21 April 2006

o me, o my, i heard me ol' wife cry

yeah. best concert ever. somehow we scored fifth row tickets to a sold-out Great Big Sea show by showing up fifteen minutes after doors were supposed to open. rock on us. those guys can throw a concert...basically sang along to every song and now my throat is gone. but how can you not when they throw "General Taylor" out there right after "I'm a Rover" and "Donkey Ridin'" and "Excursion Around the Bay..."














and "Patty Murphy" and "Mari Mac" and "Jack Hinks" and "Lukey" and "Consequence Free"...

and a boatload of quite awesome new songs. including two about horses falling through the ice, and that beautifully thoughtful one about whether it's better to have a mermaid with the top half woman and the bottom half fish or the other way 'round...

so we sang real loud. and then when they did a brief montage of verses from eighties hair ballads and such...they stopped singing and let us carry along with Whitesnake, Summer of '69...yeah.

So, by the time the second encore rolled around, they came out and shushed the audience to the first complete hush in three hours and laid out a beautiful "Ol' Brown's Daughter" completely a capella, completely sans amplification. Complete and total awesomeness.















yeah. what a night. how could such a night be any better? well, i did get a sunburned scalp from clambering around at letchworth after cooking venison burgers on the first fire of the summer...















not a bad end to a slothfully uneventful week.















oh, yeah. and spent the first night of the season outside. underneath the crisp, clear sky full of Houghton stars. in the back of my truck. let the legendary travels begin.















with a nod to Joss Wheedon, I give you...the Lady Serendipitiy.

04 April 2006

loooopity loo



well. so. this friendly lady is Maureen. she works for the University of Buffalo. see how she looks friendly, competent, engaging, professional? yes.

now. attend to the young man. perhaps not so competent, professional--but well compensated with friendliness and perhaps overenthusiastically engaging. yes. he is coked out of his mind on a friendly little relative of diazepam--known to the layman as valium, or Madame V. serendipitously, Madame V was joined on her stroll through my circulatory system by the ever congenial nitrous oxide, also known as "laughing gas." or even better, "irrepressible giggling like a schoolgirl for no apparent reason gas." our young man had just attempted--and failed--twice in valiant and perhaps overambitious attempts to stand on his own two feet. it's hard when it feels like you have three or four very groovy feet--of which one, the ex-hippie-zebra-from-florida appears slightly enamored of the green penguin. and if you thought he had an odd sense of humor stone sober...

to make things more interesting, a "short term amnesiac" had joined the pharmaceutical mambo-ing through this young man's bloodstream.

so. short term amnesia being what it is, if you recieved a telephone call this morning from said young man, he does not remember it. at all. nor could he even remotely be considered responsible for what he did or did not say, or any confusion so resulting. and, finally, he hopes that you derived as much enjoyment from the experience as he did. because he had an absolutely fine birthday morning.

with all the swank in my voice...thank you Maureen. such a lovely maiden of the moonshine mist...

now. four wisdom teeth lighter, and eight days of sick leave ahead of me...it's time to sit back, slurp down the ibuprofen-laced slurpees and enjoy this season of-- in the grand words of Dan "Perm" Crandall--maxin' and relaxin'.

yeah.

03 April 2006

the cross on my back

or "tatoo pt. II"

twilighttreader:
"The ironic thing is that you can turn on the TV and see any number of celebrities and such who are patently not Christians sporting the iconography, be it with tattoos or "bling" or whatever. Why this girl things that inking a cross on her shoulder is making such a bold statement is really beyond me."


well, "this girl" was once upon a time a good friend of mine, so I should preface with a dear affection for an old friend. but. I also have pretensions towards being an intellectual. and i think ideas are important. so here's what I think.

Why? because trendy things entail a safe and easy form of "meaningful" self-expression when one leaves college and enters law/grad/hard knocks school and discovers the sheer difficulty of actually doing anything even minutely creative or important--of simply surviving in a system of pragmatic acquiesence to forces beyond your control.

It's a cog in a wheel in a transmission in a factory "sticking it to the man" without actually losing it's coveted little coggish place or recognizing its utter dependence on the system. Refuge through empty symbolism which you convince yourself is important. a lot of religious fervor works like that. Self-convincing action to artificially enliven a disappointing futility and rescue the self-concept from the oppression of being considered pretty insignificant by forces like nature and macroeconomic systems and socialized mass behavior.

