(cue the Eddie Vedder earworm)
Yes, it's been a while since I've gotten off my butt to post here...sorry about that, folks. A few of the reasons why I've been a slackass:
1. It took about 2 months for me to finally move back into my bedroom from the futon in the living room after the Great Leaky Bedroom Ceiling Debacle--my landcritters apparently work with the Most Incompetent Plumber in Greater Boston, as it took him the better part of two months to figure out that the reason my ceiling only leaked when someone was in the shower upstairs taking one was because their damn tub/shower needed regrouting and if someone was actually taking a shower, water would splash around and slip through the crappy grout. *sigh* Once the actual leak was fixed, I finally moved back into my room, and the ceiling was actually repaired a couple of weeks after that with surprisingly little fuss and very neatly by the landcritters' contractor cousin. I still haven't gotten completely over losing the better part of two months to fucked-up plumbing, though...
2. I went off to play hardcore fangirl with NIN in five different cities (DC, NYC, Philly, Boston and Montreal), and had a wonderful time--it was truly just what I needed, and got me away from my job (let's not go there...) for a while. Five shows, five soundchecks, one meet & greet (NYC), one show spent on the rail of the pit (Montreal)...it was all a blast, but unfortunately it lead to...
3. The Ninnie Death Flu, aka "the crud I caught in NYC or Philly"--I left my house for the Boston show with a 100.4 fever (luckily, Tylenol knocked that down), and was just getting better when Montreal rolled around, whereupon I promptly came down with my friend Dante's cold and he mine (yeah, sharing a water bottle thoughtfully handed to Dante by Sweeney would do that...). Spent three days home sick from work before feeling well enough to stumble back, but kept on coughing my head off and running a low-grade fever, which my doctor assured me was par for the course with this particular bug. Started spiking a much higher fever (101.8 F) last weekend and felt as if it was taking all my strength just to breathe, so Monday morning it was off to Mass General and my doctor's office to see if anyone in the practice could see me. One office visit and chest X-ray later, it was determined that I didn't have pneumonia, but I did have some kind of bacterial infection (apparently in my lungs and sinuses), and one scrip of Zithromax later, I'm feeling MUCH better. Still dragged out from basically being sick for a month, though...how the hell do Trent & Co.--and any other touring musicians--manage not to get sick, or do they just hide it better? Whatever superduper combo of herbs or whatever they're using, I want it!
4. General slackassedness, brought on by 1, 2 & 3, not to mention my normal tendency to procrastination. I met a new friend today for the first time, and told her that what I really need is someone to crack the whip on me and demand new posts on a regular basis, which is unfortunately all too true--I get all kind of great ideas for things to yak about (many of which have nothing at all to do with music), but then I get sidetracked, or I decide "I can't post about that without pictures, and I don't have a decent setup to post pictures yet", or I think "I can't talk about that until I talk about X, Y & Z", so on and so forth. Anyone feel like playing Good Cop/Bad Cop, or maybe just Strict Teacher, and kicking my ass to get me writing more?
Let's just hope I end up having a better holiday season this year than I did last--trust me, there are definitely better ways to spend New Year's Eve than on a exam table, feet in stirrups, with the doc up to his wrist in you at the stroke of midnight. (And yes, I promise to post about this in much greater detail, if you think you've got the stomachs for it...)
Sunday, December 11, 2005
Friday, September 09, 2005
The last normal weekend ever...
...or, "how to almost get into a fistfight at a folk music show in an Ethiopian restaurant in West Philly." Really.
You'll have to wait a bit for the G.G. Allin blast from the past, because I realized this bit was far more timely--this past Wednesday the 7th was the 4th anniversary of the event I'm about to describe, and in light of what happened just a few days later, I don't think I need to explain the title of this post; also, I'd like to think that certain of the issues involved in this particular episode (namely, freedom of speech and expression) have only grown in relevance over the past four years. *bites tongue to avoid going into hugeass political rant* Also, I feel duty-bound to admit that at least 75% of this is taken directly from my Monday-morning quarterback post to the Adam Brodsky mailing list at the time this all went down, so it's not completely new writing...but hopefully you'll get a kick out of it anyway.
Anyway...back in the summer of 2001, my good buddy (and now former housemate) Dante decided that I really needed to check out one Adam Brodsky, a moderately well-known (in folkie circles) anti-folkie from Philly. (Anti-folk, for whatever it's worth, is basically folk music played with a punk rock attitude, or at least tends to be far more profane and sexually explicit than your typical wispy folk; supposedly it got started in the East Village, and I'm not sure if the term is even used much anymore, but it was current then.) Trying to sum up Adam in just a couple of phrases is damn near impossible, but how does "the bastard offspring of Bob Dylan and Lenny Bruce" sound? (Actually, I should probably namecheck Phil Ochs instead, but Bob's Jewish, and considering that Adam exploits his ethnicity more than damn near any other Member of the Tribe I know, this is an exceedingly critical point.) He's the self-anointed Dork who's gone so far as to have "DORK" tattooed on his person, in a takeoff of the Robert Indiana "LOVE" sculpture you might remember from the '70s (one of which is in Philly, FWIW), thereby ruining his shot at being buried in a Jewish cemetary, unless it's Reform Judaism, in which case they might let it slide. Let's see, what else...smart, funny, irreverent, deliberately and provocatively offensive much of the time, possibly the biggest bullshitter on the planet (or at least on the East Coast), and oh, yeah, claims girls hate him, which is quite possibly the biggest load of bullshit he's ever dumped anywhere, no, really...
(Slight digression here: My former housemate Stephanie and I once came up with what I like to call the 50% Theory, which is that any man in close proximity to either a musical instrument or a microphone is automatically at least 50% more attractive to women than the same man without said accessory--if he's onstage holding forth, either bashing away on his instrument of choice or yowling into a mike, he'll be absolute catnip to women, irregardless of looks, personality, hygiene, and damn near any other variable you can think of. Most male musicians who are honest will freely admit that one of the reasons they took up music was to get laid, and it seems to be astonishingly successful--does anyone honestly believe that any of the butt-ugly musicians who've ended up dating/marrying models would have had a chance with these girls if they weren't musicians? I think not. Anyway, Adam is nowhere near as ugly as he likes to claim he is, and, between that and the 50% Theory, probably gets more ass than a toilet in a New Jersey Turnpike rest stop, but enough of that for now... )
Anyway, if you're actually curious about Adam after this particular intro, or decide after reading the rest of this that you'd like to check him out further, hop on over to http://www.adambrodsky.com --you must read the rants; I insist. Yes, really. You WILL be offended, but it'll be good for you, trust me. *smirk* Now, on with the story proper...
Dante and I got the deranged idea that heading down to Philly to actually catch Adam on his home ground seemed like a good idea, especially in light of the venue in question being an Ethiopian restaurant in West Philly called the Dahlak; Adam had spent a lot of time online talking up this particular show, and the combination of spongy bread and snarky anti-folk was just too good to pass up. I was recently unemployed and needed cheering up badly, and Dante, well... we met up at the Riverside T station at 1:30 that Friday afternoon, and the first thing he told me was that he'd been shitcanned...I mean, forced to resign from his job. As a result of various nutjobs shooting up their workplaces, apparently expressing the desire in confidence to throttle an annoying coworker is simply Not OK these days, even if one is pathetically obviously not about to act upon such unhappiness; this means, of course, that since venting is now out, we all get to sit and stew and fume and steam until we finally do explode, but at least no one said anything inappropriate...As you'll see, this turned out to be the main theme of the weekend.
We had a fairly uneventful trip down, aside from the Garden State Parkway being an absolute bitch on a Friday evening; and couldn't help but notice that the route into Philly via the Betsy Ross Bridge has more damned billboards peddling heroin rehab services and laser eye surgery than one would have thought possible or desirable. (Too bad no one thought to combine the two businesses, a la Wilson's Soul Food and Hair Salon, or Gresham Disco and Body Shop in Athens, GA, ...get your eyes fried and your monkey off your back in one fell swoop!). We finally arrived safely arrived at the Dahlak just in time to park right in front of it, scouted around the place for Adam, who was nowhere in sight, and then settled in with several other friendly Dorkateers for a lovely combination plate of the finest in Ethiopian fare and enough spongy bread to choke a horse. I was bending everyone's ears with tales of how I became the alt.music.nin Reznor heater t-shirt queen when Mary the Merch Bitch (read: tour manager and all-around go-to person) walked in, followed by the Dork himself, who was most surprised to see us there. We all got to chat for a bit while he was setting up and restringing the guitar; this wasn't hard, because the Dahlak didn't have a stage per se, so before a show all the tables had to be moved to the back of the room and chairs set down in front of a small bit of floor space where the performance took place. (Keep this in mind; it becomes important later...) Dante got his Pocket Pussy (aka a coin purse with the "DORK" logo--one of the "prizes" one could get by attending X number of shows), and all seemed to be going well.
The show kicked off with a charming young man named Eric Peterson singing his little heart out and bashing away on a beat-up acoustic guitar with the kind of passionate political consciousness you can only have in your early 20s (call me a cynical old fart, OK? He was still pretty damned good...). The audience area was fairly crowded at that point, and there was a small pack of about three screamingly obvious babydykes sitting on the floor (hey, when you're wearing a t-shirt with your orientation all over the back of it...), right in everyone's way; one of them, a curly-haired brunette, was quite definitely in her cups even at that point, having apparently been tanking up at the bar throughout the evening and not eating any spongy bread to soak up the liquor. (Dante isn't convinced that any of these girls were old enough to be drinking; if they were indeed legal, then it was just barely.)
