I'm learning theory in Theory, theoretically.
We've been talking about how "post" everything tends to be now (post-human; post-feminist; post-modern), which is to say that entertainment is so overdone that we have to start sticking new prefixes to old ideas.
It's not so bad, really. Post-humanism, for example, is the exploration of humans beyond the realm of their own humanity, kinda. I managed to tie this to videogames (the wife's suggestion) for a paper, and that made it pretty fun. I'll share the paper, which you can check out here.
Anyway, my educator wants us to write Hypertext (capital H) for his class. From here on, I will refer to my professor as Joel because that's his name. (No surnames or street addresses, though. Do your investigatin' somewhere else, stalkers!).
As it turns out, you and I have been creating hypertext for years now, though I'm taking most of the credit. Hypertext is any work that champions choice for the reader, while also promoting intertextuallity and digital information. Like, if I want to provide you guys with a picture of a gopher at work, and I link that and give you something to click on, that's hypertext. I'm creating while you're manipulating. See? The gopher is a tad generous as an example, maybe, but you get the idea.
Now, we're not going to try and bamboozle Joel or my classmates by passing off our old discussions as though they were my new work, but you readers know how much good stuff is in here. It's all white goo, as we know. There's no Oreo cookie exteriors at Tragic Hero; just the filler. So, I think a fair compromise will be this: If I use old material, I'll say so up front, and add new content to old posts so that even previously published stuff is being updated for the sake of this assignment. Any class-specific material will be noted with a little star (*) so that my peers don't end up reading classic posts about me trying to get laid from 2008.
In class, we eventually got into 'trauma theory', which explains how the guy
who wrote Schindler's List can never work back to the Holocaust (capital H), no
matter how hard he tries.
I know, I know: Schindler wrote Schindler's List.
Don't worry, I'll elaborate on these theories as we go along.
Basically, trauma theory examines a work through the trauma it centers on, and then the de-centering of the subject due to the complications of experiencing trauma. I gravitated to this theory right away because if there's one thing I know, it's trauma.
Especially these days. I'd say that it is cheap to use the death of a friend to influence school work. I mean, people have to say something is good if it's about a dead friend. Our society dictates this sort of thing. You're not gonna write a story and say, "This is really about my friend who died and I miss her dearly," only to have the reader say, "It needs more thrills. Something with a boat, maybe?" No, they'll say things like, "Oh, isn't that sweet? Isn't that just a considerate thing? What a way to honour someone close."
So, let me begin by saying that I ain't that sweet. This needs to be done and I need to latch onto something that I understand in order to write it well. Sarah's death can't be understood, but I know it'll work for the sake of handing something in. There's nothing sweet about that rationale, really.
However, I will mention that she'd be fine with the idea. When I told her my plan, my wife said, "Sarah would be glad that you could use her to get some school work done," and she's right. Sarah's reaction would be, "Yeah, whatever. I'd do that if you were dead," and then she'd instruct me to depict her as a pirate or something equally inappropriate.
There we are. This feels right. This is going well already.
The funny thing is that I said 'pirate' before realizing I already had the picture.
So, let's get out our red pens and start giving me some marks! Let's see how the utmost (small-scale) trauma affects the writer and reader, and how they create material together.
Through this process, I keep picturing my biggest, die-hard fan, who has been waiting for an update to the blog for almost a year now. Then he sees this post and goes, "Finally! A new one!" But by the time he gets to the bottom of this he's disgusted, and says something like, "What the fuck?! School work!?"
Electric cars are like those rubber boots made by Hunter; they're not doing anything special compared to all the other options, they're just what everyone is buying right now.
You want to hug some timber? You want to "make a difference," but you'd prefer to do so without involving the bus? You want to look at hydrogen. That's where the actual car-oil-jihad-can't we all get along solution lies.
"Melt your Ducky Boots. We've decided that rain gear is fashionable now."
Overnight, the women of an entire municipality are a bunch of Christopher Robins.
Sad.
What if The Internet (capital 't', capital 'i') crapped out tomorrow? What if we all had to fall back on our merits?
It was originally designed to direct missiles, y'know. The military developed a global communications system so they could e-mail missiles right at Khrushchev.
