I have, in scientific measurements, what is known as a "shit ton" of hair and it is naturally curly. I keep it in pretty good shape, but for the regular trims (because those cost money and my damned kids are all spoiled with this "eating regularly" craziness.) Yesterday, I pulled a section of my shit ton of hair back and was rocking a really pretty cascade of curls completely by accident, which made me happy. In an instance of what can best be described as "Joy's WTF?! Luck," a guy sat down next to me at the Tavernacle and started talking to me. This shouldn't be freaky, but it was because he was wearing a necktie at 6:30 on a Sunday. I think we know what sort of people wear ties to bars on $5 pitcher Sundays -- that's right: Crazy People... people who Love Jesus... people who want to tell you how much they Love Jesus... people who want you to know that Jesus Loves you, even if you are sucking down draft beer like somebody's going to take it away from you. But then He really started laying down the Weird.
He said, "Wow! You have pretty hair. Can I touch it?"
Let's pretend for a second that isn't creepy. Let's pretend that it's perfectly normal to walk into a bar, sit down next to a woman, talk to her for five minutes and then ask if you can touch her hair.
IT'S NOT POSSIBLE BECAUSE THAT IS TOO FUCKING WEIRD FOR WORDS! I didn't even know the guy's name... and when I pointed that out, he extended his hand and said, "I'm Randy. Now, can I touch your hair?"
I wanted to say, "No you cannot touch my hair, you nutjob," because that seems like the most rational response in the face of such oddness, without having to resort to kicking someone in the junk. But before I could get the words out, my friend Chris took the option away from me by standing up and looking menacing. The Tie Guy moved three seats down and looked sad. I didn't much care because, seriously -- that's like a prelude to ending up in a dumpster. In pieces.
* * *
I saw a strange Burger King ad last night, with what appears to be the shifty Burger King from the future hanging out with people who are dressed like sperm. Okay, maybe I'm remembering it wrong, but I know it was all futuristic and it really disturbed me. You can't advertise cigarettes on television, but a puppet-y looking guy wearing some sort of festish gear can show up in a bedroom, passing out breakfast wraps and that sends an okay message to the young impressionable minds of America. Really?!
* * *
My stalemate with TV Land continues. They're no longer forcing High School Reunion down my throat 22 times a day because they had to make way for something called, The Big 4-0. This is a show about people turning 40 (der,) and to be honest -- it's retarded. The first episode was about some never-was former football player who was turning 40 and wanted to do something to mark it and make it special. I have no idea what he wanted to do because every time I attempted to pay attention, lights started to flash and I could no longer feel the bottom half of my face. I'm pretty sure he did whatever it was he set out to do because the final scene (which I saw, once I regained consciousness and my motor skills,) was him with some balloons and a cake. I doubt anybody celebrates much if you fail to meet your birthday goals.
Unless they pity you.
* * *
If you're going to go to all the trouble of writing your Gather Armageddon article under your way cool new alias of "Crusader on a mission" (with just that sort of dubious capitalization,) you probably shouldn't out yourself three-quarters of the way through by referring to yourself by your name -- unless you want James Bond to storm into your trailer and kick your ass out of fear that you have somehow superceded him in espionage tricks.
* * *
Draft beer out of taps that haven't been cleaned since the Clinton Era is something akin to drinking Satan's urine. "Cheap" doesn't do anything to improve the experience, either. I'm probably culturing some weird bacteria in my mouth right now that you normally don't see north of the Equator. My tongue feels swollen and, let me tell you -- that's not a pleasant sensation.
* * *
21 April 2008
20 April 2008
Of Love and Dancing
Okay.
I seriously almost cried just now, watching the Bay City Rollers sing "Saturday Night." Don't get me wrong - losing 185 pounds of stupid fat in the form of throwing Satan's Retarded Little Brother out of my home is the best thing that's happened to me in a long time. I'm just mourning my youth, I think - or more like lamenting the loss of what I thought my life was going to be like. There's one of them "double edged swords" for you.
I was a youngster in the days when Disco was cool and great fistfuls of John Travolta's chest hair were considered damned sexy. I was young and naive enough to believe Disco, like C.H.I.P.S, was permanent. If you traveled back in time and talked to my 9 year old self, you'd probably want to punch me in the face. I would encourage you to do that, too; Somebody needs to knock some sense into me before I start sporting that FeMullet in 6 years. But I digress. I was all over the disco stuff, as much as a prepubescent could be.
