Now I’m not saying that every post from now on is going to be about wedding planning. Because with the amount of low-key-ness that I’m attempting to enforce on the gathering the shindig will probably just take place in a dark, empty storage facility.
But I have been taking the initial steps to plan, and I haven’t had much on my brain to write about… Unfortunately the day job lifestyle has made creativity crammed into after school hours and my life updates are more like show plugs:
My band plays at the Electrical Audio BBQ on Friday after one band member got back from Europe and before another band member goes on tour in the fall. We will be playing Schubas on September 11th before the hiatus. Insert whatever “never forget” joke you need in order to not forget.
Other than that, the crochet bug has taken over my body and I am forcing baby blankets on friends who are expecting.
It’s biking season in between monsoons.
We’re looking at another venue on Sunday and I’d love to be floored and convinced and won over.
I need some artistic fuel, so I’m off to get my face rocked off at a 4 day rock fest. So in between rock shows and the theater fundraiser on Saturday and the best friends’ birthday gathering and puppy sitting, hopefully life will give me a rain check for creativity.
Here are ways to pooch a sister’s MBA Graduation or a father’s 62nd birthday celebration:
Stage a taco toss
Resurrect the archives of Howdy Doody’s classic racial humor bloopers
Start speaking only in phrases quoted in Chumbawumba songs
Screen your movie mash-up combining “Real Genius” and “The Diary of Anne Frank”
Be Michelle Obama
Convince the neighboring table to join your Fart Party, USA, brah
Usurp the neighboring table and claim it for Fart Party, USA
Get engaged
Now someone please find me a blog to be paid to write for as I figure out how to plan a wedding. Seriously, I saw “Julie and Julia” so I know that writing about yourself is lucrative and fame-inducing.
All pooching aside, I’m very happy about this husband of the future.
Please join us on May 15th for The New Colony’s web launch party. We will be announcing the upcoming madness for our third season and launching our beautiful new website for your eyeballs to peruse.
Sat on bench. Bench smelled like homeless. Got off of bench. Stood near bench. Felt silly standing by bench and not sitting on it. Moved three feet away from bench.
I lived there from age 3 to age 8. We had a mom, dad, baby sis, and a sap tree in the backyard. Cotton tree, really, but the sap stuck on the wooden porch so much that your bare feet couldn’t come in the house without first picking off the leech-like buds that dropped from the branches.
We had a tree house that was on the ground. You’d just call it a tree house, even if it wasn’t technically a house in the trees. Sure, you can call it a playhouse, but the default misspeak seemed to always exit your mouth first. Maybe I wanted one of those more, but the damn sappy cotton wood tree was too occupied with soiling the soles of my feet to bother with housing a good time in its timbers.
Virginia had cicadas. Choruses of bugs every summer. Epic life battles of love and death were sung from sun up to set. It was sonically abrasive and every night when the window was opened eventually your ringing ears couldn’t tell the difference between insect hum and summer’s silence. I was fascinated by the damn things. Bugs that lived in the ground. Then they came out of the ground. Then they shed and left their skeletons and become different bugs?! Who were these cicadas?
I was about 5 or 6. I’d see these empty molds of these bug-eyed beings resting peacefully on the cotton tree. Frozen shells of a past life. Nature’s graffiti that seemed to say, “Cicada wuz here.”
One day, by our tree house that some would call a play house, I saw a one of these cicadas actually abandoning his exoskeleton before my eyes and entering his new stage in life. Shedding his skin, shedding his past dirt world, he struggled and slowly emerged a vibrant green, a completely new entity.
My sister and I, too young to fully appreciate the miracle in front of us, watched mesmerized as mother nature spit something beautiful and kinda gross out onto the wooden plank.
We called our father over to look at this spectacle slowly emerging, tired and new.
We watched for a bit… Waiting for this miracle to be finished… It took too long. Why wasn’t this creature coming out of its past-life tomb faster? We had Sesame Street to watch or something. We were busy kids with very important things to do. We didn’t have time to wait for this bug to be ready to be a new bug any more.
I don’t know why we decided what we decided, but it was a family decision.
This miracle of life, this display of rebirth, this struggle of nature…
For some reason it became necessary to feed it to our pet gerbils.
I mean, this shedding process too took long. The bug didn’t come out of it’s damn shell fast enough for a 6 year-old’s attention span.
Papa plucked the bug out of it’s shell.
