Pussy Eating Contest

Found some old shit I wrote once in this old hard drive. Title is obviously a reference to the Sabbath song.

09/03/05 - Oriskany, NY
“Lord of this World”
Wow, it’s ironic that I “hate” New York, but over the last few years I’ve grown real fond of upstate, almost to “I could live here” level. There’s a slight Massachusetts attitude here but people seem friendlier. I literally have had no run-ins or situations with people in cars, stores, etc. like I seem to have on a daily basis back home. I’m thinking I’ll come up to Lake George in the Autumn. Anyway, this place is pretty beautiful (there’s nothing here, refreshingly), yet it’s also kind of ugly. I can feel some sort of weird vibe driving through downtown Rome, NY. It’s almost like how you feel when you are in Lawrence, MA but a little safer.

I planned on going to the show earlier today but ended up falling asleep and by the time I got myself motivated to leave the hotel room there was an amazing strawberry dusk situation happening. Reminded me of my first trip to Tennessee in 2000; I drove 13 hours that day, arriving in Knoxville at dusk and it was a similar color. Where this place is more remote and there is no orange glare in the sky from a big city nearby, it’s more intense here. Sure the thought of upstate New York being cooler than anything in Tennessee is kind of farcical given the great times I had both times I’ve spent time there, I am talking about Knoxville, TN which was basically like Saugus, MA with cowboy hats and more black people…and Waffle House.

A couple of our friends were on mushrooms and drunk tonight which was slightly amusing. I did not have any alcohol. I’m trying to remember the last time I drank any alcohol and it may have been as long ago as June. I was losing the taste for it about five years ago, but it quickly involved into having to force myself to enjoy even half a beer that I “liked” in the first place. At this point I can’t imagine ever wanting a beer. It’s been peer pressure for the last five years, really. In my entire life I’ve probably been into a liquor store and bought alcohol to drink thirty times tops. Whatever though.

The music was great tonight; I stayed for just about all of it. We had a good time mocking hippies, as well as our tripping friends while trying to stand up on a ski mountain in the dark.
The drive home was a little more enjoyable tonight. It’s scary as all fuck, but shorter this time around for some reason, perhaps because I was in a better mood. It was great to see the hotel and get to sit around here in the warm room now. Speaking of enjoying myself doing nothing.



Chapter Two of this thing I wrote about a fishing trip gone weird

2.

These winding roads were enticing the first few times we did this trip, by now they had turned into a redundant series of black and white postcards held in front of our tired heads. Don was out of cigarettes and kept taking mine for the last two hours of the 6-hour journey north. I just wanted to get to the cabin and grab a beer and a place to plant my exhausted legs and eyes for the night. The trance like effect of the John Lee Hooker on the stereo, and the postcards made for an even longer drive. By the time we got to the cabin it was near nine in the evening and I was collapsing on the walk in.

“I need some sleep”

“Chuck, you need more than sleep, you need a vacation” Don opened the door, and we both took a whiff of the all too familiar smell of our summer hide out.

“This’ll do for now” I dropped my bag on the dinner table and made my way to the bathroom.

“Chuck, we should see if the old man is out on the lake tomorrow” Don yelled to me from the room, I could hear Robert DeNiro’s familiar voice in the background on the television Don had turned on before dropping his gear down.

“I’m sure he’ll be out tomorrow, it’s supposed to be a beautiful day out. I’m not sure I’m ready for his stories just yet though, he takes a lot of energy out of our day with some of those depressing stories of the war and his dead wife”

I made my way into my room and got undressed and put the boom box on the nightstand on. A talk radio show gushed on about paranormal stuff like Area 51 and jackalopes and that kind of thing. I like falling asleep to this show when I stay up here. The sky is so amazing out side my bedside window I can imagine UFO’s flying by and being able to see every little light and gear on it. Don was falling asleep on the couch, so I got up and shut the light off, but left the television on. He had been watching Analyze This with DeNiro and Billy Crystal. An okay movie for what it is, and surely it would have the same effect on me if I put it on right now. I shut the light out, and lit a cigarette; the radio was discussing a UFO sighting in Canada, Yukon Territory. I looked out on the lake as I smoked and saw what looked like a serpent in the water, once it reached the bone white moonbeam it turned into a log though. I chuckled to myself and put the cigarette out. I fell asleep to a woman from Santa Fe that could talk to lizards.



