Quick, Man! Cling Tenaciously To My Buttocks!

Quick, Man! Cling Tenaciously To My Buttocks!

So I stood with a knot in my stomach
And I gazed at that terrible sight
Of two youngsters concealed in a barrel
Sucking monkberry moon delight"
- Paul McCartney

This day has been full of flashbacks.

1.) At work, I constantly was thinking back to the place I worked for seven months in Indianapolis, though I oddly thought more about the work itself or about the other guys there instead of thinking about Jenny, who I was so fucking crazy about at the time.

Bob and I used to make queer jokes all the time. (Bob WAS gay, but never came out and said it to anyone. He also had a great twisted sense of humour about it.) At the current job, the supervisor and I do this all the time.

Coming back from lunch...

J walks through the area, past two other guys."Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum, get to work."

Then by me. "And here's Tweedle-DUH!"

I shot back,"Laugh it up, Tweedle-Cock-Munch. So, did you and your boyfriend have a nice game of Poophole Invaders during lunch break, motherfucker?"

"That was you and YOUR boyfriend."

"I see you're still the king of snappy and original comebacks, bitch. Tell ya what. Pay me another dollar an hour and I'll teach you how to BE a more interesting hairy asshole rather than just try to stick your dick in one."

"I should fire your ass right now."

"Don't do me any fucking favors. Hey, do you have a Phillips-head screwdriver, faggot?"

"Sure, I'll go get you one, homo."

Good times. I should plook him up the ass until he realizes how queer he actually is.

2.) Lunch break. Sitting in a convenience store parking lot with a crappy sandwich and a can of low-carb Joker Mad Energy. The light blue can. Suddenly, I remembered the first time I ever drank that shit.

Sitting in a convenience store parking lot in Yuma, Arizona. Soon after crossing the state line. Madly in love with the desert, but coming home. I seem to remember Robin Trower's BridgeOf Sighs in the player as I had a quick break before zipping through the cacti of southwestern Arizona and loving every minute of it. I'd sacrifice a testicle to Kali to spend three or four months living in my car across this country, and half of them would be not far from there. Georgia Motherfuckin' O'Keefe, baby.

3.) A quick stop at the library on the way to get Katie. Picking up the soundtrack to Beyond The Sea, with Kevin Spacey singing Bobby Darin songs. Flashback to watching American Beauty, spending a couple hours thinking I WAS Kevin Spacey's character in that movie. Ahhh, Mena Suvari....yum...

4.) Watching a pile of Ren & Stimpy with Katie. Thinking back on hours spent with that show, in awe of the magical fucking morass that must inhabit what passes for John Kricfalusi's acid-addled brain. I've never done acid. I don't NEED to. I have the first two seasons of Ren & Stimpy on DVD. Log!

5.) Just now while typing this, jumping out of my chair during the version of Politician on Jack Bruce's More Jack Than God and SHITTING ALL OVER MY BALLSACK as he does the most ridiculously cool double-stop riffage under the end of the progression while Vernon Reid does unmentionable things to a guitar, bringing to mind the few seconds that changed my life during a version of I'm So Glad on Cream's Goodbye where Jack said "fuck the tonal center right up its pentatonic poophole, I'm doing THIS shit" while a younger me scraped the poop out of his pants and took notes with it. Said it before, say it again - FUCK Clapton, Jack Bruce is God.

6.) Driving Katie back home with McCartney's Ram in the player. Sudden massive flashbacks of my friend Dan.

Dan was the best man at my wedding. He dropped off the face of the planet a few years ago and I haven't seen or heard from him since. I even started calling people with his last name while I was in Tulsa last year, since I knew he'd moved back there.

I've posted an mp3 of a version of Zappa's Zoot Allures here several times, and while I do everything else, Dan is on drums. Some of the best and most adventurous shit I ever did on a bass guitar was with Dan, just the two of us in a hot attic in downtown Marion. Sweating our nards off, drinking jet-fuel strength coffee, and attacking Zappa-esque reggae rhythms for 20 minutes at a time, just bass and drums. Trying to be Wackerman/Thunes and not really doing it, but doing some really fuckin' good shit anyway.

At one point we discussed recording a version of Paul's Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey, and I took the time to learn the bass part, all the keyboard parts, and most of the vocals. We never got to it, though i think we played through it just bass and drums a couple times. There's a lot to be said for a rhythm section doing work all by itself, and i learned a LOT about my playing in those few months.

Ram is one of my favorite albums, certainly my favorite McCartney. Sure, Band On The Run is arguably the "better"of the two (it's on the other side of the tape I had on tonight) and gawd knows I love that album too, it's fuckin' SPECTACULAR in 99,999,999 ways, but Ram is such oddball goofwad FUN...

