I Got Somethin' to Say ... I Killed Your Baby Today!
Not really, though. It's just that I haven't updated but once this week, and here it is, Friday again. I'm getting pretty slack in all areas of my life of late: work, weblog, working out, housework ... a regular lazy lima bean. I seem to be practically catatonically exhausted all the time. Maybe I'm fighting off some disease or bug or illnes or infection. That's the excuse I'm gonna use, anyway.
It's hard getting motivated to do stuff that sucks, though. Like why would I spend precious time doing the laundry or the dishes when I could be laying in bed, snuggling the wife and watching baseball? That's just masochistic. And stupid.
But at some point doing the stuff is easier than not doing it. Usually when that annoying, whiny voice pipes up, "Jesus, Ian — you didn't ship out that kid's T-shirts again, you loser." Or the almost-omnipresent, "Goddammit, those dishes aren't gonna wash themselves, you slack bastard!" Yeah, eventually it's easier just to do the lame stuff to shut that voice the hell up. Maybe that's what three-day weekends are for. ...
This three-day weekend, however, will be mostly all about fun. Tonight we're doing dinner and a movie with new couple friends, which is always nice. New couple friends, I mean. Saturday is already full up, between purchasing a new (well, used, but new to me) sampler, going to the gym, band practice, and going to see an amazing rock show. Sunday will be a barbecue with other new couple friends, more band practice, and the always-fabulous Alameda Antiques Faire. Monday, sadly, will most likely be dedicated entirely to housework. But hey, if it shuts up that pesky voice in my head, it'll all be worth it. ßßß
Master the rules before you attempt to break them.
My parents have bestowed upon me many wonderful gifts (including this gift they gave me for my birthday, but I'm speaking, you know, more metaphorically here), not the least of which is a good set of table manners.
Now that's not to say I always display said manners; rather, like fine china, I break them out only for special occasions. Anyone who's ever eaten with me knows I more or less inhale my food, washing down great heaping forkfuls with water because it's much faster than all that pesky chewing and swallowing. But I know which fork to use when, and I know not to drink from my finger bowl. So when I'm meeting someone's parents, at a fancy wedding reception, or eating by myself at a restaurant à la Steve Martin in The Lonely Guy, I can switch 'em on.
Unlike the gentleman I sat across from at lunch today.
My favorite Buddhist Vietnamese place gets pretty crowded at lunch, and it's not uncommon to have to share a table. I lay my tray down obliquely across from an older dude with a plate full of gai lan and vegetarian tripe. (Don't ask. Really.) I set about to eating my lemon grass tofu, and between bites I glance up to see this guy with a big old stem hanging out of his mouth. He's gnawing on the stem, ruminant style,
and finally spits the masticated husk onto his plate. Maybe the guy is on a low-fiber diet. Maybe he's completely bereft of all manners. Maybe he didn't like me sitting near him and was not-so-subtly trying to dislodge me from his table. It almost worked.
I tried not to look up at him, but, like a rubernecker at a car crash, I kept seeing teeth and stems and lips. I tried to look away when he pulled the chewed-up stalks out with his fingers, and I mostly succeeded. But thank Christ I'm not that guy. I'm pretty sure no one left Golden Lotus today and went back to work and wrote their weblog about my lack of lunch etiquette. Hope not, anyway.
Although homeboy will never, ever read this, here are a few choice rules of the road from my Mom via me:
So close your mouth. Model appropriate behavior. If not for the guy across from you at lunch, then do it for the children. They're counting on you. ßßß
Tomorrow I become 1/365th of a year older.
Time was when my birthday was the greatest day in this young boy's life. August 23rd shone on the calendar like a marvelous beacon, a day that was all about me, as every day should have been but, throught some cruel twist of fate, wasn't.
So I waited, unpatiently, for that one day a year. Brother Josh's birthday was 11 days before mine and functioned like an opening act for the main event. His birthday was the Britny Fox to my Poison, the Europe to my Iron Maiden. Get off the stage, Josh's birthday. You suck.
