me, he always did return, so I never had to face up to my oblivious approach to the whole thing.

My brother was not blessed with my fortuitous ignorance. Even though we are twins, my brother was always able to pick up on the subtleties of such circumstances. Subtleties which were far beyond the grasp of my toddler mind. He was keenly aware that my father was gone, and that there was no solid evidence that he would return. Being but a small child of assumed limited conceptual capacity, he was not made privy to any information concerning my father’s actual whereabouts, or any proper timetables that demonstrated his pointable return. All he knew was that the old man would go very far away, for very extended periods of time, and no useable details of these journeys got passed down the family pecking order.

This, understandably, upset him a great deal.

One balmy Alief afternoon, my brother decided that enough was enough. He was incapable of continuing to play with toys, or watch network television while the family collapsed around him. He had to do something.

Even then, at the blessed age of four, my brother was ahead of the curve. He chose to do what children three times his age usually did when confronted with situations that appear to be beyond their control.

He had to run away from home.

To this day, I have no idea why I agreed to go on such a poorly planned journey. We were four. He had no map, no knowledge of the complications surrounding securing housing or sustenance, and more importantly: he had no new location to which we would be traveling to. A complete hack job, thrown together on a tantrum-fueled whim.

It must have sounded like fun though, because I remember being pretty upbeat about the whole thing. We had not yet entered elementary school, so we really had not been far beyond the boundaries of our own lawn. And when we did cross that line, we were shrouded in the shell of an automobile. We had certainly never gone very far from home by foot, and had never, under any circumstances, done so without parental supervision.

Those were simpler times, which is a phrase I have always heard my parents utter whenever discussing their childhood. My father would make ludicrous claims such as “one time, your uncle and I cut through some fence, jumpstarted a bulldozer, and ran it into a lake. Just to get back at the construction company for stealing my bike.” To which he would always affix that clever caveat-capper: “but those were simpler times back then.” As if that helped make any sense of the previous story.

Regardless, it is a loaded phrase, and I never imagined myself using it. But I am. They really were much simpler. So simple that my mother felt little trepidation at the thought of two pre-pubescents wandering the neighborhood with bags of our own toys. So little fear that she felt comfortable enough to go ahead and lend a hand.

“You want to run away?”

[red-faced, snot-screaming reply ] “YES!”

“You want to raise holy hell and cry about it?”

[vibrating, stuttered response with double the snot ] “YEEEEEESSSS!”

“Well, I’ll help you pack your bags then.” Such a helpful mother.

She helped us cram toys into a sack and a small powder blue suitcase, which actually belonged to our older sister. I probably cried during this process, but only because my brother and mother were visibly upset by the whole thing. I honestly had no idea what was actually going down. I just wanted to make sure my favorite toys made it into my sister’s suitcase, since that is what I planned on carrying out into my new life as a toddler hobo.

It is all about having your priorities properly sorted in such situations. Hobos should always be sure to have only their favoritest toys. These are the rules of the road.

Everything was packed and outfitted to specification. So my mother showed us out the front door. My brother defiantly passed through the threshold and headed straight for the street. I followed just behind, probably grinning with excitement, waving back. But just as we were about to step down the curb and into the gutter to cross, my mother shouted from the doorstep.

“Don’t cross any streets, okay?”

Streets? What the hell does a kid who still wears diapers know about “streets”? Sesame Streets? Whatever mom.

We agreed not to cross any stupid streets. No problem. Where we were headed, there would be no stupid streets, or stupid rules, or any other stupid street rules.

From the front porch we went right, and started to follow the curb toward the end of the block. We were on our way. Defiant and rebellious, at such a young age. I had no idea what the hell it was we hoped to find, why we were so damned adamant about leaving, or where we wished to end up. But I bet I really needed to pee. And I probably went ahead and did it in my pants, to save time on our journey. I was crazy smooth like that.

Around the block we went as my brother continued to rant with escalating fury about things I had no ability to comprehend. Like unraveling the intricacies of String Theory to a new puppy, or explaining an unfamiliar yet potentially violent emotion to a half-wit brother. I was completely incapable of comprehending, but happy enough to pretend.

The houses in that strange world beyond the sight of our mailbox were different than those on our street, but just slightly. We lived in a neighborhood which when developed, obviously had but four floor plans made available to buyers. “Color” was the chief design element with which people tried to differentiate their homes from their neighbors’. White or red brick? Brown or Green trim? Of course, if color failed to set your house apart, you could always try and outgrow the length of your neighbors’ impressive forests of St. Augustine creeper grass. “Mine’s the fifth green house on the left with the grass that hides a Volkswagen on the driveway.”

We trudged past differently painted homes of familiar architecture and fascia, moving rather slow due to the heat and burdensome luggage. Turned the fourth corner, still following the curb, letting the wild road take us where it may. My brother had quieted down considerably by then, focusing more on the trek, but he was obviously still seething.

The heat was starting to get the better of me. I felt tempted to abandon my sister’s carry-on with all my favorite toys therein. It would have been difficult, and potentially near-fatal, but I somehow knew I could survive out in the real world without my favorite Hot Wheels and a uselessly random selection of Lincoln Logs pieces.

Amidst my internal discussion surrounding the potential jettison of said toys, my brother stopped in front of me. A look of confusion poured over his face. I followed his line of sight and recognized the house in front of us. The misshapen hedges and cracked sidewalk were rather familiar. As was the brown color of the trim, the big tree with the perfect foothold for climbing, and our mother’s station wagon in the driveway…

My brother’s face quickly crumbled, moving from confusion to defeat. But then he mustered up some pride and marched up the lawn to the front door as if he had a full speech prepared and was completely ready to let it fly on our mother. He pushed his way through the front door, threw his things on the floor of the entryway, still sweating from the mix of vein-bursting anger and the mid-day sun. But instead of taking a left and heading into the kitchen where my mother was banging pots around, he bolted down the hallway to the right. My mother called out to him as he did so, “you boys didn’t cross any streets did you?”

“NO,” my brother replied with disappointed defiance, aware that we had been beaten by our own agreement.

“What’s for lunch mom?” I obviously had a different take on things.

Fucking Me-Me-Memes...

2006-01-11T14:18:00.000-06:00

At the request of Impulsive Compulsive (an anonymous request… can we get some names going around here?), I am actually going to answer a goddamn meme. I respect her writing, and her fierceness (good word to describe her and her wiley ways). For anyone who does not know what a meme is, I’m not going to wikipedia-link it for you. It’s a chain-letterish variety of navel-gazing that only works on message boards, “about me” sections of webbish display, and here… in bloody blogland.

Five Weird Things About Me.

[here goes the navel-gazing part]

1. I use water on my cereal. That’s right. H-TWO to the fucking O. I prefer it that way. Milk spoils, which makes me feel like a wasteful asshole when it happens (which occurs EVERY time I buy the stuff). Milk also gives me horrendous gas, which however hilarious that might be to me, the others in my elevator have little appreciation for it.

2. I firmly believe that I am the stupidest person I’ve ever met. Actually, I have no idea whether or not this is weird in itself, but when coupled against my overwhelming optimism as far as my abilities go, and my relatively strong sense of confidence, well, it just ends up sounding weird. “Hi, I’m a complete and utter idiot. Now listen close to this complex and endearing story I’m about to tell…” Fucking pointlessly weird. But that’s me. Can’t run from myself.

3. I hate to touch door handles. This is a self-preservation method, actually. People are dirty. Their hands are even dirtier. My hands are dirty enough, and I’d prefer not to mingle mine with others.

4. I do not believe that anyone should be judged by the company they keep. I describe this as “weird” only because other people find it weird. There is something redeeming about every person you’ll ever come across. Perhaps it takes a weird person to see that in others. Again, I don’t see this as weird per se, but it apparently isn’t that common, and due to that, I suppose it is “weird” by definition.

5. Desserts are of little interest to me. I cannot be bribed or tempted by way of refined-sugar products. Not that I hate the stuff, I just don’t care about it. Chocolate in bar-form is alright, I suppose, but I wouldn’t pay money for it. Ice cream holds no power over me. Cake is actually fairly repulsive. But if you gimme fried pickles or quality liquor, and I’ll be yours forever.

[here's the chain letter part]

I want to see the following suffer through what I suffered through:

CanaDebbie

MMMMM... Bella!

LyCAN, or LyCAN'T?

Glitz n' Giggles

And because she's already ahead of the curve, I'll just link to Pretty Creative Alibi's list.

Please don't actually do the meme for my sake. Do it for the kids. Think of the kids, damnit!

Making Their Ways

2006-01-11T11:42:00.000-06:00

Last year I entered a short story contest. I knew about the contest for well over two months, but kept putting it off in favor of other projects. Well, as it always goes, I waited too long and when that friend called to ask me whether I had submitted anything, I had a grand ol' two hours to submit.

So I took a real story of mine, warped it with a cliched angle, and submitted the thing. Nothing ever came of it, and I forgot that I had done such a hack job.

Today, as I was rumaging through some old files, searching for a Word template for a friend, I stumbled upon the worded beast. There it was, the Frankenstory, a patch-worked piece of disjointed concepts, typed up and ready for rejection. Awesome.

I dubbed it: Making Their Ways. Here 'tis.

Pacing the filthy subterranean platform of the Manhattan bound 7 train like a zoo animal, Charles repeatedly mutters to himself the single word: “step”. This continues for no less than thirty minutes as he waits for the tardy train to screech through, but he does not notice that so much time has passed, as he has been in a constant state of emergency since he gave up the hero’s fine wine. “Step, step, step,” he continues to repeat, though not in sync with his footsteps.

His once proud frame, thick and manly during his creamier years, is now gaunt and wretched. His back has a slight hunch, knocking a full two inches from the 6’ 4” height displayed on his New Jersey Identification Card. His beard is a clumsy mistake, more a product of neglect than a fashion statement. The dark and dreadful dreads of hair that protrude from his cabbie hat are inspired by the same laziness that built his dreadful facial hair. His clothes are equally shabby, and not in a “rustic”, “cleverly casual”, or “vintage thrift” kind of way. His quiet chanting is periodically interrupted by a whispy coughing fit that begs for expectorant. But if he had any cough syrup, he would probably shoot it straight into his veins, since that is the only form of consumption which consumes his murky mind.

“Step, step, step…”

Just as a mild-to-profound shaking fit begins to make its way from his left leg north, a familiar gust of humid wind begins to pull through the subway stop. The train is approaching, and he has every intention of boarding it. Sweaty arm pits, missing front tooth, jitters and all. The car is full, but Charles manages to squeeze on to the last car of the caterpillar train, continuing his mousey “step, step, step…” mantra. No one appears cautious to his arrival, and the train lurches forward toward the island of metropolis.

“I really need to get a job today. Charles, we must get a job today. We will be… step, step, step…” he thinks to himself as an old lady seated below him drops her umbrella and is forced to stand up in order to retrieve it. “Step, step, step…” he murmurs when he sits in her newly vacated spot. She turns back around and notices him in her seat. He is rocking, ever-so slightly, acting as if he had been sitting there all along. She turns back around and grabs a hand-pole. The expression on her face is one of indifference, a look that appears to have been chiseled into lava rock rather than an expression made by a sentient being. She would obviously be more than happy to trade a seat for the right to not have to speak with Charles.

Once the shakes have subsided, Charles’s mind begins to wander in seemingly endless directions, steered by various dark feelings of loss, his physical needs, and a sense of depravity brought on by a rather long list of physical and mental disorders.

“I checked the papers, but the classifieds section labeled: ‘available six-figure position for smack addict with an active criminal record,’ was curiously empty this week.” A grin pours over his cracked lips as he muses at the idea of such a position, and that it would be advertised in The New York Times. Ha! Hilarity, or something like it. “I bet he’s listening to something new and hip,” he comments to himself while staring at a young, bookish sort of fellow standing near the door. This twenty-something child has a blue iPod with earphones the size of peanuts, which are delivering noise of some sort to his brain. “I bet he is listening to some of that crazy punk-sounding stuff that lives in Alphabet City. I cannot remember the last time I heard music. Music that I chose. Music that was music to me. I only hear one fiddle. God, just a quick dip, just a fast load, one for the road… and that will get my mind right so I can handle this money situation. Jesus… step, step, step…”

The cold sweats were returning, and his teeth began to chatter uncontrollably. An Asian woman with bags of wrapped fish edges an inch in the opposite direction. A business man in a full wool suit, reading the pink-papered Financial Times takes two steps backward from Charles, without ever looking directly at him. “Step, step, step… For Christ’s sake.” The business man throws a disapproving, raised-brow eye toward Charles, acknowledging that he heard his Lord’s name used in vain.

The door between cars slides open, letting the sounds of the tunnel fill Charles’s car. A middle-aged man enters the car, zipping up his zipper. “Oh, that’s nice, Zipper Guy,” Charles assumes he was urinating between cars, and turns his thoughts back to the nerd’s iPod and power to control the music. “I bet he is listening to Rod damn Stewart, that little prick. I bet he has turkey on Thanksgiving too. I bet people with success and interesting stories about traveling are there when they cut that turkey. I bet they have gravy. I bet they don’t vomit every time they take a piss. I bet he has Fleetwood Mac on that thing. My God, just one hit and I’ll be straight, I swear, to get my head right and do this… thing. Step, step, step…”

The car is bursting and thick with mid-day travelers, yet the Zipper Guy navigates through the crowd as if possessed, pushing to the rear of the car. As soon as he reaches the other end, the door from which he entered re-opens. An unnaturally tanned woman with bright blue eye shadow, pink lipstick, four-pound-ornate-as-hell earrings, and teased-to-the-brink-of-liftoff "poofball" hair, enters the crowded car. She scans the motley group of riders, making eye contact with everyone including Charles (whose mouth is curiously gaping-wide open. Her sense of purpose is a force none of the thirty or so occupants of the car can ignore. After a few uncomfortable seconds of her blinkless stare, picking among them, her glare steadies and her eyes purse-up like a mole’s, focusing on the car’s most recent addition.

Zipper Man is propped up against the rear door, clutching a tattered duffle bag as if it contained his soul, and his baseball cap is over his face as if taking a siesta.

"You little bastard," she bellows through the car, still blinkless. "Do you want me to tell all these people what you were doing you fucking pervert?!" Her middle-aged lipid deposits vibrantly rippling through her body, accentuated by her unnecessarily tight, bra-less halter top and two-sizes-too-small pink Lycra stretch-shorts. "Fuck you, you sick son of a bitch," she adds.

Unfortunately for Zipper Man, he had entered the last car of the train. He has nowhere to go. The next stop is his only savior. He remains motionless, continuing the siesta masquerade.

Charles continues to chase his thoughts as they flutter and bounce around the grey matter of his poisoned brain. “I bet that kid’s dad says supportive things. Like, ‘go get’em champ!’ Or, ‘that’s my boy, playing the saxophone solo, I am so proud’. I only remember dad telling me that if I ever turned gay, he would kill us both to put me out of his misery. I bet he has Def Leopard on there too. Turkey with gravy and yams and all that country-goodness crap. With napkins and polished silverware. Why did I ever leave San Jose? Jesus… Step, step, step…”

The incensed woman continued her tirade, subjecting the entire car to her hostilities. "Do you want me to tell them you were jacking-off on the train?" her voice becoming more irritated in reaction to Zipper Man’s apathetic attitude. "You need help you sick fuck," she goes on, in what appears to be an attempt at a more personal attack, with the hope that he will respond. When that does not end in success, she begins moving through the car, much as he did earlier, irreverent of the current inhabitants. Her eyes are so laser-focused on him, one would swear she is trying to burn that cap right off his face in order to expose the shame she so desperately believes should be underneath. Or, she simply wants to beat him like a circus monkey (she has enough low-grade, "corn gold" nugget rings on each hand to put him in a coma with little effort).

Charles marvels at the passion this woman has for her cause. He also wonders what her mother looks like. He feels sure that the daughter is little more than a hastily drawn caricature of the mother: sketchy on detail, out of proportion, and completely lacking in substance. But his mind flutters back to the student’s music and benefits. “I bet his trust-funded apartment is in Brooklyn where all those hipster-types live, with those stupid looking mullet-hawk hair cuts, tight jeans, and vacant expressions. A single bump won’t do me any real harm here. I just need to figure it out. I just need to get around this thing, and… step, step, fuck.” He puts his fists into his eye sockets, straining himself. “Damnit… Step, step, step…”

Beyond the confines of Charles’s brittle mind, the tension in the car is escalating as the angry woman pushes her way toward Zipper Man. But, before she has the opportunity to pop that cap off his head and put a few nugget-ring imprints on his scrotum, Zipper Man’s prayers are answered: the Lexington and 42nd stop arrives.

As soon as the doors open, everyone pours out onto the platform like they’re running from the bulls in Pamplona. The woman, submerged in her disgust, is not properly positioned in the car to pursue the object of her current hatred. Zipper Man slips into the chaotic crowd with a marksman's accuracy, and a Wimbledon ball boy's urgency. Gone. Charles rises, slowly, and is the last person to vacate the last car on that 7 train. He is not completely sure why he is exiting at this stop, but he knows there are things to be done nearby.

The only remnants of the Zipper Man’s episode are the irritated woman's screeching demands for "the authorities", bouncing off the moldy-slime covered tiles which line the subterranean 7 train platform. Meanwhile, all the witnesses of the event ascend the seemingly endless stairs leading to the cement-floored and glass-ceilinged world above. At this point, Charles’s group of travelers have become their own collective being. Emotionless, in some form of urban mass-consciousness, methodically cleansing their psyches, purging the previous ten minutes from their memory, shoveling it all into their collective subconscious. Just like always, doing what survival demands. As soon as the conscious-cleansing process is done, "Fuck me, it's hot," Charles mutters to himself, "I really need to find some coffee. Then I’ll get this thing taken care of right here. Step, step, step…"

After Monday, comes TRUESDAY. And snot.

2006-01-10T10:40:00.000-06:00

My weekly is up at austinist... Too high on Benadryl to post anything right now.

My word, being high on Benadryl at work sucks. Big time.

The Results are Positive.

2006-01-06T15:37:00.000-06:00

Just got my truck inspected, and it passed without so much as a single raised eyebrow. If you had never met my truck, you would be wondering why this would be such a feat? Well, that would be because you’d never met such a strange acquaintance. As my truck is most strange.

For the time being, I happen to be one of those assholes with more than one vehicle, amidst rapist gas prices and a strong argument that I might not need any vehicle whatsoever, beyond my sad vanity.

I represent that variety of asshole well, except that there’s no vanity involved. I’m selling the pretty one soon, and keeping the creeeeeeeky squeek-bucket that passed inspection today. I got it from my uncle, who had traded up on vehicles, and apparently had some trouble unloading this one. At first, I was almost touched by his offer to give the thing over, as a gift. After all, it does have value, does it not?

Sort of.

As soon as I get the a/c fixed, the windshield repaired (five cracks – FIVE), a second set of tires (had to get two just to feel safe driving it home), the transmission rebuilt and the differential replaced… I will have put just as much into the goddamn thing as it would have cost me to buy one, clean, from a stranger off a car lot. Except that I have to go through the motions.

He knew all of this on the front end, so I feel no remorse in sorta-scorning the “gift”.

When sitting still, the vehicle appears to be a work truck of some sort. One that might be used to pick up a half-dozen day-laborers to do lawn work or drywall installation. But upon closer inspection, the bed is not fucked up enough to give evidence toward that conclusion. No. Oh, no. To the trained eye, the little truck is an obvious victim of negligent truckicide. Drooped rear bumper, slanted front fascia, bald rear tires, a host of phrenological bumps and chips all down the sides… and the crackle-glass for a windshield, well, that’s just to say “I’m fuckin’ classy, so snap into a Slim Jim!” When the driver door is opened, it “drops” down an inch after it passes a certain point in its swinging radius. Just to keep you on your toes.

When in motion, it is not uncommon for people waiting on the curb for a crosswalk to take a few steps back as I idle nearby. Presumably, they fear that a fire may spontaneously erupt from beneath the hood. Or from the horrendous grinding sound that hums and tanks up from the rear differential. It sounds like someone is cutting lumber with a warped, jagged, circular saw. And when the clutch is engaged, a bevy of chirps flutters from under the hood, like a flock of parakeets, chattering a demand for me to keep it in neutral.

The truck itself is awesome. Profiling in it is equally awesome.

Driving it illegally made me paranoid. Driving it legally makes me proud to be a Texan.

Truesday and the Rant

2006-01-03T10:41:00.000-06:00

Well, well, well. Looks like I’ll be writing a weekly “column” over at Austinist. Aptly named “Truesday”, which will post on (no shit?) every Tuesday (holy cow!).

I plan to suck real bad, and say really inappropriate things. So it won’t be much different than this here blog thing. You can check out the first entry here. My older stuff is here.

Feel free to comment on my writings there, as if you were doing it here. You can comment anonymously, and I’ll probably be able to figure out who it is. Or you can leave a clue, nickname, whatever’s clever. Hell, link your own blog on there with a witty comment. Who doesn’t love a witty comment, eh?

The strange thing about writing for a site like Austinist is that there is little to no real feedback. A story/post goes up, it gets read (presumably), but then just disappears into the void. I would guess that for every thousand readers per day, a comment is made. People keep pretty quiet, which sort of negates the purpose of having a comment field to begin with.

The only time I get any feedback is when I say something completely crass or inflammatory. Which has happened, but not intentionally.

Sometimes my opinions are wholly unpopular. Other times, I’m just flat out wrong. And out on the wondrously anonymous interweb, the douche balloons come out in droves if you so much as swap a “their” with a “they’re”. May the good lord help you if you misquote something, or make an off-handed assumption (better known as an “opinion”).