12/13/09 - Los Angeles, CA

Two more days and I will be six months without a cigarette. This is obviously great news for my physical being. For my mental being though, there are anniversaries every other day, the one month anniversary of the last time I was in a good mood, etc.

Making some friends out here, but really, when it all comes down to it. Nobody matches my friends back home who I have a history with. They know me well, people here it takes them a long ass time to figure you out. I see through every fucking one of them though. Suggesting ideas and places to go that I have not even the slightest care about. I see through the games played with networks and empty handshakes and silly conversations that sound like they come from outer space or some bizarre world in the back room of some shady tarot card place. All these practices to make yourself feel like you will live longer. Potions and exercises designed to sound interesting in conversations and that’s all. None of this crap does anything, it’s all empty placebos. Then you get hit by a car on Ventura Blvd and die anyway. Or some kid shoots you for $34. I am trying to keep my distance from people now because first of all I don’t trust anything they say or what their intentions may be. You pick that up pretty quick out here. Three months in and yeah even the people you feel you know best are out for something. They all show their teeth in the dark. You see it when they turn around and you can see their tail, their forked tongues and horns hidden under some bad haircut and worse outfit. I should make a list, a list of whatever those things I said were all bad things about back home and what made me want to leave there and come out here. The cold weather isn’t really that big of a deal. Also of note, this whole place is supposed to explode and die like September 11th.



They don’t know shit about me and I want to go home

I would turn on all of them and I will

I can’t take seriously men women and well you know

Back when it was just me and a whole bunch of dead horn players

I thought I was like I don’t know, some whacky guy

Just a normal plain old bore like your aunt and uncle back home though

Rippinest Town Pt I

Imagine the worst U2 song you can possibly imagine, multiply that by ten and then have Jack Johnson sing background vocals while wearing six thousand white UMASS baseball hats at once outside of a Starbucks. That is what my third solo album will sound like.

Flew into Boston a few hours ago and as usual, at least the five years or so, I always play Radiohead on the headphones for the last half hour or so. I mysteriously don’t have Kid A on my iPod for whatever reason. I was somehow able to avoid taking them off throughout the whole landing. I mean really, would a person listening to an iPod REALLY mess up a landing, I hate that rule.



Imagine the worst possible Bob Seger song, but sung from the top of the Washington Monument, which is now covered in swastikas and portraits of John McCain. At the end of the song a gigantic bald eagle swoops down over the crowd and vomits the blood of every single Goddamned fucking Iraqi baby all over everyone. This is what I want the music to play right after I kill someone if I ever get to kill a human being at some point. Like if there was an apocalypse or I was attacked, not just a random deal.

Oh yeah so Radiohead on the plane, good times. I spent the majority of the trip listening to Mouth of the Architect who I can’t get enough of right now. I have been in that mopey mood lately and listening to them and Mono, Explosions in the Sky, Mogwai, etc. I think I have had my fill of delay pedals at this point. I also jammed the new Converge, Daughters and...I can’t remember. Oh Interpol. Maybe I should get out more and stop being such a fucking pussy.

Imagine the worst possible Her Space Holiday album cover divided by the pattern on your current girlfriend’s shower curtain multiplied by seven. Now imagine wearing a sweater that looks like that.

So the flight was fine for the most part. I used to bring multiple books and magazines, etc and then realized the best way to make the trip go fast is to not sleep at all the night before and then play music in your head and fall asleep. This works for me, although I did read for a few minutes. Man this book is intense (especially the piece on Billy Eckstine), check it out if you’re a music person, or pop culture person.

Imagine the worst Kanye West song you could ever imagine hearing, which is pretty much any of them, now imagine the song is being played through speakers made of Lady Gaga’s skin, which was just removed in front of a classroom full of Mexican children who have no idea who their father is. This is the type of music I would like to hear right before I jump off a bridge.

