As the four regular readers of my blog know, I read CNN daily and often write here about it when I feel like it. Today I clicked on a story apparently about Bob Dylan's home being too smelly (what?) and it transferred me to KTLA.com which is, from what I can tell, where crazy news goes to die. It's full of stories that got caught between the fiction of The Weekly World News (RIP) and more respectable news outlets. Among the insane headlines I was met with when I visited KTLA:
Martha Stewart's Dog Killed In Explosion
Woman Hurt In Sex Mishap Involving Power Tool
Chimp Plans, Executes Attack On Zoo Visitors
Five Human Heads Found In Coolers
SoCal Man's Body Mistakenly Delivered To Pet Store
As for my life, my dead squirrel may have been stolen, but after I sent my prayers for more corpses out into the universe Ham delivered by finding me a dead chipmunk. I was going to cut it open tonight but I just couldn't bring myself to do it when I was holding it in my hands and it's little eyes were staring straight into mine. I think I need Skippy there to hold my hand while I turn the little guy inside out. Either way, my skin fever is satisfied. I thought I could keep the little guy in the Fels fridge for a couple of days without anybody noticing as long as I labeled the container this time. I left it in a Cheez-It box and then realized that people don't refrigerate Cheez-Its so I labeled it "Spinach and Lentils Pilaf - Do Not Touch" because I thought no one would want that. Then people got high and touched it and there was screaming and the chipmunk ended up in the microwave. Luckily I was there to save it. I miss my fridge.
Sitcom class is going well. We just wrote a scene for a never-going-to-happen Western sitcom which we ended up titling Full Jailhouse (my other suggestion: Fresh Prince of the Unincorporated Territories).
It sounds like my life is all skinning and classes, but I'm sure it be more than that. I'm trying to get used to being around people that I know all day long and having everybody know what I'm doing all the time. I'm also getting sick. Maybe that's a reason to miss Sue's class tomorrow. :-) I've also been texting people a lot and it's led to me using emoticons more. :-(
On the heels of discoveries about Abraham Lincoln's watch and Shakespeare's portrait, CNN reported today that one of the great mysteries of the twentieth century has now been solved. In typically dry fashion, buried far under a story entitled "Hot dogs lead cops to burglary suspects," is an article saying that DNA testing has definitively proved that princess Anastasia Romanov died at the hands of the Bolsheviks. All I could think about was the children of the future who will watch Disney's Anastasia with the knowledge that it's all a romantic falsehood; the princess is dead and there are no such things as talking bats.
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In personal news I just ran karaoke at the Student Center. Maggie got me find a pirated version of Photoshop, so now I can do everything I want. I listened to Beck's Modern Guilt finally and decided it's ok. Everything else is going fine. I have a revised list of birthday gifts that I need but never got:
A black knit hat to replace the one that was stolen from me when I went to see Coraline.
A dead animal to replace the one that disappeared.
Barbie is based on a German gag-doll of a gypsy prostitute named Bild Lilli. Also there is a life-sized Malibu dream home that features, among other insane things, a chandelier made out of Barbie's hair.
When Republicans are talking about stem cell research it is of dire importance. When a Democrat is talking about it, it's a distraction. Also, Republicans fear that soon we will be "embryo-harvesting." Wait, is that a distraction or something to get hysterical about?
ALSO:
If you missed The Daily Show last Wednesday night it was a really fucking great episode. Ch-ch-check it out.
The other day Skippy showed me how to skin a squirrel. On my birthday the heavens gave me a beautiful dead squirrel just laying out in front of commons to satisfy my desire to make taxidermy. My fridge broke down and I decided nobody would mind if it was in the Fels fridge (based on the assumption that nobody would look inside the lumpy garbage bag without a note on the vegetable crisper). Unfortunately some hungry souls did go poking around and weren't happy about it. Then it lived outside in a labeled box until either:
An angry Felsian threw it out to spite my carelessness
A maintenance or cleaning person threw it out
A wild animal took it (unlikely, cuz it probably would've left the box and garbage bag)
Anyways, Skippy still showed me how to skin a squirrel by letting me work on his. It's a weird thing skinning an animal. It doesn't smell very bad but the smell it does have really gets into your nostrils. Skippy said it smelled like dog farts. It was really stomach acid. The weirdest part is when you pull the squirrel's arms out of its arm-skin leaving it with a set of skinned, chicken-arms and a pair of furry arm-wings.
Soon, it will be taxidermied and then I'll feel ready to taxidermy my own squirrel without much direction. I don't know where I can find another dead animal, though; the last one dropped right into my lap.
Settling into classes and bullshit. Sitcom'll probably be fun. Projects is looking good. Etc. Don't know how I feel about Marguerite's class - it's a little intense.
