I Hate It When My Exposition is Longer Than My Story

We recently celebrated a holiday in America known as Black Friday. This is the most capitalist of holidays, where all of us grubby consumer whores wake up at times normally reserved for going to bed and stand outside in the cold and the wind and sometimes rain to display our unbelievable stupidity, and to show off exactly how much we value saving some money over our personal health and wellness.

So, in accordance with tradition, at 1:30am last Friday i was standing outside of Best Buy, hoping to score a $400 laptop and a $90 flatscreen monitor. Despite wearing two complete sets of clothing, a sweater, and my heavy green Army coat which may or may not have come from Siberia, the wind ripped through me and froze the marrow of my bones for three and a half hours until i, somewhere near the 100th person in line, was finally admitted to the store.

My next stop was Half Price Books, where everything was an additional 20% off in recognition of the holiday (so, 2/5ths Price Books). Amanda and Alyssa were already in line when i got there, so i just kind of sneaked in to join them. As i entered the line, the person standing immediately in front of my compatriots turned around and excitedly addressed me by name. At first i was shocked and confused, but then i recognized this short, balding fellow adorned with Green Lantern and Watchmen pins: it was Aaron, whom i'd worked with years earlier in the soul-sucking health insurance industry and one of the nerdier persons i'd kept company with!

Later on, when we were back home, Amanda asked who that person was that i'd been chatting with in line pretty much until the moment they opened the doors to the store. I responded with a story.

Aaron came in to work one day at our soulless insurance company and walked straight over to my cubicle. "Well, today's my last day," he said. I hadn't even realized that he was quitting. "I just came in to clear out my desk and say goodbye." We talked for maybe ten more minutes or so, and then he walked back across the room to make good on his assertion. Within another ten minutes, unceremoniously, he was gone.

A half an hour or so later, our boss, Jason (best boss ever), approached my cubicle. "Hey, Trevor, did i hear you talking to Aaron a little while ago?"

"Yeah," i replied.

"Um...where did he go?"

Confused, i replied, "...home?"

"Oh...why did he do that?"

"Didn't he tell you that he quit?"

"No..."

As it turned out, i was the only person that Aaron told that he quit.

Don't Trust Dr. Mario, He Is Not A Real Doctor

It's my birthday!

This post has absolutely nothing to do with that!

I'mma keep it short because i want to go to bed!

Amanda recently bought Civilization Revolution for the Xbox 360, and she's been playing it obsessively for the last week or so. I can't pull her away from the damn thing. So, since we need to be cleaning the house for the party this weekend, this morning before she woke up i removed the memory card which contains her gamer profile from the system and hid it in my pocket. Fortunately, to my utter surprise, she did not fire up the Xbox the moment she set foot downstairs, but instead waited patiently for me to finish the pancakes and then got straight to work on the house. I was amazed. Just yesterday i saw her walk in the house with Alyssa after they'd been out shopping, plop down on the couch and start playing Civilization within one minute of entry.

So anyway, we got to talking about this while we were both working in the same room, and i said to her, "You know, we have the same problem that my parents did."

"Oh?" she inquired.

See, we have little, mostly playful spats now and then about how much higher her gamerscore is than mine. I just rolled over 8000; last night she hit 10000. For my parents, in the age before Xboxes and gamerscores and such things, there was Dr. Mario.

Mom was really, really good at Dr. Mario. Dad, not so much. She was constantly beating him. He was getting to the point where he didn't want to play with her anymore, because he didn't stand a chance of winning, ever. And, in the days before online play, this left Mom with nobody else to play with. So they struck a deal: Mom would play three levels higher than Dad. Eventually, this deal had to be modified to five levels higher.

Even that wasn't really enough; Dad was still just really good at getting his ass kicked. Sometimes at night, when i was supposedly asleep, i'd hear them arguing over the trivial details of their Dr. Mario games. But the real kicker was, one time Mom fell asleep while playing...and she still beat him.

This is a common occurrence for Amanda. Amanda will fall asleep during games all the time and still beat everybody else. Usually we're speaking of board/card games here, like Settlers of Catan or Phase 10, not video games. But the principle carries over.

But the whole memory card thing this morning is what really brought up the parallel between Mom's mid-90s video gaming habits and Amanda's current ones. One time, i'm going to go ahead and call this 1994 because i think it was about the time that Tetris 2 came out (i was going to go with the release date on Dr. Mario, which i looked up on Wikipedia, but 1990 seems waaay to early for this to have happened), Mom finally recognized her addiction to that damn pill-dropping game and asked me to stage an intervention. She asked me to hide the Dr. Mario game cartridge from her for a period of time, which i did.

Well, one night, probably just a couple days later, she went out of town for some reason and wasn't coming home until the wee hours. I didn't think much of this...until she woke me up in the middle of the frigging night.

"Where's Dr. Mario?" she asked.

I mumbled some unintelligible gibberish. "You told me not to give it to you."

"That's ok. You can give it to me now," she persisted.

"But it hasn't been long enough," i protested.

"It's fine. Just give me Dr. Mario, it's ok." This may have gone on for a little longer, but i don't imagine much; after all, i just wanted to go back to fucking sleep. The game was in a bucket under my bed. I fished it out for her and went back to sleep.

In conclusion, don't trust Dr. Mario. He'll get you hooked on his little pills, and pretty soon you're harassing your single-digit-aged children in the middle of the night to get your fix. What a fucking jerk.

Liner Notes

This blog is inspired by an article i saw in The Onion once. The article is about a guy who makes a mix CD and then writes extensive liner notes for it. Being The Onion, they are of course making fun of this guy, but it made me think: if i knew this guy, i would totally read through all of this. That's a package that i'd eat up for sure.

So i've decided to compile some liner notes of my own for this year's PAC. I'm going to post another short blog immediately after this one, because i know that this isn't going to be everyone's proverbial cup of lard.

First, i'll explain the PAC itself. Trevor's Poor-Ass Christmas is a series of CDs that i've done every year since 2004. At first, it was just a collection of songs that i liked, but it's evolved to the point where i now spend the entire year compiling this damn thing. It's my way of taking all the music that i've been listening to incessantly over the year and exposing other people to it, hopefully so that they'll discover something that becomes as important to them as it is to me. Responses to the PAC have been mixed; most people like it, but not to any great extent. Then there are people like Jolly Green Giant, who has said that it's kind of a highlight to his year and he looks forward to the new compilation every Christmas.

This year, as i was working on the final mix, i realized that these CDs mean something more to me personally as a whole than the songs on their own do. Since i do them toward the end of the year (i try to have them available at my birthday party, mid-November), they're a pretty good snapshot of the kind of person that i was at that time of my life. Looking over previous collections, i've certainly changed a lot in the last seven years.

So here are my liner notes to Trevor's Poor-Ass Christmas 200X. My birthday party's this weekend, so nobody's actually seen the disc yet and few have glimpsed the track listing, so this will be your sneak peek. If you're into that sort of thing.

1. Them Crooked Vultures / Gunman
Them Crooked Vultures was pretty much the biggest news in rock music last year. Supergroups usually end up sucking, trading mostly on the names of the members and relying on that to sell records. This makes way for often lazy songwriting. Anyone remember Asia in the 80s? Their biggest hit took the guitar riff directly from their guitarist's other band's only hit. I am speaking of The Heat of the Moment, directly ripping off The Buggles' Video Killed the Radio Star. Listen close, you'll hear it. But i digress. Them Crooked Vultures, for those who don't know, is Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age/Kyuss, Dave Grohl of Nirvana/Foo Fighters, and John Paul Jones of fucking Led Zeppelin. There was no resting on the laurels here; Them Crooked Vultures debut album is one of the most amazing things i've heard in years. It delivered on, as Josh Homme promised, "riff like you've never heard before." It's truly something different and remarkable.

I remember their first show happening; it was an afterparty for last year's Lollapalooza, at Chicago's Metro, and the only way to get a ticket was to order it online, and already have a Lollapalooza ticket. But they didn't announce who was playing at the show; they just put up a web page that featured the logos of Queens of the Stone Age, Foo Fighters, and one of the runes from Led Zeppelin IV. Much of the rest had to be pieced together through rumors and other such things. Motherfucker already had his Lollapalooza ticket, and he thought he knew what was going on at the Metro, so he got his computer at work all set up on that web site at least an hour before those tickets went on sale. Unfortunately, due to the shitty internet connection we have at work, he was unable to get into the online order form, and the show sold out in minutes. Motherfucker was pissed.

The Them Crooked Vultures album came out on November 17, just a little too late to be featured on the 2009 PAC. Gunman was the first song added to this year's PAC, and i thought it to still be a fitting opener to the disc.

2. PJ Harvey / Meet Ze Monsta
The first of two PJ Harvey tracks represented this year. I originally had three songs on it, but Amanda thought that was excessive. "You don't understand," i said. "For the first six months of the year, i was listening to almost nothing but PJ Harvey." And this was true. I went through a big PJ Harvey phase in 2008, just before we left for New Zealand, and in fact spent much of the night before we departed scouring the internet for a couple PJ bootlegs to take with. At the time, i came up with only one. This phase didn't last long after we got back, for some reason, but it did land Rid of Me on that year's PAC. This year, i've come into an astonishing windfall of PJ Harvey boots, including some of her very first shows in 1992 when she performed without a band in seedy bars across the UK. But anyway. Lots of PJ this year.

3. Droids Attack / The Great Wall of 'Gina
One of the best bands in Madison. I strongly recommend checking these guys out live. Their riffs are heavy as fuck and the atmosphere they create while playing just takes you to another place. I was at the CD release show for this in...March? April? It was amazing. I was actually invited to man a camera for the music video for this song, but unfortunately the shoot was the same weekend that i was in Minneapolis seeing...

4. Biffy Clyro / That Golden Rule
...which was not worth the drive. Sure, Biffy put on a great show, but it was only 25 minutes long! We had figured, they came all the way here from Scotland, the least we can do is drive to Minneapolis to see them. But we had been under the impression that they were second from headlining a three-band show. As it turned out, they were second to play out of four. There's a very interesting story about our experience at this show, but i think i'll make a whole blog of that someday soon. (UPDATE: link)

Anyway, the album this comes from, 2009's Only Revolutions, was not available in the United States at the time of this show (March? April?) for less than $35 for an import copy. So, even though it's probably still not worth it because of gas, i was happy to score a copy of the album at the show for $10. We saw them again in Chicago two days later, which was an even shorter set and a somewhat less energetic performance. Fucking Biffy. Come back to the States and headline, dammit!