Understandably, the work I do at Austinist gets mistaken for journalism, as opposed to expressive writing, or blogging, and that’s okay. In fact, my particular perception of what blogs are supposed to do is quickly becoming the buggy whip of the online industry. Outdated, with a slight tinge of nostalgia.

You see, blogging, in my mind, was never supposed to be an “official” news source. That misses the whole point and beauty of the thing. It was initially seen as 100% opinion, and not taken as hard-and-thoroughly-researched journalism. Mainly because the unregulated blog world has no effective editorial oversight. Anyone can say anything they want. The hundreds of thousands of blogging finger tips, tapping away on keys, with nothing between their “opinion” and “fact” but the air pushed away to strike the board… that’s totally missing the point, putting far too much importance on the individual, and it assumes too much integrity from the writers. Insanity.

This is not only irresponsible and dangerous, it totally craps on the idea that blogs are a place for unbridled OPINION. Say what you want, cause a discussion, share some information. Why the hell is it being seen as “replacing” bonded, insured, fully resourced, tenured, associated press connected PERIODICALS? Unless the shits are editorial in nature, how is it that some recently unemployed dude in his underwear, with dubious credentials (probably a marketing degree), can write about politics on a free blog, and have his spew taken as gospel by anyone? Let alone: to the point where The Washington Post takes notice and begins to feel fear for their mindshare? Is this really happening out there?

Absolutely ridiculous.

My posts are never intended to threaten or replace what I see as professional journalism. Editorials are another story all together. A whole ‘nother enchilada. And I like enchiladas…

Craig the Brooklyn Idiot: The Grand Finale

2005-12-22T12:08:00.000-06:00

Craig the Brooklyn Idiot: The Grand Finale
Originally uploaded by truecraig.

That's the big screen against the far wall of the karaoke place. That's me, making a scene, as usual. I remember singing right up in the face of the guy wearing the white shirt, on the right. He was very friendly about the whole thing, even though I was standing on his coffee table there. His lady friend was most displeased with me and my shenanigans.

I don't blame her. I got nothin' but love for the crowd. Nothin' but love.

NYC For Xmas Time... Sexual Chocolate.

2005-12-19T15:05:00.000-06:00

The second day in NYC is always a bit rough for me. Every trip. Due to my tendency to get staggering, kidney-failing, bold-faced-lying drunk on my first night there, I have trouble functioning the second day.

But somehow, as if by magic, I always pull through. Afflicted and affected, I trudge through day two with a numbness that can only be brought by relentless pain. On Friday, my whole body felt like it was being run over by a bus. Every ten minutes or so. Throbbing, exhausting, crippling hang over bullshit.

Anyone who drinks must admit to the power of the hang over, but unless you are amongst others who are equally broken, you must not dwell on it. There’s nothing more ridiculous than a first-class drinker who constantly cries about the hang overs as if it were a completely random thing. Like justice, or some shit.

But when you’re amongst other binge-bender lovers, then feel free to wallow in your collective downgraded mental and physical state. Have a circle-jerk to commemorate it or whatever.

I was lone-gunning the hang over that day. If anyone else was as bad off as me, they too hid it. And I was looking for signs, believe you me. My misery was goddamn lonely and was really up for some company. To no avail.

The day was taken up with lunch at a dumpling house off Canal in China town. Cheap, courteous, and manic, the dumpling houses throughout Chinatown are always a good bet for good value, and horrendous bathrooms.

Speaking of bathrooms. As we walked down Broadway from Bleeker to Canal, amongst all the shoe shops and bustling shoppers, some dude felt it completely reasonable to relieve himself on the front of a shop. I believe it was a clothing boutique of some sort. It was almost freezing outside, so his stream of piss was moving with the speed of molasses across the sidewalk to the slushy gutter. We stepped over the meandering stream as it pooled. People just passed right by like “ain’t no thang, mang.” To top it off, the guy was obviously not homeless. He had that penciled-in beard/chin-strap thing that all tough-guy, Bronx-boys appear to have manicured onto their faces. Like Prince or some shit. His shoes were bright white (blancos, son!), and his North Face jacket wasn’t cheap.

First world my ass.

Later that night we met up with friends in Brooklyn for dinner at one of my most favoritest spots: Planet Thai. It’s right off the Bedford stop on the L, in Billysburg. There were around twelve of us there in total. I always enjoy going to Planet Thai when in NYC because it was the last restaurant I went to when I left Brooklyn back in 2001. Sentimental reasons. Plus, the food is good and reasonably priced.

But I was there, really, to see my friends and get drunk. I won’t lie. That hang over had been hounding me like a goddamn school loan all day, and I wanted to relieve myself of its weight. The best way to lighten a hang over load is to float it off. With sake, if available. Shots and shots and shots until all was warm and pleasantly confusing.

We booked it from dinner over to The Abbey for Brooklyn Lager, pool, Gallaga, and to meet up with more friends. The friends who met us there, met us drunk. We Wonder-Twinned together to form a horde-mass of drunkenness. Beautiful.

Shit got talked, beer got spilt, cards got played. And then it was time to wander down to Galapagos for what they advertised as a “Dance Party: Guaranteed to Make You Shake Your Ass!” Since I was already dancing to the muzak that constantly plods along in my mind, it was not a stretch to be interested in such an event. I was already pretty blitzed by then, so I do not remember much of the details surrounding what happened there, but I do remember some pieces.

There was a taller fellow, who was not part of our dinner group, and who was only known in a pedestrian sense by some of my Brooklyn friends. They had seen this guy out and about on occasion. They believed he was a local teacher of some stripe or another, and that he had been kicked out of just about every bar in Brooklyn for one reason or another. Sensing an immediate kinship with the man, I did my best to make friendly. But his dancing was far too erratic for me to enjoy. Far too erratic for anyone, apparently. No one would get within five feet of the guy, even though he was mixing and mingling IN our circle. When I tried to get close to tell him that his dancing was rather “inspired”, he almost knocked me in the jaw with an errant elbow. His dancing technique was very…epileptic, I suppose. It was very strange, but I appreciated it nonetheless. He was free-styling, and that deserves my respect if nothing else.

Once it hit two in the morning, half our group chose to leave in order to make their basketball game the next morning. The rest of us clung to our drunkenness like rabbit’s feet at the dog track and pushed on into the night. We literally pushed ourselves into a hapless hipster who was walking along Bedford Ave, on her way home from wherever. We accosted her for information. What did we want to know?

“Hey, hey, hey!” [tugging on her jacket] “Where’s the karaoke at?”

She was not pleased with being harassed by drunks on the street, but pointed us right around the corner. According to her, we were mere feet from a place with microphones, couches, and grand opportunities to make asses of ourselves in public.

SO FUCKING SWEET.

I called her a liar, which did not sit well with her. She should have punched me right there. In my defense, she was rather rude about the whole thing. It really did appear that she was just trying to brush off some drunk assholes who had grabbed her on the street and started asking her really stupid questions. Hell, I would have lied. So I assumed she would too.

But she didn’t lie. Right around the corner was Lulu’s (or something like that). A basement karaoke place.

We fell down the stairs and immediately went to the bar.

The place was very dark, with a small stage to the right, long bar to the left. Various tables and chairs were scattered about the floor between the bar and stage, and on the far wall from the entrance was a large screen with some artsy looking crap scrolling across it. Sometimes it corresponded with the song, but really it was just some random bullshit imagery floating around behind the prompted lyrics. There were maybe twenty other people in there besides us. But it could have been only ten, which I was seeing double of. Some guy was singing on the stage, alone, when we walked in. He had lots of spirit, which I believe is 99% of karaoke anyway, but he was ruthlessly butchering the Madonna (or whatever) tune that was on. We cheered him on anyway, because like I learned in Chicago, that’s what you fucking do in karaokeland. Everyone is a goddamn rock star, regardless of whether any talent is apparent. If they get the words wrong, you clap anyway. If they sing off key and vomit on themselves half way through, you go ahead and cheer like it’s a parade. Even if they produce photos of your beloved grandmother and defecate on them whilst chanting voo-doo instead of singing your favorite George Michael song, you congratulate them on a “job well done”. That’s the nature of these things.

So we fell in and I recommended that everyone take a seat at a table near the stage while some of us danced and sang back-up for the stranger on stage. I had no idea what the plan was, but everyone seemed pretty lost as to what it was we were doing there. Not everyone appreciates karaoke, drunk or not.

Apparently, karaoke was the brainchild of but two of us in the group. Everyone else had been somewhat coerced into going. I don’t remember threatening anyone with violence, but it would not surprise me. I get emotional over karaoke sometimes. It’s a sickness.

The real tragedy though, was that I was far, far, far gone. I had entered my “nomadic” phase of inebriation. The typical attributes I display when acting out in this condition:

1) No conversations last more than ten seconds.
2) No standing still for more than five seconds.
3) Anything remotely wet is consumed, whether it is mine or not.
4) If I know any racist jokes, I will try to tell them, and they will make no sense whatsoever.
5) I will make friends with anyone in shouting range, because it is always brilliant to wait until black-out drunk before trying to meet new people.
6) I disappear for extended periods of time without telling anyone where I plan to go. This is when I usually get in the most trouble, since I am acting on impulse ONLY.
7) I will shout/sing into any microphone/stick in arm’s reach.
8) I ALWAYS forget what I am doing in the middle of doing it and will break a conversation or jump out of a cab on a second’s notice. Beyond impulsive.

So I turned in my choice for a song, Sinatra’s “My Way”, but couldn’t wait for it to be put into rotation. They said they’d call my name when it was my turn, and I said “cool”, but in my mind I said “man, fuck that. I gotta get my Sinatra on NOW, damnit. NOW.” So I abandoned our drinking crew by the stage and sought out the microphone, wherever it might be in the club.

I found it, in the hands of two rather talented singers. A cute couple sitting in front of the stage. I have no idea what the hell they were singing, but they were singing it rather well. But, they were being very reserved about their performance. As if they were going to be graded on the realism of their treatment of the artist’s original work. Whatever man. So I sang back-up, with all my might. I must have made something of a positive impression on them because they were very nice to me.

That could also be because I had the expressions, mannerisms, and social skills of a head-trauma victim.

Once the mic was in my hands, and my song was on, everything went a bit blank for me. I destroyed the song. Lyrics were out of place. I kept loosing the beat. I was wandering around, standing on people’s tables, walking on couches, and acting like “hey honey, you remember that fucking douche-balloon from the karaoke place last night? The really drunk guy who took off his shirt and drank your Jack and Coke after stepping on my purse and breaking my sunglasses? Remember him? I hope he gets SARS. What a fucking idiot.”

Yeah. I was that guy. “Sexual Chocolate, everybody!” So, so, sweet.

NYC For Xmas Time... Night ONE.

2005-12-14T17:17:00.000-06:00

There’s nothing quite like a solid trip to NYC to help remind me that there’s nothing really wrong with my brain or failed sense of accomplishment. Well, nothing too staggering, anyhow. I drink - act like an idiot - my girlfriend hates me for a day - I trudge through some daily, touristy, on-my-feet rituals with a devastating hang over - and force hundreds of cubic feet of cornea-scalding gas from my ass, in various public places.

Repeat daily until exhausted and unable to pee whilst still standing up.

It only took three days to hit my limits this time. I must be growing up or something. But probably not.

Most of the first night there was spent at the Russian Vodka Room. Dill flavored vodka is the shit, if you’ve never heard. It really is good. The savory vodkas are quite remarkable to me, since the entirety of my vodka consuming career has been soaked in the fruity varieties, which in comparison, are pretty nancy-boy. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a nancy-boy, because I intend to return to my Mandarin & Tonics post haste. But I really enjoyed the deviation.

Horseradish vodka. Pepper vodka. Pickle vodka. Hell, there was probably some Beef Stroganoff vodka up there somewhere. In glass decanters with spigots, lined up above the coat rack next to the entrance. Wood paneled place, full of babbling Russians who represented different stages of liver collapse. I loved them all. Them and their caucasionoidal-ethnicalish-but-could-be-Boston-Catholic-for-all-I-really-know-ness.

There’s the two mail-order-bride types sitting by the rubber wait-station. Young, early twenties perhaps, sipping on vodka martinis and chattering away. Looking around the room, obviously commenting on the attire and appearance of all entrants and inhabitants therein. They’re probably waiting for someone. Waiting for their dates, husbands, “uncles”, whatever. But really, unbeknownst to them, they’re actually waiting to get behind that bar.

Because behind the bar is their shadow. The late-twenties/early-thirties post-fox Russianette. Sure, she’s still attractive, but she’s been hit by a few trains in her day. And those trains probably started out as vodka martinis and ended up in compromised situations with “uncles”. The attitude has gone from kittenish and cute, to hard-boiled and “what do you fucking assholes want from me, huh?” She doesn’t mean to come off so rough, but that’s what the dealt cards demanded. That and some hardcore therapy, probably.

At the other end of the bar from the kittens stands three twenty-something dudes. Slump-fucked-up and high-fiving. They’re drinking beer by the time we get there at ten o’clock. They’ve been there since five. Although they are the same age, and really, in the same boat as the kittens, the two groups will probably never interact based on premise. The dudes have the appearance of their exact intentions: getting droopy-eyed drunk and forgetting today. The girls have the appearance of upwardly mobile future housewives of L.A. Producers, likely drinking to forget tomorrow.

The dudes will more than likely be the bar-backs for the kittens in ten years, and will likely mean more than that to each other, if time does not harden each beyond reach. Cookies crumble under the most-impressive weight of ironies such as these.

Sitting against the wall that faces the bar, in orange-lit booths of soft clothed seats, sit what I like to refer to as “the establishment”. Groups of older, more experienced vodka drinkers who always knew what they were in for when they curled up next to such fires. They differed from the younger ones not in how they treated the booze, because they were all knocking it back with equal impunity, but rather in how they reacted to their environment. They were much more sure of what it was they were looking for, even though they still had yet to find it. Their eyes were on the levels of their glasses but their vision scanned knowingly from their past to their imagined future.

They obviously held no expectations of the night. They hardly seemed to expect to see the end of it.

But not all The Establishment were necessarily content with themselves. Oh hell no. A couple of them were tucked in those booths, silently sipping their queasy creations with the sullen appearance of church. Of a burnt-out professor at a community college. Of a once-proud bear, now sleeping pathetically, bitterly in some too-damn-hot southern zoo. Dog food in, dog food out.

I took them all in. I get the slight sensation that I’ve been taken in, if only just bit, as well.

We sit and drink and talk and drink and shit-talk and drink some good shit. It’s the proper way of those things. And proper ways have proper directions. Eventually, our pleasant surroundings and strange cast of characters blend smoothly into the interior of a downtown cab. We hit the corner of where we’re staying and duck into a downstairs club next door.

We were pretty much alone there, upon entrance. In their defense, it was a cold and listless Thursday night. Just after the first season’s snow, so the true drunks were biding their time and catching up on Tivo’d sessions of The Daily Show. No thing.

Beyond their defense was their blatant disregard for a man’s glass of alcohol, and potentially, his free goddamn drugs. As soon as I would place a drink down on ANY surface, Roomba vacuu-bots (or some other sneaky-ass shit) would scurry out and snatch it away. Thinking I had been boozebambled after going up top for ten minutes for some cancer, I kindly asked the bartender where my fucking drink magically went. Seeing as how there was NO ONE else in the place, it had to have been the help who helped themselves to my rye and ginger.

Apparently, the ‘tenders of this particular establishment have a “no drink left behind” policy, put in place to “protect the patrons” of the bar from “date-raping miscreants”, and that the practice of snatching any and all drinks that aren’t touching someone’s lips is a standard by which ALL New York bars rightly adhere to.

Which, regardless of what anyone says or believes, is complete and total bullshit. If it is a standard, rule, guideline, law, whatever…then these douche-balloons were the only ones bothering to stick to it. In most other Manhattan spots, I placed my drinks next to the exit door, ON THE TABLE LEFT THERE FOR JUST SUCH PURPOSES by the management, while out for a smoke. These assholes were obviously out to a) stop me from getting drunk enough to take a shit on one of their chaise lounges, b) pad some tabs by essentially making people pay for their first fucking drink TWICE, or c) both. I’m sticking with b), but only because a) is tough to judge by only looking at my eyes. You must train the eyes to watch my belt. That’s where I get all “telltale” about such things.

So I told him it was bullshit and that it made no sense, seeing as how a) we were the only ones in the club (so no danger of strangers and their evil free drugs there), b) I would probably PAY for whatever drug someone would be willing to drop in my drink FOR FUCKING FREE, so whatever, and finally c) I was really, really drunk and that drink was really, really expensive so please, please, please… let me, get what I want. Lord knows it would be the first time…

Dude begrudgingly gave me another drink on the house, and I begrudgingly told them that they had a fine policy of protecting their patrons from free drugs. So both of us are lying assholes who pretend to do each other favors. It’s awesome like that.

I remember peeing in the women’s restroom shortly thereafter. It was pretty nasty in the ladies’ pee-cave. It was even nastier after I left.

Whatever. At least I didn’t shit the chaise. That’s all I gotta say ‘bout that.

McNo-Can-Do #3

2005-12-05T10:20:00.000-06:00

Condiments. Yep. Mayo remains disgusting, but I left it in for the sake of a cohesive concept.

Condiments: A Middle school Art Teacher Fumbles Through Discussion of Race Relations

In life, it is easy to believe that the sidelined tastes that end up on the tips of our palates should be kept separate from one another. As if they would feud upon contact, and render a combined flavor akin to that of animal feces.

But this just isn’t so. Feel free to digest this analogy: keeping your condiments apart is the same as lodging a handful of sporks deep into your anal canal while riding a cross-town bus with no air conditioning. Your initial reaction to that fun-loaded imagery is sound: sure, it sounds like a gas, but man, it wastes what precious little time we have on this rounded, mostly wet planet of consumption opportunities. Precious, precious little time.

How little time? Not enough time to bother with the segregation of our condiment population. That’s how goddamn little.

You see, there is something truly beautiful that happens once the mayonnaise has been properly spiked with mustard. Just a knife-load will do. The flavors combine in such a manner as to become superior to their individual elements. Mustard, by itself, tastes something close to salted copper, while mayo tastes pretty much like what it is: rotten eggs and degraded animal, vegetable, or nut essence.

But if you put the two together, a free vacation for two on a Carnival cruise explodes across your capped molars, and you feel as if all your worries were set ablaze by My Little Pony and some cotton candy-ish Care Bears.

But chocolate, unfortunately, goes with nothing.

Another Seasonal Ramble and the Thing

2005-12-01T10:30:00.000-06:00

I love the holidays, I really do. Charlie Brown. Flocked bushes. Tinseled train sets and shit. But really, I only like the holidays for the feeling that I get in my gut, not for the overblown, Hallmark-fueled disaster of it all. I like the smell of Christmas trees. The taste of hot cocoa. Chestnuts roasting on… I couldn’t pick a chestnut out of a nut lineup. I always get busy busy busy around the holidays, and that’s okay. I hope you’re busy too, as it is a sign of progress (or early demise, which might also be considered progress, if only for someone else).

So, in the spirit of this holiday quarter, I have a seasonal rhyme for the house. I did one last year too, and it also sucked something awful. Sucking is the new pink, haven’t you heard?

Hark, the Hell’s Angels sing!
With wreaths weaved with meth and bottle brush shanks.
Where the hell is my cheer?
Lights on the tombstones of kazoos this year.
Pumpkins to peppermints to champagne on the floor.
Santa’s not gay, I’m pretty sure.
I want the Olsen twins in my stocking. Now.
Trickin’ sure is a treat!
Unless there’s weeping scabs involved.
Lumps of coal.
Butts of cigarette.
Three bottles of empty Shlitz.
Feelin’ the spirit yet?
George Michael never really cared,
whether they knew it was Christmas Time At All.
Santa’s still not gay…
but he might swing for thick chest hair.
Jinglin’ my bells.
The rotting turkey smells.
I’ll be hungover Christ-mas day.
It’s no fun, to not be snide, when hookers ask for pay, HEY!
33% less consumptive spirit will be felt at registers this year.
That’s like punching the baby Jesus for crying.
He sleeps on hay, which has to chafe.
Target’s got discounted influenza on every aisle.
I’m giving out STDs this year.
Again.
Hark, the Hell’s… where’s that pipe at?

The Amazin' ineptitude of Amazon

2005-11-22T17:12:00.000-06:00

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IF YOU DON’T LIKE READING POINTLESS RANTS…well, I can’t help you there.

So I put an order in for a couple of books back in September with Amazon, remembering that they have trouble with order fulfillment. As in, they tend to tell you “yah, yah, you should plan to see that reach a shipping date between next month and your third prostate exam”. I tried to order some Christmas gifts from them, two or so years back. But I did it in mid November. So they told me they would be booked up until February with delivery issues if I continued with the order.

I cancelled, of course, because that’s absolutely atrocious fulfillment. They said “sorry”, I said, “get a new business model you lazy-assed, cheeky fuckers”, and we parted ways. Until last year when Mothers’ Day came around and I got this coupon for something I thought my mother would like. It was a good month out from Moms’ day, so I figured they could handle it.

Nope.

“Please expect delivery to be beyond the actual holiday, as we are experiencing a high volume of orders.”

Oh really? No fucking shit? You mean to tell me that coming up on Mothers’ day, you’re getting MORE requests for Mothers’ day items than normal?

Get OUT!