Emily's bday party is tonight. I'm supposed to dress like my homestate, but I'm not sure how to dress like Oregon. I want to be a sad, beardy, guitar guy, but that's more attitude than appearance. Otherwise... how do you dress like Portland? I could be a Klan member, but unless you're from Portland that probably won't register as place-specific unless you grew up with historical pictures like this in the whitest city in the Pacific Northwest:
And only dickholes dress up like the Klan. Maybe I'll be Elliot Smith with a knife in my chest. Maybe only dickholes do that, too. Maybe I'll just be the spirit of seasonal depression.
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Yesterday Diggy came to visit for half a second. I remembered how much I like Diggy when she related some pearls from her Disney Channel lifestyle, the choicest being that her friend was behind the wheel of the car that killed Buddy, the Clinton family dog.
Quote Wikipedia:
Buddy, however, suffered the same fate as Clinton's previous dog, a cocker spaniel named Zeke, when he was killed by a car while running loose near the Clinton home in Chappaqua, New York, on January 2, 2002.
What it doesn't say there is that the friend was skipping school and she was afraid that if she stopped she'd get in trouble. Or that the Clintons lived by a highway. After the hoopla of Socks passing away this past week I was wondering how I never heard about this. Oh the seedy underbelly of upstate New York. You could make a really benign series of noir comics about it.
R.I.P.
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It's really strange to me that people I don't even know or don't know very well read this blog. I always think reading other people's blogs feels voyeuristic in a way that makes me uncomfortable. Especially when nobody comments on it - it's like performing for an invisible audience. Sometimes somebody will sheepishly tell me that they've been reading it and I'm always shocked because writing a blog feels so self-indulgent it's hard for me to believe that somebody would have any interest in how my classes are going or reading about smelling squirrel stomach acid. What's weirder: that or the fact that I find most blogs so boring and wanky, including mine? I guess if you hang your dirty laundry on a public line you shouldn't wonder if anyone stops to look at it.
Hey fools, Now that I'm back at Bennington it feels funny to write here because most of the people who read it already know what I'm doing daily as much as I do. It's like writing about being an amoeba for the amoebas you share a petri dish with.
What's new: I had a birthday party. I'm now officially 22 and I feel younger than ever. I'm pretty sure I'll feel the same way once my body starts to fail. No wonder old people are prone to depression. Growing up you get used to a constant personal sea change as you grow - each year you feel pretty distinctly different than the year before. But, it seems, once you hit 21 you sort of just go "So this is it? What's left?" All the fun parts of growing old are behind me. It's depressing to be in the middle of the prime of my youth knowing that for the rest of my life I'll just be fighting fat and wrinkles. It makes me wish our culture revered age and wisdom as much as we do youth. Where's my cane? Youth is wasted on the young! I used to be like you kids! What's a tanned, taught body to experience and worldliness? I need a drink.
But my party was fun. It got to the point I had wanted but dared not hope for - there was no room to walk and you had to just stay where you were standing. That's the sign of a successful party in the Barnes houses. Third Street represent! My glorified closet was decked out pretty well, too. Nice wedding lights and a portrait of Jesus staring down. This was, of course, not just to look festive, but because the Bow's traditionally offer our bodies into spiritual wedlock with Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ on our 22nd birthdays in the hopes that we will be blessed with carrying the next Christ child. It didn't work for my mom so the burden's all on these here shoulders. What the hell am I talking about? How's your side of the petri dish?
Annnnyways, the white russians flowed like water and the presents and tchotchkes ran to my open arms. Among them, $100 for amazon.com from my mom. I took the opportunity to buy some CDs I've been wanting like Self's amazing Gizmodgery (which I've had off SoulSeek for years now, but always wanted to make it legal, kind of like my love for Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ has now been formalized), TVOTR's Dear Science, Beck's latest (I'm hoping for OK and prepared for the worst after the terrible concert I saw last summer), Low's Drums and Guns, QOTSA's Lullabies to Paralyze (same deal as Gizmodgery - a fucking fantastic album), Coldplay's Prospekts March (because I've completely embraced my love of their blandness), Hatfield and the North's The Rotters Club and Susanna and the Magical Orchestra's List of Lights and Buoys.
Pretty good for $100, I think. I've been listening to Soundgarden's Down on the Upside a lot over the last couple of days. I got Superunknown when I was really young and it has engrained itself in me a long time ago - so much so that I can't really listen to it anymore because it's so familiar - but I didn't get Upside until college. Kind of like Alice in Chains, Soundgarden albums sort of sound heavily samey on first listen, I think, but after time the intricacies open themselves up. And really Kim Thayil is one of the greatest rock guitarists of all time, Ben Shepherd is amazing and Chris Cornell generated enough goodwill from Soungarden to make me forgive Audioslave - just because he can't sing a song without wailing for the rafters doesn't mean he can't wail with the best of them.