I can’t write much more as the battery on this laptop is almost done. I left the power supply at a hotel in Grover Beach, CA over the weekend and am having it Fed Ex’d to here in Massachusetts. I hope it comes tomorrow; I at least need to write a few hours a day, mostly just nothing, to myself, but it makes the day go better. Today on the plane I briefly wrote in the notepad thing on my iPhone and then realized how ridiculous it was and went back to sleep.



I guess I’ll get back to complaining about women or how my Joy Division CD's got scratched or whatever tomorrow.

To Catch a Thief

I wrote this a long time ago, updated it where it needed to be updated. I always wonder if this dude is still out there.

So there I am, stoned. How many stories can I tell that start like that? Every one that’s how many. So there I am stoned, approaching the Charlie Parker section when out of the corner of my eye I see him. “Shit” I say to myself, there’s no way that guy will recognize me at this point, it was….over 15 years ago now. “Fuck, he’s listening to jazz now?” Perhaps he always was though. I would assume that he would only listen to Led Zeppelin and Ozzy if he was doing what he was doing when I first encountered him. Looks like he gained a little weight. Has the glasses on, looks sort of like a computer programmer, or maybe someone who works at Radio Shack ( let me just say that Radio Shack is the worst thing in the history of things that have existed in the world. You go in there and first of all, they don’t have anything good whatsoever. There is not one good thing. And if you say they are different now like Sears, because they carry all these top name products now, I’ll tell you to shove a box of 9 volt [my favorite member of the battery family] batteries up your ass, as Radio Shack is not good now. I don’t care who they have doing their television ads now, I don’t care if the logo is hip now. I don’t care if when you think of Radio Shack you think of Radiohead. It’s 2 things that stink Radio’s and Shack’s. When I think of the radio I think of noisy static and shittier music. When I think of a shack, I think of an old run down fucking shack, not somewhere I want to buy stereo equipment. Anyone who buys anything from Radio Shack other than a fucking LED light or something is an asshole, and should not be allowed to listen to music or use anything electronic. You go in there to buy something, and first off they ask you for all this shit…name, address, phone number, social security number, the last time you listened to Vampire Weekend{this obviously is probably more often than not answered “yes” in the Radio Shack environment if you catch my drift}, mothers maiden name, all to buy a fucking fuse for 29 cents. Fuck that, I’ll take my business elsewhere.) or some geek like that. So I quickly make my way out of the jazz section, as the guy is there, and secondly, there’s nothing there I need right now anyway. I guess I should back up a little.

So years ago when I had a skateboard and my prom would be a couple years later where we would hear all sorts of 80’s songs because it was the 80’s, not because it was an “80’s themed prom” (I tell you, being in junior high, and high school in the 80’s was not fun. It wasn’t like those John Hughes movies. It wasn’t like Saved By the Bell, it sucked. The clothes people wore were so god-awful it wasn’t even funny. Ronald Reagan was in office, there were no punk rockers around where I lived, the pot wasn’t what it is today, if you hooked up with a girl you spent half the time trying to figure out if something was a strap or a ribbon or a belt or whatever, and then of course you were fifteen so when you did finally get the baggy outfit off you had no idea what to even do with the “stuff” So when you start thinking that you want to go back to the 80’s because it seemed cool, think again, as it really wasn’t that great of a time for anyone. Let’s let it rest.). I looked like a dork, I was a teenage punk rock kid with a skateboard, how original.

