Night of the Living Dave

Commandos - December 3

Last night I'd been at the cafe for many hours too long, just thinking about things, love related matters I can't talk about here. Is it over again? Does it matter? Is this a pain in my stomach? What is this that I'm feeling? Is this from too much coffee?

Mars rose across the sky next to a bright full moon, we sat stoned on the back porch here becoming comfortable with the speed of moving planets, an hour spent motionless watching bright lights in the sky was no problem, two hours, no problem, all night long..., but eventually I went back to my undisclosed location.

Every time my ex cheated on me a door would open somehow, someone new would come smiling at me wanting to see what all the fuss was about, when it happened yesterday I met it with dread and fear, I didn't want a new door to open though I admit I've always loved the chaos, I've always loved the crowds and the instant click with whoever had the strangest eyes that day. Yes I know its supposed to be good for me, who am I to call nature wrong, but still I defy these angels all the time, the ones that tell me how to love something new. No, this robot does not obey, this robot will cut off the signal from its masters and remain on a parkbench for days to keep from moving on. One zero zero one zero zero one. Worst case ever. Believe me.

I walked back to T's house and saw there was no work for me there, so I almost went to sleep reading Rimbaud, who had just been kicking my ass with weird cooincidence all day long.

"Dave-o, are you there?" It was T. wondering where I'd been, it was leaf pick-up day the next morning, it was eleven-thirty at night but we had to rake the lawn or all was lost. So raking we did, quietly in the dark, trying not to wake the neighbors with too much conjecture. I went downstairs to sleep when my watch said it as 12:02 am.

This morning I woke up staring at the rafters again, it clicked again this time, I could hang myself from those, I could do it today couldn't I. Yes. When I first started staying with T. he was very clear about this, "no hanging yourself in my basement" he said, "and no using my axe either!" I had actually been eyeing the axe earlier in the day that he'd mentioned this. I could drop it on myself in just the right way couldn't I, I could cut my own head off somehow couldn't I. There is a suicide on record of a man who cut off his own head with a chainsaw. He got enough momentum behind his swing that the saw kept going before his arms went limp, I always thought this was either hilarious or admirable or at least a true feat of strength of some kind, though I don't know what it means now.

When I got myself standing I went out for a smoke and discovered the street still covered in leaves, leaf pick-up hadn't happened yet, so I grabbed the rake and started raking again in case I could beat the leaf guys to the sidewalk. After I'd been there awhile this strange guy walks up and nods to me and goes past me toward the house next door, where he went into the garage and came back holding his own giant rake.

He started furiously raking the yard next door while all around us on both sides of the street the giant street sweeper vehicles had arrived, huge hulking things with turbines and roll-bars just eviscerating mountains of leaves that had been there for half the year. They swooped past us, getting closer to the edge of the sidewalk with each pass, it was quite menacing but there was still time, it was hard to say whose side they were on, these masked street-sweeping men, they seemed like they were trying to get all the leaves done before we could get the last of the shit off our lawns, but at the end it seemed like they paused to let us finish. A mystery. Still we hurried as if everything depended on our raking.

When it was done, and the masked men had finished with our square feet of pavement, I looked west toward the old man and he took out a smoke and lit it, which was awesome, and so did I, and then he said "see you later" in a thick native Italian accent and then he left and I never saw him again.

Snake head eating the head on the opposite side

There are longer palindromes out there, some of which actually including true narrative meaning beyond those ones that start with "dennis" and end with "sinned" and have a bunch of crap in the middle, but to my thinking there is no finer palindrome in the English language than this one I found a few weeks ago:

Elapsed,
a frail aria's timid tone damned rage.
So ran I,
to order a note we both sang.
I laid low,
on miserable bald locations.
Sent I was,
all it is, I was.
I wondered,
Is no cost set as I deliver debts I made?
Will a foe rise?
Dare I pass or can I leer?
In eve's yawn,
it left some gain.
On,
On I age,
most felt in ways even I reel in
Across a pier,
a desire of all I wed,
a mist bed.
Reviled,
is a test so considered.
Now I saw.
Is it ill as a witness?
No,
it a cold label bares.
I'm now old,
I align ash to be wet on a red root.
In a rose garden made not dim,
its air, a liar,
fades pale.

Not Dead Yet, 2005

"Do you think that I'm crazy?
Out of my mind?
Do you think that I creep in the night
And sleep in a phone booth?"

A long, long time ago when Sara lived at That House on 37th and Cora, we were wasted coming back from the Gladtav and I went to sleep on one of those big comfy chairs on the front porch and it was summertime so it was all cool and friendly and the next day I was hungover and I somehow made it back home to Woodstock.

Maybe six years later, I'm walking back home to Woodstock wasted off my ass after drinking at the Gladtav, and I walk by That House and this dude Rob lives there and I hang out with him for a while before again, totally falling asleep on their porch curled up into a ball on one of their giant comfy chairs.

Five years after that, which was this October, a weird thing happened. I wasn't wasted, but it was cold out, and it was late, and I'd been meaning to ask the housemates there about maybe staying over for a bit and I knocked on the door for Ryan, but no one answered so I sat on one of the big comfy chairs and waited, and I fell asleep there curled up into a little ball again.

A few days ago I was thinking about this, because I was remembering that the middle time there, the one that happened five years ago, that particular time I fell asleep on their porch, because that time when I awoke I had a blanket on me. I was totally confused when I woke up about where I got a blanket and a few days later I was hanging out there again, and Diana said that she'd seen me out on the freezing porch and that she'd put it on me.

I was like "Thank you! That's so cool! Thank you!"

That was five years ago this October.

This afternoon I'm walking downtown after running into Becky inside Pioneer Place shopping mall, Becky was buying video games for her kids and nephews and stuff. So Becky is shopping on her lunch break and she has to go back to work, she goes back to her office and I'm walking down 5th Avenue and I walk up a hill to finish my smoke and stare at my reflection in an office building window.

I'm curious about how my hat looks because I kind of like it, I like this kind of maroon winter hat, and now that I've had it off my head for a few minutes it feels kind of weird, because I've been wearing that hat all the time for days now, and I feel like I want to keep adjusting it except its not there, its only the phantom feeling of having my hat squeezed on the wrong way, and I've actually reached up to fix it a few times and I look pretty stupid adjusting my imaginary hat is what I'm assuming. When I've taken my hat off I mean. When I was standing on the sidewalk there on 5th Avenue, I had it on and I was staring at it in the glass.

Anyway, I'm standing there on the sidewalk by 5th Avenue. And Diana, from five years ago, Diana, who left town five years ago, who disappeared way back then, walks across the street at me and smiles.

"How are you?" she says and she hugs me and its totally amazing to see her and I tell her that I've been staying at That House again, except now its called the ASIA House, and she says "Yeah, I was just at the ASIA the other day to see my old cat Beast!" and I was like "Holy shit! Beast was your cat? Oh my god! Beastie is like my favorite cat! He totally only has like, three legs!"

Diana says we should go get some tea and so we go to Stumptown and she tells me that she's in town from Ohio for a few days, she's out in Columbus doing post grad work in plant biology but she came back to visit friends during break.

She has to go after an hour or so, and I stayed at the table and got more coffee, and when I got up to leave afterward I was high-fiving this giant imaginary sky with all my furious being, having to hold on to guardrails and things in case I accidentally started flying.

Big Wheel In The Sky Keep On Smoking

Had a meeting at the Housing Authority yesterday, while I was waiting I asked the guy sitting next to me if he was Steven. He said why do you want to know? I said it was because I saw the name Steven ahead of mine on the waiting list and I thought if you were him, then I could see you through the windows if I went out for a smoke, so I would know when my turn is coming, so I wouldn't miss it when they called my name because I was out smoking.

He says "Oh a smoker, I see, yeah, did you know that the things they put in cigarettes are so bad that they don't even tell you what they are?"

Yeah yeah yeah, I know all about this, he says "George Bush and the White Man and Big Money and all those evil scum, they keep the tobacco industry safe you know, they put the poison in the smokes so you get hooked and can't stop and then you die." I tell him that the Ligget Group explained all this years ago, I know already, but he doesn't know who they are. I tell him that the Ligget Group specializes in tobacco for poor people, they're the worst of the worst, they make GPC cigarettes for instance, and I think Basics too. But still he won't shut up about every single irrelevant factoid he knows, this was supposed to be a brief interchange in a lobby between two strangers, and five minutes later I still can't get him to shut up about every bad thing that's ever happened to anybody. "They test cigarettes on baby whales! CAMEL FILTERS ARE MADE OF PEOPLE! PEEEOOPLE!"

Yeah yeah yeah, you have no idea how much I know about this already. He says "Its these rich white men that keep us down, smoking and all that, not taking up smoking was the greatest thing I ever did actually". But I just did not want to hear this shit, I only had a few minutes and I wanted to get a smoke while I still could, I could hear pontificating any time. He says the Big White Man kills us with cancer and only people like him are truly free. He continues off on a long tangent about everything, about the military industrial complex, about fake science he's pretended he's read, about Lewis and Clark being the recon team for a gang of thieves, how the Native Americans hate Lewis and Clark for helping to steal their land, and this of course is all about my smoking, of course. I say "what about the French?" Accustomed to other kinds of French-bashing he gets wary. I tell him that Thomas Jefferson didn't actually steal the land that Lewis and Clark explored, it was purchased from the French, how come the Native Americans don't hate the French instead for the actual act of stealing their land?