In fourth grade, Vicki "The Bitch Who Would Ruin My Life ON PURPOSE in 7th Grade" Y. was quite the fan of the crazy sound that was rocking the airwaves, too. She even went so far as to write a really crappy three act play that was set in a discotheque and it revolved around three pretty young things hoping for their Last Chance for Romance. In a move that could be easily be misconstrued as oddly feminist, every character written required ovaries. I will explain to you now that getting the boys in my 4th grade class involved in a play (that also includes dancing,) involved basically the same Sisyphean effort as getting those same 4th grade boys to play Barbie Dolls. I unsuccessfully tried to accomplish both. I still have a scar on my left arm from what I like to call the "Chris G. Skipper Incident."
So Vicki wrote her not-really-feminist manifesto and even got permission from our teacher, the oldest and most sadistic woman living at that time, to stage a production for the entire class. Because it was my 15 minutes to be Vicki's best friend that week, I was given the covetable role of "Darla," the character not quite a pretty as "Anastasia," the girl who will have every boy panting and excited and begging to dance with her. Vicki would be playing Anastasia, and I sincerely doubted she'd be able to fill her other myriad duties of director, producer, prop mistress and all-around Hitler-like dictator with itty-bitty-breasts a-budding. I didn't want to see her "fail," per se, but I did want an opportunity to get my hands on the script which included very little actual dialogue and no discernible plot whatsoever. Seriously, Act III read something along the lines of, And then they all show up and have some pretty colored drinks and dance. Anastasia has a fight with Robbie. They make up. The End. From about halfway throught the first page, the whole thing became less of a "script," and became something more of a "suggestion." The quiet writer inside of me at that time was deeply offended.
It was my foolish insistence that people watching a play might want some plot or, at the very least, decent dialogue that didn't contradict itself and involved more than the phrase "Let's Dance," regurgitated like bad Lo Mein at five minute intervals that proved to be my downfall. Even our peers, who would have gladly swapped their Star Wars trading cards for what was shaping up to be a three hour long production of Saturday Night Nothing if it meant the Succubus of Room 114 couldn't torture us with more fractions, would be pelting up with our oversized copies of Your World and You twenty minutes into it. Vicki did not take my suggestions as being "constructive." She felt I was challenging her authority and "acting big."
So she fired me.
I then spent my recesses watching her and Karen R. scheme and whisper and practice disco dancing. And while I longed to be a part of her group again, I yearned for something more: to be grown up, to be desired, to be feminine and graceful, dancing all night with someone who found me irresistible. This is the mind of a young girl at its very worst and its very best. And tonight, when I heard the Bay City Rollers singing about dancing on a Saturday night, I didn't immediately feel sad because I am sitting in my bed, wearing boxer shorts I stole from my son when he outgrew them and an "I'm With Stupid" tee shirt that serves no real or clever purpose, except to insult the dog lying next to me. I didn't feel sad because I am 39 now, and at home on Date Night and watching something on VH1 about female rappers wearing tiaras (a truly, Joy-Specific WTF Moment if ever one existed,) and sharing slightly stale Pringles with the cat.
I just felt kind of badly for the 9 year old me who really expected so much more than what she got when it came to dreaming about love and dancing. Oh, I don't feel too badly for her; she'll live in Paris and New York. She'll travel extensively. She'll meet people who will help her be successful, people who will love her and people she will love, but she'll never be the Queen of the Disco, and I know, in my heart, that's what she really wanted.
Just so you know: Vicki's play closed before it ever opened, due to the fact that you can't scotch tape tin foil onto a soccer ball and expect it to look like anything other than some sort of sad joke. We went back to playing jacks at recess, which suited me fine, because I could get to tensies and around the world in my sleep. Disco, as we know, began to suck and it wouldn't be too far in the future before I heard the sound they were calling "punk," that spoke to me more and on a deeper level than the BeeGees ever did.
But it might have been nice to have been Darla, the not "as pretty" one, with three or four spoken lines and a scripted grace.
I seriously almost cried just now, watching the Bay City Rollers sing "Saturday Night." Don't get me wrong - losing 185 pounds of stupid fat in the form of throwing Satan's Retarded Little Brother out of my home is the best thing that's happened to me in a long time. I'm just mourning my youth, I think - or more like lamenting the loss of what I thought my life was going to be like. There's one of them "double edged swords" for you.