Fun Fact: the aforementioned Josh Homme also appears on Only Revolutions, on the track immediately after this one.

5. The Distillers / I Am A Revenant
The Distillers, like Biffy Clyro, are a band that i discovered in New Zealand, even though they're an American band. This song ended up on the PAC this year because i was listening to it extensively while editing the new version of Kiwiland, Ho!, and i really like it. At first, i had wondered if Courtney Love had been in a punk band aside from Hole, but it turns out that this band's frontwoman is Brody Dalle, who is married to...Josh Homme.

6. 10 Minutes With My Dad / Heavy Metal Parking Lot
This song is what compelled me to feature a gigantic Explicit Lyrics logo on the disc's packaging this year. Holy shit, where do i start with 10 Minutes With My Dad? I'm not entirely sure how i came about this band, it was through multiple links off of one of the many music blogs i read. They had one of the band's two 2004 EPs up for download in its entirety, and the blog entry described debauchery beyond anything i've ever heard of before. The band consists of these two blonde bombshells, who tend to perform wearing as little as possible (ie, thongs and belts across their tits), have dildo fights on stage, and sing songs about fucking their dads. I left that tab open in Firefox for months before i actually downloaded the EP, as if staving it off in apprehension, but when i finally listened to it i was blown away. These girls have as much talent as they have T&A. This song is about rednecks. Being from a certain small hick town in Wisconsin, where the high school had to start forcing students to enroll in racial sensitivity classes, this song reminded me of more than a few people i used to know.

7. The Avalanches / Frontier Psychiatrist
This is a weird one. I spent a long time being unsure how it would fit into a compilation, since the beginning and end of the song are built to be put exactly where it sits on The Avalanches' album, Since I Left You, but completely by chance i paired it with Heavy Metal Parking Lot, and the two feel like they were made for each other.

This song is such a bizarre combination of sampled audio, symphony, hip-hop beats, and record scratches, i don't even know what to say about it. It's best just experienced.

I first discovered this song through my Pandora shuffle, and ordered it from the library. The disc proved quite popular, so i had quite a wait before it came. In the interim, i was in the video suite at MMI late one night working on something or another, and i heard this song suddenly blasted loudly from another suite. It was Dick, watching the music video, which is also pretty fucked up. Check it out.

8. Shiny Toy Guns / Le Disko
Finding something to appropriately segue to from Frontier Psychiatrist was no easy task, and i'm not entirely sure that i accomplished it anyway.

This is an infectious dance/punk song that i was introduced to through another MMI student, Jesse. He used it in one of his projects, and got it lodged in my head. I ordered this from the library, and once it came, listened to the album on repeat for a week or so. Then i just listened to this song on repeat for a while.

9. Metric / Gold Guns Girls
I'm convinced that this is one of the greatest songs recorded in the last five years. I've had a handful of friends recommend Metric to me over the years, but for one reason or another i just never remembered to go looking for them. Amanda and i were at Jimmy John's earlier this year, and Gold Guns Girls came on the radio. I was awestruck after less than a minute, and asked an employee if he knew what was playing. Since they play satellite radio, he went in back and checked for me. I waited for this CD to come through the library almost all damn year. In the meantime, i downloaded some Metric bootlegs and listened to them constantly throughout the year. My only regret is that i couldn't just put this song on the PAC 20 times and call it done.

10. Broken Bells / The High Road
Another sort of supergroup, Broken Bells consists of James Mercer from The Shins and Danger Mouse, a producer/musician who first rose to prominence a couple years ago when he started some big legal fiasco over mixing Jay-Z's Black Album into The Beatles' White Album and releasing it for free to the internet as The Grey Album. I first heard this song on the actual radio, on 105.5 Triple M, the radio station i'd later do my internship with. I bought this CD almost as soon as it was released, taking it home that day and listening to it on repeat as i passed out, possibly from food poisoning from a restaurant which was shut down by the FDA weeks later.

11. Ringside / Struggle
I found this band, like many bands on the last two PACs, through Pandora. It was probably through a Spoon mix, they have that kind of vibe to them. I got their album from the library and then later found it on the dollar shelf at Half Price Books; it's worth a couple listens, but for the most part, this infectious lead-off track is as far as you need to go into it. This is another song that i ended up leaving on repeat all night long a couple times. Sometimes, when i'm alone, i'll randomly shout things like, "I just want to move ahead! MOVE AHEAD! I just want to stay in bed! STAY IN BED! BUT IT'S A STRUGGLE!!!"

12. The Sounds / Riot
Also from Pandora. These guys, especially frontwoman Maja Ivarsson, are completely full of themselves. They've been quoted as saying that they set out with the intent of being better than The Beatles, and Maja aspires to be "the best female vocalist around...at least of this century." I find their egotism quaint, and after the first couple listens of their debut album, Living In America, i more or less dismissed it. But this song, Riot, popped up in my shuffle a few months later, and i got hooked into it. I tried listening to their albums again, thinking i'd missed something before (this happened to me with CKY, a band i dismissed at first which has since become one of my all-time favorites after Frenetic Amnesic shuffled randomly through my iPod), but to no avail. It's just this song. It's so goddamn good. I couldn't stop listening to it.

13. Tegan & Sara / Hell
I may have jumped the gun a little by putting this on here, but i don't regret it at all. You'd think, since in 2007 i declared Sleater-Kinney to be my favorite band and haven't yet backed down from that, that i'd have discovered Tegan & Sara much, much sooner. Same goes for Metric, really. But this came about first when i saw a girl on my bus wearing a Tegan & Sara shirt, and i said to myself, "Oh yeah, i've heard of them. Always meant to check them out. Maybe i will." So i ordered a few of their albums from the library that day, although after copying them into iTunes, i didn't really listen to them. A friend posted a link on Facebook some time later to a video of Tegan singing Wake Up Exhausted with The Alkaline Trio live, and i was like, whoa. I read through some of the forum comments on that video and there was a guy raving about a couple other Tegan & Sara songs, one of which was Hell. So i pulled up those couple of songs on iTunes and listened through them, and Hell grabbed me in the best possible way. I'm sure i'll be listening to Tegan & Sara a lot more closely next year, but for this year, sticking with Hell seemed to be the way to go. I enjoy this song quite a lot, so i'm expecting to enjoy the rest of their catalog quite a lot, too.

14. Lady Gaga / Just Dance (f/Colby Odonis)
Last year i remembered hearing about Lady Gaga, but straight-up pop music stays pretty far off my radar these days, so i never even considered giving her a chance. But then one week, two of my friends whose musical opinions i put a lot of stock into posted links on Facebook to two of her music videos (Poker Face and Bad Romance), so i thought maybe i ought to poke my head in and say hi. The videos astonished me. This is some serious avant-garde art shit here, and it's popular in the mainstream! What the fuck?! I watched the videos a couple of times over. While i lose a little respect for Lady Gaga for taking her clothes off so much, i recognize that that's pretty much the only reason her shit got popular. But now that it's there, it's paving the way for more art to get the attention it finally deserves. And the music's damn good, too. This remains my favorite Gaga song, but really, with Lady Gaga, it's less about the music and more about the attitude. I expect to see great things from her in the future.

15. Against Me! / Stop!
This was not my first choice for an Against Me! song this year, but From Her Lips to God's Ears didn't really seem very relevant in 2010. After that i considered Miami, but it didn't jive well with the rest of the comp, plus it's over four minutes long, so it got cut. But since i did listen to a lot of Against Me! this year, i knew they had to be represented. This song popped up on my Pandora shuffle one day, and i knew i had a winner.

16. O Pioneers!!! / Dead City Sound
These guys sound an awful lot like Against Me!, don't they? I'd heard a lot about them from Mitch Clem's various comics, since he was kind of obsessed with them and even ended up playing bass for them at a couple shows, but hadn't had the chance to listen to them. When i found that online record label Quote Unquote Records, whom i also discovered through Mitch Clem, was hosting their newest release Neon Creeps for free download, i jumped at the opportunity to snag it. As a whole, the album seems a little...emo...for my tastes, but fortunately i think the music itself makes up for the lack of depth in the lyrics. Plus we need a sad song here and there. I probably listen to way too much happy music these days.

17. Butter 08 / Mono Lisa
When Jason introduced me to Cibo Matto in 2007, it was another near-instant obsession for me. Butter 08 is a side project that Miho Hattori and Yuka Honda of Cibo Matto worked on between their two albums, which also included Sean Lennon and Russell Simins of The John Spencer Blues Explosion (not to be confused with Russell Simmons of Run-DMC, a totally different guy), both of whom would appear on the second and final Cibo Matto album, as well as producer Mike Mills (not to be confused with REM's Mike Mills, a totally different guy). This is a hard to find album, i still haven't tracked down a physical copy of it, but not for lack of trying. I downloaded Butter 08 in 2008, but for some reason they didn't appear on that PAC. They should have. I used the song Mono Lisa in a re-edit of a scene from the movie Hero which i did as a class project, a video that i'm quite proud of, and therefore Butter 08 finally becomes represented on the PAC. I need to get a hold of Miho and Yuka's other side projects/post-Cibo Matto projects, i think i'm in love with these girls, musically.

18. Monster Magnet / Blow 'Em Off
The first copy of PAC 200X that i burned had a different Monster Magnet song, Cage Around the Sun, on it. But i hadn't listened to the lyrics too closely when i first selected that track, and it turns out that it's a narrative, and his dog dies in the end. I decided that it was too much of a downer for Trevor's Christmas CD, so i replaced it with this one, straight off of the Kiwiland, Ho! soundtrack. Monster Magnet has been one of my absolute favorite bands since 1998, when i first heard Space Lord. 1995's Dopes to Infinity, which features Blow 'Em Off, and 1998's Powertrip are two of the finest rock records you will ever hear. Anyway, this year i was given quite a large number of bootlegs from Monster Magnet's earlier years, 1992-1996ish, and i thought it appropriate to include something from them of that era, even though it was live stuff i've been listening to. This is probably my favorite Magnet song, anyway. This one or See You In Hell.

