By the time I arrived home after work today it had started to rain, yet the sun was still shining brightly. I ran inside to grab my camera, not knowing whether I could capture even a fraction of the intensely beautiful golden rain I saw falling from the sky. No dirty jokes please. This was freakin' beautiful. One of the pictures came out pretty good, so I'm sharing it with both of my faithful readers. As Tyra Banks would say, here is your best shot. Enjoy!
Happy Friday, faithful readers! As a reward for putting up with my frequently verbose and occasionally borderline-lunatic rantings and ravings about soap operas and restroom signage and oh so many things in between, I thought I'd offer the six of you an irresistibly joyous little ditty to start your weekend off right.
Alphabeat (my current favorite band) has just released not one but TWO videos for their second single. It's their follow-up to their brilliant debut "Fascination", a song which you may remember falling in love with just a couple weeks ago right here.
If you have somehow managed to dislodge that song from your brain, get ready for another equally infectious track that will have you bouncin' up and down and singing along with its hooky chorus and its closing "doot-doot-doot"s long after the song has ended. It opens with the line "I was not looking for arty farty love" and just gets better and better from there.
So without further ado, here are the original UK video and the new US video for "10,000 Nights Of Thunder" by Alphabeat. I personally prefer the UK version, mainly because it keeps the full original version of the song intact, complete with copious amounts of increasingly manic "doot-doot-doot"s at the end. Okay, here we go. Compare, contrast, but most of all, enjoy!
My coworker spotted this sign in a public restroom during her trip to Virginia Beach last week, and graciously shared it with me upon her return.
Let's see. Where to begin. Okay first of all, seriously? You have GOT to be freaking kidding me. Is this really necessary? And if so, for whom? What's the intended demographic here? I've known puh-lenty of alcoholics and addicts in my day, people who would swallow or snort or drink just about anything and ask questions later. I can say with absolute certainty that despite the numerous stories of people hitting rock bottom that I've heard while in recovery, stories which frequently include waking up covered in one's own vomit and/or piss, NOT ONCE has anyone ever mentioned drinking from a toilet or a urinal. From a urinal? How would one even drink from a urinal if one wanted to? And why bother? It's not as though a urinal provides an overflowing abundance of water anyway. Besides that, the angle is all wrong - especially those low urinals for the vertically challenged down at the end of the row. Better stretch first, or you could throw your back out! Perhaps a straw would help, but fortunately that would be an unlikely find in a public restroom. A silly straw would probably be ideal, but that might just make the whole thing look silly.
Is this gross misuse of public facilities unique to men and their urinals, or do women have their own version of the sign in their "hygiene lounges"? I find it rather difficult to imagine a woman drinking from a urinal, but not a whole lot more difficult than imagining a man drinking from one. Admit it, the visual is a tough one to put together. Maybe this sign is meant for children, which brings to light a whole other set of concerns. Has this great nation's once enviable educational system deteriorated to a point where children are no longer taught the fundamental difference between water that is drinkable and water that people have peed in? Is this the whole point of the "NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND" movement? Was it shortened for catchiness and commercial accessibility from its original name, "NO CHILD LEFT To Drink From Where Someone's BEHIND Just Defecated"?
Perhaps I'm being closed-minded and this is just another hip new trend that has somehow passed me by, thus prematurely casting me in the role of the curmudgeonly old man whose three recent hip replacements have ultimately failed to replace any trace of bygone hipness, leaving me to gently rock on my rickety porch while pointing a wrinkled, liverspotted finger at today's youth and chastising "those crazy kids and their loud music and their wacky toilet-slurping ways". My sincerest apologies for the unwieldiness of that last sentence. "When I was your age, we drank out of Britta pitchers and our sentences were never more than 21 words long!"
But I think the pièce de résistance on the sign has got to be the inclusion of the phrase "Non-Potable Water." Um, if you're moronic enough to go drinking out of toilets and urinals and if you find yourself incapable of comprehending the first part of the sign, chances are you probably don't know what the word "non-potable" means either. Hell, the only place I've ever even heard the word "potable" is when they have that stupid "Potent Potables" category on Jeopardy, a category which I inevitably bomb every time. It just seems to be a pointless addition to an already rudimentary sign, unless of course Alex Trebek was the impetus for the sign's creation in the first place. Oh my God! That's it! Alex Trebek is on a one-man mission to drain every drop of moisture from every urinal cake in every public restroom across America! I'd imagine potables don't get much more potent than that.
Wow, suddenly the phrase "suck it, Trebek!" takes on a whole new meaning.
The good news is that the writers' strike is over, and new episodes of my favorite shows have now returned to the airwaves. The bad news is that this influx of new programming seems to be having an inversely proportional relationship to the manageability of my life. As you may know, I'm a bit of a tv addict. The majority of what I watch is quality television, which means that my Thursday nights have turned into a burdensome night for my poor little DVR. Ugly Betty, Grey's Anatomy, Lost, 30 Rock, and The Office are all automatically recorded on Thursday, though by the end of this season I'll probably have given up on Grey's, since I now feel like I'm watching it out of obligation rather than interest. (I just re-dropped Desperate Housewives from my Sunday roster because of a similar feeling.)
But these shows are not the problem. The problem is that during the strike - and, more specifically, during the week I had off for Christmas break - I rekindled ill-fated relationships with General Hospital and One Life To Live, two soap operas I hadn't watched since my passed-out days spent on various people's couches before getting sober. I've been DVRing them EVERY DAY SINCE, watching them either late at night during the week or as a marathon on the weekends. And now I cannot stop watching them. I need help. I am outing myself here as a soap opera addict because I truly believe that a person is as sick as his secrets, and that letting something like this out and asking for help is the first step towards a successful recovery.
As evidence of the effects that this brutal addiction can have on a sane, healthy person and his sentence structure, here is an instant message that came out of me recently while chatting online with a friend:
"You see, Nikolas recently lost the love of his life, Emily, when she was strangled by the Text Message Killer, and now Nikolas refuses to have his lethal brain tumor surgically removed because one of its side effects is that it allows him hallucinations of Emily, hallucinations which he can see, touch, kiss, etc., so instead he's taking an experimental drug offered to him for $10 million by Doctor Devlin, who's secretly leading a double life as the hitman who just tried to take out mob-boss Sonny but ended up accidentally shooting Sonny's 10-year-old son Michael in the head instead."
[Side note: Although little Michael is still in an air-quotedly "permanent" coma, I am pleased to report that Nikolas has since decided to have his tumor removed. Don't get too excited. He's made the decision, but he hasn't had the operation yet. He finally said goodbye to Emily yesterday. It might've been touching if I hadn't been shouting at the tv for the past three months for him to just get the damn operation already.]
Now I will be the first to admit that both General Hospital and One Life To Live - and pretty much every soap I've ever watched - are downright crap. I'm not being immodest when I say that watching them is beneath me, and I'd venture a guess that most people who watch them probably feel the same way, albeit perhaps subconsciously. Both shows are written in a way which seems to insult the intelligence of even the most chuckleheaded of viewers and, despite a few distinguishing traits and varying levels of acting skill when handling the borderline-retarded material, all of the characters share one common characteristic which trumps all the others and which cannot be ignored. They are all dumb as a box of... um, soap.
The formula is as simple as the characters. Scenes are extremely short, playing to the limited attention spans of an MTV-influenced America. Each scene starts with a subtly bludgenous refresher of how the last scene in that particular storyline ended. How stupid are these people that they can't remember what was said a mere handful of seconds ago? Then the conversation proceeds a few millimeters, and it becomes obvious that the scene is about to end because something is on the verge of happening. But nothing does end up happening, because right as it's about to, the camera hovers on one of the actors just long enough to make the viewer wonder whether that actor has forgotten his or her next line, and then the scene ends. This bizarre phenomenon presents a two-fold problem. Since nearly everyone on a soap opera has any number of closeted skeletons, their long scene-ending pauses make them seem both unbelievably stupid and, perhaps more importantly, incredibly suspicious. Then, when they need to be reminded of what just transpired when we revisit them a few minutes later, the inate dimness of the other characters in the scene is underscored by their apparent obliviousness to how weird and suspicious their scenemates are acting. It's a horrendously vicious cycle of stupidity perpetuated by stupidity.
The end result is that pretty much nothing ever happens. It's not quite as bad on General Hospital, where the writers can use the Port Charles mafia and the titular hospital to jack up the frequency of the occurrence of situations with somewhat high stakes. And I'll admit that there really are some talented actors on there who manage to make the writers' most transparent stalling tactics and banal dialogue somehow seem genuine. Still though, not much ends up happening. Over on One Life To Live, however, all of it is poorly-acted crap about relationships and paternity issues and business deals and, come on, who cares? I don't, and yet I watch. Every freakin' day. Fortunately on DVR I can get through the two shows in about 90 minutes, but still, that's 90 minutes a day. Clearly, I have a problem.
A friend of mine once observed that someone should edit each daily episode of every hour-long soap opera down to a 5-minute recap, which could then be viewed online. What a perfect solution! Why hasn't anyone cashed in on this? Then I'd only have 5 minutes to catch up on every day per show, which is about how much time each episode's loosely-defined "action" would take once you boil it down and get rid of all the fat. [I don't cook, so I apologize if my cooking metaphors are unfavorably mixed.]
It's the deeply addictive nature of these truly sucktacular shows that simultaneously fascinates and terrifies me, mainly because I cannot entirely fathom what it is that makes them so addictive. The only theory I have is that the way I feel when I watch these shows sort of parallels the way I felt many years ago when I would do coke. I always felt like it wasn't the actual drug itself that was making me high, because most times I found the drug itself to be rather weak and its effects fleeting. What kept me high, I think, was more the psychological awareness that I would need to do more every 15 minutes or so. I think that's how the soaps are too. It's obviously not any feeling of satisfaction I get from the show itself that keeps me coming back for more. On the contrary. It's the inherently dissatisfying nature of the show and the resulting need to come back for more that keeps me coming back for more. GAH!
