The Typing Makes Me Sound Busy

Kicking, Screaming, Etc.

2010-04-06T21:01:00.002-04:00

First, I'm alive. My limbs are still attached, my obituary is still a half-finished Word document¹ and I'm still here, subsisting largely on the kind of cellophane-wrapped mistakes that can only be purchased in the shittiest of Exxon stations.

So why haven't I been writing? That's the thing: I've been doing nothing but writing since I somehow managed to score a couple of ongoing projects, both locally and nationally.² If my hands had been on any of my exes as long as they've hovered over my Mac's home keys, I'd probably need to own more than one pillow case.

But because I'm made entirely of distrac--BANANA IS MY FAVORITE COLOR! I WONDER WHAT A COELACANTH SMELLS LIKE? MY BRAIN ITCHES!--tions it's been admittedly difficult for me to focus even three Timex ticks past my deadlines. And lately my life hasn't been made of much other than typing, editing, conducting the occasional interview and hoping I won't ever develop Ellen Degeneres-style neck skin. I did take a break this morning to liberally baste myself with alpha-hydroxy products, because I never want to use the folds of my face as a change purse.

"So is it all about the Benjamins, baby?" you may be asking, because in my head you all talk like Puff Daddy. That's part of my enduring frustration; despite the increased time spent rearranging san-serif formatted sentences, it doesn't seem to be helping my financial status. When I checked my balance earlier today, my account was largely composed of dust, bits of string, and the canned laughter of the BB& T staff when I asked whether I could use a complete set of 1987 Topps cards to pay back my credit line.³

Finally, despite my near overdose on personal issues and annoyances, I sincerely thank everyone for their concern, for the emails and Facebook messages that asked where the hell I'd been hiding and whether or not I was still on the right side of the earth's crust. I owe it to you guys--the ones who have been reading this site for the past five years, three jobs and four former boyfriends--to keep this up.

But wait! There's more! Here are the last few things I've done for NBC Sports - Out of Bounds. Since February, I've covered why I didn't sleep with Wilt Chamberlain; what the NCAA tournament has in common with Cher; why the WNBA is dangerously close to becoming a state fair sideshow; how Lionel Ritchie wrecked my NCAA bracket (though I didn't know it at the time); why ESPN broadcaster Tony Kornheiser is a Douche Lord; and--just last week--the fact that it is possible to strike out at tee-ball.

And finally, let's talk about Robyn Hitchcock. Most of you know that I'm a lyric-spewing, tattered t-shirt wearing, double-decade fan of his music and that last summer, my life was pretty much made when I had the chance to interview him.

It got better.

Last month, I re-interviewed him for his website--at his request. Read that sentence again and ask yourself whether my shrieks of delight were audible from outside our own galaxy.⁴ We largely focused on his just-released album, Propellor Time, but also talked about everything from love to death to why the universe may turn out to be a jelly-filled donut. The entire process was well past stellar and--as always--he couldn't have been more engaging or more insightful with his answers. You can read the entire interview here.

So, yeah. I'm back. Thanks again, you guys. High fives and prolonged eye contact all around.

¹ In the event of my demise--probably in some Cakesters-related mishap--I want Monty Python's "Dead Parrot" sketch to serve as my memorial, obviously replacing any references to the Norwegian Blue with my first and middle name.
² And by "nationally", I mean that I'm invoicing someone who lives far enough away that we don't bump into each other in the ant trap aisle at Target.
³ I don't like to brag, but I made a solid four-figure salary last year. Things were so insanely awful in '09 that my accountant called over the weekend just to verify that I'd actually worked for all twelve months.
⁴ Yes. They were.

Figure Hating

2010-02-23T10:35:00.003-05:00

"I studied theatre in college and took enough of the required classes -- things like "Stage Makeup", "Advanced Stage Makeup" and "We Get It, You Can Paint Your Face to Look Like a Bluebird" -- to wrap up my major halfway through my senior year. For my final semester, I loaded my schedule with a number of brain-busters that involved eyeliner and emoting but was still one credit short of the minimum requirement. I flipped to the Physical Education section of the course catalog, which was like a cruise ship's activity guide, offering everything from Bowling to Tennis to -- yes! -- Figure Skating.

Figure Skating sounded like the perfect introduction to the starched white-collar life I hoped would be waiting for me on the other side of graduation, one that involved cloth napkins and roasted pheasant and other things I probably should've considered before majoring in Theater. So I signed up for the class, a twice-a-week commitment to tiered skirts and twisted ankles.

We were supposed to meet the instructors at our local ice rink and I should've known it was a bad sign when I couldn't even make it inside before sprawling face-down on the partially-frozen sidewalk. I was already limping when I took my first tentative steps onto the ice, but still knew I was going to be a natural. I had grace. I had balance. And I had ice chips lodged in my personal areas before I'd even made it halfway around the rink."

Last week on NBC Sports-Out of Bounds, I had the chance to recap another of my failures, my sad, short-lived attempt at learning how to figure skate.

You can read the whole story here. How many of you can say that your senior year involved feverishly clutching an elderly woman's arm and trying not to cry? You know what, don't answer that.

P.S.

2010-02-11T22:12:00.005-05:00

Wow, I had no idea that everyone apparently majored in Dog Feeding, which sounds infinitely more valuable than my own Theatre degree. Thank you guys for all of the tips and suggestions after yesterday's post. Several people told me that I should take the Boxerbeast's food and mix it with pureed pumpkin, which is one of the few canned goods I actually keep on hand.¹ No, really.

Unfortunately it didn't work, although he seemed to enjoy spitting the orange-hued mixture onto the floor, tongue bathing the wood as he tried to lick up every harvest-flavored splotch. Since he continued to scatter--and ignore--the LifeSource® bits, I'll be trying one of the other approaches tomorrow, right after my wracking sobs stop. Also I may be giving up a dog for Lent.²

¹ I make a protein shake with pumpkin, because I like to refuel my muscles after a workout and also I enjoy stomach cramps. For those of you who might be interested, get your blender (or register for one if you're getting married soon and your sister might be looking for a present in the $15-$20 range) and add one cup of skim milk, 1/2 cup of pureed pumpkin, 1/2 cup Butter Pecan ice cream, and one scoop of Vanilla protein powder.³ Toss in a few frozen cubes, mash the button and pretend it tastes delicious, right before dumping most of it into the sink and eating the rest of the Butter Pecan ice cream.

² As opposed to my usual Lenten sacrifice when I claim I'm going to give up celibacy. You'd think that would work as a pickup line but it never does. This Ash Wednesday, though, I'm going to try to make it out of the church before I point this out to any eligible-looking, possibly madras-wearing gentleman. I just assumed that people would be more chatty in the communion line since it's not like there's anything else to do as we endure our interminably slow two-step toward the priest.

³ I dig Designer Whey protein. Every brand tastes like ground up cow bones, but this has a hint of real vanilla flavor layered within the Nastiness.

Crunch & Munch

2010-02-10T11:06:00.003-05:00

Four.

It's not even noon and I've already vacuumed four times, not counting the Dirt Devil's victory lap around the bar stools after it sucked up the final nugget of dog food. Pigpen the Boxerbeast is on a new diet, one suggested by his veterinarian that costs more per bowl than any of the freezer-burn flavored fish I'll extract from a battered cardboard box and deposit into my own digestive system.

The good news is that he loves each expensive scoop of food that comes out of the forty pound bag that currently slumps in the corner of the kitchen. Well, he likes most of it. It's Blue Buffalo kibble, their bison-shaped logo constantly reminding me that it probably would've been more cost-efficient to raise, slaughter and serve up an actual buffalo, and it definitely wouldn't be any harder to store. Anyway, Blue Buffalo garnishes their food with dark brown pellets they call LifeSource® bits, an unsettingly named addition that makes me think that my dog is actually consuming the souls of other dogs.

Or he would if he didn't spit them all out.

When Pigpen eats, he buries his face in the dish, scooping up an oversized mouthful before turning to deposit it all on the rug to his right. Then he sifts through it, scarfing the pieces not made of ~~DogSouls®~~ LifeSource® before doing it again until the floor has been covered with a trail of pellets that make it look like I'm setting a trap for PacMan.

My options are to either leave my kitchen boobytrapped like Kevin McAllister's MicroMachine covered bedroom--and inevitably end up splayed on the floor watching as shards of my femur go skittering across the room--or to vacuum. Again.

So my question is whether any of you have ever faced (and hopefully fixed) a problem like this. Can you change the way a dog eats or is that embedded in his genetic code like his floppy ears or willingness to impregnate the throw pillows? I can't spend my entire day emptying LifeSource® bits into the trash can, not when there are other, less productive ways to procrastinate.

Unfortunately since I have enough LifeSource® to feed the Forsyth County school system, switching to a new brand isn't an option. I can't afford it and I don't know what I'd do with this oversized bag of Blue Buffalo, other than burrow inside it for warmth after I use all of my spare cash to purchase another vacuum cleaner. So one of us is gonna have to eat that shit--OUT OF THEIR BOWL--and I'm not sure it goes with fish sticks.

Your move, Pigpen.

A Flat Chest & A Fake ID

2010-02-05T12:31:00.004-05:00

As for the Super Bowl, let's ignore the teams and look at the cities they're representing in Miami. I've never had the pleasure of visiting Indianapolis, but I've heard that it's the prettiest shade of grey. I have introduced myself to New Orleans on a couple of occasions and regardless of how bright eyed and well-rested I am when I get there, I always leave looking like a less hepatitis-y Amy Winehouse.

When I was in college, some friends and I made an obligatory Mardi Gras trip, where we learned about the rich traditions of the Lenten season, the jazz-infused history of the French Quarter and also that Winn-Dixie shopping carts will comfortably seat two semi-conscious sophomores. Predictably, we spent our time subsisting on pastel-colored chunks of King Cake and drinking souvenir-sized Hurricanes, the only alcoholic beverage that can give you both a hangover and adult-onset diabetes.

This week for NBC Sports - Out of Bounds, I was supposed to pick a team for the Super Bowl. Instead, I covered my first trip to New Orleans, which included a failed attempt at wearing barrettes, zero Mardi Gras beads and a fake ID that probably would've been more effective if I hadn't tried to pass myself off as Asian.

I've only been to Louisiana one other time and that trip ended poorly as well. I should bang out that story over the weekend. I should also eat an entire King Cake, carefully trying to chomp around the plastic Christ child baked inside, because I'm pretty sure eating one of baby Jesus' arms will give you seven years of bad luck.

A Word From Our Sponsors

2010-02-03T22:03:00.008-05:00

1) I'm not sure how or why I ended up wedged between the sofa cushions like an errant Cheez-It long enough to watch CBS's Best Super Bowl Commercials of the Decade. For an excruciatingly long hour, host Jim Nantz tried his best to look lifelike as he introduced several CareerBuilder.com and Pedigree mealtime ads I'd forgotten about forgetting about. Halfway through the program, I started to feel sorry for the regular commercials that were stacked in the breaks between the hand-picked Best spots; every cheese-drenched Hardee's Thickburger or oddly-belted TJMaxx monstrosity just looked more terrible by comparison. This is probably what it feels like to be the kitchen staff at Hooters.

2) I did see an ad for McDonald's new Big Mac Wrap, which looks like what would happen if one of their burgers had sex with a Snuggie. Before their multicultural cast had finished biting and smiling, I was well conflicted, finding the idea of tortilla-swaddled beef chunks both repulsive and attractive, like the Sarah Jessica Parker of menu items.

BUT...I give it less than fourteen hours before I've emptied the silver coins from my cupholders into the outstretched hands of whatever unfortunate person punched in for the afternoon shift, leaning impatiently on the counter while I wait for a grease-soaked paper sack.

Bite. Smile. Weep. Repeat.

3) Have we all been so busy for the past several years that we somehow failed to notice that Luke Wilson killed and consumed the other two Wilson brothers?

Confidential to Luke Wilson: How are the Big Mac Wraps? Are there any left? Because I'm not going to change into my good sweatpants just for a sixer of McNuggets.

The Bob Seger Song Title Goes Here

2010-02-01T22:40:00.005-05:00

I'm a month into training for my own twenty-six (point two) mile crampfest -- Nashville's Country Music Marathon -- and I'm increasingly apprehensive as I cross each day off the calendar. Distance running isn't exactly a good time, since it often leads to blisters the size of Schnauzers or the kind of chafing that feels like you've gotten to second base with a belt sander.

It will be my fourth marathon and I'm still not sure why I'm putting myself through another Costco-sized serving of agony. Maybe I enjoy the sense of accomplishment that lingers long after the post-race ice bath. Or maybe I just enjoy exceeding the recommended dosage of ibuprofen.

Last week for NBC Sports- Out of Bounds, I chronicled--what else?--the chafe-tastic unpleasantness of marathon training. My editor suggested that I type a first-person account of something sports-related, so until eating off-brand fish sticks and consistently exceeding my credit limit become competitive events, I'm limited to writing about running.

Confidential to Chase Visa: Instead of the minimum payment this month, I'll be sending you half a bag of Skittles and a drawing of my saddest face.

Daily Double

2010-01-19T15:23:00.001-05:00

I spent a solid chunk of the weekend with my face buried in Douglas Coupland's Microserfs, a book that I snagged from the $3.99 post-Christmas clearance table at Borders. It's about a group of coders who abandon Microsoft for the greener, Lego-encrusted pastures of Palo Alto and their own startup company. It has aged remarkably well for a three-hundred pager that takes place at the dawn of the internet age and there's a voyeuristic part of me that enjoys anything written in Diary Style, except for Samuel Pepys because his journals are borderline-educational and rarely involve references to Velveeta cheese slices.

Anyway, Daniel--the narrator and Diary Master--introduces his flatmates and co-workers by listing their dream board of Jeopardy categories, the seven things that they would flat-out rock, leaving their buzzers smoking and the other contestants staring blankly into the audience, wishing they'd told that pre-commercial story about the time they held a koala.

I paused for a few minutes, the book hovering above my sofa-sprawled body, and decided that my perfect arrangement of Trebekery would be:

Semi-Obscure British Musicians
How to Breathe With a Mouth Full of Teddy Grahams
Sweatpant Lore
Where to Get Three Cases of Diet Coke for $10
Alienating Your Neighbors In One Elevator Ride
Disappointment
Microwaveable Meals

On Saturday, though, I absolutely found the Daily Double in the Disappointment category. I'm three weeks into my marathon training program, spending yet another winter avoiding sidewalk cracks and shin splits as I prepare to run 26.2 miles from Hopkinton to Boston. Last year [as a lot of you know] that race ended with my Achilles tendon on suicide watch and I spent the remaining eight months of the year trying to recover, attempting to keep my legs and lungs in shape with Spin classes and enough hours on the ass-enhancing Stairmaster to ensure that my butt now lives between my shoulder blades.

Anyway, the first 21 days of training have gone well--spectacularly, surprisingly so--but I was all kinds of apprehensive about Saturday's eleven mile run. Eleven miles would be the longest distance I'd covered since last April, and I was terrified that I'd end the morning either crumpled on the pavement in one of the nicer neighborhoods or ducking into the sketchy-ass Chevron on the verge of soiling myself. I just knew it was going to end poorly, possibly with pain and tears or swift, unyielding diarrhea. This is also the attitude I take into most of my relationships.

I told myself that if, by some chance, the run went well and didn't end with a trip to the ER or trying to surreptitiously discard a pair of stained spandex pants, I would come home and sign up for Boston. Registration opened in early September, but I was hesitant to enter my credit card number, partially because I hadn't fully healed and partially because the entry fees are close to $200. Spending that kind of money means switching to an even shittier brand of ramen noodles, the ones that are just broken shards from the other packages and instead of a seasoning packet, the directions suggest that you place your unwashed hands inside the cup while they cook.

Back to the run. It went well. Beyond my wildest Moody Blues-style dreams well. Most of the time, I kept my watch tucked underneath the edge of my mittens, stopping it only at intersections and not obsessively checking my pace at the driveways or box elders or dead squirrels that served as mile markers. When I finished, halfway through the crosswalk beside my building, I was shocked to see the numbers 1:25:38 on my watch, which came to an 7:47 pace. That's way faster than I expected to be at this point and I briefly wondered if putting my home-office in front of the microwave may have helped me grow a second set of lungs.

After a long shower that used every drop of hot water and gave me enough time to belt out several selections from Dire Straits' lesser-known albums (On Every Street, yo) I toweled off and headed toward the computer. Destination: The Boston Marathon. Within two seconds of staring at the Boston Athletic Association's website, my eyes fell to this headline:

Full.

The marathon is full and has been since mid-November. All 25,000 race numbers have been accounted for and I'm not going to be wearing one of them. This has never happened; I've never registered before January and my friends have routinely run Myrtle Beach in mid-February to qualify for Beantown in April. I was devastated. Heartbroken, even.

I didn't know whether to laugh--because this is just another offering to the Gods of Fail--or to bawl because none of it--the injury, the long-ass recovery, the 6:17 final mile I did to requalify for this year--none of it mattered.

So I did both, reveling in being bipolar for the rest of the afternoon.

And then I moved on, refusing to dwell on my inability to get another embroidered windbreaker that I'll never wear. I tried to find another race within the same time period so--instead of Boston--I'll be running Nashville's Country Music Marathon on April 24, a race that is entirely contained within Travis Tritt's beard.

Yes, I'm disappointed but I'm trying not to let it show. Perhaps the biggest entry in the Pro-Nashville category is that my sister's wedding is the Saturday before Boston Marathon Monday, so that meant I would've spent most of the day Sunday trying to get from rural West Virginia to Logan International Airport, a situation that probably would've only worked if I built a spaceship from a stack of charger plates and leftover silverware from the reception. Plus, at least now I can get hammered at the reception.

Confidential to My Mother: You may want to order another bottle of Absolut. Otherwise, I'm bringing a handle of Aristocrat and running it through your Brita filter.

Confidential to the Other Wedding Guests: I apologize in advance for the inappropriate touching.

So. Nashville it is. I'll see you in April and, eventually, I'll be one hundred percent delighted to weave through your downtown streets, leaving a set of adidas-branded footprints all over Toby Keith's face. [Mile 8, according to the course map].

Now I'll take "Microwavable Meals" for $800, Alex.

Christmas. With a Bullet.

2010-01-08T14:50:00.004-05:00

So Epiphany was this week, which is historically the day when people remove their Christmas decorations unless they're unspeakably lazy or unspeakably Southern. Where I live it's not uncommon to turn off the main road in the middle of the summer, your tires crunching on gravel as you notice a hard plastic baby Jesus sleeping peacefully beside a lawn chair and a box of Black Cat fireworks.

I spent Wednesday afternoon removing the lights from my living room windows, chugging the remaining holiday-themed cans of Diet Coke and wondering whether poinsettias were recyclable. The fact that I unholiday-ed my house on a Catholic feast day was purely coincidence and not out of tradition, since the only feast days I actively recognize fall during All You Can Eat Pancake Week at IHOP. Anyway, since Christmas is officially over, it's past time for me to recap my own holiday, one already relegated to soft-focus memories and the fruitcake chunks that still cling to the folds of my colon.

I drove home to West Virginia on Christmas Eve, where I was greeted with 70 mph winds and intermittent blackouts. Regardless of our stockpiled flashlights and space heaters and Sour Patch Kids (my contribution to the emergency kit) we still cursed and muttered every time the microwave clock went dark, since my parents live in the kind of rural area where Google Maps just shrugs and shows a blank grey screen. A long power outage would've meant we'd be either emptying the refrigerators into the snow--in the hopes the rib roast and baby carrots would remain frozen--or we'd all be sitting under the tree swapping food-borne illnesses.

Fortunately, the lights always came back on. Unfortunately, the ice-encrusted weather forecast kept my sister confined to her new house, which brushes against Cleveland's more-photogenic side. It was the first time she and I had been separated for Christmas, the first time we wouldn't wake up and wriggle into our new matching pajamas before we'd try to embarrass each other in front of our parents by giving each other the most squirm-worthy gifts possible.

Last year, she was delighted when I untied a ribbon and peeled back the wrapping paper to discover a box of industrial strength douches, the kind that could also be used to pressure-wash your vinyl siding. This year instead of tearing into the pubic lice treatment kit I'd purchased for her, she was stuck in a neighboring state getting text-by-text accounts of everything happening in the living room.

The morning got off to a perfect start, unfolding just as Norman Rockwell would've sketched it, assuming he would've ignored my hubcap-sized pores and didn't draw in the squiggly stink lines radiating from the dog's mouth, which always smells like a mix of Beggin' Strips and rotting skin. The other details were magazine-spread perfect, from the handmade stockings to the carefully arranged packages to the flickering evergreen-scented candles, the ones that helped us all pretend that the tree hadn't spent the summer months in a cardboard box behind the weed killer and wood varnish.

CONFIDENTIAL TO MY MOTHER: Really, the tree was beautiful. I'm just being descriptive for these people who weren't sitting on the sofa with us. Yes, I'm sure they would've taken their shoes off before stepping on the rug and no, none of them would've stolen the hand towels.

I quickly tore through my entire stack of packages, scraps of wrapping paper fluttering slowly to the carpet and bits of tape clinging to my forearms. Christmas morning is always the most frenzied thirty seconds of my calendar year, not counting the two or three times I have sex. With another person.

I was already thumbing through my new 2010 running log and upending the last of the eggnog-flavored creamer into my coffee mug when my mother began unwrapping the ribbons on her first gift, a small rectangular box. She pulled the paper open and gave an audible gasp.

"Bullets?!" she asked, incredulous. "BULLETS?"

She turned her head toward my uncle, since his name was inked on the 'From' section of the tag. He grinned. She opened the carton and held it up for us to see before quickly dropping the box on the coffee table. The metal pieces clinked against each other as they landed, Christmas quickly transitioning from a Capra flick to Full Metal Jacket.

Mom reached for another identically-papered package and if you see where this is going, you terrify me. You may also be familiar with the finer points of restraining orders. She dug into the wrappings and found--yes!--the gun that matched the ammo. She gingerly opened the top of its hard plastic case and immediately recoiled like she'd been given either an incinerated housecat or one of my senior prom pictures.

She gathered herself, re-opening the box and pulling the gun out of the soft foam surrounding it. It was a snubnose .38 revolver, I later learned, and immediately iPhoned a picture of it to my sister. She called me within seconds, shrieking.

"OUR MOM IS PACKING HEAT? WHAT THE FUCK?!"

"No shit," I said, both of us rubbing profanity all over the floor.

"This will not end well," she said, no doubt punctuating the sentence with a shake of her head. "She's gonna be all 'GIVE ME MY ANN TAYLOR DISCOUNT! I HAVE A GUN'"

"SHUT UP AND POINT ME TOWARD THE PETITE DEPARTMENT!" I shouted back.

"GET ON THE FLOOR AND SHOW ME THE CASUAL KNIT SEPARATES!"

Our mother--still holding a firearm--turned to me and shouted loud enough for my sister to hear through the earpiece "I KEPT THE RECEIPTS FOR ALL OF YOUR PRESENTS."

"And she's got a gun."

We hung up.

There's something off-the-charts unsettling about seeing your mother holding a handgun, even if she's wearing an appliqued Christmas sweatshirt and calmly sipping from a coffee mug with the Cascade-faded logo from our elementary school. I stared at her, briefly feeling like John Connor in Terminator 2 right after his mom started open-firing. Then I wondered at what point she'd drop her biscotti and start doing pullups.

"Open the next one," my uncle encouraged. "It's a purse holster."

"Way to ruin the surprise," I sniped, secretly relieved he hadn't hidden some surface-to-air missiles or a rocket launcher or a well-sedated hostage beneath the Happy Feet wrapping paper.

My uncle is an interesting guy, if you consider people who give weapons as gifts to be interesting. He lives on the western edge of an entirely different southern state, one where the residents tend to be familiar with Skoal rings and GEDs and fishing with dynamite. He's a borderline survivalist, the kind of person I thought only lived on the Discovery Channel or in Eddie Bauer ads. We've never quite established what he does for a living, since he goes off the radar for months at a time, most likely making a nest for himself in some rarely-traveled national park, living on rhododendron leaves and his own fingernail clippings.

"You need to get started too," he said, pointing a finger at my dad.

Dad did as he was told and grabbed the box on the floor closest to his foot, running his fingers underneath the edges of the paper.

"Bullets," he said.

He reached for another box with identical wrappings when I grabbed my new pajama pants, my brand new running shoes and a stack of biscotti and quietly slipped out of the room.

This Will Be Our Year

2010-01-05T23:59:00.003-05:00

Well hello, 2010. We're five days in and you still have that new year smell. Things are going well so far, save for this morning's inexplicable four a.m. nosebleed which was quite possibly the worst thing you can wake up with, save for an empty bottle of tequila and an unconscious Wilford Brimley.

I kicked off twenty-ten in the Outer Banks with two of my closest friends; the kind of friends you can share a sofa with for four consecutive days without wanting to shove each other into another room; the kind of friends who are cool with you sending the same tortilla chip into the salsa for the third time; the kind of friends who don't mind if the last morning show has rolled its credits and you still haven't brushed your teeth. In other words: guys.

We did a lot of nothing--partially because that was the point of getting out of town and partially because the biting wind and sub-twenties temperatures made you sympathize with every Eggo waffle you'd ever abandoned in the back of your freezer--but it was a perfect kind of nothing. My great aunt used to say that the way your New Year's Day unfolded was the way the rest of your year would go. You know, if you were happy, you'd be happy all year and all that. I like to think that her beliefs hold true, that this is going to be a year of comfortable relationships, of easy laughter and big dreams, and of heavily processed food.

On the other hand, she also thought that Liberace was straight and that Pomeranians could smell cancer, so she may not have been the most credible narrator.
__________

Since last week meant the final pages of my day planner--which was barely used, save for a few scribbled notations about upcoming haircuts and Law & Order marathons--I felt obligated to stop by Borders to pick up a new one. Since we're five days into the year, everything had been discounted 50%, so the selection was limited to a stack of well-handled Twilight calendars or a page-a-day celebration of the steelhead trout.

I decided that instead I'd make a resolution to start using the calendar on my computer or on the Google or something else that doesn't require touching paper or developing a deep appreciation for freshwater fish. This is worth noting, because I rarely make resolutions and if I do, they're things that are borderline unattainable, like Become New York Times Best-Selling Author or Develop Own Line of Skincare Products for QVC or Don't Eat Peanut Butter With Your Hands. If I'm going to fail, I like to fail in a big, big way.

Last year, I kicked tradition aside and made an attempt at making myself better. I thought that typing out a list of goals would help me work toward them, but instead they became the first entry in a journal I abandoned after approximately six and a half days. Anyway, I thought I'd lovingly cut and paste them here, a set of gently-used suggestions for improving my life that I fully intend to recycle and revisit in another three hundred sixty-something days.

You should write more. Otherwise, how are you going to win the internet?

I didn't win the internet in 2009--in Monopoly parlance, I'm probably loitering on Oriental Avenue--but I did do a lot of writing. Some of it was even exchanged for cashier's checks that were immediately thrown into my bank account, each deposit no-doubt making an audibly hollow sound, like dropping the pull tab into an otherwise empty Diet Coke can.

Last year wasn't one that paid particularly well, but it absolutely paid off. I made some invaluable connections and some equally incredible friends. I covered a pair of music festivals as credentialed press and collected more concert ticket stubs and hand stamps than any time in my life. I interviewed my favorite musician¹ and caught shows by my two next faves.² I have a recurring gig that allows me to make Tiger Woods jokes beneath the NBC logo and get to share my always eclectic, mostly English music recommendations with the unsuspecting. 2009 didn't give me much to tell my accountant about, but it always gave me a reason to get out of bed.

¹Robyn Hitchcock. Duh.
² Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello. Oh, and Morrissey. Twice.

Is it a resolution or a goal to say I’d like to break 3:15 in the Boston Marathon?

First, I like how my resolutions were phrased in the form of a question. Next, we all know how that ended: with an Achilles tendon that mutinied at the eleven mile mark, another fifteen miles with my face twisted into a pained grimace like I was trying to pass a threshing machine through my birth canal, and a finishing time of 3:40:59.

But I finished and that's probably more important. Or something.

Stop wasting as much time. Really. You’ll be better for it if you don’t spend your afternoons looking at pictures of cats on the internet.

This may have been the biggest bust of all of them. Granted, "pictures of cats" should be replaced with "downloading out-of-print pub rock albums" but still, I surrendered an unforgivable amount of hours to my RoadRunner high speed. This is the one I'll be working on the most. Right after I try to find that last LP that Ian Gomm recorded.

Save money. Don’t charge random shit to your credit card. No more t-shirts. That last one’s for real. You don’t need another damn t-shirt.

Oh, resolution, you were a mega-fail from the time I typed the first imperative sentence. Because I'm self-employed in the feast-or-ramen freelance writing business, credit cards are a huge part of my life. That overhandled Visa in my wallet covers necessities like luncheon meat and string cheese but the downside is that--thanks to my card's approximately 59.99% APR--I'll be paying for this box of store-brand tampons until long after my uterus has bricked itself shut.

And yes, I bought more t-shirts.

Take more pictures. You’re not going to remember this stuff forever.

I didn't take enough pictures. No matter how many I take, there will never be enough to fill in the gaps in my memory of all of the Technicolor good times I like to think I had. One day, I'll wish I had more, of everything from last weekend to this summer to my next Christmas. One day, I'll want to remember how young I was and to forget that I didn't appreciate it and I'd like to have enough snaps on enough memory cards to do just that. This one will move near the top of 2010's list, right before "Teach dog to use guest room toilet" and "Disinfect guest room toilet if expecting actual guests".

Try harder.

That's what I'm doing, kids.
That's what I'm doing.

Tiger Woods & Some Other Stuff

2009-12-30T22:33:00.005-05:00

Obviously, Tiger and his Value-Pack of Mistresses are the biggest sports story of 2009, if not one of the biggest stories, period. A friend and I argued about this over lunch yesterday, half-chewed fries falling out of my mouth as I insisted that Tiger's wood had to be the biggest deal, because it quickly moved from the sports page to the front page, lingering there long enough for everyone -- even those who couldn't name another golfer if Phil Mickelson was gnawing on their left leg -- to understand what's happening, whether they wanted to or not.

Even the most elderly of my elderly neighbors, the one who stopped caring about pop culture shortly after Patsy Cline died, had heard enough to suggest that Tiger should've "kept it in his trousers", shaking her head as she pressed the elevator button with the tip of her cane.

This week for NBC Sports - Out of Bounds, I recapped the ~~purported whereabouts of Tiger Woods' nether regions~~ year in sporting events, because that's what writers do in that week-long time trough between unwrapping Christmas gifts and crumpling the last page of the calendar.

I sincerely hope that article was the last time I have to write the phrase "Alleged Mistress" in 2009. I mean, other than when I'm ordering my new business cards because "Alleged Mistress" is only slightly less embarrassing than "Full-Time Blogger".

Preheat Oven to 375

2009-12-22T22:48:00.004-05:00

It shouldn't come as a surprise that as this year circles the drain, I'm left with the smallest bank account balance I've had in a solid decade. I haven't seen those kinds of numbers since my most reliable babysitting client erased me from their speed dial, after an unfortunate incident involving food poisoning and a trip to Prime Care. Whatever, like I'd know you weren't supposed to make sushi out of chicken.

