Andrew, W. T. F.

Can you believe it, over 7 months since the last entry! At this point, I believe the humane thing to do is to let this blog die a natural death, heaven knows, it's been without food, water or affection long enough to have wasted into nothing, but nah, today is not a good day to die; today is a day to live a little bit longer, at least until the super pandemic arrives.

So a brief update. Several things have happened since the last entry, which is good because that was a long time again, and a static existence is no existance at all.

1) I returned from London. F**k their banking system.
2) Both Harper and Campbell got re-elected. F**k the pestulent right wing neo-cons.
3) Michael Jackson and Farah Fawsett competed in the for most media coverage in the semi annual Great Celebrity Death competition. Michael won by a landslide.
4) I went to see Andrew W K in concert.

This is point upon which I wanted to comment, mostly because it made for a catchy entry title, but also because it was such a bizarre gong-show of an event for several reasons, not the least of which was the audience.

For those of you who might have happened upon this blog and know nothing about Canada, know this: Canadians don't generally get excited about music. There is little more to dancing than exaggerated head-nodding, no crowd surfing and no breaking shit, usually. Billy Bob Thornton probably best described this phenomenon by famously labelling Canadian crowds and "potatoes without the gravy", as you can see.



However, something about keytar over dubbed CD background tracks really brings out the beast, for at this concert, the crowd did indeed go wild, even breaking the sound system, thank god, so we didn't have to stay to the end of the set out of some mistaken sense of propriety.

More to come after a good nights sleep. Peace out, and rock on.

This explains a lot

"Hey daughter, just cause your dad is a raging alkie, don't mean you can 'hassle the Hoff'. Just f-off and leave me on the floor to finish my Wendy meal".

Up next, a post that doesn't involve a embedded YouTube video.

We have your friend staying in the Awk-ward, on your left, past the vending machines

This show is one of the good things I'll be bringing back from the UK, though I suppose I could have just downloaded the whole thing from the internet. Live and learn, live and learn.

El stupido

Ok, it's been a month a half, I apologize, but changing countries is a full time job. So, incidently, is working full-time, which I have been doing for the past 3 weeks. I worked 8 days in a row recently for a neurotic hotel patroness who was too exhausted after her vacation to her Italian olive grove to talk to me about how she doesn't want to pay me the wages she promised, which are already shit, did I mention?

I'm all full of piss and annoyance. And it's all England's fault. Yeap, if it's one thing I lived from living in 4 different countries, it's that whatever doesn't your way is entirely the fault of your new surroundings. Whether it is ones inability to get money from the ATM cause it isn't directly linked to your foreign bank account, or misunderstanding the transit system and missing your stop by a a measly 200km, or having to endure alcohol for sale in the supermarket and wondering why everyone is puzzled by the high rates of alcoholism, distance lands are designed specially to frustrate non-natives. They have standing committees that conceive of and implement suggestions for making local colour and bureaucracy as redundant and irritating as possible, like making the bank card come one week apart from it's pin number, and giving young people the insatiable urge to steal bicycle accessories.

Perhaps the biggest let down was the lack of the 6 figure income and hordes of screaming fans instantly wanting to become my friend the moment I landed. I thought surely their would have been at least a welcoming ceremony Prince Charles in attendance; I understand the queen may have been too busy, but what does Charles have better to do with his time? Watch Wimbleton in the rain? And watching the new James Bond movie in it's native land didn't even make it any cooler. What freakin' gives?

I'll give England exactly 6 months to make it up to me, then I'm out of here.

The fad of the secondury

While cruising the net looking for a free downloadable copy of the Picard Song, I was directed to YTMND Wiki, "explaining the Internet one article at a time", and discovered that the Picard Song was one of the top "fads" of 2004. Forgive me for sounding past my expiry date, but I remember when fads were things like harmony balls, Guess jeans, Michael Jackson hair, crimpers, and one liners from Saturday Night Live. But the times, they are a changing, and now fads are apparently largely electronic, post-ironic, and moving in and out faster than a couple hundred points on the New York stock exchange.

A huge number of fads are limited to a single image, plus sound bite, like the infamous "Safety Not Guaranteed", another smash from the summer of '04. This is the remixed version, feature Bill and Ted: Excellent!



This fad, like white trash amoeba, spawned subsequent copy fads, and take-off fads mostly of the same quality you'd expect from recycled window cocking, although some are not wholly without merit. like this one.