Needless to say, I chose to do nothing for Moms’ day, until my girlfriend convinced me to go on a midnight run to Randall’s for a last-minute gift basket that kicked so much ass, the Amazon gift was an insult to have even been considered in the first place. Seriously, the gift basket was tight, and put together with begrudging love, as my girlfriend rightfully insisted it should be. It really was nice, and I’m glad I did it. But that’s another story for another time.

So I ordered two books from Amazon on September 7th. They estimated the delivery to be somewhere in the following two weeks. I figured, what the hell? Better than digging through the bookstore, right?

WRONG.

The first book was sent for delivery on October 20th, which isn’t that bad, really. A month and a half to deliver a book... Certainly not stellar, but not entirely stupid either. Things can get complicated. It happens. They sent me an email beforehand, asking me if I still wanted it, explaining that I would not be charged for it until I agreed to finalize the order. A month and a half after I made it, for only half of what I ordered. Awesome. I got the book just after Halloween. It’s an okay book. I should have done better research, since it did not end up being the “internet impulse buy” that I initially took it for. Oh well.

Today, the 22nd of November, I got a notification from Amazon asking me if I wanted to complete the transaction for the second book, which would be delivered by December 24th, according to the message. Christmas Eve? THE Christmas Eve? What mail route runs by my crib on that day?

Okay.

After passing through some hoops, hunting down my password and whatnot, I got to the actual page where one agrees to complete the (retardedly retarded) order. It stated that I should expect delivery north of January 16th…

For a book I ordered on September 7th. A book which was supposed to be in stock and available at the time of order. I ordered that shit when it was 100+ degrees outside, before hurricanes started wrecking shit on the coast DURING HURRICANE SEASON. Why the fuck am I in line behind the Christmas shoppers for delivery?

Yeh, I agreed to take the delivery. I really do want the book, and I have enough other shit going on right now that I can wait to read it. But that doesn’t excuse how ridiculous the whole thing is. I’m no super-star employee or anything, but the efficiency of the Amazon system makes me feel like a human amongst walruses in a Pick-Up Sticks competition.

So I wrote them a letter to accompany my agreement to complete the purchase. They make me feel better about myself, and that’s gift enough, I suppose.

---------------------------------------------
Dear Amazon Employee Who Has to Read This,

This order was put in ON SEPTEMBER 7TH. I will be getting the book FIVE MONTHS LATER, AFTER CHRISTMAS. This makes NO sense whatsoever. Did I need to wait for a classroom of kids with Downs to finish reading them first? One by one? Oh, lighten up. I’m the one who should be upset here, not you.

Let's be reasonable here.

I realize that your company is in the business of collecting information, not selling "things" (that’s just the method, which is fine by me), but... wow. It isn't like I live in an electricity-free, thatched hut in the Andes Mountains where books must be delivered by three-legged burros. Or that you need to wait for a time machine to be invented to *actually* find these books you claimed to have access to. I assumed they had already been written when I ordered them, five hairstyles back.

The point being, I didn't just want to ORDER them back in September, I wanted to have them DELIVERED BEFORE THE CHRISTMAS NIGHTMARE that will besiege your company in the next month. I planned properly for this, knowing that Amazon, without fail, will become so constipated by the deluge of Christmas orders, that its shipping department will choke, seize up entirely, and deny anyone delivery of anything beyond disappointment. Happens every year.

But how could this ruin me if I ORDERED IN SEPTEMBER?

You miraculously found a way to scuttle my diligent efforts. My reasonable plan: unreasonably scatted upon. I am left a broken man, with nothing to read. Please weep for me. But only briefly. Then kindly get crackin’ on filling my order.

Since I am a man of honor and have respect for (however egregiously late) purchase fulfillment, I will continue with this purchase. I really do want the book. But until such time as Amazon is capable of selling and delivering items WITHIN the average lifespan of a healthy hamster, I am afraid it will be my last of such orders with your company.

Hopefully I will not be too old to read by the time this book arrives. Or perhaps you’d be willing to trade it for one on tape. If I can still hear.

Trying to laugh it all off,

Craig
------------------------------------------------

For the love of internet commerce, Amazon, get your shit together.

McNo-Can-Do #2

2005-11-18T15:00:00.000-06:00

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Man, This Sandwich is Awful.

There’s something about that sandwich that I just don’t get. When I eat a sandwich, I have pretty low expectations. Don’t get me wrong, I certainly expect it to display standard sandwich attributes like: two slices of bread should be involved. Some kind of meat product in there somewhere. Perhaps a slice of cheese, tomato, or if I’m feeling pretty chancy? A pickle.

Nothing too complicated though. And I don’t remember going out of the norm for this specific piece of lunchtime construction. No capers, nothing with “Dijon” in the title, and none of those pickled carrot things I have to pick out of those Vietnamese sandwiches I get downtown. One time, I had to take a crap behind a dumpster during my lunch break at some shit-purposed bead/incense shop retail job because some lady got shot in our only bathroom during a failed robbery that day. If it weren’t for those pickled carrot thingies, I bet I could have waited until I got home. Plus, I could have wiped myself properly before getting on the bus to meet up with my folks for dinner at The Cheesecake Factory. The cops refused to let me back in the place before I left, and my parents repeatedly noted how much I smelled like human shit. I kept telling them “I must have stepped in dog shit on my way over, and that dog must have eaten Taco Bell,” or something like that.

Whatever.

There were no fringe items used in the making of today’s sandwich. Elementary cafeteria, prison lunchroom style.

So what happened here? Let’s look at this situation, play by play, effort by effort, layer by goddamned layer. First, I got out the bread, then…oh yeah.

I think it’s the bread I used.

My girlfriend bought it, and the packaging was really complicated. As if the manufacturer was trying to protect the consumer from bread-related radiation. There were two or three bags between which to navigate before hitting breadrock, and the loaf was approximately half the size of the standard. Little stones and twigs were falling all over the place when I pulled two slices from the hermetically-sealed trio-bag. And I bet that baked disaster cost a fortune.

You’d think that the extra cost involved would demand that the rocks be ground down a little more. Or that they would remove the twigs from the mixture, like a better quality ounce-bag. It’s funny how bread + “organic” + extra $$$ = me with an explosive rectal disorder. But then again, maybe it was that weird tasting cheese.

Where the hell is “humus” cheese from, anyway? Is that country near Yugoslavia? How exactly does one buy products from Humustan, huh?

Oh, here we go again. Pardon. Excuse me and my shitnami. I really need to stop dating these patchouli-wookie girls.

Fucking Eskimo Shit.

2005-11-18T08:50:00.000-06:00

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I don’t know where you think you’re coming from with that shit, man. Those are definitely not going to fly as monkeys. Anyone can tell that they’re raccoons or something. Wolverines? What the hell are those anyway, Jack?

They’re not wolverines Billy. They’re nutria monkeys. And of course no one would fall for them being monkeys. Unless they were shown from really far away, to people who had no idea what a nutria monkey looked like. Eskimos maybe.

But we don’t know any Eskimos, Jack.

No one does, Billy. They’re made up. Made up by the Inuit to hide their true identity as the real Eskimos.

To hide their what?

Identity.

Oh.

Yeh, to hide it so that no one would ever realize that they themselves were the real deal. So that the white settlers would go off searching for some weird-ass igloo-living seal-beaters that arm wrestled polar bears or some shit, way out there in the desolate Yukon, to steal land from and give diseases to rather than the real Inuit. Like a snipe hunt.

Ah. That’s smart.

Damn right it is.

So, how does that relate to this nutria monkey situation?

I think it might have been some monkeys that told me I could find monkeys in Louisiana. I went, and these are all I could fucking find. So, nutria monkeys they are.

Oh. Good one. You were on, like, an Eskimo hunt then.

Well, whatever. They’re a bunch of fucking monkeys now.

Right.

Hey, don’t monkeys fling shit? These things aren’t flinging any shit.

I don’t know, Jack.

They really need to be flinging shit.

I don’t know about all that, Jack. Is it really necessary?

Yes. Yes, it is. Here, fling this when the crowd gets here.

Fucking Eskimo shit.

MTV CHINA? Holy shit... - GO VOTE!

2005-11-16T15:27:00.000-06:00

Just got this message from a friend of mine (go ALIEF!) whose band, Johnny Hi-Fi, has a video that is in the running to be MTV China's world debut/PREMIERE VIDEO. Goddamn. That is... beyond badass to me. But it is no surprise, given their talent and the staggering ambition of Eric, their frontman. Dude does not fuck around when it comes down to business. Much respect.

So please go vote for their video (even though we're in the US, and this is a China thing, which seems a bit strange, I know, but whatever). Johnny Hi-Fi: "Man Overboard". Here's what he sent me (via big-ass email blast):

MTV is launching its newest channel MTV Chi on December 6th. You may remember from our past emails, Johnny Hi-Fi is hosting 2 premiere episodes of "Top 10 Chi Countdown" and "Live From". But two days ago came a bigger surprise.

MTV Chi's huge PR efforts around the world, already seen by millions of visitors on MTV China and MTV Chinese, named Johnny Hi-Fi as the upcoming artist from America. MTV Chi has also put Johnny Hi-Fi's music video, in a mix with 21 other videos from multi-platinum artists from Asia and US, to compete for the first music video spot on MTV Chi (think Video Killed the Radio Star). Johnny Hi-Fi is the ONLY unsigned artist to compete for this honor.

Now we need your help. Log on to www.mtvchi.com, admire the screenshot of Johnny Hi-Fi's music video on MTV Chi's homepage, and VOTE for "Man Overboard"!!! Vote as many times as you want and make us famous!

And if you are in the New York area, Johnny Hi-Fi will headline this year's Asian Rock Fest in NYC, and of course, MTV Chi will be there to film it!

The Time I Just Kept Writing Without Structure.

2005-11-14T17:58:00.000-06:00

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This is a rambling, quasi-rant. I have no time for good editing, so I am posting it “as-is”. To all my Houstonian peeps reading this: I love you. Know that.

But your city is a hundred layers of frustration. Not that you need me to say it.

Yes, everyone here in Austin does their damnedest to point out the vast chasm of difference between our little city and the rest of Texas. The politics, the real estate, the attention paid to water-borne geckos, and our tendency to celebrate any bikini-clad homeless man with a social agenda. We’re all silly like that, and most Austinites are quick to point out how “weird” or “weirder” everyone/thing is here.

I’m all up in that bandwagon today.

But normally, I see these differences as more background noise than something that needs to be pointed out. Shit’s a bit strange here, but so what? Sure, we have a Yellow Bike Program, movie theatres you can get blasted in, and nekkid watering holes (close enough to Austin, damnit). But is that what really defines a city? What sets it apart? Honestly? Most of Austin’s big issues are right in line with any other Texas city: economic divisions, a dubious police force, and the obnoxious congestive effects experienced when half-assed city planning meets explosive population growth. So, aside from some glaring differences (like, say, knowing that voting to prohibit other individual’s rights guarantees that yours will be on the block next) we tick down the line of comparison against cities like Dallas, San Antonio, and Houston: text book, pretty much down the entire line.

But there are some more subtle differences between our greenbelted city and those in our vicinity. Much more nuanced differences. Things which we definitely take for granted until it all blows up in our face, like it has over the past couple of weekends during my trips down to Houston.

Traffic. Sweeeeeeeeet Jesus. Approximately six hours of every day I visit Houston is spent ON THE WAY somewhere. Usually, I feel like I’m stuck on some stretch of Karachi-bombed freeway, creeping along with a broken cement barrier scraping past, a mere four inches from my left side view mirror and a leaky “Fish” truck that is far too wide for its lane on my right. A smoldering cigarette butt is thrown from the Fish truck, and it bounces off my hood and over the cement barrier into oncreeping traffic. I look at the driver, he flashes us a gold-toof grin and begins to dig around in his nose for something. Word, son. Nice. Suddenly, the Fish truck’s lane is putt-putting along at a speed roughly twice that of mine, somewhere in the neighborhood of ten miles-an-hour. Ten minutes and ten car lengths later, I am no longer moving.

Things go from mildly frustrated to “fuck this bullshit” awesome.

And when you finally reach the source of your lane’s wrist-slittingly-slow speed, you grind your teeth down to dime-thickness upon the discovery that it is some douche-balloon in the LEFT HAND lane who has “magically” run out of fuel (check the gauge, bitch!), and is standing next to her vehicle, asking people to help her out with some cash for gas. Woman, you have absolutely lost your goddamn mind to do that to all of us and then request some sort of payment. You better call Tyrone before someone runs your stupid ass down.

Impressive. Impressive in that “you know, I used to believe otherwise, but there should be some exceptions that allowed for legal, impromptu public stonings” kind of way. Seventy lemur lifetimes later, when you finally exit the freeway and reach a goddamn gas station, you realize that you too were running low in the petrol department, and would have been in the same boat as that chick you just wished smallpox on.

Man, fuck that shit.

All the complaints here in Austin about traffic, based on having to sit in thirty minutes of Mopark traffic, pale in sad comparison to the hours required to navigate through Houston’s myriad of intersecting freeways with third-world no-lane interchanges. Just to get some goddamn gasoline. We have it good here, even if it could be better.

But you know what’s even WORSE than the traffic in Houston? The worthless “club scene”. Before I really dig into this, I want to state for the record that I have been going out in Houston for many, many years. I have many friends who live there, friends who I absolutely adore, who are regulars amongst Houston nightlife. When I visit Houston, it is not unheard of to see me out about the town, partaking in all that it has to offer, and enjoying myself in and amongst the “club scene” I am just about to start shitting all over. If there were a more convenient way for me to hang out with my friends in Houston, I would do it. If one of them was willing to allow us all to meet up at their place, get flammable drunk, argue with inanimate objects, and break things made of glass, then I would obviously prefer to do that rather than deal with the “club scene”. Well, you might be wondering then, “if you participate in that scene so often, how bad could it possibly be?” Oh, well then. Let me break it down for you:

Several thousand Striped Shirt dudes get together, primp, and prepare to profile by slinging credit cards and Red Bull with vodka all over the place in the hopes that some ladies, preferably total strangers, will be impressed enough to toss out handjobs beneath brass-decorated club bars like they were Halloween candy. This is the reason for the scene. This is the pack of wildebeest that supply the endless hunger of the Serengeti-like population of cash-hungry elements feeding off of them like vampires of the club-night. These dudes are out to get their rocks off, and plan on dropping lots of cash, booze, china, attitude, and pride to that goal.

Given that this is the endgame and method for the credit spending majority of “clubberz” in Houston, they get preyed upon by “club ownerz” and the “chickenheadz” that populate the interiors of Houston’s ever-changing club landscape. Bars/clubs breeze through that city by the hundreds, with very few making any real effort to change the scene, or do anything of real note. They’re out for the cash, just like the ladies are. And the system that is in place reflects that.

To begin, just about every place offers “valet”. This is a luxury service, which many people, whether wealthy or just spoiled, honestly prefer. They hate to park their own ride, and happily pay some random ex-con to wipe some spunk on their steering wheel and park their spare-tired Jetta on the no-light street next to the nearest plywood Hooverville. The same spot that homeskillet drove past to get to the valet awning, where he yelled out to his bros over the thumping house beats streaming from his iPod, “dudes, that shitty space right there is why I get valet to find me the choice spots!” And it only costs like, $5 plus tip. Plus all the change in your ashtray and a pair of Oakley sunglasses (damnit, bro! That’s my sixth fuckin’ pair, man! Lame!). Smooth.

Car has been taken away for a good keying. Now get behind the velvet rope and note that bouncer is wearing a three piece suit from Oak Tree, circa 1988. That was the year he tried out as a walk-on for the Bengals but was cut from the program for excessive steroid abuse. His teeth are chipped, probably from being on the wrong end of a few mag-lites in his day, wielded by rage-fueled doorguards of night establishments, much like himself today. He is not happy to see you. He is not happy to see anyone who is not two-dimensional, green, and a deceased prior-ruler of American politics. If you try to introduce him to Washington, he just might urinate in your bloodied mouth.

He honestly believes that he deserves such power and authority. This is the way of the “club scene”. And so it begins.

There is a cover charge for almost every fly-by-night bullshit-dancefloor-focused asshole circus in the downtown area. $5 would be a cheap cover. $10 would be considered a “typical” charge, if you are an out-of-town dude. If you are a dude wearing tennis shoes, expect to be charged a bribe for your entrance. Probably north of $20 (I got you next time Nick, sorry for pinning all that shit on you but I had no duckets! Ahhhhh!). He’ll say that your shoes are “disrespecting the establishment”, and that he is doing you a favor. This is hilarious for obvious reasons, but you will keep that to yourself. If you are wearing a hat, comfortable jeans, a smile, or hair that is not cemented into place you may be denied entrance for life. You might even get the mag-lite treatment. Again, this is the way of the scene. For the ladies, entrance is free. Unless the ladies are of the slower, or less attractive variety, which get charged as if they were dudes because they either a) are too slow to understand that they ARE the whole REASON for the club, or b) they look more like dudes, so they get charged appropriately. Thems the breaks in Houston.

So, as a dude in Houston, before you even ENTER a club, be prepared to drop at least $15 in cash. That’s an average though. Some will be slightly less, others will be obscenely more. Feel free to cry about it, as I am sure it would help your cause.

Once inside, prepare to drink heavily. You will want to do this because the interior will look exactly like every other interior of every other club you have ever been to over the rather expansive tract of time you have been indulging in such things. This realization will depress you. Immensely. And you will dive immediately into whatever will help you “adjust” your surroundings so that you can ignore everyone/everything there except for your friends (who are the only reason you’re there to begin with).

Besides, alcohol is fun. LOTS of alcohol is LOTS of fun. Especially when dispensed with complete abandon in the form of coordinated shots amongst a dozen like-minded friends. Suddenly, you’ll forget about that ass-hat manning the door who taunted your choice in footwear. You’ll forget the warm lighting. The square-foot tiled dancefloor, covered in sticky-spilled Red Snappers. That really nice dude in the bathroom that hands everyone paper towels and tells tales of living in New Orleans “before it got all wrecked-out”. You’ll forget all the Striped Shirt dudes that line the dance floor, who envision themselves as lions, stalking the crowd for the weak and sick, ignorant to the fact that they themselves are the wildebeests of the scene. It is their cash that fuels it. Well, their credit, more specifically. Their hard work and efforts that cause the owners and ladies to get together in a symbiotic effort to fleece them of what little money they can borrow at usurious rates…

Whoa. I’m going way overboard here. It isn’t that one-sided. It’s a game, really. Some dudes play it well, some dudes don’t. I, personally, never bothered playing it because I know I wouldn’t be particularly good at it. Besides, it’s more fun to show up, drink like a fish, laugh at the world for a bit, dance with the abandon of a half-wit, and scream the lyrics to songs you usually only sing in your car (alone). I’m in it for the fun. For the experience of the situation, not the game. But that’s just me. Call it lame if that makes you happy.

Where was I… ah yes. Inside. The drinks are mad-expensive, and the drunker you get, the higher the probability that your tab is going to get padded. It might occur as the result of an error in communication between bartenders over your 15 shot order. Perhaps you asked for Crown, but got gut-rot instead. It may be an honest mistake. But more than likely, the bartenders ran out of comps for their crew of broke-ass hoodrats, and your bill was already tipping out over $100 BEFORE they saw you stumbling around like WC Fields and making out with a wall-mounted light fixture, so they just started dropping some beers/McCalls on your bloated tab. You are too far gone to get that shit straight anyway. You can argue, but it won’t take much in the way of drunken-Jedi mind tricks to throw you off.

YOU: “Hey, maaaaaaan. Is this.. [holding bill three inches from face] ah hun-red an fitty two bucks?”

BARTENDER: “Yep. The tip line is at the bottom.”

YOU: “Whoooooooaaaaa, waidah minute, fursht. I de’yint drank all that man.”

BARTENDER: “I don’t know who drank it. But you ordered it. The tip line is at the bottom.”

YOU: “But whaaaaaaaaat is on here? I mean, whaddis’ on this tab?”

BARTENDER: “Right now, everything is on there but the tip. Bottom line.”

YOU: “…” [looking suspiciously at the multiple, moving images of the bartender]

BARTENDER: “The line at the bottom. I gave you twenty percent off, because you guys were so nice. It’s the line at the bottom. Thanks for coming in.” [walks away with urgency]

YOU: [curious expression melts over face] oh no shit? Twenty? Well, alright then. Shweeeet! [signing furiously, forgetting to bother doing math and totaling tip, leaving that to the limitless discretion of the bartending/management staff, which should make Christmas extra sweet this year for their kids]

And that’s just one establishment. In Houston, try going to more than one place. Better yet, try to go to more than one place with more than two other people. It becomes a logistical shitstorm of confusion and bad directions. Everyone knows how to get where they want to go, but no one can explain to anyone else. Plus, the fucking freeways inside the loop swap all around like a Harry Potter staircase. Nothing is near anything else, so it’s not like it is convenient to say “man, fuck this place! The door guy is a goddamn rabid orangutan and the bartender charged me fifteen bucks for tap water with a splash of immigrant urine! Let’s stand outside and coordinate (argue, cry) with each other for thirty minutes, compromise in frustration, drive another thirty minutes, and do this all over again somewhere else on the other side of downtown! Who the fuck keyed the entire right side of my car? That’s so awesome!”

Yes Houston, you are awesome. Awesome indeed. And by "awesome", I mean: "excrutiatingly difficult". I look forward to Thanksgiving this year, where I will repeat all of the things listed above (except for the valet, which is the most obvious fleece, as I prefer to be a mark at the bar rather than the parking lot – or both).