Mom always made sure that my birthday was truly all about me. For that day, the world was my proverbial oyster. If I wanted to go to Benihahna, which I apparently did when I was 10, because that's what we did, we did. If I wanted to blow my birthday dough at F.A.O. Schwarz in Manhattan, then, by gum, Mom took me there. If I wanted a Star Wars-themed birthday party, she made it so. (I have a distinct memory of going to a left-handed store in Manhattan on one of these birthday trips — maybe it was the Benihana trip, and maybe it wasn't. It was a lot like Ned Flanders' Leftorium. I came home with armloads of lefty-specific merch, though. Good times.)
But after 21, as those of you who are older than 21 will no doubt agree, birthdays quickly lose their luster. I mean, until you hit 60 or 65 and can retire, there are really no good age-related milestones. Except maybe being able to rent a car at 25. Big fuckin' deal.
So here I am, on the cusp of 34. Apart from getting nice cards and gifts and being treated to lunch and punching in "34" instead of "33" when prompted to enter my age in the evil elliptical machine, tomorrow will be materially like any other day. After all, we get a day older every day, not a year older once a year.
At least that's what I'm gonna keep telling myself. ßßß
There but for the grace of god go I.
So I'm driving throught the barrio of East Oakland last night on my way to band practice. Bright boy that I am, I take a weird side street, thinking I'll save some time. In a matter of moments I've gone from the major urban thoroughfare of Foothill Blvd. to a sidewalk-free, barely paved alley called Trask St.
It's hardly wide enough for the family truckster, lined on both sides as it is with parked cars, parked refrigerators, and parked oil drums. I slow to 10 or 15 miles an hour when I see a kid walking toward me, maybe halfway up the block.
I say kid, but he's most likely 16 or 17. As I get closer to him I see he's looking down, but he's walking straight and steady. No headphones or virtual-reality headset or other device that could prevent him from seeing or hearing a two-ton automobile approaching. I continue my slow but steady progress.
It's not until I'm right up on him that I realize something's amiss. There's no sign that he knows he's about to be hit by a car — no movement, no flinching, no nothing. He's not obviously loaded, but he's clearly not in his right mind, either. I edge the car over to the right as far as I can without clipping the cars on the side of the road and as I pass him, he sorta bobs outta the way like a drunk, too late to have done him any real good. Somehow, I'm still not sure how, I don't hit him. I look in my rearview as I continue driving down the street, and he doesn't even turn his head. Un-freaking-believable.
Thing is, that coulda been me.
I was a garbage-can dopefiend, taking any and all mind-altering substances I could get my grubby paws on. The first real job I ever had, not counting the job at the bait shop (which I credit in part with making me the vegan that I am today), was washing dishes at a restaurant. I had to get the job to pay back my parents for totalling my Mom's car, drunk, three months to the day after getting my license. (I actually passed out at the wheel and have no recollection of the cops coming or of my alleged assault of the officer.)
So anyway, I'm working this bullshit job scrubbing pots at a seafood restaurant. To numb the pain we dropped acid and snorted coke before, after, and during work, and we and stole cases and cases of liquor and whipped cream (and shrimp, too, but that's another entry).
I used to leave work, backpack bulging with bottles of booze and whipped cream canisters, and walk home along the train tracks, doing shots and chasing them with hippie crack. More than once I came to on the tracks, face planted in the gravel. For a smart kid, I was pretty fucking dumb, and I'm damn lucky to be alive.
Like I said, that coulda been me. ßßß
A Tale of Two Animal Programs
I don't watch nearly as much TV as I used to (unless you count Giants games, in which case I'm watching way more), so I tend to be a little more particular these days. Invader Zim, the Daily Show, Ground Force, Anna Nicole — you know, serious, quality programming. But my newest, most favoritest show of all is the Pet Shop.
I discovered this show a few months back while flipping back and forth between the only two channels we could get on a lousy motel TV set. For those of you who haven't had the pleasure, allow me to try and describe this to you.
