Hair of the Blog

Well, just read it for yourself and see what you're messin' with.

Love this picture of Doughty!

snappy4
Originally uploaded by stupidtool.

Potty-Chair Expert

Seems I don't work the double 'til next weekend. I've always been pretty bad at straightening out schedualed plans. Good thing, too. Yesterday was our busiest day of the year and we were a cook short in the kitchen.

After work, we went out to eat at this really nice restaurant in town called Stephen's. Makes you feel like you're nowhere near Ohio once you walk in the door. Might as well be some hip little joint off the corner of Spadina.

The food was great, and being only a table for two, we got escorted past the huge line and served immediately (that made me feel like I was in Toronto too).

On the walk home I saw some girl just standing on the sidewalk, nervously smoking a cigarette and looking conspicuous. As we passed her, Missy says, "Did You See that guy shitting on the driveway"? Evidently, ole' boy jabs his girl in the ribs and says, "wait here a minute, I have to doo doo," and procedes to shit, standing up, pants around the ankles, legs only slightly bent, while his girl waits on the sidewalk and tries to not look like her boyfriend is shitting 14 feet away. . . in someone's carport.

Missy was kinda disturbed that he wasn't at least squatting more or closer to the house or something. I tried to explain to her that once you cross that line and decide to crap in public there are really no ettiquette rules for "proper" public shitting. It's not like it would make it right if he changed his style. It's not as if he purposely chose the ungraceful method just to be rude and disrespectful.

I've never shat in public before. I've had to. Once, in my childhood, I even shit my pants because I couldn't find a toilet. I probably should have dropped them and did the dooty, but I'd like to recall that even back then I had a little dignity. Don't get me wrong, there's a time and place for everything, and I know people crap while camping and bury it and what-not, but I take great pride in my potty training and will shit my pants to uphold my vision of myself as a potty-chair expert.

The Weekend

It's 8:oo AM my time. I'm drinking Alka-Seltzer in an attempt to lessen the coughy throatiness this town has been passing around for the last three weeks. Everybody's got it.

Today is homecoming here at the University. Being ignorant of University doings, I'm not even really sure what that means despite the fact that I've now spent one third of my life living in a college town. What I do know is that it's raining outside and people are lining up crappily made floats down our street. Being a small town, with small town dreams and aspirations, the floats look high-school quality at best.

Soon, I'll walk through the rainy hub-bub to my regularly schedualed 10:oo shift at work. . . but the fun doesn't stop there. Seeing as it's homecoming, and the busiest business day of the year, I've smartly taken a double shift to allow a co-worker his birthday night off. Yeah, It'll be like a 14 hour day of work for me. I'll bust my ass home at a cool midnight.

Plop Plop Fizz Fizz,
What the hell was I thinking?
-M

$92000

It's at 16000 Church Street.



It's the best piece of real estate we've seen so far in our price range. It's got a working brass bell and a stage inside. It would not take too much work to turn it into a blasphemous studio space with a "studio" style living arrangement and a loft added-on. A wicked coat of paint and you got yourself a home.

I've always wanted to live in a church. . .
and I've always wanted to paint a church ceiling all pretty-like.

Guess I'll just blame it on the paper acid. . .

I wanna make Art, but all that comes out are cartoon devils. It's like they're dancing at me and taunting me.

Big stuff goin' on here. Not sure how much to blog about on account of professional accountabilities and all. The change of the season always seems to wanna drag the rest of life into it's shifting movement. It's dancing at me with the cartoon devils and everything is on the cusp of reinventing itself. It appears that the push I need to get over the hump is less than a congratulatory pat-on-the-back from my own arm that barely has the strength to keep me up, let alone shove and pierce any sort of boundaries. Maybe the wolf-blown-brick-house-leveling breath that I'm looking for is not gonna cut it. Maybe just a pin prick hole in the membrane will suffice as a catalytic trigger to slowly break-down the surface. Let nature do the work. Physics and erosion and patience.

But who's got the time for that?

Paging Dr. Davis. . .

Doctor Davis, Puh-leeeeese?

I remember now.

Yeah, and I'm gonna still remember when I'm 80 years old and no one ever got the bug up their ass to record a different "hospital" audio track. How many fucking times am I gonna be watching a movie or TV show and hear the same goddamn English receptionist's voice that they where using seventeen years ago, when they made Queensryche's Operation: Mindcrime, asking for this Doctor Davis?

Is it really such a pain-in-the-cock to get a realistic hospital background noise without grabbing ass off some twenty year old audio sampler? What, is this tape just laying around- "Oh, let me just throw the hospital sound in there and then it won't sound like it's just a movie. . . .we'll really suspend their disbelief!"