However, the fellas figured out that if they were willing to wait seven hours for the loading time, they could send nude pictures of Bo Derek to one another.
It all kinda snowballed from there.
I won't name names or tombstones, but Andie told me about how her friend's next door neighbor kept banging on their wall while her friend had sex (with someone else; not with her). So, he's trying to set the mood, and this faceless cat next door is banging on the wall, yelling, "Stop having sex!" Two days later, the faceless neighbor hanged themselves.
Now, the question is, why did I find that hilarious? Oh, I laughed when she told me about it. I laughed and laughed.
What are we going to do with me?
An elderly fellow is napping at his laptop, and I just walked in on the only other patron in this coffee shop while he was using the bathroom. This feels like as good a place as any to start. He was using the bathroom in the bathroom, just so we're clear. He's one of these plucky fellows who doesn't lock the door.
***
I can't bring myself to feel as young as I am these days. It gets tougher.
Steve Irwin dedicated his life to complicated animals only to have a stingray puncture his heart with its tail spine thingy. How many of us will get to prove we loved our jobs as much?
***
Okay, so let's start it like this because we have to start it like something before this coffee shop closes and I have to slush-trudge back to my cozy apartment with its cozy wife and dog:
I took the class, yes? We mentioned that. The class is over now and I got a 90 and mom said that if I got an 'A' she'd buy me a new pair of sneakers in the spring and I want to speak to you guys about it because for the life of me I can't determine my shoe size.
It's like this...everyone liked all of my contributions and they were supposed to because I'm a visionary without an audience, apparently. I'm some sort of idiot. Remember how I said that I submitted a blog-like piece to all of them and they hated the formatting? I think they were okay to say that. I wouldn't say that I hate the formatting. Once it got going, I rarely thought of the formatting. I always preferred this style because I assumed that people didn't really want to take the time to read, even when they were reading, and that short, clipped sentences in a line-by-line style would flow as fleetingly as our attention spans tend to. I still think I'm right, frankly, but there is something to be said of the paragraph. I mean, Dickens used the paragraph to his heart's content, until an editor would say, "No, you gotta start a new one. It's been twelve pages of this. Time for a new thought." Stephen King uses paragraphs and he wrote a book about AN EVIL ST. BERNARD. Something to think about.
In truth, when I tried to edit the blog over the summer I ran into one of two snags: I'd either get too sad because Sarah's dead, or I'd be embarrassed because I was embarrassed. That brings me to our present day in our present pants because the blog has always worked just fine as a space where I can talk about me while being me. We all know that. If it just so happens that this involves ruminations on sitting outside of lingerie stores because I'm a hipster pervert, that's okay because the world needs hipster perverts and I'm willing to admit that I'm one of them to a mass audience. The thing is that when I look at old posts only one word tends to come to mind: juvenile. Everything feels a bit juvenile and it's cleavage this and it's throwing up off of a balconythat and it's supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, but sometimes it reads as tongue-through-mouth. Yes, the blog is a great place for me to be me, but here's the thing: I tend to get on my nerves sometimes. Isn't that the way with you? The problem is that it's a bastardization of how I really want to write. I have to wrestle this stream-of-conciousness, let's-go-to-the-mall(!) approach with a more literary, high-brow approach. There are ways to write funny stuff without having to put in all of these asides and my little obvious jokes.
Here, lemme show you something. This is a piece I wrote about Portugal that had been sloshing in my head from the moment we left until the moment I wrote it. Consequently, it flowed out of me like so much water, quick and easy, and it ended up sounding exactly as I wanted it to sound. I still think it reads like a blog post, but it also reads like a polished piece of writing, and that's the difference. So here, here's a snippet. I won't upload the whole thing because I may submit it to publications and then they'd get mad at me:
Porteugese Water Cog
Ah, Portugal! Land of barking dog and hanging laundry, where
people yell things that you certainly can't translate.
The
pre-wife and I pranced about there for a sojourn during our pre-honeymoon, or
whatever it was.