Finally, it was time for Adam to go on, so I dug out the camera gear and set everything up (hey, I am the Mad Photographer, and having been informed by both Mary and Butch that Adam is a--ahem--challenging subject, I was ready to call their bluff).
At the time, Adam's main hit, such as it was, happened to be a cheerful little ditty called "The Girl I Like is a Diesel Dyke"...I believe I did mention that offensiveness was one of his major traits, no? About halfway through the set, Drunken Brunette Babydyke and her buddies had already started yelling out (OK, slurring) their requests for "Diesel Dyke", and when said request wasn't immediately forthcoming, DBB started heckling Adam. He, of course, started slinging it right back at her, cracking jokes about sexually unsatisfying ex-girlfriends, restraining orders, and the like. This didn't sit well with DBB and her buddies, who started heckling even louder and wouldn't move either themselves or their full mugs of beer out of Adam's way so he could keep on stomping back and forth into the crowd.
This, unfortunately, is where things got ugly... At some point (I think it was at the beginning of "Cubicle Girl", but don't quote me on that), he "accidentally" (well, that's his claim, and he's sticking to it...) knocked over DBB's beer, and then accidentally (I do believe him on this one) kicked the same girl (not terribly hard) when they wouldn't get up off the floor and out of his way as he tried to work the crowd. Baseball Cap Butch, DBB's buddy (dunno if she actually is her butch, but I wouldn't be surprised) and Orange Flowered Scarf decided this was Not Okay, leaped to their feet (so that's what it takes to get them to move...) and started trying to pick a fight with Adam. Mary got in the butch's face and started telling her, politely at first, and then much less so, to back the fuck down. "DO NOT TOUCH THE GUITAR!!!". By this time, there was a great deal of shoving, yelling, and threats, with Baseball and Orange trying to get at Adam, Mary valiantly (and physically) holding them off, and Adam continuing to play and sing, while I searched fractically for a large pile of napkins to mop up the beer, having the horrible mental image of Adam stepping back into a puddle and being electrocuted in front of God and everyone. (Hey, my dad was a lineman for 45 years; I get paranoid about this kind of thing...) The final song of the night, a charming little ditty entitled "Bite Me", was sung to the young ladies in question with much feeling by virtually everyone in the joint, with the girls starting to back down and threatening to trash Adam's vehicle as soon as they found it. (Luckily, he came in Mary's car that night, and they didn't know what that looked like.)
Finally the babydyke posse, along with a couple of their SNAG ("sensitive New Age guy", aka "guys who pretend to be PC and sensitive to get into girls' pants") buddies, decided to retreat to the bar, but after most of the audience had left, they came stomping back out to verbally harangue Adam some more, having decided that it was safer to try to bust his balls when there weren't as many people around who'd have his back. They were ranting and raving that he was anti-woman, threatening (yeah, right, I could kick his ass if I needed to), harassing, hostile, claiming that it was their bar and their hangout (somehow I think the nice Ethiopian folks who run the joint might disagree...) and he didn't make them feel safe (again, I could wipe the floor with his ass), demanding that he leave West Philly, take the rest of us with him, and never return again to either that establishment in particular or their neighborhood in general (their neighborhood? Considering they were obviously white upper-middle-class college girls, I don't think the 'hood is exactly their neighborhood...), etc. etc. etc. He was being very polite the whole time, explaining that while he would apologize for knocking over the beer and accidentally kicking the one girl, he was not about to apologize for his entire back catalog, stage patter, manner of dealing with hecklers, or personal existence, as they were demanding he do.
Keep in mind now that I'm normally the World's Biggest Fucking Wuss, and I hate, hate, HATE conflict of any kind--even loud raised voices upset me, much less actual ranting and potential physical threats. However, while I'm legendary for letting people walk all over me, to the point where I ought to just get "WELCOME" tattooed on my forehead and have done with it, when it comes to other people or causes that I care about at all, look out, because the Queen of Righteous Indignation WILL get verbally medieval on your ass, and you WILL fucking well pay attention! So, in full-throttle Damsel in Shining Armor mode, I leapt into the midst of the melee and lit into the whole pack of obnoxious little twerps, screaming at them (shaking in my shoes all the while) and thereby impressing the HELL out of Dante, Adam, Mary, and, well, pretty much everyone else in the joint except the recipients of my righteous rage. When one of the SNAGs started whining, "Well, I just don't want to live in a country with people like that," my immediate retort was "WELL, DELTA IS READY WHEN YOU ARE!" When Orange started whining again about Adam's entire schtick being offensive to her "as a feminist" and a woman (then why in God's name were you there in the first place? Obviously you knew his work well enough to make requests, so you should have known what to expect...), I snarled, "THAT IS A FUCKING PATHETIC EXCUSE!" (Excuse me, but I've been a feminist since way before these particular snot-nosed brats were finger-painting with chocolate pudding in day care, and I really fucking resent others trying to speak for me, as I'm quite capable of doing that for myself, thankyouverymuch...) I'm not sure quite what else I said, although I think I yelled at one of them "WELL, WHAT EXACTLY DO YOU WANT?!?", although the answer at that point was pretty obvious even if they weren't willing to come right out and say it--they wanted him to totally pander to them, cave in on everything, admit to his horrible guilt as a white straight male (sorry, Adam, I guess being a Member of the Tribe doesn't get you any slack here...), and generally snivel, cringe, and validate their self-concept as Properly Politically Correct, when it was pathetically obvious that they were really a bunch of spoiled little coeds with their satellite boys, flirting with alternative lifestyles so they could piss off their upper-middle-class families, and used to having their every whim catered to and dubious opinion agreed with. Anything less, judging by their attitudes, deserved nothing less than being hung, drawn and quartered in the middle of South Street, with the ashes scattered to the four winds.
Obligatory old-fart rant: I'm a good old lefty (and, FWIW, have the photo of Billy Bragg in the Athens Pro-Choice Action League T-shirt I bought him to prove it) and have a wide collection of friends & associates with all kinds of alternative lifestyles--I may lead a boring life, but my friends sure as hell don't--so their being lesbians was/is Not A Problem, (even if I do strongly suspect they were classic LUGs--Lesbians Until Graduation, for those who haven't heard the term). Rather, it was that they were insisting on playing Overly PC Thought Police and saying that it was all right if they were behaving badly, but other people calling them on it was not OK, that really Burned My Ass. (Drunk and obnoxious at a show is still drunk and obnoxious; it doesn't matter who's doing it or what the "official" excuse for doing it is, as it's extremely rude to both the performers and the audience.) It also really pisses me off to see people trying to play the victim card when the circumstances don't support it--I've known way too many people myself who've dealt with all kinds of horrible situations (including members of my own family, trust me on this one), and IMNSHO spoiled brats trying to co-opt language intended to apply to people who've genuinely suffered trivializes real misery--frankly, it's fucking sickening, and it made me want to bitchslap all of them upside the head good and hard. Not wanting my very first trip ever to Philly to be capped off by a night in lockup, though, I fortunately managed to restrain myself; I wasn't about to ask Dante to prove his friendship by bailing my sorry ass out of the pokey that night.
(Side note to the SNAG in the leather cowboy hat (gee, talk about PC headgear...): the usual term used these days to refer to our darker-skinned brothers and sisters is "black", not "colored"; the latter term tends to be associated more with genteel white folks in the '60s who were trying a bit too hard to pretend they weren't actually racist, and I've seen people go absolutely ballistic over being called "colored". Hey, if you're going to play Thought Police and bitch about word use, be prepared to watch your own language, buddy... Also, aren't there bigger fish you could fry, if you really want to go after someone for not living up to your particular version of PC? I mean, you could always go picket an Eminem or Insane Clown Posse show...Oh, yeah, right...you might get your asses kicked--much better to gang up on a solo performer in an offbeat venue, don't you think? *seethe*)
What these yuppie puppies need to realize is that their attempts to police the language are not only doomed to failure, but are extremely likely to be co-opted by their political enemies on the Right Wing--after all, there are plenty of people out there who find lesbians extremely offensive and want to banish them from the public consciousness, remember? Between my musical taste and my wide-flung circle of, ahem, unusual friends and acquaintances, I'm used to reading and hearing about attitudes and writing that would be considered controversial by a lot of the so-called mainstream", and I'm all too aware that people have been and are attacked for such attitudes and subjects all too often. (I can't be the only person who remembers hearing about all the kids who were harassed and/or thrown out of school for being "weird" after Columbine...) Remember, kids, don't create a weapon that could very easily be used against you by people who would be more than happy to do so--those strange bedfellows you're working with to try to push your agenda would be all too happy to stab you in the back once they get their own way, which is why the sight of the married gay Republican couple on my block posting Bush/Cheney signs on the house last year--do they really think they're going to be spared from the ovens just because they're "good Republicans"?--boggles me so much...OK, enough of the digression; on with the rant...
Anyway...the owners, bless their hearts, finally managed to sweettalk the pack into going back to the bar (probably by offering them free booze), and the rest of us helped Adam & Mary grab all the gear and haul ass and their friend Bob (who was blind, and therefore needed a bit of guidance in an unfamiliar neighborhood) back out the door and into Mary's car. I was still shaking even after they left; Dante, having waited years to see me tell somebody off, was impressed as all hell that I finally stood up and ripped a bunch of morons a collective new asshole; I don't know what Mary thought about it, but I did get a nice big goodbye hug from Adam for my trouble, so I can't complain too much.