This confuses him, he says "no, it was the Americans who stole the land" but I must correct him, you should know this mister Steven, the Louisiana Purchase was made during Napoleon's time, it was a straight up trade of land for money, there was no literal theft involved. It was the French who "stole" the land.

At this point he starts to get scared that maybe I'm a conservative of some kind and have no sympathy for the original Americans so I try to help him out. He thinks that the same people who stole the land are the same people who invented my smoking, who are the same people who manage Diebold and who are the same people that wage illegal war in Iraq and the same people who do all sorts of heinous Repuglican shit, I of course understand what he's talking about, but find him intensely annoying. I'm used to a far higher grade of babbling know-it-all than this individual, his associations were ridiculous. And I still want my smoke, and he still won't tell me if he's the Steven I saw on the list so I'm getting a little upset.

I say "Yes, it was the Americans who gave the Indians smallpox-infected blankets during the winter, gave them poisoned food when they were hungry, broke every treaty they ever made, waged illegal war, herded the Indians into camps, stole the resources, raped the land, yes yes, this is all obviously true, its just that the particular event of the Louisiana Purchase was technically not theft, or else no money would have changed hands. And you know what the Indians did in return?"

And he says, "What, die in pain?"

And I say "They gave us tobacco. They held it up and said 'Here, the kids will love this stuff.' Do you know that tobacco is the single largest cause of preventable death in the United States and is more dangerous then all hard drugs combined according to our own Surgeon General? Do you know how many Americans die from smoking every year?" He nods his obvious yes.

I say "don't you think that's interesting that we took everything the Indians had and now we die by the thousand every few days because of tobacco?" at which point I could see his gears churning.

I said "My mom smoked when she was pregnant with me, there's this big long story to it and everything about how I kicked from the womb and knocked the ashtray off her stomach, I was addicted to nicotine before I was even born" (I didn't tell him how my friend Brendan actually got me smoking years later). I say isn't that weird that we were born with this strange Original Sin kind of thing where even from birth we're paying for the bad decisions of the people who came before us? Don't you think that my smoking is actually the wheels of justice turning and helping to destroy the White Man from within and its a better statement on humanity in general that I would know this but keep smoking anyway?

And they call his name, "Steven!"

He gets up to go to his meeting but he turns back and says "Don't go anywhere, I want to keep talking to you!"

While he's gone I realize I don't have any smokes anyway and that I'm really happy I won't have to talk to him again.

From Dec 11, 2004

So we watched Rosemary's Baby last night, which I'd never seen all the way through, and now I get things like the tanis root references and the curse of Mia Farrow's haircut. One of the things that popped up was Satan's love of anagrams, how this one character's name was in fact an anagram for his real identity, because he was in hiding after becoming famous as a scion to a particular line of well-known witches. The lead Satanists's new last name became "Castevet" after the scrambling, which then stuck out to me because I'd misremembered the name of the actor who played Rosemary's husband, who turned out to be Cassavetes. And this stuck out because of that Le Tigre song my friend recommended called "What's Your Take On Cassavetes" which seems to be about the social pressure of getting along with someone interested in totally irrelevant Hollywood trivia.

First I thought he was some kind of young Ben Gazzara, then I thought he looked like my employer in Queens, then I decided that Mia Farrow was playing Gwyneth Paltrow in a parallel universe where Cassavettes played Ben Affleck and they'd stayed together despite Affleck's open Satan worship. The amazing thing is how Affleck won't even try to hide it, he'll play an angel rebelling against God, he'll play a dude in a bondage suit named Devil, and he'll say things like this to reporters in 2003: "I would rather say, 'I worship you, Satan!' than 'My favorite baseball team is the New York Yankees.'" I remember reading that quote on the Greyhound back to New York last year, on Christmas Day, while he was promoting his Phillip K. Dick movie, who is a writer famous for his attempts to locate messiahs and devils and old gods of all sorts.

Affleck's involvement in politics of course, involved infiltrating the Kerry campaign and ruining it from the inside, assisting the rise to power of our current President (burning?) Bush, who is well known for his fixation on Revelations, the end of the world, the general abuse of Christianity in all its forms and the total destruction of the Holy Land. Otherwise Affleck was known recently for his love of the openly cursed Boston Red Sox, whose World Series win has long been attributed to the use of evil magic.

Truly the resemblance to that old story showed up a number of times, young Mia Farrow before the Peter Pan haircut looks a lot like Gwyneth used to look, it freaked me out more than once or twice. Gwyneth of course, got her huge break in a movie about the triumph of the se7en deadly sins over a struggling human society.

So I figured it seemed important to decode the movie for clues to the actual movement of Satan across the movie business, with Roman Polanski being kind of a gimme as Director, the man who lost his baby to the Manson Family, with the lead Satanist in the movie having his name rearranged so that the spare letters after Castevet gave him the first name "Roman". So the idea this morning was to rearrange the letters in "John Cassavetes" to find the secret message, and what I got was: "No jest, save cash".

And remember, that comes directly from Satan's mouth. The End is near, save your money kids!

So anyway, yeah, I broke lots of shit in June and just started walking again in the last few weeks. Pretty fun time with the surgery and the pills and everything there. Every time I come back to Friendster it looks different.

Its funny that people say that snowflakes are unique. They are not unique. I've met too many of the same people to think that a lot of snowflakes are similar enough that they shouldn't count as the same damn thing.

People are cruel, there's just no getting around that. There's no system to deal with people who lie to themselves, there's no accounting for the massive sociopathic hordes who actually believe the shit they say about themselves, about the world.

All I know is that I can walk now and I'm sure it feels a lot better to me than someone who has never lost the ability to walk. Probably. At one point this Summer I couldn't even remember walking up stairs anymore, I simply had no recollection of going up stairs on foot because I was so committed to doing it correctly on crutches. Total immersion in recovery had blotted out the original version of health. Its like eating a sumptuous meal after weeks of starving. Its like knowing that the words of liars don't matter anymore because the feeling in the legs trumps the everyday sensing by the ears. It doesn't matter what you say, I can walk.

There's this guy Atmosphere, or Slug, or Sean Daly, whatever, he has this song God Loves Ugly that I listen to.

"how long i gotta wait for these fools to sit down?
appears more clear in its simplest form
nobody sees tears when youre sittin in a storm
abandoning the norm, and handling the harvest
measuring the worth by the depth of the hardships
I accept all the hate you can aim at my name,
I held on to the sacred ways of how to play the game

talkin to my shadow, he advised me not to worry
he said i should plant my tree and let it rise out of the fury
so give me some light, a little love and some liquid
im gonna creep through the night
and put a plug in the spicket
and when the water grows
and the dam starts to overflow
ill float atop the flood, holding on to my ugly"

I had a bunch of writing to put up today but there's some style sheet issue with the linux machine I'm using, none of the html coding seems to work and everything came out fucked up, I was scared to leave the essays up as they appeared on my screen.

However! This would be an excellent opportunity to point out that you can turn off those damn New Blog Posting alerts that get mailed out to everybody on my friends list, its somewhere in the preferences, I don't remember where now because of happy hour at The Know on NE Alberta.

I'm just saying, if you got an alert and got all the way here and there was nothing new to read, I did all I could, and suggest humbly that you can turn the damn alert off somehow if you were bothered.

Many apologies from all of us at Night of the Living Dave.

Not Dead Yet - April 15, 2005

So I was walking around Downtown sometime a week or two ago, after Laurel got to class one day and I had a few dollars in my pocket wanting to be spent on a bottomless cup of coffee and lots and lots of smokes. Same as usual. I tried the front tables at Stumptown Coffee but could only handle the scrutiny from the scenesters there for so long. Walking walking walking, inside the Korean store this lady I used to know told me that Brian the bartender was back working in downtown, the Rialto is open again after all these months, and Brian was back Dave, you should go and see him!

So the Rialto is covered in scaffolding and dudes with hard hats are screaming at each other over the construction noise. There's dust everywhere and orange tarps to keep falling debris off the sidewalk. In the middle of one of the tarps in tiny letters it says "Rialto OTB bar is open!" so I tried to figure out where the hell the front door was supposed to be in all this mess.

And hey, Brian was in there, he smiled when he saw me and I was like "Yeah! I still have a bartender friend around here, yeah!" and we sat and talked about shit for quite a long while.

He worked in this little room attached to the Rialto proper, it was the room filled with horse races from all over the country on about two dozen monitors. Every day the helpless gambling sots of downtown would come in, play video poker, drink beer and lose money on horses, every day Brian had to pretend he knew anything about horse racing at all. I myself hate the shit, but my family was pretty much raised at the horse track in Saratoga, it was interesting to be watching the weirdness on so many screens.

There's this girl Sara who's come in to talk to Brian. She's an ex-gymnast who got married and agreed with her husband that stripping was the best way to get through Law School, though now she works with the Federal Prosecutor's and seems pretty depressed about it. She and her husband were buying a house somewhere, and she wanted to talk to Brian to see what he knew about doing such things. He kept giving me more coffee, and I was getting twitchier and twitchier, and the art magazines I'd brought with me were becoming useless, I was losing the patience and the blood sugar needed even to look at the things.

But I'm sitting there reading one of the free mags around town, and noticing that I'd missed a contest that Voodoo Doughnuts had put on at Berbati's. Apparently, the deal was that guys would see how many doughnuts they could suspend in the air using only their erections, like a shishkebab kinda thing, and whoever could spear the most doughnuts without any of them falling off won a prize of some kind, which was probably more doughnuts.

