Shows I Missed

I finally understand all the hullabaloo surrounding the astronomically expensive space program. There is not a single man who wouldn’t penetrate the troposphere for an opportunity to put his boot on a redhead and thrust his flag into her crater.

Doesn’t mean I had the cheese for said redhead, or even a theatrical representation of her. Rather than going, I stayed at home and matched the carpet with the drapes.

[via I Am Your Canadian Boyfriend]

Just what I want to do. Attend the afterparty of a fashion show, where bird-boned ladies twice my height talk about themselves and snort powder from heaps that cost more than my computer. Not only has every fashion show I’ve explored seemed like an elaborate ploy to get attention, it’s also felt like a better-clothed and thinner extension of everything I hated about college at N.Y.U., and I already have the Internet for that, thanks. If you want a hug, just ask next time.

(And no, I wasn’t invited. So there’s that.)

Instead, I worked on my own precarious gambit for attention, You Talk to Me. I sported a slinky cotton ensemble from the 2008 Hanes collection: provocatively cut, versatile, and accented with bold stains of drip-brewed Brasilian Maragogype.

[via Either The Drapes Go Or I Do]

Why would I go to a show in Australia? Isn’t that whole continent in flames right now? Not a surprise. They’re all convicts, and it’s a good bet that a high percentage of them are arsonists.

Couldn’t have gone anyway. I was occupied with the Promethean task of re-igniting our furnace’s pilot light, which goes out more often than Paris Hilton.

[via fucking MySpace]

Those 8-track drugs our parents had back in the seventies were so weak you had to borrow your cousin TeeTee’s VW Type 2 just to be able to leave your dealer’s house with enough to get you tingly. The one thing they did was tilt your perspective enough that you thought disco was more than smoke machines, sparkling props, and sex with insecure divorcées in azure eye shadow. Other than seedy-ass grass, most drugs from that decade didn’t make your sex drive plummet or your sperm black out, which facilitated the genesis of my generation. Thank you, party favors.

Even with an Astrodome full of uppers, I wasn’t about to make it to this screening. I wasn’t yet a zygote. Not the faintest trace of me on God’s breath.

[via Waxin’ & Milkin’]

One fog-choked morning, on my way to get groceries, a cold wiggled passed the gauntlet of my immune system and replaced my head with a sandbag. I arrived home, put down the onions I had purchased, and I took a Sleeping-Beauty nap that somehow stretched out over five months. Everyone banged on my door and filled my phone with histrionic messages, demanding confirmation of my safety. No one got through my dreamless slumber. Not my landlord, not my parents, not my parole officer, nobody.  A rich rind of thorned vines crept around my house and squeezed, blocking out sunshine completely. It ensnared both songbirds and song. One day, after every other person had either forgotten about me or given up, my girlfriend procured a machete from the Internet, supposedly forged by Orcs from stainless steel and dragon spit. She spent the better part of a week hacking through the integument of dangerous creeper, avoiding allergy, injury, and worse. After countless labored hacks and slashes, she wiggled through my bedroom window and planted a sloppy wet one on my dusty crotch. I instantly awoke, hungrier than a Rwandan.  I realized that, among other things, I had missed almost half a year of life, blogging, candy consumption, and this musical performance.

[caught it here.]

When I was younger, dripping optimism, and at the apex of my physical vigor, I acquired a reputation for driving around in my shit-heap 1987 Hyundai hatchback while craning my neck out the window and whistling at females twice my age. Lodged roughly in the center of the cracked maroon dash, above the ashtray that fell out every time I accelerated, was the abused tape player. My pattern was such: put on the one tape available, play it at full volume through the rattling bass-absent speakers, drive around and around the town I was stuck in until either the gas ran out or the cassette snapped. One of the tapes in question during this era was Mudhoney’s Superfuzz Bigmuff Plus, the perfect soundtrack for driving from the cemetery to the skate rink to the clubhouse to the Arby’s. Don’t know what it would be like to see them now. They probably wouldn’t sound right without me sipping a Tiger’s Blood slushy from the driver’s seat of a lemon.

I spent the evening of the Mudhoney concert pursuing endeavors free of high-school nostalgia, namely: sex. I didn’t wear a safety belt.

[via Tuff Shit]

I’ve done gallons of idiotic things. Once I built a bonfire on a suburban sidewalk in broad daylight. I dated the daughter of a guy who thought that AIDS was something you caught from “a gay” sneezing on you. I tattooed an enormous spark plug on my forearm. I even voted for Ralph Nader, but that’s what cocaine will do to you. Fortunately, I’ve never done anything as stupid as attending a Widespread Panic show. I’m not about to slip into the idiot abyss now. If I want the delicate bones in my eardrums to go slushy, I’ll pour hydrogen fluoride into them, thank you.

Instead, I went to the roller rink and found a large dude named Charles who wore puffy brown jeans and a permanent sneer. I called him a bitch.

The doctors say I’m lucky the scars are in places I can conceal with clothing.

[poster design: Chris Bilheimer, via this place]

Early one morning, while on the bus reading To Kill A Mockingbird, I fell in love with a font. My mind turned from Atticus Finch to Verdana. Like the charged air before a storm, I could sense the change in the ink’s pallor and earthy perfume. Suddenly, Boo Radley was represented not by the words so much as the words’ specific genetic makeup, its design DNA. 

So I delicately followed the sensual curves of the S in Scout. The spaces between the letters in her name became tiny breaths connecting all fragments to the single heartbeat of the entire word, on through the cardiac rhythm of the entire sentence, working in concert with the white space on the rest of the page, forming the visceral makeup of the overall story.

As I’m climbing off the bus, I think, “Verdana is the typeface next door. It’s a font that will hold hands with the eye, emotion and sweat blooming ad infinitum. I’m tired of the exotic fonts like Braggadocio and Haettenschweiler. They’re high maintenance and cavalier, sans versatility and elegance. It is time to settle down with a solid font like this Verdana.” 

We decided to form an everlasting union and elope right away. Family wouldn’t have understood, so we had a small ceremony in a cozy bookstore that night, away from the scorn and poor kerning of others. It was everything we’d hoped, intimate and romantic and legible. Our wedding night was bold and on point. Verdana tickled my fingers with every letter of “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” 

Without the love story, I probably would have skipped the exhibit anyway. I’m just that type.

[via here]

When the two men of Lightning Bolt perform, they assemble their instruments in the middle of the audience. The drummer wears a ski mask with his mic taped to the inside, the guitarist seizures about, and the music they make with the crowd whiplashing around them sounds like werewolves riding a triple-loop roller coaster with a hurricane rolling in. In short, it’s a life changing experience channeled through a few large amps. If one’s ultimate goal was to have a deeply fulfilling existence, attending this musical event was imperative.

I went to a friend’s house and watched Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, which didn’t feature any wailing guitars or sweaty art-school punks. Just lots of salt water and a little bit of sunburnt tension. I drank a beer, too. There goes my chance at a colorful life.

[via Chongoloid]

I enjoy nightmarish hallucinations just as much as the next guy, but let’s be honest: with all my familial obligations, work schedule, and compulsive need to check my email every forty-three seconds, I simply don’t have time for this Mickey-Mouse bullshit.

Instead, I spent my time wisely. Drank a couple of pints of Guinness, wrote a few dozen haiku, and fell asleep watching The Secret of NIMH.

[via some guy’s myspace-ness]