Fun Game

First, put your playlist on shuffle.
Second, post the first lines for the first 20 songs to come up (along with these instructions).
Third, have people guess the songs and artists in comments to the post.
Fourth, in a few days the answers will be posted.

I’ve been locked in your heart-shaped box for weeks.
Might as well have fun
Mama, take this badge off of me
I’m going to get my gun
Lately I’ve been feeling low
There come a day when you take it all with you*

I never dreamed in a million years I’d see
Please, please, please, no more melody
Watching the day slip by so fast
I was patrolling the Pachinko
Things just ain’t the same for gangsters
There must be some kinda way out of here.

I hurt myself today
I know I’ve been changed
I don’t want your big French fry
I hear you talking
Tonight the monkeys die.
I’m sitting in the crib dreaming about Lear jets and coupes.

You’re all I ever wanted but I’m terrified of you
In my happy home I barely breathe

*From the beginning of 'My Old Friend,' by my friend Scott's band 'East is East.' Unless you haunt DC9 and certain other venues around DC on very specific dates, chances are you won't know this one. But it did pop up on 'Shuffle.'

Catchup

Cross the Kansas state line and the first thing you see, looming out of the dark, is the billboard proclaiming: 'EVOLUTION IS A FAIRY TALE FOR GROWNUPS.' This was two weeks ago, an adventure to the heartland to see E. - a weekend involving some of the best BBQ I've ever had (burnt ends on open-face bread, in a tiny linoleum-and-flourescent joint with yellowing celebrity photos on the wall and register-mistress with gold front teeth), a bit of medical intervention on a barely-alive fish, a hot tub, miraculously preserved artifacts from the 19th century, and a mildly terrifying sojourn through Ivanhoe, a little slice of Mogadishu in smack-dab in the middle of Missouri.

I've been back for awhile, but busy. M. and I are currently chewing away at a screenplay, a romantic comedy. We write nights and email the pages back and forth, then spend downtime at work picking over each others' copy. At the same time, also working on the book, which I'm trying to make as dark and gritty as possible; and shifting between these two modes - light and breezy, Peckinpah-on-a-bad-day - often several times a night, induces a kind of mental whiplash. Thankfully, I have the attention span of a ferret on crystal meth. And other than that, ghost-writing a few pieces for Big Shots who don't have time to churn out their own copy, and becoming cynically insurgent over the job.

Attack of the Clones

Party at Topaz on Friday night, and I'm sitting on a blue couch in front of a blue table in a blue room, the people around me sipping azure martinis the color of Pine Cay water before you hit the reef. Also sitting at the table was a marketing director of a local firm and the husband of someone else I know; when the waitress (blonde, short, shapely grad student) came over, the latter turned to her, squinted, and said, 'Hey, you look familiar - do you work in the adult film industry?'

At this point, if the speakers hadn't been blasting Chill techno, you would have been able to hear the fabled pin-drop. The waitress, frozen smile on her face, probably hoping against hope that this guy orders some food so she can spit in it, says, 'No,' and walks away.

Marketing Director turns to the other man. 'What the hell was that?!?'

And the man replies, 'Hey, dude, I'm being a good wingman. Now you can find her and apologize for my behavior.'

The human race: Always reaching new depths of moral bankruptcy.

We'll Look Back on This and Laugh. Or Cry.

Last night I went to a house party on 13th and Harvard populated with so many hipsters, you could have wiped out half of Death Cab for Cutie's audience with one bomb. The suspiciously underage band in the living room was setting hard guitar to lyrics about how their mom had destroyed their dating life; the per capita of people wearing Buddy Holly glasses and t-shirts with slogans such as 'Vote for Pedro' and 'Team Jolie' was at times distressingly high; the decorative motif of candles on every riser of the stairways leading up to the second floor was a Brooklyn Theatre Disaster waiting to happen.

The weird thing was, I recognized everybody there. Not as individuals but as archetypes. The Russians and Indians turned think-tank brains; the K Street junior associates on their never-ending quest for Truth, Justice and as much pootie as they can reasonably seize without getting a juicy case of VD; the scenesters 'between jobs' trying to talk up Donnie Darko or their latest Korean movie find; the budding nuclear scientists trying to take revenge for all those years spent in the library on the nearest bottle of vodka. I kept walking up to people, honestly thinking they were somebody else, only to realize from two feet away that they were merely a near-clone of someone from work or Chicago or some other location of my short and wayward life:

Me: 'Jimmy?'

Not-Jimmy: 'Um. No.'

Me: 'Thank God. I was going to throw you over the balcony otherwise.'

Not-Jimmy: 'Um. No!'

Me: 'Are there empty glasses over there?'

So I spent a half-hour amusing myself by convincing a group of interns that I worked for the CIA as some sort of cryptic Jack Bauer badass, then the next few chatting with some random people who had been sitting on the stoop smoking cigarettes in the cold and passing a bottle of whiskey around. Then the friend I had came with ended up too drunk, wandering around clutching a bottle to their chest while trying to lick my neck, so we extracted. A bunch of us went for late-night pizza afterwards. I crashed into bed finally at a quarter to five.

The State of the Union is ... Ugh

This fine and sunny day, I look and feel like Death microwaved on the ‘Jiffy Pop!’ setting because of an unfortunate drinking game played last night during our Fearless Leader’s State of the Union address, a speech whose only value to humanity is that it preempted Ice Skating With Celebrities or Dancing with the Stars or Dry-Humpin’ with the B-List or whatever variety show my fellow Americans are choosing to boil their brains with these days. To wit:

When Fearless Leader mentions ‘Iraq,’ ‘tyranny,’ ‘homeland security,’ or ‘September the 11th,’ take a drink.

When Fearless Leader mentions the legality of wiretapping, drain your glass.

When Fearless Leader says the economy is doing great, drain the nearest drinking buddy’s glass. Explain to them that you’re just doing what your average CEO is doing to the American worker.

When Fearless Leader mentions healing the partisan disunity in the nation’s capitol, turn around and slug the conservative next to you.

Having spent the last six years pushing a major transformative vision for this country that only got a lot of people killed and money squandered, Fearless Leader is now reverting to the form that everyone expected back on that snowy day in January 2000: tentatively offering a middling agenda with neither sound nor fury. The speech took 52 minutes and ended up killing a whole lot of my brain cells, and now I feel like a secondary character in a Bukowski novel, only sitting in front of a Mac with my headphones tinkling ‘Tiny Vessels’ instead of filling a Chicago gutter with vomit and existential despond.