This reminds me of my grade 6 hypercard project, aptly titled "Wanted: dead or alive". I got as far as making the the motorcycle pull very slowly up to the jailhouse with no one riding it.

The best part of these fad is attempts to explain them, as the line on the wikipage does whereby "the nature of the man's hair and serious tone of the ad (This is not a joke) adds to the humour". Thus that page in human psychology is written, everyone may now close their books. Entire universes spring up around these fads as well; in this case, there seem to be a dedicated handful of individuals who are actively looking for the Timetraveler, and "sightings" of him and evidence of his meddlings with history are cropping up like scabs on the unwashed homeless. One user has photographic evidence of the Timetraveler's success in a civil war era photo he claims to have found in his attic.


Naturally, there have also been attempts to call the number in the add, and scour Oakville, California, to find a certain Kentucky Waterfall, some of which has reportedly succeeded. Who can blame them? I called the Ghostbusters hotline after I saw the movie the first time, but then I was only 8; I don't know if the Time Traveler Hunters have the same excuse.

As hilarious as all this is, I must confess, I am finding the world increasingly harder to believe thanks to the wealth of BS we all have constant access to. Yet it is irresistably satisfying to pursue inane goals, like finding a guy with a mullet and asking him is he really has travelled back in time, than setting our hearts, as a society, to actual introspection and working towards goals in waking life that might effect the course of our history more poignantly than an Aryan Louisiana Purchase adding one more confederate soldier to the genetic diveristy of the Southern US. It's rather like what is said about acaedemia in general: Debates, and in this case hollow pursuits, can go on forever so long as there is nothing at stake.

I'm sick of nothing anyone does meaning anything, and I mean that on a very basic level. And I am aware of the hypocricy of this statement, having just spent over an hour searching the net for singin' Picard, researching a temporally challenged mullet man, and then writing about it on a useless blog no one reads. But that's the point! Irrelevance is like eyebrows, or HPV: Everyone has them, as is more or less powerless to do much about it, vaccine notwithstanding. This society would have Maslow turning in his grave. Time now more than ever to remember the immortal words of Robert Browning: Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp or what's a heaven for?

Just so long as we aren't grasping at nothing but straw.

Freebies

Having just witnessed the scramble of my roommates in their admirable move of umpteen boxes of stuff out of our old house -may she rest in peace- my mother decided that she wanted to clear some things out of her house, you know, while the light was still green for "go". And she unearthed some treasures from my teen-years that make for easy entries - "artwork", and crap you write down in a "personal" journal with the vain and constantly self-thwarted hope that someone totally awesome will pick it up where you "accidentally" left it, read it, and think you are the hottest thing since picked peppers and Miracle Whip. The following entries are unedited, un-spellcorrected, uncensored, and totally fierce! Bracketed comments are my adult wisdom laughing audibly at my pathetic adolescent feelings.

January 1st, 1995:

Get out of rut (I was getting a little tired of the all-perogy diet)

Resolutions:
Have Martha Steward assasinated (whatever did she do to earn my death threat?)
Stop being a @#!@ (still working on that one)
collect, hobby, get going, do something (I would be totally lost if I hadn't set such lofty goals for myself).
Write better poetry (how about "write no poetry", that one I can do)
Don't watch bad TV (Does Reno 911 count?)
Leave you now, see you later (I fulfilled this one terrible well without wanting to)

We're not getting away (underlined...for emphasis).

January 2nd, 1995

11:30 Eden's house 5548 Manson, guitar remember (As if I could forget, I was madly crushing on the boy. This note was left for the one and only purpose of making Grumpus seethe with envy).

The outhouse w/moon carved
in it is way too small
and the smell will make you
go insane, real back to nature
propane luxury (poetry: because less really is more)

