The unbearable Fuck You of being.

or, “Don’t lean on the bar if you ain’t drinkin’, there, Bad Haircut!”

My lorrrrd, the appalling lack of updates (okay, there is some bad portry waiting in ‘draft’ status, but you are being spared that particular injustice*)! I would apologize, but my computer went belly-up, whereupon I ran out and purchased another and promptly waited like ten days to get it set up. Call me inefficient, see if I care!

There are Memphis Stawrys, but I won’t tell them right now. What I will tell you is that I warned traveling companions thusly: “I feel like I must tell you a couple of key things about myself before we fully embark upon Mayhemian Pursuits^tm: I am a veritable magnetar for off-the-beaten-path occurrences, and you will likely have a low-key celebrity encounter while in my presence.” Done and done, and I will recount those things on another go-round.

Today we will explore events from last evening, when the two reigning Superiors actually got to leave their offspring with a creature named Nana and hit the mighty, mighty Nick for some fine musicks, some not-too-unreasonably priced booze and more second-hand smoke than we’ve seen in a year of Sundays. Plus, there were the idiots….I was hanging on the front porch around four this morning and heard one of the barkeeps say to one of The Guys Who Runs Around Doing Many Different Things, “This is worse than New Year’s.”

TGWRADMDT said, “It’s nowhere near as crowded as New Year’s.”

“No,” yon barkeep contended, “not the size of the crowd, their level of stupidity. It’s like they’ve never been to a fucking bar before.” See, you people? It’s NOT just me!

So, the objects of our aural affections were the Damnwells, who have been appropriately fawned over here before, and Caddle. FYI: Cad=yucky gentleman, Caddle=herd of yucky gentlemen. Also, more gorgeous free musicks from the Damnwells boys here. Please, please love the hay out of ’she’s the nyc skyline’, just like me.

Okay, the very notion of going to a show was at once breathtaking and terrific….and I mean that in a multi-tenses for both words kinda way. I’ve not really been to a show since my most excellent encounter with a tractor (and I’m glad the last one before that heinous eedle bit of happenstance was Jason Mraz, as he makes me smile so very, very much. It was unseasonably cold for my birthday, there was a spiffy venue, we wore hoodies and bounced up and down a lot, we hobknobbed with a crazily disparate crowd, Maxim yelled, “WHY YOU SO SAAAAAAAH-AAAAAAD? DON’T BE SAAAAAAAH-AAAAAAD!” at the SuperEmo opener. Who, by my estimation, is retardedly overhyped. HOWEVER, in his defense, he gives a greatly entertaining and blunt summation of his Birmingham, Alabama experience: “Tonight we’re starting a short support tour with Jason Mraz at a place called the Sloss Furnaces. We speculated as to what sloss might be, and what happened when you burnt it, but when got there, it was self-explanatory.

“This the first place on the tour where I actually felt foreign. Not because everything was outlandish and strange – quite the opposite – but because I felt out of place with my posh English accent and unruly hair.

“I assume they thought I was a fucking limey faggot hairdresser.” I’m kinda sorry that I encouraged Maxim in all his shouting….egged him on, even. The SAAAAAAH-AAAAAAD boy can actually write amusingly.)

So, the week leading up to Saint Patty’s, I was all, ‘whatevah shall I way-uh??’ In the end, I said a rousing FUCK NO to heels and something cleavagealicious. I ended up, ironically enough, sporting the same goofy rhinoceros hoodie that saw Mraz action and my favorite orange tennyshoos. Embracing my dorkitude entirely, there were pigtails, even if they do indeed make the Baby Jesus colicky. *shrug* I won’t be able to wear pigtails convincingly in my forties and I wasn’t much interested in them in my twenties. It’s just that simple, joo interenets poeple.

All day yesterday I batted ‘New Delhi’ around my brain. Hot damn if that wasn’t the first song in the Damnwells’ set. They ripped into it pretty well; not surprising since they tend to rock the teeth out of that one and ‘Death After Life’. They are deft hands at folding a decent bit of new material in with trusted favorites. This has been (and will likely continue to be) instrumental in growing their audience exponentially in music-hungry towns like the ‘Ham. The first song I ever looked forward to hearing live at one of their shows was ‘Sleepsinging’; the bloom has fallen off the rose with that one, and it has been supplanted in my heart’s Highly Anticipated chamber by tunes like ‘Electric Harmony’ and ‘I Will Keep The Bad Things From You’. I’ve yet to hear ‘For My Own Good’, one of my favorite Damnwells songs, live. There must be someone somewhere who can tell me why exactly that is.

Dear the Damnwells,

Why the hell won’t you ever play ‘For My Own Good’? Is it because I might start humping the stage??