After all this excitement, it was time for Dante & I to hit the road and head back into New Jersey to find a cheap motel for the night, and something to nosh to get my blood sugar back up. We finally found both (a drive-through Dunkin Donuts and a Howard Johnson's Express in Cherry Hill, NJ), and crashed for the night...or, rather, he slept and I laid there in the other bed trying desperately to turn my brain down from 78 RPM to 33 or at least 45 , and listening to him snore. At one point he actually stopped snoring, and I was paranoid enough about his sleep apnea to actually turn the lamp on to make sure he was still breathing, as I had this horrible mental image of being stuck in a cheap motel in Jersey with a dead body and no way back to Boston because I can't drive. I did finally manage to conk out, only to be rudely awakened by the phone ringing...a wrong number, of course, and they had to wake me up just when I was trying to explain the concept of "colloquial" and R.E.M. to an origami box turtle an inch long that my friend Feline had made me...can you say "fucked-up dreams brought on by exhaustion," kids?
Got the pictures developed the next day at a downtown Philly K-Mart and dropped them off with Adam's then-housemate Butch (they were much better than we'd expected; so much for not being photogenic!), and stopped at a used bookstore next door, where I picked up Susie Bright's Sexual State of the Union--considering Susie's usual topics of sexuality, self-expression, censorship, and other such issues, and in light of her differences with the self-proclaimed Arbiters of Decency on both the left and right, and the previous night's events, I thought it was more than appropriate that I turned up one of her books.
We finally got back in the car and headed out of town, hitting a WaWa en route and restocking the car with fine Tastycake products (my heater shirt screenprinter, a Philly native, once had a friend ship him a case of Butterscotch Krimpets--it was apparently the high point of his year), and getting to hear Dante yell "HOT BACK DOOR!!!" upon spotting a bottle of Nantucket Nectar's Half and Half in the fridge. (Can't say as I've ever heard anyone comparing lemonade and iced tea to buttfucking before, but whatever... ) The rest of the trip back to Boston was pretty uneventful, although I'm still wondering why the cheap Chinese buffet in the Big Ass Mall on the NY state line had Italian Chicken on the steam table, and we pretty much put the pedal to the metal all the way back to Boston, arriving at my place in Cambridge at 12:45 a.m. and setting a new personal best time for Dante's driving.
So...all in all, a very entertaining adventure, and very educational, too...things we learned on this trip:
1. Nine Inch Nails' Broken is EXTREMELY effective soundtrack music either when driving through Jersey to Philly, or driving from Philly looking for a cheap motel and ranting and raving about ignorant, pathetic fucks at the top of one's lungs...Trent, bless his angsty little heart, is nothing if not cathartic!
2. K-Mart photofinishing isn't all that great, but when the CVS photofinishing booth is out of commission, they will do in a pinch (but you knew that anyway, right?).
3. Seriously lethal brownies are a wonderful way to make new friends--yes, I did another long-distance brownie schlep; after all, I do have a reputation to uphold!
4. Oh, and Mary kicks ass...literally, if she has to! (Adam only does it figuratively.)
To finish this all off, here's a Susie Bright quote for y'all:
The right to free speech, when you get right down to it, is the right to make someone else uncomfortable, to outrage the respectable, and to question everything held dear. Who, after all, needs protection to say they like Mom and apple pie?
Thank you and goodnight... *falls over*
You'll have to wait a bit for the G.G. Allin blast from the past, because I realized this bit was far more timely--this past Wednesday the 7th was the 4th anniversary of the event I'm about to describe, and in light of what happened just a few days later, I don't think I need to explain the title of this post; also, I'd like to think that certain of the issues involved in this particular episode (namely, freedom of speech and expression) have only grown in relevance over the past four years. *bites tongue to avoid going into hugeass political rant* Also, I feel duty-bound to admit that at least 75% of this is taken directly from my Monday-morning quarterback post to the Adam Brodsky mailing list at the time this all went down, so it's not completely new writing...but hopefully you'll get a kick out of it anyway.
Anyway...back in the summer of 2001, my good buddy (and now former housemate) Dante decided that I really needed to check out one Adam Brodsky, a moderately well-known (in folkie circles) anti-folkie from Philly. (Anti-folk, for whatever it's worth, is basically folk music played with a punk rock attitude, or at least tends to be far more profane and sexually explicit than your typical wispy folk; supposedly it got started in the East Village, and I'm not sure if the term is even used much anymore, but it was current then.) Trying to sum up Adam in just a couple of phrases is damn near impossible, but how does "the bastard offspring of Bob Dylan and Lenny Bruce" sound? (Actually, I should probably namecheck Phil Ochs instead, but Bob's Jewish, and considering that Adam exploits his ethnicity more than damn near any other Member of the Tribe I know, this is an exceedingly critical point.) He's the self-anointed Dork who's gone so far as to have "DORK" tattooed on his person, in a takeoff of the Robert Indiana "LOVE" sculpture you might remember from the '70s (one of which is in Philly, FWIW), thereby ruining his shot at being buried in a Jewish cemetary, unless it's Reform Judaism, in which case they might let it slide. Let's see, what else...smart, funny, irreverent, deliberately and provocatively offensive much of the time, possibly the biggest bullshitter on the planet (or at least on the East Coast), and oh, yeah, claims girls hate him, which is quite possibly the biggest load of bullshit he's ever dumped anywhere, no, really...
(Slight digression here: My former housemate Stephanie and I once came up with what I like to call the 50% Theory, which is that any man in close proximity to either a musical instrument or a microphone is automatically at least 50% more attractive to women than the same man without said accessory--if he's onstage holding forth, either bashing away on his instrument of choice or yowling into a mike, he'll be absolute catnip to women, irregardless of looks, personality, hygiene, and damn near any other variable you can think of. Most male musicians who are honest will freely admit that one of the reasons they took up music was to get laid, and it seems to be astonishingly successful--does anyone honestly believe that any of the butt-ugly musicians who've ended up dating/marrying models would have had a chance with these girls if they weren't musicians? I think not. Anyway, Adam is nowhere near as ugly as he likes to claim he is, and, between that and the 50% Theory, probably gets more ass than a toilet in a New Jersey Turnpike rest stop, but enough of that for now... )
Anyway, if you're actually curious about Adam after this particular intro, or decide after reading the rest of this that you'd like to check him out further, hop on over to http://www.adambrodsky.com --you must read the rants; I insist. Yes, really. You WILL be offended, but it'll be good for you, trust me. *smirk* Now, on with the story proper...
Dante and I got the deranged idea that heading down to Philly to actually catch Adam on his home ground seemed like a good idea, especially in light of the venue in question being an Ethiopian restaurant in West Philly called the Dahlak; Adam had spent a lot of time online talking up this particular show, and the combination of spongy bread and snarky anti-folk was just too good to pass up. I was recently unemployed and needed cheering up badly, and Dante, well... we met up at the Riverside T station at 1:30 that Friday afternoon, and the first thing he told me was that he'd been shitcanned...I mean, forced to resign from his job. As a result of various nutjobs shooting up their workplaces, apparently expressing the desire in confidence to throttle an annoying coworker is simply Not OK these days, even if one is pathetically obviously not about to act upon such unhappiness; this means, of course, that since venting is now out, we all get to sit and stew and fume and steam until we finally do explode, but at least no one said anything inappropriate...As you'll see, this turned out to be the main theme of the weekend.
We had a fairly uneventful trip down, aside from the Garden State Parkway being an absolute bitch on a Friday evening; and couldn't help but notice that the route into Philly via the Betsy Ross Bridge has more damned billboards peddling heroin rehab services and laser eye surgery than one would have thought possible or desirable. (Too bad no one thought to combine the two businesses, a la Wilson's Soul Food and Hair Salon, or Gresham Disco and Body Shop in Athens, GA, ...get your eyes fried and your monkey off your back in one fell swoop!). We finally arrived safely arrived at the Dahlak just in time to park right in front of it, scouted around the place for Adam, who was nowhere in sight, and then settled in with several other friendly Dorkateers for a lovely combination plate of the finest in Ethiopian fare and enough spongy bread to choke a horse. I was bending everyone's ears with tales of how I became the alt.music.nin Reznor heater t-shirt queen when Mary the Merch Bitch (read: tour manager and all-around go-to person) walked in, followed by the Dork himself, who was most surprised to see us there. We all got to chat for a bit while he was setting up and restringing the guitar; this wasn't hard, because the Dahlak didn't have a stage per se, so before a show all the tables had to be moved to the back of the room and chairs set down in front of a small bit of floor space where the performance took place. (Keep this in mind; it becomes important later...) Dante got his Pocket Pussy (aka a coin purse with the "DORK" logo--one of the "prizes" one could get by attending X number of shows), and all seemed to be going well.
The show kicked off with a charming young man named Eric Peterson singing his little heart out and bashing away on a beat-up acoustic guitar with the kind of passionate political consciousness you can only have in your early 20s (call me a cynical old fart, OK? He was still pretty damned good...). The audience area was fairly crowded at that point, and there was a small pack of about three screamingly obvious babydykes sitting on the floor (hey, when you're wearing a t-shirt with your orientation all over the back of it...), right in everyone's way; one of them, a curly-haired brunette, was quite definitely in her cups even at that point, having apparently been tanking up at the bar throughout the evening and not eating any spongy bread to soak up the liquor. (Dante isn't convinced that any of these girls were old enough to be drinking; if they were indeed legal, then it was just barely.)
Finally, it was time for Adam to go on, so I dug out the camera gear and set everything up (hey, I am the Mad Photographer, and having been informed by both Mary and Butch that Adam is a--ahem--challenging subject, I was ready to call their bluff).