19. Wax Audio / Thunder Busters
This one was a last-minute addition. I was on YouTube looking at something or another, and you know how YouTube is, you see something interesting in the sidebar and you just keep getting linked to video after video. Well, eventually i was linked to Thunder Busters, a mashup of AC/DC's Thunderstruck and Ray Parker Jr.'s Ghost Busters theme. Normally, mashups are not my thing, but this one made me laugh and laugh and laugh. I probably watched it five times in a row when i first found it, and more times later. Wax Audio has entire albums of mashups available for free download from their web site, so i grabbed them all. They're very good at what they do. I just had to include this.

20. Amy Winehouse / You Know I'm No Good
I kept hearing this song on Triple M, but every time i did, the DJ wouldn't tell me what it was before or after hearing it! I loved this song, not knowing what it was, for months, until finally, i got out of the car just after it ended and went inside and looked online at Triple M's list of last played songs. And there it was, Amy Winehouse, another artist i'd heard of through friends but not bothered to check out. I mean, as an avid fan of the Cheezburger network, i'd seen plenty of stuff like this and this, i figured i'd never need to. Boy, was i wrong. What an amazing singer. Too bad she'll probably be dead by next Christmas.

21. PJ Harvey / Down By the Water
I hear that when this song was released, some angry groups formed mobs and attacked PJ because they thought she had actually given birth down by a river and drowned her daughter. I feel kind of weird including two songs from the same album, but i think what i'm really telling you is that you should probably go buy To Bring You My Love right now.

22. Matt "Chainsaw" Chaney / Donuts, Go Nuts!
I think that this year's PAC could have easily been a disc entirely made out of video game music. I've been pretty firmly attached to my Xbox for much of the year, and there have been a number of games i've played with great soundtracks. Fortunately, i refrained, especially since the song from I Maed A Game with Zombies is like fifteen minutes long. But the Splosion Man soundtrack...man, that is something amazing. And i didn't even include any of the symphony-with-heavy-metal-guitars tracks that make up the bulk of the soundtrack, or in other words, the entire soundtrack except for the one song i did include. This little ukulele ditty about doughnuts is pretty surreal when it pops up in the game, and i thought it would make a great closer to this year's PAC. You can download the entire Splosion Man soundtrack for free from Splosion Man.com, under the "free stuff" section. Try the game out, if you're into side-scrolling puzzle/action games. You'll like it.

Cripes, i think that was a little longer than i'd intended. Anyway there it is, a track-by-track breakdown of this year's Poor-Ass Christmas Collection, which nobody will read, but it felt good to write it anyway.

Arglesfarg.

I had a dream the night before last that we went back to New Zealand for another three weeks expressly for the purpose of shooting a sequel to Kiwiland, Ho!, my overly long and less than exciting documentary. When i woke up, things that had happened the night before seemed distant memories, as though i had actually been gone for those three weeks. Even in the two days since, i've been feeling as though i've actually lost that time. So i figured i'd pull another story from the most fertile story-telling ground i've got, those three weeks in March of 2008 that i spent abroad.

I've often said that there is one reason that i'd really like to go back to New Zealand, and it is related to video. As our trip progressed, i had been diligent in taking a quick video tour of every hostel, hotel room, cabin, and campground that we spent a night in. Out of twenty nights in the country, i only missed one of our accommodations, and it is perhaps the only one that really mattered. I am speaking of course of the anachronism that is Wilson's Hotel in Reefton.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008, the ninth day of the trip. I began my original blog entry for this day with the word "Arglesfarg," which i went on to explain that i had no idea why i did. For lack of better title for this post, i've chosen to use that.

We spent the day driving many kilometers out of our way to observe geological features with names like "pancake rocks," "blowholes," and "Crazy Paving Cave." On that day we saw the only flowing water in New Zealand which was not a beautiful blue color; it was still perfectly clear, but it was tinged a rusty red. We called it the River of Blood. I'm sure we're not the first to christen it that. I don't know what its real name is.

We stopped in Westport for dinner, which was probably one of the better meals of the trip. I've noted in my log that i ate Chicken Cordon Bleu, so you know it was a good day. But with night looming, we needed to pick an ending point for the day and get to it. After all, if i haven't underscored this enough in my previous New Zealand stories, the country shuts down pretty darn early. 6:00 is pushing it in most of the big cities, let alone the smaller towns (by "big cities," i mean "clusters of more than 100 houses." There aren't many.), and it was already going on eight.

Amanda selected Reefton as a good target, primarily because it was near to the hot springs we wanted to visit the following day. We consulted our hotel guide (our "second bible") and selected Wilson's Hotel. If i'm not mistaken, we made that choice because it was the only one in Reefton. We called ahead, and the lady on the other end of the phone gave us a 9:00 deadline to check in. It was 80 kilometers away.

Under normal circumstances, 80 km is a perfectly reasonable distance to travel in an hour. The speed limit on most roads in New Zealand is 100 kilometers per hour (roughly 60 miles per hour). This was true of all the roads between us and Reefton, even.

The natives, the Kiwis, would have even traveled at that speed along the roads between Westport and Reefton. That is because Kiwi drivers are certifiably insane. I never saw a native slow down for anything, including the random 200° turns on the sides of mountains with sheer cliffs to your right and no guard rails anywhere. New Zealand does not believe in guardrails; they seem to believe that if you are stupid enough to fall off the road, you probably deserved it. You'd better pray that you land on a sheep, because it's your only hope of cushioning that fall. There's actually a fair chance of that happening; at last census, sheep outnumbered people 20:1 in New Zealand. Cows 8:1.

As if the roads themselves weren't problematic enough, daylight was shrinking and fast. And we weren't only losing daylight because the sun was going down; no, the process was being expedited by the big, fluffy gray clouds rapidly moving into our area. When the rain started coming down and i was forced to slow down even further, we started to become worried about making our rendezvous. I'd look warily over the edge of the roads as i made yet another turn that left us facing farther around than the complete opposite direction, sometimes seeing trees below, more often seeing nothing but bare earth and boulders, trying to gauge how much faster i could actually go with an acceptable margin of safety. We probably should have just stayed in Westport.

Somehow we made it to the hotel with seven minutes to spare.

We were greeted at the door by an older lady who was completely out of place for this century. I'm talking serious vampire potential here. She could've just stepped through a portal from 17th century England. She probably did. She was overly accommodating; even at 9:00pm, which may as well be the witching hour, she offered to bring us tea and milk to our room. We politely declined, but thanked her for her hospitality. The whole thing just screamed "Twilight Zone." If i had the budget to film a ghost story anywhere in the whole damn world, this is where i would do it.

We ascended the rickety stairs with well-tread carpet and an elaborate wooden banister to our room. The room featured two beds with a communal reading light, an enormous closet, a mirror, and a sink. Yes, a sink, right in the middle of the room. I can't really come up with much of a logical explanation for it, other than maybe when the hotel was built, in the Victorian period, shaving was a more private matter than bathing and pooping, and could not be carried out in public facilities.

Speaking of public facilities, as soon as we had our luggage in the room, i made my way quietly down the empty hallway toward the bathroom on the complete opposite end of the building. I can't even begin to describe the creepy vibe i got on that journey; the low lighting, all the closed doors, the creaky floorboards, the blood red paint on the walls and the matching drapes drawn across all the windows. I was all alone and there was no ambiance ("silent as the grave," perhaps?).

The restroom was dark when i entered. I groped around fruitlessly for a light switch. Eventually i discovered it next to an entrance on the opposite end of the room. I never did find out where that door led, or why it would possibly be more important to have a light switch there than next to the main entrance.

Furthermore, each of the stalls had its own light switch. The stalls themselves were actually completely enclosed rooms in their own right, kind of like if somebody had installed a toilet in a walk-in closet.

Verbatim from my journal:

As I sat on the toilet, a moth fluttered around, trapped in the room with me, and irritated me a bit. Then it landed on my back. I began talking to it, saying things like, "I don’t mind you in here, sharing the most intimate of moments that I won’t even let my girlfriend in on, but do stay off of me! And my clothes!" because it kept crawling into my drawers as they sat on the floor. Moths eat clothing, don’t they? In the end, after flying around crazily and whacking himself so hard into the walls that I thought he’d squash himself like, well, a bug, he flew himself into a spiderweb. By the time I was finished in there, he’d gotten himself out, and when I opened the door, he flew away.

My return to the room was no less entrancing, but i made it at a considerably increased clip. When i opened the door to the room, it scared the shit out of Alyssa, who was lying on the bed with a horrified expression splattered on her face. Amanda stood near the door in a fighting stance.

Amanda woke up first in the morning (not unusual), and slipped off to take a shower. When she came back, rather than yelling at us to get out of bed (which would have been par for the course), she jumped eagerly back into bed with me, shouting about how there was no hot water and she'd just bathed with entirely cold water. Alyssa opted not to take a shower that day (Amanda and i calculated this as her fourth consecutive day of hippie living), but i, a smelly, smelly man, didn't think i could avoid it. I had no trouble with the water. It was lukewarm at first, but i had a good steam going in that bathroom by the time i was done. To this day Amanda curses my name for it. It's not my fault she was the first person in the entire hotel to try and bathe.

I don't think that we saw another tenant the entire time we were there. When we checked out, the hotel clerk was in another elaborate ancient-looking dress. She was just as engaging as the night before, offering us tea and to fire up the kitchen and make us breakfast. We again politely declined; we were already horribly behind schedule and wanted to get going. New Zealand is laid back like that; early to bed, late to rise. Reefton had no gas stations, and at 10:30am, the only convenience store was still closed. Not very convenient, now is it?

So that's the tale of Wilson's Hotel, by far the most interesting place we slept on our trip and probably the creepiest place i've ever let down my guard enough to go unconscious in. I'm not kidding; if you don't believe in ghosts, visit this place.

By the way, i know it's a little late, but happy Guy Fawkes day everybody.

Lucky Pants

"These are my lucky pants," Nigel said to me.

I looked this strangely-garbed man up and down. He was attired in a pseudo-pirate fashion; much of the outfit was of traditional pirate standards, but it was thrown off by the occasional modern touch. There was the rag on his head, the long and calculatedly dirty hair, the eyeliner, and the poofy shirt. But then there were the shoes. And the cargo shorts. This was what Nigel looked like every time that i saw him. You know when your parents bought you all those fancy Lego kits, but you almost never built them by the instructions and you always always always traded the little people parts between sets? Nigel's kind of like if you took the head off of the captain of the Skull's Eye Schooner and stuck it on one of the townsfolk.