January 3rd, 1995, Schooooooolllllllllllll

Personal Profile (just a friendly reminder for forgetful ol'e me)
Name: #######*******%%%%%%%% (must protect...identity... from....Internet)Phone: ****
Address, *(*(*)HHDHJJLSKJSLJ Powell River, B.C (suffice it to say this information was all correct and dutifully recorded).
Favourite band(s) babes in Toyland, Sonic Youth, Nirvana (I pee-ed my pants at a solemn beach vigil for Kurt Cobain, and would have eaten babies for a piece Kat Bjellands ribboned tresses)
Movie: Transformers T.V. Show: Transformers/X-files (But in a fair fight of Mulder versus Optimus, Optimus was always the true conquerer of my heart).
Current obsession: Tranformers/pepsi (the boy, so dubbed, not the drink)
Hobby(s) guitar, poetry I HATE ALL SPORTS
Greatest fear: 1996 (Y2K can suck it)
MMM (that's Most Memorable Moment for all yous illiterates) Friends and I burning New Kids on the Block tapes and screaming Weird Al's "dare to be stupid" (This is a complete fiction. How embarrassing to think that seeing how I felt that I had to make something up, that my imagination could not think of anything more impressive. Damn, I mean, "the first time I snorted heroin" would have probably earned me more admiration)
MEM: Grade 6 (The first year I rejoined humanity, there were some awkward moments, like walking upright and trying not to bite)
Favourite saying: We're all going to die/ run save yourself/ NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO (If I had I loonie for everytime I uttered those words, I might be able to buy someone a steaming pile of nothing)
Favourite song: Tom Violence (oh the haunting vocals of Thurston Moore)

(Post script) Heartfelt bullshit (can I get an "oh yeah"?)

January 4th,1995

null glitter pony promises
honey homely, paget princess
Angel bleed
Angel lead
verhain starburst (I don't like this shade for the drapes, dear, it's a little on the verhain side).

And aside from the Transformer Checklist, and a couple of long since pirated glitter-crayon drawings, that is all she wrote. I think keeping my shame on record like this will help me forgive it in those still farting through their teen years, aggressively unaware that the real suffering is waiting in the hidden dark of Grown-up land, to pounce on them and tear their thorny hearts out. Stay tuned for the glorious pictures.

Seniors in love

My grandfather, a widower of 2 years, has a new girlfriend.

Her name is Michelle, and they met at the Shady Pines nursing home (okay, I don't know what it's called, but if it's good enough for Sophia Partillo, it's good enough for my ole grand-dad) and he actually tried to marry her. Fortunately, they were both taken to court and declared too incompetent for marriage - how I wonder why they don't put more celebrities through that gauntlet - so now they have to be content only to comfort one another, in the nursing home, for the rest of their limited days. Sometimes he puts her on when we call, and she whispers into the receiver "don't cho worry, I'm takin' good o your granpaa". What care? They live in a freaking home! All comforts provided for...except... you know, I get the terrifying suspicion that it's not just the kind of cup-of-tea-and-a-slice-of-fresh-apple-pie sort of comfort they are engaged in: I think they might be having S.E.X!

The idea of a sagging sack of osteoporotic, wheezened flesh that my grandfather has come to inhabit, playing hide the salami with another tooth-less, immobile med-popper, behind the pulled curtain of a gated hospital bed makes my skin crawl. Blessedly, there seems to be a mental block firmly in place preventing my imagination from actually imaging all the gory details - the Hindi film board in my mind sort of covers everything with mist and sets the lawnmower off in the distance so I don't catch any stray moaning. Nevertheless, my parents, ewww; my grandparents, criminal! And Aristotle agrees with me on this point too: he wrote in his Essays that woman should get no hanky panky past menopause, and men should give up the snake and mongoose game between the ages of 45-55. And you know, I kind of thought all the old people were on the boat with this one as well. I mean, if you can repeat the same, lame mantra of "whoa, grandpa's gotta sit down for a minute kids, I ain't as young as I used to be" to get out of playing soccer with your adolescent in-laws, then where do you get off being all bow-jiji-bow in the bedroom?

Isn't sex was a right reserved exclusively for those with hot,steamy bods whom the thought of inspires sexy thoughts worthy of menage e moi action in other similarly sexy peoples? People like this per say:



and this


However, according to the CMAJ, 70% of couples over age 70 still have "intercourse" an average of 4 times a month. So, regardless of their wrinkly-ness, most seniors still claim the rights of most couch-humping teenagers on a not entirely infrequent basis. Sexuality is also a very reliable predictor of morbidity in the elderly as well, cause when you loose the urge to Uh! the will to live tends to follow closely behind. So I suppose I should be happy that my grandda is still a horny bastard, because that means he'll live many more full and wonderful years...in a nursing home. Though that thought is thoroughly depressing, I am meant to be happy that my grandfather, despite being a bit insane, is able to share goodtimes with this woman, and that despite being in that eight layer of hell reserved especially for nursing home residents, he is basically happy as a Frenchman living next to a brothel.

Eventually, I hope to get over the grossness and just be happy for them. But eeeww, damn.