At the time, Adam's main hit, such as it was, happened to be a cheerful little ditty called "The Girl I Like is a Diesel Dyke"...I believe I did mention that offensiveness was one of his major traits, no? About halfway through the set, Drunken Brunette Babydyke and her buddies had already started yelling out (OK, slurring) their requests for "Diesel Dyke", and when said request wasn't immediately forthcoming, DBB started heckling Adam. He, of course, started slinging it right back at her, cracking jokes about sexually unsatisfying ex-girlfriends, restraining orders, and the like. This didn't sit well with DBB and her buddies, who started heckling even louder and wouldn't move either themselves or their full mugs of beer out of Adam's way so he could keep on stomping back and forth into the crowd.
This, unfortunately, is where things got ugly... At some point (I think it was at the beginning of "Cubicle Girl", but don't quote me on that), he "accidentally" (well, that's his claim, and he's sticking to it...) knocked over DBB's beer, and then accidentally (I do believe him on this one) kicked the same girl (not terribly hard) when they wouldn't get up off the floor and out of his way as he tried to work the crowd. Baseball Cap Butch, DBB's buddy (dunno if she actually is her butch, but I wouldn't be surprised) and Orange Flowered Scarf decided this was Not Okay, leaped to their feet (so that's what it takes to get them to move...) and started trying to pick a fight with Adam. Mary got in the butch's face and started telling her, politely at first, and then much less so, to back the fuck down. "DO NOT TOUCH THE GUITAR!!!". By this time, there was a great deal of shoving, yelling, and threats, with Baseball and Orange trying to get at Adam, Mary valiantly (and physically) holding them off, and Adam continuing to play and sing, while I searched fractically for a large pile of napkins to mop up the beer, having the horrible mental image of Adam stepping back into a puddle and being electrocuted in front of God and everyone. (Hey, my dad was a lineman for 45 years; I get paranoid about this kind of thing...) The final song of the night, a charming little ditty entitled "Bite Me", was sung to the young ladies in question with much feeling by virtually everyone in the joint, with the girls starting to back down and threatening to trash Adam's vehicle as soon as they found it. (Luckily, he came in Mary's car that night, and they didn't know what that looked like.)
Finally the babydyke posse, along with a couple of their SNAG ("sensitive New Age guy", aka "guys who pretend to be PC and sensitive to get into girls' pants") buddies, decided to retreat to the bar, but after most of the audience had left, they came stomping back out to verbally harangue Adam some more, having decided that it was safer to try to bust his balls when there weren't as many people around who'd have his back. They were ranting and raving that he was anti-woman, threatening (yeah, right, I could kick his ass if I needed to), harassing, hostile, claiming that it was their bar and their hangout (somehow I think the nice Ethiopian folks who run the joint might disagree...) and he didn't make them feel safe (again, I could wipe the floor with his ass), demanding that he leave West Philly, take the rest of us with him, and never return again to either that establishment in particular or their neighborhood in general (their neighborhood? Considering they were obviously white upper-middle-class college girls, I don't think the 'hood is exactly their neighborhood...), etc. etc. etc. He was being very polite the whole time, explaining that while he would apologize for knocking over the beer and accidentally kicking the one girl, he was not about to apologize for his entire back catalog, stage patter, manner of dealing with hecklers, or personal existence, as they were demanding he do.
Keep in mind now that I'm normally the World's Biggest Fucking Wuss, and I hate, hate, HATE conflict of any kind--even loud raised voices upset me, much less actual ranting and potential physical threats. However, while I'm legendary for letting people walk all over me, to the point where I ought to just get "WELCOME" tattooed on my forehead and have done with it, when it comes to other people or causes that I care about at all, look out, because the Queen of Righteous Indignation WILL get verbally medieval on your ass, and you WILL fucking well pay attention! So, in full-throttle Damsel in Shining Armor mode, I leapt into the midst of the melee and lit into the whole pack of obnoxious little twerps, screaming at them (shaking in my shoes all the while) and thereby impressing the HELL out of Dante, Adam, Mary, and, well, pretty much everyone else in the joint except the recipients of my righteous rage. When one of the SNAGs started whining, "Well, I just don't want to live in a country with people like that," my immediate retort was "WELL, DELTA IS READY WHEN YOU ARE!" When Orange started whining again about Adam's entire schtick being offensive to her "as a feminist" and a woman (then why in God's name were you there in the first place? Obviously you knew his work well enough to make requests, so you should have known what to expect...), I snarled, "THAT IS A FUCKING PATHETIC EXCUSE!" (Excuse me, but I've been a feminist since way before these particular snot-nosed brats were finger-painting with chocolate pudding in day care, and I really fucking resent others trying to speak for me, as I'm quite capable of doing that for myself, thankyouverymuch...) I'm not sure quite what else I said, although I think I yelled at one of them "WELL, WHAT EXACTLY DO YOU WANT?!?", although the answer at that point was pretty obvious even if they weren't willing to come right out and say it--they wanted him to totally pander to them, cave in on everything, admit to his horrible guilt as a white straight male (sorry, Adam, I guess being a Member of the Tribe doesn't get you any slack here...), and generally snivel, cringe, and validate their self-concept as Properly Politically Correct, when it was pathetically obvious that they were really a bunch of spoiled little coeds with their satellite boys, flirting with alternative lifestyles so they could piss off their upper-middle-class families, and used to having their every whim catered to and dubious opinion agreed with. Anything less, judging by their attitudes, deserved nothing less than being hung, drawn and quartered in the middle of South Street, with the ashes scattered to the four winds.
Obligatory old-fart rant: I'm a good old lefty (and, FWIW, have the photo of Billy Bragg in the Athens Pro-Choice Action League T-shirt I bought him to prove it) and have a wide collection of friends & associates with all kinds of alternative lifestyles--I may lead a boring life, but my friends sure as hell don't--so their being lesbians was/is Not A Problem, (even if I do strongly suspect they were classic LUGs--Lesbians Until Graduation, for those who haven't heard the term). Rather, it was that they were insisting on playing Overly PC Thought Police and saying that it was all right if they were behaving badly, but other people calling them on it was not OK, that really Burned My Ass. (Drunk and obnoxious at a show is still drunk and obnoxious; it doesn't matter who's doing it or what the "official" excuse for doing it is, as it's extremely rude to both the performers and the audience.) It also really pisses me off to see people trying to play the victim card when the circumstances don't support it--I've known way too many people myself who've dealt with all kinds of horrible situations (including members of my own family, trust me on this one), and IMNSHO spoiled brats trying to co-opt language intended to apply to people who've genuinely suffered trivializes real misery--frankly, it's fucking sickening, and it made me want to bitchslap all of them upside the head good and hard. Not wanting my very first trip ever to Philly to be capped off by a night in lockup, though, I fortunately managed to restrain myself; I wasn't about to ask Dante to prove his friendship by bailing my sorry ass out of the pokey that night.
(Side note to the SNAG in the leather cowboy hat (gee, talk about PC headgear...): the usual term used these days to refer to our darker-skinned brothers and sisters is "black", not "colored"; the latter term tends to be associated more with genteel white folks in the '60s who were trying a bit too hard to pretend they weren't actually racist, and I've seen people go absolutely ballistic over being called "colored". Hey, if you're going to play Thought Police and bitch about word use, be prepared to watch your own language, buddy... Also, aren't there bigger fish you could fry, if you really want to go after someone for not living up to your particular version of PC? I mean, you could always go picket an Eminem or Insane Clown Posse show...Oh, yeah, right...you might get your asses kicked--much better to gang up on a solo performer in an offbeat venue, don't you think? *seethe*)
What these yuppie puppies need to realize is that their attempts to police the language are not only doomed to failure, but are extremely likely to be co-opted by their political enemies on the Right Wing--after all, there are plenty of people out there who find lesbians extremely offensive and want to banish them from the public consciousness, remember? Between my musical taste and my wide-flung circle of, ahem, unusual friends and acquaintances, I'm used to reading and hearing about attitudes and writing that would be considered controversial by a lot of the so-called mainstream", and I'm all too aware that people have been and are attacked for such attitudes and subjects all too often. (I can't be the only person who remembers hearing about all the kids who were harassed and/or thrown out of school for being "weird" after Columbine...) Remember, kids, don't create a weapon that could very easily be used against you by people who would be more than happy to do so--those strange bedfellows you're working with to try to push your agenda would be all too happy to stab you in the back once they get their own way, which is why the sight of the married gay Republican couple on my block posting Bush/Cheney signs on the house last year--do they really think they're going to be spared from the ovens just because they're "good Republicans"?--boggles me so much...OK, enough of the digression; on with the rant...
Anyway...the owners, bless their hearts, finally managed to sweettalk the pack into going back to the bar (probably by offering them free booze), and the rest of us helped Adam & Mary grab all the gear and haul ass and their friend Bob (who was blind, and therefore needed a bit of guidance in an unfamiliar neighborhood) back out the door and into Mary's car. I was still shaking even after they left; Dante, having waited years to see me tell somebody off, was impressed as all hell that I finally stood up and ripped a bunch of morons a collective new asshole; I don't know what Mary thought about it, but I did get a nice big goodbye hug from Adam for my trouble, so I can't complain too much.