What a
land! Truly a place of bodacious derriere and casual beauty, where taxi
cabbists drop you off in front of this beautiful fountain or that distinctly
different beautiful fountain. The very streets themselves are puzzle-pieced
together with intricate tiles you might find in a rich person's bathroom.
Oftentimes I'd find myself looking just past my deteriorating shoes, wondering
what sort of fellows had the patience to pave an entire city with squares one
inch in diameter. Is it 'diameter'? 'Area'? Either way, they were tiny and
probably needed to be cut with some sort of saw that hadn't yet been invented
at the time. They fashioned fish into those tiles, these long-dead men. Fishy
characters splishing about our feet, looking up at us as if to say, "Ours
is a history of artisans. Yours, of concrete."
I made sure
to look up sometimes though, otherwise I'd miss all of the violet trees and
perfectly defined bottoms that seemed to make up the country. Everything had
roosters on it. It's all roosters in Portugal, as if a grandmother's pantry was
the basis of design for their infrastructure. Is it 'infrastructure?' Wherever
the shops are. All roosters.
The
buildings themselves could have used a spackling, maybe, as the façadesall
seemed to have walls similar to those you would find in the bathroom of a YMCA;
sprawling with cracks and chips, looking like a space that people really gave a
shit about 40 years ago, but not any more. However, unlike a bathroom full of
old men getting changed, the Portuguese structures had character. These were
bruises and scrapes earned over decades and centuries of decades. Who was I to
judge, in my plaid shorts? Besides, the fissures and dents were overshadowed by
beautiful tile etchings, blue-on-white and stately-looking, like the sort you
see on Nan's finest tea cups. Y'know the tea cups that some old biddy uses when
company comes over before some visiting appraiser appraises them to be worth a
fortune? The tiles were like that. Darling, gleaming squares that seemed to be
fastened to the sides of the city with caulking. Perhaps they were.
Okay, compare that with what you know of the blog so far. Now do you see what I'm getting at? See how it still sounds like me, but it also sounds like something that a writer might write? That's...it's time I start sounding like that all of the time, so that the public will have no choice but to associate me with this balance of prose and mild misogyny. It's time I start sounding like a big boy and I write some stuff that I can be proud of, rather than what's 'good enough'. My effort through life so far has been 'good enough'. It's time I start believing I can do better. I'm proud of this snippet on Portugal. Now, in the realm of the blog as a whole, I'm proud of that too, but going post by post, I'm proud of about 3% of what I've produced over eight years. I'm not a homogenized milk kinda guy. I'm a coffee cream kinda guy. Eight years from now I want to be able to say I'm proud of 18% of the content.
Ultimately, this means I have to use things like description and imagery and yes, paragraphs from time to time. You guys can handle that, just as you've handled all of my non-decisions in the past.
***
I'm happy to wear jeans almost every day. However, if I had the resources, I think I'd be just as content in slacks.
Y'know, I think it's better when I only write occasionally.
It's probably the best way to enjoy me; occasionally. I haven't spent much time with myself besides within my head, but I strike myself as a 'small doses' kinda guy.
Good for what ails ya!
I had a root canal. Here's the irony with root canals: They're completely painless.
I think that the turn of phrase regarding root canals, such as: "I'd rather get a root canal than look my fuckin' boss in the eye ever again," is outdated.
Technology and the dental profession have made this sort of saucy quip obsolete.
My man Dyar swabbed me with Baby Orajel or something before giving me the needle, so I didn't feel that. Dyar is my dentist.
The needle, in turn, made the entire half of my mouth an afterthought.
I watched Blue Jays highlights on a TV embedded into the ceiling while he worked, and after two hours, it was over.
Then, I just had to make sure I didn't chew on my tongue while eating my burrito.
By the time the anasthetic wore off, I felt no discomfort of any kind.
I felt sleepy, but that was unrelated. In fact, the only uncomfortable aspect was the thought that the TV was going to come loose of its moorings and land on my head.
So there you go.
Really, a root canal should be compared to feeling nothing, like, "When I have sex with my girlfriend these days, it's like I'm having a root canal."
Something to think about.
Of course, this is all just my tomfoolery. There is one part of the root canal that still stings, right to the bone.
"What's that, Paul?!"
When you get the bill.
Hiyo!