The B-side of Down on the Upside is a little spotty and, to me, never really rises above "pretty good," but the A-Side is outstanding, from "Pretty Noose" to "Never Named;" it's flawless as far as I'm concerned.
Blah blah blah. While I'm wanking about music, here's a couple of the songs that have me the most excited about my amazon purchase:
Did anyone else see the response to Obama by Bobby Jindal and think it was incredibly silly in almost every way? I didn't know what to make of the fact that the GOP had suddenly started touting him as their future - "Hey, you guys like young, ethnic men? We got those!" I was ready to see some formidable opposition from the Grand Old Party, but, man does this guy seem like a clown. Am I wrong?
Prof. Whitehead may not want me here, but I'm back at Bennington to stay. All I have to do in order to graduate is pass one exam. With the help of zombie Kurt Vonnegut (Kurt Zombigut) I can do it, but I was up last night dancing at the Oingo Boingo show in the student center and performing perfectly executed Triple Lindy dives at the rec center. All for the love of my son...
Me
Stray notes:
Today in class we read a piece by Martin Buber. I realised what loneliness is when I looked around and there was nobody to laugh with about the name "Buber."
It's really cold outside. Whenever I walk out I find myself saying in my head "It's FA-FA-FA-FREEZING!" and wishing that I could say that to someone without them being irritated by it before remembering that that person doesn't exist.
Emily made me a schedule, which is very nice of her. There is a man on it with my name on his shirt as D-Bow, with the "D" being a bow and the hyphen being an arrow. How have I never in the course of my life thought of that?
There's someone on campus who looks like Adam Freed, someone who walks like Sean and someone who sounds like Brian Schultis (kind of). I wish people I didn't know would stop unintentionally imitating people I did.
I had my first class with Margie-babe today. It was intense. I don't ever want a class to end again with out-loud readings from Holocaust survivors quickly followed by discussions of our majors ("Dance-Lit!").
I told someone after watching the first episode of Friday Night Lights on Hulu that, though it is widely acclaimed, I don't think I could get into it because I'm not that nostalgic about high school and never really liked football. Then I watched two more episodes and proved myself wrong. Now I'm hooked! Go Panthers! I'm sad!
I brought one of my dad's old pipes back from home after cleaning it out into my trashcan. When I was in the car to the airport I realized that the large piece of ash I had removed was the filter. Bummer. Now I need a new pipe. It will go well with my growing incense addiction; my room already smells like a head-shop, it might as well get some of the accouterments. Next: posters of aliens in a wintry forest of mushrooms peeing "4:20" into the snow.
Last night I saw Coraline, which was exciting. The Nightmare Before Christmas played an important part in fascinating me as a child while kind of spooking the living shit out of me at the same time. Plus, Laika studios is in Portland, so hometown pride abounds (except the kid in the film pronounced it "Ore-gahn" not "Ore-gun" which is distinctly wrong).
The visuals were amazing, but, is it just me or is Neil Gaiman not really that great? I only know a little bit about his stuff, but what I have experienced seems to me to be mish-mashes of other ideas and themes into wholes that don't necessarily become original. Now don't get me wrong, a lot of the children's movies I enjoyed growing up like A Troll in Central Park or The Last Unicorn weren't bastions of originality either, but still, that's not an excuse really... While watching Coraline I couldn't help but feel that it was a collage of themes and imagery I'd seen in a myriad of other places with little original substance of its own. It's the same way I felt about Stardust, Mirrormask and Gaiman's adaptation of Beowulf. I guess to make that claim I should have some solid evidence, which I don't, but did anyone else just find themselves recalling things like Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, James and the Giant Peach, etc. and not really appreciating the movie as something on its own?
I saw it in 3D, too, which was cool but exhausting. I guess it's a neat technology and it's sure improved since the red/green glasses days, but I don't miss "2D." For one thing, putting things on different planes but keeping them at the same level of focus isn't always realistic - sometimes it's just weird. Also, I felt like my eyes could never rest - they're still burning a little.
In other news, all my dad's tools are gone and most of the books are packed up. I helped Larry, Moe and Curly move a bunch of stuff into a storage unit out in Bumfuck Nowhere, Oregon yesterday (which is an unincorporated part of Salem). Now I'm counting down the days that I have left in my childhood home. It's really hard to pack everything you own when a) you hate cleaning b) you hate packing and c) you hate getting rid of things.
Hey, as of yesterday I have 100 posts here! Wowza! Let's celebrate with a still from the (near) titular movie of this blog:
NSFW?
This weekend I traveled down to Roseburg with a friend. What an amazing little shit-hole. I saw the giant pit in the ground where I was born. I was told by my parents that, long ago, Douglas County Hospital (now the pit) used bo be next to a hill where famous goats roamed free. (When I was in elementary school I told my class I was born "in a hospital by goats" and they all laughed). The hill, Mt. Nebo, no longer has its Mt. Nebo goats, which used to come down into the hospital grounds and predict whether it would rain or not with their very presence. My friend told me that they all fell into traffic or were killed off. This is just one of the changes that Roseburg has experienced since I left it 20.5 years ago.