So now I turn to you, my faithful readers, in this my hour of need. Have any of you ever found yourselves victims of this horrifically sinister conspiracy? And if so, how did you manage to free yourself from the Vulcan death-grip it had on your soul? I am not familiar with any rehab facility that specializes in treating this particular disease, nor am I aware of any Soap Opera Addicts Anonymous meetings in the area. Therefore, dear readers, please help me. Any tips or advice or anecdotes of personal experience would be greatly appreciated. 'Cuz now that the good tv shows are back on the air, and now that it's so unbelievably gorgeous outside, I WANT MY FRIGGIN' LIFE BACK!
Is that really too much to ask?
Sorry folks. As a result of blogging at work on a computer that has no sound, apparently I posted the wrong videoclip for my current favorite song - "Fascination" by Alphabeat - in my Footloose blog last week. What I posted was the remix version which, while decent enough, doesn't come close to matching the irresistible energy of the original version. Since I literally dared my three faithful readers not to dance to the video I posted and then provided the clip for the subpar and not even remotely Footloose-inspired remix, I figured I'd better right this heinous wrong before the villagers come after me with torches and pitchforks after successfully remaining seated and still for the entire remix video. Though I guess it would only be three people coming after me, which is kind of a funny image....
So here we go again. I assure you that this time I'm posting the correct video for the original version of the song, accompanied by my sincerest apologies for last week's mistake. It's Friday, which is a perfect time to crank up the volume and enjoy the hell outta this infectious confection. Once again, I dare you not to get up and dance.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you "Fascination" by Alphabeat.
Here's a little anecdote for those who wonder where I get my sense of humor.
One year ago today, my then 68 year-old father had knee replacement surgery. As most men of a certain age seem to be, he was nervous and somewhat inherently distrustful of the hospital staff. It wasn't so much the fear that they didn't know what they were doing, but rather a more general and understandable concern that goes along with putting one's ability ever to walk again into the hands of virtual strangers. Also he was in a Prince George's County hospital, so while he knew and trusted his surgeons, there were no assumptions or guarantees of stellar care in the days after the operation. My sister and I agreed to take turns sleeping in a chair in the hospital room for a few nights. That way whenever he opened his eyes he'd see a face that he knew, and if he woke up in the middle of the night and needed anything, we'd be there to help out. SuperMom took the day shifts.
While Mom and Amy and I were watching The Price Is Right in the hospital waiting room during the hours immediately following the procedure, someone came in and told us that the surgery had gone well and that they were moving Dad to his recovery room. A little while later they told us we could go in and see him. He was not yet conscious, but we sat there for an hour or so until he started slowly opening his eyes. He was obviously still very doped up and couldn't even speak, but he did smile when he saw all of us standing around him.
After drifting in and out of consciousness for the next hour or so, he eventuallly began attempting to string sounds together in unintelligibly noble attempts to make words. As he ambled down the slow road to coherence, some nurses with thick Filipino accents came in to help make sure he was in minimal discomfort. They adjusted his pillows and his position on them, all the while calling him "Pop" - since he was clearly our father - and asking him if he was comfortable. Dad seemed to be getting frustrated, which he later told us was because he thought they were calling him "Bob", which led him to wonder if there had been some mixup and maybe he had been moved to the wrong room and was getting the wrong assistance or something. A valid concern when you're all doped up and having trouble elocuting your thoughts.
Finally, he managed to emphatically slur together the words, "My name's not Bob!"
One of the nurses leaned into him and very gently asked him what he would like to be called.
Dad's woozy yet perfectly timed deadpan reply?
"'Your Excellency' would be just fine."
Anyone who's met me probably knows that I'm not a huge fan of winter. Sure it can be pretty when snow accumulates, but there hasn't been much of that 'round these parts lately. We usually just get a "wintery mix" of sleet and rain and slush, just enough to make it a pain in the neck to go anywhere but not enough to shut down the places we need to go. And my extremely cold-sensitive appendages make me extremely intolerant of low temperatures. This year I purchased an inch-thick pair of Alpine socks for $20 (more than I've ever paid for a pair of socks in my life), and I wore them so much I literally bore a hole through them. So that helped. But no pair of gloves has ever satisfactorily kept my hands warm, and the rest of my body would rather just stay inside under blankets in front of the tv than brave the Arctic outdoors for anything other than a mandatory obligation.
All this is merely background information to help put today's message into perspective which, perhaps obviously, is that I LOVE SPRING. Seriously! It kinda blows my mind a little every year. I always get a little bit surprised and amazed when the flowers start popping back out and the trees start blossoming anew. Last summer I had my first go at gardening in the tiny patch of dirt in front of my apartment, and just last week I noticed that some of the things I planted are COMING BACK! That's just INSANE!
Some of you may have heard me talk about my favorite day of the year. It occurs every year, and it falls on or around April 20. This year was no exception. It's the one day after a couple weeks of tentative moves towards spring when, seemingly out of nowhere, the trees can no longer be seen through and winter is officially over. It's also the day when everything outside suddenly turns a stunningly incandescent shade of bright, almost yellowish green. This particularly iris-searing hue only lasts about a week. Or maybe it lasts all summer but our eyes become used to it. I'm not sure which. Regardless, it's an awe-inspiring phenomenon, one that brings me a lot of joy, and one that should be appreciated as much as possible before it fades.
Rather than spend too much time trying to describe it, I'll just show you some pictures I took yesterday en route to work. We'll let the green speak for itself. I assure you that there has been no color-enhancement done to these photos, nor were there any fancy photography tricks or special lighting when the pictures were taken. Just my digital camera on a cloudy Tuesday morning.
Once you've enjoyed the pics, GET OFF THE DAMN COMPUTER AND GET YOUR ASS OUTSIDE!
After setting the mood last night with some YouTube clips from and inspired by the 80's, some friends and I kicked off our Sunday shoes and attempted to watch the movie Footloose. My memories of this movie were spotty at best, primarily because the last time I watched it must have been 15-20 years ago. I'd completely forgotten that a pre-Garnier Nutrisse SJP was one of Ariel's giggly best friends. And apparently John Lithgow never had hair. The only things I did remember were the movie's insanely hit-laden soundtrack, the moment when Kevin Bacon slides down the apparently pre-lubed railing in the "Never" dance sequence, Ariel's red "f***-me" boots, the game of Tractorchicken, the phrase "jump back!", and the guy picking his nose at the dance while "Almost Paradise" played in the background. [My sister and I used to rewind that particular moment and watch it 50-or-so times on Beta and laugh our butts off 'cuz it's really funny when you're 10.]
As all three of my faithful readers will undoubtedly recall, normally I'm a bit of a movie-watching stickler. But last night the boys and I got all jacked up on Tab, a delicious 80's cola that turns you into a mind sticker and helps you keep your shape in shape. I mean after watching this commercial, how could we resist?
Once the Tab was flowing through our veins, all movie-watching etiquette quickly went out the window. We were all laughing and screaming and joking and having a blast while the movie chuggered (is that a word?) on nobly in the background. Long story short: Footloose? Is filthy. It's a shockingly PG-rated movie chock-full of adult language, phallic imagery, homoerotic subtext, and a positively R-worthy pube-n-butt-baring scene in the gym showers which I swear I have no childhood recollection of whatsoever. Not to mention the fact that Dianne Weist has always looked more than a tad wanton to me, and free-spirit daredevil Ariel (played by Lori Singer) constantly seems to be vibrating on an "electric ear cleaner" of her own. Where is Lori Singer now? According to the scant info provided on Wikipedia, she's a Julliard-trained cellist who most recently performed as a soloist at Carnegie Hall earlier this year. This cello thing could explain her character's tendency towards incessant vibration, especially when the actress is so used to having a giant wooden instrument erectly positioned betwixt her thighs.
But I digress. At one point during the movie I literally blew my own mind - a lesser-known side effect of drinking Tab. During the scene when Kevin Bacon and that other dude are playing Tractorchicken, and Kevin gets his shoelace caught on the pedal or whatever, my Tabbed-up brain made the connection that the only reason Kevin wins the game is why??? Because he couldn't get his... wait for it... foot loose.
Is it possible that I'm the first person to ever think of that? Shouldn't that win me a prize or something? Maybe some red "f***-me" boots? Or a hose-fight (!) with Kevin Bacon at the car wash?
I'll let you bask in my moment of brilliance for a bit while you watch the video for my current favorite song, a song obviously inspired by the wild and crazy antics of Ren, Ariel, and the rest of the wacky gang from Bomont, CO. As my dear groupie David said regarding this video, I dare you not to get up and dance.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you "Fascination" by Alphabeat.
Quite possibly the coolest thing I have ever seen in Washington, DC:
Before she passed away, my grandmother would send me a piece of fake gum in the mail every year for April Fools Day. When my dad was in elementary school, apparently on at least one occasion she slipped a cardboard chocolate bar in his school lunch. Ha! Oh how I wish I could have been at that lunch table.
So here's a little April Fools ritual I've honed over the years, inspired by the playful antics of my dearly departed Sophia Petrillo-esque grandmother, Ann Bailer. May it bring you as much joy as it has brought me, and as I know it brought her while she was alive.
1. Purchase a pack of Juicy Fruit gum - no, not Stride - and unwrap it at one end.
2. Gently slide each of the individual foil-wrapped sticks from the pack. Be sure not to remove the small white paper bands which hold each stick in its place. Those must remain fully intact inside the pack.
3. Carefully unfold each foil wrapper just enough to remove the stick of gum within.
4. Trace the outlines of however many sticks of gum are in the pack onto the thin gray cardboard backing from a legal pad or some other similarly colored, weighted, and textured paper stock.
5. Cut the cardboard along the outlines, ideally with a paper-cutter.
Just to be safe, err on the side of cutting the pieces just a hair
smaller than the originals.