The tired insect had no choice but to go along with its awful fate. Seven years it had waited to burrow out from beneath the earth. Seven years, and some fucking toddlers, some impatient tiny screechy humans who’ve been alive for less time than the insect itself, decided this fragile process was taking too long. They screamed enough to convince their father that this bug would be better off in a bloody colosseum amidst two rodents.
Not more than three minutes into this world, the cicada was dropped six inches into an aquarium where two furry creatures, the insect was devoured by two fury beasts no bigger than a shot glass.
We had no concept of death, or life for that matter. It was just all technicolor imagery dancing before us with no consequences.
Now, I enjoy each summer when the cicadas blanket the evening’s airwaves. I’m sorry I didn’t originally know about the cicada’s arduous journey, otherwise I would have been more appreciative and patient… less murderous. If there was a plague of locusts once, the 6 year-old me subconsciously sought revenge. Now, I just let the bugs be.
If you can peel yourself away from past BSG netflix’d episode — which I cannot, so I completely understand, but I appreciate your support and rejection of the DVD lifestyle — my band The Nurse Novels is playing Cal’s Liquors on May 8th at 10:00PM.
South Loop on a Saturday Night. Brag about it to your friends.
The internet sometimes is the best source of birth control.
Goddamn Chatroulette. Invented by a seventeen year-old, dicks galore, friends from other countries decked out in hoodies and internet courage*. I feel like I’m rubbernecking after passing by a horrible accident.
Other than the boil “zit” lancing video, I have maybe 4-5 images burned into my mind permanently due to the internet. If you’re not already familiar with the ones I’m mentioning, good. You don’t need to be. Don’t research them. There’s absolutely no need. You will lead a perfectly normal, healthy existence, and probably can still be sarcastically morbid with these images NOT IMPRINTED IN YOUR BRAIN.
Motorcycle Face Accident Dude – Courtesy of Rotten dot Com. Dude’s Face + Motorcycle Accident = Lack of Face displayed on Internet Site
Japanese Shit Volcano Shower Girl – Courtesy of “Takes All Kinds” Sexuality. Shower + Upside Down Japanese Girl + Jesus Help Us That’s a Lot of Diahearra Spewing Vertically Out of Her Asshole = Questioning Humanity’s Pleasure-Issuing Synapses
“Goatse” — Courtesy of “The Body Sure Can Stretch” Philosophy. Ever wonder what the inside of your body looks like, say, if you decided to check it out via your anus? This man did. If you need a giggle, go check out the delightfully clinical Wikipedia description of the “Internet Shock Site.” If you need to make sure your gag reflex is working, just Google the word. Takes “spread ‘em” to a whole new level.
Anyway.
Yesterday, since I slept in until 10:30 in the morning, I apparently had the ability to stay up ALL THROUGH TIME and could not sleep at all. The thought crossed my mind to visit Chatroulette to pass the time. Honestly, I felt weird about it. Like, it was the equivalent of drinking alone. It was okay to do it with friends, but if you are on the site on your own you had a problem. Then I realized I do drink alone, was drinking alone, and should address those issues another day… Okay, fine, I’ll go on Chatroulette.
After school special advice whooshed through my head as I signed on: Do not trust anyone, at any point you can be recorded (AKA wear a disguise of awesome Batman proportions), curb your reactions so as not to be the victim of a screen capture or YouTube montage.
Be prepared. You will be harassed, sexually or otherwise, by signing onto Chatroulette. It’s a damn wild concept–hell, maybe it’s Youth overreacting to their elementary school music teacher friending them on Facebook– but I’m sure within a year’s time, The Dicks are going to ruin it for the rest of us. Literal dicks. Dick after damn dick after damn dick. Porn is no longer a Hustler mag in a garage, it’s a random 4 second flaccid French dude’s Freedom Fry on a computer screen. But whatever, your 14 year-old is going to see a lot of dicks on this so-called information superhighway, so make sure you talk to them about the appropriate sites they’re allowed to visit at their sleepovers. Otherwise they’re going to see dick parades. Then the cycle continues and those teens will be dicks and ask girls to show their boobs like the assholes they were destined to be.