My friends are the best to get stumbling drunk with, they really are! I just wish we had a better venue...

Flippin' Yo Lids n' Sheeeeeit.

2005-11-10T10:30:00.000-06:00

Brother Nick sent me this link, so I thought I'd dick around with it. It WASTES IMMEASURABLE AMOUNTS OF TIME. So be careful. But I want to see what other people come up with (since you're all creative types with funniness and things of that sort). And I like to be entertained.

I really do.

Here's the one I did. I did another one, which liked MUCH better, but Flipbook flipped the script on me and the load-up barfed all over the place. So an hour's worth of painstaking work was burned to digital cinders, and replaced by something much simpler. Thems the breaks. Word to that.

A-lot of the other ones are just some fourteen year-old drawing pirates with big dicks, skull-fucking poorly drawn naked women, ending with the word "FART" written like chicken scratch across the screen (so fast you have to watch it like, fifteen times to figure out the plot and read the ending word) Here's a good one I found. Violence is the answer.

I want to see YOURS. (your flipbook, you dirty, dirty such-and-such)

Metabullshit Post. Yes, I suck. Uh-huh. Yeah.

2005-11-04T16:32:00.000-06:00

Okay. So I haven’t posted much around these parts lately. That’s because I’m lazy and have a “work” problem (as in: I need to do work to pay bills and shit) + a “drinking” problem (as in: if I go out I drink. I go out a-lot. I drink a-lot. And the hangovers just bleed into one another).

But I write elsewhere. Namely: here. But they don’t archive things too well, and some friends have complained that they never catch any of my shitty writing up there. So, I dug all up in that bitch and found some links. If you’re tired of reading my crap, then stop torturing yourself.

Unless you’re into that kind of thing.

A-lot of what I do is just for information purposes. I originally intended to write with more of a satirical stance, but that style met some pretty strong resistance and has since given way to pretty text-book hack-journalism. If I continue writing for them, I will have to find some way to periodically return to my pointier roots. Otherwise, I will bore myself to death whilst simply pimping shit I like through their site. Which is not the point of the thing.

Regardless, for those who missed my Austinist post-things:

I did a book review for Ben Reed’s The Bow Tie Gang. Good fucking book, if you’re literate.

I relayed my experience at EXTRAVAGASM 2005. No one read the thing, because people honestly HATE sex. I don’t get it.

I got all controversial with this half-baked opinion piece on the Austin Smoking Ban. People get so touchy over this shit.

I got to interview local DJ legend, DJ Mel. I don’t really like interviews, so I asked him ridiculous shit. I feel that it exposes more of their true character, and Mel is as crazy as me. So it worked out.

I wrote an open letter to the shittiest freeway intersection. The shittiest ever.

I told the bats underneath the Congress Ave bridge to get a real goddamn job. Freeloading, flying rats.

And we wrote a little ditty about this fucked-up 5k we have here in weird-town. Keep Austin Weird! And really fucking hot! With some bacon and ice cream, but no beer! Alright! Super-sweet alright!

I say goddamn!

Fucking Mutated Expectations and Shit.

2005-11-01T08:37:00.000-06:00

Every now and again, we as actors on a larger stage, the stage of happenings and going ons during the course of our lives, we breach the lines that separate our individual parts. That is to say, we start reading someone else’s lines, in a way. We don’t always know whose lines they are, or if that part is even meant to be played. But what can definitely be said is that we abandon our normal role, and take on some lines that just don’t fit our current selves. Perhaps the new part will stick, perhaps it will be wholly rejected. But that is not the point. I believe everyone does this sort of experimentation in personality, as a function of personal growth and progress. It is how one picks up new hobbies, changes careers, goes from being a soldier to a staunch anti-war activist, or survives prison by shanking fools in the showers from behind.

Alright, perhaps that last one is a bit specific and rare, but you should have seen the dream I had the other night. I was in this weird truckstop shower, trying to get some sand off of me, and had no idea what I was doing there. The shower was rather large, about the size of an average apartment bedroom, with hollow metal walls like those one would find for a toilet stall in a public restroom. A gap above and below the wall led out into the truckstop’s main room. Cement floor with a drain in the middle. Outside my shower stall, there were café tables set up in a larger room, with plasma TVs all over the place, like a sports bar of some sort. But it was truck stop, not a bar, and I was covered in sand, not overcharged tabs. The dream started with me vigorously scrubbing myself beneath a blast of hot water, nude as a bee.

So I was in there, scrubbing myself down, with my eyes closed. I was thinking about how weird it was to just have a shower stall out in the room like it was, wondering where my clothes might be, or how I got all sandy to begin with, and then I opened my eyes to see some dude walking through my shower stall/room, fully clothed. He passed through an arm of the shooting water, getting his pant legs wet, and was paying absolutely no attention to the fact that I was already in there. Under normal conditions, I would have totally lost my shit and probably busted out the most awkward wet-and-sandy-windmill fighting technique ever witnessed in any truck stop bath house, ever. But this was a dream. My word, it was definitely a dream. DUUURRREEEEEAM.

For starters, my penis was easily a good foot long, flaccid. Crazy thick too, like a pork loin. Not that I’m hung like a wine cork in real life, but I’m certainly not packing anything of equestrian proportions. So when I looked down and saw the thing, the stranger who was passing through also took notice, and he stopped next to the stall door, staring back at me in awe.

What the fuck?

I have no idea what it was that my mind was parsing through, or what it was trying to reconcile, but he and I just stood there, staring at my Johnson for a few seconds. When I looked up, he was smiling, and there were two other dudes looking over the top of the stall, trying to pretend that they were watching the plasma TV mounted on the wall above my shower. One of them stepped down out of view, walked over to the door, opened it, and peeped his head in, smiling like the other intruder. Real creepy-like.

Uh, WHAT. THE. FUCK? Seriously, this time.

There was a definite air of homoeroticism involved, which in all honesty, I’m cool with even in real life. I feel comfortable enough in my own understanding of the difference between my own feelings of attraction and the mere reflection of those imposed upon me. Not that I am the subject of such things on a regular basis, but whenever it has come up in my real life, I believe I have handled it with respect and decorum. Even though these dudes were much more aggressive in their stance than any I have experienced, it played out the same, for the most part. But it all felt as if it could degenerate into a jailhouse-communal-bathroom situation at any moment (don’t drop the soap, son!). Of course, in dreamland, we are all super-something-or-other, if we aren’t victims. Apparently, I was not playing the victim role in this dream, because I just folded my arms and said something along the lines of “hey, guys, I’m trying to get this sand off me, would you mind staring at some other dick, somewhere else?” Just as I imagined they would, they all scurried off with real embarrassment. Again, I’m not going to pretend I know what this dream was trying to make me privy to. But it might have something to do with unabashed confidence, even in the face of obvious reasons to be embarrassed or intimidated.

Because soon after that, the guys that scurried away must have gone around telling everyone of my bathing escapades, because a growing crowd had formed to watch me shower. Looming over the stall walls, peeking through the door, and some were just hanging out in there with me. They all started out with a menacing sort of tone, a kind of “come on now, squeeeeeel! Squeeeeeeeel!” sort of presence to them. But I checked each one individually, with a cold stare, or some snarky words about whatever jacked up gear they were wearing (typical truck stop garb: filthy work boots, padded vests, old jeans, whatever) or their potential pathetic penchants for banging one-legged, genetically limited boys. And they quickly backed down after being confronted. Then, women started to join the mob. Teenage girls and hormonal fifty year old ladies. Just as lecherous as the trucker dudes. For whatever reason, I remained calm and just continued to concentrate on the project at hand: get that fucking sand out of my various cracks and crevices, all the while wondering: where the hell are my clothes?

For those who don’t know me, I’m not an exhibitionist by normal definition, and I am certainly not the type of person who would stand for this type of deification. I mean, these trucker dudes and random ladies were slowly morphing into a benign crowd like one would find at a PTA meeting. And I was their sole focus of curiosity. Me and this inhuman slab of shlong swinging between my legs. Somehow, I had earned their respect, and they were staring at me like I was supposed to answer some existential question for them. They were highly expectant, and I realized it, but didn’t care. I was intent on solving my own sand problem. Fuck them and their ridiculous expectations. I owed them nothing, and acted accordingly.

Eventually, I got all the sand off of my skin, and was done with the shower. I still did not know where my clothes were, where the sand came from, where I was, or where I was supposed to be. But as soon as I turned the water off, the crowd dispersed, and only a few remained. It was almost as if I had just finished some sort of stage show, and there were some people milling about, hoping to meet me, the performer. All I wanted to do was get out of there. But they sort of crowded me in, keeping me in the stall, chit-chatting with me about inane bullshit. I even knew some of their faces. People I had worked with in the past, or friend-of-friends from current day. But I had no feelings of shame or embarrassment. I didn’t even think to ask to borrow an undershirt or anything. I willingly complied with the rules of pointless banter and fielded comments and questions about the weather or politics. Newborn nude and dripping wet. Whatever.

The dream ended with me requesting that everyone leave my stall so that I could figure out where my clothes were, and whether or not the absurd swelling of my procreative member was the result of something medically scary. Everyone smiled and shuffled out or lowered themselves from the top of the stall walls, wishing me luck in my quest. Fucked up sand-washing-big-dick-exhibitionist dream: fin.

Now how this relates to my little theme here, is the question of role, and expectation in an individual’s life. The occurrence and results of mutation in personality.

In the dream, I acted completely different from what I would have done in real life. Probably different from how anyone else would act as well. The situation was absurd, and there was a thick expectation from the crowd around me. Expecting what? I didn’t know. And I didn’t care. Whatever they were waiting for me to say, or do, was not going to come from me willingly. And that was a conscious decision that I was actively making throughout the events that played out. It was like a dry-run, staged by my mind, for situations (albeit much less ridiculous) that I would (and have) inevitably encounter in my real life. Situations where I would be challenged, however subtly, to comply with expectations imposed on me beyond my own abilities or willingness. This happens to everyone in life, and how we respond to these situations is a powerful molding agent for the mutations and expectations of our own personalities. It is one of the many ways in which we grow and change throughout our limited time here, together. Perhaps my brain is trying to shore itself up, or bracing itself for something it perceives as immediately threatening.

I would have had to buy new pants if that dream was my reality. I like my pants as they are. But thanks, my little mind, for the opportunity to see the other side, if only in a dreamland truck stop. Somehow, there’s no irony in any of that.

What the? Who? Whatever Man.

2005-10-20T17:38:00.000-05:00

Dash of this, pinch of that… some streaming consciousness (mental feces) pouring your way here today. That’s what the pen demands, so that’s what gets up.

Sometimes, I’m just fucking drained. I have nothing left to give. Maybe it’s my diet. Maybe it’s those dabblings in random excess. Maybe it’s my natural disposition: to be tired-dirt-spent.

Nah. Not that last one.

I hear bananas are a “natural mood enhancer”. Whatever that means. Some moods shouldn’t be “enhanced”, in all honesty. I’ve already had one today, along with three cupcakes and nachos. See what I mean about the diet thing? Not exactly stable. I have a banana sitting on my desk right now. Brown dotted. Curious little dude, wondering when I’m going to peel and destroy him with my teeth.

Then I will make him into poo. The good poo, of course.

My memory has been dealing me worse and worse here recently. I forgot two good friends' birthdays this past weekend. TWO. And even after I realized it, I kept forgetting to DO something about that. I neglected to DO anything to make it up to them.

This is becoming a rather nasty pattern with me. One that I feel is a bit of a departure from my previous self. I’m all about progress and change, but some changes work against what I would classify as progress.

And this whole forgetfulness-gone-everything is more on the steaming bowl-o-shit side of my preference scale. I rarely lean that way intentionally.

Still working on my books. The process is fascinating, but I’m trying not to write about it because that’s what the vast majority of writer’s with blogs WRITE about: the process and frustrations of writing. It’s beyond masturbatory and frankly, it makes me grind my teeth.

So I won’t read that last paragraph ever, because it proves my hypocrisy AND it makes me grind my teeth.

I need another happy hour like I need more hair around my asshole. Wait, no, that’s not right…

Christ? Christ!

*POOF*

Respect Where It's Due -

2005-10-13T17:07:00.000-05:00

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The trials of Lycan would be appropriately raucous, booze-fueled, and terse. And that’s just the judge I’m talking about.

Lessons can be so Broad.

2005-10-12T13:18:00.000-05:00

It’s always better when there are mistakes to make. Lessons available for those who desperately need them. Desperates like us.

It was an hour into “high tide”, that time of night between sleeping and waking for Average Joes, between “last call” and “get the fuck up”. Two to four A.M. The window of opportunity. We climbed through it regularly, without questioning it, as if pre-destined for such things.

The three of us made our way to a rather rough neighborhood, minutes from the hold. This was a neighborhood which, oddly enough, we would have been apprehensive about entering during the light of day. A poorer neighborhood, with all the signs of a rental/transient population: overgrown lawns, fallen mailboxes, sans-wheels-automobiles at the curbs, broken glass in the street, and packs of stray dogs. But thieves will thieve, and thieves thieve from each other. Where better to find a meta-collection of goods than where the thieves sleep? This was the faulty logic of our pursuit.

It was absolutely miserable-hot outside. We were breathing boiling water, suffocating our bodies as we suffocated our souls. And even at two in the morning, I was sweating behind my knees while wearing shorts.

The other two would be doing the run. I was to keep at the wheel, at the ready, at long-range lookout. Kalm was the front man for this venture. He had the skills and the good eye for potential property, so he would spear-head the run. The other, Breaze, was not as polished as Kalm. Breaze had been out of the action for a couple of years, but was really hyped about his return. He really wanted to jump into things, even though he was out of practice. His almost explosive desire to be involved was infectious. So Kalm accepted his excitement as resolution to put in the required effort.

Best of intentions, really.

Three streets in, I found a perfect wait-spot, somewhere near the end of a quarter-mile block. Beneath a broken street lamp. Killed the engine, they exited, and I turned the radio down to a whisper while I settled in to wait. But I was a tad apprehensive about Breaze's re-virginized run.

“You guys got this? Breaze, you alright with watch-out? It’s no joke.”

I was a bit worried that Breaze didn’t completely understand the nature of what it was we were doing. The problems are never with the law. You can talk your way out of that. It’s with bubba-joe-Nguyen and his Gloc. You can’t reason with him, even if you speak the same language, so you NEED to see him coming from a mile away. Having no guns or intention to hurt anyone, we had to avoid anyone who might.

“I got this shit. My eyes work. Let’s do this shit already.”

Rather cavalier, but Kalm didn’t even acknowledge it as he opened the back door and set out onto the wet pavement, without any illumination from the bulb-less interior light. He never bothered to hurry anyone when he set in to work, he just went. And anyone along had to keep up. That was his way. Breaze was never much for other people’s ways, but he silently respected Kalm’s record, and followed with proper step.

I sat in that sauna for a month if it was fifteen minutes. I had never relented my watch-out position to anyone else before, so this was something a bit new to me. The waiting around with top-forty radio crapping out Counting Crows was pride-ruining and ulcerous to me. But Breaze needed the opportunity to stretch a bit, and that was his right. So I silently sweat out the wait, dragging on my Marlboro, imagining what it would feel like to have air conditioning on my greasy face.

After maybe twenty minutes and three smokes, I noted two figures crossing the street behind me, in my rear-view mirror, approximately fifty yards back. They were moving with haste, and I could see Kalm’s bag of tricks in his silhouette. Breaze was close behind. They crossed, headed my way, back into the shadows against the houses on my side of the street.

“Sweet…” I thought to myself, “now we can get the fuck out of here and get some coffee. Breaze got to turn something, so he should be…” My thought was interrupted by the appearance of two more figures, perhaps fifty feet behind Kalm and Breaze, also heading my direction, but too far back to note any detail.

“Shit-shit-shit-shit-shit!!!”

I went ahead and started the car, trying to give a subtle hint to my co-conspirators to haul some ass, if they weren’t already aware of the potential pursuers.

Again, there is little that worries the common thief beyond the normal pitfalls of Average Joe living: slipping on wet tile, dropping something heavy on your toe, and paper cuts. But the one thing that scared us more than death itself, was the potential to suffer at the hands of some pack of potentially fuckmental vigilantes. Especially in the kind of neighborhood we were in. Khmer Rouge type shit. I always imagined car batteries attached to the tip of my dick in my daymares.

They didn’t heed my engine running, and just strolled right up all lazy like. Kalm got in the back seat, and immediately asked “why is the car running? It's really loud, man.” Breaze took the front seat, and before he could shut the door, we were floored and forward.

I was a bit upset by the whole thing. “DIDN’T YOU SEE THOSE TWO PEOPLE COMING UP BEHIND YOU?!!! I mean, FUCK!!!”

Breaze was pretty nonplussed. “Nah. Did you see anyone Kalm?”

Kalm seemed to understand my displeasure with the whole thing. “No, I didn’t see anyone, but I wasn’t looking either.” Very matter-of-factly: “That’s the look-out’s job.”

Breaze: "Hm."

I was livid. All the blood in my body rushed to my right foot, to get us the hell out of there.

There was a bit of silence draped around us as we pulled around and through the labyrinth of a neighborhood, pawing our way to an exit. Any exit would do. Screeching around corners, the radio tapped out Utah Saints “Something Good” while I seethed, Kalm probably considered the meaning of life, and Breaze shrugged it all off. The drive home was insufferably quiet.

Mistakes are made in any effort to polish one’s craft. But mistakes in some professions carry a much, much heavier consequence when committed. Such is the line that I was (and still very much am) a little shy to stagger around with any level of careless abandon. Paranoia is a thief’s saving grace. Paranoia in every respect and shape. The more, the safer.

After reaching the hold, without saying much to each other, we set upon organizing, cataloguing, and prepping the garnered goods. Amongst the pile of things we had to rummage through were personal items such as sunglasses, pocket knives, compact discs, lighters and cigarettes. Pretty standard lot for a pull of that size. This particular batch contained a rare find for those times: a pack of Thai Cloves. All the writing on the pack was in Thai, but Kalm knew what they were, and did not communicate that to me or Breaze. He played a bit dumb on what they were.

Perhaps it was his effort to diffuse a potentially friendship-disrupting event, as he could tell how pissed I was at what I felt was reckless carelessness that put us all in the menacing sights of retributive harm (car batteries attached to dicks). I was still fuming over the whole debacle.

So he recommended that we smoke some of the cloves. A pinched Zippo lit a single stick up, which we passed between us for a good twenty minutes (cloves forever-burn like cigars) while we continued to cut and crimp errant wires, documented model numbers and tested functionality of components. Business as usual.

But after that twenty minutes passed, we found ourselves laughing hysterically at the whole thing. We joked that the phantom pursuers were part of a competing crew, that was following us around for sloppy seconds. For the remaining change left in ashtrays. We laughed and laughed, forgetting the previous discomfort that clouded our evening, not but thirty minutes prior.

The next thing I remember is waking up, still on the floor, with a butchered CD player on my chest. Breaze was sitting up, against the wall to my right, still passed out. Kalm was snoring, lightly, in the entryway to the bathroom, tools still in his able hands.

Those cloves are no joke.

We never discussed the grievous error made the night before, ever, in any capacity. But we did discuss the cloves, repeatedly, over the turning years. They seemed to trump the more irritating elements of the evening.

We never smoked Thai Cloves again.

And we never asked Breaze to join us on such expeditions in the future. Eventually we would have to learn that it wasn’t the execution by Breaze, or details such as the brutal effects of Thai Cloves which were the problem. The problem was much broader than that. Broader than our narrow minds could possibly fathom at the time.

Always broader it seemed. Always.

San Fran's North Beach - Broadway

2005-10-11T10:45:00.000-05:00

When we hit Broadway, looking for some place decent to stay, I was not aware of just how little some things have changed in San Francisco. I had read about the insanity that surrounded the city back when it was in the grips of the opium dragon’s teeth, during mid-to-late 1800’s, but I had assumed that lifestyle had been replaced by technophiles and aging hippies. Eh, not so much.

Broadway in the North Beach district, in year 2000 of the Christians, was definite evidence that the tendency of San Fran to dip into addiction had not been pushed out by internet or hemp developments. Standing on the street, trying to find the storefront of a youth hostel we were told was nearby, I noted a man lying on the sidewalk across the way. To the left of him was a porn theatre, to the right was some closed shop, presumably a liquor store. He was eagle-spread on his back in front of an alley opening, resting his head on the sidewalk curb. He was indeed alive. Well, in some sense he was alive. I could see him squirming a bit, loosening the rope on his trousers so he could piss. While still lying down.

The stream moved its way to the gutter, along and through the dirty cracks of the pavement. Passersby simply stepped over the urine flow, as if they had some sort of auto-sensor for such things. I watched in awe, alone, at how this man was comfortable enough to LAY in the middle of a sidewalk, in front of a public alleyway, as if this was normal and acceptable behavior. And on top of that: he was so relaxed with it all, that whipping out his dick to relieve himself in front of anyone interested to watch was of no concern to him.

Fascinating.

I realize that there is a segment of every population, in every major city, which falls under the definition of “homeless”, and I would guess that this man would fit the requirements. But in every other city I have visited, before and since San Fran, I have never seen one produce any sort of excrement or urine like that without any fanfare, police intervention, or at least some mild scolding from a local business owner. Nothing. He finished pissing all over that little piece of civilization, and rolled over, just slightly, to fish something out from beneath him.

And it was then that I was truly taken aback.

He sat up slowly, stretched out his left arm, and plunged a syringe into it… like, no big deal.

I have a thing with needles. And by “thing” I mean: desperate fear.