6. Wrap each cardboard stick in one of the foil wrappers.
7. Gently slide each wrapped cardboard stick back into the pack. Be careful to get each one inside one of the white paper bands. This can be tricky, but just be patient. Also make sure that the folds in the wrappers are all facing the same way as you reinsert them into the pack. This is crucial to selling the prank.
8. Offer your friends (and, of course, your enemies) a piece of "gum".
Note: It's a good idea to have some real gum stashed in another pocket to give your friends (screw your enemies!) as a reward for being a good sport. Also, for best results, try pulling this prank in a dark place like a movie theater or a nightclub. It actually doesn't matter though, because it will quickly become apparent that some people will put anything in their mouths.
And there you have it. I have now passed this knowledge on to you, my faithful readers. If next April Fools Day rolls around and you happen to remember this, try it out and let me know how it goes. If you don't remember, well, let's just say I hope to run into you in a dark place so I can give you something to chew on.
Wait, that TOTALLY came out wrong.
Thus spake my Girls whilst disastrously attempting to impress a Harvard alum, and today, thus speak I.
Last night I went to the first official baseball game at the new Nationals Stadium. Apparently there was something called an exhibition game on Saturday night, but for some reason it doesn't count or didn't matter or I don't know why but we just don't talk about it. It's like that season of Dallas where Bobby took a nine-month shower.
Anyway, Sunday night my sister and I took my dad to the first official game as a gift for his 69th birthday, and for those of you who know me, you'll understand what a sincere demonstration of love such a gesture represented. I'm about to complain, but dad, if you're reading this, you know I love you more than, well, baseball. More than lots of other stuff too. And despite my forthcoming whinery, it really was - and always is - nice to spend the evening with family, even though mom wasn't feeling well enough to attend. Dad sent an adorable email the next morning thanking us for the wonderful time he had, and that made it all worth it.
That said.......
The cab ride to the stadium was fine, even though the driver couldn't get any closer than two blocks from the stadium to drop us off, but whatever. After waiting in line for 45 minutes just to get into the arena, then waiting another 45 minutes in line to get food, then linebackering (?) our way through throngs of people for about 10-15 minutes on a mission to find our seating section (plus about 5 more minutes because of an erroneous sign which very clearly instructed us to keep walking past our destination level), we finally got to our seats. Lest you think I'm exaggerating, the game was scheduled to start at 8:05pm and we arrived at the stadium two hours early. When our butts finally touched our seats, it was 7:55. Of course by this time the loosely-defined "Philly cheesesteak" I'd waited in line for 45 minutes to get had gone cold, but I'm a trooper so I ate it anyway. Looking back, it didn't taste as bad as I thought it should have. (See, I'm accentuating the positive there!)
Oh wait, did I mention it was about 40 degrees outside and I think I'm anemic? I dunno, that's what my sister said. I have whatever condition it is that causes my hands to freeze way quicker than the rest of me. Do any of my faithful readers (whassup Doug!) know if there's a name and/or treatment for that condition? If so, hook me up, stat.
The opening festivities began around 8ish. This included the announcement of one unknown team member after another, accompanied by typically impressive DC fireworks and two ginormous American flags being held up by a few dozen soldiers, each flag the size of, um, about 1/4 of a baseball field. Each player also had his own theme song, and I have to say that hearing Peter Gabriel's "Big Time" was a highlight of the evening. And, since I'm focusing on the positive, I am obliged to point out that the whole patriotic flags-n-fireworks display and the truly STUNNING rendition of the national anthem sung a capella by some opera chick was all pretty darned impressive, and it all became even more profound when juxtaposed with what came next.
It seems some chucklehead had the bright idea to invite president bush (I refuse to honor him with capitalization) to throw out the first pitch. His name was announced, and out he jogged. As one might suspect, the crowd greeted him with somewhat of a mixed reaction. To my ears, however, the majority of the sound coming from the 40,000 people in the stadium was an overwhelmingly disapproving "BOOOO!" For a brief moment I felt a wee smidgen of pity for him, and I thought about how unfortunate it must be to be him right now. Can he go anywhere without feeling the wrath of a nation scorned? He pitched, the feeling passed, I finished my fries, and the ever-dapper (and dare I say, worthy of capitalization) Mayor Fenty told us that it was time to "PLAAAAAAAAAAY BAAAAAAAAALL!"
Then the game started and baseball was played and runs were scored and the Nationals were winning and we got colder and colder and colder and became increasingly tired and cranky and we left after the fifth inning. And there was nary a cab to be found.
I guess now's as good a time as any to do my little sports rant. It's news to few that I've never really been into sports at all. However some people truly are surprised by this when they learn that I went to Duke University, the quintessential sports-obsessed learning institution where a student is actually excused from class if he or she is scheduled for a shift manning his or her tent while camping out for basketball tickets. (Which raises a question - can a woman "man" a tent? Things that make you go hmmm...)
Having grown up as a swimmer, I understand the concept of having pride in one's team. And yes, I was indeed voted "Most School Spirit" in my senior class yearbook, though I'm pretty sure that was mainly a result of the boldly creative fashion statements I made during Spirit Week and the artistic flair I brought to the decoration of our homecoming floats.
But what I've never been comfortable with is when I see spectators at sporting events getting so wrapped up in what's going on, to the point where it's as though they themselves are the ones playing, the ones winning, the ones losing. It all comes down to volume and pronouns. You know, when they're screaming "WE WON THE GAME!" Um, no. Calm down. YOU weren't playing. THEY were. YOU didn't get tackled. HE did. YOU didn't help score a goal by ripping out that other girl's weave. SHE did. Now I'm not talking about when people generally say something harmless in conversation like "we won last night." It's more when people are watching a game and they're in the heat of the moment, getting all crazy and revved up as rabid sports fans are wont to do. As though their very lives, their very futures, and the futures of everyone they love, are hanging on the balance of what those people on that field are doing right at that very moment. Perhaps I'm being petty, but it's just a big honkin' pet peeve of mine when people seem to subconsciously blur the line between pride in a team and the reality that they're not on it. It's a tiny little thing, but I feel like it may very well be a significant mental block that's kept me from getting interested in watching and playing sports all these years.
That, plus the backwards roll trauma. Plus the crowds. Plus the cold. Oh, plus the fact that I have little to no interest in sports whatsoever. Although I suppose the mere fact that I've had fun writing this now quite lengthy entry has proven to myself that, despite all evidence to the contrary, to some extent I do indeed enjoy various aspects of certain sporting endeavors.
Tou-freakin'-ché, Rorelai!
This afternoon as I was taking an extended lunch break in the addictive 65-degree springtime sun, I saw some teenagers carousing in the park in Georgetown. I don't know if they were skipping school or on spring break or what, but they were just kinda hangin' out. Passing a soccer ball around, eating ice cream, playing a guitar or a djembe drum... just having a good time. Perhaps even frolicking. Watching these kids made me so damn happy that my favorite time of year has come once again. Don't worry though, I'll save the rest of my SPRING ROCKS rant for next month when my favorite day of the year rolls around.
Back to the teens. At one point they started showing each other various gymnastic skills they each possess - somersaults, cartwheels, headstands, handstands, etc. And never before in my life has this thought crossed my mind, but for the first time, I wished that at some point in my life I'd learned how to do a handstand. It just looked like so much fun today! I suppose it's never too late, but at this point, training myself to exist upside-down even if only for a very short period of time seems highly unlikely.
You see, I actually remember when I was a wee little Cub Scout, and there was some kind of gymnastics badge or something, and the only thing I could do was a somersault - or a "forward roll" as I believe it was called. I COULDN'T EVEN DO A BACKWARDS ROLL! I don't remember whether I lied and said I had done the backwards roll, or if I just skipped that badge and moved on to the next one. I hope I didn't lie. That wouldn't have been very scoutly. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure there was a cartwheel requirement for that badge too, so if I did lie, I must have lied about that too. Damn. If there'd been a lying badge, I'd have had that one all sewn up! (No, there wasn't a sewing badge.)
Anyway, the sight of these teenagers in the park getting all gymnasty (?) with each other combined with the Tears For Fears greatest hits cd that's been in rotation at the office for the past few weeks then led me to ponder the phrase "head over heels". What on earth does that mean? People talk about falling head over heels for someone, but if your head is over your heels, you haven't really fallen at all, have you? You're still erect, if you'll pardon the pun. So when people say they're head over heels, that would seem to mean nothing's changed, right? Right.
Therefore I hereby submit a motion to coin the term "heels over head" to describe the reckless abandon with which a person falls for others. Both because it seems a far more accurate figure of speech, and because, at this rate, that's the only kind of gymnastics badge I won't have to lie to get.
Bless me dear readers for I have sinned. It has been waaaaay too long since my last entry. I promise to try to write more often. It's not that I don't want to or that I don't have anything interesting going on in my life worthy of sharing with my faithful readers. It's just that you both mean so much to me that I don't like to post anything too hastily, and these days my three jobs rarely allow me the time to give the two of you the attention you so richly deserve. My sincerest apologies for that, and also for yet another report from my blog-friendly subconscious.
I just woke up from a brief but very intense dream. In it, some Lost-esque chemical "purge" was taking place, meaning that the entire population of the world (or maybe just the country) was potentially being wiped out by some unstoppable poisonous gassing coming from some unknown source. Somehow we knew it was coming but we didn't know when, and we were utterly helpless to stop it. And, unlike on Lost, we didn't have gas masks.
There were rows of people lying down on the floor of long, barrack-like adjacent rooms, when one by one the ability to breathe simply began leaving people. I remember fighting it as long as I could, trying to keep breathing until it became impossible. A few seconds later the gassing subsided and I lost consciousness, when suddenly I saw my sister standing over me and smoking a cigarette. (She doesn't smoke in real life.) I could hear her tell me that it was over, that it had only lasted a few seconds, and that if I could just push through it and start breathing again, I would be okay.