As we tried to leave, the tire on my friend's car went flat an hour out of town, looking like it ran over a lawnmower blade. We didn't have any of the right tools, so we had to call roadside assistance, which took an hour. After they left we discovered the battery had gone dead and we had to wait for another thirty minutes. Then a woman with no teeth on her bottom jaw except for canines (reverse vampire!) told us that the tire department at the local Walmart had shut down thirty minutes before our arrival. We eased up the freeway on a spare until we got to Springfield.
Springfield is nothing like it looks in the Simpsons. At the Springfield Walmart, Jeff Spicoli told us that they had just closed up an hour early, but that the Walmart we had come from usually stayed open later. Of course, nobody else was open given that it's a Sunday. The Lord may have rested on the seventh day, but if he wanted to get somewhere I'll bet he would have wanted four tires (unless he rode a tricycle).
Since there was no other alternative in sight, we drove to Portland on the spare, never going above 45 mph. This meant hugging the guardrail with the hazard lights on while the world literally passed us by. It was kind of nice, because it slowed down the whole day (it took four hours to get from Springfield to Portland, 2x what it should have), and there was a distinct sense that something wanted us to take it slow. Whatever the cosmic reasoning, we missed the 10:20 showing of Coraline, and that's that.
Tomorrow mom and I begin moving our lives down to a Salem storage unit. My room looks like a hurricane came in and fucked it. It's emptier than it was yet dirtier than it was. I can't bring myself to pack up my CDs yet. There are mixes that need to be made!
Whew, I haven't found time to write in here forever. I think my readership has dropped off to zero (to match the readership of my other, more self-indulgent blog). Today I still can't be assed to make a proper blog entry, but here are some things:
I watched Demitri Martin's Comedy Central special yesterday and laughed and laughed. Comedy Central is my de-facto channel to put on while I'm packing eBay packages because stand-up makes for good background. They've been advertising Martin's new show every five minutes until I got sick of his floppy-haired visage. I was a big fan of Demitri Martin when he was the youth correspondant on the Daily Show and I've always thought his whole schtick was just a little bit grating and I couldn't figure it out until someone told me they thought he was a smug little shit. He is kind of a smug little shit, isn't he? I don't think I could hang out with him, funny or not.
I'm going down to Roseberg, the town of my birth tomorrow. It will be a great pilgrimage. I will take pictures of the depression floating by on the breeze.
I'm in the process of packing my childhood bedroom into boxes. It's a very strange experience. It's given me the idea for a book, though. I've had the desire to write clawing at my brain for weeks now, but I haven't had a good subject (that's probably why I don't write in here anymore. Plus, like I said before, I have more of a life now that I'm back in the US). But I think I'm going to contrast some of the dumb shit I'm throwing out with some of the sweet shit I inherited from my dad (a machete, a skull, mysterious teeth...). It will give me something to do in Sue's class.
Tonight I'm seeing Lykke Li. I was stoked until someone told me she was just ok in concert. Now I'm medium-stoked.
The other night I dreamed about mice crawling all over a burlap dummy hanging from the ceiling of our garage. I tried to beat the dummy so the mice would fall out and I could catch them in a brown paper bag, but I was failing. My friend told me the mice represented petty fears and annoyances. I don't know.
I just looked in a notebook I was keeping during travel from Belfast to home. In it I wrote a in/out list for 2009. The best one: Out - High School Musical. In - Reform School Musical.
I started writing a couple of blog entries the other day, but I got tired of them and the fizzled out. One was about the batshit craziness of the comic strip, Safe Havens, and how I'm sad they've replaced it in the Oregonian with a terrible local strip. The local strip is called Adams' Apples and is about a teacher named Mr. Adams who teaches a class of wise-alec, adorable elementary school kids. I like to imagine it's about Sean's future. The strip looks like it was drawn in MS Paint and most of the jokes are like yesterdays: Person A: "I'm looking for those tablets that help you lose weight. What should I ask my pharmacist for?" Person B: "Girth-control pills!" That shit makes Garfield look like Proust.
I'm finding it hard to keep up with real life here now that I have one. In lieu of that, here's some more comments about tv and junk:
My fears earlier this week were unfounded about The Office. Oh man was that a good episode; right back into the bittersweet funny.