Read, if you must, as you gnaw at the drumstick, right down to the bone!
They say that Thanksgiving is a time to be thankful. I say be thankful all of the time and just use Thanksgiving as a chance to ditch work.
Cause work deserves ditchin'.
I myself have plenty to be thankful for: a firm dog; textbook wife (also firm) and a tolerable family. I also own at least five t-shirts and we have so much fruit in our bowl that it's okay if the occasional kiwi goes bad.
If kiwis are ever good.
I'm taking a creative writing course from Lisa Moore. Perhaps you can tell by my curt, profound sentences and my devilish syntax.
There's not a lot of chemistry there, but she's wonderful at encouragement and deadlines (the two things a writer needs most).
I do up the stories and I submit them to the class and then they all go, "Oh yes, marvelous! Truly marvelous!" And I say, "Splendid" and then I ogle my classmates' breasts as best I can until class is over.
That's a joke.
Maybe this is why one of my pieces was referred to as 'sexist' a few weeks back by a classmate. Just because I talked about photographing Portuegese booty to send home to my buddies.
If someone photographed my ass on a beach, I wouldn't feel violated; I'd feel surprised. I would also feel sandy because beaches make me feel sandy.
Anyway, we're all getting along now and everyone tends to like everyone else. I try my best to aim for the gold star each week because I have a weird desire to be better than everyone else when it comes to creativity (which is missing the point of creativity).
I didn't ask permission, but here's one of the many 'postcard stories' that I have had to do. They call them a 'postcard story' because the body of the piece is supposed to be succinct enough to fit onto a postcard, if people still gave a shit about postcards. An easier distinction for a 'postcard story' would be '500 words'.
Anyway, let me rummage around the ol' documents folder to see what I can fi--a-ha! Here we go.
So, this was due the first week but I didn't know that because not everyone made it to the initial class e-mail list, so I learned about it in class and wrote it during our break. I didn't finish it because I ran out of time.
The assignment was to write one portion of pure description, another of pure dialogue, and this was to be about a person who 'had a profound influence on your life in some way'.
I wrote about the guy who came to my door looking to take my recyclables while I was living in Bay Roberts last year:
He was on my porch then, suddenly. Taller than me by an
apple or two, his hair was sparse on top of his head, like wheat that didn't
have a good season.
His survival suit was as orange as the rest of them,
unzipped to a point near the groin; a half-peeled banana. A plain shirt of some
color or another was underneath. It was clingy with sweat and had whitened
creases from earlier sweat.
His eyes darted to this and that. They were blue enough and
soft enough and likely not terribly threatening to anyone. His teeth were
yellowed, but not offensively so, and those jammed in his bottom jaw had gaps
and spaces between them, as though they had no desire to get in line in the
first place. His mouth was wide enough to fit at least one billiard ball and he
was panting through it; longer, relaxed gasps of one who has been busy all day
at who knows what. I could hear his breath as he exhaled, heavy but content,
like a dog's. His tongue heaved within his gob, like the bosom of a dancing
woman at a party. His hands were large enough for throttling. Thin, surfaced
cracks eddied from cuticle to first knucle on each of his fingers. He wore
large, untidy boots that would look appropriate on the feet of someone in
military reserve.
His face might have been handsome if it were just a fraction
more trustworthy. His jaw was squared and set and it framed his sun-worn face
well. It jutted somewhat, as if to accept any challenging fists. As his eyes
centered on me, I met his distracted gaze. He looked in need of aid, but you
couldn't say for certain what sort.
"Is it alright if I go on with your bottles that you
got there?"
It was.
"I goes around to all the different houses and I takes
the bottles and brings 'em down to the depot and that. Get a bit for 'em. I
talked to the town though and they said that I got to check with all the
residents first though, and see if it's alright."
"Okay, yeah sure, that's no problem. The bags are just
all out front there in front of the garbage box, and you can grab them
whenever. That's fine with me."
"I just got to check with everyone, see? Never stole
nothing in me life. No, I've never stole nothing."
There you go.
Oh, by the way, I submitted my first larger piece like a blog post and did it in my usual line-by-line, no indentation blog format.