A few seconds later I did manage to push through and start breathing again, and when I came to, the first thing I did was look for my parents. My father was in the next room and had already not made it. My mother was next to him and was still conscious but was trying unsuccessfully to breathe. She said that it was her time, and that she couldn't fight her way back from this, as she was too exhausted from fighting her battle with cancer for the past 9 years. She told me that she loved me, and I held her as her eyes closed.
And I woke up bawling my eyes out.
Aside from the obvious, literal, not incorrect conclusion that I'm a big ol' honkin' mama's boy, does anybody have any deeper layers of interpretation as to what this dream could mean?
Sorry this is turning into a dream journal. It's just that, other than complaining about my new Monday-Friday day job, I don't have much fascinating stuff going on in my life right now that's worthy of sharing with my two faithful readers (make that three - hi Santiago!), and when I wake up from a dream and want to remember it, I've found the best way to do so is to get it out in writing. And the only place I actually write stuff these days is here. Plus it's always nice to get an interpretation or two from you guys. This dream had several holes in it, but I'll share what I can piece together.
In the dream, it seems I had some random new day job different from the actual new day job I have in real life. My boss at this imaginary job called to tell me to meet him at some sort of job-related assignment which happened to be in a house right across the street from the house where I grew up. Suddenly I found myself there, in a room full of men and women who were drinking heavily and using copious amounts of the drugs I used to use, with porn of both gay and straight varieties playing on muted television sets in the background. I also remember that 80's music was being played from one of those mini-jukeboxes found atop tables in New Jersey diners. (If I have a spotty dream, you can bet that one of the things I won't forget is the music!) The other thing I recall about the dream is that my sister was there, completely sober and - despite her love of 80's music - clearly very uncomfortable. Almost as uncomfortable as I was when I saw her.
Now, I don't remember actually doing drugs in the dream, but the next thing I do remember is locking myself in the bathroom at the party, clearly having gotten myself very high, and staring into the mirror as I wondered if I could get away with pretending as though this hadn't happened. My real-life sobriety anniversary of five years is coming up in February, and the last thing I'd want to do is start all over again counting days. So after much deliberation I decided to make myself presentable, leave the party, and not tell anyone that I'd relapsed. When I left the bathroom, my sister had disappeared from the party. I'm assuming she knew my ill-advised little secret.
Oh, and when I was pulling myself together in front of the bathroom mirror, I happened to notice that my hair was longer than it is now - maybe 3 or 4 inches on top, kind of thick and wavy, and it looked really good. Such is truly the stuff of dreams!
The only other thing I recall is being outside the party with my imaginary boss from my imaginary new job, walking to his car, and encountering my parents' next door neighbor and her son in their car, which was parked on the street. My boss started a conversation through the open sunroof with Mrs. Addison, who clearly did not want to be talking to this guy. He mentioned something to her about seeing her again soon at LegoLand (?), and she just kind of nodded, rolled her eyes, formed a politely noncommittal response, and drove off with her son.
That's when I woke up. First breathless with panicked confusion - then, moments later, relieved.
Thoughts?
I just woke up from a very brief dream. In it, I was awakened by the sounds of insistent knocking. I groggily answered my front door to find a cool chick named Maryanna whom I haven't seen since high school with a group of 15 or so people, as if they were expecting to find some kind of crazy party going on. I told her that, um, it's 8:30 in the morning and I have to go to work. When I asked with polite sarcasm if that would be a problem, she said yes, pushing me out of the way and leading her entourage into my tiny little apartment to get the party started. I then recognized a couple other random people who haven't once crossed my mind since high school, and I got a little bitchy, telling one girl - a blonde field hockey player coincidentally named "Leslie", eh hem - that her hair hasn't changed in 15 years, a lame-oh put-down wholly insufficient for achieving the desired effect of convincing her that there was nothing cool about starting a party at my house without my permission at 8:30am on a Wednesday. As soon as I'd concocted that cleverest of digs, my alarm started buzzing and I woke to an empty apartment.
Faithful readers, leave thy interpretations in the comments sections below. Just don't say I'm old. We know that already.
Some of you may know that for a while now I've been concerned about and borderline irritated with my wonderfully awesome 68-year-old dad for the way he's been becoming increasingly feeble and slow and tentative. The biggest source of frustration has been the apparent lack of any concrete reason for his steady decline. Though he seems to have been exhibiting signs of Parkinson's Disease for the past few years, his doctor constantly and repeatedly assured him that it was definitely not Parkinson's. It was just kind of happening, and my sister and I were supposed to just kind of watch it happen. As if!
Lately we've been putting gentle pressure on mom to confront his doctors and find out what's really going on. She has a way with doctors. And I don't mean that in a dirty way. Anyway, this weekend, upon returning from their two-week cruise through the Panama Canal, the parental units informed us that mere days before departing on the cruise they'd learned that, in fact, dad does have Parkinson's.
How'd they find out? From a box on some medication that was prescribed to dad which explicity says "FOR PARKINSON'S DISEASE" in bold letters. This, of course, raised their eyebrows, so they asked the doctor, who then and only then confirmed that yes indeed, dad does have Parkinson's. Fortunately one of dad's best friends from high school also happens to be his lawyer. Rest assured that they'll be looking into this.
And me? I'm sure the shock of it will hit me at some point, even though it didn't really come as that much of a surprise. But for now I'm still in the stage of being relieved. Relieved to know that he actually has something. Relieved to know that we weren't imagining it. Relieved to know that we weren't just being too sensitive. Relieved to know that it's something that he can treat and fight. It's TOTALLY the two-part "Sick & Tired" episode of Golden Girls, at the end of which Dorothy finally finds out that despite what a multitude of dismissive doctors have told her, she's not crazy. She actually does have a real illness. There's that brilliant exchange in the restaurant:
DOROTHY: Waiter, bring us a bottle of your best champagne!
WAITER: What are we celebrating?
SOPHIA: My daughter has a debilitating disease!
WAITER: I see.
DOROTHY: And it has a name! I'm THRILLED!
WAITER: Of course.
I mean, Michael J. Fox has had Parkinson's for over a decade now, right? And he's still kickin'. So I'm not too worried about dad. Who knows? Maybe he too will write a book. Or guest star on a reunion episode of Family Ties. God knows recently-arrested Brian Bonsall could use the work. And it's always a pleasure to see the delightful Justine Bateman back on tv.
But I digress. Point is, dad rocks, and he is going to get the best care Georgetown can offer. And fortunately he's got his two kickass kids and his super wife to help get him through it. 'Cuz that's what family is for. And there ain't no nothin' we can't love each other through. What would we do, baby, without us? Sha-na-na-na.
Yet again I - and an obediently sitting good dog named Ubu - digress. I'm curious if any of my three (are we up to three yet?) faithful readers have had any experience with Parkinson's Disease. If so, could you share some of your experience, strength, and hope with me? If not, please just keep both of my parents in your thoughts or prayers or whatever. Good vibes from family ties are what help me remain the smiling, happy guy I am. And extended family and friends count as family too. I mean, think about it. If not for them - and for one Very Special Episode On Alcoholism - the world may never have been introduced to the talents of Tom Hanks. Or, for that matter, Marc Price.
What a sad world that would be.
HOORAY to America Ferrera, who won the Emmy last night for Best Actress in a Comedy Series for her excellent work as the title character on the utterly fabulous Ugly Betty, which is this self-proclaimed tv addict's uncontested favorite show now that Gilmore Girls is no longer a contender. Unfortunately Betty's Vanessa Williams and Judith Light didn't win for their equally superb (perhaps even superber!) work in their respective categories of Best Supporting Actress and Best Guest Actress. But no worries. I just can't wait until the second season commences on Thursday, September 27. OMG THAT'S NEXT WEEK! WO-HOO!
And HOORAY to Sally Field, who won a truly well-deserved Emmy for Best Actress in a Drama Series for her amazing work on a new favorite of mine, Brothers & Sisters. But BOO-HISS to the censors who bleeped her impassioned acceptance speech. This is what she said, a sentiment with which I wholeheartedly concur:
"And let's face it, if the mothers ruled the world, there would be no goddamn wars in the first place."
Also censored was the brilliant Kathy Griffin, whom I'll be seeing here in DC once again on Wednesday night. She won for Best Reality Series at the Creative Arts Emmys, or "Schmemmys" as she likes to calls them - the awards given out two weeks ago in the categories of lesser importance. (Less important than Best Writing in a Miniseries? Whatever.) The Schmemmys telecast aired on some cable channel this weekend, but her speech was cut. Here's what she said:
"A lot of people get up here and thank Jesus for helping them win this award, but I have to say nobody has been less helpful in getting me to this moment than Jesus... So I guess all I can really say is, 'Suck it, Jesus! This statue is my God now!'"
Hilarious. Absurd. And pretty much, true. But worthy of censoring? What happened to freedom of speech? There are no "bad words" in there. It's not like she said, "Jesus didn't do shit to get me here!" It's not as though Sally Field went on a profanity-laced tirade about "the fuckin' war." So where is this invisible line drawn? Does America - the U.S., not Ferrera - not have a sense of humor or a heart? Sometimes this country is so retarded. That's all I'm sayin'.
Oh, and not that this is news or anything, but Ryan Seacrest?
You're a douchebag.
Anyone who has asked me for a piece of gum over the past few months has undoubtedly had to endure an enthusiastic spiel from me about the wonders of Stride gum. You see, I'd always had problems with nearly all brands of chewing gum losing their flavor after about 15 minutes in my mouth. Were I to continue chewing beyond that point, the gum's taste would inevitably become increasingly heinous and would make my mouth feel fonkay, which always struck me as a cruel irony since the whole point of chewing the gum in the first place was to freshen my breath.