Well, I wouldn’t. Word on the street is that my mother would be horrified by such behavior once she finally finds this site and starts reading it. I, of course, would be obliged to tell any story involving a stage OR humping. Holy damn, my readers will stand for no less.

Yours until you stop talking to me before, during or after shows,

Jett “Discerning Music Spectator and Enthusiast” Superior

Amusing pre- and post-show adventures are always likely. Let’s get the things I hate out of the way:

1) Girl? Girl with the long sheet of blonde hair? Yes! Yes, yessir, I mean you. Do not flop at the waist, finger-pick your mane, flip it back over your head dramatically and re-seat your sunglasses atop it just…so. That is stupid. For one thing, it’s eleven o’clock at night. We know that those sunglasses give you a little self-esteem boost despite the fact that they appear kind of goobery. We also know that their career is mostly as head-dressing and they likely haven’t seen the sunlight at all. Why don’t you know it, too? And the hair-flipping thing? Stop it. It’s a fucking bar.

2) GUY! GUY AT THE BAR WITH ARMS ENCIRCLING GIRLFRIEND –NOT IN A PROTECTIVE, BUT RATHER– IN A THREATENING WAY! You fuckface, if you are not going to order, THEN STEP AWAY FROM THE BAR SO THAT THE DRUNKARDS MAY READILY ACCESS THE NECTAR OF BACCHUS. You turdbag. You could have at least given leeway because I was a female. It was not necessary for you to be so assy, requiring SOME WORDS from me. Next time I hope you’ll ponder a few less humiliating options and employ one of them. Plus: See the last sentence of number one above.

There are amazingly spectacular things that happen in the presence of rock music and booze. One of them is the fact that normally lonely and shy girls will become sudden automatic drip friendmaking machines. This is an especially common occurrence in lines for the restyroom. I do not tolerate random approaches by your general overliquored stranger very well when I am concentrating on important things like “It’s not really socially acceptable or endearing to do the peepee dance in an over-twenty-one extabbishment.” However, I am friendly and accommodating, because I have an innate understanding of this person’s desperation for friends and/or basic human interaction; also within the scope of my understanding is the fact that a drunk enough lonely person, insulted at the precisely wrong time, might go home and experiment with such silliness as gingerly placing a couple of barrels on what they view as a fairly useless tongue in order to go to their happy place on more than a timeshare basis.

Upon my return from one of the wee queue-gatherings, Maxim leaned in and recounted to me the sad shenanigans of the drunk, super-happy-to-be-there girl I kept gesturing toward all evening. She’d approached him, plopped down in my recently vacated seat and leaned into him,

“ALAN? IS THAT YOU? Are you Alan? Is that your name?”

Yep, she was that hammered. Dear Maxim had to tell her no, sorry, I am not the He you seek, that’s not my name.

“Oh.” she semi-pouted, “Oh, I thought you were Alan. I lost my virginity to him.” Maxim was freaked out by both her absolute conviction and her resigned desperation. He threw in another Uhhhhm, nooooo before she stumbled away. I returned with beers, he told me the story, and the next time I went to play Pee Away The Booze, Go Get A Refill, the hammered girl’s friend decided that she owed it to her friend to officially apologize to any offended parties. Maxim was, not to anyone’s surprise, one of the duly apologized-to. How delightful!

I am convinced this was some sort of goofy good-cop, bad-cop routine in order to rook poor sweet trusting Maxim and lure him back to their house for a threesome that might end in certain crashing disaster if his darling wife were to find out. Maxim=smart to take a pass on a little strange.

Before the Damnwells went on, I noticed a guy wearing a vest and The Whitest Tennis Shoes Ever. He later climbed onto the stage. It was Alex Dezen. Alex, your shoes were sooooo white. Super!

I hollered at Phillip from Caddle, “Where’s that ceedee you said was coming the last time we talked??”

“It’s absolute shit, but you can have one.” Have one, hell. I was gonna buy one. He eventually offered to mail me “…four of the fuckers. Hit me up with the e-mail!” We both made fun of his hometown. He blurted, as he is wont to do at times, “You’re HOT.”

“You told me that last time you saw me, Phillip.”

“I know. That’s because YOU’RE HOT.”

“And you’re drunk.”

“Yes. WOULD YOU LIKE TO MAKE OUT WITH ME LATER???”

I started to respond, “Only if you will sit in my lap while we do” but I could only see that as leading to trouble and I rearranged the vowels so that “I don’t think my husband’d be down with that” came out instead.

“That fucker, where is he?”

“Bathroom, I think.”

“BAStard!” *gesturing in the general vicinity of the men’s room*

I shrugged. I love my life. It is made up of music and moments and magic, all jumbled up just like that.

*for a time, anyway. duh, hineyscratchers!