A Word on Expectations.

2005-10-05T17:18:00.000-05:00

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I’ve been struggling with Expectations recently. Specifically, the Expectations that people place on one another, and when/why they are accepted. Of course, I am doing this because I question the validity of many people’s Expectations (of themselves, of others, of me), along with wondering what it is that I expect. More to the point, I wonder why I expect different things from myself than I do other people. On top of that, I wonder why others expect things from me that I simply don’t see as reasonable or obligatory.

It’s probably just a selfish phase I’m going through. But I’m going to barf up the beginnings of my quest for clarification here, just because I can. Kinda long, so feel free not to bother. I don’t expect anyone to read any of this at all. Just so you know.

I believe there are many different levels of expectations, and everyone plays around amongst and between these levels, picking whatever suits their fancy for a particular moment. In an effort to understand why people get frustrated with each other over these expectations, I have decided to list out the varieties of expectation that I have witnessed during my time here.

There are two levels of what I believe are Macro-level Expectations. Ethical and Moral. These are typically spelled out by laws and enforced by threat of punishment, generated and delivered by specific populations.

The first is Ethical Expectations.

These are expectations which I consider to be universal to the vast majority of cultures and populations, regardless of their religious or ethnic affiliation. For simplicity’s sake, I will refer to these as Ethical Expectations. To be clear, I believe there are two parts of ethics: one of which transcends all cultural or religious boundaries and is inherent to being human (the desire to procreate and defend humanity in general, as in: against alien invasion\takeover) and then there is morality. Morality is the collection of any subgroup of humanity’s moral tendencies (which differ from group to group, year to year, or between People Magazine issues), better known as Social Mores. One group’s mores may differ wildly from group to group, religion to religion, region to region, all over the board.

I am not talking about morality. That is not near as broad and sweeping as our White House would have us believe. I am speaking of ethics in the Preservation of Your Fellow Man and our Collective Sense of Civilized Behavior. Generally speaking, of course.

Back to Ethical Expectations.

Pretty basic expectation leveled from one person to another (or between a population and its individual constituents). Do not injure or kill another person without agreement of population. Do not steal another person’s shit (husband, house, loose property, dog, whatever) without agreement of population. Do not make contracts (marriage, sale/purchase, etc…) with others if you do not intend to see them through, unless you have the agreement of the population. Do not blah-blah unless you have the agreement of the population. These pretty much follow the general code of civilized society which everyone EXPECTS of each other in order for the society to outlast its membership (again, the definition, but not necessarily the examples, is universal, as what constitutes “property” in one place might not be in another, and vice versa). Note that the constant exception to every EXPECTATION involves getting approval from everyone else. You can kill whoever you want, provided “everyone else” is behind your doing so (declaration of war, death sentence, crime of passion, “well, retarded kids just kinda do that sometimes”, whatever – this is another topic for another post though, because I’m blabbing about expectations here, not the general hypocrisy one lives with in order to function properly in a civilized society).

So that’s the top level of what is expected of me, you, and everyone around you. Umbrella-style.

Drilling down a bit further, I find what I call Moral Expectations.

These are the ever-changing rules that are applied across a population that codify and compartmentalize certain behaviors, pointing out (specifically) what is INAPPROPRIATE to do in a more discrete and local sense. Farting in a court of law. Cursing at an agent of government. Punching the face of a child as a form of discipline. Women showing skin in public. Men shaving their beards. Yelling out “God is a fraud!” on a public train. Running a stop sign. And on, and on.

These social mores are more related to manners, honestly. They are always couched by the intent to protect the general welfare of a society as a whole, but really, they’re just the codified preferences of a specific population. One group’s effort to get everyone to follow patterns of some sort.

For example. Not all countries have the egalitarian notion of stop signs in traffic (bigger vehicles have right-of-way, or royalty/wealthy always have right-of-way, whatever), making it more of a manner, or preference of the population. Most western (westernized) countries have adopted the use of stop signs either for their simplicity or because they all share the same notion of manners.

So, Moral Expectations are far more regional, and certainly more abstract than the Ethical Expectations.

As a slight, but pertinent aside… Depending on the culture in question, there is another layer of Expectations which I have come across in my life. In most Western countries/societies, there is a Consumption Expectation which is not necessarily written into law, but is definitely there. In a roundabout sense, it is defended by the execution of certain laws which protect or promote capitalism (especially in tax law). In Barter Economies, Fiefdoms, Bedouin Markets, etc… the responsibility to consume may be downplayed to the point where it really only exists as a slight part of Moral Expectations (when paying tribute with a goat in exchange for bails of wheat or protection, said goat must be proven fertile enough to provide milk, or some shit like that) because it is not the focal purpose of that population. But in pure market economies such as those we live within in Western countries, there is a RESPONSIBILITY to consume. If you aren’t consuming, then you are supposed to be saving so that some entity which is producing things to be consumed, can borrow your savings to make shit for you to consume once you’ve stopped saving and re-started your expected consumption. It’s a very strange system of expectations, driven by the need for positive investment growth, fueled by the promises of investment return, and jolted around by the (somewhat contrived yet never challenged) volatile business cycle. But the idea of Consumption Expectations, in Western countries specifically, blend themselves through and amongst almost all the lower levels of expectations, listed below.

Even further down the line, I run into an even more convoluted expectation set: Chivalrous Expectations.

These are the sad remains of a time and place where men and women had very specific roles to play in Western society. I am not familiar with the Eastern equivalent to chivalry, as these things are not readily advertised. I do, however, assume that there is a roughly equivalent set of expectations leveled upon a Sudanese man on how he should properly treat and/or court a lady (along with what would be acceptable responses from her) as compared to those of the Western world. But for now, I’m going to plead ignorance of such things, and breeze over the Western set.

Chivalry is a quaint idea, from a much, much more brutal time where proof of ability to protect and secure was a chief burden of men who wanted to woo a gentile woman (read: NOT a laborer or woman of the lower castes, who probably received little to nothing in return for their services as wife). Times are much more kind, and even more complicated in today’s world. Chivalry is the buggy whip of modern interaction. Those who desperately hold on to it because it is an expectation, rather than just plain thoughtful, are not only unnecessarily complicating an already complicated existence, they are also being insufferable pains in the ass. If you want to hold the door open for a someone (male, female, shemale) because you want it to be seen as a gesture of respect, then feel free to do so. To get mad at others because they do not make efforts to display respect by using uncreative door-holding, which inevitably makes things awkward for all the strangers trying to pass in front and behind you, is a waste of time.

Not long ago, I was complimented for a particular door-opening act of supposed chivalry. I didn’t even notice I was doing it, because I didn’t consider it chivalrous or extraordinary. There were three of us passing through some door, so I opened it, and then held it open while they went through. No big deal. I’ve held doors open for dudes, friends, girlfriends, old folks, toddlers, and other people’s pets. One time, I held the door open at Pier One Imports so that these two crazy Nigerian dudes could steel a big-ass piece of table glass. I had no idea it was a heist. So much for random kindness. Another time, I got stuck holding a door at Grand Central Station for what felt like fifteen minutes because I opened it for a lady and the masses just kept…on…streaming though that fucker. My random “chivalry” quickly turned to thoughts of random violence on people I had never met, when really, they were doing me a favor. That strange woman took it for granted that I would be holding that door open, as did EVERYONE else, as soon as she saw me approach all chivalry-ish. So, unless I want to hold all doors open for all people, all of whom are perfectly capable of doing so themselves, then I am wasting my time by doing it even once. It’s an empty gesture in today’s world, as are most all acts of chivalry, when they are done only for chivalry’s sake. If you want to be nice and carry some burden for someone else (which is what chivalry really is), then do so. But expecting it from others is nothing less than rude and selfish, the same thing most chivalry ignorers get accused of.

Think about it.

Below the aged-beyond-prime Chivalry Expectations, comes Common Courtesy Expectations.

These are the most rudimentary of Expectation sets, and just like Morality Expectations, are conditioned on the basis of region/historical era. I’ll only discuss what I believe are the standard Common Courtesy Expectations set forth in the regions in which I have lived or have been long enough to gather decent information. Because these are so specific and many times completely esoteric in origin (and ironic, since they are referred to as “Common”), they are the most interesting of the Expectation sets to me (even more interesting than the Consumption Expectation, which is more frustrating than interesting, because it is so two-dimensional in nature).

As examples:

When on public transport (or anywhere, really), it is expected, as a Common Courtesy to give up your seat if an elderly person, individual with mobility issues, or a parent with children hanging off them, happens upon you (if it’s a young, healthy woman and you cede your seat, then you are acting out of Chivalry, not Common Courtesy, to correct what I believe to be a common misnomer). This act of Common Courtesy is expected because everyone has a right to sit, but others have a more pressing NEED to sit. This example is intrinsic and obvious, not convoluted or based on long-forgotten rules of public interaction. It is more a question of efficient economy of comfort.

A more esoteric Common Courtesy Expectation involves the formation and adherence to lines (or queues, as the Brits prefer). In some regions of the world, lines form naturally. People look for them, and follow or form them when necessary. This isn’t the case everywhere, as it is not a question of Ethics, Morality, or Chivalry. Even within the same region, one might fall into a line at a fast food restaurant but then leave there for a bar where it becomes “every man for himself” to get a drink order filled. The need for lines is fairly obvious when they work properly: orderly movement toward access to something that is apparently scarce (food, merging traffic into a single lane, entrance into a stairwell during a fire drill, whatever). But not always, and certainly not in all places.

To take the merging traffic example: In some cities (towns, more often) it is expected that all who are involved in the merging of two lanes into one will do so in an organized fashion. A one-to-one car blend, because that is the Common Courtesy that is expected amongst and between people who probably know each other. In Houston, there is no such Expectation applied to such situations. In the anonymous gridlock of Houston traffic, no one is expected to signal for a lane change, let alone file in an organized manner through merging lanes. In fact, no line is expected at all. What is expected is that everyone around you is trying to get theirs, and lots of honking will be involved (maybe some middle fingers, maybe some retaliatory gun shots).

I could go further with the Common Courtesy Expectations, but there are an infinite number of them, and they tend to be so regional that I have trouble discussing them in a universal way.

Damn. I didn’t expect it to take me so many words to describe what feels so simple in my mind. What a mess…

Morning Chill and the Pavlovian.

2005-09-29T12:04:00.000-05:00

We’re in the 80’s here in Texas, temp wise. That’s a 20 degree drop, over night. Sweet Jesus, I might sleep outside tonight. On my front lawn. I might even be sober this time. Huh? Right.

This cooler (seriously, 80 degrees is COOLER) weather kicks my long-term memory up a bit. Extreme changes in temperature do that to me. Odd little (pointless, yet fascinating to me) fact about Craig: when I’m in the shower (no this isn’t filthy), if I turn up the heat to steaming and hang my head under the faucet so that the water beats the back of my neck and head, I get crazy flashback memories. Of my childhood. Weird situations that have no bigger story, they’re just… “as of” situations. Or views. The most common flashback I get is of the view looking out a bay window into the backyard of some woman’s house. I was probably three or four years old, and we only went to this woman’s house once. She was some acquaintance of my mother, possibly through church. I don’t really know. But I must have stared out that bay window, cataloguing her fence line and crape myrtle trees for an eternity, because the image is crazy vivid.

Yeah. It’s pretty fucked up. I can’t remember the name of someone standing in front of me who I’ve known for over three years yet I remember how those myrtles listed silently dancing in unison against a rain-ravaged fence amidst a St. Augustine lawn that desperately needed some serious trimming. My brain very well may never work properly, and I’m okay with that. We all have our issues.

So, the memory that was triggered by my brain this morning was from way back. Back from my elementary school days. Back then, as soon as we hit autumn in Alief, all the kids would run outside and play some random sport. Baseball, soccer, volleyball, basketball, and of course: football. I was around seven at the time, so I was not yet aware of how little I cared about all of these sports, save for basketball. Back then, all the boys in the neighborhood would meet down the street at the Winkler’s house to play whatever the game-o-the-day was. This particular day, it was football. Fucking football. Oh, glory be.

The leaves had just started to fall off of some trees (like, two trees, because all the others were pine trees, or evergreens), and you could smell a hint of winter in the air (someone burning garbage somewhere, probably). It had to have been mid to late October, because it wasn’t winter enough to warrant long sleeves (no need for a “coat” in Houston, except for style). So the grand ol’ sport of organized gang-warfare had hit the Monday night lineup, and football was being pumped into all the delicate little brains of all the little boys in the neighborhood. Well, a couple were saved from this poison by being the frontrunners of the pale-skinned, ADD riddled “Nintendo Generation”, but we barely saw those joystick jockeys outside. They were almost a suburban myth at that time.

Anyhow. Friendly neighborhood game of football.

None of us really knew how to play this game, but we tried anyway. Again, I was seven, so I was just getting good at tying my shoes without parental aide. “Downs”, “hikes”, and “runs” described various diseases in my little world, not elements to a street game. We also had no concept of the “touch” or “flag” variations of football. We went “full contact”. Knowing of those variations probably would not have mattered since the organizers of these games, I believe, to this day, very well may have been questioning their own sexuality at the time. There would be much contact, much rubbing, and half of the guys involved would probably end up shirtless by the end of it all. The pre-confusion of pre-puberty is awesome like that. Regardless, we were small kids with no clue what we were trying to accomplish as far as the game went. So when this group of middle school boys showed up (with their sideline heckling girlfriends, no less), we got broke-the-fuck-down with a quickness. They were HUGE to us. Gargantuan creatures with fuzzy faces and volcanic acne. They scared the hell out of me with their high-fiving and cracking-voiced grunts. They talked mad shit to each other, and to us. That’s right. These dudes were about twice my age, and felt the need to talk shit [I’m gonna fuckin’ OWN you kid] as we lined up for plays.

Oh, the “plays”. Right. In the wonderful world of seventh grade-dom, every boy thinks he’s the star. There is no teamwork, only highlight reels of savagery committed by one man-boy against everyone else (this goes for soccer, basketball, cricket, dominos, and tic-tac-toe). Especially when the opposing team is comprised of kids half your size and age. It’s survival of the most ruthless ball-hogger. So, these dudes just took turns as quarterback and simply RAN US DOWN. No passing, no blocking, no strategy. They’d hike the ball, and whoever got it would run STRAIGHT AT US with the intention of breaking all our limbs. We were the pins and they were the bowling ball. Elbows to the shoulders, fists to the face, kicks to the chest. It was mad brutal. No one even bothered to keep score. After the third grass-stain to my face, I started to wonder why the hell I was bothering to play with these cats. It certainly was not fun. Well, of course, they were enjoying themselves thoroughly. They were having a blast trying to crack the collar bones of second graders in order to impress their head-banging, Aqua-net addict girlfriends sitting on the sideline. I really hope one of them earned a handjob out of that disaster. Something for our pain. Something, anything.

So there I was, getting battered and then immediately standing back in line for more. Like a moron lemming. Silently, I was questioning the point of the whole game, but no one else on our team was pussing out. You could see it in their faces. Resolute to beat these guys, against all odds, without a clue as to how. No one was willing to back down. Even in the face of an absolute and utterly embarrassing slaughter, none of them had the notion to just say “fuck this shit, I’m gonna go play Frogger” except me. Well, I couldn’t let them down and just sulk my way back home. Even at seven, I had a fleeting understanding of the code of brotherhood (which is total bullshit, for the most part, by the way) and refused to abandon my post. Yet, I was getting a bit weary from these assholes and their repeated efforts to loosen all my teeth.

On the next play, this particularly big fellow planned to run the ball at us. Blond, wearing a fairy-ass half-shirt, gym shorts and fucking football cleats. Football cleats? I was probably barefoot for this particular game. He even pointed at me to let me know I was his target. What a sweetheart. They hiked the pigskin to him and he leaned forward with his right arm straight out, like a jousting lance of bone and meat, kicking up lawn as he barreled right at me, other seven year-olds bouncing off his thighs. I was seriously tempted to turn around and just run my broken ass home, but I’m pretty sure he would have kept up and eventually ran right over me and my ruptured spleen. In my living room, if need be. So what did I do? I curled up into a ball, like the complete pussy I am, covering my head with my hands, and prepared to be punted, if not worse. I braced for the impact…

Apparently, this particular tactic was (and is still) not very popular in Football. Some might say it is a sissy move. Whatever. All I know is that beefcake had no clue as to how to handle the situation and tried to hurdle me instead. His leg caught the arch of my back, and hit the grass like a fat person, with no hands out to catch himself. The ball popped out and was picked up by a fellow second grader who quickly ran it down to other side and scored our first and only point of the game.

A small victory amongst a crushing defeat, sure, but it was much more than that in our minds. Suddenly, we were using all kinds of tactics to stop them. Ganging up, punching dicks, kicking knees, we’d try anything outside the standard rules (which had us being beaten like slaves earlier in the game). Things got interesting. They started having to run plays, which were very successful, but at least we weren’t being punched in the ears anymore. We felt like we were actually playing the game instead of being played by it. It was fun, for a few plays anyhow.

It all came to an end for me when, that same missing-link motherfucker got a hand off and ran straight at me again. I tried to trick him with the whole “duck-and-cover” routine but his ID-driven mind knew enough not to repeat that mistake. He picked me up by my right arm as he ran by, dragged me maybe five feet, and slammed me into a pine tree on his way to score another point. That might have been the first of many minor concussions I’ve earned so far in life. I don’t remember the trip home, but I certainly left soon after that play.

Awesome.

I’m sure there’s a lesson in there somewhere. Something about ingenuity, perseverance, or not letting your children out of the house before they’re thirty years old, but I didn’t really glean too much from it. You lose some, you lose some more. Perhaps I should have learned to cut my losses, abandon hopeless situations, or only play games that I completely understand. But even now, many moons later, I still haven’t learned any of that for sure. I honestly haven’t been able to make a discernable pattern after lacing together similar situations throughout my life. It’s more chaotic than that, apparently. Not so hard-and-fast. [love that phrase!]

Besides, it’s just a memory, triggered by the cool weather, on my way to work. Right? Right. Coffee time.

To the Scale.

2005-09-27T16:40:00.000-05:00

It is sad when you realize that you cannot run anymore because your knees just cannot handle it. It is sad when you realize that you cannot travel, visit most places of interest, or anything else that requires resources because your bank account cannot handle it. It is sad when you realize that the wide swings between highs and lows are because of each other, and your body simply cannot continue to handle the punch with any real resilience. It is sad when you realize that all your previous youthful possibilities have turned into the standard opportunity costs everyone has to grapple with to the grave, dancing with the shittiest of partners: regret.

It is happy when you find that you can pick up swimming instead of running. It is happy when you find that there are many free experiences that can be had, which are even more interesting than those hidden behind the colorful exterior of carnival tickets. It is happy when you find that those highs and lows which will never again be obtained as they were when you were able to properly distill them together, never actually balanced each other out nearly as well as your mature, wine-wise mind keeps balanced. It is happy when you find that nothing you have ever done really had any negative costs, because the end result of one’s life, along with everyone else, is death, and nothing worse than that.

One’s life is never wasted if it was lived, for better or worse, during their time, to the best of the liver’s ability. No judgment can be made. Just as there is no profit at the end of one’s life, there are no remaining costs. If the bill is guaranteed to be paid in full by the end of its term, then it should matter not where the balance may sit during its duration.

Repeat until either calm or insane.

ACL AFTERPARTIES on Saturday Night! Free!

2005-09-19T17:17:00.000-05:00

Both are on Saturday night, so there's a slight conflict, but I plan to attend both anyway. Even after an entire day in the sun with the beer and the burn and the dirty feet. Yes.

The first, is with Austinist (that's that online zine that I write for, periodically) and Trojan condoms: and it should be much fun since all the bands are quality local acts. That's right. Rubbers. Get there early to make sure you're covered.

ZING!

It's at the Velvet Spade, next door to Club Deville (ahhhhh, Club Deville...).

Here's the flyer

The Second, is at Karma Lounge, and it will feature Ceeplus (Eric, for those who actually know him) and a couple of the guys from Boys and Girls Club in Houston. If you are familiar with the B & G crew, then I need to add nothing more to this invite. Beautiful insanity. Tommie Sunshine is the headliner, but to be honest, I am not familiar with his work. So there's that.

Print out whatever you need, and be sure you get however many jimmy hats you require. No lists to get on. Just show your ass up. Word.

Blending the Stroke.

2005-09-16T16:51:00.000-05:00

To an old relationship, an old lover who knows too much.

Ahem.

On Black

Why you gotta beat me like that?
Why I gotta return and return and return to this shit?
Yes, why?
You’ve caused me immeasurable harm.
The money. The time. Oh, the wasted time.
You’ve taken what matters most to me: my pride.
No, not really. No one can do that to me.
But you DID set the stage for me to give that shit away.
Like a con game.
Like date rape.
Like a man who wants to believe he knew what he was doing.
When he obviously didn’t.
And yet my companions and compatriots are drawn to you.
They think you’re so funny and charming.
They do whatever they can to be near you.
They love the way you make them feel, how you see only them.
But it’s their reflection they see, not your eyes.
You have eyes for no one.
You are no one.
You are a dead relationship to me now.

On White

But you are so pretty.
So graceful in your movements and so well respected.
So cultured and educated!
And your cooking is beyond compare.
When we’re together, I feel like it’s all for me.
Like I’m special.
Like what I do matters to you, and when with you: everyone else.
We have so much fun together, you and I!
We never needed anyone else back then.
Just us.
Alone together, passing our days locked in constant caress.
That sounds really gay, but you know what I mean.
We’re more than that.
We’re more than ourselves when we’re together.
Like Wonder Twins, when we unite… it’s so on.
I still dream about us.
All the time.
Even though years have passed.
I will never get completely over you.
I don’t think I want to.