So I'm all upset that I've missed the fun, I was busy at the printing company those last few months there and I never got to go out and play, it sucked. I was secretly hoping that Voodoo would crumble and disintegrate in my absence, but here it is in the newspaper, they're organizing things like this mass gang-fucking of pastries, and damn, I wish I'd seen that. I missed the Voodoo wedding of Miss Mona Superhero as well, I don't know how to explain how fun that must have been.

Then of course it hits me, I actually have done stuff like that, inside Voodoo Doughnuts when the store was closed. It started coming back to me. Last Summer when there was no one around, Laurel and I would have sex in the store all the time, pretty much all over the place, on the front and back counters, at the desk, by the front door where people could look in and see even, everywhere except the bathroom and the loft where the organ player is supposed to sit. And there were times when we took the day-old doughnuts and used them in our games. So I fucked a bunch of doughnuts is what I'm saying, and I got paid to do it.

The gamblers were being pretty quiet and not talking to anybody else, Sara the house buying person was busy talking to Brian, and the only other person in there besides me was this lady who was also scamming the unlimited refills, she seemed disoriented somehow, Brian was even going to 86 her at one point for giving off this weird anti-social vibe, but she wasn't doing anything more crazy than that so we all kinda ignored her.

And then I'm reading the thing about the doughnut contest and start laughing out loud. I was suddenly remembering all the sex inside the store, and that thing with the hand especially. The strange quiet lady finally decides to speak, she says to me "What are you laughing about?"

And I say "Everything is alright you know! I had sex with that wax hand in the display case at Voodoo Doughnuts!"

She says "Excuse me?" and I continue, I tell her "Yeah, that wax hand! If you've ever been in there I'm sure you know what I'm talking about! And we had sex on that counter there too!"

And now she's full on "WHAT the FUCK" and I say "Yeah! And that chair by the desk in back, over there and I think that cutting board place where they make the doughnuts too!"

And now she was just fucking scared, but really, it was relieving. "Working all those 14-hour days was no problem" I said, "I didn't miss a damn thing because I know that I had sex with that wax hand in the display case! I don't need to see a bunch of dudes fucking some doughnuts man, because I LIVED THE DREAM!"

Then Brian got off the phone and we started talking about normal stuff again, and the quiet woman with all the coffee refills stopped trying to listen in on our conversation.

LensCrappers Pt. 1 - July 11, 2005

Again around Downtown today, doing it on crutches, giving off a Massive Headwound Harry vibe in a pair of torn surgical scrubs and one shoe and a hospital bracelet, flailing crutches akimbo in the strangest most assymetrical way.

Further research into grocery shoppers has me scared of them again, but I got some things I needed this morning, elemental things, and then was dropped by tanker plane from 10,000 feet over Pioneer Place in order to perform soft landing and extraction of new pair of glasses from LensCrappers. I had not eaten yet so I bought orange juice and these kind of tube shaped fastfood things for breakfast in the Food Court, among the only Courts now left to be made into a syndicated afternoon tv show. I don't now why this is so, it seems that there is plenty of crime there to adjudicate. The food was atrocious and I wound up ditching half of it, sipping mightly on the water I brought with me. I know by now what oxycodone does with the ability to feel the need to pee. Too many times now I've been surprised by the sudden peeing that goes on without me, often just a few feet from the bathroom after a failed mad dash. I thought these urinal things they gave me at the hospital would be useless at home, but now I see why that particular industry is so large, the economy of peeing while still in bed is just too awesome to ignore, the range of devices offered to assist in alternative deletion now fill many giant catalogs.

I peed in the actual bathroom this time, I'd made it, sixty feet across a sea of chairs while the management of numerous restaurants based on apparently delicious racial stereotypes failed to prevent every single employee there from staring at me to see if I'd make it. I hogged a sink afterward, and flogged a hand-dryer, one or two folks stopping to comment on how awful that must have been there to get your leg so fucked up. Leaving the bathroom I noticed the elevator, remembering how I'd never used it before, I was never going in that direction ever, but today it was sort of going in the right direction, it had a button for "up" right? So I get on the elevator but it only goes one floor, and then there on the ground floor there's only an exit to the sidewalk and escalators back down to Hell, and I needed to get to LensCrappers, so I went back down the escalator to Hell to go past the Food Court again and then over to the other escalators that would take me somewhere a few rings up to the glasses place.

I stopped by the bookstore on the way there and paused remembering how many years I'd spent stealing books from B. Dalton's and Waldenbooks in the malls around Albany. Always either stealing cartoons or sci-fi, because they never guarded those things. This is how I know how the impulse engines work on Star Trek ships. This is how I know about Muons. Anyway, I was in a mall again and that's what it made me think about. There was nothing in there now. All those books in there now looked stupid.

Continuing on, I made it to the escalator and picked the broken front face of my old glasses out of my pocket and held it up to my face like a magnifying glass. I couldn't see LensCrappers but I knew it was next to the coffee place and that was visible way up by the ceiling windows, so I zipped vertically there, to the 5th floor and around the corner into the empty store.

Boy were they happy to see me.

Spongebath Hotpants

So I'm laying in the hospital bed with all the motors in the mattress, and the thing is alive, the motors keep going on without my assistance and I'm being shuffled all around the thing like I stage dived a La-Z-Boy. I'm trying to pee into the little plastic urinal thing they gave me, and I'm most proud because my roomate can't do it, only I had the power to pee straight into the plastic opening in that room, and it came from my natural grace with doing disgusting things in semi-public. Oh how I loved that sound reverbing around the room, the proud piddle sound.

Privacy curtain halfway open, big ole ugly pirate nurse come sneaking up on me, "Dave!" she says and whoops! My hand shakes and I pee five feet straight out over the bed, onto the mattress and my left foot and all over. Fuck! "Spongebath" she says!

Young nurse, straight out of "Nurses Gone Wild: Cancun" has the job of hot toweling my ass in the pre-dawn fog, I remain silent, I allow them to do a thorough job, the pain in my leg from standing might have ruined it for most people, and maybe they were counting on that, but no, no, it was good.

Fourteen hours later same nurse is with me as we're out looking for the car lost in their parking lot, housemate's Mom has driven off with security to look for the car and I'm stuck alone in the wheelchair with spongebath nurse. Silence, nothing, looking the other way, squinting at a newspaper stand, we're both thinking it, she wants to forget, I washed pee off a stranger boy's ass today and he enjoyed it. Its only a job, it was obviously only a job, it was for a good cause.

Very awkward silence.

Oh that poor girl.

I think She's Recovered Now Though

There's a line in a Bukowski poem called "In the Bottom". No, its not about that kind of bottom. One of the lines though is "Gloria gone mad while shaving her armpits" which I always thought was about losing your shit over something you always thought was mundane and kind of pretty, when you suddenly notice how sharp blades and bleeding and weird chemicals are involved. My friend Teri now feels the same way about baking cakes. "Teri gone mad while piping my cake" would be the Bukowski line maybe.

She made this for my birthday.

Don't Stop Believing (July 11, 2005)

I remembered this story once, about 80's supergroup Journey, they were filming their video for the song "Seperate Ways" on a wharf somewhere near San Francisco when suddenly a British warship pulled in, disembarking hundreds of soldiers, all fresh from fighting in the Falklands.

The Brits were overjoyed at the reception, assuming that the music and the speakers and the cameras were for them. Very confused, Journey and their crew were able to get rid of the British sailors somehow, and finished filming the video.

I remembered that I heard their keyboard player Jonathan Cain explaining this to some VH-1 dudes during some Journey Weekend in the late 80's but couldn't find verification for the story anywhere on the web.

I tried to join several Journey online communities but the sites were all locked, new members would have to be carefully screened, apparently there had been a bad turn in Journeyworld and fans were suspicious of new faces. Turns out that Steve Perry, their longstanding singer known for his epileptic wheezing all over way more syllables than any of his lyrics actually included, had gotten really sick with something and was out of commission. Also he was not just sick, he was mad at Journey and trying to sue them over this thing they did with a new singer, who happened to suck so unremarkably that Steve Perry's sucking seemed even more impressive somehow.

Emissaries of Steve Perry would go to these sites and swamp them with insults, many of which about how New Journey (or Nourney) was robbing a sick and impoverished old man, so then everybody freaked, and I never got an answer about the story with the British warship.

Kurt Coldbrains

I don't really know why other people like Nirvana, some of the flaws in the whole Nirvana experience seem so gaping that a lot of kids can't get around them, but I do like the band, and I do have an interest in the strange death cult that surrounds Kurt Cobain to this day, and the reason why is because the bastard looks like me and tried to kill himself twice during the same year that I tried to kill myself, twice, around roughly the same dates. I really had no idea who he was at the time. A lot of the music really has grown on me though. Sometimes I get superstitious about it, sometimes I think Cobain's ghost is still around, punishing bad parents and destroying from the inside.

I'm really looking forward to Last Days, especially as its not about Cobain himself, but the archetype, the deranged blonde man playing in minor and diminished keys like I used to, just getting so sick of the effort involved in dealing with each day. I felt the same way about A.R.T.'s production of The Misanthrope in 1999, how it was fine as a study of a stereotype, even if all the names had been changed and the band was called Oblivion instead of Nirvana. One big difference between me and the archetype though is the heroin, I just never got into the stuff, just a few weeks ago I received the first intravenous opiates I've ever had in my whole life, in the hospital after surgery, and it wasn't even fun. I don't know what "my" heroin is supposed to be. I would smoke pot until I forgot my own name of course. I ate the weirdest hallucinogens available on three continents and used to live in the Dustbin while it was recovering from all the junkie inhabitants we evicted. A girl who would later be Frances Bean's nanny used to come and hang out and draw crayon pictures with us, maybe that's the true link there somehow.