So, these kids are born with internet courage:
*Internet Courage. (noun) - Fearlessness and conviction that one is correct and protected within the boundaries of cyberspace. One with internet courage has complete disregard towards anyone’s feelings, and gravitates towards unwarranted attacks. Stems from desensitization, fueled by the culture of the 2 second attention span and watching episodes of “Family Guy” and the misunderstanding that hurt feelings can be mended with the abbreviations “lol” and “jk”. Often times someone afflicted with Internet Courage will use all capitalization or long strings of unnecessary punctuation.
There’s no fight or flight anymore, just fight. Which finally brings me to my point. I’m a little terrified by today’s youth. I think I saw a 13 year-old’s taint on Chatroulette and frankly I’m having a hard time dealing with it. Even typing that sentence made shudder again.
Like I said, the goal (my goal) of Chatroulette is to either be with a posse of complete goofballs who can’t be hurt by anyone’s hatred, or to be completely unphased by the dick n’ ball nature of this weird world. On the screen pops two young kids who see me, a girl on the screen. A perfect opportunity to test the boundaries of courage and young dickitudedness.
“Ah ha!” they say to themselves. ”A woman! Let us show her our chest so that she might show us the same!”
After typing, “MILF,” to woo me, they corrected it to the flattering term, “GILF,” and Kiddo #1 proceeded to show his own underdeveloped tits to the computer screen as a demonstration of what I do in return. Being 90 years older than them, I didn’t do much to encourage them, but their own flailing was contagious between the two. Kiddo #2 takes this opportunity to moon me, his sphincter begging for a reaction. His friend bounces with his shirt nearly off, and I don’t do much but half-grin at the spectacle.
I’ve been mooned before, and I’m sure I’ve even mooned someone myself. But there’s mooning from a safe distance, and then there’s accidentally misunderstanding how much a web cam can capture the chiaroscuro one’s back door. ”Welcome to Chatroulette, Me.” Here I was sitting on my couch, in dumb sunglasses and a hat, my cat snoring next to me, and there is some English kid’s unknowing asshole winking at me on my screen. And that is the #5 image that is now burned in my brain thanks to the internet.
I continued to half-grin at the two pre-rapists. I would not give them the reaction that they wanted. It worked. Normally the receiver of this poop-shoot salute would click out of the room and the kids would start over, because there’s only so long one can jump around with an ass or two in the air before running out of things to do with a butt. So they may have won and actually gotten a subliminal reaction out of me, but at least I had to make them click out of the room after they eventually felt weird being pantless in front of their friend and a stranger on the internet. Hooray for me being creepy…?
It’s catharsis, writing about this immature cyber-bullying. It’s also a reason to double up on birth control. I don’t want to breed an asshole who shows his asshole. Then again, it’s also hard to not want to suit up in a dumb wig and sunglasses and log on to the damn site again right now for another freak show before bed time.
I write you this at a dark time. Netflix didn’t deliver what they promised and your baby Derrick piddled on my favorite tennis shoes. He’s here staring at me with those damn beady eyes. I don’t know why you insist in keeping a ferret. It’s meant to be worn as a necklace not kept as some foppish guard rat. So anyway, not only was I in a state because of that, but once I sat down to awful reruns of “According to Jim” while you were off at your “night classes,” I realized that I have not one friend. No posse. No buddies or pals.
I was just sitting there in your robe with the clicker in my hand. I realized you were the only one I have and everyone else thinks something else of me. That’s a very sobering thought. Or, it would have been if I wasn’t as blitzed as I was.
Now darling, please don’t hold this against me, as I admit that I am weak right now and this fact would break anyone’s heart if they weren’t as strong as I am. I’m like a python. A very handsome python. With a wallet. And pockets for said wallet.
But why bother, right? Who else will appreciate my routine as much as I do? If they don’t like “Fawlty Towers” and key parties, who needs them? Just kidding, darling. No one has ever taken up my offer for a key party no matter how hard I try, and you’re the only one who will admit to liking John Cleese.
It would be so much easier if my parents hadn’t adopted a second child and instead gave me a real brother. How am I supposed to relate to someone who grew up for the first six months of his life in an orphanage? There’s just something that connects two people together when they squirt out the same birth canal. No orphanage can provide that type of bond. But orphans can’t help it. It’s the diet of gruel and singing while mopping with brushes strapped to their feet. They’re doomed from the beginning. An amazing pseudo-brother like me can only help the little tike so much.