Anyway, as I impatiently shifted my weight from one scuffed Chuck to the other in the Harris Teeter checkout line last week, the cover of one of the women's magazines caught my eye. It had a cake that was more attractive than my prom pictures and a garish overstyled font that eagerly encouraged me to bake my own Christmas gifts this year. "What a great idea!" I thought to myself, as I dropped a can of Manwich sauce. "Because what says I care more than giving someone a plate of misshapen cookies and the enduring gift of diarrhea?"

I added the magazine to my stack of trans-fats and since then, I've been experimenting with holiday cooking in all of its forms, from baking to roasting to standing over the sink shoveling forkfuls of soggy tiramisu into my mouth.

No, this has not gone well.

I'm not sure that deciding to experiment in the kitchen was a better idea than having a sudden urge to explore body modification, since my last attempts at seasonal treats ended with a shrieking smoke alarm and tear-streaked cheeks as I pried the oven open and scraped yet another charred corpse off a cookie sheet. As the ash-encrusted pan clattered against the others in the trash bag, I more than considered using some of the sharper kitchen utensils to fork my own tongue or maybe to carve myself a forehead trench.

Last weekend, when our seven inch Snowpocalypse kept me confined to the square footage behind my front door, I decided to make a Gingerbread Cake with Blueberry Sauce, because I actually had the ingredients on hand and it required neither a mixer, a Cuisinart or any of the other appliances I won't own until I piece together a wedding registry, also known as Never.

The instructions and I were getting along fine until my eyes hit the imperative sentence "Fold in the blueberries." That was a verb tense that sent me toward my computer on the opposite side of the counter, pecking out the letters G-o-o-g-l-e as crumbs lodged themselves between the home keys and I streaked the track pad with molasses. After learning that "fold" was the chef-tastic way of saying "Dump everything into the bowl", that's what I did, dropping two cups of frozen berries into the almost edible-looking batter.

After stirring the just-fruited mixture, I realized that maybe the good people at Cooking Light left out a step, like the one that encouraged you to rinse the blueberries or Windex them or something before all this folding went down. It took maybe two swirls with a whisk before the batter turned from an appetizing golden brown to a sickly green, a hue I've only seen in nature one other time, right after the dog ate an entire box of Lucky Charms.

"Brown shade come back," I sang, wrecking Player's one hit. "Any kind of fool could see...there was something wrong with the fucking berries." I thought--hoped--that maybe baking it would make the gingerbread look like, you know, GINGERBREAD instead of a clove-scented sinus infection. I shoved the whole mess into the preheated oven, pacing back and forth in front of the counter like an anxious fiftysomething waiting for the results of their colonoscopy.

As the timer started blinking zeros, I crammed my hand into an oven mitt, slowly opened the door and...it still looked like something that belonged in a Biohazard bin. Even though it smelled amazing--like a Glade Plug-In you could eat--it still wasn't serve-able to anyone with eyes. I turned the cake out on to my best approximation of a wire rack--my tennis racquet (WHICH I RE-STRUNG BEFORE USING IT IN THE KITCHEN BECAUSE WHAT KIND OF SAVAGE DO YOU THINK I AM?) carefully balanced on David Foster Wallace hardcovers--and as it cooled, I started eating it myself in huge chunks. For the next five minutes, I was the first half of a Lifetime movie, before the inevitable purging-at-school sequence and awkward family intervention.

After the unfortunate realization that sometimes I sweat when I eat, I stopped decorating my molars with cake and carefully wrapped it in foil. I hate wasting food, so there had to be someone I could gift it to.

Someone I hate.

Someone who may have fired me because of that ONE time that their kids caught salmonella or had their stomachs pumped or something silly like that.
__________

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! Additional kitchen failures are coming, part of a recurring series I like to call "Maybe I Should've Just Bought A Stack of Burger King Gift Certificates Instead, Rather Than Trying to Make Everyone Sick On My Own."

Grasp Handles for Heart Rate

2009-12-18T10:27:00.006-05:00

"I'm just back from the grocery store and as I unloaded my Teddy Grahams and EZ Cheez and other assorted artificial flavors, I realized that by the time these hot dogs expire, it will be a brand new year. We're down to the last handfuls of Oh Nine and I'm both dreading and anticipating the opportunity to crack into 2010. On one hand, I'm looking forward to using my new Kurt Warner Fumble-A-Day Calendar. On the other, January means an endless parade of people bringing their New Years Resolutions into the gym, a solid month of watching helplessly as they awkwardly straddle the elliptical machines or snag the only yoga mat that doesn't smell like a dead raccoon.

I can't fault these people for trying to better themselves, especially when it comes to making healthy choices and positive lifestyle changes. In fact, I went through the same thing several Januarys ago when I came to the sad realization that I got winded trying to unclog the nozzle on my spray butter. Since then, I've worn out more than one YMCA membership card and continue to work out more often than I do anything other than quietly weep about my wasted potential."

--This week for NBC Sports - Out of Bounds, I covered some basic gym etiquette, geared at anyone who may be beginning a new routine as a New Year's resolution. It's also aimed at a handful of people who currently share the YMCA with me, especially the guy who last laundered his workout gear during the Carter administration and the woman who insists on baptizing herself with Designer Imposters perfume before plodding along on the treadmill.

First Class Mail

2009-12-16T17:22:00.004-05:00

So I posted my Christmas card here the other day and rarely has anything I've done generated the amount of emails that this unsettling Photoshop sent into my inbox. Half of you were curious if it was my real card and I assure you that it is, that my cousins--who I haven't seen since my days of spiral perms and Hammer pants --will be slipping that very picture out of an oversized green envelope. They'll either think that I'm delightful and that we should probably add each other to our respective Friends & Family Plans or it will just ensure that I'm never invited to their weddings. Or into their homes.

The other half of the emails were concerned that--since he didn't make the card--I was over my longstanding Hugh Laurie obsession, having discarded him like a decomposing carton of Thai takeout. I assure you that I'm still just as unhinged when it comes to Mr. Laurie but I wanted to slap a celebrity on my card that everyone would recognize, so they understood that it was obviously a joke and that they wouldn't mistakenly assume I'd developed a relationship with anyone other than the late Colonel Sanders and his new line of low-calorie, even lower taste chicken-and-potato plates.

Speaking of things that leave me doubled over with abdominal pain, this is the first year I've managed to address a card to my longest-tenured former boyfriend without smearing the ink with tears of bitterness or mouth froth of anger. Someone much smarter than me--which means anyone from Oprah to Uncle Jesse Katsopolis--said that as a general rule, it would take half the length of your relationship to fully recover from the end of said relationship. That means after three years of removing his name from the Emergency Contact form at my various doctors' offices, I should be totally over him. And I am, I finally, finally, FINALLY am. I didn't feel any pain or longing or...anything as I wrote his name on the envelope. This is also the first holiday season that I haven't asked Santa to bring his new girlfriend an anal fissure.

Look at me, growing up.

File Under: Greetings, Season's

2009-12-14T21:37:00.004-05:00

Oh hey, just hanging out by a stock photo of a Christmas tree with an unlicensed image of George Clooney. You know. Like I do.

While I waited for information on a couple of projects I'm working on, I spent a tremendous amount of time with my nose pressed against my MacBook, rearranging the pixels beneath my chin and trying to give myself a skin tone that wasn't the color of cottage cheese while designing this, my Christmas card for Oh Nine.

It's actually been a busy couple of days here, stacked with actual work and--surprisingly--a very cool local project that has a price tag affixed to it. Most times when I say I'm busy, that just means that I'm spending the afternoon trying to make all of my arm hairs face the same direction...but not today. Obviously, I've been slowly adjusting to my [brief] return to Real Work like a diver coming up from the deepest trenches of the ocean, although an ocean littered with unwashed bowls of Boo Berry, a light dusting of dog hair and endless online distractions.

"Like what?" you might ask.

"Like this copy of Bridget Jones' Diary I just had to seek out and download yesterday," I'd say. "No, I have no idea why I suddenly needed to administer a massive dose of floppy haired Englishmen and poorly rendered British accents. But I did."

Here's where you'll just shake your head and make that disappointed sound most people make when they either look at my resume or see me naked. Bridget Jones and I spent yesterday afternoon on the elliptical machine together and, as Renee Zellweger turned her impossibly shriveled eyes in my direction, I realized that if I saw anyone else watching this particular R-rated ovary-party, I would without a doubt make fun of them. And then I would blog about it.

Anyway, I thought I would tear myself away from doing legitimate, grown-up sounding Google searches (as opposed to my daily check for animals dressed as people) to paste my tastefully lit Photoshopped fantasies on the internet. If I had endless amounts of money--enough to backstroke through a vault of gold coins like Scrooge McDuck or Oprah--I would mail a copy to each of you. Until then, right click, save as, and know that I've given you the gift that keeps on giving: the gift of procrastination.

You're welcome. Happy holidays.

One Mississippi, Two Mississippi

2009-12-10T23:21:00.007-05:00

Despite having fewer on-field scenes than Air Bud: Golden Receiver, The Blind Side still works for hardcore sports fans; football serves as the motivating factor for almost every decision [Michael] Oher and his adoptive family make. Also, College Gameday junkies will have the chance to lean across the armrest to point out that Tommy Tuberville doesn't coach at Auburn anymore and that yes, Lou Holtz really does talk like that.

Both the book and the movie open with the last snap of former Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann's career, which proved to be the sound of his leg splintering beneath Giants linebacker Lawrence Taylor. The footage from that game--shown from multiple angles--is still the second-most disturbing clip of 1985, right behind Cocoon's scene of a shirtless Wilford Brimley. A clipped voiceover explains how this play changed football and--here's some foreshadowing for you--put a premium on left tackles, the players who protected the quarterback's blind side.

--From my article about The Blind Side, written today for NBC Sports- Out of Bounds.

Click here for the rest of it, including the unlikely pairing of the words "Sandra Bullock" and "football" in the same sentence, which is kind of like linking "Matthew McConaughey" and "fully-clothed".

Four Fun Facts That Didn't Make the Review:

1) Lawrence Taylor actually makes a brief cameo near the end of the flick, as a bandanna-wearing miscreant in the Hurt Village apartment where Michael waits for his mother.

2) If this movie is to be believed, every high school in Tennessee apparently has a contract with Under Armour.

3) If Sandra Bullock is to be believed, if Michael Oher's speed had ever dropped below 50 MPH, he would've exploded.

4) If the filmmakers are to be believed, there is no better way to establish the Whiteness of a family than by having Uncle Kracker playing softly through the speakers of their SUV as they idle in the parking lot of an upscale restaurant.

It Keeps You Running

2009-12-08T23:36:00.003-05:00

Thirty-five dollars.

Last Friday, I paid thirty-five dollars for a Hanes Beefy T in a sleeve-draggingly huge men's size, one screenprinted with an anthropomorphized running reindeer whose back was arched in a way that suggested either rapid motion or a recent spinal injury. I was staring at the drawing, trying to understand how something without hands could lace a pair of sneakers when the smiley face on the other side of the table tapped his pen to get my attention.

"So that's Julie, is it?" he asked, inking the wrong vowels onto my race number.

"Jelisa, actually."

I knew what was coming. He didn't disappoint.

"All right, Jelisa Actually," he said with a wink. "How old are we, Jelisa Actually?"

He winked and asked my age within a two second span. Add a plate full of beets and a reference to sleeping with my ex and he'd be a denim-clad version of everything I hate.

"We would be thirty." I grabbed a handful of safety pins from a small cardboard box beside a stack of race entry forms, wondering how many I could ingest before he finished ballpointing a three and a zero beside my name.

"All righty then," he said, dropping the number into a plastic bag along with four pins and the excess yards of fabric that comprised my t-shirt. "That's gonna be thirty five big ones."

I pulled a wadded personal check out of my back pocket and took the pen from him before he could dot the i in my name with a heart. With that thirty five and 00/100 I passed across the table, I was officially registered for a 5K, my first race since my Achilles tendon broke up with me during April's Boston Marathon.

"You'd better have a good run, Jelisa Actually."

"And you'd better not cash that check for another week or so."
__________

When my alarm started bleating in the darkness of half-past fuck you on Saturday morning, it was a crisp thirty-five degrees and the local radar was blanketed with sickly splotches of green, like Linda Blair had just spewed all over Super Doppler 12.

As I stood at the window watching puddles collect on the sidewalks, I wondered what would happen if I bailed, if I threw my shoes back in the closet and dropped my head back onto the dent in the pillow.

But I didn't.

I'd like to say I was motivated by a Chariots of Fire-ish montage that flickered through my prefrontal cortex but it was really just seeing the Krispy Kreme logo on the back of the t-shirt. The thought of a post-race pair of original glazed donuts was enough to make me zip up my Gore-Tex and wriggle into a pair of spandex pants that were so tourniquet-tight that everyone on the race course would know that I was ovulating.
__________

I loitered inside the gym until the final announcement for the 5K runners to get their asses outside. The Star Spangled Banner was almost over before I made it to the start line, but that still left plenty of time for freezing cold water to collect in the thin soles of my racing flats, turning each sock into a Build Your Own Blister Playset.

"How bad can this be?" I asked myself between the words Ready! and Set!, which is the same attitude I take to every race, all buffet restaurants, and most Nicolas Cage movies. I popped my knuckles and mashed the play button on my iPod, giving my angriest Danzig-fueled snarl to the competitors stacked on my right, a group of third graders all wearing floppy felt elf hats.

With a GO! and one muffled shot from the starter's pistol, we were off. I spent the first verse of "Mother" weaving through the clump of people who insisted on starting at the front of the pack. Hey, here's a tip: if you're wearing cargo shorts and a rain-soaked Coors Light sweatshirt, you probably don't need to line up beside the regional cross-country champion.

The 5K [3.1 mile] course was essentially an out-and-back, with each steep hill matched eHarmony-style with a complementary downhill. About halfway up the first incline, it became obvious that my finish time was going to be almost as disappointing as my personal life. My first mile was a glacial 7:14, but I explained to my brain that we lost a lot of time trying to sidestep both people and puddles. Mile Two was a wretched 7:25, a more terrible sequel than anything this side of Three Men and a Little Lady.

Despite a final 1.1 miles that had two major downhills, the total damage was a dismal 22:50, more than two minutes--TWO MINUTES!!--slower than my typical 5K finish. The only crumb in the Plus category--if I'm even forced to recognize the Plus category--is that now at least I know how far I've fallen and how far I've got to go to get back in shape. This is probably how Lindsay Lohan feels when she sees clips from Herbie: Fully Loaded.

As I stomped and brooded my way through the finish area, a teenage volunteer in a yellow poncho handed me a finisher's ribbon decorated with that same cheerfully deformed cartoon reindeer. I crammed it into my pocket with my earbuds and car keys and trudged toward the parking lot. It was barely 9 a.m.

When I got home, I stripped out of my gear and tossed the entire Fail-scented mess into the washing machine, which was a great idea until the hot water ran out mid-shower, well before I finished crafting the perfect shampoo horn. After toweling off, brooding, slipping into the sexiest of sweatpants (the ones without ice cream stains on the thighs, obviously) and brooding again, the washer shrieked to announce that it was finished.

How delighted I was to discover that everything--including that $35 t-shirt--was stained with angry streaks of red, like Hester Prynne had exploded in my Maytag. After digging through a wet clump of synthetic fabrics, I realized that my finisher's ribbon--still buried in my jacket pocket--hadn't survived the spin cycle.

"The hits keep on coming," I thought to myself, pouring another cup of detergent into the machine. "But at least I beat the kids in the elf hats."

Well. Most of them, anyway.

Ohhhh Dream Weaver

2009-12-07T22:50:00.002-05:00

Somewhere between my regularly scheduled three a.m. pee break and the light dusting of Hall & Oates that the clock radio sprinkled into my ears ["Private Eyes" clap "They're watching you" clap clap], I shot a midget in the foot. I had no idea where or how I got the gun--or why I decided to go all Harry Callahan on his Topsiders--but I vividly remember watching him sprawl backwards onto a buffet table, landing squarely in a pile of uncooked, recently deveined shrimp.

I've never studied the subconscious. I'm sure I highlighted entire paragraphs of Freud-tastic facts in my freshman year Intro to Psych class, but those memories were all immediately corroded by my overlapping Intro to Off-Brand Vodka independent study. Either way, I believe that this particular sleep-matinee was my brain's way of reminding me not to eat Tylenol P.M. for dinner. Again.

Resting Heart Rate

2009-12-05T22:01:00.005-05:00

Three Things:

1) This photograph was taken ten minutes ago, but it actually could've been snapped at any time in the past eight hours. I was so unproductive today that Ferdinand Marcos called to tell me I was being a lazy bitch.

2) Yes, sometimes I spoon with my dog. For the majority of this year, my Facebook relationship status has been Single (save for a brief time when I clicked It's Complicated after eating an entire Pizza Hut P'Zone) so I often worry that I'm incapable of interacting with anything that doesn't require monthly heartworm treatment.

3) I need one of you to hand me the remote control.

I'm Still Standing

2009-12-04T14:27:00.003-05:00

Let's just ignore that I dug into Elton John's back catalog [not a euphemism] for a post title and instead talk about how November sped by and all I have to show for it are a pair of cranberry seeds permanently wedged between my molars and a Visa bill that made an audible thud when I dropped it on the counter.¹

Last week--Thanksgiving week--was another blur of Mapquest-ed directions and Exxon midgrade. On Wednesday, after baptizing myself with a steaming cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee, I made the 150 mile drive to my parents' house in West "Don't Make Us Conjure the Mothman" Virginia. After pausing to examine the mocha-scented stain on my shirt that gave Elvis Costello an unfortunate-looking birthmark, I quickly swapped my luggage out of my car and into my dad's truck so we could head toward my sister's brand new place on the outskirts of Cleveland.

The four of us--me, my adorable parents and their hateful little terrier--spent the next seven hours idling in traffic and offering a one-feathered hand turkey out the window to other drivers. Whoever said that getting there was half the fun obviously hasn't crept through countless two-buck toll booths on I-77 while holding an unpleasant animal who delighted in placing its terrible corpse-scented mouth as close to your own mouth as possible.

Confidential to My Parents: I know you adore that creature but for real, could you please pressure-wash its face before Christmas?

After we stumbled out onto my sister's driveway, leaving a trail of bottled spices and mismatched socks, everything improved by a brazillion percent. The rest of the holiday couldn't have been better and we all agreed that it may have been the best one on record, save for that time my grandmother sat on my cell phone and we spent the afternoon snickering at the muffled sounds of "Jack and Diane" leaking out of her nether-regions.

Anyway, between driving to Ohio and Delta-ing to Seattle, it seems like I spent the past thirty days unpacking and re-packing and wondering if I ever wear anything that isn't one hundred percent cotton. That's my way of saying that although it was double-stuffed with plans for my future and the kinds of memories that linger long after the turkey has been digested, it wasn't the most bloggable, possibly because I managed to get through an entire page of my Jonas Brothers calendar without fucking something up.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. Obviously, I'll do my best to stumble through December, leaving a trail of disaster and chaos and broken serving dishes. After all, it's good for this website.

Speaking of which, since I missed NaBloPoMo² because I was busily doing NegYoBloBecYoBusWatFliReAnEatAniCraMo³ instead, I'm committed to stapling something to the internet for the majority of December; from now through Christmas, I'll be writing a post per day. Also, on my Tumblr, I'm sharing one non-shitty holiday song every afternoon, a project that began with R.E.M.'s cover of Slade's "Merry Xmas Everybody". You're so very welcome.

Finally, I've had the privilege of contributing to Out of Bounds, a recently-launched NBC Sports blog. My latest piece is about Tiger Woods and his "transgressions", which I can only assume is a euphemism for "banging random chicks."

OK, see you guys again tomorrow. I'll be the one who smells like decaf coffee and regular strength calamity.

¹ Oddly enough, this is how pretty much every month ends.

² National Blog Post Month, an annual occurrence where people who suffer from chronic motivation write a blog post every day for an entire month. So yeah, it's not just a clever name.

³ Neglect Your Blog Because You're Busy Watching Flipper Reruns and Eating Animal Crackers Month. That's trademarked, of course.

Bottle of Red, Bottle of White

2009-11-16T07:26:00.007-05:00

Believe it or not, last night a friend invited me into his home for dinner, despite knowing that the conversation would be peppered with Psychedelic Furs lyrics and that I'd no doubt find some way to soil the furnishings. As I was debating which t-shirt to wear, I somehow shook loose some Emily Post-style etiquette from the deeper recesses of my brain and realized I should probably take something to thank him for his hospitality.

I called him an hour or so before I'd be apologizing for staining the tablecloth to ask what would best accompany the meal. "Just bring whatever you'd want to me to bring to your place," he told me, shouting over the sound of pots and silverware being dropped into the sink.

"Oh, awesome! So either a remote controlled dinosaur or Hugh Laurie, lightly drizzled with maple syrup," I said.

If it were possible to actually hear someone regretting your friendship, that was the sound that filled the space between my last sentence and the dial tone.

Instead of wondering whether he'd dig a mechanized T-Rex or a smaller but more maneuverable ankylosaurus, I stopped into the Fresh Market for a bottle of wine. I know nothing about wine, since the kinds I tend to purchase have a handle on top of the box so you can more easily lift it onto the sofa beside you or snuggle with it during particularly intense SVU episodes. I quickly scanned the dark, wooden shelves, ignoring anything with a domesticated animal on the label or with the kind of ornate curling fonts you see in funeral programs.

Several varieties were highlighted with clip art and neatly typed index cards, like an alcoholic elementary schooler's science fair project. They were also all on sale. As soon as I read the phrase "great with grilled seafood"--what I'd soon be furiously aiming at my open gob--I grabbed the neck of Some Kind of White with a San-Serif Typeface and carried it to the cashier.

There was only one lane open, staffed by a girl with a green apron who stifled a yawn as she traced the outline of one of the oversized dragonflies tattooed on her forearm. It was an interesting choice of ink, since her limbs looked less artsy or attractive and more like my windshield after a late-summer road trip.

I plunked the bottle on the conveyor belt and she lazily dragged it across the scanner before dropping it into a narrow paper bag. "I'm gonna need to see your ID," she said.

"Rad," I said, because I talk like that guy you hated in eighth grade. "You've just made my day." I pried my license out of my wallet and held it over the register.

"Oh, I know you're old enough. It's for the computer" she said, pecking my birth digits into the keyboard. "Because it can't see you."

"Um. Right." I was reeling, my pride immediately deflating, no doubt settling into the deep creases in my forehead or the trenches etched beside my eyes. "Hey can you hang on for one second?"

She shrugged.

"Be right back," I said, the untucked tail of my shirt flapping behind me. "I'm just going to grab another bottle. Or two."
__________

I'm finally back from my week of Seattle, of damp overcoats and Top Pot donuts. Although I didn't come home with a Career or a commitment to business-casual dress codes, I did have some reasonably swell news on the job front. I'm going to keep it quiet for now, lest all my good fortune get spooked, bolting into the underbrush where it will immediately be killed, skinned and eaten by a hunting party.

Anyway. It was well worth the trip, despite the shrieking infants on both cross-country flights, the ones whose endless, ossicle-shattering screeches kept me from truly enjoying the SkyMall catalog. More details about the trip--and my move--will follow, of course, and many thanks go out to the fine people of King County who were willing to talk with me, forward my resume or watch me try to eat enough brisket to fill a two-bedroom condominium.

Finally, if a restaurant names an entree after Elvis Presley, it's not a menu item you should order, taunt, or make eye contact with. Any food that pays tribute to a man whose heart exploded during an a particularly intense Poop Session will break you. And--perhaps fittingly--it will also break the plumbing fixtures of your $60-per-night hotel.

Confidential to the Belltown Inn: I'm so sorry.

Gather Up Your Jackets, Move It To the Exits

2009-11-02T10:25:00.004-05:00

There used to be a band called Semisonic--I say used to be because I'm reasonably sure all the members have long since started selling real estate or detachable gutters and doing things that don't require guitars. Their big, inescapable hit was called "Closing Time" and during my freshman year of college, it was the anthem that soundtracked countless second-semester drunkfests. (Confidential to My Mother: By "Drunkfests" I mean "Endless nights spent in the library studying, taking notes, and making good use of your tuition dollars." Obviously).

That song was always leaking out of the speakers at our favorite off-campus dinner joint, a Mexican place with cheap-ass enchiladas and a tacky hand-painted mural done by an artist that clearly didn't understand perspective drawing or homoeroticism. The ambiance was limited to a row of sombreros hanging over several of the tables--so you could park yourself in either the Stereotype or Non-Stereotype section--and overhead lights were dimmer than the waitstaff, who would accept any fresh-from-Kinko's fake ID even though you were clearly not thirty-seven, nor were you a black man.

At the end of the evening, the waiters would be lazily upending the wooden chairs onto the tables as we'd hold up our oversized margaritas and shout along with the chorus, "You don't have to go home/But you can't stay here." Then we'd shuffle off to the parking lot, hoping to make it back to campus before the floorboards of the DD's Ford Taurus were carpeted with thirty-six ounces of crushed ice and off-brand tequila.

It's a solid decade later and I'm still ordering Special #11--a quesadilla, an enchilada, and swift, unyielding diarrhea--at least once a month. The place is still popular with Wake Forest freshmen and I'll eye them jealously from my side of the vinyl booth, hating their popped collars and cell phone cameras and collagen.

A few weeks ago I was there for dinner, blotting the grease off a basket of tortilla chips and drinking for entirely different reasons when--as if David E. Kelley designed my life--that same Semisonic song trickled out of the speakers. And I decided they were right: I don't have to go home but I can't stay here.

So, readers who wonder where the hell all this cilantro-garnished exposition is going, I can't stay here. I'm planning a move across the country. It's not where you think--I won't be double-parking a UHaul in Los Angeles, nor burrowing into Hugh Laurie's laundry hamper--and it's sooner than you expect. I'd like to think I'll be unpacking my Elvis Costello t-shirts and reassembling my bookshelves before the end of the year, but realistically, it'll probably be January.

Where am I heading? Seattle. Yes, Seattle, with its indie rock and Starbucks oversaturation and perpetually wet socks. There are a number of reasons that it's [hopefully] the place for me, but none of them are entertaining and lots of them make me sound almost responsible, so we'll skip over that. Instead, let's talk about why I'm leaving. I've lived in North Carolina for a decade, counting college, and I have little to show for it other than a liberal arts degree and a few dents in my heart.

BUT my pair of years as a freelance writer have gone better than I could’ve ever expected, with the kinds of experiences that haven’t paid well but have definitely paid off--if that makes sense at all--and the highlights on my resume haven’t been from this region (or even this country) so I’m not losing anything but a ZIP code and a shitty neighbor fond of pre-dawn piano concerts by skipping out.

I've also grown increasingly tired of living in a town small enough that I'm constantly reminded of what I used to do or where I used to work or who I used to date until he decided it would be cool to leave me for a withered creature who looks like a Slim Jim with hair. I'm beyond ready to turn my attention to what I can do, what I will be, and what's waiting around the next turn, rather than continually adjusting my life's rearview mirror.

Or "Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end" as Semisonic sang. If you hear that sentiment when you're stabbing an undercooked bite of Grade-Z beef, it could make you think it's a sign you should re-evaluate your life. Or it could make you think of one Beginning shitting out another, smaller Beginning.

Either way, I'm packing my Gore-Tex and Scotchguarding my shoes and flying into the Sea-Tac airport on Saturday, staying for a week to apartment shop and meet with a handful of insanely helpful contacts and also to shove my resume in the face of the unsuspecting. If you're a media outlet in the greater Seattle area, prepare to be cold-called. Also, if anyone's willing to give a hand with this job search, I'd dig it like no other. Any advice, tips and tricks are all appreciated and will be met with a sloppy kiss to each of your foreheads.

Enjoy that basket of nachos, Seattle. I'll be staring at you from the far side of the non-smoking section soon enough.

Like a Good Neighbor

2009-10-27T10:40:00.003-04:00

My apartment building used to have so much promise. I remember when the realtor cheerfully pointed out the hardwood floors and the large windows before spending an inordinate amount of time on the stainless steel kitchen fixtures, as if I'd previously lived in a place without working faucets. Her hard sell on the running water worked, though. I signed a contract and for a while everything was as delightful as it looked in the brochure.

Then other people started living here.

After two years, the turnover rate is higher than at even the most dismal fast food establishments and I'd bet that Sonic's Senior Frito Crusher has been making Chili Cheese Wraps longer than anyone has been on my floor. Most of the original owners have long since U-Hauled out of here, renting their units to other people who have, in turn, rented them out to someone else, with each generation getting crankier, dirtier and more willing to somehow triple-park their Tinkerbell-stickered Mini Coopers.

Or even to own a Tinkerbell-stickered Mini Cooper.

The current property managers are the second in a series of increasingly unconcerned, unhelpful companies who only materialize on the premises if there are free gelato samples in the coffee shop downstairs. A pair of Saturdays ago, someone spent the early morning hours prying my gas cap off and helping themselves to all the Exxon in my tank. The property dudes shrugged it off, telling me it was "probably just my friends pulling a prank", which is the crappiest explanation ever since 1) I don't even have friends and 2) if I did, they wouldn't be the kind who'd autograph the side of my car with a series of deep scratches.

And then there are the elevator rides, which are more terrifying than anything this side of a carnival in a strip mall parking lot. You haven't experienced misery until you've descended top to bottom with either the fiftysomething woman whose face is frozen in a permascowl and always smells like Band-Aids or the elderly medical experiment who will corner you to tell you all about his latest exploratory surgery. Yesterday, I awkwardly balanced two bags of groceries while he breathlessly explained the benefits of no longer having a functioning asshole.

After unpacking my Fruit Rollups and Bagel Bites and debating whether to soak my short-term memory with bleach, it was time to drag Pigpen around the block. As I held his leash and mashed the DOWN button, I braced myself for whatever reeking, recently-stitched creature could be on the other side.

Instead, it was...a guy. He was fortysomething with an expensive haircut and the kind of sharply chiseled features you see either advertising cologne or tempting a very married Judith Light in a number of Lifetime movies. I dragged The Pig onto the elevator and pressed the already-illuminated LOBBY circle because I'm increasingly nervous around attractive men. Or any men, really.

"R.E.M., huh?", he asked, jerking his chin--covered with carefully-cultivated stubble, natch--toward the image of Michael Stipe wrapped around my ribcage.

"Yeah, R.E.M." I said, because I'm good with words.

"Are they still alive?"

"Yes, all four of them are still kicking. Although original drummer Bill Berry left in 1997 and has been replaced by Bill Rieflin." A pause. "He used to play for Ministry."

"Right, only Bills can drum for them, got it."

"Well, they did have Barrett Martin for a minute and then Joey Waronker but yeah, it's mainly Bills."

The doors graciously opened before I could bury myself beneath a deeper pile of Dork. "Hey, do you live beside the stairwell?" he asked, thumbing one of the toggles on his overcoat.

I nodded.

"Can I tell you something? I apologize if it sounds a bit forward."

I nodded again--ever the master of social interaction--hoping it would be complimentary. That from a distance, I didn't look like a complete disaster. That my new clearance-rack shower gel did, indeed, make me smell like pears. That I would make an excellent first wife.

"Well, it's just that you, um..."