Dr. Marc Morrone, Long Island-based veteranarian, fields your telephone calls about all things pet-related. That's the ostensible purpose of the show. But in front of him is a labyrinthine cage setup that would put Noah and his ark to shame. Inside the cage is the motleyest assortment of animals you'd ever hope to see: chinchillas, rabbits, dogs, birds, guinea pgis, ferrets, prairie dogs, kittens, more birds, more dogs, unidentifiable rodents, and something that looks like it came from Jim Henson's imagination. No shit, I think it's a rabbit, but it looks like a muppet.
So all these animals are having their own Royal Rumble in the cage in the foreground while Dr. Morrone is trying to dispense pet advice in the background. His macaw is removing his eyeglasses. He's separating the Boston Terrier and the chinchilla, who are either fighting or copulating, and he's absent-mindedly petting the ferret the entire time. It's easily the best, and most unintentionally funny family entertainment ever.
Now at the other end of the spectrum is Sonya Fitzpatrick, AKA the Pet Psychic. She's billed by Animal Planet as "a real-life Dr. Doolittle," who can hold actual conversations with your pet. What she really is is a silly tart with a posh English accent who takes money gullible from American pet owners. Not that there's anything at all wrong with that, mind — hey, if you're fool enough to pay a pet psychic, you and your money should be parted — but for God's sake, who decided this would make a good TV show? Yeah, I know; probably the same person who greenlighted Crossing Over.
There's one born every minute. ßßß
Quarterly Soapbox Ranting, Vol. 3, No. 1
I've been vegetarian for about 15 years, vegan for the last 6 of those. One of my goals (in addition to being nice to furry animals and reducing my karmic buden) is to dispel the myth that vegans are malnourished, pasty, boring, self-righteous grad students. Cuz I may be boring, but I sure as hell ain't malnourished (180.5# as of this morning), pasty, or a grad student, and I do my best not to be self-righteous.
I'm no proselytizer. If you and I go out to lunch, I'm not gonna tell you not to get the chicken or tell you how that beef got to your plate. Unless you ask. And yeah, if you order veal, I probably won't be able to hold my tongue. But if you're a veal-eater, it's unlikely that we'd be going to lunch in the first place. But I know that the quickest way to to get someone to lose respect for you and your point of view is to ram it sideways their throat.
So I stick to sharing my experience. Like about how much more fit and energetic I felt when I quit eating red meat. And how my chronic allergies seemed to vanish overnight when I quit eating dairy products. Stuff like that.
But in the Year of Our Lord 2002, there's no excuse — NONE — to use cosmetics and household products that have been tested on animals. No excuse. I don't care what your diet is like, I don't care where you come down on medical testing on animals (it's lousy science, but that's fodder for another entry), I don't care if you're Ted Fucking Nugent, world-champion bowhunter and animal consumer. Testing cosmetics on animals is stupid and cruel. And unnecessary. And there are, like, a million and six products out there that aren't tested on animals, so there's really no excuse you can come up with that will sway me here.
So I may look like a dork with my hippie toothpaste, my foo-foo shaving cream, and my maybe-not-quite-100-percent-effective deodorant stone, but I can go to bed at night knowing that no fluffy bunnies' eyes were melted so I could look good. And that feels good. ßßß
Kneel Before the Trivia Master
Last night Tracy and I and our friends Mary and Joey went to see Tadpole which, despite getting rave reviews from just about everyone, sucked. A lot. Inept direction, half-assed cinematography, an unsympathetic protagonist, and a completely implausible storyline made for some painful movie-viewing. But it was mercifully short (78 minutes) and free (thanks to Joey's homeboy at the ticket office). They also plied us with free popcorn and fountain sodas, but we had to pay for our candy, as they actually inventory those.
After the film we retired to the lobby to hang out with Joey's friend and his two coworkers, who were amusing themselves with a little trivia contest between showings. Well, it wasn't a contest, per se, but each one had a stack of Trivial Pursuit cards, and they were peppering one another with questions. I licked my chops in anticipation.
I absolutely decimated these guys with my unassailable trivial knowledge. I reeled off answers that I didn't even know I knew — U.S. presidents, geography, science, cinema, engineering — I was an unstoppable trivia machine. If we were playing an actual game of TP, I would have had all the cheeses there were to have. Mary and Joey looked at me like I was from another planet at first; after a particularly amazing string of correct answers, they started calling me a freak and an idiot savant. I believe the term "rain man" was bandied about. Tracy just shook her head and smiled.