This spring I saw a commercial for Stride gum. It's the one where all the guys in the gum factory are talking about how Stride's flavor lasts forever. Then one guy pipes up about how that could eventually be bad for business, because with such enduring flavor, people will no longer have to buy as much gum as they used to. Just at that moment, all the machines in the gum factory grind to a screeching halt.
A key part of my customary Stride spiel is that it's the very first product I can ever remember buying strictly because of a television commercial. I mean, the ad declares that the flavor basically lasts TOO LONG, so I thought, hmmm, I'll be the judge of that. Well you know what? The commercial was right! Stride's flavor does indeed last a for a couple hours in my mouth, which was nothing short of a miracle to me. For a while it seemed I'd found the answer to my prayers.
Then summer rolled around, and I began noticing something slightly disturbing. The flat pack of Stride gum, once unwrapped, would sort of melt together in my pocket over the course of one moderately hot summer day. Each piece of gum is 
individually wrapped in waxy paper, but the pieces would all kinda mush together and the paper would sort of melt into the gum, causing a kind of sweat to form on the outside of the wrappers, which would then adhere the wrapped pieces of gum to the inside of the pack. Needless to say, it's disgusting. And once the wrapper comes unstuck from the pack, it's a whole other adventure trying to unstick the gum from the wrapper. By the time it's ready to ingest, it looks like something that's been scraped off a movie theater floor or out of the treads of some nasty-ass sneakers, making it a much harder sell to my friends.
"Um, but the flavor lasts forever! I promise! Just don't look at it!"
I thought maybe this occurrence was unique to me, since I'd never met anyone else who was an out-and-proud Stride user. I thought that perhaps when the awesome power of the gum's unstoppable flavor was combined with my slightly above-average sweating tendencies during the summer, that the conditions were just right to fire up some kind of volatile chemical reaction in my pants and my pants alone. Or something. But last week my friend Hope confirmed that I am not alone. She is also a Stride devotee, and she too has had to confront her own sweaty pack issues.
So today I decided to take action. I called the now-blurry 1-800 customer feedback number on the soggy pack of Stride from which I've been peeling my gum today (pictured above), and I got a very nice young man on the other end of the line. I expressed to him my great appreciation for Stride, then proceeded to air my concerns. He said that the sticky pack situation was a huge concern during Stride's first summer of production in 2006, and that they had taken steps to rectify the situation this year. Obviously, however, the problem still exists, and apparently I am far from the first to sound the alarm. He thanked me for my feedback, took down my mailing information, and said I would be receiving some Stride coupons in the mail within the next week.
It felt good to give something back, you know? Maybe, just maybe, I made a little bit of a difference today. And if nothing else, at least now I've got a little something to look forward to as the unpleasantly frigid - yet delightfully unsweaty - winter months approach. Free, dry gum! Huzzah!
My friend John had a bunch of people over to his place on Saturday night to watch my all-time favorite movie, "Clue". I think there were about 10 people there, two-thirds of whom were "Clue" virgins. HOW EXCITING! [Yes, I realize that this means 6.666 people in the room had never seen "Clue" before. Shut up.]
I'm one of those freaks who would typically rather rewatch a movie I've seen before than watch something new. When it's my favorite movie ever and the room is full of several people who've never seen it before, well, the stakes are high. And you never know if the people you're watching a movie with will be those kind of people for whom a special circle of hell is reserved. By that I mean those who talk or text or get up and walk around or generally distract in some way during the movie-watching experience. You people know who you are.
So you can imagine my sheer delight as the gang took in the movie in the way I'd hoped, laughing at all the appropriate spots and paying rapt attention to the rest. It was a perfect movie night experience. Until the end...
Those of you who know "Clue" are aware that a significant part of its brilliance stems from the fact that, in spite of all the detailed farce of the setup, the writing and blocking somehow manage to allow for three possible endings to exist. When the movie was in theaters back in 1985, viewers did not know which of the three endings they would be seeing. On the DVD, there is the option of picking one of the three endings, or viewing all three in succession. Unfortunately, since I was not the person who hit "Play" on John's remoteless DVD player, I did not realize until the movie's abrupt end that we were actually watching the version featuring only the first ending, which is arguably the least hilarious of the three.
Even more unfortunate is the fact that the BEST PART of the movie, and perhaps for me the best part of any movie ever, doesn't happen until the third ending. Had the overall movie night experience been a drag from the start, full of texting talkers who'd seen the movie before or just weren't that into it, I wouldn't care. But these newbies were genuinely into the movie, and at the end they all said they really liked it. I was crushed that they hadn't even seen the very best part.
Hopefully those 6.666 newly deflowered people from the other night are reading this, and hopefully they (and the rest of you) will take less than a minute to enjoy the classic clip below from the third ending of "Clue", featuring the late great Madeline Kahn.
Reprinted below is an email I sent to several friends and classmates after arriving home in the United States ten years ago today on September 1, 1997. For the record, all of this took place before I embarked upon my reckless career as a drug addict. Also for the record, the medical issue recounted below was gone by the time I left England and has never affected me since. And I still have not seen any of the "Star Wars" movies.
**********************************************
From: Me
Subject: The Truth About Matt Bailer
Friends, Romans, countrymen, and everyone else I've ever met:
Sorry for the bulk email, but I wanted to let all of you know what happened to me this summer before rumors start spreading and the story spirals out of control like a game of Telephone gone horribly awry. In the mother of all nutshells, I'm fine now, and I'll be home in Maryland this semester, recovering from a mysterious near-fatal disease that kept me hospitalized in London for the past three weeks. If you want the whole story (which you know I'll make long but I'll try to make entertaining and complete), read on. If not, see ya later. I'll never know.
Brief warning: Some parts may get a teensy-weensy bit graphic - nothing more graphic than normal body functions that I couldn't perform for a while. But you'll deal with it. I did.
Another brief note: Despite my occasional tendency to hyperbolize and be a little bit jokey about what happened, everything in this message is true, exactly as it happened, with very very very few exaggerations, all of which will be painfully obvious. But this is the story as truthfully, completely, and readably as I can tell it.
That said, here goes.
After seeing 30-some plays in 6 weeks during the brilliant Duke Drama in London program, I decided to stick around for a week after the rest of my group left so I could do my own sight-seeing and club-hopping and whatever. So the entire group flew outta town on a Thursday, and I spent the next day bopping around London hitting this club or that cafe or whatever.
Friday night I was planning to go to my favorite place of dance, but I was feeling a little feverish so I decided instead to lie down and rest for awhile. Well, as soon as I did that my entire body became really sore (like the kind of sore where you something brushes lightly against your arm and your entire body hurts really bad), and no matter what I tried I could not get comfortable. I decided it probably wouldn't be a good idea to go out that night, sore as I was, so I'd just get to sleep early and then wake up early the next day. Well, I didn't sleep at all that night and instead tossed and turned, trying in vain to find a comfortable position, and hallucinating all night long. At various points in these hallucinations I was in the court of some Jabba The Hut-esque king, then I was a math teacher, then one of a family of ants building a hill... I don't know how I remember this, but I do. When I was the math teacher, I was trying to come up with an equation that would help me find the perfect comfortable position I was looking for. This part is not an exaggeration. It was really freaky.
I got out of bed the next morning and followed through with plans I had to meet up with a friend. I was still kind of sore, but walking around made it less bad. I actually just felt tired and kind of sweaty, but it was a hot day so I didn't think much of it. I was supposed to spend the whole day with my friend (who had traveled two hours by train to come into the city and visit), but he said I looked awful at one point and advised me to go get some sleep. He said he could come back later in the week.
So he went home and I went home, and I again laid down and again couldn't sleep. I tried for a while, but with no success. And I was sweating like a pig in heat. Then the really terrifying part happened. All of a sudden, I could barely breathe. I mean, I could breathe, but each breath was really short, and really REALLY painful. It felt like something was stabbing at my lungs every time I breathed. This was when I decided that I was sick. I called my parents at home in the U.S. and told them what was up, and we decided I should head off to the nearest emergency room because, well, I couldn't breathe and that's kind of an emergency.
I went to the front desk at the dorm where I was staying and the girl who was working the night shift, Lisa, walked me to the emergency room which was thankfully only a couple blocks away. There was a three-hour waiting list, but they checked my vitals upon arrival and, because my blood pressure was extremely low, they took me in right away and immediately began doing all kinds of tests. Now, I don't remember much about that first night or the next few days, but Lisa (who stayed with me all night that first night) tells me that they believed I might've had meningitis, so they put me in an isolation room for the night until the doctors could see me in the morning.
Well, I didn't have meningitis. What I did have, as they figured out a couple days later, was a condition called pericarditis, which is an infection of the sac surrounding my heart. This infection caused the sac to swell up so that each time I breathed, my lungs would rub up against it and hurt like hell. So they started treating that...
Then, two days later, they found by x-ray that I had developed a collection of fluid in one of my lungs which, well, wasn't supposed to be there. Because of this, my lungs couldn't operate at full capacity, so the oxygen level in my blood got really low, which made my heart have to work much harder to get its job done. This condition is also known as pneumonia. So now I had pericarditis and pneumonia.
They began draining the fluid out of my lung, yes, by sticking a drain through my back into my lung and providing me with a little fluid-collection handbag to carry around with me at all times. Well, not to carry really, because I wasn't walking at all. I could barely move while lying in bed. I had to pee in bottles.
Then, the next day, they found out that I had developed an enlarged liver. This condition is generally referred to as hepatitis. So now I had pericarditis and pneumonia and hepatitis.
THEN, the next day, they found that I the sac around my heard which had been infected was now filling up with fluid. The fluid was collecting between my heart and lungs, which once again made them start rubbing up against each other, again causing searing pain with each breath. This time, however, the amount of fluid was growing and, basically, was closing in around my heart.