I waited, holding Pigpen's leash with one hand and adjusting my Bruins hat with the other, hoping that my ears protruded in the sexiest possible way.

"You...uh...you really play some shitty music."

And with that he walked out into the parking garage, a cold blast of air coming in to take his place. I stood at the window watching him, my breath fogging the glass as I waited to see which car he climbed into. You know, just in case someone would need to park uncomfortably close to his driver's side door.
__________

P.S. It's totally unrelated to my unfortunate mailing address, but my review of Nick Lowe's all-acoustic, all-amazing concert has been posted at BitchBuzz. It's an article I'm reasonably pleased with, especially since it prompted a discussion with my mother about Lady Gaga's genitals.

It'll Be A Pop Publication, Tougher Than Tough

2009-10-19T00:55:00.005-04:00

So that just happened.¹ After a decade-plus of marveling at his songwriting, blasting Jesus of Cool loud enough to alienate my neighbors at six different addresses and wearing a Labour of Lust t-shirt that has--so far--outlasted all of my relationships, I finally FINALLY had the chance to see Nick Lowe in concert.²

He and his Gibson J-45 captivated the sold-out crowd packed into the tiny Barns at Wolf Trap in Vienna, Virginia and it was the best seventy-five minutes I've ever spent without removing any clothing. He played twenty-one songs, each one featuring a lyric or a sentiment that will linger in your head--or your heart--long after he's moved on to the next. I'll do a full review for BitchBuzz, dumping at least a thousand words onto the internet and, even then, it'll feel like I've left something out.

For ~~both~~ those of you who dig this kind of thing, the set list was:

People Change
Ragin' Eyes
What's Shakin' On The Hill?
Long-Limbed Girl
Lately I've Let Things Slide
Has She Got a Friend?
All Men Are Liars
Heart
When I Write the Book
I Read A Lot³
Cruel to Be Kind⁴
The Kind of Man I've Become
I Live On a Battlefield
I Trained Her to Love Me
Rome Wasn't Built in a Day
Without Love
I Knew The Bride (When She Used to Rock and Roll)
(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding

Encore:
Soulful Wind
Seven Nights to Rock
The Beast in Me

With the exception of three tracks, Nick's entire set can be found on Quiet Please, his recently-released two-disc greatest hits bonanza. I could go on about how it's an excellent way to hear the evolution of his sound, from spiky new-waver to soul-soaked crooner, but I'll just assume that you'll check it out for yourself. Then we can talk about it over appetizers at The Cheesecake Factory.

Anyway, I'm not sure I moved until the house lights came up after the encore and--for someone who can barely finish a package of Saltines without getting distracted--that speaks to the power of Mister Lowe and his acoustic guitar. Seriously, I've had sexual experiences that didn't keep my attention that long. Just ask my neighbors.

¹ Yes, that is a poorly-cropped shot of my Stiff Records "So It Goes"/"Heart of the City" 45 that Mr. Lowe was kind enough to drag a Sharpie across after the concert. I may or may not still be clutching it.

² This year, I've been lucky enough to see all three of my favorite Englishmen, with Nick neatly inked into that lineup along with Robyn Hitchcock and Elvis Costello. Now that I've crossed this concert off my To-Do list, I fully expect to die in my sleep.

³ This song is as-yet unrecorded and he introduced it by saying "When you hear the statement 'I'd like to play a new song for you', does your heart sink?" When he's the one asking the question, no way. My tiny heart floats like a fourth grader's neglected goldfish.

Some of his best songs have a timeless quality, like you could've dropped a needle and played them pretty much any time between 1955 and yesterday. "I Read A Lot" is one of those, a song channeling the late Arthur Alexander with its simple arrangement that gives the words the chance to hit you right in the chest and none of you are still reading this, are you?

⁴ If you've heard of Nick Lowe before I gushed all over the internet about him, it's because of this song. It's been spun by mainstream radio and soundtracking your meals at chain restaurants since the late seventies...and I'm not being critical. It's a great song. When I told a friend of mine I was coming to this show, she asked what he sang and I namedropped this one. "Holy shit!" she said, "10 Things I Hate About You!"

I thought she was going to start cataloging my flaws, before realizing she meant the soundtrack to that flick, when Letters to Cleo covered it. There's just no reason that Nick Lowe should have to be explained using Julia Stiles movies. There's no reason anything should be described that way, even other Julia Stiles movies.

Carded

2009-10-16T06:43:00.005-04:00

My face was bloated and misshapen, like the slowly melting head of a late-March snowman. My smile--crooked and off-center even on my most presentable days--was punctuated by soda-stained teeth dropping haphazardly out of my gums.

And my eyes.

My eyes. One of them had burrowed into my face, the other bulged in a way that made me look like a puppy mill Pug.

Basically, I looked like ass. And I would continue to do so for the next eight years.

"That'll be thirty-two dollars," he said, dropping my new driver's license through a slot in the plexiglass. "Make the check out to the North Carolina 'Partment of Motor Vehicles."

I resisted the urge to ask how to spell 'partment'. Sometimes, I make decent decisions, quietly adding the "D" and "e" he'd apparently packed away with his collagen and summer clothes.

My old license had expired on my birthday--four solid months ago--but because I'm made entirely of Irresponsible, I didn't realize it until the Door Guy stopped me on my way into a concert downtown. "We're not supposed to take an outdated ID" he said. "But you're here all the time."

It was true. The only reason I ever mash the Cash Back button at the grocery store is so I can deposit it directly into this club's cash register. Also I'm pretty sure the only reason he continues to card me is because he knows it makes my day to think that I'm not too old to wear leggings as pants."I'm not sure I can do this next time though," he said, stamping my hand with a black star.

I thanked him, filing my license in my wallet beside the other worthless pieces of plastic, with my over-maxed Visas--plural--and unpaid car insurance card. Either I was going to have to fork over my passport the next time I ordered an Absolut-soaked bad decision or make a trip to the seventh circle of hell--The DMV--a place outweighed in Awful only by the customer service line at Walmart and my last relationship.

A friend of mine suggested that I ignore the office in my home county in favor of the slowly rusting outpost in the county that rubs suggestively against my own, one better known for its commitment to trucks without mufflers and some of the state's more recent cases of rickets. It took a solid thirty minutes to get there, the cruise control set exactly on the speed limit lest the day take a turn for the O.Henry, getting me busted for speeding and an old license on the way to score a new one.

I reached the last line on my Mapquested directions and pulled into a parking lot with only one other car. This was a good sign. A bell jingled against the metal door as I stepped into the office. It was empty, save for one woman lazily thumbing through a faded copy of a magazine with a turkey on the cover.

"C'mon back," said a man who'd probably been filed under H-for-Hot at sometime during the late seventeenth century. I briefly thought I recognized him from the state seal. He directed me toward a vinyl chair in front of his desk, pausing to adjust his blue-on-blue uniform before taking a seat on the other side.

We were the only people in the back half of the office. He put on a pair of oversized eyeglasses that could double as a welding mask, picked an invisible thread off the M in his DMV patch, and asked for my old license. It had been issued in mid-2002, the picture commemorating my brief flirtation with mock turtlenecks and glitter eyeshadow. I looked like either an over-eager kindergarten teacher or an off-duty hooker, and I cringed every time I passed it through my open window to whichever officer had just tagged me for doing 74 in a 55. Again.

After reading the twelve-letter clump on the eye test, he asked me to look at four different shapes through the viewfinder. "Tell me what each of those are," he said, his accent thick enough to bread, fry, and serve with white gravy.

"A red octagon, a yellow rectangle, yellow circle, and yellow triangle."

"Well, that's a first," he said, tapping his pen against the side of the desk.

"What? Nobody else knows what they are?"

"Nope. Nobody else ever jus' give me the shapes. You're s'posed to tell me what the signs are."

"Oh." I was less embarrassed than I was delighted that I'd done something no one had done before, even if it was stupid. "A stop sign. Um...like, a traffic median, maybe, like the one in the mall parking lot? Or a Children Playing sign like in that one subdivision, the one where all of the houses look like vinyl-sided Monopoly piece--"

"And the next?" he interrupted.

"Uh, that one's a railroad thing where you're supposed to stop. You know, I had a great uncle who was hit by a train."

He blinked, almost audibly. "Continue."

"Well, apparently he got lost on the way home an--"

"With th' signs. Continue with the signs."

"Oh. Maybe a falling rock zone? Or, like, Bridge May Ice Before Road?"

He said nothing, carefully laying the pen beneath the word October on his desk calendar. He took a deep breath, staring at his hands. When he looked up, he focused on the place where my boobs would be--assuming I'd ever grown a set.

"Is that a catfish? A catfish wearing a top hat?"

I glanced down at my shirt. It was, in fact, a catfish wearing a top hat, because it was screenprinted with the cover of Captain Beefheart's 1969 album Trout Mask Replica. Yes, that's exactly how I wanted to be immortalized for the next eight years.

"Yes sir, it is."

"Well, it sure does make your eyes sparkle. And you don't have to call me sir, but I sure do 'preciate it. Now come have a seat for your picture...Bright Eyes."

I never thought that manners--and a fondness for borderline-unlistenable albums--would serve a purpose but apparently they do. Also, an anthropomorphized fish somehow makes me more attractive? This I found disturbing on a number of levels, but made a mental note to turn one of those singing bass from Spencer Gifts into an oversized pendant.

Bright Eyes or not, my picture made me look like the Elephant Man. It would be another five minutes before I knew that though, five minutes while I waited in the lobby with the woman who was still wrapped up in her turkey magazine. I was about to take a seat when I noticed one rogue strand of someone's hair weave coiled menacingly on the plastic chair beside me. I decided to stand.

"That'll be thirty-two dollars," the man said, knocking on the plexiglass to get my attention. And that's where we came into the story.

On the way home, I stopped at the grocery store to pick up dinner, another sodium-drenched single-serving reminder that I live alone. The end of the aisle advertised a sale on Mike's Hard Lemonade, which I like because it combines my love of both sour beverages and breath that could melt plastic.

The cashier slowly dragged everything over the scanner, stopping briefly with the six pack.

"I'm gonna need to see some ID," she said, grabbing the Mike's before it could finish riding toward the plastic bags.

"Yes ma'am," I said, smoothing the wrinkles in my Beefheart tee. "I've got my driver's license right here."

Now Boarding at Gate 23

2009-10-12T17:20:00.003-04:00

Everything Grizzly Bear lead singer Ed Droste said was followed by a squealed “That’s so awesome!!” from the American Apparel-wrapped girls beside me, making me feel like I was standing in the middle of several thousand smiley emoticons.

“That’s so awesome!”

“OMG! So awesome!"

Colon. Parenthesis. Stab myself.

Grizzly Bear’s harmonies were as gorgeous as anticipated, although sometimes an over-amped bass overpowered their delicate vocals. A shimmering version of “Two Weeks” followed, with Daniel Rossen on keyboards and bassist Chris Taylor cooing into the microphone like Gizmo the Mogwai. “THAT’S SO AWESOME,” American Apparel said, her head on the verge of exploding as she made a note to update her Facebook status when she got home.

--ACL Festival, Day 2 [via BitchBuzz]

“She’s, like, 97,” a kid in a backwards Texas Longhorns hat said when Kate Pierson and her radioactive-looking orange hair took the stage with new-wave pioneers The B-52’s. He was only off by 36 years but Pierson--the oldest of the Georgia foursome--was the most well-preserved especially compared to a paler-than-usual Fred Schneider, who looked like he may have just eaten a bad plate of--ahem--rock lobster.

The somewhat-listless crowd was unmoved by their newer material and didn’t stir until they played back-to-back karaoke favorites “Roam” and “Love Shack”, with Schneider barking out his trademark over-enunciated spoken parts. Twenty years after those songs were released, I’ve started to worry that the Love Shack--what with its rusted tin roof and faded sign--has probably been torn down and replaced with a Starbucks.

--ACL Festival, Day 3 [via BitchBuzz]

__________
I'm not sure how it took me a solid week to catch up from a five day trip, but it did. It also takes me half an hour to cook Minute Rice. ZING! Anyway, I’m back from Austin and--seven days later--no longer have the lingering scent of breakfast burrito or hotel shampoo.

The ACL festival was a totally different experience compared to Bonnaroo, which I covered for Bitchbuzz in June. Not only was Austin slicker and dotted with more corporate sponsors, it had an entirely different demographic, which managed to skew both older and younger. Older, because some mid-afternoon crowds looked like orthodontists on their day off, endless rows of recently-exfoliated fortysomethings raising their Lone Star tallboys and kicking off one Topsider at a time.

The youngest ACL-ers were asleep in the strollers I sidestepped on the way to buy another pair of fish tacos. I'm horrible at estimating the ages of both children and pop stars but at Friday night's Them Crooked Vultures show, a woman held a child who was still in the Plastic Underwear years, which put him somewhere between 3 and Cher. Well played, Responsible Parent. It's never too early to introduce your children to hearing loss.
__________

This time last Monday, I was heading to the airport in my rented white Toyota, the one that I would've described as my RAD-4 if I'd actually spoken with anyone who wasn't checking to see how many $4 KitKats I'd swiped from the minibar. I did briefly exchange pleasantries with the hotel's front desk staff who were no doubt delighted to see me wandering through the lobby on Sunday night both barefoot and wearing a trashbag as pants.

After having to discard my ruined flat shoes on Saturday, I went to Walmart and scored a pair of $7 sneakers from the kids department. Did they fit? No. Did I care? Absolutely not, since I was pretty sure that we were only going to spend seven or eight hours together. The festival grounds on Sunday were so epically disgusting that my new Starter kicks were abandoned beneath the RAD-4's rear tires in the ACL parking lot. After that, I scurried behind a dumpster to swap my mud-caked denim for the finest in Hefty Cinchsak couture.

Keep in mind that I grew up in The American South. Shoeless, naked beneath a trash bag... if somebody queued up the dance mix of "Cotton-Eyed Joe", it would've been every Homecoming dance I ever attended.

Anyway, my plastic bottoms and bare feet were an attempt to preserve the integrity of the RAD-4, even though the passenger side was already littered with a beat-up baseball cap, three empty Whataburger bags, and countless crushed soda cans. It probably looked a lot like Michael Moore’s living room.
__________

My flights back were chock with delays, all weather-related. When I finally boarded the plane to Atlanta, I was wedged between a woman who turned Delta #1672 into her personal slumber party and a flight attendant who spent an inordinate amount of time rearranging his fuschia pocket square.

Despite being one of Delta's Li'l Platinum Milers (or whatever), I'd never had a seat beside the airline staff before. I was disturbed to learn that on their seats, they get an over-the-shoulder harness that straps them in like they're about to jump Snake River Canyon. Meanwhile, all that keeps me from certain death is an adjustable strip of nylon and a non-functional ashtray.

Anyway, Miss Window Seat to my left immediately unpacked her oversized carry-on tote to remove a smaller bag decorated with cartoon characters, something that would’ve been cute if she’d been seven, with a missing front tooth and a light dusting of freckles across her nose. Since she was damn near fifty with a hairstyle last seen on the late Jerry Garcia, it made her look either creepy or mentally deficient. Or both.

She wedged both bags under the seat in front of her--earning a head nod from Delta’s own Evel Knievel strapped in beside me--wrapped a velveteen neck pillow around her head, popped in some ear plugs, and wriggled into a garish fleece pullover that looked like it was made from dead Fraggles. Next, she kicked off her Keds and changed into a pair of rainbow striped socks with non-skid bottoms, just in case we'd be asked to stop the plane with Flintstone-style foot brakes.

Finally, she pulled a sleep mask over her eyes, turned at a 45 degree angle to the window and STRETCHED HER LEGS OUT UNDER MY SEAT, her goddamn nonskid socks napping on my own carry-on bag, the one with my iPod, this month's MOJO magazine, and all the other distractions that keep me from making a list of the ways I can die during air travel.

We were halfway across the country before I stopped hating her and probably somewhere above Alabama when I decided to kick her.

She didn't move.

I kicked again.

She snorted.

And three times a lady.

She pulled one corner of her mask up and glared at me. I shrugged.

She deposited her feet under her own chair, curled herself into a ball like a recently-salted slug.

I was finally--FINALLY--able to grab my iPod as the flight attendant adjusted his harness and pretended not to notice.
__________

I had a four hour layover in Atlanta, which turned into five thanks to another delay which turned into me eating a giant bag of animal crackers and purchasing a paperback book I never intend to read.

At the gate, the endless loop of CNN kept shuffling out the same story about an elderly woman being mauled by raccoons and--after thirty minutes and three reruns of the story--I wondered if I could summon any kind of bloodthirsty woodland creatures to Terminal B.

To my right was a sixtysomething woman with a waxy complexion and a t-shirt that said “My Period Is More Like An Exclamation Point”.

No.

Her Period Is a Question Mark. Three, actually: 1) Where does one acquire such a Klassy Garment" (says the girl who wore a garbage bag not twelve hours earlier) ; 2) Even if you do own that 50 cotton/50 poly gem, why would you wear it in public? And 3) Why does she still have a period? It seems like her Baby Factory should’ve bricked its windows and boarded its doors by now.

No, that's not the first time I've thought about a stranger's uterus. Thank you for asking.

She was eating an oversized cinnamon bun--as if there are any other kinds--loudly sucking the glaze off of each of her swollen fingers before wiping her hand on one leg of her nylon pants and returning to the Laci Peterson paperback she was reading. Chomp. Suck. Wipe. Chomp. Suck. Wipe.

I don't have many marketable skills, but one of them has to be the ability to actively hate someone without exchanging more than a sidelong glance. I'll be adding that to my resume, sandwiching it between "Doesn't Bite Unless Provoked" and "Proficient in Microsoft Office".

Color me more than relieved when she boarded the next flight to arrive, heading toward Omaha and--with any luck--a pack of Cinnabon-craving raccoons.

Hand Stamps and Wristbands

2009-10-04T10:42:00.011-04:00

Another Austin morning and another day of live music is coming as soon as I extract myself from this embroidered hotel robe and make my way back to Zilker Park. The first two days of the Austin City Limits festival have been excellent. My eardrums remain intact, although I broiled both shoulders in the sun on Friday and last night I held a memorial service for a pair of rain-soaked, mud-caked flat shoes, whose reeking faux-suede bodies were interred in the trash can beside the minibar.

It rained for a solid nine hours yesterday and after dropping $5 on an ineffective poncho, I spent my afternoon wrapped in a thin layer of plastic, much like my grandmother's sofa. That didn't stop me from digging sets from The Decemberists, Grizzly Bear, Flogging Molly and a fragile-looking Levon Helm, the former drummer for The Band, the least Google-able musical group of all time. My full Saturday recap will be posted shortly at BitchBuzz (as soon as I, um, start writing it) but you can clicky here to read all about Day One.

I've been concert-ing pretty much nonstop since my Chucks hit the terminal at Austin-Bergstrom International. On Thursday night, I had a cow skull stamped on my hand at the Continental Club where I caught The Baseball Project/Steve Wynn IV/Minus 5 for the second time in six days (Clicky: Full recap of their Cat's Cradle gig). The place was packed and they absolutely rocked for both sets and an encore that featured an appearance by Bill Rieflin on a pair of songs (More on him in a paragraph or two).

I stood behind a hulking dude in a t-shirt who shouted along with every lyric and yelled "DREAM FUCKING SYNDICATE"--a reference to Wynn's former band--after several of their songs. During the intermission, he wandered over, sweat streaming from his shaved head, and said "You know the words too!"

"Yeah, I dig these guys," I said, because I really do talk like that.

"FUCKIN' A!" he shouted. "HEAD BUTT ME! DO IT! LET'S HEAD BUTT!"

Since I barely have enough brain function to remember to wear pants if I leave the house, we high fived instead. And, of course, I thought "I CAN TOTALLY WRITE ABOUT THIS" as he headed toward the bar.
__________
During "Medicine Show", I looked to my left and realized I was standing beside Bill Rieflin, the former drummer for Ministry and current kit-master for R.E.M. and Robyn Hitchcock. And then I looked at him again. And again, in rapid succession until he noticed. Because I make terrible decisions, I grabbed his arm and said "YOU MAY BE MY FAVORITE DRUMMER EVER!" I wasn't shouting because of the music--it was actually a break between songs--I was shouting because I'm insane.

He looked, um, surprised and said thanks. I was telling him how many miles I'd run while listening to Ministry when a woman tapped his shoulder and asked if he'd care to watch her purse while she went to the bathroom.

To his credit, he did.

When she came back, drying her hands with the front of her skirt, he disappeared, probably terrified that one of us would've licked his face (Me) or asked him to feed her dogs (Her). Five minutes later, he popped up onstage beside asskicking drummer Linda Pitmon during a cover of The Sonics' "Strychnine".
__________

I hit my word count on my BitchBuzz ACL review before I could mention seeing Robyn Hitchcock & the Venus 3 (Rieflin, Scott McCaughey and Peter Buck) on Friday night. Anyone who's read this site or exchanged more than three sentences with me knows how much I dig his music--and his delightfully skewed worldview. I also more-than-appreciate the fact that he graciously agreed to an interview this summer, which was pretty much the highlight of my...ever.

Anyway, despite some early technical issues, he gave a good show and was extra-animated, dropping between-song monologues about tofu burgers and tsunamis. Believe it or not, he actually played a track I hadn't heard live--"Brenda's Iron Sledge"--in any of the FOUR OTHER CONCERTS I've attended this year.
__________
Time to un-robe and shower, even though the lighting in this bathroom makes me consider having my clothing permanently stapled on.

More updates to come... today's concert calendar includes White Lies, Dirty Projectors, Arctic Monkeys and several other adjective/noun combinations.

Mantle This! Mantle That! It Makes Me Sick!

2009-10-01T09:27:00.009-04:00

I used to collect baseball cards as a kid, tearing into countless Topps wax packs and shoving the broken shards of flavorless bubblegum into my mouth before shuffling through all seventeen cardboard players. I always hoped to unwrap a Wade Boggs or a Bo Jackson but always got, like, a Billy Jo Robidoux instead. Nothing teaches you to manage your expectations like the Milwaukee Brewers.

The cards--way before they came emblazoned with holograms or with strips of the players' skin embedded on the back and HEY KID! GET OFF MY LAWN!--had baseball trivia listed below the stat columns, tidbits about how Dave Henderson was a high school All-American or that Roger Clemens would eventually become an overfed Yankee douchecake. I tried to memorize all of those throwaway facts, from who hit the first major league triple (Levi Meyerle) to Ty Cobb's lifetime batting average (.367) to the number of guys who've ever wanted to make out with me after hearing this (0.00).

My commitment to anything with 108 double stitches explains why I immediately fell for the songs of The Baseball Project. This supergroup-ish side project--composed of Steve Wynn (Dream Syndicate), Peter Buck (R.E.M.), Scott McCaughey (The Minus 5, Young Fresh Fellows) and Linda Pitmon--is like the Traveling Wilburys if they could've explained the infield fly rule.

Wynn and McCaughey have written some incredible songs about The Artist Formerly Known As America's Favorite Pastime, without the cloying scent of Cracker Jack or the first hint of camp. Their ’08 release Vol. 1: Frozen Ropes and Dying Quails features thirteen engaging tracks about players both famous (Mark McGuire, Fernando Valenzuela) and forgotten (Harvey Haddix, Ed Delahanty), with lyrical turns of phrase that'll buckle your knees like a well-thrown changeup.

I had the chance to catch 'em on Saturday night at the Cat's Cradle in Carrboro, an excellent venue for fans of both rock music and alliteration. After braving the Seattle-style weather--which was a thousand percent more authentic than the Seattle-style coffee they sling at the airport--I swapped my freshly ATM-ed cash for a ticket and made it into the club just before they kicked into "Ted Fucking Williams".

"We'd like to start with the opening band," McCaughey quipped. "The first band is the same as the last." The night was sold as the Steve Wynn IV, the Minus 5, and the Baseball Project, an overlapping triple bill that may as well have been called the Turducken of Awesome.¹

The turducken's first sixteen-song set was well-worth my eighty mile drive, with Wynn and McCaughey trading lead vocals depending on whose back catalog they were blasting through. "Here's a fantastic song," McCaughey said, launching into a new track from the Young Fresh Fellows, his other other band "Just like all the rest of 'em we're playing, they've all been fantastic."² Particularly high on the Fantastic Scale was the Minus 5's "Out There On The Maroon", which drops the greatest opening line of all time--”I had six White Russians tonight/And two of them were people”--over a Roy Orbison-style guitar riff.

They closed the set with a driving version of Wynn's "Amphetamine,” powered by Linda Pitmon's asskicking percussion. After watching her for three hours, I no longer want to grow up to be Tina Fey, unless Tina Fey is also a raging rock drummer. I was blown away well before her Keith Moon-style bombast put the exclamation point at the end of an incredible set.

“We’re gonna get liquored up, sell some CDs, and chat with our friends” McCaughey said before the intermission. "Because that's the way we roll."

Due to my long drive, I rolled by throwing back Diet Cokes like a champ but eventually made my way toward the merch table to say hello. Of course, by ‘say hello’ I mean ‘spew entire paragraphs about where and when I purchased each of their individual albums.’ It’s hard to balance between enthusiastic and unhinged, as best illustrated by the dude outside my building who excitedly points out that my iPod is going to give me "head cancer.”

Steve Wynn, Peter Buck, and Scott McCaughey (wearing his hat, Mister Fuzzy)

The second set featured some new Baseball Project songs, including a pair about the polar opposites of the post-season, Reggie Jackson and Bill Buckner. “The Straw That Stirs The Drink” was sung from Jackson's typically, ahem, self-assured point of view ("There were stars/And then there's what I am") with a call-and-response chorus. Meanwhile "Buckner's Bolero" was a brilliantly detailed seven minute examination of baseball's most famous fielding error. It sympathetically examined the other factors behind Boston's '86 World Series collapse ("If one play killed the Sox/Could you please tell me which?") and noted the otherwise overlooked aspects of Buckner's double decade career.

"It's sort of Homeric, isn't it?" McCaughey asked. Yeah, it is. It's also the kind of thing I needed to hear as a traumatized seven year old Sawx fan who'd just watched the fuckin' thing on TV.

This writeup could end here if not for for the encore. Holy shit, the encore. Standing in the small but attentive Saturday night audience was Peter Holsapple, a hell of a guitar player who's perhaps best known for his work with jangle masters The dB's.³ He was pulled onstage for a trio of covers--including a rollicking version of "The Ballad of John & Yoko"--as I tried to peel my jaw off the PBR-coated floor. ⁴

Mister Buck & Mister Holsapple

It was quite possibly the best concert I've seen all year, a bold statement considering how many OVER 21 stamps I’ve scrubbed off my skin. It was so good, in fact, that I'm going back for a second helping tonight in Austin, Texas.⁵

Maybe I’ll even bring a package of baseball cards.

¹ Trying to explain their current, previous, and interwoven musical connections--from R.E.M. to Robyn Hitchcock's Venus 3--is harder than untangling an Appalachian family's DNA, but that doesn't mean that I won't try. I'm super fun at parties.

² With the addition of the 'Fellows track and Wynn's "Trial Separation Blues", recorded by his former band Gutterball, everyone's musical past had been represented, save for R.E.M...despite the dude behind who repeatedly requested “Talk About The Passion”, like Rain Man with a Michael Stipe fetish. “Murmur, yeah. Definitely Murmur." Also: Insert your own "I'm an excellent Driver 8" joke here.

³ Holsapple also records with Chris Stamey--another former dB--and I can't recommend their recent release Here and Now enough. Go, check it out. G'wan now. Git!

⁴ In addition to the Beatles, they did the Flamin' Groovies "Teenage Head" and "Sometimes Good Guys Don't Wear White" by the Standells, a band whose "Dirty Water" has become an unofficial anthem for the Boston Red Sox. See, it all comes back to baseball.

⁵ That's right, starting tomorrow I'm covering the Austin City Limits festival for London's BitchBuzz.com. That means tonight I'll be in town and shouting along during their show at the Continental Club. No, that's not creepy at all, thanks for asking.

Working Nights

2009-09-16T16:08:00.003-04:00

I've got a nightmare problem. The problem, obviously, is that I have them, and spend a portion of almost every night being dragged through the sketchier neighborhoods of my subconscious. I'll inevitably drift off, earbuds lodged firmly in both sides of my skull, listening to At My Age and hoping that my brain will send me to make out with a variety of Englishmen or raise fruit bats or wear pants made of ham or any other totally normal dream plots. Instead, my third grade teacher whose face is made of broken glass and dangling eyeballs holds me down and feeds me a bowl of salsa seasoned with my own teeth.

Good times.

The other night, I woke up at 3:17 a.m. to the smell of smoke and singed hair. I yanked the 'phones out of my ears and assumed that my gothtastic neighbor--an over-eyelinered college student majoring in Sighing Loudly with a minor in Leggings--had done her best Sylvia Plath impression, broiling herself beneath the faux-granite countertops.

"There's no way she'll get her deposit back," I said to myself, sleepily rolling out of bed and hoping that the firemen would be too busy with the human pot pie across the hall to notice my dinosaur footie pajamas.

On my way toward the door, I stepped on one of Pigpen's bones that he'd somehow chewed into a rawhide shiv. Pulling a shard of animal byproduct out of my foot was painful enough to wake me up completely. The building wasn't burning and my neighbor hadn't gotten Plath-tered; I'd just been fooled by the nastiness inside my own brain. Again.

I turned to Pig's bed in the corner, expecting to see him sound asleep on his back, weiner pointing skyward like a DirecTV dish. He wasn't there. I pulled back the sheets on my own bed, assuming he'd burrowed under the covers when I headed for the door. No Pig.

Now I'm concerned. And confused. Confuserned. "Oh shit," I said out loud. "He's stuck!" Just last week, he'd chased his tennis ball under the bed and lodged himself between the baseboard and a box of outdated sweaters, forcing me to shove the mattress onto the floor so I could lift the bed frame and drag him out by his back legs. I flipped the light on and pressed my face against the carpet.

No dog.

I raced to the other side, moved a stack of music magazines and pulled out a half-eaten carrot.

Nothing.

I sleep with the bedroom door closed because even after ten seasons of Law & Order: SVU, I'm still convinced that even the rapey-est of intruders will be deterred by two inches of artificial wood. There's no way out of the room, saved for the always-locked sliding glass onto the balconOH GOD THAT'S HOW THEY'LL GET IN WHERE CAN I BUY APPROXIMATELY FIFTY THREE CINDERBLOCKS? HURRY BEFORE THEY GET HERE--ahem--the balcony.

I looked in the bathroom, lifting a pile of festering gym clothes with the gnawed stump of the carrot.

No Pigpen.

Now I'm seriously entertaining the idea that at some point during the three hours I'd been asleep, I managed to eat him, I'd devoured the entire dog. I stared at my bedheaded reflection in the mirror wondering how many calories are in a two-year old Boxer when a muffled thump came from the closet.

Warily I approached the door, pushing it open with my pajama-ed foot and smacking Pigpen in his smashed little muzzle.

He looks pissed, like I've interrupted. I turn on the light and see that I have. He's dragged a number of shoes--all sneakers, all mismatched--into the center of the floor and topped them with the jacket from The Artist Formerly Known As My Interview Suit (now rechristened as my Funeral Costume) along with a handful of unfortunately patterned tank tops and my bathrobe. Basically it looks like he blew up Punky Brewster.