I just want to know when this happened. I think I used to have friends, didn’t I? A whole lot of them, really. They would all gather to drink swill with me and march me around on their shoulders. We’d go to Vegas and have adventures, great ones at that. We blacked out due to accidentally ingesting rohypnol on the roof of our hotel… Then we found Mike Tyson’s tiger in our room… And my friend lost a tooth, but we made it back for the wedding in time… And the car we wrecked, it was okay that we wrecked it because it was actually a wedding gift… We gave back a baby too. Oh, those guys. We had some good times.
But where are they now? What about my personality has driven everyone away? I find myself wondering if I’m just a sad sod of a sack nowadays. Have people made up their mind about me and I can’t get it back? That’s enough to drive a man to drink if he hadn’t drinked all the booze in the house already. That reminds me, dear. I drank your Zima thinking it was tooth paste, so you’ll have to pick up some more on the way home. Why don’t people like me anymore?
I’ll ask you not to remind me of this tomorrow, as I’m sure these feelings will pass. I am comfortable in my skin, who I was, (awesome), who I’ve become, (probably more awesomer), and what jerks the company I used to hold have also become (opposite awesomest). What’s that phrase, “It’s not you, it’s me”? I agree 100% with that statement if say, you were saying that to me, and then replacing “me” with them, so we could just say, “It’s them, not me.” And I would agree with you agreeing with me about them. I sincerely believe that you are right to support me, Maria, no matter how much the “Thems” of the world dispute it. If it’s not me, then it must be them, right? Or you, I guess.
I’m glad I could express to you these feelings. If I’ve fallen asleep on the couch, please don’t wake me and just keep my side of the bed warm, darling.
And with the closing of one show, we begin another immediately.
That Sordid Little Story opens on July 8th at The Viaduct Theater. I’ll be a part of the live band, writing some good old-fashioned folky tunes.
We had a showcase of some songs n’ scenes we’ve been workshopping over the past three weeks at the Chicago Cultural Center last night. I’m addicted to this dang ditty. Take a look and listen:
Watched some men’s wrestling on ESPN while at the gym.
It was either that or “Half Baked.” Wrestling won. It’s surprisingly easy to watch and it drowns out the sound of your knees screaming, “Fuck you!” It’s also pretty easy to feel like you’re getting away with watching pornography while running on the treadmill.
Dudes in spandex writhing on the ground. Cute Iowan farm boys with butts and thighs that were sculpted from will power and a need to prove something to his parents.
“Look at me, Dad,” he says with fire in his eyes. “I am strong. I am worth something. I am more important to you than your dairy cows.”
Dad takes a vacant swig from his Coors and stares at his muscular child, now nearly a man, seeking his approval.
“Bessy is strong, too. Bessy brings in more money than you do, son. Bessy don’t waste time rollin’ around on no mat with another faggoty-ass cow, now does she, boy? Now get a job or get a wife, but get out from under my roof.”
Then the boy screams something like, oh, I don’t know, “I DON’T WANT YOUR LIFE!” and pins his dad in a choke hold. His father gasps for air and taps the floor for mercy as the boy’s angry tears stream down his cheeks. He releases his father’s neck just in time, and they both sit on the floor breathing heavily until the silence overwhelms them both. Then Hollywoods gives me moneys and I win.
(Actually, the kids who were wrestling instantly bounded up into the crowd to tackle their parents with hugs after a victory with such energy, it just made you want to have a litter of wrestling babies.)
Back to the fact that I was watching hot dudes touch each other. I kept looking around to see if anyone else was seeing this hot spectacle on the flat screen, but everyone there was mesmerized by March Madness activities. I wanted to scream, “Kiss! Kiss!” hoping my pleas would spark the men’s lips to touch. I wanted to clink glasses and see some man on man action. Show me my homoerotic pornography on ESPN while I’m running at the gym, goddammit! Make the outrageously expensive monthly dues fucking worth it! America wants its gay porn!
I eventually changed the channel. It was all hot and sexy until the winner was interviewed about what was going through his mind.
“I was just asking God to give me the strength to win…”
Snore… Jesus really kills your gay porn boner, I tell you what.
I was about 5 or 6. I’d see these empty molds of these bug-eyed beings resting peacefully on the cotton tree. Frozen shells of a past life. Nature’s graffiti that seemed to say, “Cicada wuz here.”
Dudes in spandex writhing on the ground. Cute Iowan farm boys with butts and thighs that were sculpted from will power and a need to prove something to his parents.