Nigel is one of the many people that i meet up with annually in Indianapolis, at the Nerd Jamboree that is GenCon. I always make it a point to say hello, if even for only a few minutes out of the year, for exactly the reason of conversations like this. It's not always easy. Nigel's a popular guy in a big exhibition hall.

"Lucky pants?" i inquired. The shorts had a ragged tear that ran straight from the leg hole up to slightly left of center of his crotch. The gash was held together by a leather cord, strung alternately from side to side through further holes punched through the fabric. They looked more like his unfortunate pants than his lucky pants.

"Yeah!" he went on enthusiastically. "See, i've always liked these pants. But one day i noticed that they were starting to develop a hole right about here." He pointed to the top of the rip, just off center from his crotch. "I was so disappointed! But it wasn't going to keep me from wearing my pants.

"As time went on, the hole got bigger. One day, this girl saw the hole in my pants, so she just stuck both of her index fingers in there and ripped it open and gave me a blowjob!"

Me and my small band of geeks laughed merrily at his tale, but Nigel was eying me in a peculiar manner. When the laughter stopped, he pulled a knife.

"Come here," he commanded.

Suddenly i was a little nervous. "What? No."

"Come here," he said, more forcefully.

"No! I don't want to!" See, i knew what he was up to. I was rather fond of the shorts i was wearing myself.

His eyes got really big and a little angry-looking. He started making exaggerated gestures with his hands. "COME OVER HERE, RIGHT NOW! I'm doing you a favor!"

I was pushed toward this knife-wielding pirate by one of my so-called friends. With my pants within his grasp, he stuck a finger in my belt loop and pulled me toward him. He then proceeded to cut a hole in my pants, just to the right of my crotch.

"There! Now you've got lucky pants too!"

The next time that i saw Nigel, it was the fourth day of GenCon the following year and i had not been able to locate him throughout the entire convention. I had been worried that maybe he hadn't shown up, but suddenly, i ran across him in a hallway, in conversation with somebody else. I happened to be wearing the same pants.

"Nigel!" i called, striding briskly up to him. He turned to see who this interloper was. He didn't recognize me at first; not that i so much expect him to, like i said he's a popular guy and i'm sure he has bizarre, otherworldly conversations with lots of strange gamers for four straight days every single year. I extended my hand. "I need to thank you for the best sex of my whole life!"

"Uh...um, you're welcome..." he stammered. I took a quick, exaggerated glance down toward my own crotch. When i looked back up, i saw Nigel doing exactly what i wanted: making an involuntary, reflexive check to see exactly what i was looking at. Once he saw my pants, he burst out into an uncontrollable fit of riotous laughter, because my pants, too, were torn all the way down the leg and sewn back together crudely with a length of leather cord.

Phone Books

Gosh, that last story sure was a downer. I'll make it up to you.

On September 23, 2008, my co-worker and good buddy MF turned 40. Being the tight-knit crew of fun loving chemists and associated professionals that we are, we of course hit the town with him for a night of carousing and general debauchery.

We started out at the Memorial Union, largely due to its proximity to our laboratory on the University of Wisconsin campus. This was not the first time that we had gone out drinking at the Union together, either. The first time, my boss Tom, already a little tipsy, stole a bottle of Smirnoff for me because the workers were all standing around by the popcorn machine bullshitting rather than serving the patrons who were waiting so patiently at their bar. He just reached behind the counter, grabbed one, and walked away, as the employees watched disinterestedly. That was a good time.

The thing about the Union, though, is that the only kinds of alcohol they serve are various beers and Smirnoff Ice. Since i don't like beer, whenever we go out there, it leaves me stuck drinking Smirnoff and being accused of having a vagina.

However, this made me an ideal candidate to drive somebody to our next stop, Jolly Bob's, across town on Willy Street. I got saddled with the Jolly Green Giant riding shotgun in my Jeep, who was at that time sort of panicked because he'd failed to mention to his girlfriend that he was going to be out with the guys all night and wouldn't be coming home from work. Not that he needed permission, he kept reiterating, but just because she should probably know. But the weird thing in all of this: he couldn't remember his own home phone number. We were all like, what, obviously, but he kept insisting that it was perfectly normal since he just had it programmed into his cell phone and never needed to know the actual number. Keep in mind that she moved in with him, not vice versa, so this was definitely his own personal home phone number. I'm not sure why he didn't have his cell on him. He'd borrowed someone else's phone and tried a couple numbers whilest we drank at the Union, but to no avail.

So anyway, on the way to Jolly Bob's, he gets this great idea that we should swing by a friend of his girlfriend's house, since it's practically on the way, and see if she knows the number. We got a little lost in the Willy Street area, because he couldn't quite remember which house it was (i'm not sure how much beer he'd consumed at this point, but it was certainly...an amount...an amount of Optimator, a strong, dark, German beer). Well, i assume that we found the right house, because he went in and was there for a few minutes, but it turned out the friend of his girlfriend was not present, so we proceeded on to Jolly Bob's. We were strongly criticized for arriving last, since we had left the Union first. The rest of our group had already consumed a whole drink.

Jolly Green inquired of the bartender if they had a phone book he could use quick, so he could look up his number and phone his woman.

"Sure!" the bartender replied. "We just got two of them today, in fact!" He produced a pair of phone books from beneath the bar, which were still plastic wrapped together. He separated them and handed one off to Jolly Green. "You can keep that if you want. I only need one."

"Thanks but i don't really need it," he said.

"Wait," i put in. "I don't have a phone book. Do you mind if i take it?"

Neither of them did, of course, so i took it. At this point, the whole thing was perfectly reasonable, if a little odd, sitting at a bar with a phone book. But that's all it was, at that time: a guy with a phone book.

Jolly Bob's has got some amazing drinks. They don't serve anything that you might consider standard in the United States. I ordered a Captain and Coke only to be told that they stocked neither Captain Morgan nor Coca-Cola. Jolly Bob's is strictly Caribbean. I instead got something made with multiple fruit juices and Jamaican rum. I'd have a good many of these as the night wore on.

We spent the majority of the night at Jolly Bob's, including dinner, more mixed drinks, and a few rounds of shots.

Eventually we moved along with our barhopping, i can't actually remember what our next stop was, or for sure that there was another bar between Jolly Bob's and Mickey's, but i think there was. In any case, as the night was drawing to a close, we had walked several blocks down the street to Mickey's. But as we were congregating outside the entrance to the bar, the general consensus became that it was time to call it a night. I phoned Amanda to come pick me up, and the cloud of chemists started to disperse. Suddenly, somebody realized that Tom was not among the crowd. Tom had gone inside to get another drink. Tom was already hammered beyond the capacity for rational thought. He did not require another drink.

Jolly Green went in after him. Around this point, i, in my stumbling drunken stupor, decided that i really, really needed to pee. My phone book, which i had dutifully clung to throughout the last several alcohol-filled hours, could not come inside with me, although i'm not exactly sure why. So i set it on the concrete stairs in front of Mickey's, propped against the building.

"Don't let anyone steal my phone book!" i commanded, truly believing that somebody would. The remaining chemists agreed to keep an eye on my precious phone book, and i went in. I stumbled through the crowd (Mickey's is always crowded, even on weeknights. I have never seen that place with reasonable walking room earlier than 1:30am any day of the week), at one point brushing past Tom and Jolly Green, the former recognizing me and excitedly proclaiming something about the night not being over, now that i'd arrived. I made my way to the restroom and conducted my business. By the time i came out, Tom had a fresh Captain and Coke in his hand, which he thrust upon me. Jolly Green was gone.

"I bought you another drink!" he proudly exclaimed, partaking heartily of his own brew.

"Hey alright!" i chimed, because at that moment, if there was one thing that i did not need, if there was one thing that i truly wanted, it was another Captain and Coke.

Jolly Green returned moments later, disapproving through his own haze that we were still drinking. He was trying to haul us out of the bar; i protested that Tom had just gotten me this drink and dammit, i was not going to let it go to waste. He responded by taking possession of the glass and downing it himself. Dejected, i headed for the door.

Upon arrival outside, i discovered that my phone book was missing.

"Where's my phonebook!?" i loudly inquired of the dwindling group. They responded that they did not know.

Somebody had stolen my phone book. I couldn't believe it. My incompetent co-workers had just stood by and let some drunken hobo walk off with my precious. He was probably using it as a pillow and sleeping in a nearby alley as we spoke. But seeking him out wouldn't do me any good, i'd probably get shanked.

Suddenly it occurred to me that i had probably taken the phone book inside. I must have left it in the bathroom! I couldn't just leave it there! I had to rescue it!

So i once again entered Mickey's, only to come face to face with Jolly Green and Tom, finally on their way out. "Why are you coming back inside?" Jolly Green demanded.

"My phone book! I lost my phone book."

Looking around, Jolly Green spotted two phone books, wrapped in plastic, sitting on a bar stool next to the door. He grabbed them, tore the plastic off, and handed me one of them.

It just wasn't the same. It was not my phone book, just some other skeezy phone book that happened to be in a convenient locale. But, i didn't want to anger Jolly Green further, so i exited the building.

Amanda was waiting outside for us. Jolly Green appealed to her for a ride home, and the two of us climbed into the back seat, where Alyssa's dogs were already residing. Toby, her gigantic German shepherd, snapped at Jolly Green, which amused me at the time, but i guess really wasn't that funny.

The next day at work, the majority of the staff was dealing with hangovers and serious sleep deprivation, but everybody who was out partying made it in. Only Pukeflower called in sick that day, and she wasn't even part of the festivities, or even invited, because nobody likes her. I've got an unfinished blog about Pukeflower; there's so much to be said about her which i'm sure an outside observer will find hilarious. It'll show up sooner or later.

As i was sitting in my seat, quietly doing my work, Kelly came up behind me and plopped a phone book down on my desk.

"I heard you lost your phone book, so i brought you mine. I don't need it," she said.

"Thanks," i said. "But the Jolly Green Giant already stole another one for me."

She left it with me anyway. I now had two phone books.

The following day, David came in holding a phone book. "I protected your phone book for you!" he proclaimed proudly.

"What?!" i said, confused.

"You left it sitting on the step at the bar, and i was leaving, so i thought i'd keep it safe for you and i took it home."

Well, that explained that. I now had three phone books.