I was a youngster in the days when Disco was cool and great fistfuls of John Travolta's chest hair were considered damned sexy. I was young and naive enough to believe Disco, like C.H.I.P.S, was permanent. If you traveled back in time and talked to my 9 year old self, you'd probably want to punch me in the face. I would encourage you to do that, too; Somebody needs to knock some sense into me before I start sporting that FeMullet in 6 years. But I digress. I was all over the disco stuff, as much as a prepubescent could be.
In fourth grade, Vicki "The Bitch Who Would Ruin My Life ON PURPOSE in 7th Grade" Y. was quite the fan of the crazy sound that was rocking the airwaves, too. She even went so far as to write a really crappy three act play that was set in a discotheque and it revolved around three pretty young things hoping for their Last Chance for Romance. In a move that could be easily be misconstrued as oddly feminist, every character written required ovaries. I will explain to you now that getting the boys in my 4th grade class involved in a play (that also includes dancing,) involved basically the same Sisyphean effort as getting those same 4th grade boys to play Barbie Dolls. I unsuccessfully tried to accomplish both. I still have a scar on my left arm from what I like to call the "Chris G. Skipper Incident."
So Vicki wrote her not-really-feminist manifesto and even got permission from our teacher, the oldest and most sadistic woman living at that time, to stage a production for the entire class. Because it was my 15 minutes to be Vicki's best friend that week, I was given the covetable role of "Darla," the character not quite a pretty as "Anastasia," the girl who will have every boy panting and excited and begging to dance with her. Vicki would be playing Anastasia, and I sincerely doubted she'd be able to fill her other myriad duties of director, producer, prop mistress and all-around Hitler-like dictator with itty-bitty-breasts a-budding. I didn't want to see her "fail," per se, but I did want an opportunity to get my hands on the script which included very little actual dialogue and no discernible plot whatsoever. Seriously, Act III read something along the lines of, And then they all show up and have some pretty colored drinks and dance. Anastasia has a fight with Robbie. They make up. The End. From about halfway throught the first page, the whole thing became less of a "script," and became something more of a "suggestion." The quiet writer inside of me at that time was deeply offended.
It was my foolish insistence that people watching a play might want some plot or, at the very least, decent dialogue that didn't contradict itself and involved more than the phrase "Let's Dance," regurgitated like bad Lo Mein at five minute intervals that proved to be my downfall. Even our peers, who would have gladly swapped their Star Wars trading cards for what was shaping up to be a three hour long production of Saturday Night Nothing if it meant the Succubus of Room 114 couldn't torture us with more fractions, would be pelting up with our oversized copies of Your World and You twenty minutes into it. Vicki did not take my suggestions as being "constructive." She felt I was challenging her authority and "acting big."
So she fired me.
I then spent my recesses watching her and Karen R. scheme and whisper and practice disco dancing. And while I longed to be a part of her group again, I yearned for something more: to be grown up, to be desired, to be feminine and graceful, dancing all night with someone who found me irresistible. This is the mind of a young girl at its very worst and its very best. And tonight, when I heard the Bay City Rollers singing about dancing on a Saturday night, I didn't immediately feel sad because I am sitting in my bed, wearing boxer shorts I stole from my son when he outgrew them and an "I'm With Stupid" tee shirt that serves no real or clever purpose, except to insult the dog lying next to me. I didn't feel sad because I am 39 now, and at home on Date Night and watching something on VH1 about female rappers wearing tiaras (a truly, Joy-Specific WTF Moment if ever one existed,) and sharing slightly stale Pringles with the cat.
I just felt kind of badly for the 9 year old me who really expected so much more than what she got when it came to dreaming about love and dancing. Oh, I don't feel too badly for her; she'll live in Paris and New York. She'll travel extensively. She'll meet people who will help her be successful, people who will love her and people she will love, but she'll never be the Queen of the Disco, and I know, in my heart, that's what she really wanted.
Just so you know: Vicki's play closed before it ever opened, due to the fact that you can't scotch tape tin foil onto a soccer ball and expect it to look like anything other than some sort of sad joke. We went back to playing jacks at recess, which suited me fine, because I could get to tensies and around the world in my sleep. Disco, as we know, began to suck and it wouldn't be too far in the future before I heard the sound they were calling "punk," that spoke to me more and on a deeper level than the BeeGees ever did.
But it might have been nice to have been Darla, the not "as pretty" one, with three or four spoken lines and a scripted grace.
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