After all this excitement, it was time for Dante & I to hit the road and head back into New Jersey to find a cheap motel for the night, and something to nosh to get my blood sugar back up. We finally found both (a drive-through Dunkin Donuts and a Howard Johnson's Express in Cherry Hill, NJ), and crashed for the night...or, rather, he slept and I laid there in the other bed trying desperately to turn my brain down from 78 RPM to 33 or at least 45 , and listening to him snore. At one point he actually stopped snoring, and I was paranoid enough about his sleep apnea to actually turn the lamp on to make sure he was still breathing, as I had this horrible mental image of being stuck in a cheap motel in Jersey with a dead body and no way back to Boston because I can't drive. I did finally manage to conk out, only to be rudely awakened by the phone ringing...a wrong number, of course, and they had to wake me up just when I was trying to explain the concept of "colloquial" and R.E.M. to an origami box turtle an inch long that my friend Feline had made me...can you say "fucked-up dreams brought on by exhaustion," kids?
Got the pictures developed the next day at a downtown Philly K-Mart and dropped them off with Adam's then-housemate Butch (they were much better than we'd expected; so much for not being photogenic!), and stopped at a used bookstore next door, where I picked up Susie Bright's Sexual State of the Union--considering Susie's usual topics of sexuality, self-expression, censorship, and other such issues, and in light of her differences with the self-proclaimed Arbiters of Decency on both the left and right, and the previous night's events, I thought it was more than appropriate that I turned up one of her books.
We finally got back in the car and headed out of town, hitting a WaWa en route and restocking the car with fine Tastycake products (my heater shirt screenprinter, a Philly native, once had a friend ship him a case of Butterscotch Krimpets--it was apparently the high point of his year), and getting to hear Dante yell "HOT BACK DOOR!!!" upon spotting a bottle of Nantucket Nectar's Half and Half in the fridge. (Can't say as I've ever heard anyone comparing lemonade and iced tea to buttfucking before, but whatever... ) The rest of the trip back to Boston was pretty uneventful, although I'm still wondering why the cheap Chinese buffet in the Big Ass Mall on the NY state line had Italian Chicken on the steam table, and we pretty much put the pedal to the metal all the way back to Boston, arriving at my place in Cambridge at 12:45 a.m. and setting a new personal best time for Dante's driving.
So...all in all, a very entertaining adventure, and very educational, too...things we learned on this trip:
1. Nine Inch Nails' Broken is EXTREMELY effective soundtrack music either when driving through Jersey to Philly, or driving from Philly looking for a cheap motel and ranting and raving about ignorant, pathetic fucks at the top of one's lungs...Trent, bless his angsty little heart, is nothing if not cathartic!
2. K-Mart photofinishing isn't all that great, but when the CVS photofinishing booth is out of commission, they will do in a pinch (but you knew that anyway, right?).
3. Seriously lethal brownies are a wonderful way to make new friends--yes, I did another long-distance brownie schlep; after all, I do have a reputation to uphold!
4. Oh, and Mary kicks ass...literally, if she has to! (Adam only does it figuratively.)
To finish this all off, here's a Susie Bright quote for y'all:
The right to free speech, when you get right down to it, is the right to make someone else uncomfortable, to outrage the respectable, and to question everything held dear. Who, after all, needs protection to say they like Mom and apple pie?
Thank you and goodnight... *falls over*
Thursday, September 08, 2005
Don't go chasin' waterfalls...
...because the motherfuckers will come to you when you least expect it, usually on a Sunday morning when you've just gotten out of the bathroom to find water dripping out of the ceiling onto your bed. (I'll explain this in a bit...)
I'm going to try to start posting in here much more regularly, partly because I've been meaning to use this as a venue for my writing/performance jones (too bad I can't do audio posts; I've been told the best part of my stories is hearing me tell them), and partly because I'm feeling shamed into it...you see, my friendly acquaintance Rob just started his own Blogger blog recently, after holding forth on MySpace for quite some time; he's always been a kickass writer with a hysterically warped view of the world, but his recent posts have raised the bar so high that I can only bow before him and hope to catch up to his level of...well, I'm not quite sure WHAT to call it, but I'm sure I'll think of something. *smirk*
My good intentions may have to wait a bit, though, as my apartment is in a certain amount of upheaval--my bedroom ceiling sprang a leak almost 2 weeks ago, and I've been camping out on the futon in the living room ever since. The actual leak stopped very quickly once the plumber came by and determined that the problem was the second-floor shower in the apartment above me (funny, I didn't realize there WAS a bathroom right over me), but I now have a gaping hole in the ceiling right over the head of my head, covered by a contractor's trash bag screwed to the ceiling ("Why not use duct tape?" "It won't stay on."), and with a hole poked into it just in case the damn plumbing starts dribbling again. To add insult to injury, while I was musing aloud to myself whether I should even think about sleeping in my own bed, or just give up and decamp to the living room, the plumber offered this helpful bit of advice: "Why don't you just kick your daughter out of her room?"
I don't HAVE a daughter.
I DO have a female housemate (the lovely and charming Laura), who is, admittedly, 18 years younger than me, but the only "children" I have at this time shed like hell, puke on the floor, and crap outside the litter box on a regular basis. (In the increasingly unlikely event I ever do manage to spawn, I figure looking after Jezebel and Delenn will stand me in good stead in terms of dealing with general ickyness.) When you're tired, freaked out about your home possibly falling down around your ears, and feeling rather sensitive about your age, you REALLY don't need random strangers telling you that you look old enough to have a daughter Laura's age, believe me.
Needless to say, I redid my gray roots the very next night...
In the meantime, I'm having to go online while sitting perched on the edge of my bed, which has now been shoved to the opposite end of the rather small room from where it usually sits, which means that my Comfy Chair is now in the kitchen, where it's holding a trash bag full of clothes and shoes for Katrina survivors until I find a place to drop them off. I feel as if I shouldn't complain that much, especially in light of the horrific events in NOLA and the Gulf Coast, but damn it, I'm paying too much rent as it is to live in a freaking BASEMENT (excuse me, "garden apartment"), much less not having full use of my property and fucking up my back sleeping on the goddamn futon, AND having to lock up all the cats in the living room during the day just in case the contractor/landlord's cousin by marriage deigns to show up and actually patch the friggin' ceiling (the cats have both litter boxes, food and water, soft places to sleep and a window to look out of, but I still feel like a rat having to shut them up like that)....OK, I'll shut up now, just needed to vent a little... *sigh* Anyway, it' s much easier to spin funny yarns about rock star dolls, generally freaky people, and former clubowners who jack off with conditioner when I'm nicely settled into my chair, and so further anecdotes will have to wait a bit--I do promise, though, that I'll tell the strange story of how I became acquainted with none other than G.G. Allin very soon.
I'm going to try to start posting in here much more regularly, partly because I've been meaning to use this as a venue for my writing/performance jones (too bad I can't do audio posts; I've been told the best part of my stories is hearing me tell them), and partly because I'm feeling shamed into it...you see, my friendly acquaintance Rob just started his own Blogger blog recently, after holding forth on MySpace for quite some time; he's always been a kickass writer with a hysterically warped view of the world, but his recent posts have raised the bar so high that I can only bow before him and hope to catch up to his level of...well, I'm not quite sure WHAT to call it, but I'm sure I'll think of something. *smirk*
My good intentions may have to wait a bit, though, as my apartment is in a certain amount of upheaval--my bedroom ceiling sprang a leak almost 2 weeks ago, and I've been camping out on the futon in the living room ever since. The actual leak stopped very quickly once the plumber came by and determined that the problem was the second-floor shower in the apartment above me (funny, I didn't realize there WAS a bathroom right over me), but I now have a gaping hole in the ceiling right over the head of my head, covered by a contractor's trash bag screwed to the ceiling ("Why not use duct tape?" "It won't stay on."), and with a hole poked into it just in case the damn plumbing starts dribbling again. To add insult to injury, while I was musing aloud to myself whether I should even think about sleeping in my own bed, or just give up and decamp to the living room, the plumber offered this helpful bit of advice: "Why don't you just kick your daughter out of her room?"
I don't HAVE a daughter.
I DO have a female housemate (the lovely and charming Laura), who is, admittedly, 18 years younger than me, but the only "children" I have at this time shed like hell, puke on the floor, and crap outside the litter box on a regular basis. (In the increasingly unlikely event I ever do manage to spawn, I figure looking after Jezebel and Delenn will stand me in good stead in terms of dealing with general ickyness.) When you're tired, freaked out about your home possibly falling down around your ears, and feeling rather sensitive about your age, you REALLY don't need random strangers telling you that you look old enough to have a daughter Laura's age, believe me.
Needless to say, I redid my gray roots the very next night...
In the meantime, I'm having to go online while sitting perched on the edge of my bed, which has now been shoved to the opposite end of the rather small room from where it usually sits, which means that my Comfy Chair is now in the kitchen, where it's holding a trash bag full of clothes and shoes for Katrina survivors until I find a place to drop them off. I feel as if I shouldn't complain that much, especially in light of the horrific events in NOLA and the Gulf Coast, but damn it, I'm paying too much rent as it is to live in a freaking BASEMENT (excuse me, "garden apartment"), much less not having full use of my property and fucking up my back sleeping on the goddamn futon, AND having to lock up all the cats in the living room during the day just in case the contractor/landlord's cousin by marriage deigns to show up and actually patch the friggin' ceiling (the cats have both litter boxes, food and water, soft places to sleep and a window to look out of, but I still feel like a rat having to shut them up like that)....OK, I'll shut up now, just needed to vent a little... *sigh* Anyway, it' s much easier to spin funny yarns about rock star dolls, generally freaky people, and former clubowners who jack off with conditioner when I'm nicely settled into my chair, and so further anecdotes will have to wait a bit--I do promise, though, that I'll tell the strange story of how I became acquainted with none other than G.G. Allin very soon.