Identity through contrived spiritual experiences. A coping mechanism in the place of humility.

Of course, I'm probably reading my own experiences and psychology right on top of hers. She may be validly experiencing something very spiritual, something she chose to express from deep conviction of its importance. For her sake I sincerely hope so. Because if not, she's compensating around an important bit of reality rather than facing it. And as we learn in the medical profession, compensation without action to address a threat is a losing game.

And for my sake, I hope she never reads this :)

02 April 2006

myspace blues

So I have an old friend who I rediscovered last week (through myspace--go figure--and I just got an account so that I could comment on my little bro'sspace) who happened to just be finishing the process of getting a tattoo--an outline of a cute cross on the right shoulderblade to be precise.

But--for all of you more interested in the tawdrier details of my romantic life rather than the higher world of philosophy...skip to "Part II" below, where someone propositions me on mySpace, and quandries ensue.

Now this tattooing is a pretty serious move from a conservative, Christian homeschooled girl, whether or not she's in law school. I mean, we weren't just reading "I Kissed Dating Goodbye" in high school--we were mad hardcore Eric Ludy fans. "When God Writes Your Love Story." Which, if I may digress, absolutely blows. He doesn't. He doesn't write anything. He just kind of sits there waiting for you to do something, and there you are waiting for him to do something, and there's this awkward silence...

Well. Anyway. She's got this tattoo now, against the advice of her parents, etc, etc., and decided to explain it. On Myspace. I for one, am thinking she'd better not have any serious agnostic or faith-shaking experiences for the rest of her life, because, hey, you've got this permanent tattoo, and people will always be asking, and you'll be either bitter or ashamed. And carrying a cross of bitterness on your back is probably a bad idea. Unhealthy psychologically.

At any rate. "I sincerely wanted to permanently and publicly identify myself as a Christian. It's a personal thing - I've struggled in the past with being ashamed of my faith, and this is my way of telling myself and the rest of the world that I am no longer, and will never again be ashamed of my relationship with Jesus."

Well. Okay. This helped me finally resolve some of my ambivalence about calling myself a Christian. I am not ashamed of my faith. But I am pretty ashamed of a lot of other peoples'. The church across the street is advertising on that little church-sign of theirs a "Christian" coffeehouse. Which pretty much guarantees that it will be lousy, contrived and uncomfortable. Quite frankly, if I could go through life without ever again being called Christian, I would be quite happy. I would actually be free to live the life my creator made me to live and the mysterious, often vaguely ominous but always fiercly beautiful, holy ghost calls me to. The last group to publically and permanently take up the cross as part of their bodily attire was during the Crusades, and we all know how that went. You will never see a tattoo of the cross on my body because I would rather cut off my right hand than identify myself with what passes for "Christianity" today. I will take up the cross in my lifestyle, thank you, since I have tried enough to avoid it to know that such a feat is impossible anyway.

well. that gets that off my chest.

Part II.

And then I checked my mySpace mail. Now, keeping in mind that I started this whole mySpace thing as a fun way to get back in touch with a bunch of old friends who, I happened to discover, were using said electronic forum, know (O gentle reader) that I whimsically chose to make a good time of it and not reveal my identity easily.

So the myspace space lacks my actual name, and the picture I used on my profile is from a certain Shakespeare play in which I was topless, clad in yellow harem pants, with flowing black hair and a "Dark Egyptian" complexion courtesy of a ridiculously brown, liberally applied sponge. And I had a beard. And I was attempting to imitate Ben Stiller, of the Derek Zoolander "Blue Steel" fashion.

Suffice to say, it's not a very...representative...picture of me. and I'm flexing what little bulk Iwas in posession of as well. I still had abs back then...or so I like to think.

So I check my mySpace mail, to see if said old friends have written me back with confused queries as to my identity yet, and some lady in Albany, (blonde, young and attractive, with a healthy social self, if the picture tells any truth), pops up in my Inbox. she is, as mentioned, cute and presumably in posession of a healthy enough social existence to not be an internet obsessed mySpace stalker mind-job. the subject line reads: "heyyyy buddy..." which is precisely the sort of thing I'm well known to say. I'm sure you're all quite aware of my little fondness for elipses.

so I open the letter.