See, nobody expects the guy with full sleeves of tattoos to be a walking trivia repository. But I am.
And what has it gotten me? Sweet fuck all. I always said that when I was 30 I was going to go on Jeopardy, figuring that by that point I would have amassed enough trivial knowledge to compete with the real freaks. Of course, in the intervening time I'd plug the holes in my game — especially Bible stuff, geography, American history, etc. — and learn other random stuff too.
But here I am, on the doorstep of 34, and still no Jeopardy winnings. Maybe one of these days I'll drive down to Culver City or Studio City or whatever godforsaken L.A. suburb hosts Jeopardy and I'll enter, or at least kick Alex Trebek's smug ass while I'm there. Until then, I'll just be the human encyclopedia of utterly valueless information.
I swear, if I could only purge my brain of all the useless stuff in it (one hemisphere is currently devoted entirely to song lyrics), I swear I might actually be able to remember things that matter. ßßß
Clean Bill of (Dental) Health
My mental health may be questionable, but my dental health is flawless, according to the polite but totally bereft-of-humor dental hygienist who cleaned and examined my grill this morning. (What is it about dental hygienists, anyway? Is a sense of humor somehow a liability in their line of work? Jesus, if I cleaned people's teeths all day, I'd have to crack jokes constantly just to maintain my sanity.) Yup, I got some good, hard teeth. I can bite ice cream with my incisors and have my teeth drilled without novacaine. Freakish, huh?
So my cleaning consisted of the following activities: scraping of the teeth with pointy metal objects, the buffing of same teeth with delightful fruity dental paste, and flossing of said teeth.
Why does my dental hygienist floss my teeth? you may ask. Excellent question, and one to which I proffer no answer. I am patently unqualified to scrape my own teeth (or anyone else's, for that matter) with a pointy metal thing, nor should I be trusted with tooth buffer and fruity paste. But I think I can (and often do) floss my own goddamn teeth. I paid close attention to my hygienist's flossing technique, and it bore a striking resemblance to my own: work the floss between the teeth, slide it around, remove detritus as necessary. Isn't there some other humorless task she could be doing? Asbestos remediation? Euthanizing puppies at the pound? Something?
Plus they use that antiquated waxed dental floss that invariably shreds in your teeth, leaving you with uncomfortable and unsightly cotton balls inextricably shoved down in your tooth cracks. Why anyone would still use the old-school floss when modern science has provided us with the miracle that is Glide is beyond me. Anyways. My teeth are clean. See you in six months. ßßß
One of *Those* Days
Yes, sadly, I am having one of those days. Those days that seem to consist only of cleaning up the interpersonal messes I've made. Those days where everything I say seems to come out wrong and I misinterpret everything that's said to me. Oh, waa-waa, poor, pitiful me, I know. I'm just sayin'. Today pretty much sucks, and getting through it without stabbing someone is pretty much the best I can hope for. ßßß
You'll get nothing and like it.
OK, so it looks like I've moved to an every-other-day, or thrice-weekly, publishing schedule. Deal with it.
Against my will and better judgment, I'm a carbound commuter.
As much as I'd like to be taking public transit, there really aren't any good mass transit options to get me from home to work and back, and my neighborhood is far too hilly and too far away to bike (unless I want to arrive at work each day drenched in sweat). So I drive the family truckster, the sex machine known as the 1987 Nissan Maxima wagon (which looks more or less like this). (The only other real option is the motorcyle. I rode one for a few years a few years ago, but it get totalled in an accident [not my fault, of course; it almost never is the cyclist's fault], and I bought a 1964 Galaxie with my settlement money, which was much more practical for moving bass gear around. I still have my Class 1 license, so that kinda bike is a distinct possibility.)
So I drive. Which means I have to park. Which means I have to pay. Which sucks.