On Grey

Really, this is ridiculous.
We keep doing this to ourselves.
To me.
I keep doing this to me.
Because there never was an “us”.
And that’s okay.
Sure, we had some great times.
And we’ll have more, if we see each other again.
But we’ll never be as intimate as we were then.
We were new to each other, and that has weight.
Well, you were new to me.
You had seen guys like me a million times over.
Old hat.
And that’s fine. I hold no grudges, for that is who you are.
And I still love you anyway.
I cannot help myself.
You will always be carried in my soul.
But we will never carry one another again.
And I know that now, more than I would admit before.

Thank you for everything NYC, you filthy bitch of a fuck hole place that I cannot help but love with all my might with every bone and every fleshy cell of my body. Fucking fuck, you can be such a shit sometimes. Such bullshit... Such. A. Shit. And so can I.

Okay then. Now that I have that out of my system, let’s stay friends in the grey. Cool? Cool.

Love,

Me (you asshole)

Saaaaaay WHA?

2005-09-14T15:40:00.000-05:00

I have successfully returned from a couple of weeks out and about. I LOVE to travel. Seriously, it makes life in a smallish, townish-type city worthwhile. It helps to relieve the pressured, sinking feeling I begin to acquire after being planted here for so long. Perspective is a great gift that you can give yourself, for free, just by paying some attention to wherever you happen to be. My travels, lately, have not been fruitful in the same ways as they were before. I’ve been picking up a-lot more thought than airport trinkets and hangovers. I’m not sure how I feel about it all just yet.

Regardless: lots of recent traveling!

Two weekends back: Amarillo for a wedding. Fantastic wedding between two fantastic people. I seriously doubt they would ever read this blog, so I do not feel obligated to give them a whole-hearted shout-out. It would be a lost sentiment. Suffice to say, they were worth me driving over 1,300 miles round-trip, through shit-hole north Texas towns, while gas was cha-chinging between $3 and $3.30 a gallon. And I would do it again if requested. My love for them runs that deep.

Moving along.

MY LORD, Amarillo is an interesting place. If you’ve never heard of it, you are far from alone. Most of the modern and moving parts of the world have not either. But here in Texas, Amarillo is a pretty sizeable fish. Thar be oil in them thar plains.

I don’t really know the complete history of the city, nor do I particularly care. It’s in the middle-of-nowhere panhandle (insulated from the outside world by the sheer and understandable disinterest everyone else has in visiting), there’s an obscene amount of oil money there (held by like, ten families), and it is quite possibly the most conservative place I have ever had the displeasure of hearing people express themselves in. One comment I heard (NOT overheard, as this comment was specifically directed to me for response):

Well, you know, the real shame about the New Orleans “situation” is that a city like that, with, you know, “elements” such as those who stayed behind, is that it’s kinda like a rock. New Orleans is. And when you pick up a rock, well, there are cockroaches down there, hidden most of the time. And it’s a shame that this is how we have to see them.

Whoa. That one really threw me back. I said nothing in response. What the hell can a person say to THAT? I mean, all cities have their share of disenfranchised, underemployed, addicted, criminal, or just plain lazy people. And… uh, so what? Takes all kinds in this world, and to even try and classify such things based on CNN coverage seems beyond brash and cavalier. Hell, it borders on straight-up, textbook prejudice (potentially racially based, depending on what video footage or personal experiences birthed her insect metaphor).

Well, if I could have gotten over the shock of the thing, I suppose I could have asked what I honestly wanted to know: “are you seriously comparing those who are stuck in New Orleans to filthy insects which we only associate with disrepair and waste? ‘Cause that’s mad-fucked-up if you are.” And it would be.

And I think it was.

She was in her late fifties I would guess. Very well-off. Probably educated up to at least the lower collegiate level. Hell, she is probably fluent in French and collects genuine Egyptian obelisks (along with an astonishing amount of Elizabeth Arden interior décor, which as a side note: makes me want to vomit in a cotton candy gin while tightening a vice on my dick - it's that unpleasant for me). But obviously not terribly active in the day-to-day workings and recalculations of a modern and moving society composed of an ever-increasing and ever-heterogeneous mix of races, nationalities, and socio-economic backgrounds. In other words: at the risk of fighting accidental ignorance with brazen ignorance, I pose that her viewpoint is not a minority viewpoint in Amarillo. Further more, I am tempted to believe that such an insulated community, having more than enough financial resources to avoid coming to terms with the real world can and will remain that way. I see no motivation in and amongst similar populations for advancement in perception. If your Daddy (Pappy, Lord of The Manor, whatever) or your Daddy’s Daddy was a bigot (as historically, most of the white folks you’ll ever meet are familiar) and you essentially live in the same if not MORE comfortable environment touting as much… then I’m just not sure how something so culturally anchored would miraculously fix itself. In an experience vacuum.

And it worries me quite a bit.

We live in a Red State. Texas is blood-red-Republican, politically. Now I take no issue with our state’s political leaning, regardless of my personal feelings, because I do believe in the rule of the majority… to a point. If I lived in a place where the MAJORITY of the population beat their dogs with aluminum bats and believed that the Chinese were all too mentally deficient to live outside of holes in the ground… well, that would kinda fuck up all that faith in the “will of the majority” now wouldn’t it?

Sometimes, I wish there were some sort of requirement, as awful as it sounds, which provided a measure that would ensure that anyone in a position of authority, political influence, or financial wealth, had to have a testable understanding of the necessity and beneficial interest behind diversity: different countries, languages, customs, religious practices, skin colors, sexual preferences, favorite Star Wars movies, whatever.

Because it seems to me that with the influx of that information and experience comes understanding. And with that understanding, comes acceptance (NOT “tolerance”, which to me is a bullshit word used to establish majority/minority relationships, which is hollow unless you intend to capitalize on those lines, making it an even deeper bullshit word) which leads to collective involvement, which eventually leads to a reasonably educated and rational political base. A well-groomed, intelligent, and logical political base which will make decisions without being confused or manipulated by the use of subtle metaphors which may or may not be dehumanizing for those who lack the means to rebut.

Better yet, a well-groomed, intelligent, and logical political base which would never say something so casually callous. A political base that would know better than that. Better.

But for the record, all the friends of the happy couple were cool as shit. Well, except for that one dude who smoked with me out front when everyone else was too scared to look like a dirtbag in front of the families (who all smoked it up after they got blasted). He was cooler than the rest of them.

Word.

They Never Do.

2005-09-06T17:04:00.000-05:00

The scenes don’t seem quick to change.

And the people keep keeping the same lines propped up for “the ready” to grab and read. I feel for the ones on the inside. The outside. The ones that everyone forgets until they’re getting gone. The Machine’s leftover parts. The fuel for fires of relentless progress and the reason for books that preach blind justice. I feel for them the same way I feel for a fourteen year-old girl in Sudan. A distant, yet ever-present Janjaweed prospect. A part of a system of take-and-taken where they’ll never, never ever, by the design of the thing, ever see a fair dealing of cards. Off suit every time. I don’t see victims. I see a machine at work. A fantastic machine, with cold and smooth edges. Lots of blinking lights. Input-output-throughput-execution-results. I don’t see the bending over. I don’t see the “sudden abandonment”. I see no given targets. I don’t see any new hatred.

I see the same scenes that dance in history books, flowered-up with partial and ultra-partial language. The language of The Machine. The Machine's preferred language.

The Machine’s been working like this forever. Forever and ever. And The Machine sees no color, region, or time as an important context. Everyone has been on every side of The Machine because The Machine knows no loyalties. The machine cares not. The machine only knows what it has always known to do: maintain The Machine.

I feel. I feel for the burgeoning intellects of twentysomethings in rural Idaho that read the interweb and pray on it like gospel. As if CNN has anyone’s interest in mind but that of The Machine. As if anyone holding out on being moved has anything in mind but The Machine. As if stories of raped babies and sewage sammiches were trying to be hushed by The Machine. As if the Bush regime IS The Machine. As if The Machine would ever bother stooping to such pointless levels. It needs no evangelism. It needs no figurehead. It needs no purpose.

It is its own purpose.

The scenes don’t seem quick to change.

And the people keep pouring over the same frames… whether paper or screen, scroll or minstrel, tablet or blimp. They’ll consume the output given proper throughput, processing the results by the tick-tocking of the execution schedule. They take as it’s given. They empathize at The Taken, as if it were their experience when in fact the opposite is more true. The experience is what is taken from The Taken. That is The Machine doing the bidding of itself, for the benefit of the unknown majority. Double-dealing amongst everyone so that turns are taken, and The Taken from one time are the voyeurs of another.

The Machine needs no friends. Only the apathy of its voyeurs and the spite of its enemies.

From Pampers to lost dogs to bloated forms to reunited families to suicidal cops to feces-flooded toilets to horrendous heat to that saved baby to the blanketed wheelchair that obviously seats the dead to “gunmen” and mobsterish playground bully stories of hospitals under siege to Astrodome Bedouins given open-bar privileges to the family that took in that darker and less fortunate family to the reworking pump systems to the bus driver that drove that family from Minnesota straight out of the mouth of hell to the cholera, e coli, West Nile, and pages that list each threatening “itis” that currently cooks over cobbled streets. When The Machine speaks, listen close to not miss a beat. Not a dime.

But allow a brief pause for thanks. For but a second, that Bourbon Street is still dry. And that five years from now there will be the most powerful frozen brain demolisher ever made, offered from tattered and wretched street booths... and it will be named the Katrina Hurricane, served from pink vessels resembling the form of an empty soul, sucked through a straw forged from the nightmares that stream from the minds of fourteen year-old Janjaweed prospects. The Machine will name it as such. The Machine names all things of wanton nature. All things of traded value. All things of lost value. All things.

The scenes don’t seem quick to change.

They never do.

PART 2 of Work in Progress

2005-09-01T15:57:00.000-05:00

This is a continuation of this post from last week. I shall be out of pocket for a bit, so feel free to actually read any of this whenever your job gets insufferable.

We pushed through the rain toward the bay, back to Broadway. The Chinatown trash, stacked in messy piles all along the curb was starting to topple under its own rain-soaked weight and fall into the gutter to migrate down Grant. We moved with it.

We entered the first open bar to seek refuge from the trash and weather. It was a stately place, with a long well-carved bar that covered half of the entire left wall. The ceilings were somewhere near twenty feet up, and were covered in pressed tin plaques with highly ornamental brass chandeliers looming below. The walls were a tasteful red, with stained bead-board running a good three feet up from the wooden-plank floors. Barstools and tables dotted the entry with a pool table and juke box in the rear. There were perhaps ten people drinking merrily at the bar, and the bartender greeted us as we walked in. “Come on in out of the rain and warm up!” She wore a cheery, dimpled smile and her face was daintily framed by locks of curly brunette hair. She was petite, and she was the only one behind the bar.

Two shots of whisky were in order, just to get the flavor of death from our mouths. It took another beer to completely cleanse the ill taste of that evil Ng Ka Pi from our palates. Once that was taken care of, we set our minds to conquering the pool table in the back. Red felt, full size, with top-notch pool cues. There were already some balls on the table, but there was no one back there but one lone fellow who was lazily flipping through the selections on the juke box. He had a slight build, average height, draped in an oversized team jersey with bright-white K-Swiss kicks. He seemed thoroughly busy with music selection, and uninterested in the pool table. So I pulled out the racking triangle and began to herd the balls my way.

“What the fuck are you doing man?” The juke box was not his only interest. He was obviously miffed, but he was not aggressive in any way. Being drunk enough to forget that some questions are purely rhetorical, I continued to pull balls while I answered.

“Oh, we’re here from out of town. You know, came in to play some pool. Why? You want to play or something?”

“We WERE playing.” Hm.

I continued to disregard him, as if he was just being a nuisance. I have no idea why I continued that way, but I did. “We? Who else are you playing with?” As if he could not possibly be playing alone, with a severe psychological disorder where his personalities would play each other for control over his conscious self. Or something like that.

“With Steve, at the bar. He’s getting drinks. We were playing a game here.”

Oh, I see. Semantics and shit.

Steve walked up to punctuate the last comment. “Here’s your water Carlos, you fucking fag!” Steve had obviously been drinking as much as we had. Either that, or they were related. An even further possibility was that Carlos was indeed homosexual, and did not mind being slighted for it. Actually, I was up in the air on the whole matter. I just wanted to play pool.

Carlos looked over at me, as I continued to rack the balls. “I’m drinking water because I don’t want to get all fucked up before we ship out tomorrow. Steve’s crazy.”

Ah, Navy. Made sense. Steve dove right into sloppy-handed introductions, which are my specialty.

“Hey man! What’s up? I’m Steve, just here to play a little pool and get a little pussy before we go to Japan tomorrow.”

He was significantly taller than his counterpart. And much more professional in his appearance. Early twenties, black shoes, fitting jeans, untucked polo shirt, nice gold watch and a buzz cut to match Carlos’s.

We all exchanged introductions. For the next hour or so we played games of pool. Carlos remained sober and aloof while Steve, Vance and I traded rounds of shots until we were slobbering drunk.

Periodically we would step out into the night to catch a smoke. Each time we went outside, we met up with an older gentleman named Charles, who was obviously a member of the rather large population of homeless in the area. Mid forties, heavy-set African American with graying hair, heavily stained clothing, and the crustiest set of lips I have ever had the displeasure of watching as he rambled on and on about himself. Between requesting cigarettes he entertained us with stories about his past, and all the amazing things he was supposed to become before an unspecified injury caused his pain killer addiction.

“I used to throw these barbeques back in the day. Danny Glover used to come over just for my ribs. They were that fuckin’ good man! Danny goddamn Glover, I’m tellin’ you!”

His stories always involved famous people hanging out with him in weird situations. He would sit with Tom Hanks during church. He and his cousins were in a high school play with Magic Johnson. Or John McEnroe would stop by his place to watch videos from time to time. I pressed him on the whole Danny Glover claim, just to see how far he would push it.

“Danny Glover came over to your house for barbeque? Did he ever live here in San Francisco?”

He stuck to his guns like a champ. And even though his defenses were as empty as the initial claims that required them, I really had (have) no reason to doubt his sincerity in believing the lot of it.

“Oh yeah man. My barbeques were famous. They came from all over. It’s in the sauce, you know. Like the best crack you ever had! Sharon Stone, Robert Redford, Eddie Murphy, all them used to show up for my Sunday ribs. I was THE KING! Danny used to call me all week to make sure I was still doin’ it. ‘Yo Chuck, you still doin’ the ribs this Sunday, ‘cause I gots to get me some of that!’ And I’d say ‘you know it Dee!’ ‘cause we were tight like that, back in the day. You just DON’T KNOW man.”

He was right. I had no idea what the hell he was talking about most of the time. I was flammable drunk, and he was spilling lots of strange stories about tangential relationships to rather famous people. But I kept pretending to listen.

As the night progressed, and our trips out front to smoke and talk shit with Charles happened with increased frequency, he got bored with convincing us of how many famous people he used to feed, and decided that we should all sing some songs.

Because he used to be in choir with Lionel Ritchie, or some such nonsense.

“You know what? You know what you guys need to do?”

Steve and I had no idea what would be said by this man. “Nah, Charles. What?”

“You got beautiful young voices. And beautiful young voices have to SING!” And with that, he raised his hands up in the air and turned slowly while drawing out “SIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIING!”

Then he stopped to face us, motionless. “Beautiful voices must be heard. It’s your DUTY.”

With such a fantastic presentation, how could we not? Three smokers, sloppy drunk out in front of a bar at two in the morning, in the rain? The only thing we were missing was the incoherent off-key butchering of some rail yard bonfire tune.

He started by deducing who was what. Vance and I were tenors, Steve was the soprano, and Carlos was told he was bass before he muttered a single word. It did not even make sense that Carlos was out there because he certainly did not smoke, and he was sober enough to have the sense to keep dry inside. But there he was, the reluctant bass in a corner choir, led by a homeless addict.

Under Charles’s arm-waving direction, we destroyed the same two bars of “Chain Gang” in between dodging back inside for more shots. Eventually, Vance was asked to stop because he really could not hold a tune, and Carlos wised up and kept inside where it was warm and soul-free. So there we were. The three of us. Steve, me, and our crazy director, shouting at the top of our lungs down Broadway, bellowing the deep pains of the imprisoned by way of slave-song.

My memory of the session is filled with overwhelming emotion. I honestly thought we were good, and was honored to be part of something beautifully irreverent. It was inspiring, even it sounded atrocious.

I was so impressed with what I thought was his talent for voice training, that I invited him into the bar for a drink.

“Fuck it Charles, let’s go inside and get a whisky man! It’s cold and I’m thirsty!”

Charles hesitated at first, but then agreed with a grin. “Ah, yeah. Yeah! A drink’d be nice!”

I figured he was a recovering alcoholic, and that was the reason for his staggered response. He must have been overcome by our wonderful performance and wished for a single celebratory drink to mark his success as a street-trio director.

Straight to the bar I went and ordered four whisky cokes. The bartender, with her curls dangling down, did not register my order. Her eyes were fixed on the door I just staggered through. Steve was struggling at the entrance with Charles, I could see jittery motion from the corner of my eye. The mood in the bar had obviously taken an uncomfortable turn, and I was having trouble understanding what was souring the situation. The bartender, still staring at the door where Charles and Steve continued to fumble with each other, asked me with a flat tone, “did you invite him in here?”

I turned to follow her eyes and saw Steve with a look of irritated shock on his face, hands up in a non-threatening manner, stepping back from a slowly disrobing Charles. “Goddamn it’s hot in here WOMAN,” he bellowed while tugging at his shirt.

“I, uh, yeah. He’s in here with us.”

She set her vibrating eyes on to mine. “I don’t want his ass in here.” Then she leaned forward and whispered “he threatened to…”

“I’LL KILL YOU BITCH!!!” Charles was visibly angry, but not moving a whole lot. Just sort of shuffling in place, not but five feet from the door. Steve moved toward him with the obvious intention of calming him down.

The bartender, matter of fact, “that’s why we don’t let him in here.” Then she yelled out over my head. “You get your fucking ass out of here Chuck or I’ll call the cops again, and they’ll fuck you up even more!”

I had no idea what was going on around me, but it was not pretty. Suddenly, all the patrons at the bar rose from their stools and made two menacing steps toward Charles. Steve put an arm on Charles’s chest and stood between him and the drinking mob. “Whoa! I got him, no problem here folks! We just came in for a drink! No trouble here!”

Charles was not making things any easier.

“FUCK YOU BITCH! AND FUCK THE GODDAMN POLICE TOO! I’M GONNA KILL YOU BITCH!”

We were obviously in over our heads. It was time to reverse the damage we had inadvertently done. “Forget the drinks, we’ll get him out of here. No problem.”

“You do that.” She was more irritated with the whole exchange than she was intimidated.

Steve, Vance and I shuffled Charles back through the door while Carlos watched with his hands in his pockets, and the booze crew returned to their seats at the bar. Charles continued to hurl threats and slurs back over his shoulder as we pushed him back out into the night. He bolted from our grips and made his way down the street, still yelling about police brutality and the potential murder of a certain “bitch bartender whore!”

He was right about the duty to sing when you have a beautiful voice. But he was not so clear on what one should do if their voice is less than pleasant. I suppose he was too close to the problem to have formed useful advice for that end of the spectrum.

We shrugged it off, had an awkward smoke, and re-entered the bar to continue drinking. Apologies were made, stories of Charles and his drunken disasters were told, and then last call punched us in the collective, limping liver.

Out on the street again, we said our goodbyes and good-lucks. Vance and I made our way back to the hotel, falling down on and spreading the garbage that littered the slimy surface of Grant St. I do not remember entering our hotel room, but I have splintered memories of jumping on the beds, knocking over a side table, and kicking my luggage like a football across the room (presumably to get it through the window and down into the street, which was rather distant from brilliant, but whatever).

A beautiful voice should indeed be used. Lucky for us, such beauty is in the ear of the beholder.

The Whole is Hotter Than the Sum...

2005-08-30T12:05:00.000-05:00

The heat here is tremendous. And by “tremendous” I mean: absolutely fucking awful. It’s old-folks-death hot down here. That means that my air conditioner has been running like New Orleans water pumps for the past month. Which leads to budget-blowing electricity bills. Which then ends up with Craig pulling out his hair because his bill is astronomical, yet he still sweats like a slave when he sleeps. What. The. Fuck?

There are multiple problems that are contributing to this issue. None of them are in and of themselves ruinous in terms of ambient home temperature, but they all join forces like the fucking Voltron of hell-heat and cook my crib. A Reese’s Peanut Butter cup MELTED on my kitchen counter last night. It’s so badass… I just… fuck. It’s not good in any way.

Here's my list of fabulous contributors to the ruinous crib-heat:

Shitty windows. Man, I cannot stress enough the importance of avoiding two-bit window panes and frames. This aluminum, no seal bullshit with rice-paper-thin glass on the market today is just plain garbage. I can feel the heat pouring in all around the opening, like an open oven. I already caulked and sealed the edges, but there’s nothing I can do for the frame structure itself. ‘Tis hopeless, unless replaced. Damnit. I am considering thick-ass drapes to just block that shit out entirely. That or a wall of bricks. Fuckin’ windows.