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
The Slippery Saga of Humectress Man...
Back in 1988, I got the bright idea to go visit scenic Athens, GA on vacation, with an eye to living there, decided I loved the place, and came back 7 months later with all my worldly possessions in a U-Haul trailer attached to the back of my friend Martin's Mitsubishi Montero...and spent the next 8 1/2 years there, vacillating between "I LOVE this place!" to "Get me the FUCK out of this hellhole NOW!!!" (Athens is the kind of place that tends to provoke that reaction; I'll get more into this some other time.) I've often heard Athens called "Berkeley with a southern accent", and considering that the Bay Area and Athens-Clarke County are both home to some of the fucked-up people you'll ever meet (or, in some cases, wish you hadn't met), I'll buy that; but Deep South depravity, in spite of or perhaps because of the suffocating weight of so-called Christianity ("so-called" because something tells me there's no way Jesus would recognize any of the assholes at the Prince Avenue Baptist Church as followers of his...but I digress) has a special kind of flavor--quite literally in some cases.
(A quick example: if you ever happened to see the documentary Athens, GA Inside/Out, you might remember a band called the Bar-B-Que Killers, fronted by one Laura Carter, who resembled nothing so much as a seriously pissed-off and drugged-up 13-year-old boy. Well, Laura's post-BBQ Killers band was called Felch, and their very first band flyers, posted all over downtown Athens, depicted exactly that activity...somehow I don't think the 40 Watt Club was terribly happy about having to pay the fine simply because they'd booked the damn band in the first place. Anyhow, at one of Laura's live performances--which usually involved some degree of nudity by the end of the set--she had apparently stuffed the better part of a sack full of Mardi Gras beads up her hoohoo, and proceeded to pull them out, one or two strands at a time, and throw them into the audience...certain members of whom actually proceeded to put them in their mouths and suck away gleefully. One friend of mine told me that was the very first show she ever saw in Athens shortly after she moved to town; frankly, I'm just amazed that she didn't run screaming all the way to Hartsfield International to catch the first plane home to Toronto, but I guess she was made of stronger stuff than that. )
I could go on, but I promised you a different story, and it's time I started telling it...)
Humectress Man was none other than the SO of a housemate of mine in Athens; at the time the events to be described took place, he was involved in the operation of a music venue in town. I had thought he was being friendly to me simply because he was a nice guy, and perhaps he was, and thought I was reasonably cool (at least, that's what he claimed once), but his main motive was to get into my housemate's panties, at which he was eventually successful. Too bad he already had a girlfriend at home--somehow he neglected to mention that particular fact until the housemate was already quite on the hook, the schmuck--so his extracurricular activities tended to be conducted either backstage at the venue, or when the GF was out of town...
One time, after the evening's entertainment was over, he made a booty call to invite her to the now-empty club...at some point during the late-night entertainment, he decided that showing her some of his girl/girl porn magazines might be just the trick to get her terribly hot and bothered. (Apparently it didn't occur to him that most straight women find fake lesbians boring, stupid and not at all arousing.) Not one to waste an opportunity for good clean fun, and more than willing to take matters into his own hands, he disappeared into the venue's shower (which his female business partner tended to use to clean up before heading home), returned several minutes later from the club's shower with her bottle of Nexxus Humectress conditioner, and proceeded to jack off in front of the housemate while reading the magazine, using the Humectress as lube. (I imagine it worked pretty well, especially if you happen to like having nice, soft, coconut-scented pubes, although I'd bet his partner would have been PISSED to find out what he was using her expensive conditioner for...) Needless to say, after my incredulous housemate told me the tale the next day, I immediately dubbed the wanker "Humectress Man", and that he shall remain, at least in our personal mythology.
(One more tale of HM's boundless creativity: One fine weekend, he had the housemate over to his own personal love shack (the official sweetie was, of course, out of town), but unfortunately Little Elvis just wasn't in a partying mood that evening due to rather too much Bolivian Marching Powder snuffed up earlier in the evening. Being an inventive fellow, though, he disappeared into the kitchen and triumphantly re-emerged with a ziplock bag half-full of Wesson Oil...which he then proceeded to use to attempt to fire the Surgeon General while she watched. Of course, she had to tell me the tale the next day, and was damn near rolling on the floor by the time she got to his go-round with the baggie.
"My," I observed dryly..."that certainaly puts a whole new spin on "Wessonality", now doesn't it?")
(A quick example: if you ever happened to see the documentary Athens, GA Inside/Out, you might remember a band called the Bar-B-Que Killers, fronted by one Laura Carter, who resembled nothing so much as a seriously pissed-off and drugged-up 13-year-old boy. Well, Laura's post-BBQ Killers band was called Felch, and their very first band flyers, posted all over downtown Athens, depicted exactly that activity...somehow I don't think the 40 Watt Club was terribly happy about having to pay the fine simply because they'd booked the damn band in the first place. Anyhow, at one of Laura's live performances--which usually involved some degree of nudity by the end of the set--she had apparently stuffed the better part of a sack full of Mardi Gras beads up her hoohoo, and proceeded to pull them out, one or two strands at a time, and throw them into the audience...certain members of whom actually proceeded to put them in their mouths and suck away gleefully. One friend of mine told me that was the very first show she ever saw in Athens shortly after she moved to town; frankly, I'm just amazed that she didn't run screaming all the way to Hartsfield International to catch the first plane home to Toronto, but I guess she was made of stronger stuff than that. )
I could go on, but I promised you a different story, and it's time I started telling it...)
Humectress Man was none other than the SO of a housemate of mine in Athens; at the time the events to be described took place, he was involved in the operation of a music venue in town. I had thought he was being friendly to me simply because he was a nice guy, and perhaps he was, and thought I was reasonably cool (at least, that's what he claimed once), but his main motive was to get into my housemate's panties, at which he was eventually successful. Too bad he already had a girlfriend at home--somehow he neglected to mention that particular fact until the housemate was already quite on the hook, the schmuck--so his extracurricular activities tended to be conducted either backstage at the venue, or when the GF was out of town...
One time, after the evening's entertainment was over, he made a booty call to invite her to the now-empty club...at some point during the late-night entertainment, he decided that showing her some of his girl/girl porn magazines might be just the trick to get her terribly hot and bothered. (Apparently it didn't occur to him that most straight women find fake lesbians boring, stupid and not at all arousing.) Not one to waste an opportunity for good clean fun, and more than willing to take matters into his own hands, he disappeared into the venue's shower (which his female business partner tended to use to clean up before heading home), returned several minutes later from the club's shower with her bottle of Nexxus Humectress conditioner, and proceeded to jack off in front of the housemate while reading the magazine, using the Humectress as lube. (I imagine it worked pretty well, especially if you happen to like having nice, soft, coconut-scented pubes, although I'd bet his partner would have been PISSED to find out what he was using her expensive conditioner for...) Needless to say, after my incredulous housemate told me the tale the next day, I immediately dubbed the wanker "Humectress Man", and that he shall remain, at least in our personal mythology.
(One more tale of HM's boundless creativity: One fine weekend, he had the housemate over to his own personal love shack (the official sweetie was, of course, out of town), but unfortunately Little Elvis just wasn't in a partying mood that evening due to rather too much Bolivian Marching Powder snuffed up earlier in the evening. Being an inventive fellow, though, he disappeared into the kitchen and triumphantly re-emerged with a ziplock bag half-full of Wesson Oil...which he then proceeded to use to attempt to fire the Surgeon General while she watched. Of course, she had to tell me the tale the next day, and was damn near rolling on the floor by the time she got to his go-round with the baggie.
"My," I observed dryly..."that certainaly puts a whole new spin on "Wessonality", now doesn't it?")
Saturday, June 25, 2005
A life saved by rock & roll (and television)...
Jenny said, when she was just five years old
There was nothin' happening at all
Every time she puts on the radio
There was nothin' goin' down at all, not at all
Then, one fine mornin', she puts on a New York station
You know, she couldn't believe what she heard at all
She started shakin' to that fine, fine music
You know, her life was saved by rock'n'roll
OK, so it's not 100% accurate, inasmuch as: (1) my name isn't Jenny; (2) I was 13 years old, not 5; and (3) we couldn't pick up New York AM stations before 6 P.M. or so where I grew up; but the gist of it's the same, and if I'm going to invoke anyone for my own personal mythology, then the Velvet Underground is an excellent place to start....that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. :-)
I know it's a total cliche to bitch about the younger generation as one gets older, but I really don't think most kids today, even those growing up in my podunk hometown, have any idea just how isolated we truly were in northern New Hampshire during the 1960s and '70s--no internet, no MTV, no interstate, no malls, no Top 40 radio, no record stores, no fast food, no music magazines (except for the rare issue of Rolling Stone that found its way to the local drugstore and ice cream counter)..no, well, nothing, really. My hometown's population at that time was between 1000-1500; there were about 300 kids total at my highschool, and 45 or so in my actual graduating class--and that included kids from all over the school district (roughly a 30-mile radius); and for the most part, everything we knew about the world outside in general, and popular culture in particular, came to us through television, or at least such programming as we could pick up with huge rooftop antennas. Getting cable TV for the first time in 1973, which basically allowed us to get clear signals from the regional broadcast stations, was truly a godsend--before that, we were lucky if we got one station from each of the three major networks--ABC, NBC and CBS--(yes, kids, Fox, the WB and UPN didn't exist back then) and much of the time, NBC, coming as it did from Plattsburg, NY, was still terribly snowy and was a poor third choice, usually avoided unless it was Sunday night and time for the Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom and The Wonderful World of Disney double bill. After the Coming of Cable, we not only had PBS (Sesame Street! The Electric Company! Zoom! Masterpiece Theater!), but Canadian programming from the English-language CBC (complete with a riff from "Free Man in Paris" used as the signoff music for the weekend news) and a French-language channel from Sherbrooke, Quebec that frequently featured soft-core smut late at night (something my brother discovered long before I did, damn it...).