The metered spaces are all limited to two hours, and so is all the rest of the street parking downtown. Which leaves lots and garages. Most of the cheapo lots have those weird contraptions where you wad up your dollar bills and shove 'em through a slot, and I have an aversion to those places. It literally feels like I'm throwing my money away. There's no way in hell that there are people who drive around and check every spot in every lot every day. So even if they check, let's say, every other day, that means that I could be getting away with not paying about half the time. And paying when I could be not paying is just too painful a notion to contemplate.
So I pay five bucks a day to park in a dilapidated old garage a few blocks from here, because it's close, (relatively) cheap, and is staffed by two actual people, not bottomless no-armed bandit slot devices. And I'd pay double if they made me, because along with the parking, I inevitably get a show.
Today the money-taking guy (as opposed to the ticket-writing gal)(and no, I have no idea why it takes two discrete employees to perform these two very simple tasks) said to me, "God damn you're all lit up!" w/r/t my tattoos. "Thanks," I replied. Now he didn't really pay me a compliment per se, but saying "Yes" or "Yeah, uh huh" sounded ungracious.
Yesterday a guy was trying to pick up the PM attendant, a thick, blond-braided sista. He was trying to impress her with his piety, but she was having none of it.
"My son??" he said, excitedly. "Ten years old, and already born again!" He paused for effect. "Now that's my success!!"
"Mmm hmm," she said, eyeing his 1980 Celica coupe. I could practically hear her thinking out loud, "Your success needs to be owning a car that's younger than me."
The weirdest one, though, was the other day. I pulled up to the kiosk in the morning, and the money-taker and the ticket-writer were deep in conversation.
"Man, I don't know what's happening," Money-Taker said.
"That's them Jews," Ticket-Writer replied.
"WTF???" I thought.
Oh, to be a fly on the wall of the parking garage kiosk. ßßß
Worst. Movie. Ever.*
If someone suggests that you see Signs, do yourself a big favor. Kick them in the shins as hard as you possibly can, and run in the other direction.
I absolutely loved The Sixth Sense, even though it had that annoying, doe-eyed, slightly deformed kid in it, and that annoying, beady-eyed, balding, paunchy guy who occasionally stumbles into a good role. I went in expecting a typical Hollywood "thriller" (please to note use of quotation marks used to denote irony), and instead got an incredibly well-thought-out, eerie, touching, and uniquely plot-hole-free film. Great concept, solid acting, competent direction ... the wole package.
So you can imagine my surprise when I went to see M. Night Shammalammadingdong's sophomore effort, Unbreakable. There were moments during this movie where Tracy and I looked at each other and just burst out laughing. And it wasn't supposed to be funny. If you haven't seen it, please, let me spare you the agony: Bruce Willis and Sam Jackson are superheroes! Only Bruce Willis is a pathetic rent-a-cop, and doesn't know that he's a superhero. Sam L. is his nemesis. Hilarity ensues.
Unbreakable was everything The Sixth Sense wasn't: incongruous, shoddily done, and just downright hokey. The concept may have been good enough for an episode of the Outer Limits, but certainly not a big-budget Hollywood film. But hey, I'll give the guy the benefit of the doubt. Everyone has their whole life to make their first movie, and three months to do your second. They rushed this into production on the heels of The Sixth Sense. Sophomore slump. Happens to the best of us.
So I'm down to see Signs. Even though it's got that other awful, paunchy, gracelessly aging leading man, that hare-lipped brother of that dead guy, and the brother of that other awful former child actor turned King of Pop consort.
(So what is with the Culkin clan, anyway? The parents of Macaulay and his ilk seem to have a neverending stream of these wet-, red-, slug-lipped urchins to cast in lousy movies. I picture an infernal cloning operation in their upper West Side brownstone where they keep churning out these kids, not unlike Saruman's orc machine in Lord of the Rings.)
Anyhoo, I go see Signs, and I know within five minutes that it's going to be the worst movie ever.
The casting: appalling. Cherry Jones was uproarious, and again, not on purpose. The ultimate act of hubris, though, was M. Night casting himself in his own movie. He was beyond bad but, luckily for him, the other players were nearly as bad, so he didn't even look that bad.
