Son of a Preacher Man

On Valentine's Day I got an unexpected voicemail- from a long lost surviving member of the Northern Florida surfing gothic hippie crew. Actually, he was probably the first (new) person I met upon landing in the swamp in 1994 with whom I actually wanted to spend time. I met him when we both auditioned for a play and were cast as partners-in-mischief and (perhaps, I don't quite recall) even brothers. Of course shortly after rehearsals commenced, I met the FairyGodFaggot (who sprinkles sparkle dust on me from an adjacent plane as of November 2006, raise hell in death brother) who was, like me, cast across gender as a goofy old fortune-telling Gypsy. It felt like I had joined on with a psychedelic 3 Musketeers that summer.

The truly uncustomary thing for me- having grown up in the North- was that both of them were really chivalrous- southern gentlemen, as much as a couple of 18 year old boys in fishnets and eye makeup could be (Which, I suspect, is probably a bit more gentlemanlike than your average unadorned adolescent boy) They paid, they brought the wine and grapes, so to speak.

Partner-In-Crime guy actually did my makeup and cut my hair for me, when I was still stoically in denial about my bisexuality and far too dykish to even attempt those skills. He also regularly woke up at 4:30AM to borrow a car to drive me to work at AMOCO. (Here, "regularly" is a word meaning "for 3 and a half weeks until I got canned"). My Fairy Godfaggot dressed me up with fabulous textiles and cast off rings and bailed me out of jail and made me multiple mixed CDs. Partner-in-crime guy, on the other hand, wound up stealing a hideous heirloom opal ring from me* and my Dead Milkmen tapes when he fled up North (with his traditional zero notice). Of course, Fairy Godfaggot was far from perfect, as he had a terrible drinking-and-going-home-with-strangers-abandoning-me habit.

Generally speaking, I maintained a warmer relationship with FGF (who I'll refer to as Pryncess Xanax from here on out). Women and combustibly gay men often mate for life, and while I know he had friends out the french horn who all adored him, I have it in writing that I was one of his top 10 most favorite people in the world. I was his pet hippie and he was my, well- not to put too fine a point on it-my pet faggot. But after I moved, we strayed. I become essentially too depressed to tolerate. But I guess he one-upped me there, pulling the ultimate no-show at age 30.

Not as if the Preacher's Son (grandson, to be precise) was a cheap plastic consolation prize. Our relationship was different. I imagine part of it came from the natural intrigue a chick who (thinks she) is a lesbian holds for a young man. Another part of it, I'm sure, is that a diet high in cannabis with regular doses of LSD is key in maintaining that blissninnied-free-love state that had us all thinking it was a good idea to hitchhike across the country in March and sleep in the park in New Orleans. Further, the Preacher's Son actually introduced me to my very first Rainbow Gathering, a happening which profoundly affected the course of my life. . . until I blew it, of course, on booze and women. He was really quite generous, not even a bit of a chauvinist pig, broadened my world tremendously, and was a great sparring partner. . .

. . .Which really should have clued me in earlier. I mean, how do little boys and girls show affection for one another? Hell, I still have a certificate proclaiming me "Queen of the 'I Hate Tommy' Club" from kindergarten.

It seems he was also tricked into leaving Surfer Hippie paradise and now lives just a couple of (mid-sized, Midwestern) states away. And he decided to call me up on the 14th. And he's single, and still a cutie pie. Oh dear, watch me screw this one up within 48 hours of our reunion.

I've essentially had one "normal" sexual relationship in my life, because my preferences have led me to years of total asexuality broken up by a couple of mania-induced whirlwinds of sexual carnival tours. My ex-wife and I met at the tail end of one of those, and I always felt guilty about pulling a sexual bait-and-switch on her- towards the end as my sanity peeled away, so our sex life died after a long illness of acute loss of quality followed by ever-widening spans of behaving like roommates who sniped at each other, or childhood best friends who feel obligated to one another though they really have nothing upon which to base an adult relationship.

Who knows, though? Perhaps we'll just reignite that stiff upper-lipped justfriendship accessorized with a slice of cold, gelatinized sexual tension on the side. And- what the hell- he is alive.