Any pussy can live-Tweet a trip to the garage. Now, infiltration; bothering people. That takes something else. Call it: Entitlement. Or whatever word means 'entitlement' and 'desperation' in one.
I believe I mentioned the toothache, which has proved to be a dull throb for me and a dull topic of conversation for other people, since I can't seem to stop mentioning it.
We've all got problems. What's the big deal?
I guess I just like chewing without having to think about it. I'm not one for ginger chewing.
I also mentioned the dental conference, right?
"Come all ye dentists!" they exclaim. "Collect ye your tote bags and don your lanyards!"
I passed a guy on the street holding a bag with Crest on the side of it and figured I was on the right track.
I entered the Delta Hotel, where they still are as I type this, and quickly dug up a notepad (my book is missing). Hotels are all notepads. Then I kinda...wandered around and tried to look like I was just another guy in the lobby.
I saw them all, alright. Fat cat dentists throwing their heads back, guffawing with perfect crowns and impeccable molars. I envied their unhindered gums as I ogled all of the beautiful women who were milling about. Dental assistants, presumably. Not because they're women, mind you. More because dental assistants always seem to be attractive. Girls can be dentists, too. We all know that.
So, I sat in an armchair near some couches. A fellow with puffy hair sat across from me, a bored-looking gentleman with his name tag. Immediately beside me was a middle-aged woman who had a Padma Lakshmi smile, face and body. That's a great woman to share a smile, face and body with.
I was working up the courage to utter, "Err, excuse me...are you a dentist?" but I just couldn't do it. When I was young I almost seemed to enjoy embarrassing myself in front of attractive women, but these days I have more shame.
"I'll bother the guy," I thought as I took a deep breath.
I was expecting the process to be really easy, but I was surprised at how shy I was once I got there. These were all dentists and who was I? Obviously, some guy who didn't brush properly. Now, here I was crashing their one opportunity a year to flirt and have sex with someone besides their wife.
"Can I ask you a personal question? Are you a dentist?" Yes, he was a dentist. "Well, I've got this toothache..."
I told him the whole thing and he got me to prod under my jaw and answer several questions.
The resulting diagnoses: My tooth is fucked, basically. Extraction or root canal. Hockey player or a guy wearing a barrel; those are my future choices.
He told me plainly, "A root canal will be $1000" I felt like saying that those would be Ontario prices (where he hailed from) and that everything is more expensive here. Just look at the price of broccoli, for Christ's sake.
Anyway, he told me about fluids and bacteria and was generally very nice about the whole thing, however he wouldn't have me say 'Ahhhh!' He wouldn't go that far with it, but he certainly met me halfway.
So there you have it. You're never too old to bother professionals if you set your mind to it. That's lesson number one.
Number two: Get your teeth tended to while you have coverage, and brush out those sugar bugs.
I'd really love to fill you in on the wedding--the thrills and spills, the fisticuffs and which bridesmaids really had it "goin' on," but I'm too contrary.
I had a toothache begin yesterday and toothaches cause way more whining and misery than I thought.
Get this: my toothache started yesterday, which was also the beginning of the Newfoundland Dental Association's conference. Most dentists on the island are in attendance and none of them are near their chairs.
Sometimes, much like today, the irony surrounding my life just hurts.
Anyway, I've figured out that they're all down at the Delta, which is nearby.
I may drop by there and attempt to convince one of them to diagnose me in the elevator.
There are mirrors in elevators, after all.
The grounds of Grant Park were the same this year as they were two years ago. There weren't enough garbage cans, but there never are for these concerts, are there? You can put out as many giant bins with event employees standing in front of them (to make sure the garbage really goes in the can), but your farmland or race track will still look like the smoking area of a high school afterward, with chip bag debris and prophylactic wrappers shuddering in the hot breeze.
And then come the sea gulls!
At Lollapalooza, young women dress in less-than-nothing--the sort of outfits that concerned fathers have nightmares about. The rest of us fellows love 'em, though (the scariest part), and I can't stress enough how lovely it was to have some more hot Chicargo days in which to admire all of these supple young vixens from days that have long since passed Peter and I by.
