Something Funny Someone Else Came Up With

Specifically, Big Fat Whale

Kick-ass show update

The Old Scratch Revival Singers will be in town this weekend.

One band, two great show this weekend. If you like old-timey folk-punk gospel revival music (I know there's such a glut of it lately, but this is the cream of the crop) you'll love the show. Can't recommend these people enough.

Come out and see them:

July 27th--8:00 p.m.
The Church
724 E. 26th St.
Minneapolis, MN

July 28th--10:00 p.m.
The Bedlam Theatre
514 1/2 Cedar Ave. S
Minneapolis, MN

If you're super cool, you might get to come to the after party at my apartment. But only if you're super cool.

Do the Zombie Dance!

Nothing like coming home from a nice vacation to find your good buddy is being held on $30,000 bail for "simulated weapons of mass destruction", by which, of course, is meant he had a radio in his back pack.

I'm sure the arrest had nothing to do with the fact that he and his friends were tyring to make an anti-materialistic statement by disrupting people's shopping experiences in trendy Nicollet Mall.

Sigh...it's good to be back in the "liberal" big city.

"Why I Love the Big City, No. 376,843" or "Like Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer (Only Less Homoerotic)"

Last monday night it was me an' Arturo's weekly trek to Bunker's for an evening of music, and on rare ocassion, pretty girls. Arturo's good people, and after he has long been the Val Kilmer to my Tom Cruise (or the Iceman to my Maverick, if you will), I decided it was time to switch up and play a supporting role by being his wing man.

So as he swoops into a decent-looking girl (it was pretty late in the evening by then), I made my move toward the corpulent friend in an attempt to engage her long enough to free the object of his desire. But as I turned to speak to her, I realized someone had already taken the wing-man position for me.

But it wasn't just any someone, it was National Football League Hall of Fame defensive end Carl Eller.

Yes, I had been usurped at the position of wing man by a Hall of Fame member of the Purple People Eaters.

It was even crazier than that time I found out that Alan Page was a male stripper.

Cellular Telecommunications Technology and Letting Go

Just found out today that the wedding of an old buddy of mine happening late next month will be attended by That One. Now, everybody has a That One. It’s not to be confused with The One (which I’m inclined to argue doesn’t exist, but that’s another post for another day), but she is most definitely That One. You know, I’ve loved a couple of women, and I’ve had my li’l heart broken more than ol’ Bob Dylan, but this is the one that stung the worst. Maybe it wasn’t the most serious, maybe it wasn’t even the best, but it sure seemed like it was going to last. Which it obviously didn’t. And I can make all these arguments about how it helped me grow as a person, and how it’s great to be single in the city (especially when you meet a ballerina at closing time…but that’s yet another blog for yet another day), but it’ll still be weird. Weird to see That One.

Long story short, I need a really good-looking date for this wedding. Just passing the word along, in case…you know…you know anybody.

But that’s not the point of this post. Well, it is kinda. The real point is about letting go.

For the other day I took a momentous step when I finally erased all the old messages from ex-girlfriends. You see, I keep the voice mails that old girlfriends have left when they were angry, drunk, or angry & drunk. They range from an angry rant explaining to me that I care more for the starving children in Ethiopia than about our relationship (which was probably true) to asking me why I don’t want to settle down and “have babies”(Why?!? Because I’m 23 fucking years old, you crazy so-and-so).

I would listen to these when I needed a pick-me-up. Not in the sense that I could go “Oh, someone used to really love me” but in the much pettier sense of “Ha! Glad I ain’t crazy like these bitches.” (You’ll forgive my sexist language here, but I have a theory that it’s ok when you’ve had your heart broken…another post, another day).

But no longer. I’ve decided that to truly move on means to forgive and forget. I have erased the messages, the phone numbers, the e-mail addresses. Everything. And it was one of the most liberating moments of my life.

You see, I have this theory about how cell phones are against God’s will, because they destroy all of the Good Lord’s protections against the drunk dial. In the good ol’ days, you had to both a) be near a phone, and 2) remember the number. But with cell phones, you’re always near a phone and you only need to remember the name of the person you’re calling. As such, I’ve made more than a few calls of which I’ve been quite embarrassed.

But now I see the wisdom in the Divine plan. Fr with cell phones, you have no need to memorize numbers. You simply put them in the phone once and never think about them ever again. That way, when it is deleted it is as final as can be, because you have no way of contacting that person even if you wanted to.

Now Verizon Wireless is my Moses, and he has commanded the Pharaoh of my psyche to let my past go.

