Chubby Clooney vs. Kong

Went to the Dandy Warhols concert at the 9:30 last night; the band collectively kicked the door in, energy-wise, during the first five songs of the set, then dissolved for the next hour into sonically mushy chord experimentation and feedback play. Worth going to – not just to see one of my personal favorites, but also for the conversation that preceded the lights going down, as I was sitting on the balcony surveying the crowd.

My date had abruptly canceled with the same stomach flu that left M. incapacitated on her couch, and I was alone but not lonely. Suddenly materializing at arm’s length: five-foot-eight of jailbait in a skirt and purple shirt that proclaimed, in spangles, ‘Hustler.’ She put a hand on her hip, and cocked her head, and smiled. I smiled back, tentatively, unsure about the nature of this invasion of my personal airspace. She said, “Just wanted to let you know, I wouldn’t even sleep with you if the per-pet-u-ation of the species depended on it.”

I smirked at her, playing like Johnny Cash during his blackest flop-sweat years. “Isn’t it past your bedtime, sweetie?”

She gave me the finger, then turned on a 2-inch cowboy heel and flitted away. Why this incident made me laugh, I can't really say. Maybe the ludicrousness of her assumption that somehow my ego would be crushed with the rapidity of Bruce Lee chopping through a set of wooden blocks. Maybe because it was some welcome randomness after a weekend of Thanksgiving events through which everyone deliberately moved with the formality and care of Kabuki dancers, anxious to not offend, to play nice in the proverbial sandbox.

Later on, after the concert was over and I had completed the five-block shuffle past the underage kids trying their best gangsta lean against the sides of the darkened Ethiopian restaurants lining U St., I sat down and churned out another 5,000 words for the book, the one that I was supposed to complete in a month. December 1 will see me roughly 15,000 words short, I’m estimating. Half of me wants to go stream-of-consciousness simply to meet the deadline; all of me wants to simply finish the thing. At work, trying to get to Dubai.

Upright and Breathing

Six years ago, as part of the overflowing package of vaguely university-related paraphernalia I received upon moving into the freshman dorms, I received a compilation CD – a dozen or so artists of that particular period (Moby, etc.) all contributing a song in the name of some social cause (I think it was ending world hunger). The first cut on this album was a remix of a G Love and Special Sauce song which, while not the greatest four minutes ever burned into silicon, was good enough to last to this day on various hard drives and iPods.

So this weekend, the editor of a magazine I freelance for on a semi-regular basis decided to leave me with two tickets to G Love at the 9:30, as a means of apology for paying me six months late for two articles. They were for Sunday night, which ordinarily means time for Netflix and reheated pizza, so I was glad at the chance to head out. The opening band came and went. The lights went down. Little strips of yellow paper kept fluttering from the ceiling. Then G Love came on, and burst into song, and in a minute of confusion dawning on vague wonder, I realized that the song I had been carrying around for the last fourth of my life wasn’t actually by G Love at all – either the initial CD had been mislabeled; or somehow along the way I had mistakenly named the song something else, and my Loki of a brain, my occasionally treacherous mind, had gone back and re-etched my memory to make me think it was G Love. Anyway, I’m standing there under the bright lights open-mouthed, experiencing an epiphany about the nature of memory and time, two random girls in front of me engaged in some sort of lipstick lesbian routine for the benefit of the practically slavering frat boys in front of them, and I say, in what would be the most random comment of the evening if anyone could hear me over the roar of guitars and drums: “Wait! You’re not a Hispanic rap group!”

I am a quarter-century old now. There was a brief existential crisis at around midnight last Thursday, but that passed after a brief phone call to the ever-reliable Ben:

Ben [sleepy]: Hello?
Me [sitting in front of laptop, working on the book, sipping Zinfadel and listening to Pachabel]: I’m floating in the existential black.
Ben: What the fuck time is it?
Me: It’s too late, man.
Ben: You’re the editor of a major magazine. So what if you haven’t published the Great American novel yet. Go back to bed.
Me: (beat) Okay.

And I realized, despite my continual bitching, that I really do have a lot to be thankful for:

1. I am upright and breathing.
2. Ronald Reagan is still dead.
3. Salmon roe.
4. E. (The person, not the drug)
5. I have the ability, despite the flimsiness of building a career on words, to put a decent roof over my head.
6. ‘24’ was renewed for a fifth season.
7. Angelina Jolie
8. The freedom to make snarky comments without being tossed in a ditch and shot.
9. That I don't live in a red state.

So that’s that, for now. I am thinking about doing one of those DNA tests that National Geographic offers, to trace my ancestry back to the first human.

Yikes

I glanced at the blog the other day and realized that I hadn’t updated in several weeks. The reasons are fairly straightforward, namely a combination of projects and social engagements that have made even taking 30-45 minutes to write an in-depth analysis of said activities an exercise in futility. The Monster project that dominated my life for eight months out of this year is finished but I haven’t seen hard copies of it yet; I’m participating in nanowrimo, the national contest in which you attempt to write a novel in a month; I just finished a piece on Riz Khan, and my interview with Ashley Judd went online; and if I’m not careful, I’m going to soon end up in the middle of another love triangle, two and a half years after I should have learned my lesson about such things.

And I’m nearly 25. Ready for the cliché of the Quarter Life Crisis, complete with additional navel gazing and drunken pronouncements to Ben that I’m adrift and floating in the existential black, which will doubtlessly earn me a well-deserved slap to the back of the head.

Which I probably won’t do; but it’s a scary comment on your life when the first 30 seconds of the trailer to Albert Brooks’ “Looking for Comedy In The Muslim World” seems exactly like a typical day at the office.

Train Delay

Insanely busy for the last month ... more posts starting next week.