He circles the pile and takes a seat on a shoe, looking absolutely delighted with his handiwork. I'm confused more than anything, wondering how he managed to get these things off their hangers in the dark and wondering if he has retractable thumbs I'd just never noticed before.

I dragged him out of the closet and closed the door tightly behind us, hoping we'd get through the rest of the night without any additional redecorating.

Fast forward to the next night when a similar scenario occurred. I'd just been tracing the outline of a friend's face with my tongue when his wife shoved me off the inflatable iceberg and into the path of an oncoming clipper ship. I woke about the time my head struck the side of the boat. Again, I looked toward Pig's bed...and he's gone. I trudged toward the closet and there he was, sitting on a totally different stack of my shit.

The closet is conveniently located to the right side of the toilet so, in case I'm ever sans Charmin, I can always reach a t-shirt from a company that's long since fired me. Last night, I woke up when Pig tried to wriggle through the semi-closed bathroom door on his way to his night job.

So I'm asking you guys...WHAT THE HELL?! He's not being destructive. He's not chewing the armpits out of my shirts or clipping his toenails into the coat pockets. As far as I can tell, he's making a nest or a shrine or perhaps a sacrificial altar where he'll eventually kill me for buying store-brand Snausages. Either way, has anyone else's animal ever done this?

And while we're at it, can someone tell me why I've started smelling my dreams? Because fruit bats are way less fragrant than their names lead you to believe.

By Request

2009-09-09T07:51:00.012-04:00

Here's my eagerly anticipated Maid of Honor outfit. No, my actual dress won't be blaze orange, not unless the reception program has been restructured to include deer hunting. I just hope that the other members of the bridal party will be able to find an Elvis Costello tee and brown leather ankle boots because those accessories are obviously what bring this ensemble together.¹

I'd been in the store less than two minutes when a nametagged David's Bridal associates--one wearing several pounds of eyeshadow--tapped a logo pen against her clipboard, cocked her head to the right and said "I'm guessin' you ain't the bride."

Wow, what gave it away? The fact that I strolled in still licking bits of my Long John Silvers' combo meal off my forearms? That I have no idea what my dress size is but quickly volunteered that I wore a medium t-shirt? The tumbleweeds rolling out of my vagina?

"Nope. I'm the Maid of Honor."

"Really?" she said. "OK, we can get start--um, you've got something on your face."

I flicked my tongue toward my cheek, ever the lady. "Tartar sauce."

She sighed. "This is just my second weekend here. We may need my manager for this."

¹ One of my friends said that I looked like a Hooters waitress from the 1940s.
__________

I'd been dreading the trip to D-Bridal since last fall when my sister used a handful of Anytime Minutes for a shrieking, weeping phone call that sounded a lot like "SQQQUUUUEEEEAAL! I'M ENGAGED! SQUUUUEEEEEEAAL! OK BYE!" Of course I'm delighted for her but I wish her wedding had the same dress code as Burger King. The nicer Burger Kings, obviously, the ones that have playgrounds and dumpsters with lids.

The search for formalwear is a difficult one for me because of my comically oversized back. Yes. My back. My workouts include an abundance of pullups, which means I cast the sexy silhouette of a king cobra. Or Michael Phelps, minus the Marfan syndrome. It's a bit of a problem because shoving myself in a size large for my lats means that I have enough excess room in the bust to successfully shoplift a number of appliances.

It's not a scenario that the staff deals with very often although Eyeshadow did tell me that my actual dress, when it arrives, could be altered to accommodate my cape-like back and Craisin-like boobs. She may have phrased it more politely.

I was given a stack of unfortunately-hued items and quarantined in a dressing room until I emerged wearing something that I could actually zip, like a denim-clad larva that becomes a dry-clean only butterfly who will find a way to stain her dress several months before the actual ceremony. It took several false starts, a lot of creative profanity, and several twirls in front of the most unflattering mirror on earth, but I won. My Maid of Honor Costume is now on order and I have the receipt to prove it JUST IN CASE THE BRIDE OR THE MOTHER OF THE BRIDE (AKA MY OWN MOTHER) REQUIRES DOCUMENTATION.

Now it's just up to the bridesmaids to find matching boots.

Packed

2009-09-04T08:58:00.003-04:00

I'm just about ready to take it to the streets, Pointer Sisters-style, and head home for the weekend.¹ As soon as I lug my suitcase to my car and drop Pigpen off at his luxury accommodations² it'll be time to weave in and out of traffic as I try to reach the neon orange peanut butter cracker I just fumbled onto the floorboard.

Obviously, I'm taking the essentials with me. From left to right, we've got:

--The latest issue of Mojo magazine, a British import I dig enough to justify the $9 cover price, even though I didn't pay nine bones for the last pair of pants I bought. Read that sentence again.

--Some Vonnegut, even though Kurt will immediately be swapped for whatever Britney-infested tabloid I can impulse-buy at the grocery store, along with a bag of teriyaki-flavored beef jerky and a package of tiny razors so I can carve my bikini area into elaborate topiary.

--DVDs of The Prisoner and Black Books. I will watch neither of these because my sister and I will spend all of our time watching endless episodes of Law & Order: SVU. She's recovering from shoulder surgery and just yesterday spent a pharmaceutically-enhanced afternoon watching NINE HOURS of SVU, which means she's officially an NYPD officer. And also terrified to leave the house.

--McDonalds' coupons. FREE McGRIDDLES, GUYS! I've never been more excited to get a piece of mail lovingly addressed to "Resident".

-- A pair of Robyn Hitchcock box sets. This needs no explanation, not even to help you understand why I need damn near a day's worth of music for a two hour drive.

--Two screenprinted garments that put Peter Buck's face dangerously close to my boob. JUST LIKE THAT DREAM I HAD.

¹ I have been instructed to stop at David's Bridal to order a Maid of Honor dress for my sister's wedding to Dr. Fiance. Apparently this garment is going to be painstakingly woven from unicorn pelts or decorated with the eyelids of endangered species because that's the only reason it needs to be purchased seven months before the wedding.

² Pig doesn't get to make the trip across state lines because my parents' Nasty Little Dog doesn't take kindly to strangers. If she did, perhaps she would have a more charming nickname.

146.59 Miles

2009-08-31T11:57:00.013-04:00

On Friday, I'll be packing my three favorite R.E.M. t-shirts and tearing up I-77 toward my hometown to visit my wonderful parents and their nasty little dog. Not only will I get to sleep under the watchful eye of the Springsteen poster I tacked up one seventh grade summer and eat things that weren't dumped out of dented cans, I'll also get to see my sister, Runtie, for the first time in forever.

Until last August, we just lived four or five Cracker Barrels away from each other and hung out at least once a month, gorging ourselves on pepperoni-encrusted mistakes and watching direct-to-DVD horror movies, only peeling ourselves off the sofa long enough to get another Diet Coke or shoot fireworks off my balcony. Then--almost exactly a year ago--she moved to the midwest and now going to see her requires boarding and deplaning more than one regional jet or spending half a day on various unspectacular interstates. Either way, it's a supersized bowl of Suck.

Runtie and I couldn't be more different but we also couldn't be closer. We share a love for animals dressed as humans, Oreo Cakesters and Christopher Meloni's one facial expression, but that's where the similarities end. She is a nurse who is engaged to a doctor. My romantic prospects are limited to my building's recently-paroled maintenance man who told me that I could be a real catch if I grew some tits.¹

Runtie and Dr. Fiancé recently bought a house and will be closing on it later this week. Yesterday I purchased two boxes of Food Lion brand fish sticks. She graduated from nursing school with honors and has held a steady job ever since. I'm a semi-employed blogger whose recent accomplishments are limited to illegally downloading the first season of Family Ties and being able to recall Roger Clemens' 1986 ERA in conversation.²

Runtie is Gallant. I am Goofus.

We're both descending on the only real home address we've ever had to celebrate our mother's birthday. Runtie will no doubt present her with a thoughtful, quite possibly handcrafted gift that reflects what an unbelievable mom she has been, one that appropriately thanks her for subletting her uterus to the two of us for a combined 18 months. I'll be giving her either a framed copy of my latest dental X-rays or a somewhat unevenly wrapped box of Sour Patch Kids, although I will take the time to remove the shitty flavors.³

The last time our entire family got together, Bea Arthur died.⁴ As the same three clips from Maude aired on the evening news, Runtie and I stood in the kitchen passing a bowl of brownie batter across the counter to each other, scooping out oversized spoonfuls and shoving them into our faces.

Runtie was retelling a story from the previous week, something about making crucial adjustments to a patient's medications. "And then I had to consult with a phlebotomist," she said, "To ensure that the levels would be acceptable."

"Uh, yeah, I have no idea what that is," I told her, licking a glob of chocolate off my forearm. "But there are probably terms from my job that you wouldn't understand."

"Really?" she asked. "Like what?"

"Like sweatpants. And poverty."

Four more days. Sha la la la.

¹ I also had a brief makeout sesh with a picture of Hugh Laurie I cut out of Parade magazine.
² 2.46.
³ Orange and yellow, obviously.
⁴ I'm pretty sure the two events are unrelated but I'd appreciate if one of you would keep an eye on Rue McClanahan until Sunday evening.
__________
Oh! Here's a thing! I recently had the opportunity to chat with singer Justin Townes Earle, the 27 year old son of Nashville legend Steve Earle. Our conversation was wide ranging, covering everything from his somewhat unexpected influences to his [excellent] new album to what makes a good drug dealer.

Part 1 and Part 2 of the interview have been posted at my other hangout, BitchBuzz, a site that you should probably be reading, like, all the time.

^{Photo Credit: Joshua Black Wilkins}

Terminated

2009-08-29T13:38:00.004-04:00

I spent the first part of the week making my way through a borrowed copy of Joshua Ferris' And Then We Came To The End, a novel that was in my opinion over-hyped and under-hilarious. My reasons for disliking the book are less important than the reason it was recommended to me in the first place. Basically the plot revolves around working at an ad agency or--more accurately--being fired from an ad agency, an item which was crossed off my life's To-Do list several summers ago.

The agency was the second of three office jobs that ended with me beings escorted out of the building, my belongings hastily stacked in cardboard boxes or bins borrowed from the mail room. Twice I was given the chance to lovingly pack my own Starting Lineup figurines and Happy Meal toys, carefully wrapping them in pages torn from the Employee Handbook. The third and final time everything was packed for me, arriving in a dented box UPS left on my doorstep, my Kurt Warner poster creased beneath the weight of an engraved nameplate I'd never need again.

Everything I've ever had to fill out a W-2 form for has ended with my termination, along with an increasingly long list of people I can't use as references. Monday, in fact, marked the one year anniversary of my sacking from The Foot Bucket, the last 'real' job I had.

This time last year, I walked into work wearing a freshly Febreezed Mizuno running tee tucked into a pair of high waisted khakis, the door jingling behind me, tattling that I was three minutes late. I clocked in on the computer and finished shoving hangers through the necks of the morning's shipment of reflective windbreakers. After ten minutes of hanging jackets on the wall and revisiting every bad decision I'd ever made, I headed toward the dressing room to empty them of the wadded pile of Tempo Track shorts in a range of sizes that suggested that the person who tried them on was contemplating an eating disorder. In either direction.

One of the managers knocked on the white wooden doors causing them to swing inward, saloon style, and clip me on the shoulder. "We need to talk," she said, with a pained expression that made her look like she'd inserted her Super Absorbent in the wrong orifice. She took the shorts out of my arms and placed them on the bench attached to the wall. "Leave these. We're going out back."

As she led the way to the Emergency Exit, I quickly learned that "out back" didn't mean Bloomin' Onions and Unyielding Diarrhea. It also didn't mean the Manager's Office, a tiny windowless room that always smelled like a nauseating combo of Gatorade powder and damp socks.

Instead she held the door open, teaching me that the "ALARM WILL SOUND" sign was just for show, much like the fake cameras in the corner or the unneeded underwire loitering around the bottom of her bra. Her cup? Half empty. Anyway, she led me outside--behind the dumpsters--where I immediately assumed I was going to be killed.

I hoped she'd make it quick, mainly because the store shared a massive trash bin with a hair salon. The smell of chemical treatments and perm solution mingled with that of leftover pepperoni currently baking in a stack of empty Papa John's boxes from the previous night's high school Kross Kountry Kickoff or whatever dreadful name was assigned to an evening of sullen kids picking at their facial eruptions as they sighed deeply and shoved last year's mud-encrusted spikes in your face. Lather, rinse, repeat until you stomp off to the stockroom and seriously consider making a noose out of a pair of shoelaces that were rejected for being a rival school's color.

A fly jumped from a slab of grease-stained cardboard to my left forearm. I brushed it away, stealing a glance at my watch and realizing if this went quickly, I'd be home in time for a solid hour of Mama's Family.

"This isn't working," she said, crossing her arms and staring at the fluorescent 50% OFF sticker I'd managed to affix to my sternum. "As of right now, you're considered to be terminated."

"Does that make you the Terminator," I asked because it's not like things could possibly get worse.

"Yes," she said, unsmiling. "I am the Terminator."

"COME WITH ME IF YOU WANT TO LIVE" I replied in my best Schwarzennaccent.

"See? You repeatedly made this decision easy for us. Perhaps you'll take your next endeavor more seriously."

Seriously?

I had to seriously swallow an ill-advised snicker, considering I was standing outside in the unseasonable September heat wearing an oversized foot-shaped button that said "I ♥ Sole Music" and being reprimanded by a grown woman who wears a visor to work.

"Well. That's it. Give me your nametag. And your Sole Music button."

"Aw, my nametag?"

"That's what I said. Give me the nametag."

And that became my favorite moment of perhaps the entire plantar wart-encrusted summer. There weren't any belongings for me to box up. I didn't have a locker or any personal items, other than a can of Lysol I contributed to the employee bathroom and three single-serving packages of Cheez-Its. The nametag, my Sole Music and the sweat-wicking t-shirt I was wearing were all I had to show for six months of misery.

She snapped her fingers and pointed at my boob. "NAMETAG." I fumbled with the pinback, wondering what would happen if I just made a break for the car, keeping their logo pinned to my chest in an effort to go rogue. I'd work as a Street Fitter, crouched on the corner of Seventh and Trade streets hissing at pedestrians. "Hey! HEY, OVERPRONATOR," I'd shout to the man who needed a gait analysis and a pair of custom orthotics. "Do you know about plantar fasciitis? BECAUSE YOU WILL."

I removied both buttons from my tee and placed them in her outstretched palm.

"Can I keep the shirt?" I asked, wide-eyed, innocent, and overwhelmed by the bottles of 40 Volume Bleach offgassing two feet to my right.

"Yes. Consider that our gift to you"

I walked to the car, confident that I'd never shove an oversized foot into an undersized shoe, never stare at another set of split toenails, never have the manager tell me how stupid I was for mismatching a pair of socks for the try-on bins. "The real gift," I thought to myself as I rolled down the window "The real gift was letting me go."

Wocka Wocka

2009-08-26T17:26:00.005-04:00

So tomorrow night--Thursday night--I'll be telling jokes (pictured, above left) at The Garage in downtown Winston-Salem (kind-of pictured, above right). The show starts at 9:30, which means you should be dangerously close to soiling the upholstery by 9:34. This is the second straight month I've stomped around their stage and I'm coming armed with some new material, some old favorites, and some in-betweens that I've pulled from my various notebooks of Funny Shit.

It's been four weeks since I've been onstage and it was, like, nineteen James Patterson novels before that (which translates to roughly three months) so I've spent this entire calendar page missing it. As much as I dig living in everyone's computer, it's a brazillion times better to get the immediate feedback that comes from a room full of people laughing at you. On purpose, as opposed to from across the aisle at Target when you inadvertently knock over a rack of personal lubricant.

There was a pretty stellar turnout in July, possibly because it's free--did I mention it's free?--and I stuck around after the last comic to suck back a pair of vodka and cranberries. The V & C is my beverage of choice because it's such a little multitasker. While it's corroding your liver, it's simultaneously strengthening the various pieces of your urinary tract so you're totally breaking even on the health front. When it comes to drinkin', though, I'm more than a lightweight, to the point where too much Listerine almost guarantees I'll be dry-humping strangers in the elevator. Or the elevator itself.

That night I consumed eight bucks worth of Aristocrat vodka, which left me stumbling through the club like a recently tranquilized animal. I lurched and pawed my way toward the bathroom, pausing only to make a pass at a dish towel that was crumpled--SEDUCTIVELY CRUMPLED--on the side of the bar.

It was late enough in the evening that the lights had been turned out in the back half of the room--including the bathrooms--a discovery I didn't make until I was standing in the pitch black single seater wondering whether it was appropriate to tongue kiss an ash tray on the first date. My choices were to either to try to Frank Slade my way to the toilet or to step back out and admit that I'd spent five minutes in the dark trying to flip the switch on the August concert calendar.

My brain dredged up some Discovery Channel-ish memory about bats and sonar so I let out several high pitched screeches in the hopes they'd richochet off the porcelain but that just made someone softly knock to ask if I was OK.

A pair of Vampire Weekend songs passed before I felt the smooth surface of the toilet against the back of my bare calves, so I took care of my business and shuffled back into the bar. I politely held the door for the next woman in line, while launching several silent prayers that I hadn't accidentally defiled the sink. "The lights are out," she said to the empty room, before casually flipping a switch on the opposite wall.

"Yeah, I know," I said, fumbling for an explanation. "I just don't like to see myself naked."

"You take your clothes off when you go to the bathroom?", she asked, giving me a confused expression like I'd just told her that I save all my scabs or start small fires or really dig Steely Dan.

"Um. Not all the time, no," I replied. She immediately pulled the door closed behind her, shaking her head and muttering to herself. Then I heard the lock snap into place.

What's the point of this story? I have no idea. But if you come to the gig tomorrow night--and you know you want to--just remember where the light switch is. And if you see a pale pink beverage in my hand, you should probably just clinch your kidneys together until you get home.

PBR Promenade

2009-08-24T14:20:00.009-04:00

So this weekend was somewhat of a rarity in that I changed out of my sweat-wicking fabrics and actually had Things to Do on both Friday and Saturday nights, things that didn't involve licking Cool Ranch seasonings from my fingernails, ThermaCare HeatWraps, and watching Dateline reruns about trophy wives who'd been tossed into one of the lesser oceans.

By Things to Do, I mean back-to-back concerts at my favorite un-airconditioned local music venue, a pair of evenings full of excesses that left my ears ringing and my liver wracked with sobs. I'm far from having a social conscience--or any conscience at all, really, since my baby one fell out and my permanent one has yet to take its place--but I do think that two of the most important things you can do in your own ZIP code are drinking your coffee from an indie shop and supporting your local music scene. I've adopted one particular bar as my fave, the kind of place that decorates with bowling pins and rusted signs, has floors that can easily be hosed down at closing time, and a variety of vinyl-covered seating options that will keep a piece of your thigh skin as a souvenir if you stand up too quickly.

Saturday night's show was by American Aquarium, a six-piece band from Raleigh who serves up slabs of alt-country with a side of Springsteen and garnished lightly with Ryan Adams. The lead singer, BJ Barham, crams a lot of attitude into his skinny jeans, telling stories about strip clubs in between songs about broken hearts and empty bottles. "If y'all wanna keep sendin' us shots, that would be great," he said, with an accent thick enough to sop up with a biscuit. "Cause it feels good in our tummies."

The place was overstuffed with an interesting all-ages crowd who ranged from Wet Seal to Withered Cougar. There were popped collars and madras shorts. There were Skoal rings and unfiltered Marlboros. And they were all shouting out the choruses to songs like "I Hope He Breaks Your Heart"--formerly known as "The Whore Song"--and "Ain't Going to the Bar Tonight".

Writhing in front of the stage was a pack of newly-minted college freshman who had swapped their free credit card t-shirts for spaghetti strap tanks. They all had identical asymmetrical haircuts and identical dance moves as they bounced and gyrated with their arms fully extended over their heads, a gesture that made the more coordinated look like they'd recently watched the Pole Katz Stripper Skillz DVD while the less-talented ones looked like they were trying to block a free throw.

Collectively they weighed less than my ottoman but were more than intimidating, what with their unlined faces and unwasted potential. "Whatever," I told myself while tearing a napkin into pieces of poorly absorbent confetti. "At least I'm old enough to rent a car. A CAR I COULD DRIVE TO A PARTY WHERE I WOULD ABSOLUTELY BE DANCING IF I'D WORN A PAIR OF SENSIBLE SHOES."

On the other side of the jumble of plastic furniture were the over-forties, all animal print skirts and their best attempts at Looking Sexy. They rocked identical expressions that featured raised eyebrows and sucked-in cheeks as they tried for Seductive but were closer to Quietly Choking on a Cough Drop.

One particularly intoxicated woman wedged herself beside me at the bar. She had dark roots and faded tattoos and introduced herself by asking if I thought she looked good for forty-six. I wanted to ask if she meant forty-six human years but realized she probably hadn't gotten those forearm scars by raising orchids and taking harp lessons. I nodded vigorously while trying to avoid both eye contact and any sudden movements. Satisfied, she leaned hard into the bar, shouting her order for another drink which she needed almost as much as she needed to be wearing a pale pink tube top.

"Gimmanothershotakeela" she slurred toward the bartender, who must've bought the Rosetta Stone program for the language of the Overserved.

"Coming up," she said, reaching for a bottle below the counter. "You're not driving tonight are you?"

"No, course not," Tube Top said, shaking her tangle of split ends. "Iss mah fortieth birfday."

She upended the shot glass and slammed it down, before wiping the back of her hand across her mouth. Turning her attention to the dude parked on the stool beside me, she scraped four press-on nails across his Levis and shouted "Donchu think I'm lookin good for thirdynine?"

She Benjamin Buttoned her way down the bar--somehow scoring another shot in the process--so I'm not sure how old she was when she fell in the middle of the floor, her skirt bunched around her Spanxx and her face resting against a table leg. She raised her head tentatively. "M'allright," she muttered to an empty chair, which was good news since no one moved to help her up. She made several false starts at standing, like Bambi on a frozen pond if Bambi had spent his formative years drinking Boone's Farm and flashing his tits at volunteer firemen.

Abouth the time she staggered toward the back of the room, Barham excused the band for a "piss break" as he delicately put it, and he strummed through a few acoustic songs. That was the cue for a prom to break out, as strangers paired off into couples and awkwardly swayed in front of the stage.

"These guys are great, right?" said a voice beside me. I assumed someone else had snagged the still-warm seat after its previous owner grabbed a woman in a peasant skirt, headed to the impromptu dance floor, and was currently spelunking her molars with his tongue.

I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to see a twentysomething dude with massive biceps and a vacant expression, an Abercrombie ad in distressed denim. He flashed his Whitestrippiest smile and repeated "These guys are great, right?"

Wait. Wait. Wait.

I'm not very good at recognizing these kinds of things, but the way he rested his hand on my right scapula made me think he might have been hitting on me. And the way he swayed unsteadily toward the rear wall made me think he was drunk enough to try the same line on a river otter.

"Yeah, they're spectacular," I said. "I saw 'em at the Cat's Cradle a couple of weeks ago."

We swapped a few more sentences before he closed his eyes--as if to compose himself--leaned in toward my ear and whispered "Aren't these guys great? These guys are great, right?"

It was like talking to an ice bucket, although an ice bucket I probably would've made out with. "Yeah," I sighed. "They've got a great album."

Album.

He jerked his head away, surprised either by the unfamiliar term or startled by a sudden realization that I must be borderline elderly, that beneath my t-shirt was a set of brittle bones and irregular bowels.

Album.

I may as well have spewed another set of things he wouldn't understand, like "daguerreotype" or "laser disc" or "literacy".

He twisted one of the gelled peaks on his head, patted my knee and said "You have a good night, sweetheart", probably in the same way he tucks his grandmother in before rolling her back toward her oxygen tank and Poise pads.

And that's when I stopped having fun and started feeling old, with a capital O, I am the morning DJ at W-O-L-D levels of Old. I was a solid two summer Olympics older than the band and the dancing freshmen weren't helping, what with their invisible pores and unfinished Cosmopolitans.

I was closing my tab when two of them flounced toward the bar. "I need a dah-rink," one of them pouted, dropping an oversized purse on the stool.

"That's my cue," I thought, stuffing my copy of the receipt into my pocket. Then I headed for the dah-oor.

I Know This Much Is True

2009-08-17T06:34:00.001-04:00

Some of life's most important lessons are also the most painful to learn. Experiencing these truths for yourself can leave you mentally spent and emotionally battered but each shot to the heart--to spill a bit of Bon Jovi on you--is more than important. Some of the things I'd file in this category include only love can break your heart and only music can save your soul and only six pieces of popcorn is enough to turn your dog's colon inside out.

It's not entirely his fault, but if Orville Redenbacher were still alive, I would've dragged him into my closet at 3:17 a.m., handed him a roll of paper towels and told him to start scrubbing. One handful. One handful of 100 Calorie Kettle Corn was enough to ensure that this Monday would begin with a raging internal debate over whether it would be easier to scrub the carpet or just to pack up my furniture and move.

Four Things

2009-08-12T07:00:00.008-04:00

1) Sometimes when I meet people, I’m so insanely nervous that I can’t do anything except a) pant uncontrollably or b) talk incessantly about myself. Unfortunately once it starts—the schmuck-like jabbering— I can’t stop until I'm driving home, wiping an errant smudge of barbeque sauce from my cheek and thinking about all of the questions I wished I’d asked or things I wished we’d covered instead of starting another sentence with “I”. This item is also filed under “Reasons I Rarely Have Second Dates”.

2) Sometimes I’m a chronic over-sharer. This is probably a direct result of spending the past four years putting my entire life on the internet, and while hopefully it’s never as unsettling as being introduced to a friend’s mother just in time for her to fill me in on her uterine fibroids, it’s probably still a bit jarring to the uninitiated (See: Above) who follow normal mores of communication. I have zero secrets, yo.

3) Sometimes when I can’t sleep I catalog my flaws.

4a) There is no four.

4b) Yes there is, and it's a Life Lesson for you. When your neighbor tells you that she and her boyfriend of twenty five years ("TWENTY FIVE YEARS," she repeats for emphasis) have just gotten married, it's not a good idea to respond "Congratulations. Does that void his warranty?"

Just...trust me.

You also may want to avoid the elevator and the building's common areas for a while.

Another Boring Romantic, That's Me

2009-08-05T09:57:00.001-04:00

Well hello, internet. Remember me, the one who used to rummage through your desk drawers while you were at lunch and accidentally-on-purpose brush against you when reaching for the DOOR CLOSE button in the elevator? I'm back from a busy couple of weeks of...not much, really, save for fighting with my own brain. I know there are things I need to be doing--websites to pitch, unsolicited emails to send--but for some reason, my frontal lobe would much rather spend the morning organizing the silverware drawer and wondering whether to be proud or ashamed of my more-than-impressive spork collection.

I've for real been trying to find more work and my emails are most often ignored, although I do get the occasional "you're good with words but we're just not looking right now" response, which is the equivalent of when I'd ask someone to the prom and they'd tell me that I had a really fantastic personality and more novelty t-shirts than they'd ever seen (I was partial to a Bubba Gump Shrimp tee at the time) but they didn't like me in that way. "That way", of course, served as a euphemism for "any way that might involve actually touching you". So that's where we are. Several websites, all of the local alt-weeklies, and a couple of other stray outlets for all my typed thoughts don't want to slow dance with me.

Anyway.

I have gone to a couple of concerts and managed to skip town for the weekend, despite the best efforts of the airlines. I rolled into LaGuardia on Saturday morning just in time for Crazy Bag Full of Batteries Guy and--courtesy of the subsequent terminal closings--I spent several hours sitting crosslegged on the stained carpet at the gate, reading People magazine over a stranger's shoulder and hoping she wouldn't notice all the powdered donut dust I'd rained onto her shirtsleeve. The flights back on Sunday weren't any better. Thanks to an endless storm system that left the local radar as red and angry as my complexion, I had flights delayed, canceled, re-delayed, then ended up on a completely different set of planes than I was originally scheduled for. It essentially turned into an airport key party, where you'd just go home with whatever flight you pulled out of the bowl.

On the music review front, I attended last week's Willie Nelson/John Mellencamp/Bob Dylan show in Durham, North Carolina and wrote a piece for BitchBuzz about it--one that I'm 'specially proud of--which you can read if you clicky here. A couple of days later, it turned up on John Mellencamp's official website, which is one of the coolest things that has ever happened to me, ever, because I've been a massive Mellencamp fan (SHUT UP) since I spent my after-school detentions writing Dr. and Mrs. John Cougar Mellencamp on my Trapper Keepers.

Look at that. I wish I could let my fourth grade self know that things like this would happen. I also wish I'd never bought that Bubba Gump shirt. Or any clothing, really, that was ever on sale at Spencer Gifts.

So. How have you guys been?

Cavity Search

2009-07-24T12:26:00.004-04:00

I woke up with a toothache, the pain annexing my jaw and much of the right half of my face, like I'd been pistol-whipped in my sleep. In keeping with my strategy for handling most Medical Issues, I ignored it, save for occasionally prodding it with my finger. Still sore? Yes. Still sore? Yeah, we get it, right hand.

Somewhere between the pair of Mama's Family reruns that I'd penciled in for the afternoon, I noticed a knot near the source of the OW OW OW, one big enough to warrant a name. I called it Felix. The problem with Felix--one of the problems with Felix--is that once your body grows something big enough to be named, it's probably a good idea to get rid of it, the exceptions being massive boobs, swollen biceps, or a goiter huge enough to score an hour-long special on Discovery Health.

Because of my addiction to House, as I worked Felix's tender borders I had a flurry of increasingly irrational thoughts that involved jaw tumors or a nest of baby spiders beneath my skin and freaked out, wondering how I'd endure the rest of the summer what with the radiation burns and the hatchlings wriggling out of my face.

I called my most level-headed friend to get a second opinion that didn't require a co-pay. After giving a quick explanation of the situation and introducing Felix, I breathlessly asked "So do you think I should spray a can of Raid into my mouth just in case?"

"Go to a dentist," he said, sighing deeply.

"OK, but what are the symptoms of lupus?" I asked, hearing the click of his phone before I even reached the question mark. I gave one more shot at curing myself--a trio of Tylenol P.M. washed down with a mouthful of cranberry juice--but on the third day, Felix was still hanging out.

I admit it. I haven't been to the dentist in years, probably since before American Idol was on television, at least three relationships and twenty pairs of running shoes ago. Because I'm essentially Unemployment's conjoined twin, regular dental checkups are a luxury I can't afford, on the same list with oil changes, PBS pledges, and brand name soups.

After reluctantly axing the idea of keeping Felix and claiming him as a dependent, I played Yellow Pages roulette, flipping to the D-for-Dentists section and making a choice based on which doc had the happiest-looking cartoon tooth. I selected the beaming molar that--creepily--flashed a mouthful of perfect teeth while holding hands with a toothbrush that was either winking or had Bell's Palsy.

I dialed the number, casually deflecting the questions about the last time I'd been flossed and fluorided. After writing the appointment in my planner, I bolted to the sink to start doing all the shit I should've done for the past several years. I scrubbed and Scoped, wove a piece of waxed floss between my molars and dusted the back of my tongue, even though I knew it was way too late, like the kid who sits quietly in the back of the car for the ride home in the hopes his parents will forget that he threw a massive tantrum at the restaurant.