Not Grant, though. He was getting dozens of "oohs" and "ahhs" wherever we went. I paid more attention this year and I noticed that the truth of the matter is this: People just don't tend to bring their toddlers to massive outdoor rock festivals. If you do find yourself bringing your toddler to a massive outdoor rock festival, I recommend ear protection, plenty of sun screen, and cool outfits for the kid so that you seem that much more hip. It worked for us.
Some buxom woman came by and she was just entranced by our little trooper. I was blown away. I kept thinking, "Jesus, she can't love kids this much, can she?" She more-or-less ignored us, apart from the occasional question, and picked and pawed and cooed at Grant, who was loving it.
If we're all being frank and beans here, we were loving it too because this woman had huge breasts in a bikini, and Grant kept squealing and reaching for her, and I continued to think, "He's going to catch that top with his hand and rip it off, and that's going to be incredible."
I tried my best to concentrate on general conversation with her friend while keeping the corner of my eye nice and peeled. I probably wasn't as discrete as I was trying to be.
Sadly, the best case scenario didn't happen, and they eventually moved on, leaving us to watch Metallica as bachelors, which was still just fine. It's the best way to listen to Metallica anyways, probably.
I saw a guy go into a Port-O-Potty with two women while several of us stood in line to pee. I turned to the guy behind me and said, "That was unexpected" as others jeered and complained that the guy had cut in line. That's missing the big picture, if you ask me.
One chick got tired of waiting for them ("What the fuck!?") and ripped the door open to discover that one of the girls was vomiting in there. Port-O-Potties are kinda like the garbage can; unmanageable.
If you have to stand guard while your buddy changes a diaper, I recommend going over by those trees where no one is. Y'know the ones, near the children's stage. We listened to a pre-teen band there who were surprisingly tight.
I almost lost my party at one point due to my being irresponsible. That was pretty unsettling. The sheer concentration of the populace really kinda pops out at you when you can't find the one and a half people that you're looking for. This is particularly the case if you have some refer with a guy from...Milwaukee? Minnesota? Somewhere with an 'M'. That was during Gogol Bordello, one of the few bands I have an album of.
I scanned the countless passers-by as I waited for Pete to materialize (he's level-headed and he has a good sense of direction. He'll show) and thought about losing your party at a place like this. It happens all the time; the 'wild' one of the group gets too fucked up on the mickey of Fireball he managed to sneak in, and suddenly he has disappeared. Everyone in the group pauses to buy a corndog, and when they turn away from the stand, the guy is gone, never to be seen again. These people then wake up in the park and wander there for weeks, only to emerge malnourished and fired from their jobs. Bad news, losing your party.
We managed to hang tough together, though, and I suppose we had a great time.
Grant found a stick he really liked and while Peter changed his diaper I really thought Grant was going to take his eye out with it. He also had some close calls with complete strangers, since he was waving it about, fascinated, while people surged closely by.
"Watch yer stick," Peter kept saying while I subtly suggested he should maybe wear his sunglasses while changing Grant for the time being. .
We saw a squirrel! That was neat. You see squirrels in parks, but in the midst of so many people it was kinda bizarre.
Peter said, "Fat squirrel eating hot dogs all weekend," and I wrote it down to put it in the blog later.
On our final evening the sun began to set on a very intense and cloudy sky. Pete maintained all day that there was supposed to be a fuck-tonne of rain that evening, likely cancelling the whole thing. I was skeptical all day, even when a massive downpour postponed all acts by an hour while I was napping. By the time I woke up, everything was dry again and the sky was cloudless. Despite this, I dragged us to a bunch of places for a rain poncho, since I was too stupid to pack my slicker.
I bought three.
I thought about them in my backpack as the sun descended on what would be our last night. The wind was humid and billowy, with the clouds thick and angry, like the eyebrows of someone who should be plucking more.
(The second photo was taken while it was nice outside.)
As the vibe turned ominous and the headliners began, I thought about what a disaster it would be if rain dumped itself in buckets on us--not to mention lightning. All of those people running and shouting for their friends, splashing up footsteps as they try to get to shelter. The fragility of the situation kinda hit me then, as I thought of these 100,000 people all gathered here and what they would look like plopped into the middle of the November Rain music video. Such a small thing like a downpour/hail storm or a well-placed explosive can turn a massive group on its head so quickly. It instills awe when you think about it, among it.