The dialogue: atrocious. "Don't we have a book on UFOs back there, Paw?" one character asks. "We got it by mistake, and we decided to keep it for the city folk." The city folk??? You mean the gentry who ride up on their horse and buggies to purchase their dry goods??? This movie was set in the present day. Have you ever heard any real person use the phrase "city folk"? I thought not.
Then the aliens come. You'd think something exciting might happen. But you'd be wrong.
These particular aliens have mastered interstellar space travel but will fight us hand to hand instead of using their vastly superior technology to decimate us. And that, we learn via Rory Culkin and his city-folk UFO book, is because otherwise we'd retaliate using nukes and render the earth useless. Ummm ... OK. So they can fly here, but they can't figure out a way to disarm or otherwise incapacitate our nuclear weapons? Oh, and get this: water burns them like fire. So they come to a planet 70 percent of which is covered by water, and they don't think to devise any defense against water. That would be like you and me flying to the sun and then being surprised when we get crispy. Give me a fucking break.
And that's not even the worst part. No, the worst part is that the whole movie, the whole alien-invasion deal, is just an elaborate deus ex machina, an excuse for Mel Gibson's character to have — and resolve — a crisis of conscience. So your discriminating moviegoer (which I assume you are, because you're still reading this) feels manipulated and cheated. Or at least I did.
So like I say. If someone tries to get you to see Signs, kick them hard and run away. Alternately, if you've seen Signs and are under the misapprehension that it did not suck, email me and try and sell me on it. I need a laugh. ßßß
Really. Big. Shoe.
Yep, thhe have a big show tonight at the Pound with everyone's favorite prog-rockers the Cancer Conspiracy and everyone else's favorite electronic noise merchants Your Enemies Friends. Should be good times.
If nothing else, playing out makes me feel like my recent obsession with and expenditures on effects pedals isn't completely ludicrous. Oh, and it also more or less keeps me sane, so that's also a nice bonus.
I played in a band for two years that was more or less professional, where we played between 100 and 200 shows a year. I was the only one in the band with a day job, so everyone else depended entirely on the band for their rent, food, drug habit, etc. This was problematic in a number of respects.
Firstly, it led us to take gigs that no one in their right mind would actually do: two-week tours exclusively of ski resorts, for instance. Cold, miserable, and filled with skiers. Kill me.
Also, I was away from home. A lot. Which sucked.
Add to that the fact that I was cooped up in a van with between 5 and 8 other people (all but 1 of whom I really didn't like. at all.), and you have a recipe for some seriously bad shit. Picture the most dysfunctional family you know of, add liberal helpings of mind-altering substances, subtract any semblance of responsibility, and you might get an inkling of what it was like.
That's not to say that there weren't good times, 'cuz there were. I met tons of great people, played amazing gigs in front of — literally — thousands and thousands of people, and made most of my living doing something I loved. But being in that band scarred me for life.
I thought I hated touring; turns out I just hate touring ski resorts with a van full of mutants. It's taken me years to put that whole experience in perspective, but it did teach me a lot. Like how no amount of money or perks or anything can make an unbearable situation palatable. Of course I forget this from time to time, but circumstances always conspire to remind me.
It's funny what I end up writing about when I have no idea what to write about. ßßß
Oww! You guys!! My ass! Seriously!!
Fuck, fuck, fuckety fuck fuck.
Work is putting a serious damper on my fun, not to mention my blawg. This shit needs to stop, and soon. Sadly I've taken a job at an incredibly stable nonprofit, and people seem to like me, so the odds of me getting fired or laid off are slim, approaching none. Unless ...
I ate a wolverine today. It was scrumptious.
Michele bitched me out for not linking to the boobie blog. There you go, pervs.
My ass is killing me. My gluteals, to be more specific. A combination of running the bases at retard baseball, squats, and stiff-legged deadlifts has torn up my ass muscles to the point where I can barely walk.
Retard baseball was pretty fun again last night. Erica shook her ass, Tracy did cheers, Kris yelled like a madwoman, Ellie flew off the merry-go-round like a trained stuntperson, and even Mr. Fancypants himself showed up. I booted pretty much every ball that was hit to me, but other than that, it was good times.
Me and my ass are paying for it now, though. ßßß
Don't miss last month's brilliant insight.