*C'mon, H.! What kind of a moron do you take me for? I soothed all my resentments by making hippie- dresses out of all your stuff, though.

Winter Cometh

Severe wind conditions today. 50mph is really fast for air to travel. Especially when it doesn't have a ton of water or dust to create drag. I was very much afraid it would rip my car door off or slam the trunk shut and decapitate me while I was half in it. I was trying to prioritize my groceries in order of freezer durability with only one free hand at a time, switching off the clown mitten as quickly as possible after the glove-only hand reached a "flash-freeze" state and quit functioning entirely. Fortunately today's haul included a sizeable proportion of dry goods safe to leave in the tundra while I focused my immediate attention on dairy, bottles of condiments, and approximately 10,000 cans. It would, however, have been mighty inefficient to succeed at the sorting-juggling game had I inadvertently failed to prioritize my head and left it for later retrieval with the baking mixes and crate of boxed stuffing.

Le Krappste

God, I feel truly and completely decrepit. I've got a Ragin' Cajun UTI which, as the night has crept in, seems to be slithering its way up to take up full squatters' rights in my bladder and kidneys. I've felt nauseous all day, which somehow has failed to be relieved by any amount or matter of food I stuffed down my gullet (and kept!). And to top it all off I've got a lovely lingering headache which reemerges from the analgesic fog of APAP and/or ibuprophen every few hours.

It's really quite lovely.

I also have my longstanding tinea versicolor now possibly enhanced by a vaginal yeast infection.

And I'm supposed to be up and out of here to visit my little brother for the first time in a couple of months in just 4 hours? I really miss him. Maybe I can get authorization from my mother to go and take him out myself one weekend, instead.

Oh, yeah- I turned another year older yesterday, and I am really starting to show it.

The Pedant Still Lives

Despite what my browser and /or the Blogger "New Post" template would like to believe, I did not misspell "filet" in the previous post.

A *real* Bipolar Life

. . .not descriptive my moods nearly as distinctively as my life. It takes a year or two for my depressive episodes to successfully mentally castrate me.

For instance, I became pretty gung-ho about suicide at the ripe old age of 9. Or maybe I was 8? What I know for sure is that I was in the fourth grade. So commenced my long, boring, often worthless/ detrimental life in therapy. However, it wasn't until the 6th grade that I opted to trade off leisure time and my brain-mouth filter for passing grades and freedom from the tyrannies of detention.

5 years after that I quit high school and, over the 7 years to follow, spent my time essentially being a winner at life. I travelled around the US and to the opposite end of the Earth. I followed the Grateful Dead (the *real* Dead) I travelled the Russian countryside "riding the dog" (Russian colloquialism for taking the train without buying a ticket.) I dyed my hair blue, red, pink, and purple and taught college classes without considering removing my nosering. I won over 20,000 dollars in grants, largely for the express purpose of going to study in countries known for hard drinking. I met a fabulous girl and married her.

Unfortunately, in my 2nd year of grad school I was socked in the belly by the most ruthless depression I had, till then, experienced. My concentration was so poor that, not only could not read for awhile, but I couldn''t even sustain attention long enough to make it through a sitcom anymore. I also lost a huge chunk of my appetite; I probably averaged a couple hundred calories a day for about 3 weeks. Oddly enough, I didn't notice that I was getting malnourished until one night in bed I discovered my cervical vertabrae. At the time, I also noted how much money I hadn't spent on groceries.

Of course, cash flow from starving myself ended very shortly. I relapsed with my bulimia in all its former glory. I was genuinely aurprised and secretly proud when I was diagnosed with Anorexia a few months later. I mean, I knew that I could puke my way thin, but this was the first I'd heard my 100,000-calories-per-day habit included in the criteria for AN.