I got off the bus that day, clutching my original phone book, and walked up the cul-de-sac that i lived on at the time. As i came up to our door, i found a brand new phone book in a plastic bag on our doorstep. They were on many of the other doorsteps in the neighborhood. I suppose, if i'd given any thought to the whole phone book situation in the very beginning, at Jolly Bob's, i'd have seen this coming. I now had four phone books.

The story may as well end there, but a few months later, we moved across town to a new apartment complex, and they had bricks of eight phone books wrapped in plastic that were sitting outside the main entrances to each building. They'd been there since we'd done the walkthrough; it was clear nobody was taking them. We used them to prop the doors open as we moved in.

Somehow, one of these bricks of phone books remained in our apartment during our entire tenure there, and for some reason moved to our next residence with us. I now had twelve phone books.

All of those phone books are gone now, but at the time i got some strange pleasure out of telling people that i had twelve phone books, and then telling them why.

Died Inside

I barely knew Dan when he asked me, in December of 2009, to drive out to Milwaukee with him and shoot a music video for a band that he knew. Dan was one of the quiet guys in the class; Dan and Mark, both pretty much background characters in the first two semesters, were often confused for one another by teachers and other students alike. However, i had made the determination early on that during my time at MMI, i was going to dip my fingers into every video project that i possibly could. I agreed without hesitation. Plus, there was the offer of free food, and "free" and "food" are two of those keywords that everyone knows they can use to manipulate me. That's not a complaint.

We became acquainted on the drive out. During those ninety minutes, i heard Dan talk more than i had in the previous ninety days. I'd later learn that this is a hallmark of Dan while he's smoking. I was really glad to get to know the guy, though; our class was small (nine people left by this point), and i wanted to know them all. Dan and i became good friends after this, and would go on to work together whenever possible. See: Ed Wood Part II.

Problems struck almost immediately when we arrived at the shooting location, a VFW in one of Milwaukee's suburbs, i forget which...might've even been Waukesha. We had nonworking lights in both of the lighting kits that we'd brought along (as our tenure at Madison Media Institute went on, we'd learn that this is normal), and we'd forgotten the spare camera batteries. We had no choice but to continue as best as we could.

The lighting situation turned out ok; our shots are much darker than they perhaps would have been, but with the way the final product turned out, it's probably better this way. The camera batteries that we had miraculously held out. Given our further experiences with those cameras and batteries, to this day i can't figure out how we pulled that one off.

Setup took longer than expected (experience would later teach us that this, too, was normal), but there were further issues. The band's guitarist wouldn't be showing up for hours yet, limiting the shots that we could do. The food didn't show up until much later than expected either, and by that time we really just wanted to be done and go home rather than take an extended break to eat.

Man, this blog is turning out much more negative than i expected, and not nearly as funny. I suppose most of my blogs don't turn out as funny as i always hope they will. Paradigm Pudding is one big downer, isn't it?

Throughout the shoot, the band remained cold and impassive toward us. Dan and i ended up sitting together across the room from the band for dinner. I was bored and uncomfortable.

After we'd listened to their song, Died Inside, played over and over about 30 times while we shot different members of the band from different angles, we suddenly realized that not one but both of our cameras had the volume on the microphones turned off. What does this mean? It means that there's about 60 clips of the band playing with no audio. Granted, the audio recorded on location isn't going to be the audio used in the final product, that would be awful, but without the audio on the source footage, these clips are going to be next to impossible to synchronize for editing.

Dan told me on the drive home that there was actually already significant outside interest in this video, before it had even been shot. Oprah, of all people, wanted it for her show. Why? Because the song, and consequently the video, are about child abuse and raising awareness thereof. Also, one of the networks in Europe, possibly even MTV Europe, i don't remember, had it slotted for airtime. This was kind of a big deal. I'd had no idea going in, but i was glad. It would be good exposure for me, early in my career.

So what happened?

Dan spent probably 100 or more hours over the next few weeks synchronizing that footage based on lips and hand positions on instruments. I didn't help with this process, but i know from experience how much of a pain in the ass synchronizing this way is, although i've never done it with more than five clips or so, and my clips were much better lit.

Dan continued to put in long hours on the project well after the footage was synchronized. There was the actual editing, color correction, special effects, and so on, and then the live video was together. But wait! There was still storyline footage to be shot and edited into the live stuff!

The first shoot was really my major involvement in the video, but as Dan progressed on the storyline footage and further editing, i acted as a creative consultant, providing valuable advice on what he should and shouldn't do (some of which he actually took) and helping out with some of the post production. Somehow he roped Dick into helping with some of it too, before the Ed Wood fiasco.

I was terribly, terribly sick of hearing that song over and over a couple months in. I'd come in to school late at night to use a video suite to work on my own projects (principally Kiwiland, Ho!: Second Edition), and i'd hear that song resonating from one of the other rooms where Dan was diligently fixing the tiniest details, usually things nobody but a director would even notice. I had to admire his dedication. This is one of the chief reasons that i pointed straight at him when we were nominating a director for Weinelstein.

But then, when he thought it was finished, and i thought it looked beautiful, and everyone else he showed it to agreed that it was far beyond the scope of what any student of his stature should have been capable of, the band started to demand changes.

They started out as minor changes, and continued as minor changes for a while, but the problem was that they were coming in constantly. Every time he thought he'd sated the band, they'd demand something else trivial and stupid.

Meanwhile, after every revision, Dan kept dutifully taking time out of his own busy work and school schedule to export and reformat the video four or six different ways, optimized for different forms of presentation such as web or DVD. And, since the video was supposed to go overseas, that meant doing each version in both NTSC (America's format) and PAL (the entire rest of the world's format). I could see Dan getting more and more irritated with each passing day as more and more was demanded of him; more and more work that he wasn't getting paid for. I told him after the second or third revision that he should just tell Bellevue Suite to blast it out their fucking asses, and he agreed with me, but somehow he couldn't let it go. No, this video had to be perfect and it had to be used for its intended purpose, or else everything was for naught. I can respect that decision, but it still sucks.

Then the biggest problem came about: Barry, the drummer, had either quit the band or been fired, i don't recall which but either way, the band wanted all of Barry's shots removed from the video and replaced with their new drummer.

This is where i absolutely would have drawn the line and told them to just take what they're given and be happy with it, and Dan almost did exactly that, except that the band then said fine, give us the original project files and we'll make the changes ourselves.

Dan had the misfortune of seeing the footage that the band themselves had shot of their new drummer and saw exactly what they were about to do to his masterpiece. He caved. He took their footage and integrated it into the video himself, lest they destroy his art. He explained how shitty the new footage was and all the work he had to go through to bring it even close to the standard set by our original HD video; it wasn't pretty.

I've actually never seen their final version. But the version with Barry looks great, it could easily play on MTV alongside million-dollar industry videos.

But it never did.

Not because of anything Dan did, either. And not because the band was lying about the outside interest, either; that turned out to all be legitimate. No, the entire project was fucked over by the band itself, no surprise. That astonishing mass of DVDs that Dan had burned over and over and over again? Not one of them got shipped out.

I don't know why the discs were never shipped, but when the producer from Europe started calling looking for them, the band's representative told him to "just download it off of YouTube."

What?! What the fuck!? No, you don't just download shit off of YouTube and throw it into rotation on MTV, unless it's a fucking joke, like Tosh.0 or something. How the hell did this guy think he was going to be taken seriously?

I don't know what exactly happened with Oprah, but i'd assume something similar, or else it just took too long to get the finished product into her hands. We'd started in December of last year, i don't think the video was finished to Bellevue's satisfaction until May or June.

Dan's still proud of his work. I'm still proud of my contributions. I think we both came away from it with a very impressive portfolio piece, and we can still truthfully say that that video was "produced for MTV Europe," even though it never aired.

Dan was lamenting to me, though, shortly after the whole thing was over. "If i could go back and do it again, there's a few things i'd definitely do differently..."

I replied: "Like not making a $100,000 music video for free?"

Died Inside

Friendiversary

Today's the ten year anniversary of what was probably the single most important event in my whole life.

In 2000, i was a sophomore in high school. I hung out mostly with a bunch of freshmen. Like most single, nerdy kids in high school, there was this one girl that i had a huge crush on, also a lowly freshman, but i was too nervous to ever approach her.

Every day at lunch, my friends and i sat at a table in the center of the far back of the commons. She sat alone, often at a table to the far left from my vantage, about centered between front and back. Though i was of course enjoying my lunch and having a good time with my friends at the table, i'd always be looking at her, and somehow i'd always have a clear view of her diagonally through the parted tables.

This was Amanda.

I found out through my friend, whom i shall now refer to simply as The Worm because it's so damn appropriate, that his and Amanda's mutual friend Alyssa was having a party for Friday the 13th, which was also a full moon, and they thought it would be a good idea to have a seance. Amanda would be attending this party. I did some finagling with The Worm about getting myself invited to this seance party, not because i was interested in the seance, but because, obviously, i was interested in Amanda. I didn't tell The Worm this. I led him to believe that i was genuinely interested in his occult bullshit. Disclaimer: i'm not calling the occult bullshit, this is me retrospectively declaring The Worm's interpretation of the occult bullshit.

The Worm dragged his feet on this for a good long while, saying he needed to check with Alyssa if this would be ok. He kept forgetting, or as i now retroactively believe, "forgetting," until a couple days before the seance, i saw him walking through the school library with both Amanda and Alyssa, and i brought it up directly in front of them. He gave an annoyed sigh, turned to Alyssa, and asked if i could come to the party. This is my first recollection of having ever met or seen Alyssa. She looked at me apprehensively at first, and said, without enthusiasm or really any emotion of any kind, "Sure." It was a very happy moment for me.

When i arrived at Alyssa's house on Friday afternoon, i met several new additions to the cast of characters that was my life, and this is of course the point of the blog. This was where i met Juli, Cyndi, and Ally.

My first ever interaction with Juli was her telling a joke to somebody else at the party, and me standing by listening.

"What do you call two nuts on a wall?" she said.

Her conversation partner, who i think may have been Alyssa, said, "I don't know, what?"

"Walnuts!" she answered. "What do you call two nuts on your chest?"

Alyssa again responded that she didn't know.

"Chestnuts!" Juli exclaimed proudly, then continued: "What do you call two nuts on your chin?"

Alyssa thought carefully for a moment before again denying that she knew.