My fears about Skins were very founded, though. (Spoilers if you care) Skins took a page out of Degrassi's book this week and sent its most interesting character to Africa (right after we got to know him!). There were some ok moments as stories and characters develop a little bit, though I sure wish it would stop trying to be edgy and crazy and just represent how real teenagers act. In my opinion, the inclusion of a mobster character who gets tangled up with teenagers for some reason (not to mention his comical henchmen) is like when The Flintstones added the Great Gazoo or Itchy and Scratchy added Poochy: it's just unnecessary and bizarre. If they went all the way and made him act like a human being (problems with that this season) they might get somewhere, but instead he drinks Cup o Noodles to show he's tough and challanges a 16-year-old to a fight that consists of eating raw peppers. What the fuck? What universe is this?
As for what's happening in the Bow household, I'm surrounded by things that need homes. Since my mom and I are both moving, everything we own needs to be packed, given away or sold. A mountain of old t-shirts and baseball caps is going out the door to make room for weird inheritances like a machete and creepy masks. They're not interchangable when it comes to usefulness, but some things are more important than others.
Today I finished posting all of my dad's old board games on eBay. The geek money's piling up! Nobody wants Assassin, though, which shocks me. Going by the box lid alone, it's easily the coolest game.
From what I can tell, the game is like Taxi Driver except instead of a mohawk Travis Bickle has a mullet and his target is John McCain.
Assassin's only competition on the cool-o-meter is the dashing fellow on the cover of Rail Baron, the "game of building railroad empires" (which I'm keeping for myself). He's There Will Be Blood but drunk.
In other media news, my literature burnout has moved me to comic books. I read Phoebe Gloeckner's A Child's Life, Debbie Dreschler's heartbreaking Daddy's Girl, a bunch of R. Crumb and now I'm halfway into Watchmen. I sure like them words when the come with lots of purdy pickshures. Reading the much hyped Watchmen, I totally understand why it's considered a classic. I didn't know how into it I was until I saw a preview for the movie the other day and had a nerdgasm. I hope it doesn't suck.
As for music, I can't stop listening to Love's Forever Changes. Sometimes it sounds like someone going crazy, sometimes it teeters into hippie-dippy bullshit, but most of the time it's just an amazing beautiful album. I bought it for my dad but I don't think he ever really liked it. I'm not sure why. I can't embed anything from it, but check it out anyway.
Today on TV there was a British movie from 1999 called Virtual Sexuality on. I remember passing it at Hollywood Video and always thinking that it was raunchy Cinemax-style porn. Little did I know that it was basically Just One Of The Guys but with shitty CGI. The amazing thing is how late-'90s everything about it is. There's bleached tips and Macy Gray everywhere. When my kids want to know what 1999 was like I'll hand them VHS copies of this, Can't Hardly Wait and Spice World.
I'm afraid that all of my favorite TV shows are dying. I thought the last two episodes of The Office were pretty weak in comparison to what had been going on. What, so the Angela/Andy/Dwight triangle reaches a head and then the issue's dropped and everything's normal? No! I have a stake in these imaginary people's lives and I want resolution!
Degrassi's long been put out to pasture, but that doesn't make its decline from pre-teen, Canadian guilty pleasure to pre-teen, Canadian guilty pain any more acceptable. Who are these new people that I'm supposed to care about? You can't just send characters to Africa and expect me to forget about them, Degrassi writers; not when you've left me with this:
But what's really broken my heart is Skins. Oh Skins, I loved you so much! For those of you who aren't British and/or retrograding back to middle school, Skins' first two seasons were hella good. What started as a guilty pleasure (Matt warned me it was "Degrassi meets Rules of Attraction") turned into one of my favorite shows ever. But now? Let me list some of the offenses: extensive plots involving gangsters; penis-tattoos; drawn-out fart jokes; live goldfish-eating; characters nobody could give a shit about.
These characters who seem to be drawn from imaginary TV-types rather than actual people - sensitive sk8r boi, walking pharmaceutical receptacle (Chris without the likability), Screech-like nerd who the former two are friends with for no discernible reason, xtreme maybe-lesbian (probably not) named Naomi Campbell (wtf??), twins (one's wild the other's not and probably is a lesbian). Oh, and Tony Stonem's little sister who the show keeps reminding us is totally attitude and anything-goes, yet somehow became way less interesting now that she talks. Skins - don't make me hate you. Please come back down to earth.
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Back to that irritating nerd and Darcy's froggy, Jesus-loving sister in Degrassi, let me put a question to you, world: is the nerd stereotype even relevant in 2009? Revenge of the Nerds? Fine. Saved By The Bell? Cool. The straight-laced programming geek in Virtual Sexuality? Ok. But now that the internet has taken over our lives and people camp out all night for Apple products is there still a cultural otherness to nerds? Look at tv - shows like The Office and motherfucking Chuck; movies like Rushmore and its imitators; the rise of Michael Cera and all indie quirkiness.
The outdatedness of the nerd stereotype really hit me when I was on the airplane from Belfast and they showed an episode of The Big Bang Theory. I guess it's a popular show, but it felt to me like something from another era. Haven't the nerds finally taken over? When the biggest movie franchises of the last decade have been The Lord of the Rings, comic book movies and Star Wars, I think we need to reevaluate things. Does this really represent a reality anyone thinks of as true anymore?