All I know is that I am in approval of what Gus Van Sant is doing here, and I hope the event of his movie coming out won't be drowned in sarcastic wailing about soul dead junkies doing stupid things to themselves, because I'm sorry, that kind of whining only serves the people who think they know when others should call it quits, what others should do with their own bodies, and nobody really knows those things. I can't tell you to only drive at 20 MPH just because its safer, and you can't tell me when its not time to live on nothing but grape Kool-Aid for six days. No one's forcing it on you, you can shut up at any time if you don't like one of the trillion festival movies not geared toward your family values. I like to think that if I do finally kill myself some day, in some sudden and effective way rather than years of smoking or neglect or what have you, that the subject has been walked over and trampled on like some bad concert festival seating, and therefore folks wouldn't get so sad about it. I think this is a good idea somehow, as weird as it sounds.

Proudest Moment of My Life

Let me give you guys a little lesson on the power of Livejournal.

During the Summer of 2003 when I was the first person on any known website or printed or televised media anywhere to observe that Ann Coulter had an adam's apple, and thus was actually male, I had no idea that the rumor would spread to the lengths that it did. Comics pages, BBS sites, the radio, all over the place people suddenly understood that Ann Coulter was no sell-out to her gender afterall, that she'd been a man, or at least a transsexual this whole time.

Now look at this. Its a piece on the recently held "World Stupidity Awards", hosted by Lewis Black. Yes, the Lewis Black

Dubbed the "Oscars of Idiocy," host Lewis Black of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart led a team of comics and celebrities who handed out awards recognizing achievement in ignorance and stupidity.

"I was dumbfounded," Spence said in a statement. "To see so much stupidity in one room, I almost lost my mind. In fact, I did..."

U.S. President George W. Bush may not have led the dumbest government, but he was honoured with the award for the Stupidest Statement of the Year after telling a news conference: "They never stop thinking of ways of harming America, and neither do we."

Accepting the award for Bush was Darth Vader.

Hotel heiress Paris Hilton won in two categories. She was named Stupidist Woman of the Year and was star of The Simple Life, which was named Stupidest Show of the Year.

Conservative columnist Ann Coulter won the award as Stupidest Man of the Year. She beat out Bush, U.S. Senator John Kerry, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman and Players Association director Bob Goodenow, and former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma.

Stupidest Man of the Year!

Motherfucking Stupidest Man of the Year!

I'm Not Thinking, Dialogue One

Actual interchange with girlfriend in Summer 2004

Dave what are you thinking about?

Oh nothing.

No really, what are you thinking about, you look totally lost in thought.

I'm really not thinking about anything, I'm just drinking water is all.

Dave! I demand to know what you're thinking about!

But why would you...

Dave!

Okay, I was thinking about the water filter in the fridge.

What?

I was noticing that the water in the Brita gets colder when it drips through the filter while still in the fridge, rather than if you have a giant volume of water at the same temperature already inside it, already filtered.

What the fuck are you talking about?

Well I just figured this out because I wanted some cold water. What happens is that the warm water from the sink takes forever to get cold in the fridge, but if you put it in the Brita then it gets cold faster, because of the surface area ratios and all that. You start off with a bunch of water in the top container, and then it drips down, right?

Right...

And then when the drips get to the bottom, they form a tiny pool at first right? Of water with fewer bits of crap in it?

Right...

So that small pool at the bottom gets cold in the fridge faster, because there's less volume to be chilled, the fridge makes the drips get cold faster than it makes a whole quart get cold right?

Um, I think I get it, I dunno...

Its because the heat of the water isn't protected by the "outer layers" of water, its just basic hydrodynamics.

Oh.

And then when new drips fall into that little pool, they get cold faster too, because they're only tiny drips, and they'll lose their heat faster in cooler water than in the water where they just dripped from.

Uh, yeah.

And then the water's cleaner as well, so there's less crap in it to retain heat and that probably helps chill the water faster also.

What does this have to do with anything?

Well nothing really, but I was just figuring this out and wondering how it helped form geologic things like caverns and shit, like Howe Caverns where they took me in 4th grade.

Howe Caverns?

Yeah, I was thinking that water dripping down into small openings in the rock might get cold faster, and then freeze and expand the openings in the rock, and crack all this limestone open and shit.

Weird.

And I was trying to imagine what it must feel like to be that kind of rock after all those thousands of years with the condensation and the dripping and the expanding and all that, it must have been huge, this thing with the cold drips was probably a massively important geological thing.

Oh. So that's what you were thinking about?

Yeah, pretty much.

Well that's weird.

Well I told you it was nothing.

Yeah but I thought that meant you were thinking about other women.

Nope, just water.

You were thinking that your ex is better in bed than I am.

No! Not even true anyway. You're fucking hot baby!

Oh.

So when you keep asking me what I'm thinking later on, would you believe me if I said nothing? Would you possibly believe that sometimes I'm just spacing out thinking about random things like this and it has nothing to do with other women and that my spacing out isn't a threat to you in any way?

Yes. No.

Want to watch a movie?

Smirking Class Hero

I remember the first time as an adult that I spent my last dollar. I was walking from the Dustbin (my old house) to the Woodstock Wine and Deli in 1993 and I was thinking about it, "why am I going to the Woodstock Wine and Deli? Why would I buy an expensive sandwich and an expensive German beer with my last dollar? Don't I know any better?"

I remember being concerned that I had no safety net, that I didn't know for sure where the next dollar would come from. Half my house was working for a place that rarely had any work, we were all broke as hell that summer, I had no money coming from parents or benefactors or financial aid or anything, and I'd never gone live without a net before. I only knew I wanted my turkey sandwich and my giant bottle of Optimator, even though I was scared.

I got heartburn from the meal, like I always did, but I only really noticed it that time, when the meal was so important, I was at the table on the sidewalk when I realised that I'd been eating heartburn food for months, and paying too much for it as well, what a waste.

I don't ever remember being scared of spending my last dollar after that for some reason, and this high tolerance for poverty is probably one of my least attractive traits. I just don't have the alarm bells going off when the money is dwindling down, I just don't notice it. I know when I'm broke, but I don't know when I'm almost broke, unless it literally is my last dollar and I suddenly remember I need it for the bus. When I only have five dollars left though, I'll still buy smokes and a giant coffee with it. I know how to live without money, I know how to ignore shame and grime and the scorn of others, I know how to steal from stores, and I know how to seduce high society into thinking I'm normal despite the obvious grotesque problems with my decisions.

People use me as an excuse sometimes. They think that my existence proves its okay to be lazy and never earning money, I remember the first time someone told me they looked up to me for being an ascetic, this kid named Clinton told me about how he'd emulated my worst traits and developed cardiac problems because of it, but it was okay because cardiac problems are part of nature. I remember a guy in Sacramento who was too lazy even to use his own ATM card when he was starving, he said it was because he was impressed with my transcendentalist style, he said I was like Thoreau living out in the woods with a pocket knife and nothing else. Those people deserve what they got.

I took the last month or two off from the world, and let the dollars dwindle away again. I struggled with a worthless relationship, and related to a worthy struggle, I finished up some personal dramas that were many years in the making. I became sensitized to crooks trying to run off with my last dollar, because I was noticing that last dollar so hard. I developed complex plans for revenge that will never pan out because I'm just too lazy to go about it right.

Several times over the years I spent my last dollar in a bar, preparing for the end by purchasing the required depression so cheaply. Yesterday the bartender called me up and said he wants me to come stay at his new house until September, he said he could use someone like me around the place. My last dollar has come back to me. I'm really impressed.

Not Dead Yet - June 4, 2005

So I was trying to be careful of built up expectations anyway, I hadn't seen her in five years and overthinking the whole thing was becoming an obvious problem. I stopped fucking off at the house finally and smoked a final smoke before leaving and not repeating the cycle of more cleaning, more coffee, more smokes, just grabbing the smokes and going finally, just going, now, to the bus, now, no more grooming, just go, now.

So I got to the school but still I stalled a while, I walked to the store for matches first even though I know she doesn't approve of my smoking, and I rolled another smoke on the way down, and I took the road down instead of the path even though I'm used to the path, and I sat on a bench on the outskirts of school to stall awhile longer, to roll another smoke and adjust the shit in my backpack, before finally walking directly toward the giant white tent on the front lawn where she would surely be eating.

I came within view of the crowd and the wave of recognition was instant and overwhelming, voices saying my name from all over the tent came from people who knew me really well and from people I'd barely met, at least one person remaining silent and pretending he didn't know me. Which was good, because I hate that guy. Fuck that guy I say, that's what I say, fuck.

I looked and looked around the stacks of faces for the one I came to visit but she wasn't there, a few faces became upset that I was ignoring them and staring over their shoulders for someone else, some of them seemed to be fighting for my attention, I forgot that I'd ever been such a big deal, the obscurity of the last several months had left me a little weakened maybe.

"Eat!" they said, "Eat!" so I did finally, returning to the table with the New York lawyer and the two software dudes to hear them talk of business things while I scanned and scanned for my friend. "Drink!" they said, "Drink!" so I did and came back to the table with a bottle of blonde ale from the little bar thing there. The lady behind the bar seemed to notice that I wasn't wearing a name tag and had therefore not paid, but she said she'd give me a beer because I'd asked nicely enough. I wondered if someone had warned them about me beforehand, that if I wasn't given food and beer I would try to steal it somehow anyway. So it was better just to feed me the cheap booze and asparagus, or maybe they were just being nice, I have no idea.