"A dick in your mouth!"

I really liked this girl, right then and there. While we were at this party i found out that Amanda was actually dating one of my friends that i ate lunch with every day. I can't specifically remember which one, she dated a couple of them during high school, but the fact that i didn't know about it leads me to believe that it was The Worm at the time. None of us really knew this about him at the time, but looking back, it makes so much sense; he never wanted us to know he was dating her because he liked to appear single, so that he could attract other ladies.

In any case, Amanda was now totally unreachable to me. I cut my losses and moved on. In spite of the strange and, in retrospect, mostly stupid, events of that night (which i will not relate today, or probably ever), i started hitting on Ally. This was largely because we were both taking French classes (although her somewhat more successfully than me), and we were trying out some phrases on each other.

The record will show that nothing came of this. I found out later that Juli was interested in me, so i pursued this wholeheartedly. We ended up dating for two and a half years, almost consecutively.

The three of us, Juli, Cyndi and i, remain the closest of friends to this day. Every year on October 13th we get together for dinner for what Juli has dubbed our "Friendiversary."

And, as you all should know by now, Amanda and i did end up together. We've been together for just over seven years now.

So this story has a happy ending. And it all stems back to that one strange, stupid day ten years ago.

Rave This

The Rave in Milwaukee is not a place that i go. I've never quite figured out why so many big-name bands make The Rave their one tour stop in Wisconsin. The place is a dump. I'm surprised that the whole structure hasn't collapsed from those heavy metal vibrations it endures almost every single night.

When i saw Korn there in 2002 (yes, Korn...i'm not proud), i was thoroughly unimpressed with their sound system. I thought it was overly tinny and there was too much high end. The bass sounded like Fieldy may as well have been beating on high-tension wires on a radio tower, and whenever the higher three strings on the guitar were used (which, with Korn, is rare), i though it was going to sever my eardrums. And i was 16!

But the main reason that i don't go to The Rave has to do with their shitty policies and their shitty employees. The Rave is well known for these "free tickets" that they send out to everyone everywhere and throw around on the streets. You can probably find a good pile of them in the gutters at any outdoor event, oftentimes even in Madison. These colorful strips of paper with the word "FREE" so boldly emblazoned across them seem so enticing, with their photographs of big-name national bands coming through and all the coolest tours that the teenagers want to see. In smaller letters underneath "FREE" it says Two Drink Minimum. Having so recently been there for the Korn show, and knowing that a bottle of water was $3 or $4 (can't remember for sure anymore; but either way, absolutely ridiculous), i figured hey, it's worth $6 or $8 to see Sevendust, Cinder, and whoever the other band on the bill was. So i grabbed that free ticket and a fistful more of them.

The day of the show, we ended up leaving for Milwaukee far, far later than we wanted to. It was Cyndi, Windsor (her boyfriend at the time...i can't even remember his real name anymore. We called him Windsor because that was the name of the city he was from.), and myself, speeding pretty badly down the ice-slick interstate, trying to make it to Germantown in time to pick up Juli and then make it into Milwaukee before the show started.

Luckily, we weren't stopped by any cops and we didn't go flying off the road or anything. We made it to The Rave just as Cinder was taking the stage. I didn't want to take any chances parking my vehicle on the streets in Milwaukee. I lived in a small town at that time. Milwaukee was fucking scary. So, I ended up paying an exorbitant amount of cash (i think $20) to park in a lot just a block away from the venue.

I could hear the band playing as we walked in. We presented our "free" tickets to the guy at the door, who then directed us down a flight of stairs to a bar in the basement. Annoyed, we complied.

We took our tickets up to the disgruntled bartender. He instructed us to write our mailing addresses on the back of them, which we dutifully did. We didn't really think about these kinds of things back then, we just did them. Parents: teach your kids about the evils of marketing!

Once we had finished, we handed the tickets back. "Alright guys," he said. "$17 each."

"Seventeen dollars?!" i shouted. "For two drinks?!"

"Yes, that's right."

"We'll just have water. That's like $3."

It's hard to tell who was more irritated with the other at that time. "No, you have to buy these drinks. Seventeen bucks."

Between the four of us, we had a total of $45. "We don't have enough money between the four of us. What do you suggest the rest of us do?"

"Well, i guess some of you will have to wait outside." In Milwaukee, in the middle of December? Really?

"Fuck you, man! Fuck you and fuck this place!" I let loose a torrent of obscenity that i only wished would knock the whole building down. I probably said "fuck" more times than you hear on your average Limp Bizkit album. Security ended up brusquely following us out of the building to make sure we were gone. They left us at the door.

As we were walking down the street, we happened across the same Rave employee who'd taken my money for the parking not ten minutes earlier. I was able to drop my rage and adopt a diplomatic poker face momentarily, and politely asked him for a refund. He confirmed that he recognized us as having just come in, but refused to give me my money back.

"Well then fuck you too! I hope the whole fucking place burns down and" blah blah blah. I thought it was vicious at the time, but it was really just a bunch of swear words. I probably could have at least called his lineage into question.

I haven't been back to The Rave since, and i've no plans of ever being back to The Rave. I think the way they do business is shitty and i think that every Rave employee i've ever come into contact with was an asshole.

I don't mean to say that their "free" ticket thing is altogether evil, though it is misleading. If it said right on the damn thing "reduced ticket" or something to that effect rather than "free," i'd be a lot happer. Something to prepare you for the actual cost you are going to pay so that you can be sure to have enough money before you drive all the way to Milwaukee from Madison, just to get thrown out on the streets. I mean, $17 is still a good price to see a band like that in their prime. It just would have been nice to know ahead of time.

Somebody asked me earlier this evening about my reasons for avoiding The Rave, so i told him the entire preceding story. He's a big fan of the "free" tickets, but he explained that it's because he expects The Rave to gouge drink prices and somebody like him is going to have at least two drinks at a show anyway, which i suppose is reasonable. But the problem still lies in the fact that we were all 15-16 years old at the time, we couldn't get any drinks that were worth that price. But another shitty thing that they do that he just told me about is that if you arrive bearing these "free" tickets for a show which is sold out, you will be turned away. The "free" tickets are valid only if there happens to be space available.

I think that any business which is going to promote itself with free anything should be held accountable for providing that free service or those free goods. They should not be handing out these "free" tickets like so much cheap Mexican candy if they aren't going to back them up. It would be better just to be well known for having kind of a "flying stand-by" type service, where you can be let in to any show, without wasting all this paper on printing up "free" tickets, for a reduced rate if there is space available. At least then, people would know what they were getting themselves into and could elect to go or not to go based on that risk, and then people who have somehow not obtained a "free" ticket could take advantage of the program too.

The sad epilogue to this tale is that for years i continued to receive fat envelopes stuffed with "free" tickets for every single show The Rave put on for the next several years, until i moved away. Shit, those tickets are probably still going to that house on a nigh-weekly basis.

Welcome Home

Yesterday i purchased a MacBook Pro.

After all of my training and experiences at the Madison Media Institute, Mac was definitely the way that i needed to go. Sure, it was a veritable assload of money, but hopefully, a couple good freelance jobs will pay it off. I've also invested in the Final Cut Studio and Adobe Creative Suite 5. So, if anyone needs any video or graphic design work done, let me know. Because i can do it.

I've spent pretty much the whole day sitting in front of my MacBook. I felt really terrible when i woke up, i couldn't move without my stomach lurching all over the place, so i didn't go to work. Maybe it's just me freaking out from having dropped so much money into an uncertain future.

But my conversion from the PC world over to the Mac world is not completely without precedent. I grew up in the 90s, when computers were beginning to show a prevalence over everyday life. You were starting to see them in more and more places, both public and private, and not just in rich niches. Since my main contact with these wondrous machines was, of course, school, the majority of my early learning on computers was on Macs.

In grade school i was fascinated by computers to a greater degree than most of my peers. I spent as much time as humanly possible on any computer i could get in front of, even if i had nothing to do, just to poke around with its software and see what i could get out of it. Through this constant tinkering, me and two of my friends expanded our computer skills far beyond any of our classmates. Even up through high school, we were the ones that the other kids came to when they needed help for even the most rudimentary processes.

Eventually, my dad purchased a computer for use with his home VCR repair business. It was a 386 with Windows 3.1 on it, and he paid out the butt for it, but it suited his needs. He wouldn't let me near it very often, but i did start to get a taste for the other side of this computer business. I didn't find out until later that he had a program on it for strip poker. If i'd have known that earlier, it might have had an impact on my development. Heh.

Meanwhile, my friend Matt's dad worked as a computer technician for a large company in the next city over from our small town. As a result, he was able to take home all kinds of obsolete parts that would otherwise be thrown away. For the first time, i was able to get a look at the insides of a computer and start tinkering with hardware. I started to learn a great deal about PCs, and the Mac world started slipping away from me. From there, i began to obtain my own obsolete computer parts from garage sales, Goodwill, and other such channels for little to no money.

When it finally came time that i felt i needed a computer that was up to date, in 2002, i struggled for a long time trying to decide between a Mac or a PC. In my heart, i wanted a Mac, but working things out logically, i knew that i'd be better off with a PC. I wanted something that would be compatible with more of the programs i thought i needed and the ones that i already had. I wanted something that would be compatible with the rest of my family's gear. And so, i turned to the Dark Side.

Once i owned a reliable PC, the Mac world was completely closed off to me. I had no contact with it whatsoever for the next several years. In fact, i became one of those condescending PC supremacists. Mac was the enemy, it was worthless, and it was just plain wrong.

The first time that i went to college, at MATC (Madison's Alternative To College), the entire school used PCs, but there were two Macs hidden in a poorly lit corner of the library. One day, all the computers i could find were taken, but as i ventured through the library, i came across these two unoccupied machines. I figured, what the hell, i used to be pretty darn good with a Mac, i can probably get whatever i need done on one of these. I'd heard, from my brother no less, that the then-new OSX was rather good. My brother is of course a vindictive Mac-hating PC guy. He's as deep into the Dark Side as Darth Vader. He'll never turn.

I turned out to be wrong. The Mac OS had changed completely and there was barely a glimmer of what i knew left. At least it didn't have At Ease, i guess...remember that bullshit? We had it at our high school.

But what was this row of icons at the bottom of the screen? I am referring of course to the dock. I had no concept of it at that time. What were all these strange icons? WHAT DID THEY MEAN?!?