Guess what? After it gets to the point where it's obtrusive to my ability to not think about the "audio track" my sense of disbelief is shot. Way to ruin my movie-going, Geoff! You half-Indian-son-of-a-bitch. I Hate You! I hate your hair!! I'm not waiting for 22, I'm waiting to not remember ever hearing your stupid album again so I can watch TV and not think about former prostitutes turned nuns and riding around in D's shitty blue New Yorker in Libertyville with Seth making prank CB calls disguised as a woman.

I wish I had the ears of a stranger so that every medical scene I ever experience in any format disn't leave me thinking about fat Harry belching out I Don't Believe in Love and then making-off with my live Lizzy Borden video.

And don't even get me started on that won't-call-us-back-cause-he's-too-good-to-be-too-good-for-us-anymore prick, Justin.

Fuck!!

FUCKKKKK!!!!

The only "dangerous underground movement" I'm gonna have is not led by Professor X. It's gonna be the Prog-rock turd I'm gonna shit down my fucking pants the next time I hear that bitch asking for "that Doctor".

It should have been Scott Rockenfeld's arm that got severed.

For a band that was heralded for it's appropriation of electronic sound-generating techniques, ya think they coulda' made their own god damn sounds for fuck's sake.

And fuck Della Brown too.

You know we're busy when. . .

. . . the fridge get's this empty:



Sharpened pin shafts last night. I keep talking about giant sewing pins and everbody seems a bit baffled, so they look like this:



And there's hundreds of them. The balls on top are cast ceramic and the shafts are aluminum. Missy has gotten them into five shows so far. In order, maybe, they will be in:
Columbus
Nevada
Athens
Baltimore
Chicago

Hopefully, her grant-writing skills will allow us to get financed for traveling to a couple shows for set-up and possibly a lecture or two for her (while I just kinda lackey-around and look Bohemian).

Not the five BEST concerts. . .

Just the five Best Concert Stories.

*Driving through a tour of suburban Chicago malls, killing time.

If you've ever been to the suburbs of Chicago then you realize the vastness of it's malling culture. Endless parking lots like moats surrounding three-storied shopping complexes as big as castles. On the way to a particular mall, the radio is on, announcing free concerts tickets to the first-comers. The radio station's loudly-painted trailor is parked in the mall lot we've just entered and we approach to claim our prize:

two free tickets for the Tears for Fears show.

We snatch our booty (which turns out to be the only snatch we'd witness that night) and proceed to downtown Chicago for an all-male-audienced show that turns out to be just fine.


*Walking through Ashville North Carolina for a day trip, I spot a sign on a bar promting the night's show:

GLOVE

I enter the establishment to use the bathroom and the band is on stage, very early, setting-up and sound checking. The half-bald-long-haired bass player is stationed behind his stand-up bass and ripping through a diggy diggy beat. The singer/guitarist/harmonica player is clad in a full denim ensemble and is a dead-ringer for a more aged, more drugged Bobby Brady. I realize that GLOVE is G. Love and the balding up-rightist is one third of the secret ingredients for the Special Sauce. We stick around and the show is a blast. Set two turns into a naked-hippy-titty-dance-fest (Ashville is the Hippiest town I've ever seen). Good toons, good boobs and an ass-shaking night to remember.


*In Toronto, at some Emo-liscious concert bill, I'm only slightly waiting to see Thursday. There's a band on stage that sounds familiar. I look to my comrade and exclaim that, "these dudes are stealing money from Ken Andrews, 'cause I'll be damned if this band doesn't sound exactly like Failure". A second later I realize the lead singer is a dead-ringer for Failure's lead-everything, Ken Andrews. A second after that a realize that this is Year of the Rabbit, Ken Andrew's newest incarnation of rock and roll's unrecognized perfection.

*In Omaha, Nebraska I step over a duo of little black boys wrestling on the floor of a bowling alley-game-room in front of a WWF stand-up video game. I had to leave the back-room-stage area to get to the seperate bar that is two rooms away. I'm with an unlikely crew. Performance artist John Wenderoth who once traveled the country dressed like an Indian performing spirit release ceremonies on inanimate objects, including beached whales and various road side attractions, after which point he'd set up a styrofoam igloo and document the whole process. He later moved to a buddist temple and lived there for a year in silence. He was not silent this evening. The other indivivual was a creepishly introverted kid I knew who would not drink alcohol, refused any drinks bought for him while he downed sodas, and ate bag after bag of vending machine peanuts until the show started. These two where an obvious mismatch. John was discomforted by the others lack of boozing, and the other just plain 'ole didn't like people talking to him. After a momentously ackward waiting period, we cross through the bowling alley, enter the back room and proceed to meet Mr. Bungle for a loud and rowdy performance by an entire band wearing loafers, dockers, Hawian shirts and brown-lensed-porno-shades.