I'm always amused, and sometimes exasperated, to listen to people who've never lived in a very small town natter on about how quiet and peaceful it must be, how comforting to know all your neighbors and have a real place in one's community, how much simpler and purer life must be away from the corrupting influences of the Big Bad Cities, and so on and so forth (something Red Staters and Republicans are especially prone to)....yeah, riiiiiiight. Ever read a book called Peyton Place, folks? You know, came out in the mid-50s and scandalized everyone with describing just how many and what particular kinds of bugs would come crawling out from beneath when that metaphorical rock was flipped over? Well, Peyton Place the novel (and town) was most likely based on Gilmanton, New Hampshire (and considering the crap Grace Metalious put up with for the rest of her life, it must have been a pretty damn accurate portrait), but my hometown is namechecked in the book as a place known for its "loose women", and you could and doubtless can still find the same kinds of people there as in the fictitious town. (For the record, Grace was a tad bit late to the dance when she wrote about women of easy virtue in my hometown; during the 19th and early 20th centuries, when there was still logging traffic on the Connecticut River and the town was a major railroad hub in the area, there was quite a thriving red-light district down near the river, and even into the 1920s and '30, decent women tended not to go too far downtown alone after dark lest they be accosted by drunken railroad men. By the time the novel was published in the mid-'50s, however, those days were long past, and my mother says that the gullible men who actually came crusing through after reading the novel were severely disappointed.) I'm telling you right now, people: small-town life is only picturesque and romantic and charming when you have the option to actually leave and make a life somewhere else; otherwise, you get all the petty, backbiting, gossipy aspects of life combined with utterly crushing social and cultural isolation, and it's NOT pretty.
Slight aside (get used to it, folks, 'cause I'll be doing it a lot): Since one of the main themes behind this blog is my life and times as a music fan/snarky pop-culture commentator, one of the people/bands I'll be talking about the most is Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails (and, as every good Ninnie knows after buying Pretty Hate Machine, Trent IS Nine Inch Nails ;-) ); and discovering that Trent and I shared similarly isolated childhoods is one factor that's drawn me especially close to the man and his music. When I read interviews where he describes growing up with a cornfield in his back yard and the McDonald's opening being the biggest thing to happen to Mercer, Pennsylvania in 20 years, I have to laugh, because he could be just as easily be talking about my hometown in New Hampshire. As if growing up in the boonies wasn't enough, my dad's been a frustrated farmer my entire life, and every summer we always had a good-sized garden behind the house, complete with small cornfield (you may laugh, but I've been spoiled for life by homegrown, freshly-picked corn on the cob), and another garden at a lot elsewhere in town; and yes, my town getting a Mickey D's--long after I grew up and moved away, mind you--really was one of the biggest things to happen in many, many years, especially after an elderly lady coming out of the supermarket parking lot across the street lost control and drove through the front window, injuring several people and causing one of the line cooks to have to leap onto the grill to get away, thus burning his hands fairly badly...but I digress. When he talks about how TV was his only real window on the outside world, and how everything interesting and exciting and real seemed to be happening in a whole different world, out there somewhere that he couldn't get to, far beyond the confines of Podunk, USA, and being the smart, geeky, non-jock who never fit in and wanted desperately to get away from the whole narrow-minded small town attitude and actually see the whole wide world for himself...well, I understand all too well, because I've been there and done that myself, and it's oddly comforting to know that I'm not the only member of my generation who's not only had many of the same experiences, but who had and has a similar attitude towards them. (One of us! One of us!)
Anyway, back to my musical epiphany:
It was Christmas vacation 1974, I was in 8th grade, and my mom had just gotten a large, fancy-schmancy multiband radio for Christmas, which meant that I could now freely claim her old ivory plastic AM radio for myself. I'm still not sure what led me to do this (serendipity or karma, perhaps?), but one evening I ended up alone in my room, turned on the radio, and started twiddling the dial until I landed on something that sounded interesting. It was WABC, 770 AM out of New York City, and the first song I remember hearing on it was the Three Degrees' "When Will I See You Again"--granted, it was just another R&B song of the time, but to me it was new and different from anything I'd heard on the AM station we always listened to at home (WDEV in Waterbury, Vermont, for what it's worth), and I kept on listening and listening and listening, late into the night, and the next night, and the one after that. Not long after, I flipped a little further back down the AM dial and discovered WRKO 680 AM out of Boston, which didn't mix quite as much R&B into their top 40 playlist as WABC did, but was still pretty damn good, and sometimes even had a stronger signal at night as well, and started dividing my listening time between the two stations. Eventually, as tends to happen, my mom's new radio eventually found its way into my room, and I was able to check out both the AM and FM bands, and find new stations with new music; and some of the bands on all of these radio stations would sometimes end up on American Bandstand, where I would be surprised and fascinated to see the real people behind the songs. (For some totally inexplicable reason, when "Mandy" first came out, I thought Barry Manilow was actually black, and was more than a little startled to see that he was just a blond white guy with a big old nose...yes, I really was that clueless as an adolescent.)
By the time February vacation rolled around, I was quite the Top 40 junkie, and when my friend Bonnie and her mom invited me along on one of their occasional shopping trips out of town, in the comparatively big "city" of Barre, Vermont, I jumped at the chance to add to my music collection. Mind you, I'd bought albums in the past--I was a huge John Denver fan in 7th grade for some odd reason (probably the glasses and the sense of humor), and thanks to another friend, Laurie, had already discovered Elton John and the Carpenters; I'm still not sure how I stumbled on Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark, but I bought it some time in 1974, and it's not only the only album from that period in my life that I still listen to regularly, but has only gotten better over the last 30 years--but this time, in addition to an album or two, I wanted to get some actual 45-RPM singles, and I did: Elton John's "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", Olivia Newton-John's "Have You Ever Been Mellow", Neil Sedaka's "Laughter in the Rain" (he'd been recently signed to Rocket Records, Elton John's vanity label) and Helen Reddy's "Angie Baby"--if you're familiar with that last one, then you'll realize that my liking it was more than a tad creepy (as is the song), but it wasn't the idea of trapping some random boy to use as a plaything via the power of the radio waves that caught my ear, but the sense that, in a weird way, I was that off-kilter girl, alone with the music. (I hadn't even thought of that latter song for years, until just after 9/11, when I saw Jim Infantino's band Jim's Big Ego playing at the late lamented 608 club, with Faith Soloway opening up...it was a very strange night anyway, complete with tea lights on the stage, and ended after the most cathartic version of Jim's "Porno Plot" I've ever heard him do; but Faith and her band actually covered "Angie Baby". I knew it was a creepy song anyway--talk about a weird one to have in the top 40--but it really hit just HOW fucking creepy it was that night. BTW, go check Jim out atwww.bigego.com sometime--he's the only person I know who can and will do a respectable acoustic cover of "Down In It"--and google Faith Soloway while you're at it--Jesus Has Two Mommies is truly not to be missed.)
Admittedly, my musical taste at the time was horrifyingly middlebrow, but it took a number of years and various friends and roommates to really expand my musical horizons (special props to my college friend Angie, the only girl in Plymouth, NH to have bright fuschia hair in 1983 and the reason I ended up actually having a friendly civilized conversation with GG Allin--but that's a story for another day--and my roommate Ann, who got me into R.E.M. and the Violent Femmes, thus being indirectly responsible for my moving to Athens, GA 5 years later), and we all have to start somewhere, right?
There was nothin' happening at all
Every time she puts on the radio
There was nothin' goin' down at all, not at all
Then, one fine mornin', she puts on a New York station
You know, she couldn't believe what she heard at all
She started shakin' to that fine, fine music
You know, her life was saved by rock'n'roll
OK, so it's not 100% accurate, inasmuch as: (1) my name isn't Jenny; (2) I was 13 years old, not 5; and (3) we couldn't pick up New York AM stations before 6 P.M. or so where I grew up; but the gist of it's the same, and if I'm going to invoke anyone for my own personal mythology, then the Velvet Underground is an excellent place to start....that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. :-)
I know it's a total cliche to bitch about the younger generation as one gets older, but I really don't think most kids today, even those growing up in my podunk hometown, have any idea just how isolated we truly were in northern New Hampshire during the 1960s and '70s--no internet, no MTV, no interstate, no malls, no Top 40 radio, no record stores, no fast food, no music magazines (except for the rare issue of Rolling Stone that found its way to the local drugstore and ice cream counter)..no, well, nothing, really. My hometown's population at that time was between 1000-1500; there were about 300 kids total at my highschool, and 45 or so in my actual graduating class--and that included kids from all over the school district (roughly a 30-mile radius); and for the most part, everything we knew about the world outside in general, and popular culture in particular, came to us through television, or at least such programming as we could pick up with huge rooftop antennas. Getting cable TV for the first time in 1973, which basically allowed us to get clear signals from the regional broadcast stations, was truly a godsend--before that, we were lucky if we got one station from each of the three major networks--ABC, NBC and CBS--(yes, kids, Fox, the WB and UPN didn't exist back then) and much of the time, NBC, coming as it did from Plattsburg, NY, was still terribly snowy and was a poor third choice, usually avoided unless it was Sunday night and time for the Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom and The Wonderful World of Disney double bill. After the Coming of Cable, we not only had PBS (Sesame Street! The Electric Company! Zoom! Masterpiece Theater!), but Canadian programming from the English-language CBC (complete with a riff from "Free Man in Paris" used as the signoff music for the weekend news) and a French-language channel from Sherbrooke, Quebec that frequently featured soft-core smut late at night (something my brother discovered long before I did, damn it...).