The truth is that other than my money situation--which can only be expressed by turning my pockets inside out and making a frowny face--I'm actually kind of terrified of dentists. I've never had a bad experience in any of their identical mint-scented and Highlights-filled offices, and even dated one of 'em for the better part of a baseball season. The reason we split had less to do with his job and more because of his unfortunate Stevie Nicks fixation; as much as I liked him, I'm never gonna pull off that fingerless lace gloves and witchcraft vibe. Also I hate white-winged doves.

Anyway.

A massive chunk of my DDS-related squirminess comes from a late night HBO airing of The Dentist, a post-LA Law Corbin Bernsen flick where he plays--no shit--a dentist who has some issues with his wife's infidelity and starts pulling his patients' incisors like unwanted weeds in a flower bed. Granted, I don't recall screwing around on Corbin Bernsen so I should be safe, but my brain keeps spewing out one of the final scenes of his wife crawling on all fours, toothless after he'd yoinked every bicuspid out of her face.
__________
Cut To: Yesterday afternoon when I drove through an endless office park of identical squatty buildings before plopping onto an equally squatty piece of office furniture. The receptionist handed a prescription-logo clipboard through her plexiglass window, asking me to please complete a questionnaire that asked whether I'd ever had angina, tuberculosis, or a recent vasectomy.

I made one giant circle around the entire 'NO' column and flicked my tongue across my just-scoured teeth, kind of wishing I’d taken the opposite approach. Rather than trying to overcompensate for years of neglect and a case-a-day Diet Coke habit, I wished I’d made lunch out of Laffy Taffy, corn on the cob, and a number of well-seeded fruits. You know, so I got my money's worth.

My name was called quickly and--to their credit--correctly and I was led past the unmistakable sound of drilling to a chair covered with plastic, a decorating decision I recognized from my grandmother's living room. The hygienist clipped a bib around my neck and said "We're going to do some X-rays" before draping me with a lead blanket. With every "Bite down", I heard a cash register ching in my head and wondered if the gyno's office across the parking lot would let me pawn a handful of my eggs so I could pay for this.

She left me alone while she developed my scans, as the speaker above my head leaked a number of back-to-back-to-back musical tragedies. By the time she came back with a stack of transparencies, Brenda and Eddie had had it already, no doubt squabbling over which one of them got the Sears wall-art and who got the plush carpeting.

Without any warning other than "Open", she'd shoved a hooked tool in my mouth and started scraping, a menacing sound that reminded me of the pair of raptors in Jurassic Park scratching at the kitchen door. Much like the terrified kids on the other side, I had no choice but to smash my eyes shut and wait for it to be over. Unfortunately my choices were to listen to pieces of my enamel being etched off or to hear the worst radio station ever, one that made me want to exhume Nikola Tesla just so I could punch him in the face. "Do you hear that?" I'd shout, shoving his ear toward "Me & You & A Dog Named Boo". "THIS IS YOUR FUCKING FAULT."

The two noises tag-teamed to make the next several minutes industrial-strength misery. Scrape scrape scrape they called her Wi-i-i-i-ldfire scrape scrape scrape and he shall be Levon and he shall be a good man scrape scrape scrape I heard my mama pray the night Chicago died...

About the time a pocket-sized Paul Simon was strumming his tiny guitar about something so right the dentist came in. He was not Corbin Bernsen, thank God. He was, however, efficient, skipping the introductions and moving in a blur of crisp white sleeves and gleaming chrome instruments. He gently prodded my still-bleeding gums. “Do you floss?” he asked, pulling his paw out of my mouth so I could reply.

“Religiously,” I said, wiping at my lip with the bottom of the bib.

“Every day?”

“No, Christmas and Easter.”

He sighed deeply, which was disappointing. That was comedy gold, Tooth Man, GOLD.

“You’ve got a significant cavity in your number thirty molar, which is contributing to the inflammation and discomfort of your gingiva."

"My gingiva is inflamed?"

He nodded.

"I should've worn a longer skirt."

Nothing.

James Taylor duked it out with fire and rain above our heads, a battle less painful than this exchange. He pulled his gloves off, turning them inside out and dropping them into a smudged stainless wastecan. "We'll need to see you again next week to take care of this." He stood, replaced the stool underneath the desk and walked out without looking back.

I unclipped my bib and left it wadded on the Saran-wrapped exam chair. “I always thought that I’d see you one more time again,” Sweet Baby James said as I trudged down the hall.

I made my follow-up appointment and reluctantly agreed.

Because I Sez So

2009-07-20T07:24:00.006-04:00

The binder should’ve been a tipoff.

Shortly before the New York Dolls took the stage in Charlotte, NC, a black-clad stage hand propped a three-ring binder beside the microphone stand for lead singer David Johansen, a binder full of song lyrics. Considering that the Dolls have only released four official albums since 1973--for a total of 46 tracks--it seems like maybe he could’ve committed the words to memory by now, instead of doing a Kinko’s printed karaoke version of “Muddy Bones”.

You can clicky over to BitchBuzz to read the rest of my take on the New York Dolls appearance in Charlotte. I've been a Dolls fan forever--my neighbors on all sides can attest to how often I shout along with "Personality Crisis"--so it stung to file this concert under D-for-Disappointment.

My spirits were briefly lifted after the show when Original Recipe guitarist Sylvain Sylvain¹ wandered out to chat with fans and graciously sign anything that was shoved into his hands. I choked down all of my nerves in an attempt to say something to him that wasn't completely stupid ("GOOD SHOW!") or lame ("GOOD SHOW!") or insane ("I AM THE KING OF THE FISH PEOPLE!") but he interrupted me before I could tell him that lemon was my favorite color. "Everyone should call Tremont Music Hall and tell 'em to book my band again." He smiled for a picture. "The Sylvain Sylvain Band".

Really, Syl, a promotional message? Really? I felt like Ralphie in A Christmas Story when he tears open his Little Orphan Annie decoder ring and realizes that the secret code says "Drink More Ovaltine."

From the reviews I've read of the Dolls other spring shows, Charlotte seems to be the oddball performance and the only one where their energy dropped below Amphetamine levels.² Hopefully I'll catch them again down the road so they can change my mind. Until then, my neighbors are just going to have to suffer.

¹ The Dolls lineup has dwindled to two founding members after the deaths of axeman Johnny Thunders, drummer Jerry Nolan and bassist Arthur "Killer" Kane. It's somewhat unsettling, though, to realize that the Dolls Version 2.0 have been together longer than the Originals.

² In fairness to the rest of the band, the only lackluster performance came from pocket-sized frontman David Johansen. The rest of 'em spent the eighty minute show sneering and solo-ing hard enough to make their eyeliner run.

Bloggage à Trois

2009-07-13T11:30:00.005-04:00

1) We're a solid month into summer, which means here in the south we have balmy one thousand degree temperatures with stifling humidity levels rarely experienced outside of C.C. Sabathia's jock strap. Regardless, I still have to walk the Boxerbeast into submission every day which means my choice is to either drag him out the door before sunrise when I'm rocking a bleary-eyed expression and the imprint of my watchband across my forehead OR to wait till later and have to carry his fifty-five pound carcass back to the apartment when he inevitably overheats and gives up. This has happened before--most recently last Wednesday--and I was surprised to learn that no one will stop to offer a ride (or even a cup of Chick-Fil-A lemonade) to the scrawny girl staggering up a steep hill with a limp dog in her arms.

That's fine, I guess, considering that I wouldn't accept a ride (or a styrofoam cup of high fructose corn syrup) from a STRANGER, since a thousand Netflixxed Law & Order: SVU episodes have taught me that my afternoon would include a pistol whipping, leg shackles, and a damp basement with a scummy water dish to keep me company.

Anyway, this morning Pigpen and I were doing our pre-dawn trip through the neighborhood when a drifter on a child's bicycle teetered past us, doubling back to make looping circles around us on the sidewalk. I've seen this dude before and have also been responsible for him being escorted away from my building after watching him spend an hour bashing his broken arm against the wall, picking at his cast and screaming something about worms eating his hands.

So he's wobbling around on his pink Huffy, swatting at dogwood branches with his good arm, when we lock eyes. "GREAT ASS, BABY!" he shouts at a decibel level that hopefully roused the neighborhood watch advertised on the street signs. "How 'bout you run away with me?" he said, spitting on a Prudential Realty logo before launching himself off the sidewalk and onto the yellow center line.

He didn't wait for my answer. I didn't wait for him to come back. I mean, how would Pigpen have ridden on his bike?

2) Since the Boxerbeast and I are a no-income family, we don't have room for a lot of extras and non-essentials. I've already nibbled my life down to the cuticles, save for the occasional splurge on a Bojangles four-piece (with a side of Bo-tato rounds, obviously) and a monthly appointment to have my eyebrows waxed into two separate entities, choosing to drop $15 instead of looking like Jim Henson should have his hand up my back.

After axing my ESPN The Magazine subscription, my last unnecessary item was Sirius satellite radio, which I booted last month. I never had any issues with the service itself; there were enough channels for me to absentmindedly flick through as I drifted through traffic, swerving and weaving as I attempted to read the song titles from Jack White's latest side project. For the most part, I didn't listen to it. I always plug my iPod into the dash and--despite a total of 643 different albums to choose from--chances are I'm singing along with the same twelve R.E.M. tracks that have soundtracked my...everything since, like, eighth grade.

The problem? Sirius is harder to shake than Alex Forrest. They call at least four times a week, making promises they don't intend to keep, swearing that they could be better--that they WILL be better--if only I'd take them back into my arms, my dashboard, and the Stiletto portable receiver that I could purchase for $20 off the listed price.

Every other day a different rep calls to do a stiff line reading of the same script, but they never listen. "I won't be ignored, Dan!" is the subtext hidden beneath reminders of all the good times and Grateful Dead songs we shared in my car, in the house, or in the boat. Wait. My boat? "I don't have a boat," I told the hourly employee who identified himself as Anton. "That must be your other girlfriend."

Silence from the other end. "I'd been thinking about it and I was SO CLOSE to coming back, until you confused me with her. Didn't our two years together mean anything? All those Air Supply songs, all the original programming, all the hours of commercial free music? That's all I am to you is another subscriber?"

"Ma'am, I'm sorry you're upset, but today we can offer you--"

"What? A Stiletto portable radio? Too late, Anton. Take your Stiletto and park it in your Underground Garage, if you know what I'm saying."

I hung up.

He'll call back. They always do.

3) So I'm on Facebook, like pretty much everyone from my third grade teacher to the mole I just had removed. Friend requests land in my inbox almost every day, which is awesome because I enjoy reveling in the recent miseries and unfortunate hairstyles of everyone who hated me in high school. In the past couple of weeks, mixed in with the hellos from people I'd forgotten and the "Which Strain of Hepatitis Are You?" quizzes, I've been asked to become a fan of pretty much everything. If it's a noun, it has a fan page. Marie Curie? Yes. Beaver, West Virginia? Why not. Babybel cheese? Absolutely.

With the rare exception, I always politely click the ignore button, since I don't see the point of showing my undying loyalty to dairy products on my profile. In the time it's taken me to finish this post, someone has asked me to become a fan of a local jewelry store. How about instead of becoming a fan, we'll just agree that I won't actively sabotage your business, mkay? I won't put your name on my page but I also won't throw a canister of midgrade gasoline through your Tag Heuer display. Just click Confirm if that sounds cool.¹

¹ And oh yeah, I get the irony of railing against fan pages when this site actually has one (THAT YOU SHOULD JOIN), but c'mon, we're way cooler than a net bag full of wax wrapped cheeses, amirite? Right? Maybe?

Exit In An Orderly Fashion

2009-07-07T17:04:00.005-04:00

"I guess you didn't get the email either," he said. We were in the parking garage and he was brandishing a walkie talkie in each hand, both of them burping out intermittent blasts of static. I was naked save for a beach towel, clinging to my dog's leash with one hand and clutching a record sleeve with the other. I’m not sure there could’ve been a better opening line.

I shook my head and flicked a trickle of water from my cheek.

He sighed and looked away, which is typically the reaction I get when I'm partially naked. "It's just a test. They were supposed to let everybody know but they're not the best about, you know, doing things in this building." He illustrated his point by gesturing toward the garage's roof leak which they--The Management--'fixed' by stacking a series of cones in the spaces directly below the problem. When people like me parked there anyway, the cones were replaced by increasingly larger ones until now I'm forced to get out of my car and kick the cone over before pulling forward, popping the key out of the ignition and ignoring the orange carcass mangled beneath the front tire.

I thanked him, tugged the Boxerbeast's leash and tried to step in my own wet footprints on the way back into the still-shrieking building, hoping I could scratch "Being incinerated while I'm loofah-ing my back" off my list of Things to Fear, which bumps "Going bald from malnutrition" back into the top slot.

It seems like maybe a planned test of the fire alarm would be something The Management would think to tell the residents about, especially since one of those residents might’ve been in the shower grooming her personal areas when the alarms went off, a resident who is now rocking a half-finished nether region that currently looks like an alien-carved crop circle.

Mashing the rewind button for a minute, I was--as you might have guessed from context clues--in the shower, fully lathered and quite possibly singing a number of Psychedelic Furs songs when the alarm in my apartment started screaming, the attached strobe light flashing wildly, giving my square footage the appearance of a residential dance club where there would be piles of laundry stacked beside the DJ booth.

I remember touring the building before I moved in and getting a detailed explanation about the emergency alert systems, the khaki-covered property manager speaking in fully-formed paragraphs about the differences between the alarms in the hall and the ones in each individual unit, a monotone monologue I completely ignored because I was too busy gorging myself on the complimentary Triscuits he’d neatly poured onto a paper plate in the kitchen.

Despite being unable to recall any details of that afternoon other than whole wheat goodness, when my version of "Love My Way" was interrupted by an alarm bleating above my bed--IN MY OWN APARTMENT-- I knew it was bad. I expected to race out of the bathroom, rounding the corner to find a Scooby Doo-caliber fire monster waving my tangle of interconnected extension cords or oily rag collection or some other scenario illustrated in the DON'T column of an instruction manual and cackling madly as he painted the upholstery with flames.

I put my razor on the shelf and grabbed the towel hanging over the shower door, one purchased at the kind of novelty beach shop that offers you a free hermit crab with every purchase and sells a variety of t-shirts with slogans like “I Shaved My Balls For This?" My particular terry cloth tragedy has a drawing of a pit bull on it, with the phrase Pit Bull! written in a spray paint-ish font on the wall above its square head.

Yes, I used to have actual bath towels, back when I also had a sofa that wasn't accessorized with deep scratches, before I had to purchase cleaning supplies labeled “dander control”. Pigpen has a tendency to disappear when he’s bored, which means that I’ll inevitably find him in the closet having a brief but ultimately violent relationship with whatever piece of cotton he could drag from the hamper. The casualties have included countless bath towels, two hand towels, a pillowcase, and a Killers t-shirt, proving he has lower standards than anything this side of last call.

Anyway.

I wrapped the pit bull around my torso and sprinted out of the shower. The living room was free of Fire Monsters and smoke, but holy shit was it loud and intolerable, like I’d invited Fran Drescher over for drinks. I shoved Pigpen’s head through his collar, clipped his leash on and--just in case it was a Towering Inferno deal--I doubled back to grab the 7” single framed and sitting on top of the fridge, the one autographed by Robyn Hitchcock and Peter Buck.¹

We pushed through the fire doors and ran down the stairs. Halfway to the garage, I secretly hoped that if anything at this address was currently smoldering, it would be in the apartment of the chick on the top floor whose garish red curtains make it look like she’d skinned Clifford the Big Red Dog and hung his pelt from the window as a warning to other beloved children’s book characters. You know, just in case the Berenstain Bears had considered rummaging through the dumpsters.

I was panting and wiping a soap bubble off of the record sleeve when I saw the maintenance guy, who politely refrained from asking why I wasn’t wearing pants before sending me back upstairs. This type of shit isn’t supposed to happen to Real People. Until today, it only happened on sitcoms in the last century, back when the theme songs had lyrics and the mothers all had feathered hair. Unless you’re me. Then it seems perfectly acceptable. Normal, even.

The alarms continued for another hour, my already disjointed thoughts interrupted every eight minutes by more disco strobes, skull-shattering screeches, and Pigpen’s best attempts at a duet. Eventually I abandoned all efforts at Doing Things and parked myself on the balcony to thumb through US Weekly’s Best and Worst Beach Bodies. I examined my own scrawny form and imagined I’d rank somewhere between Richard Gere (Age 59) and the adjustable wooden chair visible in the same shot with that girl from The Hills who can’t figure out how to look at the camera.

I’d just finished making a list of things I’d lick off Hugh Jackman’s chest--getting as far in the alphabet as Scorpions and Stinging Nettles--when a different maintenance dude with, inexplicably, the same name stitched on his shirt rang the bell. “Everything’s done for the day,” he said. “Sorry for the inconvenience but if--god forbid it--you hear ‘nother alarm, it’s for real.”

“Great,” I told Pigpen as I locked the door, “Those curtains may not make it after all.”
__________

¹ My sister Runtie heard this story last night and she was gobsmacked by my critical thinking skills. “So, you’d just leave all the pictures of, like, OUR FAMILY to burn?”

“I’m sure Mom has copies. Or they’re on Flickr.”

“And that record or whatever is probably on eBay.”

“No way. It’s an original pressing, the one with the picture sleeve.”

“I don’t even know what that means, but it sounds like you’re never having sex again”.

“Probably not, no. But it’s signed by Robyn Hitchcock and Peter Buck and, even though Peter didn’t play on this single or even with the Egyptians until Globe of Frogs in ’88, it’s still Peter Fucking Buck, you know? Hello? Hello, Runtie? Are you still--shit.”

When I posed the same question to her--if you thought your building was ten seconds away from being a Pompeii-style ash pile--what would you rescue from your place, she immediately answered “Gabby (her miniature Daschund, aka The Cocktail Weiner) and Teddy.”

Teddy is the stuffed bear she’s had since her first Christmas, a tattered, threadbare lump that, at this point, has to be like nuzzling with a manila folder. With its shapeless form and eyeless face, it looks like something you see slithering out of an ocean trench in Discovery Channel documentaries. And there’s no way Peter Buck would sign it.

No Whammies

2009-07-05T23:59:00.001-04:00

My car is always a disaster. Between the Wendy's logo foil that lines the floorboards and the crumpled Krispy Kreme napkins that ride shotgun, there's enough evidence of my destructive personal habits to save the CSI team some paperwork when my aorta eventually explodes. This morning, for example, I fumbled my sunglasses across the car and they landed on a wadded McGriddle wrapper that was nestled beside an empty bottle of Muscle Milk, the unlikeliest pairing since Heidi Klum met Seal.

I don't live this way, I just drive like it. Here in my apartment, you can eat off the floor, provided that you're cool if each bite is covered with dog hair, fossilized shards of Pop Tart frosting, and an errant staple.

Anyway.

When I stopped at Exxon this morning, I shoved the nozzle in the gas tank, mashed the button for the cheapest grade, and was kick starting my memory, trying to recall when I last ordered McNuggets so I'd know whether to eat the one resting comfortably in the cup holder. The gas pump bleated that it was finished and--before spitting out a receipt--asked if I would like to save $2 on a car wash. Just like a Phish fan, my car hasn't been bathed since Bonnaroo. I looked at the insect bodies Jackson Pollacking the windshield and the dried mud icing the doors and enthusiastically pressed YES.

I replaced the gas cap and drove to the car wash half of the parking lot, the side of the building decorated with an unlicensed reproduction of Buzz Lightyear, one juuuust misshapen enough to avoid trademark infringement and also to make him look like his mother drank throughout her pregnancy. After spending seven minutes in the LASERWASH--approximately two Spooky Tooth songs worth--I drove out Bonnaroo free, glistening and pure like a newborn infant. A newborn infant that had also just been laserwashed to get all of the birth-nasty off.

It's fitting--poetic, even--that I de-Roo'ed my wheels the day after I learned that there's more live music in my future. I'll be part of the credentialed press for this October's Austin City Limits festival which promises to be all kinds of awesome. The lineup is top-to-bottom mindblowing, including Pearl Jam, Kings of Leon, Lily Allen, Levon Helm (late of The Band, the least Google-able band ever), Jack White's shiny new project The Dead Weather, and--a sleeper fave--Texas' own Daniel Johnston.

I sat in the car absentmindedly fumbling with the now-fraying Bonnaroo wristband that I'm still rocking on my right arm and thinking about that weekend. There were countless tiny moments that I'll try to remember, all of them tangled together like coat hangers int the back of the hall closet...and a much smaller bundle I'd prefer not to recall.

The former includes things like seeing Elvis Costello--1/3 of my Three Favorite Englishmen Ever--quietly singing along backstage as Jenny Lewis belted out "Handle With Care"; the latter is my hotel and everything affiliated with it, including the damp carpet, the convenient location between the exit ramp and the site of a recent gas explosion, and a whiff of menace that made me half expect Javier Bardem to kick the door in before calmly pressing a cattle prod to my forehead.

Most of the time when I travel, I'll do a workout in the hotel room, one probably close to what people in prison do to pass the time: a circuit of sit ups, push ups, and squats followed by five minutes of trying not to cry after inadvertently ramming my face into the corner of the dresser. Since this place would be filed below Typhoid Mary's kitchen on the sanitation scale, I went to the plexiglass panel that served as a lobby to ask about finding a gym.

I tapped quietly on the glass.

"Yeah," the attendant said, not looking away from a Game Show channel rerun where a man with wide lapels and a glistening--possibly wet--mustache was clapping, chanting "No whammies, no whammies."

"Yes, I was just curious if there was a fitness center nearby?"

"Nope," she said, popping a piece of Nicorette out of the plastic and lodging it in her jaw. Considering that all the contestants, the host and most of the audience members were quite possibly dead by now, I thought maybe she could take a break to look me in the eye.

"OK, well, what about running?" An animated Whammy snickered and ran a lawnmower over a bag of money as Wet 'Stache shook his head and dramatically snapped his fingers.

"What about it?"

This was going well. "Right, I wondered if there was a place to run around here?"

She stood up and turned the television off in one swift movement. "I wouldn't," she said, walking out of the room.
__________

Everything I wrote that week was published at BitchBuzz, the organization who trusted me to be a serious journalist, albeit one who almost abandoned her career after her backpack brushed against the walls of the porta-john. I also learned that it's effing hard to be pretentious when your pen has the Family Dollar logo on both sides.

Those words are all here: Thursday | Friday | Saturday | Sunday
__________

Speaking of BitchBuzz, last week I had the chance to interview Robyn Hitchcock for the site. No, really. Those of you nice enough to be longtime readers know that when it comes to a matter of personal importance, this is like if Paula Deen had the chance to talk with the dude who invented butter.

For the new kids, he's been soundtracking my life since I was a college freshman, when I scored a ride to the Record Exchange to trade a stack of one-hit-wonders for a different collection of bands you rarely hear unless you need a root canal. When Hitchcock's "Oceanside" blasted through the store's speakers, I almost smacked the Salem Light out of an employee's hand in my rush to find out who was singing. I dropped $8 on a used copy of Perspex Island and immediately transferred it from its cracked case into my stereo where it remained for the rest of the semester. That album twisted my brain around in a way I've never forgotten--or never recovered from--and ensured I'd spend unsettling amounts of time roaming the H aisle of countless music stores until I'd collected his entire catalog.

Since then, his subsequent releases have each provided a waypoint as I navigated the tangled mess of my twenties. I fell in love to A Star for Bram (1999) and managed to sustain a reasonably healthy relationship for the rest of his solo career. He’d formed a new band by the time my heart was incinerated to Ole! Tarantula (2006) and I scorched someone else’s after casually peeling the plastic from a vinyl copy of Goodnight Oslo (2009). I got fired to Robyn Sings (2002). And to Spooked (2004). And in time for the B-sides of the I Wanna Go Backwards box set (2007), completing my hat trick of insubordination.

You can (you should!) check out Part One here; Part Two ~~will be posted on Monday~~ can be found here.

Stay tuned...

Must Be This Tall To Ride

2009-07-01T13:40:00.005-04:00

I was thirteen the last time I threw up. It was another eighth grade morning in my one elective, the euphemistically named Gifted Class, which was a polite way of categorizing the uncoordinated, unathletic students like me who would staple our eyelids together in wood shop or slice open our jugular in a failed attempt at jumping rope.

Instead of sanding the IV pole I’d carved while recuperating from kickball injuries, I was tethered to a desk. The teacher, a fit woman with Mary Lou Retton’s calves and MacGyver’s haircut, was reading passages from Pudd’nhead Wilson when I started feeling extra-strength awful. The potential for spewing had introduced itself on the school bus, which wasn’t a new occurrence since most of my rides on Bus #246 ended with my neighbor cutting a wad of half-chewed Bubble Tape out of my spiral perm. Scrawny kids dressed in an unending rainbow of sharply creased Duckhead shorts didn’t have it easy.

Anyway, whether it was the repeated mentions of Pudd’n or the fact that my desk was practically on top of the radiator, I felt my Golden Grahams making for the exit and I did what anyone who wanted to earn the unshakeable nickname Barf Vader would do: I calmly opened my copy of Mark Twain’s slim novel and blanketed the pages with my breakfast.

That was almost sixteen years ago, I realized yesterday, right before I spent six hours trying to make myself hurl.

Over the weekend I had an intense craving for roller coasters because between the unemployment, my less-than-zero bank balance and unending singlehood, my life just wasn’t making me feel nauseous enough. After realizing that Virginia’s Busch Gardens was only a four hour drive away, I decided that was the perfect place to potentially die in a freak accident beside a Dippin Dots stand.

The trip was meticulously researched, which meant I Mapquested a set of directions and Googled “Severed Limbs + Busch Gardens” because my brain dredged up the memory of an Inside Edition piece about a girl whose feet were lopped off on an east coast roller coaster. After several articles reassured me that the severing in question occurred in Ohio, I bought my day pass.

I hit the road at the crack of What-the-Fuck? yesterday, armed with Water Babies oil-free sunscreen and a twelver of Diet Coke. My pre-dawn departure was met with surprise by my friends and family who knew that even when I had a job I could rarely be troubled to arrive at work before ten. I pointed out that maybe if any of those offices had Skee Ball and a petting zoo, I wouldn’t have been escorted out of the building with my belongings hastily stacked in borrowed cardboard boxes.

After a McGriddle stop at the Virginia state line, it was 9:45 when I dropped my car in a lot marked GERMANY and boarded the tram into the park. Much like Disney’s Epcot Center, Busch Gardens is divided into countries but B-to-the-G doesn’t have a rotating cast of good-natured characters ambling through the park waving, a difference that was noted when I complimented someone in Scotland on their costume and was rewarded with a gesture I typically save for people who won't let me merge into traffic.

I took a few minutes to study the map and immediately had a problem with their geography, which shouldn’t be surprising since the entire place is named after a brewery. Three bottles of Michelob Ultra and I'm unsure why I’m naked on a mini-golf course, let alone capable of remembering whether Italy dead-ends into Turkey or not. What I learned yesterday is that France recently annexed Ireland, that England has the cleanest bathrooms, and that Canada smells like grilled meat.

I stopped for a pee break in Ireland (which doesn’t believe in paper towels), then turned my attention toward the ‘coasters. The park had five trademarked thrill rides, each scattered in a different country bordered by a number of shops inexplicably selling Billabong tees and Rainbow flip flops, proving that Douche is the universal language.

After deciding to get the biggest and newest coaster out of the way first, I headed toward Griffon, a floorless metal suicide machine. There were zero people line, since everyone was still constructing their Bugaboo strollers in the Germany lot, so I scored a seat in the front row. “Hope you’re ready for this,” a nametag wearing teenager told me, tugging at my shoulder harness as I tried to forget that my life was in the hands of someone wearing a puka shell necklace.

Unmoving amusement parks where the rides are all secured in concrete make me feel thismuch safer than state fairs, if only because I assume that the employees go through a screening process that doesn’t involve questions like “When’s the last time you booted black tar heroin?” or that they aren’t mashing buttons as part of a lenient prison’s work-release program.

The Griffon slowly inched skyward before reaching the top of what would be a two-hundred foot drop. We soundlessly moved toward the edge and it cruelly left us dangling in midair, faces pointing toward the earth. Much like the Bond villain who outlines his entire plan before hooking your face to a car battery, it gave everyone time to comprehend how they were going to die. It was the kind of ride that makes you hope you’ve mentioned what song you’d like to have play at your funeral. For what seemed like several days I stared at the fake French village twenty stories below, debating between Robyn Hitchcock’s “Airscape” and The Facts of Life theme song.

Then we dropped, as did a section of my colon. Until you’re hurtling toward an unforgiving strip of asphalt at seventy miles per hour, you never know what kind of primal noises you’re capable of making. Mine sounded like Björk songs. After what couldn’t have been more than two minutes, we were guided back into the station, the safety harnesses popped open and I stumbled toward the exit turnstile. The Griffon left me shaken, still clinching my inner thighs and checking to make sure I hadn’t bitten off my tongue. It also made me realize how long it’s been since I had sex.

So I rode it four more times.

From Griffon it was on to the Alpengeist, located in Virginia’s best imitation of Italy, which involved plastic snowbanks and another stand selling flip flops. “Alpengeist means 'Ghost of the Alps’,” the woman behind me told her son. “Alpen means Alps, and geist means Ghost. Alpengeist.”

“And poltergeist means Ghost of the Polters,” I said helpfully. Both of them ignored me, the woman turning around hard and fast enough to hip check me with an overstuffed fanny pack.

Alpengeist also means “Ghost of the Spinal Injury”. My fetus-sized skull didn’t fit securely in the headrest, so it smacked against the side of the car for a solid two minutes. I thought I tasted inner ear fluid as I staggered out to the pavement. Then I rode it again.

The park’s former signature roller coaster, The Big Bad Wolf, was decorated with a banner commemorating its 25th Birthday. The only other time I’d been to Busch Gardens was also in ‘84 and I threw a massive tantrum when I learned I couldn’t ride it. Since at the age of five I weighed less than an ironing board, I was stuck on slow moving rides shaped like hot air balloons and flying carpets and other impractical methods of transportation. “I’ve been waiting for you,” I said loudly enough for the family beside me to move their son to the side of the line farthest from my crazy.

“The Big Bad Wolf will propel you at the SPEED OF FRIGHT!” the recorded voiceover said as I waited for an empty car. That’s a phrase that’s open for interpretation, since anyone who ever rode with my great aunt knows that the speed of fright could be 10 to 15 miles per hour, depending on how crowded the sidewalk was.

Scotland’s representative in the roller coaster United Nations was the Loch Ness Monster, a ride that managed to look more entertaining on the map, although the harness did give me a complimentary mammogram. After considering whether Germany’s Der Marktplatz had a Pops-A-Dent that could un-invert my left breast, I took a break for lunch.