Again, it was in a bowling alley in Nebraska. . .

*I'm with my soon-to-be-ex-fiance at a NIN concert well before the NIN frenzy hit the public. We uncomfortably run into her ex-boyfriend who was dating her and away at college the night we conjugated our relationship. Being a suprahuman enigma of positive energy and forgiveness, he hands us both a handful of mushrooms.

During the first act, the fungus seeps unnoticeably into our systems, only to rear it's bulbous mushroom head during act two's intro song. The shrooms hit hard and I witness for the first time in my life, deep in a hallucinogenic stupor, the Rock and roll glory of Marilyn Manson. They had no albums out at the time, no one had heard of them, no one had seen them, and I wasn't really prepared mentally to behold his unique brand of other-wordly dementia. The drugs had me convinced that the momentum of the crowds' push and pull was some stranger, grabbing me by the wrist and twisting me through the pit of gothy bodies. I'd try to leave the area in front of the band and the mysterious force would escort me back to the front of the stage where I would look up and see unthinkable sights that could not be deciphered as the reality of MM or the hallucinatory cartoon-play of my brain's expanding grasp. Real people didn't look like that. My drawings looked like that, but they weren't real people. My imagination was obviously creeping out into the dark of the theater. Marilyn Manson could not really look like that, could he? Did he really just ask, "Which one of you little boys is gonna come up here and let me put my fist in you?". And for the love of sanity and all that is balanced in this lifetime, why, when I'm on drugs and not so in control of myself, do I have to keep looking up and seeing men in bondage suits, towering over me without eyebrows, sounding a lot like thay're singing about cake and sodomy? A year later, when the first album was finally released, I was both relieved and disappointed to discover that the truth of the situation was less drugs than reality.

I sometimes wonder. . . I mean, you hear that by the time you die you'll have spent something like four months of your life brushing your teeth. . . how many months and weeks I've spent standing on sore feet, watching live music unfold in front of me?

Definately more than I'll have spent brushing my teeth.

America's Playground

If you leave the house on a wednesday, early in the morning when this town is at it's slowest, you can catch them. Having grown up in the city, the first thought is of carriage rides and then of Hasidic Jews, but it's just the Amish in their horse-drawn carts replenishing whatever supplies they don't grow, cobble, blacksmith or create for themselves. Dusty black/grey clothes and dusty blck/grey beards atop a vehicle that would be convincingly from a hundred years ago if it wasn't for the reflective orange and red triangle affixed to the back end.

Their presence here is quite sobering, in this town of youth. A college town is not about an education. Sure, there's a handful of kids that will excell in their classes and make an academic name for themsleves. but the cream that rises to the top always has a bucket-full of worthless, milky water underneith it.

Thursday through Sunday the academics in this town drown the fear of growing up in cheap beer. That's what they're here for. To exorcise their youth. To prepare for adulthood. You can see it on their faces, the desperation, the need. This is the last chance for fun. Do it now and, worst case scenerio, you'll at least have it to regret while you go to work everyday and struggle against the responsibilities of marriage and parenthood. Drink, yell, fuck, be loud, be something, 'cause it's your last chance.

Have you ever seen those TV specials on the Amish teens. When they are 16 they get to experince the Devil's Playground: The Non-Amish World. It's a chance to leave the community, break all the rules and then decide whether they are gonna go back and be Amish for the rest of their lives. It seems absurd at first, when you see these Amish girls and boys in the their grey and black garb taking down beer bongs full of rum and smoking pot and hash and cigarettes, but it's a perspective I can appreciate. The Amish are not isolating their brood from the rest of the world. They are not keeping life's alternatives a secret. Mostly, they are not paying $20,000 a year and kidding themselves into thinking their kids are getting a higher education either.

The first reaction to all those Devil's Playground specials is:

How the fuck do those kids go back to all the restrictions of being Amish after tasting the world?

But, then, in reality all these drunken staggerers and bare-titted-heel-walkers and yelling-homo-phobic-pukers and frat-brothers and frat-squaws and wanna-be-cool-but-can't-get-it-rights and dressed-like-a-whore-but-scared-to-dances will all pack up and move from this town of youth. They'll start families and start careers and buy cars and think about all the fun and freedom they had for those four years of college. They will re-enter their society for good, fresh out of their chrysalis of booze and parties, and they will be the providers.

And I'll still be looking and wondering how the fuck those kids can go back to all the restrictions of their culture after tasting the world.

The Amish aren't fooling themselves. They can face the truth. As much as they remain seperate from the "modern World", there's still that reflective triangle to keep them from getting rear-ended by some house-wife on a cell-phone, whose probably distracted thinking about the good rogering she got in the fraternaty closet so long ago.