I'm always amused, and sometimes exasperated, to listen to people who've never lived in a very small town natter on about how quiet and peaceful it must be, how comforting to know all your neighbors and have a real place in one's community, how much simpler and purer life must be away from the corrupting influences of the Big Bad Cities, and so on and so forth (something Red Staters and Republicans are especially prone to)....yeah, riiiiiiight. Ever read a book called Peyton Place, folks? You know, came out in the mid-50s and scandalized everyone with describing just how many and what particular kinds of bugs would come crawling out from beneath when that metaphorical rock was flipped over? Well, Peyton Place the novel (and town) was most likely based on Gilmanton, New Hampshire (and considering the crap Grace Metalious put up with for the rest of her life, it must have been a pretty damn accurate portrait), but my hometown is namechecked in the book as a place known for its "loose women", and you could and doubtless can still find the same kinds of people there as in the fictitious town. (For the record, Grace was a tad bit late to the dance when she wrote about women of easy virtue in my hometown; during the 19th and early 20th centuries, when there was still logging traffic on the Connecticut River and the town was a major railroad hub in the area, there was quite a thriving red-light district down near the river, and even into the 1920s and '30, decent women tended not to go too far downtown alone after dark lest they be accosted by drunken railroad men. By the time the novel was published in the mid-'50s, however, those days were long past, and my mother says that the gullible men who actually came crusing through after reading the novel were severely disappointed.) I'm telling you right now, people: small-town life is only picturesque and romantic and charming when you have the option to actually leave and make a life somewhere else; otherwise, you get all the petty, backbiting, gossipy aspects of life combined with utterly crushing social and cultural isolation, and it's NOT pretty.
Slight aside (get used to it, folks, 'cause I'll be doing it a lot): Since one of the main themes behind this blog is my life and times as a music fan/snarky pop-culture commentator, one of the people/bands I'll be talking about the most is Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails (and, as every good Ninnie knows after buying Pretty Hate Machine, Trent IS Nine Inch Nails ;-) ); and discovering that Trent and I shared similarly isolated childhoods is one factor that's drawn me especially close to the man and his music. When I read interviews where he describes growing up with a cornfield in his back yard and the McDonald's opening being the biggest thing to happen to Mercer, Pennsylvania in 20 years, I have to laugh, because he could be just as easily be talking about my hometown in New Hampshire. As if growing up in the boonies wasn't enough, my dad's been a frustrated farmer my entire life, and every summer we always had a good-sized garden behind the house, complete with small cornfield (you may laugh, but I've been spoiled for life by homegrown, freshly-picked corn on the cob), and another garden at a lot elsewhere in town; and yes, my town getting a Mickey D's--long after I grew up and moved away, mind you--really was one of the biggest things to happen in many, many years, especially after an elderly lady coming out of the supermarket parking lot across the street lost control and drove through the front window, injuring several people and causing one of the line cooks to have to leap onto the grill to get away, thus burning his hands fairly badly...but I digress. When he talks about how TV was his only real window on the outside world, and how everything interesting and exciting and real seemed to be happening in a whole different world, out there somewhere that he couldn't get to, far beyond the confines of Podunk, USA, and being the smart, geeky, non-jock who never fit in and wanted desperately to get away from the whole narrow-minded small town attitude and actually see the whole wide world for himself...well, I understand all too well, because I've been there and done that myself, and it's oddly comforting to know that I'm not the only member of my generation who's not only had many of the same experiences, but who had and has a similar attitude towards them. (One of us! One of us!)
Anyway, back to my musical epiphany:
It was Christmas vacation 1974, I was in 8th grade, and my mom had just gotten a large, fancy-schmancy multiband radio for Christmas, which meant that I could now freely claim her old ivory plastic AM radio for myself. I'm still not sure what led me to do this (serendipity or karma, perhaps?), but one evening I ended up alone in my room, turned on the radio, and started twiddling the dial until I landed on something that sounded interesting. It was WABC, 770 AM out of New York City, and the first song I remember hearing on it was the Three Degrees' "When Will I See You Again"--granted, it was just another R&B song of the time, but to me it was new and different from anything I'd heard on the AM station we always listened to at home (WDEV in Waterbury, Vermont, for what it's worth), and I kept on listening and listening and listening, late into the night, and the next night, and the one after that. Not long after, I flipped a little further back down the AM dial and discovered WRKO 680 AM out of Boston, which didn't mix quite as much R&B into their top 40 playlist as WABC did, but was still pretty damn good, and sometimes even had a stronger signal at night as well, and started dividing my listening time between the two stations. Eventually, as tends to happen, my mom's new radio eventually found its way into my room, and I was able to check out both the AM and FM bands, and find new stations with new music; and some of the bands on all of these radio stations would sometimes end up on American Bandstand, where I would be surprised and fascinated to see the real people behind the songs. (For some totally inexplicable reason, when "Mandy" first came out, I thought Barry Manilow was actually black, and was more than a little startled to see that he was just a blond white guy with a big old nose...yes, I really was that clueless as an adolescent.)
By the time February vacation rolled around, I was quite the Top 40 junkie, and when my friend Bonnie and her mom invited me along on one of their occasional shopping trips out of town, in the comparatively big "city" of Barre, Vermont, I jumped at the chance to add to my music collection. Mind you, I'd bought albums in the past--I was a huge John Denver fan in 7th grade for some odd reason (probably the glasses and the sense of humor), and thanks to another friend, Laurie, had already discovered Elton John and the Carpenters; I'm still not sure how I stumbled on Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark, but I bought it some time in 1974, and it's not only the only album from that period in my life that I still listen to regularly, but has only gotten better over the last 30 years--but this time, in addition to an album or two, I wanted to get some actual 45-RPM singles, and I did: Elton John's "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", Olivia Newton-John's "Have You Ever Been Mellow", Neil Sedaka's "Laughter in the Rain" (he'd been recently signed to Rocket Records, Elton John's vanity label) and Helen Reddy's "Angie Baby"--if you're familiar with that last one, then you'll realize that my liking it was more than a tad creepy (as is the song), but it wasn't the idea of trapping some random boy to use as a plaything via the power of the radio waves that caught my ear, but the sense that, in a weird way, I was that off-kilter girl, alone with the music. (I hadn't even thought of that latter song for years, until just after 9/11, when I saw Jim Infantino's band Jim's Big Ego playing at the late lamented 608 club, with Faith Soloway opening up...it was a very strange night anyway, complete with tea lights on the stage, and ended after the most cathartic version of Jim's "Porno Plot" I've ever heard him do; but Faith and her band actually covered "Angie Baby". I knew it was a creepy song anyway--talk about a weird one to have in the top 40--but it really hit just HOW fucking creepy it was that night. BTW, go check Jim out at
Admittedly, my musical taste at the time was horrifyingly middlebrow, but it took a number of years and various friends and roommates to really expand my musical horizons (special props to my college friend Angie, the only girl in Plymouth, NH to have bright fuschia hair in 1983 and the reason I ended up actually having a friendly civilized conversation with GG Allin--but that's a story for another day--and my roommate Ann, who got me into R.E.M. and the Violent Femmes, thus being indirectly responsible for my moving to Athens, GA 5 years later), and we all have to start somewhere, right?
Sunday, March 20, 2005
It had to start somewhere...
I've been meaning for a number of years now to get off my lazy duff and start writing up my various (mis)adventures as a music fan, not to mention blathering on at length about, well, just about anything else that comes to mind; but sitting down and actually trying to write a--*gasp*--BOOK isn't really working, it occurred to me that perhaps blogging would be a good way to test the waters and see if there's even an audience (outside my circle of friends and net acquaintances) for my blather. (I should know better than to try to get this off the ground on the first full day of a Mercury Retrograde, but since it's been mentally in the works for quite some time, perhaps it qualifies as "unfinished business" that needs to be cleaned up, and which Mercury Rx is just perfect for...at least, I hope so. Yes, I do believe in astrology to a degree, so consider yourselves warned.)
So here I sit in front of my trusty iMac, wearing the ratty old schmatte I thrown on for hair-coloring fun and games, rubber gloves (which make typing a bitch when your fingers are too short to fill out the gloves' fingers), and way too much Lush Caca Brun henna cooking away on my head (another obsession y'all should be aware of--Mark Constantine owes me a bronzed shopping basket for my efforts in keeping the Boston Lush store in the black)...perhaps not the most auspicious start to what I hope will be an entertaining literary venture for both myself and any readers I might have, but hey, it's a start...
So here I sit in front of my trusty iMac, wearing the ratty old schmatte I thrown on for hair-coloring fun and games, rubber gloves (which make typing a bitch when your fingers are too short to fill out the gloves' fingers), and way too much Lush Caca Brun henna cooking away on my head (another obsession y'all should be aware of--Mark Constantine owes me a bronzed shopping basket for my efforts in keeping the Boston Lush store in the black)...perhaps not the most auspicious start to what I hope will be an entertaining literary venture for both myself and any readers I might have, but hey, it's a start...
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