We were fine though as we listened to Florence & The Machine. (Flo got all of the camera-time, by the way. I have no idea what The Machine looks like.)
The storm came later, when we were safe in the hotel. 40mph winds with rain and hail. The television interrupted itself to tell us this. We watched twigs of lightning flicker and belch all over the city's skyline as it pelted down. I wondered where the homeless dudes went while this was going on, as a children would wonder of bees.
By the way, I saw one girl wearing a t-shirt that said "FESTIVAL ADDICT".
I'm no expert on them myself, but I know that festival addicts don't
wear shirts that say 'festival addict'. Instead, they wear a lot of face
paint with a lot of bangles, or a full-length shark costume.
All we humans have vulnerabilities. Rich or poor, white or black (or some other colour), beautiful or single, we all have them, many of which go unmentioned. However, I think you'll all agree that we share the most vulnerable human quality of all:
Our eyeballs. No matter what else happens, we can all agree that without our eyes, we're fucked.
I like that.
Okay, so I'm currently in a motel room that looks like it would be shared by two long-distance bus drivers having an affair, but let's go back a few days and pretend this is still fresh in my head.
Started (but not finished) Sunday, August 2nd:
I'm on the Lollapalooza grounds, better known as Grant Park. I have taken my shirt off. If you close your eyes at your desk, you could almost swear you were here with me, couldn't you?
You're not, though, so let me tell you what you're missing. I just finished watching Death From Above 1979, a band I was cheated out of seeing in 2006 because I was too busy watching some guy I'd never met try to open a bottle of wine, minus a corkscrew, by smashing it on a curb.
There was a blimp, but I don't know where it went. A plane keeps flying overhead, trailing a banner that's telling me to use Trojan condoms when I have sex with people I shouldn't be having sex with (the true use of condoms). It'll take more than an aircraft to convince me of that, though--like having sex while wearing a bread bag. Remember: the official condom of Tragic Hero is Durex Sheik. When things get out of hand with a stripper, it's Durex.
Lollapalooza, at ground level, is a crop circle of 20-somethings enjoying music, Ecstasy, sexual promiscuity, or a combination of all three (speaking of condoms...). I'm enjoying music because I can't score drugs in a foreign country and I'm not allowed to have sex with other people.
This is just as well because even if I could tryst away with one of these supple young things (they're all around me, by the way. There are beautiful young women dressed in hardly anything in absolutely every direction I look at all times during the entire festival. If only I had a pigeon's cone of vision), I couldn't because I keep forgetting that I have a retarded haircut.
The reason for this is because I know that Kirk Bussey (soon-to-be best man) sees the humor in a barber's college. That's the only reason. Well, that and I needed a haircut.
See, Peter, Grant and I were walking along some street, and since we were walking at Grant's pace, I had time to notice this shopfront:
Walk-ins welcome!
All haircuts $8 and performed by students.
Now, some of you know that I cinch up the wallet strap on the ol' trouser belt sometimes, whatever that means, but this wasn't a cost-effectiveness thing. I got a haircut here the following day for the two reasons I just mentioned, and those reasons alone. I needed a haircut. I knew that Bussey would find it funny if I got my hair cut at a barber's college.
That's reason enough.
"That's okay, but you really shouldn't be getting your haircut by students right before your wedding." This was Andie after I had showed her my new do, and that hadn't even crossed my mind before then. Hadn't even dawned on me.
Anyway, clang the bell over the door.
I walked in and some lady sent me over to sit with the other fellows, who were all black gentlemen dressed as though they'd just finished a pick-up game of basketball at the Y. (That isn't race bullshit; that's really how they were dressed.)
It had that barbershop energy that you see on TV, y'know? Hairdressers concentrating on their conversation with the other dressers more than on what they're cutting, pausing every now and then to throw back their head and cackle at a joke someone made, lolling their shears about as they did so. I had a good feeling about it.