They quickly transferred me to a different hospital where they could drain that stuff out of the narrow space between my heart and lungs. This advanced procedure was too difficult to do at my first hospital. They did the procedure, with me basically out of it the whole time. I began to recover from that over the next few days.
THEN, the following day, they found some fluid in my OTHER lung, and started draining that stuff out of me too. By this time, I was a pro at the whole drain thing. Just kidding. I cried in my mother's arms every time they dug into my back. Oh yeah, so my parents flew over around the third day I was in the hospital, and I'd never been so happy to see them before in my whole life. There were several points during that first week-and-a-half where all I could tell myself was that I wanted to die. I mean, every day I found out something new was wrong with me, and it just kept getting worse and worse and worse. Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, the next day sure enough they'd come up with something new and awful for me to deal with.
And, maybe I'm weird, but I've never done two weeks before without walking, without showering or shaving, without seeing hardly anyone I know. Fortunately, Lisa came to see me every day, and my parents, and a couple other people I had met over there. I was losing my mind, really really depressed, and also physically in a TON of pain. I mean, I'd never even been sick before in my whole life, never been in a hospital before in my whole life, and never been out of the country before in my whole life, and here I was, trapped in a hospital bed in London. Some nights, despite quite strong and moderately successful pain killers (oral injections of morphine, anyone?), I simply couldn't manage sleep, and I would just lie in bed whimpering and crying and tossing and turning (just a little 'cuz it hurt to move too much), and the nurses - who are the closest things to gods and goddesses that I've ever stumbled across in this lifetime - would have to come by and politely shut me up for the sake of the others in the cardiac ward, all of whom were over 90.
It was not fun.
But then, when the third week rolled around I immediately started improving. By Tuesday of the third week I was walking again, showering again, and using a toilet again. Oh yeah. Had my first experimentation with a little thing called constipation too. After a week and a half of stillness, some things just don't move so easily anymore. Damn inertia. After I'd been on that damned toilet for a half-hour, the nurse had to come in and hold my hand while I sweated and cried and tried to push, except I couldn't really push without disrupting all the needles and drains and whatnot that were poking into my organs. Goodtimes. Anyway, slowly but surely, I got back to normal, if you can call me that.
Once I had pretty much recovered physically and mentally and emotionally, one of the nurses - Deborah, the one who had become sort of like my sister away from home - told me that at the point they drained the stuff out of the sac around my heart, if they hadn't caught that when they did and drained it when they did, the fluid would have kept collecting around my heart and it would've tightened it up and soon - like, within a day of when they did the procedure - it would have drowned my heart and killed me. The nurses from my first hospital kept calling the second hospital, just to see if I was still alive. Seriously. I'm convinced they had a betting pool going on behind the nurses' station.
I spent a week recovering and, FINALLY, on the third Saturday, tI was released from the hospital. The really bizarre thing, however, is that despite the dozens and dozens and dozens of blood tests they did on me (which remarkably didn't get me any more comfortable with needles), they were never able to figure out what caused all of this to happen. They said that my recovery was completely independent, and was not related to any medication they were giving me. I just somehow got better. Now, of course, that right there is a silver lining with an accompanying life-long dark cloud because, great, I'm better, but since they don't know why I got sick in the first place, they don't know if it will come back sometime or if it's gone for good. So the rest of my life could just be lived in constant fear. What fun that will be.
I flew home Sunday afternoon, yesterday, August 31st, and will be spending the next four months at home in Maryland, armpit of the nation. However, it'll give me plenty of time to record the 30-or-so songs I wrote in England, and I'll certainly rent a lot of movies (maybe I'll finally see all the "Star Wars" flicks!), so maybe it won't be too bad after all. But I assure you that at many points I will be drastically, pathetically, hopelessly bored. That's why I'm asking for all of you, please, to stay in touch.
Oh, and thanks to those of you who actually cared enough to read all of this. I'll never know how many of you did, but know that, if you did, it really means a lot to me. As Bette Midler put it, "God is watching us from a distance."
And there you have it folks. That's the truth about me.
Picture it. London. August 1997. A beautiful young peasant boy with clear, olive skin...
While perhaps not as domestically earth-shaking an event as, say, when JFK was shot, I have a feeling that most U.S. Americans - shoutout to Miss Teen South Carolina! - remember exactly where we were when we found out that Princess Diana died.
Where was I, you ask? I was in London, coincidentally enough. I had just been released not 24 hours earlier from a three-week stay in the cardiac ward of the University College of London Hospital. This was a year before I started doing drugs, so this particular verge-of-life-and-death drama of mine was in no way related to that. I'll post the details of this story over the weekend. Here's a link to download a song called "Goodbye" which I wrote on the last day of my hospital stay.
My father and I stayed at the Bonham Carter House for the night following my release from the hospital, and it was 5:00am when we got into a cab to take us to Heathrow Airport. On the cab's front passenger seat was the early edition of the daily newspaper, whose cover indicated that Princess Diana (and that ever parenthetical Dodi dude) had been injured in a paparazzi-fueled car accident in France. It seemed as though our cab driver, my dad and I were the only people awake in London at this hour, and therefore the only people who knew of this news. Needless to say, the long ride to Heathrow through the sleepy London ouskirts was more than a smidge surreal.
The cab driver had the news playing on the radio. Before we made it to Heathrow, it was announced that Princess Diana had died. And this will no doubt sound strange, but in that moment and for a while thereafter I felt like my very recent battle with - and subsequent triumph over - a mysterious near-fatal illness in a foreign country was provided with some sort of weirdly symbolic closure by Princess Diana's death. I mean, the timing of it all was just too perfect.
Often I've wondered, if I had died in that hospital, whether Elton John would have rewritten his song about me. Perhaps he'll rewrite it (again) when I do die someday. For as Sandra Bernhard once said: "Your candle burned out long before the royalties ever did."
As my flight departed the awakening city through that surreal August dawn, a nation began to mourn as it had never mourned before. I guess I just have that effect on people.
Do you remember where you were when you learned that I left England Princess Diana died? Let me know in the comments section below. And stay tuned this weekend for the rest of the story...
The e-mail message below - with its rather direct come-hither opening and its awkwardly incomplete bitchslap-n-run conclusion - greeted me this morning in my AOL inbox. If either of my two faithful readers knows this Jennifer Gervasio woman and/or has the moxie to send her an email on my behalf, please tell her that regardless of how many case [sic] she's prepared by (?), in my estimation she's even less than zero. Emailing strangers to tell them they're nothing? Child, please. At least I know the difference between "your" and "you're".
I'd email her myself, but I'm afraid my computer might catch an STD.
-----Original Message-----
To: medc2la@aol.com
Subject: He's also observed
Hallo. How is it going? I am young female Jennifer Gervasio. Email me at ucmrp@mailmessagecenter.info only if you would like to see some of my pictures. It is clear that prepared by two case. Your zero
Time for another long-awaited game of Let's Analyze Matt's Dream! In this dream (from which I just woke up at the ungodly hour of 6am - ugh!), apparently I had some temp assignment in the city, and I was using a car to travel to and from work. I had to park the car in a garage for the day, and there was some asshole of a guy who ran the parking garage. White, middle-aged guy, kinda sizable but not huge, with a brown, almost Jheri-curlish semi-mullet and a moustache. He didn't remind me of anyone specific from my life, though he did perhaps bear a fleeting physical resemblance to a white(r), thicker, much more imposing Lionel Richie with way less class. Which basically means he bore no resemblance whatsoever to Lionel Richie, so let's leave him out of the interpretations, shall we? I have no issues with him. The guy in my dream was more like a Sal. Or a Louie.
This particular morning I had to leave my car behind another car under the garage entrance while I took the key up to the asshole in charge. The next thing I remember is coming back to get my car at the end of the day and seeing it still sitting behind the other car exactly where I'd left it that morning. I noticed that the other car, however, seemed to have been destroyed from above by something or other, either by some giant piece of the garage's ceiling, or by some kind of garage door apparatus. Kind of like in that presently ubiquitous "Life Comes At You Fast" commercial (which I loved the first thirty-seven times I saw it), except that whatever had fallen on the car in my dream hadn't just repeatedly dented one spot on the roof - it had demolished the entire length of the car, seemingly in one fell swoop. Naturally I was concerned, both because the car in front of mine had been completely smashed in, and because my car was still sitting there where I'd left it hours ago, mere inches behind the other car's now ruinous remains. So I hastily went to retrieve my keys from Sal or Louie.
While en route to his little booth, I heard a thunderous noise behind me. I turned around to see that something else had fallen from the ceiling and completely totalled MY car. I looked on in horror, and ran up to the booth, furious. I started yelling at Sal or Louie, screaming that he could've prevented this and that he knew this was going to happen. He laughed at me, basically making fun of me for even bothering to yell at him. Then he kind of dared me to fight him. I was more than a little scared, both because I was carless in a parking garage with a falling ceiling, and also because I'm a lover not a fighter. Good old pacifist me would completely get my ass kicked by this dickhead who basically could not wait to beat the crap out of me. He approached me and was pulling back his arm to take the first punch... when I woke up.
Which of my two faithful readers wants to take a stab at this one? As always, I look forward to reading any and all feedback - no matter how potentially insane - in the comments section below. Just know that I've already considered and discarded any interpretations related to "Dancing On The (Falling) Ceiling". And I'm also fully aware that now, with this morning's subconscious Henny Penny antics, my poultry-themed nickname trifecta is finally complete. Um, yay?
I momentarily contemplated posting the following stand-alone sentence as a blog entry today:
"The last time I smoked a cigarette was exactly four years ago."
But as those of you who have been reading my entries have undoubtedly noticed, I'm not one to leave the blanks unfilled-in. And besides, what if one of my faithful readers wants to know how I did it, perhaps because he/she is struggling with the desire to quit as well? Then read on, faithful readers. This is how it happened.