I was completely unable to make the machine function in a way that remotely resembled satisfactory. I ended up meandering the library aimlessly for a while until somebody vacated a PC.

The New Zealand trip changed everything. Not because anything Mac-related happened there, but because it was the catalyst to my enrollment in Madison Media Institute.

MMI is dominated by Macs. The PCs have one lowly room where they rule, but the rest of the complex is entirely Snow Leopard territory. During my tenure there, i was trained in all kinds of great Mac-only software. I learned a great deal about the Mac equivalents of PC programs that i was wizardly in. It took a couple of semesters to break me down, but once i knew the power of an Apple, i knew what i was going to have to do.

Now that i've graduated, i finally went out and purchased my first brand-new Macintosh, a 15.4" MacBook pro with the Intel i7 quadcore processor. It's pretty much the top of the line right now. It only makes me sad because i know it'll be obsolete by the time i've paid for it.

But these first two days have been amazing. I'm doing things at blazing speed and with such great ease as i never thought possible. Sure, i've had iTunes on my PC for a while, because it beats the hell out of Windows Media Player, but i had no idea what was in store for me once i'd made a full conversion.

I have Final Cut Pro.

I have Adobe CS5, which, though available on the PC, just works better on a Mac.

I've been tinkering with things again, and i love a lot of the built-in programs, like Garage Band and iPhoto and Photo Booth. Don't ask me why i like Photo Booth, it's kind of a pointless program, but i had some fun with it this morning.

I had initially planned on retaining Microsoft Office, though, until i found out that Office 2003 won't run on it, only Office 2007. And if you don't know already, Office 2007 is bullshit. We recently "upgraded" at work from 2003 to 2007, and it pisses me off on such a regular basis i just can't stand it. Instead, i bought iWork, the current Macintosh equivalent of Office. I haven't used it yet. Here's hoping it's not the damper on this whole Mac orgasm i'm having.

So that's it. Today, Bill Gates controls one less Sith. As of yesterday, i am Jedi.

Gay Eskimo's Punishment

Ben had a thing for punching guys in the junk.

Through the simple assertion that i preferred my junk to remain un-punched, i was able to avoid this. But for the majority of the men i went to high school with, who were maybe too proud to plead for their packages, or maybe just too stupid, testicular trauma was imminent.

I don't know why Ben punched junk, but it was kind of his thing. He was well known for it. I guess he was cool enough of a person otherwise to make up for the damage that junk punching would otherwise do to the relationships he had with people. I mean, he was a pretty cool guy.

Ben's three years older than me. But hell, before i had even gotten to high school Ben's junk-punching was already legendary among my peers. In 8th grade i had a friend who was taking advanced math classes at the high school, pre-Calc or Trig or some such thing, where his classmates were all sophomores and juniors, including Ben. He'd come back down to the middle school after class and tell us about his times there, such as ever time a hot high school girl had to bend over to pick up a pen (from his description, you'd think that high school girls' bodies repelled pens for some reason...they were ALWAYS bending over to pick them up...), and how he'd come into class and greet everyone. "Hi Ben!" he'd say in his reenactments, and then double over in mock pain, clutching his genitals.

So Ben would have been a Senior when i was a Freshman. Gay Eskimo was in 7th grade at this time, but all three of us spent the bulk of our free time at Gay Eskimo's house in those days. Myself because Gay Eskimo and i were whatever the male equivalent of BFFs was, and because of our gaming group (see previous blog), and Ben because he was really close friends with Gay Eskimo's sister. I think at the time he was still dating her best friend. They were together for a really long time. Also, we were all really tight with Gay Eskimo's mom. She was the coolest mom around.

Well, i guess that somehow Gay Eskimo had gotten the impression that once Ben punched a junk, he never punched that junk again. Kind of a one-time deal of sorts. I'm not sure why he had this impression, but holding it as he did, one day he decided to end the suspense and get it over with.

One night, we were gaming in the living room, and Gay Eskimo, randomly, as i recall, stood up and approached Ben, who was sitting and conversing with, among other people, Gay Eskimo's mom peacefully in the kitchen. Eight commas in one sentence? Is that even ok?

I remember quite clearly the somberness of his voice as he looked Ben in the eye, spreading his arms to each side at hip-level. "I'm ready to receive my punishment."

Ben looked at him, confused. "I, um, i already got you," he said cautiously. After all, he was standing right next to this kid's mom.

"No, you didn't," Gay Eskimo argued.

"Yeah, i'm pretty sure i did," he pleaded. This went on for a minute or so, Ben looking at Gay Eskimo's mom for guidance. She provided none. I was still in the living room, so i can't vouch for the accuracy of this, but knowing Gay Eskimo's mom, and knowing that she knew Ben and what was going on, she probably just figured, if he's going to ask for it like this, then he fucking deserves it. She was not usually one to protect her fledgling boy from his own stupid self. After all, experience is the best teacher.

"No, i'm quite sure that you haven't," Gay Eskimo prattled on.

"Look, i know that i..." and, in mid-sentence, Ben's fist suddenly just balled up, perhaps of its own accord, and thrust itself faster than the eye could follow straight into Gay Eskimo's crotch. He dropped like a sack filled with churches. The old brick and mortar kind, too, like from the 18th century. I'm surprised floorboards didn't crack when he hit them.

To his credit, he didn't cry, at least not in front of us. He went fetal, and just lay there, still as death, while the rest of the room stared at him in silence. After a couple minutes, conversation resumed, briefly about the damaged boy on the floor, then quickly segueing back into wherever it had dropped off before Gay Eskimo's odd request. The gaming group was unsure how to proceed with out him, but eventually we just handed the DM his character sheet and pressed on. Maybe fifteen minutes later we noticed him slithering, snake-like, toward the bathroom, still in a loose fetal position.

Not being able to reach the lock, the door was left partly ajar, and he somehow wriggled his way into the bathtub, where he remained for an hour or more before somebody needed to legitimately use the bathroom.

Carpe Scrotum

It's strange to think back on the days when i used to hang out with the likes of Gay Eskimo, Skippy, and Other Kid. If you haven't gathered yet, these are of course handles and not their real names; further, odds are good these handles haven't been used since those days. [Side note: I've been trying to use handles or nicknames for people in this blog because i don't feel like people would want me using their real names; sometimes i use just a first name but this becomes problematic when you consider how many people are named things like "Chris."] But it's weird to think about because i haven't even seen any of these people in at least five years, and we all used to be inseparable. We were a gaming group, for god's sake! That's closer than kin. But then after high school we all started to occasionally game with other groups, and eventually we kind of informally disbanded. We all wear different clan tags now.

The separation may have actually started before the end of high school, come to think of it. Probably about the time that we started to spend time with actual girls, rather than just comic books and game art and pictures of the Spice Girls.

That kind of thing started a little earlier for me than it did the others in the group, which kind of makes sense since i was a little older. But naturally, i wanted my newfound female friends to be friends with my other little group, so i thought i'd bring them into the fold. Many gamers would probably be apprehensive about this, and in most cases they'd be right to be, since your average girl is going to be scared off pretty easily by your average gamer, but things worked out pretty well.

I remember the first time that i brought Juli and Cyndi out to hang out with my group. Gay Eskimo, Skippy, and i...i'm actually not sure if Other Kid was there or not...had spent the night at Gay Eskimo's house, up late playing GoldenEye on the Nintendo 64, as we usually did on the weekends. In the morning, which is defined as "whenever we woke up," we were going to meet up with Juli and Cyndi and bring them back to Gay Eskimo's house to hang out for the day.

I slept on the top bunk, Gay Eskimo on the bottom, and Skippy (and Other Kid if he was in fact present) on the floor. These were our standard arrangements.

When i opened my eyes, Skippy was standing directly in front of the bed, his head at the exact level of the top bunk so as to look me in the eye. If there is a creepier thing to wake up to than a man who's best known for sticking his dick into his own ass staring you in the face, i've not experienced it.

"Umm...good morning..."

His gaze was unwavering and more serious than i'd ever seen him before. He spoke with a cool, even meter and i swear his voice was deeper than normal. "Today's the day," he said with conviction. "I'm gonna get laid."

I think my laughter was probably what woke Gay Eskimo up.

Predictably, Skippy did not get laid that day. It would in fact be a couple more years before he did lose his virginity, or at least his virginity with people, and even that was kind of an accident.

A year or so later, Juli, Cyndi, and i were heading over to Gay Eskimo's house to hang out. When we got there, he was playing his Sega Dreamcast. People still remember that the Dreamcast happened, right? I mean, it was kind of a big deal at the time, and as far as console gaming platforms go, it was really ahead of its time. But unfortunately, the system didn't do so well, and i think it's dropped into obscurity by now. I guess you young whippersnappers can think of it as the predecessor to the Xbox.

So we were trying to get him to be sociable with us, but he just kept brushing us off in favor of his game. It was rather rude on his part, and i suppose nowadays we probably would have just left the sad sack of shit to wallow in his own filth. But not back then! Back then, we were convinced that getting him out of the house and making him friendly was the right thing to do. Plus, we didn't really have anything else to do. Diplomacy having failed, we turned to physically trying to remove his fat ass from the couch. We attacked.

Unfortunately for us, we had not taken into account that the Dreamcast gives Gay Eskimo superpowers. I'm not kidding. Suddenly he developed super strength and agility as long as he held on to a Dreamcast controller.

Now, it had been proven time and again that i could take Gay Eskimo in a fight. I did mention that we were a gaming group, fights are liable to happen in those. But suddenly he had become a fortress! It was like he had extra arms or something, we'd come at him and he'd bat us away like flies. He remained immobile on the couch for the longest time before we somehow pried him loose, and then he just stood in the middle of the room, clutching his Dreamcast controller, trying desperately to play his damn game while continuing to fend us off.

Finally the battle reached a climax when i rushed at him and, in the most surprising feat of physical prowess of Gay Eskimo's entire life, he reached out with one hand, grabbed me by the nuts, and threw me over his shoulder. I saw a carpet coming straight at my face for just a second, and came away from it with rugburn on my forehead.

This action, though, finally pulled the controller from its port on the Dreamcast (yes, the days before wireless controllers had their advantages), and broke Gay Eskimo's videogame trance. He felt genuinely bad about what he'd done, and agreed to go outside with us.