Crooked door frames. Either my back door, or its frame, is rhomboid in shape. That means I have great seams all around it. At the base, you can see daylight peeping through. It’s awesome. The bugs LOVE it until they get inside, realize it’s magically HOTTER indoors, and subsequently die where my girlfriend can get upset at seeing their up-ended carcasses in the kitchen. It’s super sweet. Like eating an old tennis ball.

Hot-ass lighting. Light bulbs, whether anyone registers it or not, emit heat. For serious? For serious! That’s why northerners will place a plugged-in bulb on top of their car batteries over night, during the winter. To keep the battery heated, so it won’t die. So having lights on at the crib is like having little heaters going, all over the place. So I’m switching to low-watt bulbs and stumbling around in the dark more often. Good times.

Electronic shit. All electronics produce heat. VCRs, TVs, computers, microwaves (no shit Craig? Yes, no shit!), alarm clocks, battery chargers, blah-blah-blah. Just like the lights, these are little heaters, spread all over the place. The more you have, the more heat is produced. And if you cluster these things (entertainment center), you have a full-blown space-heater in your crib. Might as well be a fireplace. So I unplug that shit when it isn’t in use.

Cooking. NOTHING heats up a crib faster than boiling some water on the stove while baking a cake. The humid, hot air created by that process is mad-intense. If you are like me, and do not have a real stove hood (mine sucks the air from the stove top and exhausts it to the ceiling, not to an outdoor vent. It’s brilliant), then the heat created by cooking just kicks it with you. Your whole place becomes a broiler. There is nothing that can be done about this within reason. Sure, you could cut a hole in your roof and install a vent yourself (good luck with that) or just stop cooking altogether. Just eat cold cuts and hot dogs fresh from the package. Life would be bad either way.

Showering with any degree of heat. This is a given. I remember when I stayed with friends in New Orleans (bless the souls of that city) a few years back, in an apartment with NO air conditioning, in 100+ heat… fucking miserable. We only took cold showers. Cold water to wash dishes. Cold-cold-cold. If they had a hot water heater, we never used it. Fuck that. But even at my crib, a mildly cool shower produces enough heat and humidity to make the house unbearable for a few hours. It gets mighty tropical in there. Rather nasty and sticky. Almost impossible to sleep in.

Alright. Enough crying. I’m done with this topic. Just had to vent for a minute or two. Any suggestions would be much appreciated. Any tricks of the trade you may know, or whatever. “I’d piss on a sparkplug if I thought it’d do any good”…

Work in Progress...

2005-08-23T21:40:00.000-05:00

This is a piece of what it is that I'm currently working on. Just to give you something to read while you either wait for someone to post something interesting, or something interesting happens at your work.

11am, the alarm shouts at me for the third time. Vance is already showering and his things are all packed up and ready for departure. I take note of this, admire him for being so prepared, and fall back asleep.

Fifteen minutes later, he is shaking me awake, somewhat violently.

“Come on. Get up. I already called around to find us another place to stay. It’s close. Like, ten blocks tops.”

“Sweet. Anything with a better view would rock.” I fully intended to keep on sleeping after firing off my support.

“No man. Get your ass up. Check-in is at noon, and I told them we’d just go there instead of reserving anything over the phone. First come, first serve. So get the fuck up.” He was not messing around, so I did as was requested.

Ten minutes later, we were wandering through Chinatown with our luggage in tow. Showers are overrated. The scene was vibrating with activity. The streets were as I would imagine the streets of Beijing: narrow strips of pavement with shops crammed on top of one another, knick-knacks and touristy crap spilling out over the sidewalks. The Jenga-like designs of their porcelain Buddha displays seemed intentional, as if to beg some clumsy Clevelander with a fanny pack to topple them to the pavement. “Ahhhhh, you buy all now!” Bustling bodies were everywhere, the smell of business was thicker than egg-drop soup. We made our way through the gauntlet to our next set of beds at Grant Plaza, Chinatown. Fourth floor, corner room with a bay window that overlooked the intersection of Grant and Pine.

The view was absolutely amazing. To our right it was the pretension of a modern downtown city, high rise apartments and skyscrapers. Straight forward was the almost Guang Zhou provincial look of Chinatown. To the left was a hint of coastline, giving me the feeling that we might be staying at Mouth’s house, somewhere in the Goondocks.

Our bags properly stowed, and deuces properly deposited, we hit Grant to explore the city.

We made our way east, through the edge of Chinatown and toward the bay. It was a perfect day, with scattered clouds and the temperature threatening to break seventy. With mild winds kicking up off the ocean, over the city to the bay, we wore jackets to fend off the chill. I learned that in San Francisco, it is always necessary to have a jacket or sweater handy. Much like the desert, regardless of the temperature during the daytime, it gets brisk, if not downright cold come evening. Best to be prepared for anything whenever you plan nothing. We had no real schedule for the day. “Wandering around” was the only thing we penciled in.

There was a stumpy tower off in the distance, not too far ahead of us that caught our fancy. Coit Tower to be specific. But much to Vance’s irritation, my memory would not allow me to remember the name. I could remember the letters, somehow, but could never quite get them in the right order. So with every mention of “Cito Tower”(that’s “sea-toe” instead of the proper “coy-tuh” spelling and pronunciation), I could feel the heat coming off of Vance’s head, as his ultra-rational mind struggled to figure out how many times, in an hour, he would have to correct me before he would be forced to adopt my letter-scrambled spelling. Just to avoid a meltdown. This was not, by far, Vance’s first run-in with my inability to remember such details, but it is the most memorable for me because we actually had to stop walking at one point for him to give me a stern talking to. It was the only kind-of-argument we had on the entire trip. It was special like that.

“So, how old is this Cito Tower, anyway?”

“The Coit Tower?”

“Right, Coit. Whatever. How old is it?”

These types of questions, by me, were interspersed with other conversations we had as we strolled through the narrow streets. He had actually read the travel manual, so I was depending on him as a source of information. Simply repeat the above three lines of dialogue, with a different question attached, every ten minutes. It always started with “so, ______ (how tall is, who built, etc..) this Cito Tower, anyway?” After about the tenth repetition, Vance, understandably, lost his cool. His teeth were clenched, as were his pumping fists, as I (as best I can) remember.

“Dude. It’s not Cito, it’s COIT. COIT, COIT, Coit. Four letters. It isn’t that hard to remember.”

“Sorry man, jeez. I just can’t seem to get that to settle in, you know?”

“No. No, I don’t know.” Vance is the kind of guy who if he told you he remembered the name of the nurse who delivered him as a baby, by her nametag, you would not be surprised. So it stood to reason that he would consider my memory slippage dubious at best. He continued his pro-memory crusade. “I think you’re doing it on purpose. Either that or you’re just not trying.”

Me, with slight indignance, tempered with consideration, “not trying? Well what the hell am I supposed to do? Make a flashcard for the fucking thing?”

As an aside: Later on in life, my inability to remember insignificant details blossomed gloriously into full-blown forgetfulness. Vance has been steadfast in his opinion that I am either intentionally forgetting things, or just not trying hard enough to remember them. I am far too close to the problem to say for sure whether or not his diagnosis is correct, but he has not been wrong about much in the fifteen years I have known him. Take that for what it is worth,

We made it to Coit Tower, climbed up the thing, and peered out onto the beautiful city of San Francisco. There are no proper words to describe such a visually explosive city. Splendid, fantastic, scenic, a gift from the Gods, whatever. Nothing fits right. The architecture is fantastically mixed in age, with ultra-seventies high rises peaking out next to sleek pieces of high-design, high-tech contemporary buildings, which are surrounded by stone buildings which appear to be about a century in age. And the best part is that the city seems to sit on the peak of a mild land-ridge which separates the bay from the open ocean. So everything is tiered downward. From the bay, you literally look UP at the city. Impossible to describe how much there is to see and take in. Especially since both of us grew up in Houston, where the entire incline of the (rather expansive) city is probably one foot, north to south. It makes a city as topographically interesting as San Francisco that much more fascinating.

Pictures were taken, artistic shots were attempted (got lots of thumb close-ups), and then it was time to return to the streets for more wandering. It was decided that we should check out Fisherman’s Warf, which is on the bay. If I had known what a tourist disaster that place was, I probably would not have gone. But it was there, so we had to check it out.

On our way to the wharf, we zig-zagged through private courtyards, between and amongst the squeezed and stacked architecture of the area. Multi-million dollar town homes with rooftop decks. We scrambled up stairs and on to private patios, just to see how the other side lived. As expected, they live quite well. We were not pretending to BE them by invading their spaces. That would be psycho. We were more… criminal, I suppose (but not literally). More like, casing their cribs, but in a really lazy way. We just walked right up and sat on their patio furniture, taking inventory of their outdoor wealth. Lots of thickly-painted wicker atrocities, pastels, rustic wind chimes, and all the other Home and Garden bullshit one would expect to find littered on the patio of a wealthy person’s second home.

We continued this type of invasive tourism until we hit the bay and found the fabled Fisherman’s Wharf, the big-ass pier.

Standard fare for any city that understands their tourist market. It is indeed a pier. A long, well-developed pier that looks more like an amusement park than it does a place where longshoremen would crank out crabs and unload barges from faraway lands. Clowns wandering around making balloon animals, some dude doing parlor tricks, cotton candy and lots of trinket shops. A big, wooden cash vacuum. The most notable part of that experience was us coming upon the largest dog I had ever seen. It was a Saint Bernard, and it was living with horse-like proportions. I would estimate it to have been somewhere near one hundred fifty pounds, with feet the size of mine and a panting mouth, capable of swallowing whole watermelons. While moving through the crowd, trying to leave the pier, we stumbled upon the laying creature as it was being assaulted by three slobbering toddlers. The kids were hanging on the thing like baby possums, shrieking and yanking. The dog just sat there, panting rhythmically and staring up at its owner without any sign of emotion. I almost expected it to start digging as if trying to remove fleas, to shed the diaper-wrapped irritations climbing on it. But no. It just sat there, with amazing patience. My only guess is that when you are that large of an animal, nothing really threatens you, so there is no need to be defensive. You could put a yoke on that thing and plow fields, or pit it up against bears in a cage match and sell tickets, but it was someone’s loving pet. Perfectly content to kick it in harmony with strangers’ babies. A gentle, hairy giant.

Seriously, the dog was the only cool thing about that stupid pier. I would try to wax philosophic about the place, but it has no soul or depth. Well, unless you consider the exchange of four dollars for a spun-ball of wispy, blue-colored sugar to be deep and somehow meaningful. I have since heard that a favorite activity of many visitors to the pier is to go out to the tip, where the seals are basking on rocks and wooden floats, to give the creatures names. I have no idea why this is so entertaining for people. The seals have no interest in being named, and if they could speak, they would probably tell all the gawkers to fuck off. Maybe I am all alone in that opinion. It matters not.

By the time we left the pier, the sun was setting and it was threatening to rain. We walked straight back to the hotel and suited up for a night of heavy drinking. The previous night had allowed for limited results in that regard, and we intended to tip the scale back to our favor.

I was in no mood to take it easy on the booze. “Let’s just start in the first bar we hit. That way, we won’t feel like we left out any options.” Vance was down with the plan. “Yes. Let’s not waste any time trying to figure out the nightlife around here, and just make it ourselves.” With our brotherhood-in-booze renewed, we entered the first bar we came to, as agreed. Good thing too, as it was starting to rain.

It was a small place off Grant, not but two to three blocks from our hotel. The signage was mostly Chinese, but the neon out front read “Li-Po” with “cocktails” underneath. Perfect. The interior was well-worn and reeked of stale liquor. I could almost feel the history of the place, the faint smell of dragon chasers and Shanghai attempts. There was a Trent Reznor look-alike standing at the bar, hunched over and chatting with a mid-thirties Cantonese bartender. Her hair was long and her rougher facial features were softened by the soft-red, cave-like lighting of the interior. They were both somewhat startled at our entrance, and the fellow immediately made his way past us to the door to watch the rain fall.

We sat down and ordered some Seven and Sevens to start things out right. After a couple of those, amongst some minor banter with the bartender about how no one really drinks Seven and Sevens anymore, Vance and I noticed a set of strange looking liquor bottles on a shelf above the bar. The bottles that were labeled, were done in Chinese. Some bottles were completely blank, with just sealing wax over the caps. They appeared to be there more for show than anything else, but still, always a curious drinker, I was intrigued.

“Pardon me, but what the hell is in those bottles?”

She was genuinely interested in the question, “oh, those are the real deal. Chinese liquor and wines.”

“Oh really? So, are they for sale?”

She obviously anticipated this question, and intended to head me off at the pass. “They’re an acquired taste. You probably won’t like anything you try.”

“I’ll try anything twice, if it doesn’t kill me the first time.” I thought I was being witty. But really, I was just playing into her hands.

“Alright. I won’t bore you with the wines, and just go straight to the good stuff.”

“Good stuff?” Oh, I was extremely pleased to hear those words.

She brought down a Chinese-character-tattooed clay bottle with a bunch of twine wrapped around the neck. “This, gentlemen, is Ng Ka Pi.” She pronounced it “Nung Kah Pee”, and claimed it was a traditional Cantonese liquor, distilled from something abnormal, which I neglected to register because I was so fascinated with how ancient it looked. The cork did not “pop” when she pulled it off.

“Yes! Let’s drink THAT, whatever it is!” Vance and I were both excited to taste this exotic, potentially illegal-to-serve elixir. She poured three shots and left the jug on the bar. It was bourbon brown, but had no odor. We clinked glasses and downed them like cough syrup.

The taste was absolutely horrid. A strange mixture of dirt and sugar, with just a hint of pepperminty nastiness. It had a most ruthless demeanor, abusive, as it felt like someone was ice-picking my gums while pouring battery acid down my esophagus. Mine almost came back up, but my teeth stopped the flow, and I re-swallowed, giving myself a double-whammy. After I shook my head and let out a “whoooooo!” I noticed she was already setting up three more. I stared with dreamlike concentration as she poured, feeling like I was developing tunnel vision. I could feel massive sets of brain cells perishing as the shot ran roughshod through my bloodstream and my liver let go of a single tear.

But there was no turning back. The second set was topped off and ready to bring pain. Suddenly, I felt like we were in a really shitty drinking contest, where the chosen liquid was vomit juice and the prize would be mental retardation. Unfortunately for me, it became a game of pride. And even though those games are lost once they begin, I was incapable of resisting the challenge. I could see the guy at the door grinning as we touched glasses and pounded the second round down. It went down with more ease, since the first shot had prepared my throat for the ill-flavored shock. No regurgitation.

But my sight was threatening to go out. I looked up to my left to see Vance, in a shadowy haze, wincing and wiping his mouth. He, too, had resigned himself to see the thing through. Regardless of the inevitable and immediate damage to vital organs. My right leg was twitching uncontrollably, probably to combat a sudden onset of shivers.

She was laughing while setting up the third round. Specifically, she was laughing at my reaction to the first two. “You alright there? I told you it is an acquired taste.”

My response was delayed, as I was trying to regain clear eyesight by way of frantic rubbing of my sockets with my sweaty palms. “Oh, I remember what you said about the taste. This is what it looks like when acquiring it. I mean, fuck, this stuff is… my god it’s nasty.”

Again, she must have expected my reply. “You get used to it! Cheers!”

With the third round down, I wanted to get the hell out of there. With each shot I was losing functionality and she was obviously going to continue this punishment until we either walked out, or got carried out. I wanted my night to last a little longer, and I wanted my drinks to taste significantly better. But really, my failing eyesight and freaked-out right leg were starting to make me feel mortal. And feeling mortal went against the whole point of drinking in the first place. We had to invent a gentleman’s exit. Some way to save our livers from immediate and acute failure, yet maintain some face even though it was obvious that she was handing us our own asses in shot glasses. One of us needed to pretend to get an urgent phone call that would pull us out of there. That, or one of us needed to prod the other and say something like “dude, we’re already thirty minutes late to meet those chicks from the strip club at that place. We seriously gotta go now. It’s been fun! Thanks crazy lady!”

But before any shoot-from-the-hip plan could get rolling, yet again, she anticipated my next move. “So, is that it guys?” She was not pouring a fourth round. In fact, she was putting the cork back on that bottle of wet death. She just pulled that rug right from beneath us. No chance to save face at that point. “Uh, yeah. We uh, need to meet some… yeah. I guess we’re done here.”

Damn. Punked out. Oh well. Sometimes, it is much better to take an experience for what it is: a losing proposition. And then abandon it like a ripped condom.

She Knew it Had to Rain.

2005-08-18T16:04:00.000-05:00

It’s not like she wasn’t aware of what was going to happen. She knew that as soon as she signed that form, that the trigger was pulled. She knew they’d be after him. They’d find him. And then he’d find her. She knew that, going in, on the front end. The end of the front, rather.

What she didn’t bargain for was how it was going to make things easier. How her sleep would be so much more sound and deep, once she had set the blind-fear catching machine on its way. How the inevitability of it all was more comforting than it was ominous. Before, she had no idea when or where the strike would occur. On the toilet, while shaving her legs, because the back door had obviously been used that day. The fashion of the arrival. A midnight window shattering constructed from a mis-ironed shirt, a failed interview, a jewelry box, and a pint of bourbon. She had clue: not, as to what shape it would be delivered. Like a claw-back hammer to the piano that was passed down from her grandmother, with the delicate fingers of a virtuoso… Mangled with torn ends and ripped corners. Like everything else that she lived and breathed for the past five years.

But now, she could easily see the clouds rolling in from the horizon. Sure, they were dark, and sure to bring her life to a compressed and beatless halt. But at the very least, she had the sunlight in front of her until then. The clock was ticking, as it was before, but she felt it was finally readable. She finally had a watch to monitor. She actually HAD time, and she planned to kill it.

It’s never easy to be on the run. It’s never easy to admit to being on the run. And it’s damn near impossible to put an end-cap on the running experience, after you’ve done it for so long. And the machine wanted the details. The machine wanted to know the whys-hows-whats of every scenario that lead up to the running. They wanted her to “discuss” it. As if it would ever be something to splay out over and between an afternoon tea, on some veranda in the Hamptons, let alone a cold room with dated recording equipment in downtown Detroit. No place fit the discussion. The discussion hardly fit itself.

Discussing it becomes akin to the task of breathing bagged smoke. In a pitch-black hall closet. Without even a “hello” before it broke down all around her. It’s not like she didn’t remember her grandmother’s beautiful fingers, the blades that they were, and how those blades sliced the air as they danced through wondrous concertos, endlessly complex movements, and irreverent man-problems. It’s not like she didn’t wish for hands like those, hands to catch those smoky clouds before it broke down all around her. Like it always did. “It’s not like you didn’t fucking know what would happen if you left the fucking air conditioner on all goddamn day, you stupid whore!!”

But it’s not like she wasn’t aware of what was going to happen. It was obviously going to rain.

So, Like I Was Sayin'

2005-08-12T09:53:00.000-05:00

Since I am FAR too lazy to think up and post some story today, I am going to be a bastard and just link to my four little posts on Austinist. That's right, I'm all kinds of uninteresting like that.

Side note: there is NOTHING "sophisticated" about a wine hang over. Just in case you thought there was. It's a sham, lie, and wild fabrication that needs to die. Okay, so I was the only one under that impression. Whatever.

My first little story is an ode to the Migas served at Curra's here in Austin (all articles are Austin-in-relation, so that we stick to the point of the site, dig?). If you don't love to eat chorizo when hung over, then go to the next article. BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The second story is an open letter to my home-away-from-home, Club Deville. I got some shit for this, as many are under the (hideously) false impression that Deville is little more than a watering hole. To them, I say "up your ass, commies", because they are wrong. That, and I have no tact or sense of responsibility to the feelings of my fellow man. So sweet. POOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW!

Numero three-o crashed and BURNED as an article, since no one fucking read the entire thing. They read the first paragraph and bailed on it. It starts out sounding like I am honestly going to make some pork taquitos, which is utterly ridiculous because I would probably burn my right arm off AND taquitos are like, ten fucking cents at the super market (big ol' bags of 'em are sold at Fiesta! So Delicioso!). Why would I bother to make my own? That's just... whatever. The beginning makes it sound like I am, but then the script flips and the predictable happens. All in the name of pointless silliness. I really liked this one when I typed it. BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAM!!!

Installment number four… I don’t think anyone even read it, which is fine, I suppose, since that would bring the paycheck-to-readership into parity. This is a description of a true Austin happening. In some ways, it is a pretty standard and mundane happening, which I was trying to shine up with some tricky word-play and extraneous description. But, as the old philosophic and clichéd question goes: if a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to pee on it, will the bears do it? I, for one, certainly hope they would pick up man’s slack. So philosophical, so deep. My brain hurts now. BUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUURRRRRRRNNNNN!!!!

Don’t fuck up your weekend by watching reality TV all day. I’ll be in Houston to pick up a pick up. Getting it back here might be a ill-fated journey of broken timing belts and tire-changings. Hopefully I will have no interesting stories, but will still be alive, come Monday.

Word to that.

Just Like Camp. Damnit.

2005-08-11T13:28:00.000-05:00

I’ve been showering in my back yard for the past two days, and it has not been as sweet as I had initially imagined it. In my mind, I would go out there, fire up the hose, get all wet and soapy, and naked chicks would just pop out of nowhere, excited by my wet-skinned manliness .

Needless to say, it didn’t quite go down like that. More like, my 40-something neighbor pulled up in his Volvo and was like, “hey, uh, Craig. You know I have kids that play out here, right? What the hell are you doing?”