So the boozing began, they even put me in the giant class picture again this year, and I realised just what I had done in a complete year, and what had happened at this very spot the first moments after I got back to town last June, and I looked out onto the front lawn and saw two women and a man laying on a blanket drinking wine away from the crowd, having an anti-Reunion like we'd had last year. I stared at them intently for a while as the memories invaded my giant good time, and I used another cigarette as an excuse to wander away from the people.

The beer came on two fronts, in bottles and glasses, from buildings and porches, and I grabbed up an awful lot of it. I talked with the bartender lady who had given me the free beer, she asked me where I'd worked and I mentioned Voodoo Doughnuts, and she said "did you know a cleaner there named Laurel Kurtz?". I kinda freaked a little. I said "yeah, I just actually broke up with her recently, she was doing stuff at Voodoo just the other night actually" and suddenly the mood changed and Ulrich and Rob and these other guys realised we'd touched on a difficult subject, so I bailed on the bartender after talking with her a little more. She'd gone to high school with Laurel and had run into the both of us at the CrowBar that one time, suddenly I recognized her from that night.

I thought fuck, the ghost of Laurel is all over this place! Start getting more wasted and right now! You can outrun this thing man!

And I found out all these amazing things, it turns out there really is an MG buried under the library and I met the guy who buried it there, and I smoked with very very old men, and then when they locked up the SU and everyone went home, I crawled through a window and hung out with the stragglers still hidden in the offices, drinking more wine and having giant conversations with Nick Church and the SU Manager and Chilton and others.

Lookalikes abounded, I pretended various people were various other people, and other folks turned out to be the real thing, but none of them were the lady I'd been waiting for. Eventually I crashed on a giant chair in the bookloft, sleeping in the SU for fuck's sake, and sleeping soundly.

This morning I woke up hung over and destroyed, half my face flattened into the fabric shape of the chair, and I stumbled towards commons to see about more food.

Creaky and smelling horribly of thick smoke and beer, tired with raspy voice and headache and serious dizziness, blinded and hateful of all light sources, I'm by the staircase near the lounge door when I hear a voice say dave.

A girl is staring at me but she looks unfamiliar, I try to trace the doe eyes and the light brown hair, I cannot place it, the glasses I would remember, I love women with glasses, I just do, and I don't remember this, wait.

"Its the glasses" I said, "you threw me off with the glasses. Is it really you?"

I still hadn't said her name so she showed me her name tag, even though I knew who she was.

"I know who you are Molly. I've been looking all over for you!"

There is so much more.

Our Man in the Fucking Hague (Class Reunions)

Ulrich has a baby, Ian and Carol have a baby, Zanzot has a baby and another one a few weeks off, Rob Mack has a baby, Jess and Ben's babies continue to be, all these people have babies. Defrancia is working for the fucking Hague. He's working in the office they set up to deal with the Iranian hostage crisis in the 70's, the money for which has been used for every which thing since then. He says he doesn't know what'll happen to his job if we go war with Iran.

He asked me, what happened to you in five years, how did you get so much better, you look all good and healthy now, what happened? I had to think about it because I don't know exactly what happened, in my mind I quickly listed all the people who've fed me in five years and thought well, they're what happened, but really I dunno. I think he misunderstood five years ago maybe? Or obviously not. I didn't know what to say. I write it down here all the time but I didn't know what to tell him. I said that I'd had a toxic event and was pretty sick for a few years, which was true, and he asked if it was drugs, and I was tempted to say yes but told him it was something else. Trying to waste yourself over a stupid girl didn't seem like a good enough idea somehow so I didn't mention it. He told me I should get a radio show and I agreed, because all the places where I've stolen food would probably recognize me on a television show, radio was more ideal.

We went to Montage and Dona ordered spicy mac but couldn't eat it, so she traded with me, reaching over and grabbing half my boring mac and replacing it with her spicy, it was like we'd been in the same family for years and it was just old hat to reach around and eat from the other's plates. It was entirely benign in every way but the mind reeled somehow, Dona is eating food from my plate like LBJ would eat his girlfriend's bacon, which was about the most romantic thought I've ever had. LBJ actually did do that, but no one ever reported on this woman who would show up with him at dinners and feed him her leftovers. My history teacher emphasized the bacon on this one for some reason, LBJ loved the bacon.

Everyone at the table was international but me and Dona were stranded here, we were Portlanders, we couldn't go party with Fed and Colin in London or the Netherlands or wherever. Dona wants out of here, I'd forgotten why I'd decided to stay, but then I remembered the whole Fortress Portland thing, the ultimate blue city in the ultimate blue state. Or almost. It made Dona feel better to remember this.

Earlier I was caught in a weird jam when Scott Benowitz lied about the jumping from the balcony thing. A few days before, I'd told the same story and he smiled and said yes that's what happened, but in front of Molly he lied and said that it was his roommate who jumped from the balcony that time. I hate that. Molly ran away to a bachelorette party last night, someone's getting married she said, she said to Scott that he had to be female or gay if he wanted to come along, but really it seems like an excellent cover story. I waited for her to come back, she said it would only be a couple of hours, but went away with Dona and Our Man In The Fucking Hague when it got too late. We totally interrupted Pete Forsythe making out with the British girl, heh, sorry, do you mind if we come in here and drink this beer and play these guitars? Sorry, did we make your dog bark? Oh, I'm sorry, are we interrupting?

The MacCulloughs are staying at Ulrich's, and Ulrich just lives down the road from my home. I was going to walk down and see if they'd drive me back to school maybe. He's a doctor now at OHSU, but he told everyone at Reunions that he works in Waste Management. I think he opened a few minds trying to explain why he was using his medical degree to help with all the sewage.

Meet Lonely Single Cultists In Your Area!!!

So it was like a Sunday of some kind and I'd been at Laurel's and away from home for maybe three days at that point.  This is almost always bad because I miss phone calls and my housemate steals my laundry and stuff, but its always so damn cozy anyway even if I get there with only the clothes I was wearing and my beard has grown in and my toothbrush is far away and now its next week already and I'm still writing 1977 on all my checks and I'm still at Laurel's house.  There are worse time traps to be caught in than the one with all the coffee and sex, surely.

Laurel wanted to get her schoolwork done, the Social Sculpture class had assigned everybody the task of getting their neighbors to make music: to actually go to their own neighborhoods, knock on the doors around their street, and get the neighbors to either sing or play an instrument into a microphone.

I had no idea how to go about such a thing and at that point was just exhausted.  In theory I was doing all these incredible things at home and it would be a bad idea to get distracted with a new project or four more hours of a television show or whatever new drama can sometimes happen there.

So I was trying to get out the door really, but Laurel looked so pained trying to figure out how to get at least three neighbors to sing that I couldn't let her do it alone.  We grabbed the iBook and went out the door.  I'd remembered that I'd just seen the hippie neighbors across the street pull into their driveway while I was out smoking, and they were smoking too, and we smiled back and forth "hey smoker!" as they walked inside, so I brought us over there first to get them to sing.

Knock knock, hello?  This shaggy old gravelly voiced hippie dude came at us all squinty-eyed, I'd never seen him close up, he's 30 but he's wrinkled like he's been suspended in saltwater for forty years, and he has this tom sawyer straw hat thing and a few teeth gone and when we tell him what we're after he calls his girlfriend over to help confirm to him that we, the guys across the street who they've never met, want them to sing any amount of any song at all into the little white flappy plastic thing with the monitor on it.

The girlfriend confirms this but seems a little shaky on the concept as well.  Just to make sure she knows what we're talking about, she sings a little song and says "you know, you mean, like that?"

So we have the song now, "Twinkle twinkle little bat", yes, that's a great song! Can you sing that after we press the record button and then we'll have one finished?

"Twinkle twinkle little bat, how I wonder where you're at, up above the stars so high, like a diamond in the sky, twinkle twinkle little bat... Eeeck! It's a cat!"

So we're 1 for 1, we only need three neighbors singing so this is a good start.

We knocked on the next few houses but no one came, we found a few that had a no soliciting sign going on also.  We approached a few old ladies walking across the hospital parking lot but they escaped us.  This was looking hard to pull off in a neighborhod with only a few hippie freaks to bother.  Laurel had the idea to walk around the corner to a house on the street behind hers, to visit the neighbors through her backyard where you could always hear guitar playing.  We got there and the doorbell made a golden retriever go absolutely apeshit inside and spin in furious circles barking, sometimes pausing by the window to calmly look out at us before going back to apeshit.  A little kid answered the door and went to ask his Dad what it means when strangers show up wanting to hear music.  The Dad came over, listened to our story, and seemed a little grumpy about the idea, but had his guitar by the door anyway and had made the mistake of letting his kid hear us talk with our nice-good-citizen voices.  He couldn't let anybody down in front of him now.  "We're just poor college students, we need you to play guitar or we'll die! We'll die from silence!"

"Alright," he said, "I'll try to think of something short" and then played the longest piece we were to record that day, a three minute blues thing where you could tell he felt like a rock star all alone inside his head and this was his big chance to be famous.  You could see him squinting one eye and biting his lip in mock superstar style, it was like Mr. Rogers playing Winterland, even folks that play Christian rock probably would have laughed at Grampa doing the rock out with his cock out.  Yes, I am mean.

Guitar guy done, we went back to Laurel's street and looked for more people.  We were too slow to chase down some more old ladies in the parking lot, fuck those people anyway, scared of strangers coming at them with a laptop in a parking lot, fuck them.  We walked down the street some more and passed a tree with super tweaky squirrel noises coming out of it and stood there recording it for awhile, holding the computer up in the air just waiting for a bird to come by and shit on it. after a few minutes there, shitless and all squeaked out, we started knocking on doors some more.