I'll be honest, I felt like I was in good hands. Students or no students, this was Chicago. These people would have seen far more afros than Bernice working over at First Choice Haircutters in the mall. This was my presumption going in, and that is some race bullshit.
However, they paired me with Tommy, who looked very Irish, white and if I might say so, nervous. He said that he'd seen lots of hair like mine, though, and so I figured this would be okay.
He started snipping sporadically while I learned from him that he was from Wisconsin, his cousin owned a barbershop around the corner, and that he would start working there so long as he didn't puncture anything of mine today. Then I learned that he checked out Eminem last year at Lollapalooza, that there isn't much to do in Wisconsin, and that they drink a lot there. Then I learned that you can smoke pot there and the cops don't really bother you and that's good because it's Wisconsin. Then I learned that he liked football and hockey kinda, and he caught a ball game every now and then. Then I learned that everyone at the school was real nice and the instructors were supportive. By this point I was beginning to realize that I didn't really need to learn anything more about Tommy, no offense to him.
Though it was blurry because I receive haircuts without my glasses, it seemed as though Tommy's progress up to this point had been...cautious. There still appeared to be lots of rogue hair left on my head relative to the amount of forced conversation we had already had. To make matters worse, Tommy would stop cutting during conversation to gesture, which was time he was spending not cutting my hair.
He called over an instructor to help him set a 'guide' on the sides of my hair after beginning one with the bangs, which were finally done (too short). He later called over the instructor again to check his work on the right side of my head, at which time he was encouraged to do the left side. All-in-all he asked for assistance approximately five times, sometimes stepping to the side to allow the instructor to "take over for a second." By the end of the process I was legitimately learning methodologies for performing a haircut. I now have a general idea how to do it, and I intend to offer cuts to anyone who wants them for a fee of $8.
I didn't mind that it took an hour and a half. I shit on him a little here, but Tommy was a nice guy and whatever. Besides, some people like to make sure they're doing well as they go along. I'm like that myself. The fly in the Barbicide didn't come until the end of the process, when a different instructor was called over to see the finished product. That guy wetted me down and insisted on having a pick brought to him. "You gotta pick that out. If you've got it, you may as well use it, right?" Where was this guy during my time in high school I wondered as Tommy feebly told him that he didn't have a pick in his bag. Tommy was missing a couple of combs when asked to produce them, which was more uncomfortable than it should've been. When he'd meekly offer, "Oh, I left my flat comb home," I had this fucked up sensation like I was disappointing the teacher as well. Like, if Tommy didn't bring his, I should have at least had one on me.
The experienced guy began picking my hair out, suggesting I do this all of the time, and do I use product? There was a palmade at the counter I should look at, and I thought to myself, "Y'know what? I will buy the pomade. Fuck it." Otherwise, I responded where I was supposed to, thinking the whole time that I hated the way it looked as he teased it, and that I couldn't wait to leave there and tousle my hair around, like a 6-year old just out of church. I do this after every haircut, by the way, immediately after leaving a salon.
Anyway, as he was doing this, I noticed that the entire back of my hair dome was still...there. Come to think of it, I couldn't recall Tommy working on the back at all, and wasn't that the exact same length that the back had been when I came in? Wasn't that supposed to be included? Had I been fucking up afros since university, and in actuality they were supposed to look like two separate haircuts on the same head? Shouldn't the instructor be picking up on the fact that this haircut was only half done? Who was it that was lacking a sense of style here, exactly? In the end, it looked as though the front of my hair had been done by a professional landscaper on the Friday afternoon before a long weekend, the sides had been mowed by a neighborhood kid with a strong work ethic, and the back had been done by another neighborhood kid who was only mowing the lawn in the first place because he needed enough money to take a girl to the matinee where he hoped to get a handjob, and it was close to showtime.
Afterward, I found myself looking in shopfront windows and elevator mirrors, asking, "Wouldn't the instructor have said something? I mean, is this a totally shit haircut, or not?"
According to most of the people I've asked, it is.
Luckily, I have a pomade that will hold it in place no matter how windy it gets.
As the band played, I watched the Trojan plane bank sharply and I thought, "How ironic would it be if this plane crashed on us while watching a band called 'Death From Above'".