I’m sure you’re wondering the same thing. Well, for any judgmental assholes out there, I am not some exhibitionistic, lecherous cretin (well, I'm not lecherous anyhow). I was wearing my sweaty-ass jogging shorts on both occasions, because I’m sensitive to the gag reflexes of my neighbors. I have been re-grouting the tile in my shower, which takes 48 hours to cure, and I run four miles every other day. I HAD to clean my stankin’ ass, my kitchen sink is far to small, and the front yard seemed like a wholly inappropriate place to take care of my personal hygiene. Even though, my neighbors cut hair and wash their babies on their driveways. DOMINO, MOTHERFUCKERS!

We’re a tight community like that, but not tight enough for me to suds-up out front.

I got to take my first normal shower in two days, this morning. Oooooh it felt good. Warm water. My razor. Privacy. No more summer camp livin’ for me. But last week, pre-re-grout, the outdoors seemed like a reasonable option when compared to the moldy disaster that was my shower. You see, about a year ago, I noticed that the grout between the base shower pan and the wall tile was chipping out. Well, grouting is a pain in the ass (as evidenced by the backyard showering) so I said fuck it, and just bought some sealed caulk for the job. That shit dries over night. Presto! A year went by, and that caulk line turned into a dreadfully moldy filthy-shit line. Prest-nasty-o!

Stop, vomit time!

So I pulled all that shit out, bleached the affected areas, and re-grouted it. Now it needs to be sealed. That’ll take another 24 hours to cure. Sweet. Let’s hope the mosquitoes aren’t ravenous this weekend.

Damn I need a nap. And a million dollars.

Oedipus was a douche bag? For serious?

2005-08-05T16:20:00.000-05:00

The funniest shit I have ever seen. Possibly ever. Make sure you zoom in on the images and actually read this dude's paper. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.

It's fucking ART people. ART.

Chicago Day 2, Pt 1: that bus was nasty.

2005-08-05T11:51:00.000-05:00

We woke up somewhere around noon on Day 2 of the Chicago trip (I got pretty fucked up, big surprise, on Day 1). The weather was still brilliant, and we really wanted to take advantage of it. Food was foremost on our minds, and JJ had already decided that we would be eating at this Vietnamese restaurant around the way. The only problem was that the establishment was too many blocks to walk, so we were forced to ride the bus.

Oh, mass transit in metropolitan cities. Soooo fantastic. All the "big city" tour books always recommend that visitors check out the bus system so that you can travel about the city and “take it in”. What they always fail to mention, but what should be completely obvious to the average mind, is that public transportation is barely functional and far, far, far from luxurious. It's an A-to-fucking-b translation, and nothing more is promised. Coming from, and having lived in large cities, we were well prepared for the standard and reasonable irritations associated with riding buses in downtown settings. I was expecting to see some sleeping bums, really shitty graffiti, and maybe a puddle of urine somewhere between the back row of seats. But this trip was special. And by “special” I mean “unduly nasty”.

We boarded the bus and saw two empty seats to our right, just past the requisite blind man in a wheelchair with some child who I assume was somehow related. The kid had to have been somewhere near ten years old, and the dude in the chair must have been four hundred and thirty five. Give or take a century. Dude probably invented the “pointy stick” for improved hunting, when in his prime. We passed them for the empty seats. My lady took the left seat, and I intended to take the right. However, it was occupied by a thin set of paper adverts. Upon trying to remove said adverts, I noted a strange resistance. I tugged and it released. Upon inspection, it was apparent that someone either sat on some chocolaty nougat, or shit themselves straight through their trousers. And then made a half-assed attempt to remedy it with a blanket of coupon inserts. I immediately let loose of the evidence, disturbed at the discovery. My lady was most disappointed at the situation.

I decided to stand.

At the next stop, some people relinquished some seats further back, so we took them. JJ acquired a seat directly across from us. An elderly woman and a teenaged boy came aboard. The woman took the clean seat while the teen eyed the greasy, dirty spot on the seat next to her, and then sat right in the nougat crime scene without blinking. Dude had to have known there was an issue there. That’s life in the big city I guess. But it's still fucking nasty.

Just before we reach the next stop down, some woman behind us starts prodding who I believe was her son, telling him to run out and get her something "real quick like". Initially, the kid, probably fifteen, is completely uninterested in the errand. But she’s adamant, and is pushing him with the whole “do it for your momma” guilt-trip bullshit, so when the bus stops he runs out the back door. He jogs up to some dude leaning against a quickie mart window, and they make a sideways-glancing exchange. The kid runs back on the bus with momma’s request and hands it over. “That’s a good boy for momma!”

For all the current and future bus-riding mothers out there: buy your own fucking dope. Send your kids to college, not on crack runs. There’s wrong, and then there’s that. Don’t they deliver that shit in Chicago? They do in NYC. I mean, fuck.

Two stops down, the largest and still operating-on-two-feet man I have ever seen in real life lumbers on and makes his way down the aisle to stand between JJ and me. Now I take no issue with anyone who may have some sort of glandular disorder, physical impairment which precludes them from healthy exercise, or a woman who has just given birth to quintuplet silverback gorillas. Obesity is no joke. I read CNN, so I am aware that it is a national concern. Dude was big, I mean, he was probably twice in pounds what the wheelchair guy was in years. But his weight was not the issue. It was the sad and utter disrepair of his attire and hygiene.

Yes, I am critiquing the attire of others riding an inner-city Chicago bus. Sounds pointless, doesn’t it? On the one hand, who the hell am I to critique ANYONE on how they look or smell? And on the other, it’s a goddamn public bus , what the hell should I expect, right? But you had to see this guy. If he had looked down at me and said “worst. bus ride. ever,” I would have written him off as a hilarious and overzealous fan of The Simpsons. And that would have been brilliant. Almost brilliant enough to overlook/oversmell the sights and odors involved.

The man's gear was atrocious. Just awful. And for me to take notice, AND remember, is saying a-lot.

He was wearing grey sweat pants, and he was obviously making sure that they earned their name. You could see the soak-lines running down the legs from the waistband, at differing rates of dryness. Like the rings of a tree. I’m pretty sure there were Doritos bits stuck to the inside of his left knee, clinging there in silent desperation, hiding, imbedded in tufts of balled-up cotton fibers. His green t-shirt did not quite cover all that… material which folded over and into the pants area. Some pink-belly goodness peeking out from below. Various holes and stains dotted his back like the grain and knots on a sheet of pine plywood. The man was an amazing piece of work.

I never considered it, but later My Lady confided in me that she has something of a phobia that in tight public spaces, such as a bus or elevator, large and profusely sweaty people will fall or rub on her. Sure, that’s pretty disturbing, but I was too busy swimming in mixed fascination at the man to consider such horrors. He was so secure, just emitting this “hey fuck y’all, I gotta get to my D&D tournament so you can breath in my being. Inhale it, shitheads ,” kind of vibe. And boy, what an odor his being brought with it. Dude was RIPE. He smelled the way I would expect a dead cow, soaked in dumpster wine, and placed in a shed for a month, in Haiti, to smell like. Parts of that man had not seen soap in years. Fella reeked of dying extremities.

Damn. I feel like I have spent far too long describing this man in such a sinister light. I’m sure he’s actually a great guy who loves his grandmother, donates to the Red Cross, and remembers his friends’ birthdays. But shit, he made one hell of an impression on me based on his far less impressive attributes.

Whatever. Moving on.

A few stops later and we got the hell off. Right in front of the restaurant...

My Words, Spreading Like Fungus?

2005-08-04T11:46:00.000-05:00

I have started to write for Austinist (not "THE Austinist", just "Austinist"). This is part of my cleanup plan. Another element in my effort to keep out of trouble, although it will probably require more effort than what is required to write a free-column. However, Austinist is by far my favorite Austin-based site to see what the hell is going on around here. Most other publications are old and shitty.

Theirs is tip fucking top. And hopefully I will be able to write in almost the same way I get to rant here. Tell some stories. Act like I know things that I clearly have no clue about. Ramble on and on about details of issues no one cares about. It will be awesome. And you are more than welcome to drop by Austinist periodically to check it out. And if you live here in Austin, feel free to send me any information you have on art openings, parties, shows, independent film screenings, new bars, whatever. I'm no journalist, but I can get that info to the right people and spread your word.

Word to words.

Don't Believe it? Just Watch Me.

2005-08-01T22:16:00.000-05:00

The unthinkable is currently under consideration. This statement will require repeating, periodically, amongst the other sentences. It really is that serious.

Anyone who knows me, or has even met me (briefly, even), is fully aware that I am a huge proponent of drinking intoxicants. I don’t stand behind the juice just because I’m a drunkard, although that might be debatable on some level. I stand behind it because it is a fantastic out, a great barrier remover, a splendid way to go ahead and just give up all that worthless pretension for a few hours, and fine fuel for making all the mistakes in life (except the ones that endanger OTHERS’ lives) that really should be made. Besides, if you know what you like, then it tastes really damn good.

But just like everything else, there comes a point where it simply isn’t necessary. Gasp! I know. The unthinkable is currently under consideration.

But not permanently.

You see, my personality is one that lends itself to a truncated life, littered with all abandoned vices, all of which are fully capable of peace-ing-me-out of the post-womb. I’m not particularly interested in going out early, but if it happens, then so be it. However, it MUST happen amongst joyous circumstances. Like a failed parachute, while skydiving naked. Or hot sex in a tent on Kodiak island. Maybe a bad barrel ride down Niagara. Whatever.

What it CANNOT be is from a baseball bat, wielded by some douche balloon in some random public place who is simply sick and tired of hearing me talk a circus port-o-potty’s worth of shit because I’m drunk and my mind is boringly swimming through an oatmeal mush of general malaise. That’s where my sirens start to sound, and words like “abuse” and “temperament” get tossed around between my… selves. Myselves? You know what I mean.

In other words, when something destructive is no longer entertaining to me, then it needs to get curbed. If you aren't enjoying your state of obliteration, then you are, by definition, abusing it. Even worse, if you are irritated and cranky instead of laughing and telling lies about how cool you are, then you're wasting AND abusing it. And right now, I’m seriously on the cusp of getting my GROWN ass completely tore down for acting like a complete dick when I’m sauced. Sure, getting thrown out of bars is fun. It really is. But you don’t want your friends to be cheering on the bouncers and shit. You want them to get your back, even if you don’t deserve it.

BOUNCER: Hey, fucker, you peeing on the couch?
YOU [with only one eye open, leaning hard to your right]: Uh, maybe. That or someone else just peed on it. With my dick, apparently. Maybe.
BOUNCER: [lunging at you, slobbering] My MOM has to clean up that shit with a wet-dry vac! Ahhhh! I hate drunk people even though I work at a bar! OH MY FUCKING GOD I MUST CRUSH YOU!
[Lots of punching, some knocking down, laughing, crying, maybe a broken zipper in there]
YOUR FRIENDS: [option 1, preferred] Dude! Get the fuck off him, you're going to push his hemorrhoids out his ears!
[Mad Friend-defense ensues, you get hauled to safety, no one ever sits on that couch during subsequent visits]
YOUR FRIENDS: [option 2, not so preferred] What the...? Fucking Craig! Here, I'll help you drag him to that flight of cement stairs out back! He's been crying the last couple of hours and think I might like to watch him die at the hands of an angry bar-mob! Sweet!
[Bad Friend-defense ensues, you get kicked in the head by your out-of-town guest and your coworker steals your wallet before they roll you into the alley out back, where strangers join in by beating you with deck timbers and loose plumbing pipes]

Don't kid yourself, that could totally happen.

I'm extremely attached to my friends. For bad, and for worse. Even if they're tempted to get all Benedict Arnold on me. Maybe they’re just touchy every now and again, and that’s alright. We cannot be dependable ALL the time, right? But I CANNOT have my friends joining in a good ol’ ass-whooping on me, just because I have diarrhea of the mouth.

More importantly, I don’t need to be having diarrhea of the mouth. Not only does it sound completely disgusting, it is entirely preventable.

Cranky people are cranky for a reason. Every irritable lion you’ve ever met has a thorn in its paw. Problem is, no one has the time or patience to pull out anyone else’s thorns. So we’re on our own.

And in the process of finding my thorn, the most basic and necessary step for anyone with a personality as shifty as mine is to consider the unthinkable. Time for a break. Time to re-establish reasons to celebrate. Time to give myself something to cheer about when I’m plastered instead of “man, I need to do something with myself. I’m not designed for this shit. Blah-blah, poor little me, blah-fucking-blah.” Once this sort of inebriated self-consolation starts to repeat itself in front of live audiences, the speaker needs to put down the cup of impairment, stop crying about doing nothing, and go out and fuck some shit up.

Something that will bring back the jovial drunk that really, really wants to hang out. He really does. But there just hasn’t been good reason for him to drop by lately. So, dry up the double-old-fashioneds and hiballs until he returns with something to sing about. Otherwise, you just end up kickin’ it with a really surly fucker who spends WAY too much goddamn cash on booze. And food. And he tends to burn the seats with lit cigarettes or kick strangers at bus stops. It makes no sense to call that guy if you plan on going out, so if he’s guaranteed to show up every time you’re out, then just don’t bother with it.

Not until you’re sure he’s on vacation. ‘Cause that dude’s a total dick, and he’s going to get your face all kinds of broken.

So. The unthinkable is currently under consideration. And after typing this out, I believe I have come to the conclusion that I shall shelve my boozing until I get something worth boozing about. Like a finished book. Or a mastering of Chinese. Or a bronze sculpture of my naked body, wrestling Neptune, in front of any public library in Wisconsin.

Especially that last one. Jesus, that would be the best thing to happen to anyone, ever.

Of course, this means that I might be curiously absent from this blog thing for a bit. Not because I only blog when I booze, but because I might choose to do something more productive with my work hour.

Bygones. Boozegones. You get the idea.

Word.

Nothing Particular.

2005-07-27T11:57:00.000-05:00

I got a new chair in my office, and it is fucking ruining my life. You see, my previous chair, while nasty looking, had become part of my person. It fit me right, like a favorite hat. Sure, it was all sweaty and dirty, well-worn and owning strange smells. But still. It was my chair.

This new chair has all this lumbar-support bullshit, and it makes me sit up like church. I can’t get comfortable in the thing. And it is forcing me to type with proper posture, which makes me a sad working stiff. This is making me most miserable, and is contributing to my general feeling that this whole work-path thing is a leech on whatever energy I have to dedicate to whatever I am supposed to become.

Because I know it certainly can’t be this. Because this is… a really shitty sitting experience. Seriously. Posture prison and shit.

I played Texas Hold ’em in a little tournament this past weekend. For those who don’t know, Hold ’em is a card game where everyone involved pretends that a huge amount of statistical skill is required to win, and that the original psychological element present in all the five-card varieties of poker is for old people and Old West movies. Really, it’s just a way to simplify the original game so that anyone can play. And anyone can be led to believe that they could destroy Kenny Rogers if he were to show up at the table. Drop some “pocket jacks” on his ass and punch him in the face.

Well, when Craig plays, it’s all about the bluff. I try to bring that shit back into the game. Not because I want to re-hash the glory days of saloon five-card, where sharks got leaded, but because some of us are honestly UNLUCKY in cards. Statistically speaking, if you are always dealt bullshit cards, you will eventually be forced into a bluff (or you'll just get bled dry by the blinds), and then you will lose (and possibly cry as a result). And since I never get good hands, thereby never giving anyone reason to believe I have a good one once the bluffing commences, I lose with record-breaking speed. It is a wonder to behold.

Deal 1: 8 and 2, off-suit. Fold.
Deal 2: 3 and 10, off suit. Fold.
Deal 3: 5 and 10, off suit. Fold.
[Jesus, how did that dude get 2 aces? Shit ]
Deal 4: 2 and 7, off suit, Fold.
Deal 5: 3 and 8, off suit. Fold.
[A straight? How the hell did he do that, again?]
Deal 6: 8 and 2, off suit. Fucking fold.
Deal 7: 5 and 10, off suit. Fold and start thinking about naked chicks instead.
[A flush? Seriously? That guy just busted out a full house last hand. Fuck.]
Deal 8: 2 and 7, off suit. Fold before it even gets to my bet.
Deal 9: Fold without looking at cards to save myself some effort.
Deal 10: Jack and 3, off suit. Is that a face card? It’s been so long… ALL IN!!!!
Stand up, and lose to full house guy, who slaughtered beat my Jack-high hand.

So sweet.

So I suck pretty bad at Hold ‘em. Because the reality is, you MUST get good cards at SOME point if you are to ever win. And I rarely get decent, let alone good cards. So there’s that. I have no idea why I just typed all this shit out, but I’m not deleting it now.

My left knee is sooooooooo shot right now. I went jogging two days in a row, which sounds vaguely healthy, but not really. One has to have the right physical fitness to begin with, otherwise you’re just mashing all your joints together for no good reason. Tall or top-heavy folks are not built for running the same way as other runners are. Even beyond that, the theories fold all over on top of each other, spawning a whole industry of work-out guru types who make a killing off of "tailoring" individual exercise regimens for dedicated skin-sweaters. There’s a science to fitness, and that science is apparently really complicated. As in, you can exercise too much, too highly, too strongly, with incorrect frequency, at an improper heart-rate, and under the wrong moon-sign… and you’ll do nothing more than break your body and speed up your march to death. It’s true. Exercise can be the worst thing you will ever do to yourself, if executed improperly. Worse than china-binges, an all-Cinnabon diet, or joining the military. Well, maybe not the military, but you get the idea.

I’ll be back on the trails tomorrow though. ‘Cause I’m smart like that. Plus, I feel that this left knee is simply being a little bitch, and you can’t bow down to a little bitch by doing whatever its whiney ass demands. Right? Right.

And that goes for internal organs too. Like, say, a cry-baby liver for instance. Yes.

IMMEDIATE CONCERN

2005-07-26T11:50:00.000-05:00

An old friend of mine just contacted me about a friend of his who is in desperate need of a liver transplant. Her liver has shut down entirely, two months from her wedding. She needs a complete liver IMMEDIATELY in order to survive. I'm talking DAYS not weeks.

Forward the link, or email liverforalife@yahoo.com if you have a direct connection to a transplant.

Please check it out, and do whatever you can. Not having a spare liver of my own, this is the best I can do.

Imagined Conversations

2005-07-20T16:11:00.000-05:00

Between two competitors at The Special Olympics, before the race.

“So, you gonna run the entire thing? Or just kind of crap-out half way because you get a medal regardless?”

“Oh hell no. I plan to book it the entire stretch. I'm breaking records today my friend. SONIC BOOM, BITCH! What do you think I am, some kind of pussy?”

“No, but I’m just sayin’. I mean, there’s no need to risk pulling a hamstring out here. We all know this is more of a meet-and-greet kind of deal. So what’s the point in bustin’ an ankle over this shit when you don’t even have to run straight? You could just run home instead of toward the finish. They seriously DO NOT CARE here. Fuck it: medals for everyone! So why try?”

“For pride.”

“For NOTHING.”

“Pride.”

“Nothing.”

“Pride.”

“NUH-THING, fucker.”

“I shall bury you in the lanes.”

“Fuck you. You, you… retard.”

“…”

“…”

“Not cool man. Not. Cool.”

----------------------------------

Two survivors from a bus in rural Guatemala that was ransacked by a roaming Jungle Death Squad.

“H-h-hey man, you alright?”

“Yeah, I think my wrist broke when I jumped out the back. I can never get that ‘tuck-n-roll’ thing right.”

“You’re alright though. I think my ankle is shot. I tripped on some roots when I was running blindly through the jungle, bullets whizzing by my ears.”

“I just pretended I was dead on the roadside. After the explosion, they didn’t bother to check everyone’s pulse.”

“Lucky.”

“No shit. You see that one chick that flew through the front glass after the bus piled into the ditch?”

“The one with the green cap and Converse All Stars?”

“I think.”

“Khaki shorts and that patchouli-looking bag? Hemp on everything?”

“Sounds right.”

“Cute toosh, low buttoned shirt, and those two pony tail things, like Pocahontas?”

“Fuck yeah, that’s the one. She ate it pretty bad, huh? Right on over the hood?”

“Yeah. I hope her next of kin is a sister. That would be so sweet.”

“You’re damn right it would!”

“So! Sweet! Hey, uh, have you seen my kids anywhere around here? There’s like three of them, one is about yea-tall with a blue back pack…”

------------------------

Dick Cheney and Friend having after-dinner wine at Cheney’s D.C. apartment.

Friend: “So, this whole Rove thing is getting way out of hand, eh?”

Cheney: “I guess. Hell, they already crucified me, the president, and the twins. It was just a matter of time before they mounted a hunt for The Big Dog.”

Friend: “True. But what if what they’re saying is more than just a liberal witch-hunt? What if he was the source of the leak?”

Cheney: “Whatever. I was all over that Halliburton scandal, they proved it, and it still added up to a steaming bowl of dick for them. It’s just a distraction.”

Friend: "..."

Cheney: "What? What are you so creeped out about?"

Friend: “So... the Halliburton deals really were crooked? You really are a double-dealing, democracy-raping, America-hater?”

Cheney: “Shut the fuck up. We don’t talk about that. Ever.”

Friend: “But, this is… all rather shocking, and frankly I just don’t know how to fee…”

Cheney: “I’m warning you. One more word and…” [cracks knuckles]

Friend: “No, no, no! I just can’t believe you would betray…”

Cheney: “This must end. Now!” [stabs friend in ribs with ball point pen]

Friend: “Sssssssssssshhhhhssssssshhshshhhsss” [slowly deflates to plastic puddle with enlarged lips, draped over couch cushions]

Cheney: [frustrated, self-defeated] “Damnit. Sometimes I get too carried away with this shit.”