The trick was evidence of activity, was there anybody around who was awake and stirring at noon?  Which houses look empty and which houses "feel" unwelcome?  "Friendly" house #1 had this balding longhair answer the door but he wasn't into singing at all.  His yard looked like he might be interested, there were overgrown plants and debris all over the place and frat humor bumper stickers on his car, it looked at first like he would be game for anything but smiling blonde art students at his door was too much. Over by Stark Street we spied a group of people unloading a station wagon and almost approached them, but Laurel had already made a catch.

This dark-haired lady about our age (but far more serious sounding than us) was doing yardwork at a house right on Stark and Laurel's street. Laurel asked her if she wanted to help with a project for her art class but the lady begged off and gave us her husband to play with instead, he was also an art student at PSU and would surely love to help.

Laurel told him which professor for which class this was intended, they chatted about the eccentricity of some of these concept art projects and then when he was about to sing he realised that he couldn't think of a song.  I remembered in High School how Mr. Ellington would make kids sing Happy Birthday at the musical auditions, I remembered that the auditions for Pippin included five people singing Happy Birthday and this one kid (Kris the Human Pube) singing Secret Agent Man, but for some reason I suggested the Brady Bunch theme because everybody already knew it, it's about one of the most benign songs ever written, and because it was the first thing that came to me when it was my turn to speak.  I only mentioned it as an example, but he liked the idea.

"Here's the story, of a man named Brady, who was bringing up three boys of his own
they were four men living all together, but they were all alone
Til the one day when Alice met Mike!
and they knew it was much more than a hunch (heh)
Carol said 'You're our maid and now we have to fire you'
And that's how they became the Brady Bunch,
the Brady Bunch,
That's the way that they became the Brady Bunch!"

And I hummed the little trumpet part at the end and said into the mic "music by DeVol" who was the one-word-name-guy we have to blame for the original Brady music.  When I was a kid, I think "DeVol" was the first one-named musician I'd ever heard of. Dawns on me now though that DeVol backwards spells "loVeD.  So DeVol is the opposite of loVeD.  Hell I knew that.  I know too much about the music from our winter of discotheque, that's what I'm deciding right now.

But with that guy we had three recordings, even though Laurel wanted a few more just to be safe.  Heading away from the Brady Munch couple we saw this big shaggy bearded hippie dude walking up the sidewalk and I knew, just knew, that he would be a good one so I chased him down.  I forget what I told him, something about having a disease that only singing could cure, and then when Laurel caught up and he saw what was happening he really really wanted to sing.

He already knew the perfect song, and he stuck his head down near the microphone and went at it: "We are opening up in sweet surrender/ to the luminous love light of the One / We are opening up in sweet surrender to the luminous love light of the One / we are ooooooooopening / we are oooooooopening / We are opening up in sweet surrender to the luminous love light of the One" after which I whispered "awesome" just because this guy was such a weird find, not because the song itself was that awesome, but he thought I'd praised him somehow, and that's how it sounds on the recording, as if we were worshipping his little Unification Church jingle.  Really though its been hard to keep from laughing everytime I think about it, weeks later we still do imitations of his horrible song.  "We are opening up my tight suspenders to voluminous bum fights on some nuns."

Afterward he hung out for awhile, he hadn't ever been able to talk to Laurel before living so far away across the street there, and now was his big chance.  Out of the blue he offered to sell us ounces of weed but we couldn't afford anything like that, and then he offered to sell us grams of hash instead and we kinda jumped at the chance.  Later on Laurel told her class that one of the neighbor singers sold us some dynamite hash and they all approved heartily.  I think this means she won the class or something.  What a great art department on that school, you know?  He not only sold us hash, but he fronted a gram or two to start with, "come back and pay me later" he said, which was just great.  He was really excited to be talking with Laurel actually, when she thanked him for singing he said "I'd do anything for you, I adore you" and made it sound harmless enough.  Dude had the tunnel vision glasses on though, and suddenly started explaining his entire, entire life to Laurel, emphasizing the part where he'd recently become single in a way so traumatizing that he was leaving town in a week, "so this might be my last chance to scam on you relentlessly" he might have said, "before some no-strings drug dealer sex on my way out of town."

This is what "Social Sculpture" means I guess, creating a new "object" out of immaterial things like belief and perception, resulting in bearded cultists trying to seduce your girlfriend with drugs and the "luminous love light of the One". I think he was upset that Laurel brought me along when she went to pay him later on.  He said he had a lot more hash for sale though, so I kept dude in mind for later.  I only lost about two weeks out of April in a delusional THC-induced fog in the end, which is to say that the hash he gave us was some terrifying stuff.  I hadn't been so retarded in a long time actually.

Somehow we got out of there.  Laurel wanted one more recording because this was becoming so interesting, and the houses that luminous love light dude suggested we visit were either empty or had signs up telling us the residents were shut-ins who would turn to dust if exposed to salesmen or sunlight or happiness or life itself.  Laurel had to live on the same block as these people, so we left them alone.  At the end of the street though, right on Belmont there was a house where you could see a guy working behind a fence in the back, and I told Laurel that I think Weezer lives there. "Really!?!! Weezer lives here! How did you know that!!?? That's incredible!!!", but Weezer did not in fact live there, only this guy with Weezer glasses who made us think it was the luckiest day of our lives that we'd asked him to sing.

Weezer Glasses Dude sang the Star Spangled Banner in this excessively operatic kind of way, going off-key half way through and making him stop in his tracks (recording pun there) before the rockets' red glare could give proof of anything besides that he couldn't sing high notes.

A few doors down, there was one more guy, Laurel's next door neighbor who refused to sing for us because he and Laurel's Dad have been suing each other for years, resulting in newspaper stories and plenty of lawyerly speculation about how to get away with using a pellet gun on your neighbor.  It was some stupid zoning thing actually, dueling homeowners feuding over bland suburban bullshit, but whatever the case he went inside and closed his door when he found out we knew Laurel's Dad.  We can only hope that the power of Social Sculpture will someday bring these two together, to sue each other over something more meaningful like lemon chicken recipes, or how to muffle the screams of the abducted Mormons locked in every basement on 61st. "Look, your Savior is called Moroni and he saved you from crickets. Mine is called Anynamethatdoesn'tspell'i,moron', and I've saved you from crackers, do you understand?  You just shut the fuck up and make some more wallets you trenchcoat fuck!"

So back to Laurel's house we went, to get high and watch some quality vampire television.   Hell yeah! we were done! And we had hash!

I forget what happened after that, what is it now, May or something?

What To Do When You're Sperm

So Charles was getting drunk at a beer garden years ago, and was trying to tell me his problem with the direction "up", how it was a meaningless distinction between "down" and itself, because really, "up" was a constantly moving condition, relative to the center of the Earth, and to casually say "up" in conversation, as in "move the picture up" forced his mind to start from scratch and consider the geometry of an arrow pointing from the center of the world out into the neighborhood around Earth's rotating and revolving, and then track where that state of spinning starts spinning on itself because the sun is moving along differently than the Earth, and then of course everything else in the universe is moving as well, so that there is no real order to where the direction "up" will ever appear at any two moments in all the billions of years of existence, and then visualizing himself along that moving line, before he could even consider the picture he was supposed to be moving. So he had a problem dealing sometimes.

I was having that same problem with sex for a long time, not able to imagine human identities in the swirl towards reproduction, imagining the component metals recombining into different chemicals which all came from the original accretion of dust that itself originally came from some dead star mass, and so lovers are parts of a dead sun, doing what the sun does, fusing to create heat until the fuel runs out.  So who cares about boyfriend girlfriend drama anyway, even if I could pay any attention to it in the first place?  Its a campfire, it goes out, that's it.  This was only a phase mind you, but it stuck with me for a while.

I mean I lose "my" grasp on human identity all the time anyway, imagining the human species as the sum of its parts instead of individuals or as nations with histories and struggles.  Humans build things only so high, fly things only so fast, self-realised chemicals with the ability to spontaneously cause uncontrolled fission, chemicals fighting with other chemicals to keep from spilling the chemicals.  Earth's acne with nuclear first-strike capability.  Italo Calvino used to write about the creatures beneath the Earth's surface, how they have the majority of the Earth as their home, how we're just an infestation on the outside, like moss growing.  But I'm getting off the point I guess.

Hometown loyalty, patriotism, alliegiance to something from which I originated gets redirected, so now I'm from the total Earth, made of Earth rocks, but that's not right either because the Earth is made from something else, and besides that we're all solar wind's effect on the Earth anyway, solar radiation, magnetar food, metals made from inside a star, and beyond that, well, it goes on almost forever.  There's no beginning to anything except the beginning to everything, so no I don't care what you feel like wearing out to the show, IT DOES NOT MATTER TO ME.   

For instance: NASA has no money to see about the other space rocks like us, but the cost of a robot mission to Mars is spent in Iraq, uselessly, in some tiny fraction of an afternoon.  So human identity is all stuck inside these petty problems that have nothing to do with the reality around us at all.  I do not care about your petty personal problems.  You're getting in the way of the space rocks I crave.  Cooperate or perish.  I'm trying to get you ready for asteroid collisions and mass extinction, I don't care if only 99% slavish devotion to your emotional needs is one percent too short, you have bigger problems that I'd love to tell you about instead.