"Hey there buster brown...

"So i guess the time has arrived for me to start using this site. I can resist no longer...Let the games begin! I took a look at your page and well, I liked what I saw... ;p"

"So, my name is C-----, and I'm from Albany, New York. I think us crazy kids should be friends. Cause you seem pretty nice, and smart, and possibly cute! (it's so tough to tell in this cruel digital world.. :)


And so on. Now, as many of you know, I am completely vain and ridiculously vulnerable to flattery. Especially when topless. But, quandries (and insecurity) begin striking me immediately. They always do. I no longer have flashing black hair flowing like sheep down the mountains (the sheep being black, and the mountains being my masculine shoulders except that it was never that long...more's the pity) I have a self-buzzed crop of red hair with a sparse, rather mundane goatee.

And, if I get her greeting right, I also am no longer "Buster Brown." More apt perhaps would be Wanker White, or Poppa Paleface. I am, after all, the child known for a rare ability to blind airline pilots at will by merely wearing a bare-midriff t-shirt (not that I have ever committed such an abomination...but think about it.) (on second thought, no, please don't.) (for the sake of your sanity and your bright future, I implore you, stop. the effort will leave you a broken man.) (or woman.)

And please to not even be mentioning my "EMS tummy" which has become much more...comfortable with its "lounging by the fireside in a dressing gown with wine and a quiet, self-satisfied belching and tummy-scratching" self. At least I don't have "EMS ass" yet.

hmmm...caught under false pretences, and I wasn't even trying. I guesss the lesson to take away from this is...

I'm that good. [polishes fingernails on shirt] can't fight the moonlight, baby...

[addendum and disclaimer] This has nothing to do with the previous two posts, and the firestorm on controversy surrounding the mysterious identity of the lady Nissa. just got this mySpace thing this morning. Amazing things can happen in my life and have nothing to do with women. Truly! I know it is hard to believe, but there is life without estrogen! And it's quite good!

01 April 2006

my fair lady

well.

okay.

i give.

there is a new lady in my life. and though it pains my stoic pride to admit it, she has inspired sheepish grins, unabashed rejoicing, and even little fits of giggling lately. Dr. Gallman introduced me to her the other night; it was a serendipitous meeting, completely unplanned...I'd almost decided not to go the International Banquet.

almost. it's a good thing I did.

funny enough, I'd just talked to my dad the other day, musing a littley amusingly about "the list"--attributes I didn't want to compromise on, traits I'd always admired.

"the ability to head off into the wilderness and carry her own weight is a plus...you know me, pop, so high-maintenance frills and frippery aren't important. I want a girl who just kills you grinning there, mud splattered on her face, miles from the beaten track, and doesn't need to be showered and shaved and tucked into bed every night...doesn't need a lot of coddling, doesn't need new accessories every payday...the kind where scratches and scars just add character and make you love her more."

and then a day later I was talking to Doc Gallman at the International Banquet. Wham. Bam. Slam. She hit everything on the list. And more.

she's just as old as I am--born in 1983, just hitting her prime. she grew up in America, but she's Japanese by birth and Japanese by family. That makes me excited more than anything--I've always gotten along best with cross-cultural sojourners, and I admire the reliability, practicality, durability, economy and grace of her Japanese heritage. Of course, maybe it's just the closest I'll ever get to being a samurai...

sure, other people may not think she's much to look at--but I find beauty in her simply graceful lines. she is elegant without being ostentatious--solid and durable where it counts, not plastic or a sporting a quick-fading faddish style.

and she's only got 90,000 miles on the engine--her people are well renowned for living well into their second or third hundred thousand miles. best of all, she's not only got the manual transmission, but the four-wheel drive as well, and the super-gas efficient, super-long lasting 4 cylinder engine. everything I've been looking for for over three months now, right under my nose, and for a lot cheaper than anything else out there.

here she is with the gracious and kind Dr. Gallman, last fall. isn't she lovely? I couldn't be happier. hongera for me!





ps--I have the next eleven days off of work...so I'll be alive during normal waking hours. and probably bored. and super-drugged up, because my wisdom teeth are getting pulled Tuesday. so you should call me. 716.698.4358. now you have no excuse.