You wouldn’t expect France to be the purveyors of corn dogs. Or of churros. Or of an all-Asian waitstaff. But there the three of them were in a blue building hand-painted with the word patisserie, which is French for you paid $40 to get diarrhea. I took a deep fried mistake in each hand and sat in the shade behind the building. The Griffon whizzed by at regular shrieking intervals and I wondered what it would be like to work there, listening to people scream all day. At first, I imagine they would invade your dreams but eventually the shouts would seamlessly blend with the rest of the day’s soundtrack, proving no more invasive than someone in another cubicle who had a tendency to type too hard. And then you’d start smoking a lot of pot.

The last ‘coaster of the day was Apollo’s Chariot, a ride I’d hoped was named for Carl Weathers. Despite the late afternoon heat, the crowd had tripled in size and I shuffled through the line behind a woman who was tattooed from scalp to ankle, a look that says “I have a casual attitude toward hepatitis” and also “I enjoy working retail”.

There were a surprising number of inked people in the park and, as I gawked at their shoulder blades wondering why anyone would scar themselves with the Miami Dolphins logo, I was often met with angry stares. Look, if you don’t want me to eyeball you, then don’t decorate your back like a bridge overpass. I thought you’d be more offended if I didn’t look, considering that you spent more money on that full-color picture of your father than I did on my living room furniture. Oh, it’s your mother? I’m totally sorry. Are you going to finish that corn dog?

The line moved past several closed circuit TVs playing Busch Gardens proganda and after ten minutes it all started to blur together in my brain. Some distant piece of the park was described as a “high energy hands-on adventure zone” which is how I’ll be marketing my bedroom from now on. I’m pretty sure that both areas will offer the same high percentage of disappointment.

Finally I scored a seat on the Chariot and pulled the restraints into place. “All clear,” one of the kids in charge said before accidentally hitting the button that released the harnesses. “It’s OK, it’s OK,” he repeated, using the same tone I use when I tell the dog I’m getting ready to vacuum.

We were snapped back in, rechecked and--hopefully--spared from an undignified death in an artificially colored lake. The purple and yellow cars started climbing toward the sun, click-click-clicking toward the top of the hill. I looked down at the parking lots named for sovereign nations and the tiny dots scurrying in the direction of the log flume. The row ahead of me screamed as they tipped over the edge. “The Facts of Life theme song,” I said to myself before throwing my arms in the air. “I hope they’ll play The Facts of Life”.

Here and Now

2009-06-29T22:18:00.003-04:00

At one point, Chris Stamey talked about the joy of marriage and how it’s provided inspiration for his recent songwriting. “This one is dedicated to my wife,” he said before playing “To Be Loved”. Far be it from me to begrudge anyone’s happiness, but I liked it way better when he was broken-hearted and bitter.

Overly sentimental songs make me uncomfortable, especially when I know who it was written for. I’m cool if I just have to imagine some faceless thing that inspired the words or—in the case of everything that falls out of Nick Lowe’s mouth—I just assume he’s singing to me.

I have friends who can’t watch The Office because the awkwardness is too unsettling. That’s how I feel about sincere love songs. Overt displays of emotion always leave me embarrassed, like I’ve just overheard a conversation that wasn’t meant for me.

I rolled that idea around my brain during “Early in the Morning”—the song [Peter] Holsapple dedicated to the woman wearing his last name—and decided that maybe the problem is less about the words and more about me. Since my own personal life is littered with more wreckage than the infield at a NASCAR race, maybe I just can’t appreciate an album about domestic bliss, about English muffins and marmalade and the same person’s head denting the pillow beside you until forever.

Or maybe I’m just a bitch.

I saw Peter Holsapple and Chris Stamey--formerly one half of jangle pop masters The dB's--on Saturday night at Cat's Cradle. I also wrote an insanely detailed review of the show, which you can read here.
__________

Tomorrow I'll be spending a total of nine hours in the car and, in between breakfast and dinner breaks at the nearest Exxon stations, I'll be riding roller coasters all day at Busch Gardens. Because that's what an unemployed, overdrawn thirty year old does. Also, I really want a funnel cake.

Meet and Greet

2009-06-26T10:00:00.005-04:00

On Tuesday night, my friend L. and I joined approximately five hundred of our closest friends at Barnes & Noble for an in-store appearance by David Sedaris. He was delightful, self-effacing and brilliant--as expected--as he read some unpublished essays and diary entries and a lengthy New Yorker piece that he'd selected because it began at the very Costco just down the street from the bookstore.

I've been a swooning fan of his since several summers ago when I picked up Me Talk Pretty One Day on a whim, probably from one of those 'Buy 2 Get 1 Free' tables at Borders that always send me home with thirty pounds of paperbacks. As soon as I finished it, I snapped up everything else he'd written and still eagerly await Amazon's automated emails that announce the release date of his next cryptically-titled essay collection.

David Sedaris has always put things in perspective for me. I don't mean that as a reflection on his work or in that off-putting preachy way like, say, the apron-wearing woman at Whole Foods who judges me because I don't buy organic bananas, her thoughts almost audible as she imagines a variety of orifices where I can shove my conventional (read: cheaper) variety. He's not like your co-worker who took a mission trip to Honduras purely in the hopes of making out with that earnest guy who wears a fringed vest but comes back wide-eyed and full of reasons why we all need to stop living in houses with walls.

No, the Sedaris-style perspective is entirely more damaging. See, sometimes I think I'm a good writer. Not necessarily good enough to earn an unflattering caricature on a Barnes & Noble bag but better than the average YouTube commenter. Then I read some knee-buckling turn of phrase in Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim and I realize how wrong I am. There are people who have shaped who I am (see: George Carlin, the Monty Python cast, Robyn Hitchcock) and then there are those I want to be. That, kids, is David Sedaris. And I mean that purely on a talent level, although he does have some very nice belts and we seem to enjoy the same painkillers. But still. I'm being professional here.

Anyway before he began, as the massive crowd filled the back part of the store, forcing everyone to decide whether they wanted to be mashed against a stranger's nether regions or feel the sharp corners of the Liberal Fascism display digging into their kidneys, I made the comment to L. that within the next decade, I wanted this. This being the throngs of people with numbered wristbands who would wait two hours to hand me a dog eared copy of my paperback. People who spent the duration of my remarks half listening and half trying to decide what exactly they'd say when they reached the folding table where I'd be signing things. People who were so desperate to get a glimpse of me that they were willing to stack up several copies of something with a newborn's face on it and use it as a step stool. People who would clutch their now-personalized copy of my latest release as they walked across the parking lot to Macaroni Grill critiquing my shoe selection and commenting that they thought I'd be taller.

L. looked at me like I'd said I wanted to do shots of molten lead. "Why would you want that?" she asked.

I shrugged. "Why wouldn't you?"

Unfortunately, the only thing standing between me and an adoring crowd is, um, writing a book. That, and talent. Sometimes I think assembling something with chapters would be a great idea. Other times I realize it would be impossible, since my attention span is shorter than most seizures. Considering that--just this morning--my waffles caught fire when I got bored by their two minute toasting time and excused myself to start arranging my dress shirts by sleeve length, the thought of banging out several hundred thousand words is daunting, if not damn near unbelievable.
__________

The most unintentionally hilarious moment of the night came after David (yes, I call him David, especially in the conversations we have in my head) read the New Yorker piece that eventually veered onto the topic of book signings. He had several paragraphs that explained why he didn't allow photographs to be taken at his in-store events and, sure enough, B&N was blanketed with "NO PHOTOGRAPHS OR VIDEO" signs and equally prevalent wordless versions that had cameras with Xs through them, just in case some illiterates made their way to the book store.

Not two minutes after we'd all tucked our books under our arms so we could applaud the last sentence, a thin, fidgety man wearing a garish shirt pattern that looked like a sparrow had flown into his chest at an insanely high speed climbed to the second shelf of the Animal Husbandry section and held up his cell phone...to take a picture.

A uniformed police officer immediately confronted the guy by loudly asking, "Sir, were you aware that there's no photography allowed?"

Sparrow Shirt, who was standing under a NO PHOTOGRAPHS sign the size of a vending machine, shook his head dopily and said, "Nope, I didn't know that." Since he had both eyes and ears, I kind of hoped that the cop would call bullshit and beat him with the nearest available copy of A Beginners Guide to Falconry.
__________

If you have the chance to catch David (again, I lead a rich fantasy life in which we'll be going to Chick-Fil-A together later) when he resumes his book tour in the fall, I highly recommend it. Despite the massive crowd, he graciously said that he wasn't leaving the store until everyone who wanted a book signed had gotten their chance. "If your number is higher than 100," he said, "Go see Up and come back when it's over, I'll still be here. Also, if you don't cry during that movie, you're dead inside."

I had to roll out for a friend's birthday dinner before I got my chance, but I'm pretty sure he would've hung around for the wild-eyed girl wearing wristband number 383. I'll stay till the store closes when it's my turn to sit behind the author's table.

I promise you that.

Now I Wish I'd Super Sized It

2009-06-24T16:46:00.005-04:00

I just got an automated phone call, the kind where a disembodied voice mangles my last name almost as completely as something with a central nervous system, the kind I usually ignore because they always involve phrases like "overdue" or "legal action".

Today's installment wasn't any better. I pressed the phone to my ear just in time to hear a monotone voice repeat "Hello" three times before soullessly informing me that my bank account was overdrawn.

That final, fateful debit charge, the one that shoved my balance into the red? A $4.25 McDonald's Filet-O-Fish sandwich.

I'm pretty sure that I heard the robot judging me when she gave the one-sided recount of the purchase that sent my net worth into the negative numbers and it didn't brighten my spirits to shout "YEAH, WELL AT LEAST I HAVE ARMS" before throwing my phone into the sofa cushions. Usually it does.

Let's ignore, for a moment, that I couldn't scrape together enough change to pass through the drive-through window and had to sign a receipt for my square-shaped mistake. You know what really sent that sandwich crawling back up my esophagus? The $35 overdraft charge that BB&T gave me as an after-dinner mint.

I don't recall the last time I paid $39.25 for a meal, if I ever have, but I sure as hell wish it hadn't been served in a cardboard box.

We Have Some Lovely Parting Gifts For You

2009-06-20T09:30:00.001-04:00

I have a very elaborate system of doing laundry, with countless exits on the road between Clean and Dirty. Typically whichever band t-shirt I wear as I procrastinate and loiter around my apartment is the shirt I'll sweat through at the gym the next day. That meant that yesterday's dorktastic workout garment was the "It's O.K. To Like Nick Lowe" tee I rocked during Pop Music Trivia Night at a local bar on Thursday.

Anyway, I was stumbling between the Y's two weight rooms when a guy with a chest bigger than mine¹ stopped and said "Hey, I love Nick Lowe!" This was something I didn't expect to hear, since most of the dudes who frequent the Y on Friday night are walking staph infections who pause from lifting heavy things just long enough to throw up in the trash can. They're not typically the kind who go for gently aging English pop stars.

His genuine enthusiasm shocked me enough that I stopped in the middle of the hall and cocked my head, Golden Retriever-style. "For reals?"

"Oh yeah," he said, before singing "Take a little walk to the edge of town, go across the tracks..."

Yea--wait...what?

"Fuckin' Bad Seeds, man", he said, wiping a stained sleeve across his forehead. "They're awesome."

"Um, no, that's actually Nick Cave."

"Oh. Either way, he's great."

With that, he shuffled toward the water fountain, still singing "Red Right Hand".

Either way? No, brah, eight letter names are the only things that Mr. Lowe and Mr. Cave have in common. I've reached the point where I'm willing to be less-selective when looking for potentially datable dudes² but that kind of mistake just doesn't get it done.

I'm not sure what it says about me, but I would've overlooked his willingness to, um, reblog his dinner in public if he could've dropped a couple of bars from "Cruel to Be Kind."
__________

Earlier in the day, I was trying to drag Pigpen away from a dead squirrel he was desperately trying to make out with when a guy rounded the corner and stopped on the sidewalk about six feet from the Boxerbeast's leash.

"Wow," he said, jamming his hands into his back pockets. "Great legs."

I immediately assumed he meant Pigpen, since I'm built like a lawn flamingo. "Yeah, you should see him in heels."

He laughed and extended his hand. "I'm Eric."

"J-Money," I said, thrilled that I was actually able to respond with something that made sense.

"Look," he said, whipping out a small notebook. "I'm in kind of a hurry, but I really want to give you my number."

I didn't know exactly how to handle this. Yes, I'd gotten a set of digits this quickly before, but it was because that guy had just parked his Hyundai in my back bumper. He tore the page out and handed me a set of neatly ball-pointed block letters. "Give me a call sometime. But you need to do it before the end of the month."

I grinned. Bold. I liked it. "Why's that?"

"Because my soon-to-be ex-wife is going to stop paying for my cell phone. Oh, I should probably mention that I'm going through a divorce."

"Um. OK, sure, that happens."

"And I'm homeless."

And this is the point where my frontal lobe exploded. I was completely unable to comprehend that last sentence, and responded politely with a sound that was somewhere between "AATUUGUUEH" and "EEEIIGAAGHH".

"Well," he said, completely undaunted by the fact that I'd morphed into Nell's less-coherent cousin. "See you around."

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is my life. It's also why I'm starting to consider Binge Drinking as a viable career option.

¹ That's not saying much since I'm only slightly more voluptuous than Montgomery Burns.

² My current criteria: Lactose tolerance, correctly paired chromosomes, ears.

Bonnaroo: Day 1

2009-06-12T13:21:00.003-04:00

OK, so Day One of Bonnaroo is in the patchouli-scented bag and—other than the creeping realization that I’ll be loofa-ing dried mud off my lower half for the next several months—I managed to survive reasonably unscathed.

I merged onto I-40 West around 6:30 yesterday morning with an overstuffed backpack full of impractical outfits¹ and three cases of Diet Coke, you know, in case of emergencies. Most of the drive was non-eventful, save for my screechtastic singalong with whatever spilled out of my iPod, although I could’ve done without the torrential rains. Little did I know, that was to be the theme of the day. HELLO, MY NAME IS FORESHADOWING.

After three pee stops (caffeine, you diuretic minx) and a swing through a Subway/Exxon hybrid, I got to my hotel around 1:15 and I’m pretty sure I recognized my room from an episode of CSI. I can’t say I’ve ever stayed in a place where the staff stands behind a plate of plexiglass and passes your key through a slot. “You’re in the handicapped room,” the cashier said, leaning toward the keyslot.

“What exactly does that mean?”

She sighed, as if I should be well-versed in the latest innovations in universal design. “It means your sink is lower and your shower don’t have a door. Sign here,” she said, passing me a credit card receipt and a pen with a logo from the regional medical center. “Checkout time’s noon on Sunday and remember, occupancy by more than six people is unlawful an’ violates the fire code.”

“Six people? You have more faith in me than I do.” I gave her my best student council smile. She responded by closing the slot and turning up the volume of the small television behind the scratched window of her cage.

I quickly showered, changed and ironed my shirt. The iron rained rust flakes and white pellets onto the front of my garments but that stopped mattering when I flipped it over to find I’d melted a centipede into the back of it. Grabbing another shirt, I tossed 90% of my things (including anything that touches my face and/or my gums) back into my backpack and carried it out to the car, where it will spend the rest of my stay living in the tailgate of my earth-mauling SUV.

My luxurious accommodations are close to 20 miles from the ‘Roo grounds and, although it took six and a half hours to cover 450 miles, it took almost three more to go the final 15. I had to swing by a radio station to pick up my Media Wristband, an accessory which is reasonably cool-looking but its dangling ends get in the way of my Portajohn maneuvers.

After several false starts at going in the right direction, I stopped at a Kangaroo gas station to casually bat my eyelashes at at Tennessee State Trooper to see if I could get any assistance. “You’re with the press,” he said, unable to hide his surprise when I nodded. “You ever interview Metallica?” I told him I hadn’t. “You’re young. You still have time. They’re my favorite band, you know.” We swapped stories about Master of Puppets, covered the years he spent stationed in Germany and, ten minutes later, I was directed back onto the interstate, back to the same endless line of traffic. Flirtfail.

Officer Metallica did direct me to a different exit on the interstate, but that was one for VIPs and artists, not for minor members of the internet press. A girl in a shirt stamped 'Security' made me bang a U-turn in the middle of the road and on each unsuccessful attempt, the honks and one-fingered salutes from the other drivers made me wish I didn't have a personalized license plate.

After another stop and another chat with concert security, I was directed toward a field where I waited for the staff shuttle and within ten minutes, I was lodged in the back seat of an Astrovan, wedged between two Canadians who had come to sell dreamcatchers. “You get your car searched on the way in?” a bandanna wearing twentysomething asked me. I shook my head. “Lucky. Cause that sucks. They had us on the side of the road, going through our shit. What I learned last year though is that anything you want, you can buy here anyway.”

“Yeah, after waiting outside I could use a glass of lemonade.”

He looked at me like I was speaking in tongues. “Um. Yeah. Anyway, we hid some stuff in our taillights. If you’re interested, I get off from work around ten.”

After a quick trip down a rutted road, we were deposited at the far end of the facility. If Bonnaroo needed an enema, they’d insert it where the staff shuttle rolls in. But I was there! And all that stood in my way was a thick grey mudsludge that made me understand why the media info suggested that you wear wellies.

The rest of the evening went by quickly. I’d hoped to see indie popsters the Delta Spirit but they had some weather-based travel delays (or maybe they just talked to the same cops I did) so instead I caught the Alberta Cross, White Rabbits, and Hockey—the latter of which should be your new favorite band.²

Just after ten, severe thunderstorms and tornado warnings sent me screaming for the press tent, where I cowered on an inflatable sofa and hoped that my life wouldn’t end with mud-caked feet beside people wearing ironic t-shirts. When the weather calmed down and the angry red splotches disappeared from the local radar, I made a break for the shuttle and rolled back into the hotel by midnight.

As I write this now, I’m waiting for media orientation and the beginning of what promises to be a very busy, very full day with a couple of interviews in the early afternoon and the David Byrne show tonight, where I’ll test the limits of this multicolored wristband and see exactly what I can do with it. Cause, you know, Once in a Lifetime and all that…

¹ Note: Don’t wear anything white. Or anything that you don’t want to stain. Or anything you don’t want someone else to stain for you.
² Reviews of the shows and a couple of videos are on my main gig at Bitch Buzz.

Road to 'Roo-in

2009-06-11T05:30:00.003-04:00

My car is packed (again) and I'm ready to hit the road (again) for yet another six and a half hour drive. I'm on my way to Bonnaroo to report on the action for London-based BitchBuzz.com. It's their first U.S. music festival coverage, so here's hoping I don't screw it up. I'll be rocking an official media wristband and everything, which is something that hasn't happened since I covered SSHS Homecoming '96 for The Tiger Times and I promise to be no less obnoxious in Tennessee.

I have some interviews lined up and am trying to score a few more but it promises to be a swell time all around. I'll be sending updates to my editor daily, so check out that site for the goods and this one for all of my misadventures. The lineup is excellent this year, featuring Bruce Springsteen, Wilco, Robyn Hitchcock, Elvis Costello, Robyn Hitchcock, Nine Inch Nails, Robyn Hitchcock David Byrne, and roughly a brazillion other bands, including my all-time personal fave, Robyn Hitchcock.

25 minutes until Dunkin Donuts opens, which means it's time to lock my doors and program the GPS. A long day of gas station coffee and Slim Jims awaits...which may explain why my car smells like a hamster cage.

Are any of you guys hitting the 'Roo as well?

Nuggets

2009-06-03T14:30:00.003-04:00

1) On Saturday night, I went with some friends to see Sam Raimi's latest creepfest Drag Me To Hell. It's the story of a Pam Beesly-ish bank drone who pisses off an elderly gypsy, which is a bigger no-no than taking a handful of Starlite mints from the teller window. The flick was much better than I expected with some genuine scares and the potential to reach cult-classic status if only because several scenes involved a talking goat.

It also ensured that I'm never speaking to any women over the age of 50 since I'm now convinced they have the potential to summon the kind of demons that don't drop by to trade Crockpot recipes. Also, let's just say I won't be swiping my old 'n' hateful neighbor's Sunday paper anymore 'cause if she opened a portal to hell in my living room, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't get my security deposit back.

2) Speaking of my building, there's a new dude on my floor who has been non-stop listening to a song with Shakespearian couplets like "If you want it/Get up on it". After three days of bone-rattling bass, the only thing I want to get up on is a sign for Prudential Realtors.

3) Yesterday was my long-dreaded birthday, which was commemorated with cards from both Banana Republic and Sunglass Hut, leaving me unnerved that all thirty trips around the sun gets you is a discount on cropped pants and oversized plastic eyewear.

Actually, it was a great day, start-to-finish. I rolled out of bed before 5 and immediately cleaned the kitchen and squeezed some scrubbing bubbles into the toilets because, at the very least, I wanted to start my new decade with gleaming bathrooms and empty trashbins. AND THAT WAS JUST THE BEGINNING. I think I heard from half the internet, got a thirty-candled cupcake from my non-douchenozzle neighbor, some friends took me out for mini-corn dogs and chocolate cake, and I came home to find FOUR BOXES of Oreo Cakesters on my doorstep. If it were possible to overdose on happiness, yesterday I was Jimi Hendrix on Jim Morrison's back.

I also heard from two of my three most recent exes, which was nice. The one no-show was--ironically--the dude who put the least amount of effort into our relationship but came out of it with Costco-sized boxes of bitterness. It's like if you ignored your houseplants for several months then acted surprised when the geraniums died. And then you called the geraniums a bitch, told the geraniums never to contact you again, and un-friended the geraniums on Facebook.

Anyway, my longest-tenured former boyfriend made an excellent point about my birthday-related discomfort. He hit the half-century mark last year and--because of our double-decade age difference--we'd been longtime subscribers to Age Is Just a Number Illustrated. He essentially said that it didn't make any sense to ignore my birthdate in one aspect of my life but to let it overshadow the other parts and--as much as I hate to admit it--he's onto something.

So that's one day down, 3,650 to go until life's odometer causes me to freak out again. Until then, I'll just worry about sensible things like gypsy curses and why I ever gave Sunglass Hut my mailing address.

So That Just Happened

2009-05-31T23:25:00.005-04:00

Author's Note: This was originally posted Friday on Tumblr but, really, I feel like I need to share my awkwardness with the widest possible audience, in the hopes that eventually I'll be shamed into acting like a Real Human.

Gentlemen, start your cringe-ines.
__________

The coffee shop downstairs has inexplicably started opening at noon and as soon as I saw the owners putting their umbrellas out on the patio, I nipped down to liberate a pair of Diet Cokes from the fridge, like I was gonna build an ark for phenalalanines.

Anyway, I’m in full-on deadline mode today, which means my ratty Sox hat, a wrinkled Nick Lowe Jesus of Cool tee, and a deep-set scowl. I had just dropped a can directly on the top of my foot and was giving The Real Jesus an interesting set of surnames when I turned and smacked into the sternum of a fortysomething Peter Gallagher lookalike, assuming Mr. Gallagher ever weed-whacked his eyebrows.

“Shit, I’m so sorry,” I said, because I’m smooth like that.

He smiled.

“No problem. I love the sound of breaking glass.”

I almost turned to see if I’d actually shattered the refrigerator door when I slammed it but then realized that HE WAS QUOTING A NICK LOWE SONG FROM THE VERY ALBUM SCREENPRINTED ON MY CHEST.

“Wow, you’re a Nick Lowe fan?”

He smiled again, reaching over my shoulder to grab a soda.

“Been a Basher fan for years. I had that album when it came out.”

I didn’t know what to say. He was obviously waiting for me to do something, staring at me expectantly with a pair of blue eyes the color of holy shit I want to make out with him. I fumbled. “Yeah, it’s stellar, start to finish.” I backed away, dropping a stack of quarters on the counter. AND THEN I PANICKED.

“Well, cool, excellent. See you, then.” I hurried out the door, pausing only when I dropped the other can and Pele’d it across the patio until it exploded against the side of the building.

And so it goes and so it goes
But where it’s goin’, no one knows

Sigh.

I'm Not Dead, I'm in Pittsburgh

2009-05-27T10:28:00.001-04:00

So last weekend I hit the road immediately after Dunkin Donuts opened their drive-through window and a trio of Boston Cremes and I spent just under six hours in the car on the way to Pittsburgh. A group of my friends from Twitter had planned to descend upon the Steel City for the weekend so we could wear nametags, show our faces in three dimensions and make awkward advances toward each other that would be recounted 140 characters at a time.

I spent the morning driving the entire length of West Virginia. If this obscene gesture is the state of Dubya Vee, I started at the wrist and came out beside its extended middle finger.
In between, there was nothing but trees and Exxon stations and trees and zero cell service and trees, which was a problem because the purpose of long drives is to simultaneously talk on the phone while you try to lick powdered sugar off your dashboard.

Around one p.m. I rolled into the 'Burgh and immediately made a stop at Primanti's which--just like an indie rock band--came either highly recommended or strongly discouraged, depending on who I asked. After mashing my PIN on the attached ATM to comply with their handwritten CASH ONLY policies, I ordered a steak and cheese sammich, which the menu said was their #2 seller¹.

Their gimmick is that the french fries are baked into the sandwich, between the bread and meat and a stack of cole slaw big enough to landscape your backyard with, but edspite the promise of an after-lunch aneurysm, I have to admit that it wasn't very good. It was blander than a PBS pledge drive and co-starred my arch-nemesis, soggy bread,² although that doesn't mean that I didn't shove all of it into my face, even scraping my bottom teeth across the wrapper to gather any errant cheese drippings.

From there, an iPhone walking map led me across the Seventh Street Bridge to the Andy Warhol Museum. I'd been looking forward to checking it out both because I dig his work and because I'm only a pair of Ray Bans away from looking like Mr. Fifteen Minutes of Fame since we have the same bleached hairstyle, doughy cheeks, and attitude, although he obviously wins the talent portion of the competition. The museum had recently featured a Star Wars-themed exhibition but unfortunately it had closed the week before and the only remnants of Darth and Co. were a number of Lucasfilms-branded action figures on the clearance rack of the gift shop.

There were no special exhibits--the next one wasn't on the schedule until June--so several halls were stacked with locked trunks of what used to be or what was yet to be assembled. The rest of the building is definitely worth a stop if you're in town but I was a bit disappointed by the permanent collection, if only because one floor focuses more on Warhol's mother and another is devoted to his Interview magazine. There are some interesting pieces though, including his collaborations with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring and several works from his Death and Disaster series, the latter coming as a silk-screened surprise to the visitors who just knew him as the Tomato Soup and Jackie O dude.

After contemplating the purchase of a Velvet Underground t-shirt, I hoofed it back to my car in a persistent drizzle that left me with enough mascara streaks and wet cotton to appear as an extra in a Whitesnake video. I drove toward the airport to my Expedia-priced accommodations at the Holiday Inn Exxxpress, where the Extra X stands for Extra Stranger's Hair in Your Shower and the bored-looking staff took their time finding my reservation as I busied myself by grabbing the manager's business cards and shuffling them before asking the couple behind me if they wanted to see my magic trick.

After several attempts at pronouncing my last name, the staff slid a plastic key across the counter but told me that none of the locks in the building were working so they'd have to call Hank to let me into my room. Three minutes later, Hank materialized behind the desk, leading me down the hall while lugging an oversized universal key. He crammed it into the lock and grunted as he opened the door, while staring at me in a way that was unsettling enough for me to worry that I'd wake up and see him watching The Red Shoe Diaries on the other side of my room.

I had just enough time to shower and change before dinner, so I hurriedly lathered, rinsed, and repeated before wriggling into a dress I bought at a store that stocks Laffy Taffy at the register and caters solely to the Learner's Permit and Pre-Algebra set. I smeared some shadow across my lids, grabbed my worthless key and was on my way out the door when I simultaneously felt something scrape my shoulder blade and heard the distinctive sound of tearing fabric. I managed to bungle my exit, somehow snagging myself on the door hinge and tearing a trench through the 100% cotton covering my back.³

When I introduced myself for the first time to one of my friends in the lobby, I had the awktastic opportunity to extend my hand, muster my least-sociopathic smile, and ask if he could please tape the hole in my dress. After grabbing a roll of packaging tape from the front desk, he gingerly collected both halves of my torn ensemble and slapped some adhesive on it, ensuring I'd spend the rest of the evening giving my name and an explanation as to why I looked like I'd just rolled out of the Captain D's dumpster.

The rest of the night was lovely, including stellar Thai Tapas at the Silk Elephant and reasonably priced drinks at The Squirrel Cage, where our only complaint was that we were all quarantined in the windowless balcony where we would've been incinerated if there had been a fire. Perhaps that was the point. It was amazing to meet everyone and the night ended with exchanged numbers, promises to stay in touch, and packing tape on my shoulder blades.

It was just like prom.

¹ Their Number 1 menu item was Iron City Beer. I have mad respect for those who consider booze to be a food group.
² This is why I keep lettuce away from my Big Mac. No that's not a euphemism.
³ If you guessed #4 on this post, you're totally right and have obviously read this blog more than once. While I did try to snap a shot of Mister Windpants in the museum, one of the polo-shirted attendants pounced on me with the quickness and made me delete the shot. No pictures means no pictures, yo.

BRB

2009-05-25T10:13:00.004-04:00

The past week has been liberally basted with Lame when it comes to posting. It's partially because I've been working on a for-real project that pays for-real money and will let me buy foods that haven't for-real expired and also because I've been on the South Carolina coast for a few days with my entire family¹ and have been busily gorging myself on all manner of deep fried mistakes.²

Anyway, I hope to have the recap of--sigh--last weekend finished and will return to my regular irregular posting schedule tomorrow. In the meantime, enjoy your holiday. Go outside or something... I'm pretty sure you can still get wi-fi.³

¹ Including my soon-to-be brother-in-law, who wins the weekend on sheer hyphen volume alone.
² At this point, my blood type is officially hush puppy.
³ Yesterday was 85 degrees, with the kind of cloudless blue skies found in ELO songs, yet I spent a tremendous portion of the day sitting on the balcony downloading out-of-print albums by British pub rock bands with a handful of Chris Stamey side projects thrown in. I know how to party, yo.

The 'Burgh

2009-05-18T18:14:00.007-04:00

So I drove to Pittsburgh this weekend to meet some of my favorite Twitter people¹ and because I needed to ensure that my car will smell like Cool Ranch Doritos and gas station coffee for the next several months. I'm writing a recap of the entire weekend but if I had to paraphrase it in the style of eBay feedback, it would be A+++ HIGHLY RECOMMEND! WOULD SEE THEM IN REAL LIFE AGAIN.

Until then--and based on what everyone knows about my tendency to fumble through life--I suggest you look at the photo above and ask yourself Did J-Money rip the back of her dress open by:

A) Trying to save a litter of Puggle puppies from a burning building/hot car/flea market.

B) Fleeing the Andy Warhol museum after being scolded for trying to take an iPhone picture not of the art but of the man wearing a purple mesh shirt and breakaway Chicago Bears wind pants.

C) Defying all practical knowledge and waking Wolverine while he was sleepwalking.

D) By running into a door.

¹ My dad was disappointed to learn that Ashton Kutcher wasn't there.

Photo by Tony Delgrosso

Thursday, I Don't Care About You

2009-05-14T09:55:00.004-04:00

Morning, kids. The sunlight is highlighting all of the places on the floor where I've spilled soy sauce or tracked the Outside World onto the carpet and we're being assaulted by midsummer-style temperatures, with a humidity level rarely seen outside unventilated laundromats. So what am I doing? Sitting on the sofa, listening to the somewhat dated but no less enjoyable new wave-y funk of Ian Dury and debating whether finishing the stack of magazines that has accumulated on the ottoman counts as an accomplishment.