And this was my solution to what might be called "Bukowski's Paradox", the problem derived from knowing that you came from your Dad's sperm, but you hate your Dad, because your Dad is evil, but you apparently "came from him".  And further, how do you defeat your Dad when your own success means that your Dad's line is prospering? Its a problem.

But you didn't come from your Dad's sperm, see, and you're not continuing your Dad's line if you reproduce, nor your grandparents' even if that has always helped you think about it before, you should probably stop with the rocks when you start thinking about my space analogy too hard, you came from rocks, and you'll only make more rocks, a drip of cooling lava doesn't care which molten glob it dripped from, you're pummice now, and that is that, you are alone in the universe, except that everything else is exactly the same, alone.  Your incompetent asshole father has no idea how you were made, and is not responsible for your existence, before you even realised you existed you were already fully developed hydrocarbon mass for fuck's sake, so why don't you act your age already!

This one's for you Patty Davis-Hearst-Hitler-Cakes!

September 12, 2004, the day after three years after

So the recurring problem has been that I'll get too stoned before a big day full of things, it happened on Friday so I didn't go out and see the shows but instead woke up at some post-dinner hour and worked on my html resume. Excitement! Saturday was huge though, so I was about to be upset that it happened again, the missing of events because of exhaustion I mean.

I'd gotten out the door to my shift at Voodoo pretty early, Laurel appeared like a miracle and drove me down there and even helped a bit so that I could try and meet Jemiah at 1, to help her move to a new place. But then we got there late anyway, at 1:20-1:30 we drove around the appointed block a bunch of times to look for her, but it was no good.

Making it back to Alder House, the unconciousness came, I fell asleep on the pile of blankets again and Laurel went back to the House of the Recurrently Wounded Dad. When I'd woken up, the Chunkathalon had already been underway for a few hours, fuck.

Again, Laurel came to the rescue, driving me over there to watch the spectacle, we couldn't find the right intersection at first because they'd changed addresses this year from the Lucky House to the alley by Reno's house. Here's the thing though. The Lucky House is on Bush St, and Reno's house is on Clinton St. I was always wondering, as an occasional practitioner of voodoo and other sympathetic resonances, when they were going to notice this and stop doing their crazy shit on a street named "Bush". We drove down Clinton and peered up the side streets and saw nothing for awhile, before suddenly being stopped by the gigantic crowd of punkers and freaks at 13th, here they were, wow.

We got out of the car and approached, L never having seen this crowd before and being a little nerveous at all these strangers who all seemed to know each other. There was a stranded schoolbus with deck chairs on top of it, destroyed grocery carts and empty cans and bottles everywhere. Maybe half of all the visible skin was tattooed, and wrecked bikes littered the lawns for blocks in every direction. I walked up around a mob of folks to stand on a streetcorner and search for the beer and then looked behind me to recognize Flink maybe two feet away, which was great, this day is going to absolutely suck, the Viking himself is here, and next to him was P. Manson, which made it just that much more special. When would I ever be free of these trespassing cavemen fools? I saw B. Salzburg a ways off and immediately walked over to hang with him. I introduced L. to B. and B. to L., asked if he'd seen terebi anywhere but there had been no sign. I hoped she was okay wherever she was, moving your whole life to a new place can be a little soul-punching sometimes.

We'd missed the Chunk racing, but the Tall Bike Impaling With Huge Sticks was just starting. The jousting was getting off to a slow start, the lances weren't connecting and the two riders were just flying past each other over and over again, the crowd screamed for blood but no blood was available, and they just kept trying and trying. The bikes would race at each other and then after the opponents would miss their target, the bikes would go careening off into the crowd, making everybody have to dive out of the way every two minutes. "Dive out of the way" might not be as accurate as "jump for their lives", but whatever you call it, they had to keep on doing it until something more violent happened, its just the way the game works.

L had to go suddenly, she'd spotted the creature who'd bothered the hell out of her the last time she was at the Egyptian Room, she didn't want to stay in his/her vicinity and left as if teleporting, she was almost twenty feet away before I noticed she was leaving. I tried to explain to her that Flink and Manson were here but I'm staying, does this help with the perspective thing on having to deal with assholes in close quarters? No no, this was too serious, and she left, so I adapted, though I didn't want to. I was scared of dealing with this scene alone, but it turned out more than okay in the end.

Hung out with Salzburg some more, as much for the actual physical cover from assault as for the social benefit, met some of the new Portland peeps that occupy Ben's world these days, saw some of the jousters actually connect and knock the shit out of each other, but was distracted by the naked kickboxing behind me. The naked kickboxers included a guy with long arms and a girl with long legs, the girl was keeping the guy at leg's length so he couldn't reach her with his long gangly arms. It was a stalemate for most of their sparring, punctuated by the girl suddenly rushing in and slapping the guy across the face really hard, really loud savage bitchslaps, you could see the red on his cheek from being hit so hard, but they were laughing, it was all good. I was just about to stop watching them so I could see the tall bike jousting when suddenly a stray tall bike busted through the crowd and crashed into them, naked people and plastic armor and bike parts everywhere, it was glorious. Really, who needs Burning Man when you have this at home.

I saw Gabe creeping up along a sidewalk when I went scouting for beer, he gave me a can of the shittiest Hamm's that Hamm's ever made, and made me feel at home being back at the scene in Portland. I think he could tell I was a little nerveous being around the Viking derivations, he remembered when the Lutz fell too, they came after him after they came after me, doing it one by one so that they could fight a single person at a time rather than the giant crowd they were trying to spiritually evict from its alcoholic home. But they couldn't make any of us really go away. There was never any hope of that to start with, the Vikings never really had a chance, I think they realise that now.

I drank my beer with Ben and saw the jousters getting more serious, the lances had found human chestplates a couple of times in a row and the crowd was insane with joy when the bodies hit the pavement, things were picking up and it was fun. I told Ben what I'd been up to, told him about the Billionaires and how big they'd gotten and he said "yeah, I've heard of those guys, they're in all these papers, they're famous, like the Zoobombers". I thought well, yeah, no, they're not really like the Zoobombers at all, but he gets the picture and that's all that matters. A bottle rocket then went off and flew into my crotch, making this little thump sensation, and it bounced off and exploded on the ground in front of me about a millesecond later, a really close call for someone whose penis has been so busy lately.

Ben was standing halfway up a traffic barricade so he could see over the crowd, but the barricade was fifty feet away from the actual bikes and it was questionable whether he could really see any better from the thing, it being so far away. So I dove into the crowd, the beer had made me strong enough to deal with whatever was out there. Again, I found Gabe, sitting on a sidewalk drinking a bottle of Rossi from a paper bag. He told me that he'd run into one of his own bad guys, someone who'd assaulted a girl he knew, that it was difficult being on the same block as that guy and that last year when the same one showed up he got his friend Heath to walk up and slap him. Heath had worked at Voodoo also, so I was kinda like his Heath this year, maybe I would be asked to slap the bad bad man. Instead I was asked to drink the wine, then invited back to Reno's porch to drink some beer as well, and do whatever.

Then the fireworks started. They'd loaded down about four bikes with around eighty whole newspapers each, stuffed them with fireworks and doused them in gasoline. They all got their bombs lit and rode into the jousting area weaving into and around each other, the flames causing rockets and firecrackers to light automatically. It was utter devastation. There were blue flames and red sparks coming out of Karl's bike, Barnaby's bike caught fire and the tires were burning like the guy in Ghost Rider, everyone else screamed for more even though they were being pelted with burning cardboard, everywhere the crowd was leaping away from the explosions, a hundred people actually scared for their lives. I hid behind the guy with the doctor's shirt when I got scared of my face burning off, but the show didn't end, all four bikes were eventually consumed in flames and crashing into one another, the riders couldn't steer the things after the tire rubber melted, but they kept on riding anyway, with goggles and jumpsuits of course, and eventually far less hair. Birds freaked out and screamed for miles in every direction, smoke obscured the view of the carnage, the concussions from the explosives shook everybody in the stomach and the feeling of chaos took over.

This was amazing.

When the explosions stopped, a band that sounded like The Donnas started to play by the PA scaffolding, folks danced and slammed remaining beers, and I joined Gabe on Reno's porch. As if by magic or some other benevolent treachery, L came back to join me, completely making my day by showing up out of nowhere and hugging my big happy drunken ass.

Also there was Monkey George, the one who went to rehab with Julie Andrews and Dave Navarro that one summer. I was not exactly happy to see him but I knew I could handle him in case he went weird again. He was typically George in that he was near incomprehensible with booze, he kept forgetting where he was and what he was doing. He kept mistakenly putting pot in my hands instead of the rolling paper at his fingertips, because he was on the distant Planet 9, very very far away, but it was all okay, because we were getting stoned, and L was really looking forward to it.  So who cares if George is crazy is the point.

Crack walked by, I hadn't seen him since the Chunkathalon in New York a few months ago, I was curious if I'd see any of the New York crew here, and here he was, maybe the strongest of all Chunk's riders. I told him that Black Label had gotten really huge in NYC and everywhere was tall bike jousting, even at the Rubulad parties, even on work days, even on subways. He was impressed hearing this, that the league was now getting so well known, but countered my assertion that tall bike jousting started in Portland. He said that it started in Seattle, Minneapolis and Portland at about the same time, and probably other places too. I reminded him of that Bill Murray movie about the bank robbery but he was perplexed. What was Dave talking about? It was a scene in that bank robbery movie with Bill Murray and Geena Davis and Randy Quaid and Jason Robards as the cop. They were making their getaway from the bank to the airport and got lost in the barrio somewhere. Suddenly, without explanation, they heard spaghetti western trumpet music coming from one direction and they looked up to see two guys jousting on bicycles. It was the most randomly hilarious thing that could have happened at that point in their story. It was the first time I'd seen bike jousting anywhere, if you don't count that George Romero Rennaissance Fayre movie with the motorcycle jousting, because those were motorcycles, a completely different thing.