I spent most of 2003 on a long-term temp assignment at the American Association of Medical Colleges at 23rd & M, assisting a handful of other overqualified temps in the verification of transcript information on medical school applications. My boss was named Shanequa, and her boss was named Cleashay. I shit you not. I could never come up with a name quite so - for lack of a better word - cliché. Not that I haven't tried. I think the word "debris" would make a pretty name. Of course it'd have to be spelled like DeBr'is or something, but still, I think it's lovely.
Anyway, it was an oppressively hot, humid, downright unpleasant morning in late July 2003. I had a 10-15 minute walk from the Metro to the office, during which I would suck the life out of a Parliament 100 every morning without fail. Which reminds me, can anybody explain to me why 100's cost the same as regulars? It always seemed completely counterintuitive to me. I mean, you get like WAAAAY more bang for the buck, right? Or am I missing something?
ANYWAY - focus, Matt! - it was disgusting outside on that late July morning, and I realized that I was already going to be pretty much soaked with sweat by the time I arrived at the office. I simply could not make any logical sense of the desire to voluntarily add cigarrette funk to the general disgustingness in which I'd be stewing for the duration of that particular workday. And while I'd never performed studies or conducted research to test this hypothesis, somehow I independently arrived at the conclusion that inhaling something while it was on fire would probably raise my body temperature even higher than the day's weather already had. So I decided not to have a cigarette on the walk to work that morning.
The day progressed. When it came time for my regular morning smoke break I went through the same thought process as I had on my walk to work. Knowing that the heat and humidity were only climbing higher, I decided to stay at my desk. When lunchtime rolled around I crossed the street to the little buffet place to grab a bite to eat, but chose not to hang around outside ingesting fire while schvitzing my tits off. Afternoon smoke break and the walk back to the Metro, same thing. It was simply too nasty outside to smoke.
Which brings me to one last tangent. Why do smokers get built-in smoke breaks at work? And why, then, do we non-smokers not get "fresh air breaks" built into our schedules? When it's nice outside I'd love to go stand in front of the building and loiter, enjoying the fresh air for 15 minutes before going back inside to work. But I can't just stand there. I'd look like an unprofessional idiot. If my boss happened to be entering or leaving the building at that time - or in the office, looking for me - she'd think I was slacking off. If I were a smoker, however, I'd have a perfectly valid excuse. There's this one guy who works in our building who is literally ALWAYS either in front of the building on a smoke break, or stinking up the elevator en route to a smoke break. If he ever gets any work done he must be staying until midnight, which I kind of doubt is the case. Both of my faithful readers already understand how these types of workplace inequities rile me up. I'm not sure which is worse, allowing flip-flops for women or smoke breaks for smokers. I should write a(nother) letter.
The yucky day recounted above was July 29, 2003. The heat and humidity were the same and/or worse the next day, so my simple logic persevered and kept me from smoking that day as well. And the day after that. By the third day it dawned on me: I think I've just quit smoking. It was not a plan, nor was it a decision. It was really kind of an accident, but once I'd accidentally quit, it was definitely a conscious decision not to start again. A conscious decision informed by a handful of delightfully immediate realizations about my newly smoke-free self. My fingers were no longer yellow! My clothes no longer reeked! I was no longer giving myself lung cancer! Besides, once I'd quit, it just seemed easier to stay quit than it would be to try quitting again in the future. I hadn't planned it, but the timing worked out just fine for me.
So there you have it, dear readers. That is how I accidentally quit smoking. To celebrate this four-year milesone, I think I'm gonna go hang out in front of the building now to enjoy some fresh air. And of course to glare at that other, far more fetid slacker who really should be out of a job by now. Stinky asshole.
After linking to Craig Ferguson's illuminating clip in my last post, I feel a skosh guilty using this post to point both of my faithful readers to this far less eloquent one from Tuesday night's episode of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. It's interesting, however, because it just helps to drive home the idea that, at a certain point, kicking a celebrity while she's down - not to mention riddled with a disease that could kill her - is just plain cruel. And in this case, painfully unfunny.
I promise this will be the last post on this topic. If not, may Rob Schneidner himself come and take my sense of humor away from me. Lord knows he needs it.
Usually I try to keep my humble little blogs away from the realm of celebrity gossip. There are already hundreds of bloggers out there devoted to that crap, and it's just not what I do. Don't get me wrong. Of course I read puh-lenty of that inanely ubiquitous drivel, however I prefer to regard myself as wholly incapable of the vapidity required to write it. That said, an item in today's news hits a tad close to home, so I feel obliged to share.
In yet another unsurprising turn of events, Lindsay Lohan has gone and gotten herself arrested again. According to cnn.com, this time she has been charged with "driving under the influence, possession of cocaine, bringing a controlled substance into a jail facility, and driving on a suspended license."
Okay, um, first things first. "Bringing a controlled substance into a jail facility"??? Apparently times have changed in Los Angeles, because I'm relatively certain that when I was arrested there nearly 4.5 years ago, all drugs had been removed from my person by the time I crossed the threshold of the jail facility. Isn't it the responsibility of the arresting officers to ensure that all drugs are confiscated prior to escorting a scofflaw onto the premises? And is the negligence of the police seriously something they can add to someone's list of charges? Hardly seems fair to charge a person with the cops' own oversight.
But I digress. I like Lindsay. I've seen a handful of her movies, and it has become quite clear to me that she does indeed have the potential to someday become a truly great actress. If she lives long enough.
Many recent articles about the newly legal 21 year-old have mentioned a new high-tech alcohol-monitoring ankle bracelet which she allegedly volunteered to wear upon her release from rehab a couple weeks ago. Each article is accompanied by photographs of Lindsay partying her ass off at some hot club in Las Vegas, fashionably dressed in floozy chic, whooping it up until dawn with said ankle bracelet in plain view. Captions hail that this "new Lindsay" - who bears an uncanny resemblance to the old Lindsay - now merely sips on Red Bull all night long, and that her whooping has become more tame than before.
We recovery folks have a saying. Well, we actually have a lot of sayings, but one of them is that if you keep hanging out at the barber shop, eventually you're going to get a haircut. After seeing so many pictures of recently rehabbed Lindsay hanging out at her metaphorical barber shop, I sensed it was only a matter of time before she'd get herself a metaphorical haircut. (At least she didn't shave her head... yet.) I can't honestly say that I expected this to happen so soon, but I also can't honestly say that I'm surprised. If we addicts keep doing what we've been doing, we'll keep getting what we've been getting. It applies to the good times as well as the bad. It's not exactly rocket science.
It is, however, a disease. And like so many diseases, this one is a killer. I was reminded of that this weekend when I learned that an acquaintance of mine named Timmy had just passed away. I didn't know him very well, but I do remember when I first met four years ago at the very first Crystal Meth Anonymous meeting I attended in Washington, DC. In the time since he had relapsed frequently, but he kept coming back to meetings and trying again. Although it seems he died from complications from an earlier suicide attempt, I've heard that when he died he had 59 days sober. While that number may seem small to a few of my faithful readers, even just one day sober can be a seemingly impossible challenge to a struggling addict. Two months is nothing short of a miracle. Sometimes I forget that keeping such a cunning, baffling, and powerful disease in remission isn't as easy for some addicts as it has been thus far for me. Then something like this happens, and I remember to be grateful.
So tonight, instead of gossiping about Lindsay Lohan, I think I'll take a page from the Aretha Franklin songbook and say a little prayer for her. And I'll rewatch this excellent clip of classy late night funnyman-slash-recovering alcoholic Craig Ferguson, a clip which first aired on his show earlier this year as Britney Spears was going through her head-shaving meltdown. I hope you'll take 12 minutes and 30 seconds to watch this incredibly eloquent clip as well. It's definitely worth the time.
Do it for Timmy.
This is the song I mentioned in yesterday's post, the one I wrote for my friend Darrah. At some point during one of my first NYC visits many years ago, she told me about a boy she had been friends with when she was a little girl. He and his family had to move away, but before they left, the boy gave her a small wooden box filled with pieces of broken glass. He said he was giving her his diamonds to hold onto until they saw each other again.
Every time one of my visits with Darrah has ended, that story has resonated loudly in my mind. So I wrote this song for her and recorded it in my bedroom back in the fall of 1996. You can download the mp3 by clicking here. [NOTE: I think that download link will be good for a limited time only, but I'm not sure how limited, so just go ahead and download it now.]
BOX OF GLASS
she walked away as a cab drove out of her life and down broadway
there she stood waving smiling cold beneath the rising sun
then the teardrop raindrop took its course and the memory became real
and she lonely climbed that empty stoop where they once sat and smoked
her friendship seemed to surely pass the time and time again
the treasure won for three small days was hers upon the shelf
give it back to the owner as he drives into the dirty city dawn
to sleep beside the home that he once knew so well
she didn't have to give him anything
just a box of glass
still the diamonds cut the memory and it shines
for centuries to pass
he loved the game but he didn't know all the rules and he couldn't play
but he knew that the fated ship would sink as soon as it left the dock that day
so he placed it in a bottle and he sailed it to his star above the sea
peaceful dreams inside would wake her up forevermore
she didn't have to give him anything
just a box of glass
still the diamonds cut the memory and it shines
for centuries to pass
she gave him everything
inside a box of glass
her diamonds bring the sunlight down to earth
and the pain will pass
yes the pain will pass into the autumn air
and the night will come again someday
i know her confident integrity
i know her simple sacred sanity
i know her vision keeps him safe
until the sun drowns into the deep blue sea
and all the birds fly east to the wind's defeat
and she will see him come alive when he is free
she didn't have to give him anything
just a box of glass
still the diamonds cut the memory and it shines
for centuries to pass
she gave him everything
inside a box of glass
her diamonds bring the sunlight down to earth
and the pain will pass
yes the pain will pass
I want to offer BIG THANKS to all of you who wished me a happy 2nd 29th birthday yesterday. Words can't say how warm and fuzzy I get inside with each and every text message or email or phone call I receive from you crazy people. I love my friends, and it's true what they say - you get what you give.