Terrible metaphor, but you get the picture. Once a skeptic, now I see that cell phones may not be so bad.

An animation for our times

With all due credit to the brilliant Dr. Douglas James Shaw and his Clubhouse for Ladies and Gentlemen, a picture for our times:




Lack of internet skeelz prevents me from putting up the animation, but you can find it by this conveniently placed link right here.

Why I love my neighborhood

A short play, and by "play" I mean "exact transcript of what happened"

To set the scene, I have just returned from seeing the Combo at Bunker's, a monday night tradition of myself and strib cover-boy Artuto. Then there is a loud knock at the door...

(Offstage): "Open Up...Police!"

Gutter: "I'll go see who it actually is"

Woz: "Why do your friends think they're so funny?"

(Incomprehensible muttering)

Gutter: "Hey Woz, can you come down here?"

Woz: "Sure...what's the matter?"

Police: "Are you sure this is the only other person in here? No one else ran in here?"

Gutter: "No, it's just us"

(Police run off with big dog in what appears to be hot persuit of someone)


Let me tell you, this is very funny when you're drunk. Speaking of which, I apologize for all for the spelling and gerammer errors I can only assume I've made in this post.

The best thing an artist can often do is nothing

So driving home last night at 4 a.m. after watching Fear and Loathing, I was in an artistic and introspective mood. And as I struggled to stay awake and on the road, the Current was playing some weird Eurotrash techno that gave way to Beck and I caught myself doing this weird, arsty internal monologue about how I know Beck is a musical genius and all that, but his is the kind of music that leads one to insanity when they're in the altered state of mind that only sleep deprivation can bring on.

And for a minute I thought "Hey, that's pretty fucking eloquent. I should write that down. In fact, I should get back into creative writing. I haven't wirtten anything good for months now. This is the kind of shit I should be doing...you know, like jotting down wry observations of the madness of everyday life"

But then, as always, you wake up in the morning and realize it was just really, really hackneyed crap that every other person vainly trying to make their way in the world of creative work comes up with and it's never entertaining, no matter who writes it.

So I didn't write it down. You can thank me later.

Tales from the weekend that became a week

This is one of those "space filler" posts that I write because I haven't written anything for the past couple of days and I feel like I should. In talking to some old friends over the weekend, I found that many more of them are reading my humble li'l blog then I would have expected, so now I feel the pressure to keep the content coming.

So here's the problem with open-ended vacations: when you don't have a day you have to be home, and all of your research is waiting for you at home, it gets hard to actually come back. So a little 3 day break becomes a week pretty quickly. But plenty of interesting stories came from it, so that's a plus.

The CD player? Classic Wozniak story. We finally shilled out for a decent unit, and it worked for approximately 25 minutes. After I ejected the first CD I put in there, the electronic sensor became jammed making it permanently think it had a CD in it, even though it had no CD. Thus, it wouldn't take new CDs, so it became just a kind of expensive radio. So I had to go back to FD to get the box and receipt from my folks and take it back. Then we shelled out a few more bucks for a brand I've actually heard of. Now this one has lasted for 3 full days, which is pretty good. But it would probably be ridiculous of me to expect it to last for much longer.

Ended up at a house party on friday night full of people that I didn't know and the people who took me there didn't seem to notice either. But there was one gentleman there who was dressed like your standard Abercrombie & Fitch ad, but with a mohawk. When he approached our little cadre to hang out ackwardly next to us, I noted the fact that his ensemble and haircut seemed to contradict one another. Apparently, this was not the thing to say to this particular young lad, as he became quite incensed. He then took advantage of his sleeveless shirt to flex his biceps for me and inform me that I was wearing "faggot clothes" because I'm a "faggot." And he apparently didn't like my witty reply of "it doesn't make me a faggot just because I want to rip that fancy shirt off you and fuck you right now" because that caused him to take a swing at me.

Fucking kids these days!

But at least the party was broken up by the most polite police officers I've eevr met in my life. Even while I was standing in the middle of the yard urinating while drinking a 40 and then shouting "Who the hell are the new people?" they were quite polite. And even when the 3 of us drunkenly stumbled away from the party all they asked was if we were ok to drive. After I informed that them I most definately was not, they let Timmy drive, eevn though I think he drank more than me. Again, very polite cops.

But all good things must come to an end. Here I am back in Minneapolis, drinking some moonshine my friend Kete made (and taught me how to make...apparently in Mpls you can make 100 gallons a year before you need a lisence) and trying to read my research, which seems to be getting hard the more and more moonshine I drink.