This week has been a wash as far as Getting Things Done. While it feels like I spent an inordinate amount of time scratching at my to-do list, I don't have a lot to show for it. T.S. Eliot measured his life out in coffeespoons; mine seems to be ticking by with an ever-growing folder of unanswered emails, endless smears of under-eye concealer, and a stack of uneaten Andes mints from a week's worth of Lunchables.

I'm also suffering from something related to writer's block, like one of its in-laws that still allows you to spew a thousand words on any given topic, but you're guaranteed to hate all of them. I've created endless varieties of the same ten paragraphs this morning and, regardless of how I arrange the predicates, I give the sentences the same disapproving look I tend to reserve for people who have a sofa on their front porch.

Sigh.
__________
I haven't run since the Boston Marathon, but this afternoon I may bravely attempt One Mile to see how my weakest tendon is recovering. During my three-week trial separation from my sneakers, I've sampled several of the group exercise classes neatly typed on the monthly calendar I've always promptly discarded.

Regardless of what action verb is in the class description (Pump! Crunch! Kick!), every hour-long episode does nothing but prepare you for a situations in life that will require you to jump onto a low step. Repeatedly. With enough practice, I'll soon be able to hop onto a curb like no other, leaving potential assailants too stunned by my rhythm and coordination (Left foot only! Now switch!) to make a cape from my skin.

Unfortunately, last night's 5:30 class taught me that I'm a less-than-average jumper. It may be partially related to my still-healing Achilles and partially because I'm never going to excel at anything that makes you accidentally pee on yourself. The woman in the row ahead of me had calves the size of cocker spaniels, so I'm willing to stick with it, damp pants or not.
__________

Before I go back to staring at my blinking cursor and convincing myself that I just need to change fonts several more times, here's a present I made for you. Over the weekend, I designed a late-spring playlist with twenty songs that are on heavy rotation here in the Land of Dog Hair and Unwashed Dishes. The lala-powered player is embedded in the site, so clicky this link and you can play all the tracks while you work, operate heavy machinery, or assemble Swedish modular furniture. IT'S JUST THAT VERSATILE.

Finally, if there are days I don't write here for whatever reason, you can almost always find something on my Tumblr. If this site is an honest look at this tangled mess I call my life, the Tumblr is a direct link to whatever happens to be tapdancing around my corpus callosum. Today, it's been the cast of Saturday Night Live circa '75 and quotable lines from Wayne's World.

You're welcome.

Saturday: A One-Act Play

2009-05-10T10:01:00.005-04:00

I talked to all of three people yesterday, not including a one-sided conversation with my building's New Vagrant in which I told him that I understood that he had to battle the demons coming out of his face but would appreciate if he could do it more quietly.

Last weekend, I noted a reasonably attractive guy moving into one of the ground floor apartments, and although he was neither a British musician nor middle-aged, the fact that he was wearing a Red Sox hat and carrying a giant set of speakers made my heart briefly rattle around my ribcage. He was back on the premises yesterday, making labored trips across the rickety metal ramp extending from the back of his Ryder rental, and as I rounded the corner with the Boxerbeast I decided it was an excellent time to say hello.

I casually adjusted my sweatpants, glad I was wearing my dress pair with the orange piping down the side and walked closer to the cab of the truck. I'd just rearranged the excess ass fabric when I heard the first verse of "Watching the Detectives" pouring out of the truck's open window. Since he wasn't carrying anything unwieldy at the time, I made my move.

"Hey", I said giving him what I hoped was my least creepy-looking smile, "Glad another Elvis Costello fan is moving into the building."

He tugged at the brim of his hat, which was ringed with a white corona of dried sweat. "Oh, hey. I don't really follow sports. I just bought this at the airport."

"I meant the musician," I said, undaunted. "On the radio."

He pulled the bottom of his shirt up to wipe his face. "I don't listen to the radio," he said through a mouthful of cotton.

"Yeah...um...it was just on in the truck. Nevermind then, welcome to the neighborhood." I tugged the Boxerbeast's leash and hoped to get back to the parking garage before I started sobbing.

"Oh that. It's not the radio, it's a CD. My girlfriend likes stuff from, like, the 60s."

Things couldn't have gone more smoothly if I'd just emptied my colon into the cardboard box marked 'Kitchen'.

"Elvis Costello is an excellent choice, but that song actually came out in 1977."

He said nothing. So of course I kept going.

"It's from the My Aim is True album. Well, that's not entirely accurate, because it wasn't on the original release, but it was on the version that came out in America."

A pause, as I felt a trickle of sweat slide down the back of my thigh.

"I have the t-shirt," I beamed.

He stared at me in shocked silence, like I'd just torn a squirrel apart with my teeth.

"OK, well I'm just going to go throw this bag of dog poop away. Nice talking to you."

Aaaaand scene.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why I rarely leave the house.

Every Day I'm Hustlin'

2009-05-06T09:16:00.008-04:00

The fact that I'm titling posts using Rick Ross lyrics should give you sufficient insight into my mindset. Things have been hectic here at The Money Pit¹ because life as a freelancer can either be Feast or Ramen and right now I'm running out of seasoning packets. This week I've tried to act like An Adult, which means my wardrobe has included more than Sleep Pajamas and Work Pajamas and I've been sending unsolicited e's to a brazillion publications--both the print and bloggity blog variety--in the hopes they need another slightly unhinged writer whose areas of interest and expertise involve David Lee Roth-era Van Halen, how to use Charmin's cardboard spindle as a viable wiping option and dinosaurs.

I've also tried to schedule interviews with several musicians and have been writing lists of appropriate, interchangeable questions like "If you had to make a suit out of someone's skin, whose hide would you use?" and "Theoretically, how long would you let me hide in your back yard before you'd call the authorities?"

Basically, I hope that if I throw enough lawn darts at enough strangers, eventually I'll nail one. In that highly developed metaphor, "lawn darts" would mean "pleading missives liberally garnished with samples of things I've written for The Internet" and "strangers" would denote "strangers".

My frenzied burst of productivity has been fueled by the fact that my bank balance has dwindled to the point where I'm concerned they'll be coming to repossess the soft-sided logo cooler they gave me when I opened a checking account and the fact that I'm three weeks away from tongue-kissing my twenties goodbye, dashing my long-held hope that the phrase "twentysomething whiz kid" would follow my name in a Parade magazine profile.² I know I've whaled on this Turning Thirty horse carcass for, oh, the past year, but my twenties haven't yielded much of anything except a trio of severance packages and a wildly uncontrollable housepet.

My earbuds have been blaring the Beach Boys for the past week and it's humbling³ that Brian Wilson was all of 24 when Pet Sounds was released. Granted, he also turned his dining room into a sandbox, frequently soiled himself and had intense arguments with plates of carrots, but still. I can match him pajama leg for pajama leg when it comes to crazy but the outpouring of genius? That's what I'm waiting for, begging for, putting fresh sheets and a mango-scented candle in the guest room for.

Thirtysomething Whiz Kid wouldn't look too bad on a business card.

Neither would Dinosaur Resurrector. I'm keeping my options open.

¹ Yes, that's how I describe my apartment. It was either that or The Pit of Sarlacc.
² I also hoped for "Baby Genius" or "Heisman Winner".⁴
³ Sometimes, I use humbling as a euphemism for so jealous I ground my back molars into a fine powder.
⁴ Once I read an article where a pre-Duchovny Tea Leoni was described as "impossibly lithe", which would be an improvement from my current status as "impossibly unemployed".

Potassium Benzoate To Preserve Taste

2009-05-04T07:20:00.005-04:00

This is my new jam, yo. Also, dig my bedhead and ringer tee. Yes, gentlemen, this could be yours.

Thanks to everyone for their input concerning my itchiness, all the stories, suggestions and remedies. You guys are awesome, especially since no one came out and said "MAYBE YOU COULD JUST KICK THE CAFFEINE, ADDICT" or suggested a guest appearance on A&E's Intervention where my family members would all tearfully read essays they'd written on legal paper about how they felt when they discovered my trashcan full of silver empties.

Anyway, the festive yellow Splenda stripe is part of my life for a while because--as I learned last week--there's no way to discreetly scratch your underboob while you're in line at the bank. More words coming later today and--I swear--none of them will involve a skin condition.

Or my underboob.

Itchicoo Park

2009-04-29T12:58:00.002-04:00

For a week I've been itchy. The kind of itchy that makes you kick off the covers so you can buff your bare calf with one sock-covered foot; the kind that leaves you with a map of angry red highways etched into your forearms; the kind that makes you claw at your sternum like John Hurt in Alien.

At first, I assumed I'd been slapped with this year's installment of seasonal misery, since pollen and I are longtime enemies. As a kid, I was perpetually cursed with the kind of puffy, bloodshot eyes seen in Phish concert parking lots and always kept one pocket stuffed with aloe-infused tissues, the other filled with an asthma inhaler. I spent every Monday afternoon at the pediatrician's office getting allergy shots but was so insanely sensitive to everything you'd color with a green Crayola that even the injections made me break out in hives. ¹

Once a year, I had to do the prick test² where they divide your back skin into a Bingo board of allergens, liberally dousing you with animal dander and dust mites and the other co-stars from vacuum commercials that will ensure you'll never put a blanket beside your face again. I'd always have violent reactions and they'd just assume I was still allergic to all carbon based life and make adjustments as necessary. One year, it cost my parents an Oriental rug; the next, we had to divorce our dog, sending her to shit in some other family's laundry hamper.

Eventually--whether because of the shots or in spite of 'em--I outgrew most of my issues, leaving them in middle school with spiral perms and a pair of Ocean Pacific pants I specifically bought because they looked like something the Fresh Prince would wear.³

Allergies don't cross my mind anymore, save for the occasional a.m. Visine eyebath or taking a pre-run hit of an Albuterol inhaler. Until now. Until this, which is taking twice as long to type because I keep stopping to see if I can gnaw my own shoulders.⁴

I've tried to pick my world apart to track down what's doing this to me. It isn't the pollen that blankets my car in its sickly yellow dust because I spent the weekend in West Virginia, where they're just wrapping up Winter 1992. It's not the Boxerbeast, because I itched even when we were apart. It can't be my apartment because I run two high-powered HEPA air filters that suck the dust off of anything that isn't bolted down. It's like living with Lindsay Lohan if she had three power settings and a retractable extension cord.

I cracked open a Diet Coke this morning, the first in the endless enamel-wrecking parade I guzzle every day and tried to figure out what aspect of my life to manipulate next. I've swapped all my fave things in and out of my life to see what happens. Meat for no meat. Milk for soy milk. Pants for no pants. I even stopped my final week of free tanning in the case I'd contracted some Abercrombie-borne illness from the Greek lettered co-eds that broil themselves in the beds every day.

Nothing helped.

As I stood in the kitchen digging the corner of the counter deep into my forearm it hit me. The Diet Coke is the culprit. The Diet Coke...MY Diet Coke. Within fifteen minutes of shotgunning enough artificial sweeteners to blow up a lab rat, the itching hit an all-time high. I stopped picking at my skin long enough to shake a fist at the sky and shout "ET TU, ASPARTAME?" How does something like this this happen? I've been chugging upwards of ten silver & red cans a day for years, so why now?

I'm devastated. The only thing that could give a bigger kick to my morale is if I developed a sudden intolerance to middle-aged English men. Ignoring the how or why, does anyone know the way to cure this? Because I can't function without 120 ounces of caffeine and caramel color and--even worse--I can't switch to Pepsi.

Please send help. I'll be the one who reeks of anti-itch ointment, listening to how her sobs echo out of a stack of empty silver soda cans.

¹ Yes, I know the gentle irony of writing about my festering skin two days after I banged out a post about people who overshare. One day, we'll look back on this and laugh.
² That's also how I refer to all my first dates. And by all, I mean that one time at Pig Pickin's.
³ Read that sentence again.
⁴ Yes. I can. My resume has already been updated.

Oversharing

2009-04-27T01:11:00.002-04:00

Last night I went to the gym and--since I'd sucked down 32 ounces of artificially-flavored energy drinks--I made a pit stop in the Ladies' room before making the epic quarter-mile trip back to my house. I was taking care of my business, earbuds firmly in place so I wouldn't have to listen to the labored breathing of the woman on the other side of the wall as she worked through a particularly difficult transaction, when I saw someone pacing outside my stall door. Tapping my own feet to the Modern Lovers, I watched as the same pair of sneakers made several round trips across the well-worn tile. Assuming this was some kind of emergency, I quickly wrapped up, flushed, and stepped out of the stall, almost smacking directly into the shoulder of the pacer, a woman I knew well enough to wave to but not enough to make reference to her potentially exploding colon.

"Hey!" she said, with a genuine enthusiasm that echoed in the empty showers. "I was waiting for you."

There are few phrases that reach Creepiness as quickly as that one, especially when this woman would be filed under Casual Acquaintance on my life's contact list. In fact, the only reason I even recall her name is because she shares a set of letters with the brand of dishwashing liquid that lives on my sink, so when I see her I always think "Cuts Through Grease".

"What's up," I asked, edging my way toward a section of the locker room with better lighting. She took a seat on a wooden bench and immediately dropped several paragraphs detailing the difficulties in her relationship. She'd hoped to talk to me, she said, about her issues with her boyfriend. If she knew me at all, she'd realize that this is only slightly less stupid than asking a ground squirrel about space travel.

I shifted my weight from foot to foot and traced the grout with my toe, trying to defer, but she obviously wanted to talk. So she did, outlining all of her problems--and she had them--and none of them were the kind who could be solved by a girl whose most enduring relationship is with something that requires monthly heartworm treatment.

The thing is, this happens all the squirm-inducing time. People spill their brains to me--unprompted--often divulging info that not only did I not ask for, but always leaves me unsettled with its intimacy. Maybe it's my prominent ears, but this weekend alone I was cornered by a woman who detailed her skiing-related groin injury in all its vajay-perforating detail and stopped in the checkout line by a man who thought I'd like to know how difficult it is for him to digest sweet potatoes. My former neighbor used to keep me updated on the itchy archipelago of scabs that inexplicably appeared on his torso, which pretty much ensured that I spent the year that we shared an address keeping him away from my upholstery.

Does this happen to anyone else? Please say yes.

I did my best to listen to the Grease Cutter, nodding as sympathetically as I could while suggesting that she speak to someone whose Love Life consisted of more than licking a hole through TV Guide articles about the cast of Bones. She wiped her eyes with the frayed wristband of her sweatshirt and we walked out together, catching a glimpse of the left stall where a pair of unmoving Asics were still visible beneath the door.

Did I ever tell you about the time I thought about checking a stranger's pulse?

Q & A: You Q'ed, I'll A.

2009-04-24T23:39:00.002-04:00

OK, hang with me everyone because I swear this is going to be the last running-related post for a while. After this, I'll go back to bungling things and seeing how many pieces of popcorn shrimp I can eat at once and whining about the tumbleweeds rolling out of my vajay. But first, I'm going to give my best shot at matching A's with the Q's you left in the comments of my last two posts. Here goes...

Mary@Holy Mackerel: Didn't you hear your mother telling you to dress more warmly???

Yes, and before the race I was swaddled in several layers of clothing, rocking two shirts like Binford-era Al Borland. As a general rule, though, when you run you're supposed to dress like the temperature is twenty degrees warmer than it is, because that's how it will feel. Monday's 40-something Farenheit felt like sixty, and so on. This twenty degrees thing is one of those maxims I've heard repeated but haven't found any evidence to back it up, putting it on the same list with Don't swim after you eat, Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's ass, and Jamie Lee Curtis was born with a penis.

Mike: You have to tell us about the gloves and other people wearing arm warmers.

When you're running, the blood flow to your extremities sucks since most of the juice is going to your heart, lungs, and legs. This means your hands can get cold quickly...and then they'll stay that way. As for the arm warmers, it's the same principle, since races start early in the a.m. and the ones on the spring and fall sides of the calendar can be chilly. Arm warmers can keep you toasty while you're standing around but can also be easily stripped off after you warm up, as opposed to trying to wriggle out of a long-sleeved shirt.

I actually had a pair of arm warmers for the first couple of miles, which made me look less like an athlete and more like the Bee Girl from that Blind Melon video.

Cardiogirl: No music? Not listening to an iPod while running for over three and a half hours?

Last year, Boston made a big deal about iPods and about how music was a competitive advantage, as if they expected the unbridled energy of John Cougar Mellencamp to send me rocketing past the Kenyans as I shouted "LITTLE PINK HOUSES, BITCHES". They went so far as to threaten to disqualify anyone they spied wearing earbuds, but apparently they backed off on that stance a bit this year, changing the wording in the race info packet to reflect something about "strongly discouraging" them instead.

I did all of my training to music--most of it involving the words Huey and Lewis--but chose not to rock out during the race because the crowds in Boston are absolutely mindblowing. It's 26 miles of people cheering, shouting, and clapping for everyone that goes by and I think that probably motivated me more than hearing "Hip to Be Square" for the brazillionth time.

Robbie: The gloves, are they for impromptu magic tricks to boost morale for other runners?

Pantomime, actually. I ran the first five miles pretending to be trapped in a tiny box.

Also, I didn't want to leave fingerprints on any of the Gatorade cups I tossed. I've seen Gattaca. I know how these things work.

ETHAN HAWKE, YOU WILL HAVE TO BECOME A SPACEMAN WITHOUT ME.

los_tartist: You have to qualify to run marathons? They don't just let you stroll across the finish line at your leisure?

Fun Fact: The Baaaaastin Marathon is both the world's oldest annual marathon and--other than the one run during the Olympics--is the only one you have to qualify for.

Any other marathon, no, you don't have to qualify. You pay your entry fee, pin your number on your shirt, and you're off. Boston sets qualifying standards based on your age and gender and you have to complete a certified marathon in that time--or faster--before you can run their annual April crampfest. Elitists.

Emmysuh: What was the temperature there?

Pre-race, it was probably 40-ish and warmed to 45 in the middle of the course. Since it starts at 10 a.m., you're running in the warmest part of the day. Unfortunately, the sun was negated by the steady (~25 mph) headwind which sent a lot of people into the medical tents with hypothermia. My cot was sandwiched between two other shivering people who--by the time I was wheeled in for treatment--were both wrapped up like expats from the Ptolemaic era.

Sun Runner: I'd like to know if you followed a particular variety of training plan. If I don't BQ at Cleveland, it's back to the drawing board for me...I've been Hal Higdon-ing it for two halfs and this full, and maybe there's a training schedule that's better-suited to my needs out there.

First, Hal Higdon is awesome. His wisdom got me through my first half marathon and I repeated that program more than once. For this race and for last year's Boston, I designed my own program using the Runner's World Smart Coach. I'm more of a ~~lover~~ sprinter than a distance runner so--even though it's essentially computer generated--I like the emphasis on speedwork. Plus you can set your own parameters as far as how many miles you want to run per week and the intensity of the program, ranging from Easy to SWEET CHRIST ON A CRACKER, WHAT HAVE I DONE?

Most importantly, best of luck on your BQ [Boston Qualifying] effort. Let me know how it goes, because I fully intend to set a small fire in celebration.

Erin: Hey, so what ended up being the diagnosis on the Achilles tendon injury?

Here's the thing. I tend to avoid doctors unless they're being played by Hugh Laurie, mainly because I have the Big Lots of health insurance and it's not exactly cost effective for me to sit in a waiting room reading outdated issues of People. My sister, Runtie, is a nurse who said that the Med Tent Crew's initial use of the word 'rupture' was probably premature since if that were the case, my tendon would've retracted like a cheap tape measure. I asked her what a doc would tell me; she said I'd probably get a lecture about staying off my leg and not running for a couple of weeks. Simple enough. I'd planned to take a post-race break anyway and by DIY-ing it, I'll have more money to spend on McGriddles and candy.

Ms. Changes Pants While Driving: How many marathons have you run?

Three. San Diego ('07), Boston ('08) and Boston ('09). I also just registered for New York (November '09) because I have suffered some kind of brain injury.

How long have you been running?

Since 2001, when I started dating a guy who’d run track in college and--after a double decade layoff--decided to drag his Nikes out of the closet and get back into it. Since we were still in the bright shiny stages of our fledgling relationship, running together sounded like another excellent way to bond, since at that point I had no idea how hard it is to carry on a conversation when you’re dry heaving in someone’s flower bed. Almost eight years and at least thirty pairs of shoes later, he’s the one I can attribute this madness to. It’s especially fitting since he eventually ran off with another woman.

How are you so awesome?

Really? Because as I write this, I'm wearing a Schlitz malt liquor t-shirt I just stained with tartar sauce and have spent my Friday night alternately watching Morrissey videos on YouTube and wondering whether I can still turn my eyelids inside out. Thank you, but I couldn't be farther from awesome.

Kaeti: What's your favorite race fuel (brand/flavor)?

Are you talking about the gels you choke down during runs? Carb Boom, Banana Peach flavor because it tastes like baby food, which is actually a major selling point for me. Sometimes C-Boom can be hard to find, so my runner up is GU.

Chafing. In really BAD places. How do I prevent it? Do I have to body glide my bum? After my first 20-miler I felt like there were fire ants in my drawers.

This is one malady I've managed to avoid but--thanks to working in and eventually being fired from a running store--I know how to prevent it. Body Glide is one way to attack it, as are compression shorts. If that doesn't get it done, try liberally sprinkling talcum powder in your shorts. Seriously. And not just because it's intimidating to the competition if you fire a white cloud out of your ass.

Jen: How the holy f did you run a 6:17 mile at the end of a brutal marathon!?!?!

Because I had to. Because I'm less than a success in almost every other aspect of my life. Running is the only thing--other than spilling drinks at every social occasion I've attended since 1995--that I've consistently done well and if I'd lost that too? RIGHT BEFORE I TURN THIRTY? Jesus. If I hadn't requalified, I most likely would've had some kind of psychotic episode that ended with me splashing around naked in a mall fountain, demanding that people pelt me with coins so that I could grant their wish.

Deidre: How do you get your hair to look so awesome?

Because my hairdresser is amazing. Before I found his salon I looked like I was wearing a cocker spaniel's ass for a hat.

Jillie1979: I once heard something creepy about peoples' toenails falling off after running marathons. Is there any truth to this?

Oh yeah. Runners lose toenails like I lose jobs, which is to say often and effortlessly. Typically it's from wearing kicks that are just small enough to allow your toe to bang the end of the shoe, damaging the nail bed and eventually ejecting the nail. Sometimes there might be fungus involv--wait, were you eating? I'm sorry.
__________

Thanks again for the supportive comments and for the questions. Should you have any other running-related queries, drop me a note at thetyping [at] gmail [dot] com.

Now I'll be getting back to the business of failing at things.

Eff You, Phidippides

2009-04-24T10:45:00.004-04:00

Seventeen minutes. That's how much slower I was this year compared to last year's Boston Marathon, a difference of about 40 seconds per mile. Despite running two other twenty-six milers, along with enough 5 and 10Ks to earn a closet full of t-shirts screenprinted with poor quality clip art of smiling runners, Boston was the first race to break me, to leave me shivering beneath a pile of blankets in the medical tent trying to recall enough dialogue from House to remember whether O2 Sats were something that determined whether or not I'd end up with a misdiagnosis of amyloidosis or just uncontrollable bleeding from the ass.

But let's back up to the beginning of the day, which started with a pair of donuts and a side of promise. My Dunkin-filled breakfast and I were on the bus by 6:45 for the hour-long ride to Hopkinton. The race course is what's called a point-to-point, which means you start in Hopkinton and essentially run a straight line back into Boston. Once my jelly-stained shirt and I stepped off the bus, we had another two hours to stand in the cold, alternately huddling on the ground pretending to do a little-known yoga pose called the Crumpled Wad of Paper or hiding in the noxious warmth of the port-a-john, wondering how long I could stay in there before I was overwhelmed by the scent of partially-digested Powerbar.

At about 9:40--after scarfing several complimentary bagels and making countless strangers uncomfortable with the way I rubbed my own inner thighs--it was time to walk toward the start line. I was in Wave 1, which meant that I'd share a corral with 13,000 of my closest friends, wondering why some of them already smelled like a glove box full of rotting meat. It took six minutes from the official start until I actually made it through the mass of people onto the race course. My goal for the day was modest since my training had been less-than-stellar, interrupted by our miserable wet winter or the unexpected ill effects from eating a bag of Sour Patch kids before a long run, but I still expected to roll in at around the 3:30 mark.

Through eleven miles, that seemed like a possibility. My mile splits were all between 7:55 and 7:25 and I felt effortlessly awesome like the people in Michelob Ultra commercials, minus the moisturizer and cosmetic dentistry. I high fived some kids on the course, I waved every time someone shouted "J-Money!", and seriously considered ending my race to tongue kiss an insanely attractive fortysomething who was standing on an overturned Igloo cooler outside a car dealership.

Anyway, everything was cool until just past the eleven mile mark when something popped in my Achilles tendon-y area. Despite having zero medical training other than once beating Dr. Mario on GameBoy, I knew that this was Very Bad, especially when my calf meat was slapped with searing pain, like it had just been shoved through a sausage grinder. "That's it, then," I told myself out loud, because that's what crazy people do. "You're done." I knew there was a medical tent at the halfway point--mile 13--so I planned to seek treatment and call it a day. But when I started to run again, the shrieking ache in my ankle went away. I made it to the medical tent all right...and decided to keep going.

It took less than a mile before I realized that this would be filed under Bad Fucking Idea. In an effort to avoid further damage to my left side, I made subtle changes to my stride, which caused a number of Latin-named pieces of my right leg to throw a tantrum. By mile 15, I couldn't push off with my left side and was struggling to extend my right. My mile splits got slower--8:00, 8:40, 9:00--as I fell into a pained shuffle, trying to blink back involuntary tears.

Eleven miles to go, and I tried to lose myself in the more pleasant parts of my brain, first attempting to recite the entire script of A Fish Called Wanda, starting with John Cleese's opening "And on that point, members of the jury, I rest my case." Next, I rattled off all of Robyn Hitchcock's album titles in order, spending the duration of Heartbreak Hill arguing with myself about where to put Queen Elvis. Then I tried to remember the last time I had sex.

I was approaching another dark green medical tent when my mind drifted toward the internet. It's a sentiment that borders on Hallmark Hall of Fame territory, but I thought about everyone who takes the time to read this site, the people I "know" from their comments or Twitter or Tumblr... all of my imaginary friends. I thought about how bad it would suck to type out several paragraphs about how I quit. How I dropped out. How I gave up.

So I didn't.

Instead, I dragged myself through another pair of miles. When my limping form made it to Boston College, I learned that the more you're struggling, the more the crowd cheers for you. By that point, I looked like something that would be dredged out of a scum-covered marsh during the opening credits of CSI. In every picture from the event--both the expensive official ones and those snapped by my friends on the course--I look like I am:

Crying
About to cry
Just finished crying
Soiling myself

Adding to my misery was the quickly approaching reality that I wasn't going to re-qualify to run Boston again next year. At the 25.2 marker, there was a bright yellow banner that said ONE MILE [to go] and--from the time both my adidas-covered feet passed it--I had six minutes and 17 seconds to make it to the finish line if I wanted to do this shit again.

"That's four laps around the track," I said loud enough to attract the attention of a woman wearing a pair of inflatable angel wings. "Let's do this." I picked up the pace, refusing to give in to the ache in my leg or the fire in my lungs, sprinting down the straight stretch and hoping I didn't lose too much time making the final left turn. I couldn't have had more than a quarter mile to go but the finish line looked like it was in Minneapolis. My arms felt heavy and worthless, like dead animals or Rachel Ray. My throat burned like I'd just smoked a pack of fiberglass-filled Marlboro Reds.

I checked the time. Run faster. Ten seconds. Faster. Five. Pick it up. Finally, my feet landed between the I and the S in the word FINISH. I stopped my watch.

The maximum finish time I could've run and requalified? 3:40:59.

My time? 3:40:59.

Sometimes Fortune kisses you on the mouth.

"Congratulations," a fluorescent-clad race volunteer told me, draping me in a foil blanket that made me look like a half-eaten Big Bacon Classic. She handed me off to a handsome Australian who untied my shoe and fumbled with my timing chip. "How're you feeling?" he asked. Rather than answer, I thought it would be more effective to just pass out. He waved for someone to bring him a wheelchair as he scooped me off the pavement and I was pushed into the medical tent.

I was quickly informed that my blood pressure had bottomed out and my temperature had dropped to a reptile-quality 93.5, so I was wrapped burrito-style in a thick blanket and monitored for 90 minutes while a number of different medical professionals periodically checked my aforementioned O2 Sats and asked me questions I would've struggled to answer on a good day, things like "What's ten times nine?" or "Why would you do this voluntarily?"

When my temperature returned back to human levels, I autographed some forms that said the Boston Athletic Association wasn't responsible if my heart exploded later in the day and was released back into the wild so I could--no shit--walk another mile and a half back to my hotel. It was approaching 3:30 at this point, so I stopped into Burger King for a large fry and a six pack of those dwarf-sized burgers because I decided if the race couldn't kill me, a paper bag full of trans fats couldn't either.
__________

Injuries aside, I'm heading back to the gym this morning but will be taking a two or three week trial separation from running. I probably finished this race at the expense of others, but I'm OK with that. The important part is that I finished.

That makes for a much better story.

P.S. A lot of you have asked about my gloves, my haircut (thankyew) and what it means to 'qualify' for the Boston Marathon. Since--according to the description on the cable guide--I've already seen this afternoon's Law & Order: SVU episodes, I'm going to do a running-related Q&A post later today. If you have any other questions, leave 'em in the comments...

3:40:59

2009-04-22T20:34:00.005-04:00

The good news? I survived my second Boston Marathon.
The less good? My post race activities involved a ninety minute stay in the medical tent with a hypothermic body temperature that was hovering around iguana levels. Also, my left Achilles tendon gave up at mile 11.
The bestest? Although it was the slowest finish of my marathon trio, I still hauled my aching ass fast enough during the final mile to requalify for next year, which meant I didn't have to sell my Boston logo hoodie on eBay.

A full, quite-possibly boring race report is coming soon, since I'm finally back home, hobbling through my apartment as little as possible and half-heartedly encouraging the dog to soil the carpet because it hurts to drag him outside. Most importantly, though, I want to thank every one of you for the blog comments, the emails, and twittered messages of support. As a friend of mine put it the other day, sometimes sincerity is uncool but know this: when every fiber of my being wanted to quit, you guys gave me just as many reasons to keep going. Thank you.

In the meantime, can we please examine why my forehead looks so bizarre when I run? It only takes a couple of miles for me to go from average-looking human to full Klingon.

Ten A.M.

2009-04-20T06:03:00.005-04:00

Hey, everybody, check out my poor-quality Photobooth picture, taken in my drab hotel room with its spinach-colored walls. I'm getting ready to leave the hotel, grab a nutritious jelly-filled breakfast, then get on the bus that takes us the 26 (.2) miles to Hopkinton.