...I just put on another Jack Bruce album. Something Els. Fuckin' Christ, I'd give a nard to science to be able to sing like that. Waiting On A Word. If I were a woman, I'd...

But Ram is such oddball goofwad FUN (Have I mentioned that? I have? OK, let's press on...) that I have to give it the edge. With all the catchy melodic joy you'd expect from Paul, all the killer arrangements and tasty playing, it's also the most RETARDED thing in his catalog, just because of so many of the lyrics. Holy fuckin' Dada, Batman! I LOVE singing along to it, and the lyrics are so fucking weird I don't even know a third of them, I just make shit up along with it and hope it kinda fits.

Dan and I knew a thing or two about being retarded. We'd play all this killer shit together then spend hours getting liquored up, watching porn, listening to Zappa bootlegs, and laughing our balls off to the STOOOOPID shit the other one would come up with. I miss the fuck out of Dan and I have for years now. We met in 1998 in Muncie at a Keneally show, and discovered within minutes that we worked maybe 200 yards from each other. I taught guitar, he provided internet service.

We briefly had a weird blues/Zappa/rock band with me on guitar and one of my students on bass, but it didn't go anywhere beyond some really pathetic rehearsal recordings. I had more fun just the two of us doing the vamp on the solo of Zoot Allures for hours on end, asking the eternal quesstion WWSTD (What Would Scott Thunes Do?) while he Wackermanized the groove. Never have I had a partner in evil quite like Dan, somebody so fucking wackaloonesque as to make me spend half my time trying to catch up with his twisted Conan-O'Brian's-evil-twin -brother ass, and to this day, only Dan has drawn the kind of outside scraping-the-edges-of-ton ality playing out of me that we achieved in that short time, only Dan has locked in so perfectly to my dipshit scatalogical frenzy and made it even more disgusting and pure, and only Dan has compared me to Chris Farley and made me think that was a compliment.

I miss you, you fucking swine.

7.) I stepped out of the car in Sheryl's driveway to drop off a sleeping Katie, and looked up into the clouds. An airplane coming from the north, then cutting to the west and flying a straight line in front of the house.

I saw that sight many times standing in that front yard while we were married, and the one I saw just before I left too, another airplane route passing right over the house to the southwest.

I saw it a few years ago as I sat in the front yard, watching the planes fly over while neighborhood kids came scrambling for candy one pleasant Halloween night. There was a brief time I thought I could live in that environment, and tonight I missed it more than I have in months, flashing back to a night that our daughter went around the neighborhood in a princess outfit and I passed out candy to Spongebobs and vampires.

I don't miss it often, but I do sometimes. I miss her more often. I hope she's OK with that. We're better off this way, but I do think back sometimes, and I try to think back on times like that, when we were happy.

8.) After driving away, to the grocery store I worked at last year.

Going to the back of the store, I heard her voice, loud and clear over everything else. "Hey! Doug!"

I turned around. E was at a register,and wasn't looking at me, but taking care of a customer. It was definitely her, though, and it sent shock waves up and down my spine. She sounded excited, like she wanted to talk to me. Soemtimes she does, other times...

When I left, I walked by her, and said "Hi, E!"

With about as bored a look on her face as I've ever seen, she said "Hey, how ya doin'?" and kept walking, as if I wasn't there anymore.

E in a nutshell. Drives me fucking batshit. I think she's more bipolar than I'll EVER be.

I miss bullshitting with her at work. I miss being able to see that incredible blast of utterly recognizable light blonde hair four or five nights a week. I'm not sure I miss never knowing if she was going to be super-friendly or if she'd totally blow me off. I always figured nobody else saw quite what I saw there -she's kinda spacey and slow and really pale and usually looks like she hasn't slept in years - probably because with two full-time jobs and school she HASN'T - but she's really sweet and fun to fuck with and every once in a while the dead look in her eyes will be replaced by a really NASTY "I'm a dirty little girl" shot right down my spine, and I'd really like to fuck her just once. She's pretty cool in her off-center, detached way.

9.) I spent sometime yesterday and tonight looking through pictures of the band, thinking back on the last year and a half, wishing it didn't have to end. The few pictures of "Layla" are enough to tear me apart, but the pictures of M and I together are more so, because I made some great fucking noise with him, and it's over. I'm making noise with a couple new people now. The other M has the dubious honor of keeping this band going now that I'm soon to go too, and there's a few pics of us that fuck with me too. All the hours I spent with him in his record store, listening to obscure '60s and '70s rock together. It's a very different thing than what I had with Dan, or what I had with other people I've loved to make music with. But I really love doing this with him and want to keep doing it, but I don't know how possible it is.

Two more pics. Me. And me with M. What a long strange trip it's been.

Love, Dougie