Denk, the old sax player for Hazel and one of my very few heroes, walked by and agreed to my pleas for more chess someday, she said come by any time, I about jumped and sang and kicked a tree when she said this. Denk wants to play chess sometime. Incredible. Lucy walked by and said hi, calling me by first and last name as if one big word. I enjoyed showing L that a lot of folks seem to know me, that I wasn't just a hermit in my little internet dungeon all the time, that I once mingled with humans as if I were one of them.

Barnaby and Gabe told dirty jokes for awhile, they really liked my one about the buttfucking Superman, I thought everyone had heard that already. In the end there was no trouble at all, no Vikings marauding, no Gavin trying to gouge my eyes out again, no B. Stoner mad that I still owe him forty bucks, no Marthas, no Eelymosynary, no Karen remnants at all, naught but the good shit for a mile in every direction. Paradise.

It was getting close to ten, so L. drove me to the Crystal Ballroom to go and see my show. Built To Spill was playing of course, and I'd been excited for weeks to see them.

The concert had already started by the time I got there, but I couldn't have missed too many songs because it was only a few after ten when I showed, L had called earlier to confirm that the show started at ten and it had, so hey. Another reason to appreciate the L, she's like the assistant I never deserved but needed anyway. It pleased me that this summer I'd learned how to stop being an asshole to the folks closest to me, like her, like others. It added to the joy to be adding to the joy. It was like plugging the exhaust pipe of joy back into the gas tank of joy somehow, making some cool new Tesla coil of joy out of being in the car with her.

Once inside, for a while there I was lost. I thought maybe I'd run into the Akerman folks like the last time I went to a BTS show, but it was too crowded to find anybody at all actually. I went up to the balcony to smoke but was stopped by earphones and flashlight guy, no smoking in the balcony anymore, which means no smoking anywhere in the Crystal Ballroom anymore, the song playing at the time got louder when I stubbed out my smoke, in appreciation I thought, fuck, now they're a non-smoking band, we're all too old now aren't we, fuck. I didn't know a lot of the tunes, but they seemed suited to a top 40 audience, I wondered how far removed I had become from the BTS I remembered. Being stoned and drunk I wondered if they were waiting for people like me to come back and save them from the teenagers, if they'd been enslaved to some music industry standard for expressiveness that precluded their old sense of depth. I wondered why I had made such a big deal about this band if I didn't even know them afterall.

Getting tired of of seeing from the huge distance I walked closer to see their faces as they played. They played another bunch of new songs at that point, but these were different. The guitar epics were peeking through, the arrangements less sugary and the other guitarists besides Doug getting extremely worked up. The crowd suddenly woke up and started jumping. The still standing scenesters suddenly swooned. Zounds! Here they were, okay this was fun. I looked over the velvet rope by the stage for Ralf, but he wasn't around this time, he was concievably playing his own show somewhere maybe, or going to one of the many Chunk afterparties. I wondered how that would work out. But no Ralf, that's okay. Chiara was back there though. Interesting. I wondered if that guy next to her was the new husband. Interesting. I wonder if she saw me.

That last hour of their concert was amazing. "Else" was beautiful. "Your body breaks, your needs consume you forever", just beautiful. No wonder Doughty copped the line from that song for Smofe Smang. I wasn't even annoyed by "Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss", and for the first time I heard "Carry the Zero" as a positive song about me the solepsistic listener, rather than a sign that I'd fucked something up somewhere, it was years in coming and definitely worked as proof that I'd come back to this world in one piece. "And you've become/what you thought was dumb/ a fraction of the sum" and I knew who the fraction was that day, and it was perfect. I even danced. You don't understand, I don't dance. Ever. But I did last night.

L. said she'd pick me up after the show if I called, so I walked 11 blocks to Voodoo to use the phone. The place was swamped, the front room was filled to capacity with folks wanting doughnuts and up in the cubby hole was a dude with a giant fro playing fake sitar music on a fake Strat. The smoke machine had filled the place with mist and Jay was selling doughnuts like they were the last oxygen atoms on Earth. I hung around for the crowd to die down before I ate my own free doughnuts, I didn't want them to see me breeze past the huge line and just start eating off the rack. I'm still learning about the business I think. There are usually a collection of doughnuts leftover after each shift, and I try to be sparing when I'm snacking on them in the day time, because I know they sell the day-olds when they can, so its better not to eat all the supplies, right? But that shit is chump change apparently, these guys were selling hundreds of doughnuts each hour, the line was filled with the happy and the eager, my little doughnut habit could never make a dent in a monster like the Voodoo. For the fourth or fifth time that day I was actually feeling something akin to pride.

Cherokee Don came in, which was weird because he'd been 86'd for stealing the tip jar months ago. Jay made the announcement: "Hey there, how are you doing tonight Cherokee Don?" Tres heard this and came screaming out from behind the mixing table, "Get out of here Cherokee Don! Go! GO!! GO NOW!!" and the place didn't even get still for a second, Don just turned around and left, all was peaceful though Tres apologised to this one guy for yelling. Turns out the one guy was a magazine photographer coming to snap some pics of the place so Tres was being super kind. Wow, another magazine. I wonder if this one was like Dental Home Journal or something.

Some random short-hair waiting by the counter had ordered a Cock and Balls, one of the more infamous doughnuts available at Voodoo. Basically, its two boston cremes for testicles attached to a cruller which was the shaft, I think its one of the things that attracted Playboy to write the artile about the place in August. He was openly screaming his distaste for Richard Meeker and Mark Zussman, the two publishers of the all-powerful Willamette Week. The screaming was becoming brutal after awhile, more like what shrieking sounds like it should mean. He was asking folks if they thought that either Richard or Mark had the bigger penis, and folks seemed to think Meeker's penis was larger, but Zussman's was more versatile. The reason why he was asking was because he was trying to figure out what to get monogrammed on his Cock and Balls, see, one of the principles of Voodoo Doughnuts is that they'll write the name of your intended victim on the actual doughnut so you can wield your voodoo at them more effectively. This guy wanted a Cock and Balls with the name of one of the Willy Week guys written on it, and after some thought, he eventually settled on Richard Meeker. The sly fact was that I had located Richard Meeker's house keys in my pile of shit at Alder House the week before, I had just been fondling them earlier in the afternoon. They were leftovers from the time before the mutation when I was this upwardly mobile dude in khaki pants all the time, and Richard Meeker had me and Karen stay at his house drinking beer and playing with his dog while he was on vacation. I woke up there on Christmas Day in 1999 actually, it was one of the key hinges of the huge Christmas Day story I've been writing one day a year for the last ten years.

This kid was screaming. "Richard Meeker's penis! Richard Meeker's penis! The suspense was killing him. Tres yelled out jokes from around the corner while finishing the final parts of the Cock and Balls. "The Cock and Balls comes in a big box you know, just like Richard Meeker's penis". Judge Ellen is now a "big box". This was too good. I wondered if I'd been so happy in years.

I called L. for a ride and hung around until the fake sitar guy stopped playing, crammed a few very luscious doughnuts in my face while thinking a few kind thoughts about some folks out there who have some voodoo coming at this point frankly, and then went out to the sidewalk to wait for the Volvo of Destiny.

Outside, Ankeny was closed off by barricades and a semi-clothed marching band. There were fire dancers and electric bass amid the brass and marching drums and the shit was about as decadent and satisfying as the Hungry March Band I'd loved so much in New York City, the best part was that they'd seized the entire street block for themselves and could not be moved by traffic or police horses or a crowd of hundreds. I snuck between people to get a better view, trying not to ruin it for folks behind me, looking for people I recognized, but mostly I was too entranced by the fire dancers. I recognized one of the dancers as a girl that works at the Magic, it was interesting seeing her dance to something more official and choreographed than a striptease to an Elvis Costello song. I thought that this was the Portland I loved and missed so much, hundreds of painted freaks and their happy kids all dancing on the sidewalks, obliterating all doubt that the good guys would win eventually, that there were just too many of us and the fun was just too big. For the first time in a a decade I saw a non-Reed related thing come close to the wild scene they have in Brooklyn, I was so proud of our little downtown that suddenly everything started to click and I looked behind me through the sea of folks just in time to see L's car weavng through the hordes and down the road to make another pass in search of me. I darted out from the party and chased the Volvo down, catching up at a stoplight only one block away, where L was silently hoping that I'd seen her car and was about to appear at the shotgun side door from out of nowhere, which I did.

Pure joy.

We stopped at Plaid for some smokes, which was extremely magnanimous of the L because she's quit smoking again and being around smokers really is a problem at this stage of it. The graveyard girl was there again, I hadn't seen her in weeks and she was playing Modest Mouse very loudly on the little speakers inside. She sold me the smokes and we talked for a minute about what it feels like to be drunk and stumbling at a convenience store on a Saturday night. She said her whole house went to the Built To Spill show and she had to work, please please tell me, she said, please tell me how it was? It was good my friend, you have placed your trust in good musicians, never worry fair graveyard girl, never doubt your instinct to rock. And hey I have to go, my girlfriend is waiting outside.

"But what's you name?" she said.

"I'm Dave. I'll be around, don't worry."

Today, we go to the beach.  I love the beach.

Almost as much as I love the girl going with me.

Happy September 12th folks.