I'm delighted to tell you that I had an undramatic yet full day closing out an undramatic yet full week in my undramatic yet full life. I was off from work all of last week, and even though I wasn't working, my week was packed. My "vacation" began last Saturday and Sunday, the first two days of my new weekly DJ gig out at the Guess store in Tysons Corner, VA. [If you haven't yet visited me there, come by and say hello any Saturday or Sunday from 2-7pm.] Then Monday and Tuesday involved some long-overdue bathroom cleaning and general apartment "stuff" sorting, a process which I always seem to start and never seem to finish.
On Wednesday the 4th I had a blast white-water rafting with some friends out near Harpers Ferry, WV. The day was almost as beautiful as our river guide Charlie, a shockingly only 18 year-old soccer player (yum!) blessed with dark, curly hair (yum!) and an aw-shucks straight-but-gay-friendly attitude (YUM!). Then came the thunderstorm and the subsequent rush to the finish line to avoid being struck by lightning, which admittedly would have been a rather fitting demise for a raftful of gay men lusting after an 18 year-old. Storm notwithstanding, it was a fun day start to finish.
Early Thursday morning I took the Chinatown bus to New York, caught up with one friend over lunch and another friend over dinner, and ended the night dancing with another friend at a gay bar in Chelsea called Splash. My fondest memory of Splash is from the fall of 1998, when I went there while a student on the Duke In New York program. Some drunk stranger shoved me onto the stage and I ended up in Splash's weekly amateur strip contest. Nine stacked-n-ripped Chelsea men and little scrawny me, me who NEVER takes my shirt off, me who would NEVER enter any kind of strip contest, standing there beet red and ready to die from embarrassment - or from the anvil I was hoping would fall on my head at any moment. While the rest of the men thought they were hot shit and got off on the exhibitionism of it all, I laughed my way through the whole thing, covering my face in sheer incredulity that this was actually happening. The crowd ate up my genuine humiliation, thanks in no small part to the drag queen hostess strongly egging them on. She dubbed me "Chicken Little", which, as both of my faithful readers may recall, was not my first chicken-related nickname. And then when she was suggestively positioning me and the other two final contestants to have us gyrate for 30 seconds in our undies as the final round of the competition, for some reason I let it slip that I could put both of my legs behind my head at the same time. The crowd lost its collective shit, chanting "Chicken Little! Chicken Little!" Needless to say, I won the $250 prize that night. Perhaps also needless to say, the $250 went up my nose by the end of the night. This was just a few months into the first year of my drug career, while I was still in my coke phase. Ahh, memories!
Moving on. Friday morning I had brunch with my friend Darrah, a sparkling Elisabeth Shue-esque beauty I met in Durham the summer after my sophomore year at Duke. Her West Village apartment became my crash pad for the frequent trips I would take to NYC during school breaks, and we had many great times talking on her stoop, hanging at Art Bar - I even wrote and recorded a song for her called "Box Of Glass". Darrah kind of embodies New York for me, and she lives a life similar to the one I've always dreamed of living there. Anyway, while brunching it dawned on us that we hadn't seen each other in NINE YEARS, since my New York stint during the fall of 1998 mentioned above. So I of course filled her in on the highlights of my drugalog, as well as the ongoing story of my recovery, and she of course was glad that I am still alive. She also brought back a handful of memories from oh-so-long ago that I would have thought my drug-addled mind had completely forgotten. That was truly a beautiful thing. And without her even saying a word about it, I'm once again thinking about moving to New York. The mere sight of Darrah's stoop always plays that vicious Jedi mind trick on me. Stoopid stoop.
I got home from New York on Friday night, DJ'd at Guess on Saturday, and then rested up for Sunday, the big 3-0. The day started with an emotional standing ovation after my piano-playing debut as an accompanist for the incredible vocalists on the Metropolitan Community Church's Praise Team. Then I went out to Tysons to spin all afternoon, which is so great because I'm basically getting paid to loudly listen to whatever music I want all day long. I love it! And I ended up at the Bailer compound out in Camp Springs for a delicious home-cooked meal with the family and the Jackalyst.
Like I said, just another full day rounding out another full week in my full life. I sure am a lucky old man. It's good to be old. Especially since there were times when it didn't look like I'd make it. Now I'm gonna go home, strap on my Depends, settle into my rocking chair, and hit on younger men. And maybe I'll come up with some wise stories to share with you crazy young'uns. 'Cuz that's what we old gay men do. That, and identify with the Golden Girls.
So watch out Dorothy Zbornak. They may have called you Turkey Lurkey in high school, but there's a new Chicken in town!
Kathy Griffin kicked ass Wednesday night at the gorgeous Lyric Opera House in downtown Baltimore. We got stuck in traffic on the way there and didn't arrive until 8:10, but fortunately she didn't go on until about 5 minutes after we were in our seats, so all was well. In her opening segment she asked if anyone had just driven from DC up to Baltimore for the show that night like she just had. She commiserated through our hoots and hollers, saying "Yeah what's up with all the fucking traffic?"
I won't retell all of her stories here, because a) this blog would go on for-EVER; b) I could never do them justice; and c) they will probably all end up in one of her tv specials anyway. I will say that a significant amount of time was devoted to her recent encounters with "too stupid to vote" Paris Hilton, highlighted by brilliantly nuanced imitations of her freaky retarded baby voice and her "half-horse/half-tarantula" likeness. She also discussed a run-in she had with Dr. Phil, whom she repeatedly addressed merely as "Phil" in an apparently successful attempt to ruffle his feathers. Hee. Other targets included Oprah and her boyfriend Gayle, Aaron Carter and his methed-up complexion, Paula Abdul and her onscreen oxycontin passouts, and Larry King and his seemingly shapeshifting head. And of course, Miss Ryan Seacrest.
The show ended with yet another in a long line of hilariously infamous tales from Kathy's apperances on The View. This was from the first day immediately following the big Rosie vs. Elisabeth blow-up, and Kathy was scheduled to sit in as a guest co-host. Apparently one of that day's "Hot Topics" involved the age-old (heh) issue of menopause. Here's what Kathy said:
Those women on The View looooooooove talking about menopause. Menopause menopause menopause.... So we were talking about how once you hit menopause, your vagina dries up. Little Elisabeth - bless her heart - didn't believe us, so I told her, "It's true! I'll admit it, I'm not afraid of a little K.Y."
And you know what Barbara said?
"I pwefer Astwo-Gwide."
I'd like to take this opportunity to point both of my faithful readers to the glorious return of one of my favorite online features, the Chart Flashback column on Entertainment Weekly's website. Every few weeks or so, EW blogger and music aficionado Whitney Pastorek lovingly takes Billboard's top 10 singles of that particular week from some random year over the past few decades, revisiting each song with highly entertaining combs of varying fine-toothedness. [Thanks to YouTube, she is also able to provide the often dubious videos for each song in her column.] Sometimes she offers her opinions on how well a song and/or its video has held up over time. Frequently she'll throw in personal anecdotes or memories she has attached to a song. And every once in a while, she'll just sum up a song in one word and give it a grade. For this particular edition of her column she has chosen to evaluate the top 10 singles of this week from 1989. This is exciting to me for a few reasons.
First of all, 1989 was my favorite year in pop music. It was sort of a random transition year from the hair-sprayed ubercheese-that-knew-it-was-cheese of the 1980's to the hair-gelled ubercheese-that-thought-it-was-cool of the early 1990's. As you'll see in her column, crap acts like Milli Vanilli and New Kids On The Block (sorry Amy!) cross paths with more streetwise acts like Bobby Brown and Neneh Cherry. Throw in some veterans like Natalie Cole, Bette Midler, and Donna Summer, and you've nearly rounded out quite a wacky top 10. I LOVE THAT SHIT! Today? A top 10 like that would NEVER happen. Sad.
Also, for a period of time in middle school and high school I was kind of obsessed with the top 40, even going so far as to create my own weekly lists and countdowns. (If I hadn't done so before, I have now completely outed myself as a dork. But a music dork, which isn't quite so bad, right? Lovable, even?) Along with this obsession came a fascination with the charts in Billboard magazine. I ended up getting a subscription for a few years while I was in high school, but this week, with this particular top 10, is the first issue of Billboard I ever purchased.
The reason I remember the top 10 from this particular issue is because it was the week that "Cry" by a Welsh band called Waterfront peaked at #10. Nobody - Whitney included - remembers this one-hit wonder, but it spent so much time at the top of my own weekly countdowns that it ended up becoming my overall #1 song of 1989, and I was thrilled that it managed to graze Billboard's top 10. Perhaps even more significantly, "Cry" was the very first cassette single (remember the "cassingle"?) that I ever purchased. These watershed acquisitions of my first cassingle and my first issue of Billboard came within mere minutes of each other. We were on a 7th grade end-of-the-year trip somewhere downtown and we went to Union Station for lunch. Pretty exciting, with its food court and its train schedules and its SAM GOODY! It was there that I bought the cassingle for "Cry" (as well as the cassingle for "Let The River Run" by Carly Simon). Shortly thereafter I wandered into one of the train station's comprehensive magazine stores and picked up my first ever copy of Billboard. I think I spent all of my lunch money on these purchases. No Sbarro's for me, thankyouverymuch! Despite the now obvious red flags which somehow evaded this 11 year-old audiophile's wide-eyed gaze, my heart grew ten sizes that day.
So without further delay, I invite you to take a trip back in time. Get a Gumby-do like Bobby, prepare to dine with the Fine Young Cannibals, and check out Billboard's Top 10 Singles for the week ending June 24, 1989.
Maybe you'll thank me in 8 more years.
Last night I was talking to a fella I've been hanging out with lately. He had not yet read my most recent blog installment, so he asked me what I thought of Cirque Du Soleil.