Of course, this is coming from someone who reads comic books, watches childrens' programming and then goes and writes about it in his blog, so what do I know?
Amelie Gilette at the Onion AV Club wrote about Saturday's SNL with this really cringe-worthy banjo performance by Steve Martin. I was aware that SNL had stopped being funny, but I hadn't thought about Steve Martin. I know he's a comedy legend, but all I can think about are Pink Panther parts 1 and 2, Cheaper By the Dozen parts 1 and 2 and this. IMDb is telling me he was in The Man With Two Brains, but I don't think I believe them. Was Steve Martin ever funny?
Regardless of history, this performance is not for comedy's sake nor is it for an upcopming children's album. It is an honest-to-God, sincere song for adults. Shocking.
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I don't normally write about truly personal things here. It feels exhibitionistic and cheap to me. But I felt like sharing today. Last night I think I had my first dream truly dealing with my dad's death. I had a dream a couple of weeks ago where he was around and I had to wake up to remember he was dead, which was strange, but this was different. In my dream I was reading out of an imagined childhood book I owned, personalized with a main character named David Bow. In the book David finds a briefcase containing paternal signifiers like a trenchcoat, fedora and pipe. When he opens it his father magically comes back. I was reading from the book to friends, but when I got to the part about opening the briefcase I just started crying so hard I couldn't read. All my friends understood.
Earlier in the dream I was at a party with some people. The party was like a child's themed birthday, with giant inflatable barnyard buildings we were informed were empty. I thought that meant there would be no animals, but I found a pen with some coyotes inside. The pen-keeper told me and my friend that they called them "big porcupines," which made sense to us when he grabbed one by the scruff of its neck and lifted it, yelping, outside the cyclone fencing. He then proceeded to lay it on the ground, where it exposed a big, jagged mouthful of teeth.
I couldn't tell what he was doing to it, subduing it or killing it, but he had a knife out and was moving around its body. Blood started to come out of its nostrils and, it seemed, elsewhere, forming a big river of blood in the mud at our feet. I was startled and my own nose started to bleed. I wiped it with my hand and ran to the bathroom across the dirt road to wash up to save me the embarrassment of having the man notice I was bleeding as well. This is the third night in a row where I've dreamed of my nose bleeding in response to being startled by things (last night it was a horse rearing at me). This is weird in a lot of ways, one of them being that my nose doesn't bleed when I'm startled (though once it bled in 6th grade Humanities class when the teacher said "Regina, Canada" and I contained my laughter so much I think it created some kind of pressure).
I have a book from 1938 about dream interpretation that I consulted when I woke up this afternoon. It says that a nosebleed is a good luck sign and "augers health and relief from anxiety." Or at least it did in the '30s. Online dream journals all say different things.
Anyways, I dreamed for so long that I woke up very late and now I'll be awake again all night.
Tonight was my Grandpa's 98th birthday, which was pretty cool. I learned that he used to herd cattle (which neither of his daughters knew), that he met Howard Hughes (whom he says was , surprise surprise, crazy) when he turned down a lucrative job to work for him and that his grandmother came over on the second wagon train to ever go to Oregon (and the first with women). In addition to these facts, he also told me emphatically that religion is stupid because there is no proof for it. I've never heard him come down on religion or politics before, but the man was a Sunday school teacher and a deacon as well as an engineer/lumberjack/cattle-hearder/naval officer.
I got to tape some of his stories. He is deaf so rather than converse, all he really does is tell stories from his past. When they're not sprinkled with engineer-speak that he assumes I know, they're really fascinating. Above is my favorite.
As I'm moving around all of this stuff that was my dad's I'm thinking about the mutability of history. It's only in and around this last century, during the time that my grandpa was alive, that we've been able to record music - before you had to listen to the musician live or nothing at all. There is no record of the sound itself from before, only instruments and documentation (at this point in the post I should warn that I've been smoking, so if I'm not already blowing your mind you might want to bail). Similarly, all the things that my dad left me are really part of my memories of him; I think about all of my things now in terms of what I want to pass on to my children (when they exist).
I spent a long time tonight letting my grandpa go through an old family album and tell me who the people are. If he doesn't do it then no one else will! My mom doesn't know who the people are any more than I do and my grandma can't see them. The best story that came out of it:
There's a picture of my grandpa at about ten-years-old dressed in a policeman's uniform. Grandpa told me a story about visiting a sick family friend who was, at the time, also being visited by "a big Scotch-Irishman." "Oh great, just what I need, a cop," joked the sick man. "Help me officer, this man is accosting me!" At this point grandpa revealed to me that his fake uniform came with a real billy club (his college also had a shooting range under the gym, just to give an indication of how times change). He started beating on the other guy with his club. "I pert near took his head off!" laughed my grandpa.