My friend Peter and I used to hang out at this shopping mall literally every day of our lives. It was a small shopping mall with maybe a dozen stores, anchored by a big pharmacy (pharmacies are out of fucking control nowadays, people don’t think about it, but you go into a pharmacy and the days of just getting a prescription and a card for your sister are long fucking gone now you can get anything you want in there…at any time of the day. They have 24 hour pharmacies here, perfect for a guy like myself who sometimes will wake up in the middle of the night and go out to the car to take a ride and cool myself down. Sometimes I need a bag of licorice in the middle of the night, and sometimes I need to buy a box of blank DVD’s, or maybe I am coming back from a keg party on a golf course at like 4 million o’clock in the morning and I need a copy of the new Michael Crichton novel [paperback edition], either way, it’s now all there. Pharmacies do not get the much deserved respect they have built over the past few years now), and a department store. The details of this are sketchy at this point, but from what I remember Peter may have said some bad words about some girl. For a week or so after that we kept seeing these two sort of scary looking guys in the mall. We thought they were after us for saying what we did. So one night, I’m sitting in the mall leaning against this wall with my skateboard, I have a clear view of one of the entrances (I can still picture the big brick pillars outside at each entrance), so anyone pulling up in a car, you can see. This would be where you waited in the winter for your mother to pick you up after a long day of mall shopping, if you weren’t a nerd like me who just hung out there. So I’m sitting there, presumably waiting for my friend to get out of work when I see this motorcycle pull up, okay, well a “chopper”. I notice it’s our two friends who we thought were going to kick our ass, they look a little different though. The taller, blonde one is wearing mirrored sunglasses, and a bandana on his head, and overalls; he gets off the chopper and enters the mall. The shorter dark haired one stays on the chopper and is looking in at me. I’m thinking he’s going to come in and kick my ass. I hadn’t had much experience with getting my ass kicked at this point (although, a few years before or so, I was down at the movie theatre and there was this nerdy “new kid” eating a sandwich, for some reason I decided I wanted to eat the sandwich, so I took it away from him. Me and my long hair, and my Ozzy Diary of a Madman tour shirt [which was the first concert my mother let my brother and I go to without parental guidance, and I was right after all these years with the date thanks to the new reissue of this classic record which shows a flyer which indicates Ozzy would be in the New York are on April 4th, 5th of 1982. I always remembered the show being April 2nd, 1982. Which now that I think of it, me buying the reissue of Diary of a Madman back in 2002 was the 20th anniversary of that gig. Shit. Fuck. I wish I knew, I would have celebrated by going to the Boston Garden that night, or rather where the Garden was. UFO opened for Ozzy at that show, without Michael Schenker, who had already started making waves with his solo career, we also missed Randy Rhoads who was killed right before the gig, instead we got that guy Brad Gillis who ended up on the underrated Speak of the Devil live record, and eventually to Night Ranger] took the poor kids dinner away from him. Big mistake, it turned out the kid was the younger brother of “that black belt crazy kid Bill Ward {we’ll call him Bill Ward for the sake of anonymity}” So now the rumors were that Bill Ward wanted to fight me. I couldn’t fight him however; I was a long-haired freak who couldn’t hurt a fly. I avoided Bill Ward for weeks when finally he caught up with me. He was definitely the Mike Tyson of the town, not really a big guy, just crazy, and could fight and knew karate and loved ninjas and shit. So one day, I’m leaving school, about to cut through some backyards when he runs up. Mind you, he’s running, not walking. “Let’s go man, why’d you fuck with my brother??!?” “I didn’t know it was your brother” “Well, you have to fight me” “Bill Ward, I’m not gonna fight you” He then says “Then I have to hit you”, and he punches me in the face and says “Don’t fuck with my brother”.), so I was getting more or less ready to run away from the crazy biker guys who wanted to kick my ass for having a skateboard and gallivanting around with the kid that said that shit about his sister. (Un)Fortunately, it wasn’t that at all, as while I was standing there with my skateboard and punk rockness I heard this door being flung open loudly and a woman yelling. The tall blonde mirrored sunglasses and bandana guy was running out with a box in his hand, coming from the jewelry store. He hopped on to the motorcycle, or chopper rather, and they drove off into the sunset. The police came down and I gave them a report.

A month later, I get on a bus and look in the back, and there’s mister tall blonde guy with the bandana and mirrored sunglasses, this time he’s wearing a baseball hat though. I avoided eye contact with him and hid my face for the bus ride.
So now, years later I see the guy at the record shop looking through the jazz and blues CD’s, before I disappeared from his sight I wanted to see what he was buying. BB King – Live at Cook County Jail. Ha (?)

Okay I'll go back to writing about how miserable I am and that kind of thing later on. This was fun for a minute.