I suppose it's only appropriate to finish this post with this:

(RLC)Ducks out

The Saddest Thing That I Have Ever Seen

I love Allie Brosh's blog Hyperbole and a Half. I love it so much that i'm directing a short film based on one of her blogs. In fact, it was my inspiration for starting this blog. But as i've been spending my days at work wading backwards through her archive, i keep seeing mention upon mention of the song "Midnight Train" (aka, "Don't Stop Believin'") by Journey. This is a little bit of a problem for me, because every time that song crosses my mind, it makes me think of The Saddest Thing That I Have Ever Seen. That is all capitalized because it is a proper noun. It's short for The Saddest Thing That I Have Ever Seen In My Entire Life Thus Far, And Probably Sadder Than Anything I Will Ever See Again.

Now, i have never been a fan of Journey. There is not one moment in my life that you could point to and say, "See that right there? He is totally into Journey right now." Even when i was growing up and i was quite fond of my dad's music, Journey was never really something i voluntarily listened to. Rush, absolutely. Styx, yes. Even Kansas, which is so damn near Journey that you'd be surprised i would differentiate the two. Hell, i had my own copy of Kansas - Greatest Hits on cassette.

So here's the story.

Earlier this year, i did an internship with Madison's adult alternative radio station, 105.5 Triple M. I was a cameraman for the second season of their web-based reality show, Project M. The gist of the project was that they took ten local musicians and put them in a Survivor-type contest, where the winner would get to open for a national touring act and have a meeting with an executive from Atlantic Records, on top of some other free shit from Guitar Center and Ancora Coffee. There was also lots of free pizza, beer, and Monster energy drink for all of the contestants and the crew (such as myself).

The weeks went by and the contestants dropped one by one until they were down to four. On the second to last episode of the season, we relocated from Triple M's in-house studio to the High Noon Saloon, probably the biggest bar in Madison. That week, they wanted to beef up the program a bit, since the general public was invited, so rather than just have the four performers play their songs, they got an opening act.

Good N Loud Music, a local instrument store, is one of Project M's sponsors. So, to open the second biggest show of the season, they got...the students from Good N Loud's music program. We are speaking here of kids between the ages of eight and fifteenish.

I could have forgiven that. Kids need encouragement and the arts, especially music, are something that i support fervently. These kids deserved a moment in the spotlight.

They deserved a moment. Not 75 minutes.

Besides the fact that there were at least twelve kids on the stage at one time, being a bass player, a drummer, a keyboardist and nine guitarists, i knew something was wrong when i saw their teacher step in. I had thought at first that he was on stage to help the kids set their stuff up, make sure they're in tune, and so on, but i was wrong.

After checking in on each of his students, this roughly potato-shaped man with one of the world's Top 100 Gnarliest Beards strapped on a guitar, stepped up to the microphone, and introduced himself and his students (not by name - just as his students). In his introduction, he gave the impression that they were to perform two short three-song sets. With himself on lead guitar and vocals.

I wish i could say i'm making this up, but really, i don't think i could if i tried. It was like a real-life version of that crappy Jack Black movie, School of Rock. But picture Jack Black as a middle-aged 1980s-style computer nerd with thick glasses.

I don't remember what their first song was, but it was a cover. Then their next song was a cover. Then their third song was a cover. Then their FOURTH song was a cover. Somewhere mixed in there was "Brain Stew" by Green Day, which made me want to spew blood from all seven orifices of my head. Their seventh song was "Midnight Train." That's how they closed out the set. Then they took a break, and i think most of the parents left.

I wanted to cry. I wanted to weep for my immortal soul, hoping that it hadn't been crushed by what it had just witnessed. What i had just stood in the front for, right up by the stage so that i could get good close-ups of those poor, poor kids, standing in the shadow of their music instructor's gigantic ego.

Except for the one kid, about fifteen, tall, obnoxious, and at least as egotistical as his teacher. This kid, whom i'd met before at one of the other Project M sessions, had the ego of Brett Michaels and the physique of DJ Qualls. He would be constantly showboating, sticking his tongue out and leaning back like he was in Poison or something. He acted like he was playing at the Coliseum, all sold out and shit. He was like the instructor's ego's Mini-Me. I did not feel sorry for that one. At the previous Triple M session, he had actually said to one of the contestants, "Don't mess with me or you get the fist."

As i moved back to the green room with my gear, i felt like a wet rag. Like i'd just been in Mortal Kombat with an asthmatic fourteen year old girl with braces and gotten my ass kicked. I felt embarrassed for having even been there. And for having filmed it.

Half an hour later, they all got back on the stage to play another set.

It was almost the exact same set. They'd swapped out two of the songs. "Brain Stew" remained. And again they closed with "Midnight Train."

So every time that i hear, or even THINK the words, "Don't stop...belieeeeeeeeving...!" i don't even hear Steve Perry's voice. All i see and hear in my head is that potato-shaped computer nerd, standing in front of his band of jailbait rockstars, like he's the king of the world.

If i ever see anything in the world that is sadder than that, i will probably kill myself.

The Mysterious Play

At its inception in 1997, i was not allowed to watch South Park. Being the Good Kid that i was, i never even tried. My mom said don't do it, so i didn't do it. That was the way of things in my youth. Yeah, i was weird.

One night, i was over at my friend Aaron's house with a couple other friends. We spent much of the afternoon with the PlayStation (the original PlayStation - get off my lawn you damn kids), but then it rolled around time for South Park to come on and everybody wanted to watch that. I was vehemently opposed at first, of course because my mom said no, but somehow they talked me into at least sitting down to watch the opening credits (i'm not kidding - they just wanted me to watch the credits with them). I was a little upset, i kept babbling incoherently about how my mom was going to find out that i had watched South Park and then my life was going to be over, or something.

As soon as the credits started, the doorbell rang. It was my mom. I'm not kidding, this totally happened. She had stopped by because i was on some medication at the time and i had forgotten to bring it with me. So, while everybody else was downstairs, asking each other, "Seriously? SERIOUSLY?," i casually asked my mom, "Hey, everybody else wants to watch South Park. Would it be ok if i watched it with them?" After a frustrated groan, she acceded to my request.

So, at the tender age of 13, having never seen an episode of Beavis and Butt-Head or The Simpsons or any such similar thing, watching Robert Smith of The Cure duke it out with Mecha-Streisand on Aaron's gigantic 32" TV pretty much changed my life.

Once South Park had become a fixture of my existence, little nuances of the show began to creep into my reality. I'm not sure who started this tradition - it was actually probably me - but we did this thing on our various Boy Scout camping expeditions where we would all suddenly emerge from our tents wearing just our boxers and run around for upwards of ten or fifteen minutes shouting "Beefcake! BEEFCAKE!!" I'm not sure why we thought this was a good idea but there were at least six of us that did this on a regular basis.

Well, one year at summer camp, 2000 i believe, we decided to escalate the beefcake situation. Summer camp is obviously a much larger situation than any of our other camping trips, because it is a week long and takes place at a facility which includes about ten other camp sites, each of which houses another troop from a completely different end of the state, or even from other states.

So Gay Eskimo, Zippo, Skippy-Bo Playdo, and i gathered together a Discman, some portable speakers, and a copy of The Bangles - Greatest Hits, stripped to our underoos and running shoes, and went out for a jog. We named this "Operation: Fugishi Yugi," which i am pretty sure is Japanese for "The Mysterious Play," due to the anime series. It may not mean that at all.

I guess some of the other troops didn't think that four teenage boys running around barely dressed blasting Walk Like An Egyptian on repeat at nearly midnight was as funny as our troop did.

Things were ok on our first lap around the campground. We got our expected response - a bunch of people looking up, asking themselves what the hell was wrong with kids these days. That was the kids asking themselves what the hell was wrong with kids these days. The adults were probably asking themselves if they were going to jail for bearing witness to this.

On the second lap, i think that the novelty had completely worn off of these people. And on the third lap, one of the other troops started to chase us.

After we'd gained some headway coming up near the front office of the campground, i turned off the music in hopes that our pursuers would lose track of us. However, without the music drawing us all together in the dark, we got separated. I sneaked up behind the archery range, which was very close to our troop's camp site, but the captain does not return home without his crew. The archery range was in a clearing, with a line of trees butted up against one side, which was opposite to the side where i was hiding. Our troop was nestled in just on the other side of those trees.

Not knowing where the rest of the guys were, i determined that the only way to rally them to my position was to turn the music back on and start running again. I booked it for our camp site. Well, it turned out that part of the opposition was waiting right inside the treeline. I was forced to turn back around and head into the dark forested area beside the administrative offices.

Gradually i picked up my cohorts as i ran. We made a reverse lap back around the way we'd originally came, and took the scenic route toward the secret back entrance to our site. We had the only site on the whole campground with two access points, but if you'd never camped at that site, you probably wouldn't know about the rear entrance. I was counting on this.

Somewhere near the Quartermaster, our few pursuers turned into a veritable horde. They became kind of like the mob in the old Frankenstein movies, and some were armed. Right as we were about to hit our secret entrance, somebody shoved a stick in my ass. I did not like it. Not at all.

Once the throng of irritated Boy Scouts had entered another camp site without permission (a huge violation of etiquette), things got a little out of hand. The ensuing riot took all of our adult Scoutmasters at least fifteen minutes to sort out and to remove all the intruders from our site. I don't know exactly how long, but i do know that i slipped into my tent and got all my clothes on well before the pandemonium stopped. I keep thinking that our fire cans came into play here, but i can't remember the exact circumstances - maybe they were getting thrown? For those who don't know, the fire cans are old coffee cans which are brightly painted and filled with water. You put two of them outside every tent, so that in the event of the tent catching on fire, you have something to fight it with. By the end of the week, there's a layer of dead bugs across the surface of the water thick enough that you often can't tell there's water in the can.

In the end, i don't think anything came of it. We weren't disciplined, i don't know if any of the other kids were but i suspect not. Hell, their adult leaders may not have ever found out that they were trespassing in our camp site. Nothing was ever mentioned at the campwide morning announcements. And for most, i think the incident passed into the recesses of their minds, never to be thought of again.

I think that pretty well put an end to the Beefcaking. Every now and then, at any sort of gathering, one of the four of us might mention that we should, "Commit Fugishi Yugi," as a joke i guess. Usually that would be Zippo. But it of course never happened again. Which is probably for the best.