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Elsewhere in the dinner I argued with my aunt and uncle about how good The Wrestler was. "The guy was such a loser!" my uncle kept arguing, as if that meant something. "What a meathead!" We came to common ground when he invited me to come with him to WWE Wrestlemania the week before I leave. Whhaaat? My whole family was shocked at how much I knew about WWE, except for my cousin who used to play WWF: No Mercy on N64 with me. I guess that was a phase in middle school the rest of them missed. This is understandable because I only watched Smackdown because my friends did and I didn't have cable. I'm still not sure how seriously my uncle takes it. Maybe he expected The Wrestler to follow a storyline similar to those that happen during WWE matches. Like, maybe he thought Micky Rourke would get surprised at Raw Is War and challange Mankind to a Pay-Per-View ladder-match. Probably that or the plot of Rocky.
In other entertainment news, I also saw The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and it was awesome. That and Gone, Baby, Gone have me excited about Casey Affleck's future career, cuz he really knocks those out of the park. At least, as excited as you can get over the career of an actor I don't know or an Affleck. Plus, Skins is back with a whole new cast! I'm gonna watch it right now and see if the magic is still there! And by magic, I mean drugs. (Update: just watched it. OH. NO.)
Here I am blogging again. It feels a bit strange getting back into writing here, now that I'm home and have people with similar interests around me I don't really need a blog as an outlet anymore, but I thought if I didn't keep it up now I'd probably lose the knack completely and then where would I be? My mom gave me a book for Christmas about finding one's strengths and apparently my #1 is the desire to collect knowledge, information and objects. If you don't have an outlet for these things, though, it can be stifling and lead to stagnation, which is really the subject of tonight's show:
Q: What have you been doing since you've been home, Dave? A: I've been clearing out all of my dad's old stuff and figuring out what to do with it. Like myself, my dad was a collector of things that he didn't really need. As my mom says, he kept things because he loved them. This extends to vast collections of nerdy items that I'm really getting off on, like a mammoth collection of '70s superhero comics that I don't know what to do with. I thought initially that I would read them all. You see, I have clear memories of picking them out of their cataloged cardboard boxes as an elementary-schooler, lying on the flea-infested rug in our guest room with some Hostess snack cakes, my nose in an old comic. I loved the smell of them and the quaint old ads for fruit pies (there are about 3 fruit pie ads per comic).
My favorite series at the time was The Micronauts: a little-loved comic about a group of royal aliens who are forced to flee their home planet and traverse the galaxy, but get this - when they come to earth they're really small! Micro, you could say... The idea of having little people running around in my kitchen was already in my imagination, so this fed into that nicely; especially in the second comic where they run into a kid mowing the lawn (like I did!) and he helps them defeat tiny enemy spaceships (like I wished I could do!).
The problem with the Micronauts was there was not much reason for them to be on Earth, which meant their story quickly shifted to other planets where, for the most part, they were proportionate to everything (making them just Nauts, I guess). This fed into no fantasies of mine, given that I found space pretty boring on a whole.
(the guy with the sword was my favorite)
The problem with these Marvel comics I inherited is, in general, now that I'm not 8-years-old, they're really lame; boring and poorly written. This bums me out. Unfortunately, I don't have the time or energy to weed out whatever gems there might be. My dad sold all the really valuable ones, too (and made a pretty penny by all accounts), which accounts for big chunks of plotlines missing. I think I'm going to take them en masse to a comic store and see what I can get for them, which is pretty sad, but my mom told me I need to save my energy and I can't see myself putting them all on eBay one by one.
Other collections involve role-playing war-strategy board games, tin soldiers and tiny racecar sets, among other, more badass things. My dad was such a cool guy! The things that got him excited were often the same ones that excited 12-year-olds. I loved him so much, man. I can't really look at it objectively, but I'm sure that explains something about me.
It's hard for me to part with most of this stuff, but my mom and I are both moving in the near future and neither one of us needs tin soldiers. Hell, my dad didn't need tin soldiers; he just liked them. As for the games, those have gone on eBay and are selling quite nicely. There are a lot of retired nerds out there who are willing to cough up money for PanzerBlitz and Imperium - Empires in Conflict: Worlds in the Balance.
Most of the books went to Powell's, except for a big chunk of classics that are in my sights (and some sci-fi/fantasy gems like Conan and Tarzan, which my dad loved and I hope, in the future, to read and appreciate). Some of these books are way cool and have led me to the creation of...............
As for books, my scheme of a middle school book club has been put on hold (though it's still incubating). In my recovery from learning Old English and Victorian tea-lady etiquette I've reverted to comic books. Aside from the comics I waxed nostalgic about and disowned above my dad also left me his collection of Zap Comix and other sweet goodies that I was not allowed to see at a young and impressionable age. They're great! Most of Zap is just things having sex with other things, which is pretty easy to read. But more on all that later. I'm worn out from trying to update this thing already. See you soon and welcome back!