Yesterday morning when I was trying to find my Red Sox hat, I emptied out my bag and realized that it was on my kitchen table, along with my sunglasses, my gloves, and my FAVORITE MARATHON SHIRT. I spent a chunk of my Sunday morning trying to have one commissioned because I insist on wearing my name across my sternum and while this is a less-than-awesome replacement, it gets the job done.

Other than that, I'm set. I just groomed my eyebrows which probably cut down on my wind resistance, making me sleek and aerodynamic like a seal's head.

See you guys this afternoon. I'll be the one weeping and dragging herself down the sidewalk on her hands.

26 Point Two

2009-04-19T08:28:00.002-04:00

Good morning from ~~Massachussets~~ ~~Masachusets~~ Massachusetts, a state I still can't type without doing a Google-assisted spell check. Did you mean Massachusetts? Yeah, that's the one. I'm sitting in an overpriced, underappointed hotel trying to smooth the pillowcase creases out of my forehead and obsessively counting the hours until tomorrow's Boston Marathon. I'm running this thing for the second year in a row because I enjoy both a sense of accomplishment and severely chafed nipples. I'm getting ready to go scarf a pair of Dunkin Donuts, pick up my number, and get a handy typewritten list of ways I can die during the race but first...

Five Quick Things:

1) Traveling yesterday was liberally doused with Unpleasantness, mainly because I didn't gobble my normal pre-flight anti-anxiety meds, lest they interfere with my highly tuned Diet Coke-and-Cakester fueled training plan. I spent a pair of flights shaking, twitching and picking at my eyelids while the man in Seat 3B gave me the mile-by-mile replay of the 112 Boston Marathons he's done before. I'm not down with generalizations but runners tend to be intolerable when they meet other runners and this guy was no different. He had the healthy complexion of a dried apricot and cheeks hollow enough to hold my winter clothing and--somewhere between one-sided explorations of his pulled hamstring or his plantar warts--I noticed that he was wearing a t-shirt that said "RUN LIKE AN ANIMAL". I assumed that meant "on all fours and in pursuit of prey", so I debated whether to throw my pair of USAirways-issued peanuts into the aisle to see if he'd chase it. Instead, I nodded politely before excusing myself to hide in the bathroom.

2) Since I didn't really pack anything other than my running shoes and my Snuggie, my bag was small enough to cram in the overhead bin. The downside? TSA confiscated my hair gel because and--I'm quoting here--it appeared to have been "tampered with", it looked "suspicious", and I had to "surrender" it. I tried to argue my case by pointing out that the only thing suspicious about it is why a land-locked kid like me would smear her head with something called "Surf Hair". The man in the blue vest didn't budge, dropping it in a plastic bin where it landed with a muffled thud. Obviously a stop at CVS is on the agenda today because I can't be seen in public unless my hair is a carefully constructed mess of matted peaks.

3) As if dragging our carcasses the 26.2 miles from Hopkinton to the Common isn't painful enough, Boston hotels enjoy adding to the misery by quadrupling their room rates. I'm staying in a place that falls between "discarded refrigerator box" and "kidnapper's basement" on the luxury scale, but the three nights I'll be sleeping here are pricier than the FIVE I spent in a hotel in London, where the linens weren't made of a shoddily woven combination of pollen and gravel.

My room is the definition of basic, co-starring the aforementioned itchy sheets , an unfortunate-looking armchair, and a bedside shelf bolted to the wall. Oddly enough, there's also a collection of reference books in here, ranging from Fenway Fiction--an anthology of Red Sox-related short stories--to a thick volume simply called FACTS. They must know that I plan on spending a lot of time in the bathroom. This morning I learned the names of Latvia's former presidents.

I'm also distressed that there's just a small shower--one without a bathtub--especially since I was counting on a post-race soak. This means I either transported this carton of Epsom salts up the eastern seaboard for nothing or I'm going to have to flood the lobby.

4) Speaking of the Sawx, I'll be at the game this afternoon. Here's hoping Jon Lester's left arm looks better than it has so far this season.

Confidential to Jon Lester: After the game, would you like to share my Snuggie? What if I told you I could list the national holidays of Vanuatu?

5) I'm nervous, yo. Without boring you with the details, my training wasn't quite as stellar as it was last year. I missed a handful of workouts because of travel or our disgusting wet winter and I honestly just don't feel that sharp. My times were always slower, the workouts felt harder, and I have no idea what to expect tomorrow. I'm trying to be optimistic that I won't be openly weeping by the sixteen mile mark but--at the same time--I don't want to get disappointed when I get passed by a runner wearing a costume. Or pushing an oxygen tank.

OK. I'm out to roam through the Race Expo, which promises to be a crowd of people with prominent rib cages and oversized calves. There will be more from me later, perhaps tonight when I liveblog all the reasons I can't sleep.

The Man Who Invented Himself

2009-04-15T16:38:00.010-04:00

Author's Note: This is the companion piece to an article I wrote for BitchBuzz. It was way too easy to spill several thousand words about this man's music so I split it in half, King Solomon-style. The 'Buzz got the album review and you get the concert, with a bit of a Rough Guide to Robyn thrown in by way of introduction.

The first time I heard Robyn Hitchcock, I was a college freshman with oversized pores and an ill-advised perm who'd scored a ride to the Record Exchange to swap a stack of Mighty Mighty Bosstones CDs for some other band whose members have long since started selling real estate. Before I made it to the cash register, I heard "Oceanside" through the store's speakers and almost smacked the Salem Light out of an employee's hand in my rush to find out who was singing. I dropped $8 on a used copy of Perspex Island and immediately transferred it from its cracked case into my stereo where it remained for the rest of the semester. That album twisted my brain around in a way I've never forgotten--or never recovered from--and ensured I'd spend unsettling amounts of time roaming the H aisle of countless music stores until I'd collected his entire catalog.

Since then, Hitchcock's subsequent releases have each provided a waypoint as I navigated the tangled mess of my twenties. I fell in love to A Star for Bram (1999) and managed to sustain a reasonably healthy relationship for the rest of his solo career. He’d formed a new band by the time my heart was incinerated to Ole! Tarantula (2006) and I scorched someone else’s after casually peeling the plastic from a vinyl copy of Goodnight Oslo (2009). I got fired to Robyn Sings (2002). And to Spooked (2004). And in time for the B-sides of the I Wanna Go Backwards box set (2007). And to...moving on.

For those of you unfamiliar with the musical stylings of Mister Hitchcock, there’s never been a better time to add him to your iPod. His latest release, Goodnight Oslo, features ten genre-hopping tracks that range in style from Big Star-ish power pop to country-tinged stomps but never skimp on the stellar wordplay that has become his trademark. Hitchcock’s band, the Venus 3, is composed of longtime R.E.M. lead guitarist Peter Buck, as well as bass player Scott McCaughey and drummer Bill Rieflin--also known as the other members of R.E.M. not named Mike or Michael.

Hitchcock’s live shows have developed their own reputation based on his epic between-song banter—he's dubbed them "word solos"—that are as hilarious as they are provocative. Sometimes they’re an obtuse introduction to the songs, sometimes a comment on the social climate, or an anecdote that seems unrelated until you think about it…and you will. The seemingly spontaneous monologues have always reminded me of the animations Terry Gilliam dropped between Flying Circus sketches, straddling the same line between comedy and “Holy crap, where did that come from?”

Last Wednesday night, I had the chance to catch Robyn & Peter & Scott & Bill at the Cat’s Cradle in Carrboro, NC. As I watched the decidedly middle-aged crowd file in, it seemed that everyone could be neatly sorted into three groups. The audience was one third J.Crew cable knits who had recently pledged to PBS, dropping three digits for a canvas tote and the promise of additional airings of The Old Grey Whistle Test; it was one third slightly disheveled former college DJs who cursed the recent smoking ban and swapped stories about spinning "So You Think You're In Love" to a mention on the Modern Rock chart; and it was one third people who just wanted to see Peter Buck.

Around 10:15, Hitchcock strolled onstage—still-steaming cup of tea in hand—picked up his guitar and kicked off a setlist that covered his entire thirty-three year career. “This is a reverse birth trauma song,” he said before launching into an electric version of “I Often Dream Of Trains”, the title track from the 1984 acoustic gem that has been widely praised as the highlight of his massive discography.

“This song is in the same key as the one we just played. It’s like two rabbits with the same colored fur, but thinking different thoughts.”

The band was in excellent form for the twenty-two song, double encore set. Buck and Hitchcock have shared stages and studios for two decades and their guitars intertwine perfectly, each playing with a style that manages to be distinct yet interchangeable. What struck me during the live show was how essential Bill Rieflin’s percussion is, noting that he counts in the songs before anchoring the band in a solid rhythm. Hitchcock seems to appreciate it, giving a lengthy introduction to “Saturday Groovers” that compared Rieflin’s drumming to a sailor who single-handedly dragged a whale onto the deck of a ship, which I assumed was his Melville-drenched way of saying “Swell job”.

Other highlights included the ethereal beauty of “Airscape", a scorching version of “Somewhere Apart” and “Up to Our Nex" a song Hitchcock wrote for--and performed in--the Oscar-nominated Rachel Getting Married. “This is a song with a message,” he said, “So we won’t introduce it.” The song perfectly captures the overwhelming feelings and frustrations of relationships, while summarizing the film with the devastating stanza “Forgive yourself and maybe/You’ll forgive me.”

With over 400 (!!!) compositions to chose from, Hitchcock can easily surprise you with his song selection. During the first encore he dusted off the Soft Boys’ “He’s a Reptile”, which he said he hadn’t played onstage since 1979. He also dedicated it to “that famous British reggae outfit The Police”.

Early in the show after finishing A Star for Bram’s “The Underneath”, he lowered his voice to ask and answer his own existential questions. “Where do we come from? The Dark. Where are we going? The Void. Why are we here?” He waited long enough for one enthusiastic woman to shout “TO HEAR YOU!”

Without pausing, Hitchcock replied, “Thank you. That gives my life meaning, purpose, and renewal.” I could say the same thing about his songs.
__________
Robyn Hitchcock & the Venus 3 have another week of tour dates scheduled in April. Next month finds them opening for The Decemberists before rolling into that great unwashed clusterfuck called Bonnaroo. If you can’t see him live, I encourage you to check out Storefront Hitchcock, the intimate acoustic concert film directed by Jonathan Demme and currently streaming on Hulu.com.

As for the tunes, depending on how you classify them he's either released sixteen albums (the originals) or upwards of thirty (counting rarities and box sets). iTunes has a decent selection but eMusic has a huge chunk of his back catalog--including stuff from the Soft Boys--as does his record label Yep Roc. Where to start? As I said about 10,000 words ago, Goodnight Oslo makes for a great square one. After that, my personal favorites are Element of Light, I Often Dream of Trains, and Moss Elixir.

Maybe She's Born With It

2009-04-09T23:18:00.003-04:00

I made the mistake of walking into Sephora¹ today which meant I spent ten minutes staring helplessly at my oversized pores in a hand mirror, half expecting to see Buzz Aldrin bounding between the craters on my face before planting a flag in the middle of my forehead.

Meanwhile, a flawless store associate named Sofie played matchmaker, trying to pair each of my facial imperfections with a neatly packaged product designed to cover them up. She was--of course--perfect. Her cheekbones jutted through her skin like the ribs on a greyhound and she spoke in a soft voice garnished with the slightest hint of an accent, reflecting either a rich European heritage or a summer as a hostess at Olive Garden. "You could benefit from what we call an eye brightener," she said, pulling an $18 colored pencil out of her pocket. "Because you look like a dead orbed goblin".

OK, that last part was implied. BUT I HEARD HER THINK IT.

I managed to stand still long enough for her to brighten one eye, sweep a bronzing powder across my cheeks and colorize both eyelids with an unfortunate amount of glitter, ensuring that I'd spend the rest of the afternoon looking like Ziggy Stardust's unemployed half sister.

When Sofie turned to greet another customer, I bolted for the back corner of the store to undo her handiwork, quickly smearing all eighteen shades of green into my eyebrows. After scraping my cornea with a rogue shard of glitter, I saw her picture--the star of my favorite poorly written police drama!--advertising the only product in the store that I desperately needed. I immediately snatched the last tiny box out of the bin, not because the organic ingredients will make me look any less terrifying but because it will bring my Law & Order: SVU obsession to its logical conclusion.

Oh yes, I'm now proudly wearing a long-lasting shade of lipstick named for Mariska Hargitay, giving me the power to stay smudge free through even the greasiest of microwaveable pastries. I also think I'm allowed to carry a concealed weapon and arrest anyone who looks rapey.

I SWEAR my bizarre attraction to SVU stops here--now--with this purchase. Between the twelve episode Saturday I spent building a bedsore and my now Hargitay-hued lips, I'm one stop on the Creepy Train away from writing Christopher Meloni a letter to ask if I could have a small piece of his skin.

Until then, I'll be out arresting my neighbors. Hope you like the leg shackles, 102-A.

UPDATE: Because you asked for it... "Mariska" can be purchased here.

¹ I'm pretty sure the store motto is "Let us help you feel ugly today!"

Burn Risk

2009-04-07T22:24:00.011-04:00

I got a call yesterday from the tanning salon informing me that they'd made a billing mistake before I axed my account so they owed me a free month of what they call "Unlimited Bronzing" but I've found is closer to "Accidentally Scorching Yourself". I hung up feeling like I'd just drawn the Community Chest card that said there'd been a bank error in my favor, assuming that WaMu could give me a cantaloupe-sized melanoma.

Of course I immediately went to collect my complimentary incineration and was greeted by an impossibly-muscled dude with skin tanned the shade of a perfectly-toasted Pop Tart and an over-gelled platinum hairstyle, his long bangs swept forward in the style of land-locked Hollister shoppers, late 70's David Bowie and less-fashionable lesbians. He was probably younger than the Joshua Tree tour shirt I was wearing but that didn't stop me from doing my best imitation of flirting while I pulled my velcro wallet open and handed him my ID. "How long do you want to go today?", he asked, flashing a set of gleaming mah-jong tile teeth.

"The fewest minutes possible. I'm so white that Cruella de Vil wants to kill me for my fur," I replied, because I am the master of sexytalk.

He'd written "E-Dog" on his sunshine-shaped name tag and while I waited for him to clean my Personal Tanning Station, I mentally decorated the basement apartment we'd rent together and was trying to explain why a drawing of Bob Marley with pot leaf-shaped hands wasn't art when he interrupted to tell me it was time for my UV-rich broiler nap. "Thank you," I told him, trying to tilt my head to the one angle that doesn't make my twice-broken nose look like a crumpled tube of Aquafresh.

He smiled. My knees locked mid-buckle when the words "No worries, ma'am" fell out of his mouth.

MA'AM.

I am TWENTY NINE years old and will be for another 55 days, seven hours and 32 minutes.¹ I know I've looked less-than-awesome lately, especially since earlier in the day a friend dropped the dreaded "You look tired" on me, which is the polite way of saying "You look like you sleep in a dumpster." Also my allergies to all carbon-based life forms mean that for the next few weeks, my eyes will be swollen to the size of the Insert Coin slot on a soda machine while my voice sounds like a less-feminine Bea Arthur.²

NONE OF THAT, however, makes me an effing ma'am. I couldn't spill any of that to E-Dog but as I walked toward my six minutes in my Personal Tan Station at the end of the hall, I packed up his blacklight and boardshorts and the goddamn acoustic guitar he'd drag to parties and threw them all into the parking lot of the place we'd never live.

¹ I have no plans on going gently into 30, instead choosing to punch it repeatedly in the face as it drags me into another decade. That said, anyone who purchases any 30-themed novelty balloons for me on June 2 should go ahead and schedule a colonoscopy for the next day because it's going to take professionals to pull all that mylar out of your ass.
² I apologize if that gave anyone an ill-timed boner.
__________

I'm going to see Robyn Hitchcock tonight so I'm practically itchy with excitement. This is the second time I've seen him in the past two months--and on the second different continent, which doesn't make me seem Hinckley-levels of unhinged at all. If you've read my site(s) at all, you know I could easily spew a thousand words about how much I appreciate his love of language, his singular brand of weirdness-spiked brilliance and the way his work has shaped my worldview, like the stake to my mind's tomato plant.³ Also? Dig his sideburns.

For reals though, I'll say this: in a career spanning thirty-odd years--with the accent firmly on the odd--he's not once sacrificed his authenticity or compromised his style in exchange for seeing his name in ten point font on the Billboard chart. As he says in the opening track to his most recent release "It doesn't matter what you was/It's what you is/And what you is/Is what you are". To my ears, it's an important sentiment, especially since so many of the bands currently littering the airwaves are shitty products with superior packaging, just like hotel shampoos, Vin Diesel flicks and novelty condoms. So crumble that into your Katy Perry poster and smoke it...I'll be the one at the Cat's Cradle tonight, singing along with "Adventure Rocket Ship" and digging every minute of it.

That's what I is.

³ His song "Belltown Ramble" drops the line "It's an independent life/And you want to see your eyes/Reflected in the world". Whether intentionally or not, I like to think I'm part of that reflection an--OK, I SWEAR I'M DONE WITH THE ROBYN REFERENCES.

I Will See You in Far Off Places

2009-04-06T11:13:00.009-04:00

At around 7 a.m. last Wednesday, I dropped the dog off at what I euphemistically refer to as Camp Buttsniff, immediately tie-dyed my white t-shirt with a large Krispy Kreme coffee and set the GPS for my second Morrissey concert of Oh Nine. Other than consuming enough sodium benzoate to embalm my internal organs, it was an uneventful 378 miles through North Cackalacky, Virginia¹, Left Virginia² and Ohio³.

After chewing the edges of my St. Christopher medal for exactly six hours, I rolled safely into Columbus, parked the car and dragged my duffel bag toward the hotel. As I made my way around the block, I saw a tour bus idling at the side door and my heart lodged itself in my trachea. Could it be that...that...Morrissey and I would be unwrapping identical brands of tiny toiletries? Would he be making a hand puppet out of the same cloth shoe mitt? Would he be stealing the same towels? As I checked in, I casually asked the well-pressed woman at the front desk whose wheels were outside and she answered with a shrug that I interpreted as "THE SAME GUY WHOSE COFFEE-STAINED FACE IS STARING AT ME FROM YOUR T-SHIRT".

I dropped my stuff in my room, laced my sneakers and decided to do my best sleuthing in the guise of a run, kickstarting the first chapter of Nancy Drew and the Case of the Sad Stalkery Fan. As I stretched on the sidewalk, I watched a burly man with a hotdog neck toss several cases into the bus and--after a glimpse of the Mississippi plates--I decided it probably wasn't the MozWagon after all. BUT when I got within a half-block of the Palace Theatre, the same bus passed me, belching some exhaust directly into my bronchial tubes. I followed it to the alley behind the building, trying to look nonchalant despite the fact that I was sweating profusely and sucking on an asthma inhaler.

I loitered long enough to even creep myself out and didn't seen anyone other than a pair of black-clad men with All Access lanyards. Later I found out that Team Morrissey and I HAD briefly shared a building, but they all checked out pre-show. While I was disappointed, it saved me from asking the Room Service Chef if he could bake me into a pie. ⁴

Before the show, I met up with some 'net friends from the Moz message boards⁵, L & her husband ⁶ who had rolled in from Pittsburgh, and S, a local attorney. Over a table-buckling amount of Indian food, we swapped backstories and quizzed each other about what Smiths lyrics we'd get inked on our bodies. It's always nice to split appetizers with people who share your obsessions and couldn't have had a more perfect group to spend the evening with.

Fast forward to immediately after The Courteeners' opening set when I scrambled from Section One down to the Pit, said hello to the security guard and plopped my ass into an empty second row seat beside S. There's a ~~Billy Crystal~~ Michael Keaton flick called The Paper where he drops a line about how a clipboard and a confident wave will get you into any building in America. There's mad truth to that, and if you don't have any available office supplies, batting a set of Cover Girl-encrusted eyelashes works too.

We made adrenaline fueled smalltalk and I waited to get yanked by the collar back to the cheap seats. At exactly 8:30 the lights dimmed, the REFUSAL background was illuminated, and the crowd surged to the edge of the stage. We went with it. The same well-muscled mass of security I'd spoken to stood directly behind me, pushing everyone else back. We were in.

The show somehow seemed to speed by and to unfold slowly, every note loitering in our ears. It was during the fifth song--the Smiths classic "How Soon is Now?"--that Morrissey made his way to our side of the stage and, in order, shook S's outstretched hand, then L's, then mine.

Read that sentence again.

Morrissey touched me. Our eyes met and I think I know what an aneurysm feels like. My mitt was in his for maybe a solid second, but it was long enough to notice the smoothness of his skin, the way it felt firm and cool like a marble statue. Or a pint of Ben&Jerry's about the time you unbag it and shove it in the freezer.

We all made our best "HOLY FUCK" expression, staring at each other wide-eyed and relieved that we had each other to confirm that it had really happened. The rest of the show was excellent as he swung through another fifteen songs and, of course, ripped his shirt off like a Hugo Boss wearing Hulk Hogan. S managed to both find a stray button and get demolished by security when he tried to invade the stage, L got one of guitarist Jesse Tobias' MEXI-CAN etched picks and I scored another setlist.

We made our way through the shuffling crowd and stepped out onto the street with sore throats, ringing ears and full hearts. Stop me if you think you've heard this one before...

¹ I do owe Wythe County a new raccoon.
² It costs a cumulative $7.50 to drive the length of Left Virginia twice which blows goats. Thanks to dropping all my cash and a handful of pennies at the tollbooths, I'll now be paying 29.99% APR on the McGriddle Value Meal I had to Visa.
³I spent two solid hours passing and being passed by an erratically driven Seibring. I started hating her after the fifth time she blew past me only to immediately park herself in front of my bumper. I despised everything about her, from the WVSTEELR vanity plate to the Pittsburgh flags flapping from both sides of the car to the inexplicable pyramid of Bounty paper towels stacked in the back seat. If you require enough paper products to sop up an Exxon spill, you think you'd head home to start mopping instead of reading road signs that flashed three different state mottos. Or maybe she was just having a heavy flow day.
⁴ There was a couple from Michigan patiently waiting in the hotel for the Mozzer and I'm curious if they ever saw 'im. We spoke briefly after the show but were split up by the crowd before I could ask if there were any parts of the lobby that I needed to lick.
⁵This prompted my sis to send me a text that said "Please don't be a Law & Order episode where you get killed by the internet".
⁶ L was wearing a handmade "Now My Heart is Full" sweater which should replace the Shroud of Turin as a museum piece. Seriously. It was so awesome, tourists should make pilgrimages to see it and schoolchildren should sketch it. I wish I'd snapped a picture of it, but meeting someone and immediately demanding to photograph their clothes is probably farther down the creepster scale than I'd like to be.

Now My Heart is Full

2009-04-02T16:00:00.004-04:00

After 13 hours in the car, four packages of pizza-flavored Combos and enough caffeine to kill an apatosaurus, I'm back from Columbus and the GREATEST CONCERT EVER. There will be a full recap, of course, but here are the three main ideas:

1) I was in the front row again and--I'm not going to lie--it took a full serving of good luck, lightly drizzled with a bit of deception.

2) Morrissey was staying in my hotel. Unfortunately, he and the rest of the band checked in the night before and rolled out immediately after the show, which means I didn't have the chance to cling to the underside of his tour bus, Cape Fear-style.

3) HE TOUCHED ME. I TOUCHED MORRISSEY. He shook my hand during "How Soon is Now?" and for the entire time my paw was in his, I was terrified either my aorta would rupture or my bowels would release. Somehow, I managed to keep all of my parts intact.

Yes, I have washed my hand, but reluctantly.

More-issey tomorrow (DO YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE?) and then, I swear, I'll go back to talking about my failures.

But I Haven't Got a Stitch to Wear

2009-03-31T23:56:00.001-04:00

I tend to dress like a teenage runaway most of the time, all 100% cotton and untied Chuck Taylors, regardless of whether I'm home or at the gym or avoiding eye contact with former neighbors in the Food Lion parking lot. Today I rocked one of the many Morrissey-themed tees from my collection, the one that is several washings too small so my right boob gives him a forehead goiter.

My Moz tee. Let me show you it.

Anyway, I'm in the Y's weight room, staring at myself in the mirror and wondering when I developed a Predator-ish forehead vein when I notice a guy looking at me. Or, more specifically, looking at the Mozzer's misshapen face.

"Morrissey, huh?", he says. I lower my weights and nod. His eyes are a deep Windex-y blue and they are both fixed on my boobital region, which hasn't happened since...ever. "That's hilarious."

"Wait," I say, turning around so I'm not speaking to his reflection. "What do you mean hilarious?"

"You know. Like, irony or whatever. I have a Kool and the Gang shirt that I break out from time to time." He picked several terrycloth droppings off his shoulder and lazily snapped the towel at the forty-five pound plates.

Let me point out that I do have tees that I launder with, like, irony or whatever, from the one with Jimmy Carter's face beneath the words "Politicians Do It With Their Mouths" to the stack of shirts that imply that I enjoy country music or have recently had sex with another person. Those are hi-effing-larious. But I do, in fact, dig Stephen Patrick Morrissey and am willing to shop the Hot Topic clearance section to prove it.

"Um, yeah, I really do like Morrissey".

"Wow. Really?" I'm not sure he would've been any more surprised if I told him I was making a quilt out of my own scabs.

"For serious," I said, picking up another pair of twenty-pound tetanus risks.

"I'm sorry," he told me, using a tone that sounded like he was more upset that I spent my free time singing along with "Cemetry Gates" than he was about insulting the pre-shrunk pop star I'd wrapped myself in. "At least it's not Huey Lewis or something."

I started another set and decided I'd just let that one go.
__________

So tomorrow I'll be spending six Slim Jim and McGriddle-filled hours on I-77, heading to Ohio to see the aforementioned Morrissey again. Why? Because after this April's annual installment of governmental sodomy, my bank account will be emptier than Oprah's womb. I may as well blow my last few bucks on something I know all the words to.

Get ready, Columbus, cause I'm heading your way. I'll be the one in the Morrissey t-shirt.

And Dann Florek as Captain Cragen

2009-03-28T10:03:00.002-04:00

If anyone needs me for the next 17 hours, I'll be within one pajama-clad leg's length away from the USA network's ALL DAY¹ Law & Order:SVU marathon. According to the opening credits, the crimes are 'especially heinous' and--according to anyone who's ever seen more than one episode--so are most of the scripts.

It's a horrible show but for some reason I can't pull myself away. It's like being at a party where dessert arrives in the form of a store-brand sheet cake and despite knowing how bad it will be--that the icing will taste like BandAids and the cake-y bits will be charred on the bottom--within ten minutes you've scarfed better than half of it, staining your shirt with $7.99 worth of self-loathing.

SVU is my shitty sheet cake.

Enjoy your Saturday, everyone. See you on the other side of approximately 14 creepy pediatricians, 27 dead hookers, and one hard-nosed detective who's tough but fair.²

¹ Save for sixty minutes between 11 p.m. and midnight when USA interjects one episode of Criminal Intent. This is when I'll take a break to brush my teeth.
² That would be Mariska Hargitay's Olivia Benson whose hairstyle will change every three hours but I'll always think it's judging me.

If You Drive A Car, I'll Tax The Street

2009-03-26T11:12:00.001-04:00

"Meeting with the accountant" is a phrase I never thought I'd use, let alone Sharpie across an Anklysaurus' face in my dinosaur day planner. That's one of the sentence fragments I've frequently filed in the Things That Don't Apply to My Life category, listing it somewhere between "Yes, I'll Be Your Life Coach" and "Ask Me About My Invisible Pores".

My dad has always handled my tax stuff but in Oh Eight the majority of my income¹ came from freelancing--save for the $183 and a plantar wart I earned as a part-time toe-handler at The Foot Bucket--and he didn't know how to make the numbers look right. He explained it more eloquently, dropping terms like withholding and deductions but I admittedly wasn't paying attention since he called in the middle of a TLC program about real-life werewolves.

A couple of weeks after our one-sided chat, he mailed me an overstuffed envelope full of menacing pieces of paper, official-looking documents decorated with the state seal, and other things that I probably shouldn't have used as bookmarks. Paperclipped to the top page was a note in his familar left-handed font that said "Go find an accountant", an imperative sentence that sounded almost as ridiculous as one telling me to go find a husband. I know nothing about personal finances, have a closet full of ill-fitting illustrations of my poor money management, and never considered the I.R.S. as anything but R.E.M.'s first record label. It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel...fucked.

After ignoring Dad's envelope for several weeks, moving it only to dust the counter or to extract an errant jellybean that skidded underneath it, I decided I should probably try to find a Taxman. I trashed the Talking Phone Book last month to make room for a Costco-size carton of Cheese-Its so I had to consult the Friend-Of-A-Friend network to get a name, eventually scoring a recommendation from a guy who frequently spots me when I bench press. If I trust him to keep a hundred-plus pounds of metal from splintering my sternum, I'll gladly take his financial advice.

Fast forward to Monday morning when I had to skip an episode of SVU in favor of spending an hour visibly squirming in an office wallpapered with a pattern from Home Depot's narcolepsy collection and learning I couldn't just send the IRS a balloon bouquet and a picture of me turning my pockets inside out. During the sixty minutes I spent smudging The Accountant's glass-topped table, answering questions with a shrug and otherwise making him hate his life, I learned the following things:

When The Accountant asks you something, you can't say "Pass" and expect him to move to the next question.
My dog is not a dependent. Neither is an ovarian cyst.
An original Van Halen 1984 t-shirt is not considered an asset. Snapping your fingers and saying "Oh, I beg to differ, son!" does not change his mind.
Sleeping with that guy from Radio Shack is not a charitable contribution.
Your Grateful Dead-patterned Chuck Taylors are not a business expense, regardless of how many times you wore them while you worked.
When he asks if you have any investments, don't remove the Class of '01 graduation tassel from your rearview, dangle it in his face and say "This is an investment. IN MY FUTURE."

Doing It Wrong.

Sigh. My first attempt at doing taxes has been nothing but a reminder of how much money I don't have and how not responsible I am. The Accountant needed proof of my self-employment, things like receipts from Kinko's or love notes from my health insurance--neither of which I have--but I do inexplicably own a purse full of printouts from McDonald's documenting every McGriddle I've ever scarfed.²

"I really need a copy of your 2007 tax return," he said, carefully placing his pen beside the legal pad in front of him.

"And I really need the dinosaurs to come back to life," I told him, putting one hand over his.

He eyed my mitt like it was an expired mouse in the middle of a glue trap. "Flirting with me isn't going to help you", he said, brushing it aside and possibly wondering if he would survive if he launched himself through the window.

"OK, well, do you know who I would need to flirt with?" He stood up, smoothing invisible wrinkles out of his pants. "Because from the right distance, I can look almost attractive, especially if you see me at an intersection through my unwashed car windows...Yesterday someone honked at me."

He sighed, pulling a business card out of an engraved holder on his desk. "Just try to find those receipts, OK?"

I nodded, dropped the card in my purse, and walked out into the lobby, wondering if it was too late to get a McGriddle.

¹My use of the word "income" is almost laughable, since I probably could've earned just as much money by checking the coin-return slots on the Coke machine outside the Exxon station.
²I saved the receipts in case a piece of undercooked sausage left me with a raging case of salmonella/gave me that shit Seal has/made me colorblind. That way I'd have proof to either mount a lawsuit or to get my $2.47 back.