Ladies and gents, when I wrote my post about Katy Perry's enduring shittiness back in December, little did I know that it was going to be sent around the internet and discovered by actual Katy Perry fans. Increible! The power of this information super highway!
The responses I've gotten have inspired me to get back on that blog horse and ride, clarifying why Katy Perry sucks and you should hate her, too (that's hyperbole, middle schoolers; don't get in a tizzy yet). I'm happy to find that, here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, Perry's 15 minutes lasted its rightful course. That doesn't mean she's gone, though. So let's hold our breath and go back in, taking it back to the opening lines of "Hot n Cold" again to pick that shit apart.
"You change your mind like a girl changes clothes"
Ok, so that's just playing with a hackneyed stereotype; not necessarily offensive, but certainly not trenchant or funny. It's the kind of thing that seems so outdated to me; an ignorant sweeping statement from a past age. It might as well be about women bringing home so many hat boxes that men don't have room for their golf clubs. "You make excuses like my wife makes supper - poorly! Har har! Now lemme tell you about airplane food!" More disturbing than the implication that women are fickle and indecisive (at least when it comes to clothes - they love their clothes, amiright?) is the implication that men aren't and shouldn't be because it's a feminine trait. More on that later.
It goes on:
"You PMS like a bitch - I should know"
Here's where it gets more complicated. PMS, something that is inherently feminine (at least in the literal sense), is being used as an insult. Basically, "you're acting like a girl;" a little playground chauvinism. Like "don't be a fag," it's putting down a whole group of people for being different. More than that, Perry ropes herself into the inferior group. She's a fickle bitch and she's proud of it! But that doesn't mean you can be one, indecisive guy; unlike her, you can probably help it.
Where does this weird latter part come from? Why, it comes with help from the song's co-writers, Dr. Luke and Max Martin! Two men - surprise! See, if Katy Perry were just a shitty singer-songwriter things would be a little different, but the fact of the matter is that she is part of an industry made up of people - many of the men - who are capitalizing on selling this inferior, bimbo-bitch image to the very people it's trying to keep down. Not like it's trying to keep them down in some sinister/conspiracy-theory way - I doubt Dr. Luke, Max Martin or even Perry herself even thought about it - but a minstrel show's still a minstrel show.
That brings me, briefly, to Perry's bigger song, "I Kissed a Girl." Where once Jill Sobule tread with introspection, Perry struts with the lesbian-lite, attention-grabbing look-at-me attitude of a college girl who thinks it's wild to kiss someone of the same sex. Aren't I crazy? Bet you never thought you'd see me doing this! Fuck you, mom and dad! But don't worry, I still have a boyfriend and care what he thinks, so I'm not really an icky lesbian. That's hot, right? On that note I could go into her failed single, "Ur So Gay," but that really speaks for itself doesn't it? Doesn't it??
But that's just who Perry is, old maaan! She's a crazy bitch who don't care what no one thinks! You mean she's not a calculated, iron-on icon who was created to fill pockets? Then what do we make of her career starting point as the Christian pop singer, Katy Hudson? Ellen Carpenter at Spin Magazine says it better than me:
"But I can claim to be an old-school Perry hater. It began in 2004, when she told another music magazine, "I'm completely outrageous and I'll do anything for attention!" This from the daughter of two pastors, who had already attempted to be a contemporary Christian music star, but whose debut didn't skyrocket her to Michael W. Smith heights (despite Christianity Today calling her song "Growing Pains" "pure ear candy with the message that we're being molded perpetually into Christ's image")."
Now I know it's been almost ten years since Katy Hudson came out and I know that people can change, but my guess is that the change that came over Katy Perry was a desire for more money.
Now with that all said, I'm willing to pull the microscope out. I hate it when adults spend their time wringing their hands about the impressionability of today's youth. I was a youth not very long ago and I remember how little credit I got for my own intelligence. I also understand the argument that "the song's just fun." Why pick it apart? Well, because it's everywhere. And kids are listening to it. And some kids - maybe not you bright young things reading this - are dumb as dirt; willing to swallow the old gender stereotypes that this contrived cash-cow is pushing.
Lastly, my speculation on the future of Katy Perry: Next comes the weak sophomore effort with songs that sound like "I Kissed a Girl" and "Hot n Cold" but less catchy. People will move on to someone else. Maybe Miley Cyrus will start flashing her crotch getting out of cars or something and that's where attention will shift. After that, Katy Perry will reinvent herself, releasing a softer, more mature album of acoustic songs showing "the real Katy Perry." It will have a one-word title - probably Katy. One of the songs might be about God. Then the world will forget...
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