While its true that earned my M.A. that year, and, two years later, was awarded my second FLAS fellowship to spend a year drinking in Poland, I never recovered totally mentally/physically and certainly not intellectually. My flame had burned out, and I slogged my way through the fifth year. Unfortunately, 5th year is when your committee and your advisor seem to expect brilliant ideas to actually be developed and ardent copyediting of every last draft. The ten=day long exam sounds like it would suck, as well. I started getting occasional Cs, whereas in my first term I'd actually cried about A minuses. I always felt like a mental midget in graduate school after maintaining a 4.0 GPA (in my field only) through my BA. While my specialty isn't large enough to be considered a big pond, I did feel that I'd gone from big fish/small pond to small fish/small pond.

It's pretty much been upstream in cold waters since then. I've gradually lost interest/ability in everything that once made me at least minimally sociable and lucky enough to have varying regular opportunities to appreciate singlehood (from taking exstacy to going dancing at the S&M club, to taking random jobs- some under the counter- and leaving them on a whim and dying my hair to clash with my mostly Goodwill couture). My friends were family to me and our fundamental duty to one another was to let the good times roll. Having to quit graduate school did a number on my self-esteem & my work ethic. When I thought nothing could be any worse, 2004 really was spectacularly bad, especially exogenously. (Nearly had my foot amputated, the last year of my 20s, an awful president was elected for the first time to a second term, my wife left me.) 2005 sucked me dry and spit me into the wind as I dealt with the end of my marriage by honestly applying myself to suicide. I just went round-and-round the drain of my own misery, pulling anyone who tried to care about me in to drown, too. To top it off, my eating disorder- which is now old enough to drink, BTW- has managed to mature into its most feral and extreme depths in the past 4 years.

I would really like to grow out of this stage, but I honestly believe that 34 may be too late for me to accomplish a life worth writing about, not to mention worth reading about.

(If you actually managed to read this thing, kudos! Leave a comment so I can single you out on tEEf)

Bueller? Bueller?

Is there anybody out there?

I care terribly what you think of me, or even that you think of me at all.

Please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please leave a comment. Any comment at all, including the silly and unrelated. Just stroke my ego.

Examples: It's raining frogs and grape jelly in the UP today.

or

Yo! I'm here!

Something I meant to "publish" in January

Dead Tour:
April 12 Greensboro NC Greensboro Coliseum
April 14 Washington DC Verizon Center
April 15 Charlottesville VA John Paul Jones Arena
April 17 Albany NY Times Union Center
April 18 Worcester MA DCU Center
April 19 Worcester MA DCU Center
April 21 Buffalo NY HSBC Arena
April 22 Wilkes-Barre PA Wachovia Arena @
Casey Plaza
April 24 Uniondale NY Nassau Coliseum
April 25 New York NY Madison Square Garden
April 26 Hartford CT XL Center
April 28 E. Rutherford NJ IZOD Center
April 29 E. Rutherford NJ IZOD Center
May 1 Philadelphia PA Wachovia Spectrum
May 2 Philadelphia PA Wachovia Spectrum
May 5 Chicago IL All State Arena
May 7 Denver CO Pepsi Center
May 9 Los Angeles CA The Forum
May 10 Mountain View CA Shoreline Amphitheater

Phish Tour:
6.04.09 Nikon at Jones Beach Theater, Wantagh, NY
6.05.09 Nikon at Jones Beach Theater, Wantagh, NY
6.06.09 Comcast Center, Mansfield, MA
6.07.09 Susquehanna Bank Center, Camden, NJ
6.09.09 Asheville Civic Center, Asheville, NC
6.16.09 Fox Theatre, St. Louis, MO
6.18.09 Post Gazette Pavilion, Burgettstown, PA
6.19.09 Verizon Wireless Music Center, Noblesville, IN
6.20.09 Alpine Valley Music Theater, East Troy, WI
6.21.09 Alpine Valley Music Theater, East Troy, WI
Fuck this. I did a really short "Phish tour", from FW or Austin (whichever is wester) to NOLA primarily for company on the drive home to FL in 95. And yeah, I vended. But I didn't go around asking for free tickets, I honestly couldn't (still can't) name a single song of there's. Here is the sum total of my knowledge of the band Phish:Trey Anastasio

So maybe I'll find a renfest to crash for a month orhmmmmmm maybe I could go visit a friend who lives in California but of course I couldn't be so forward as to straight out and say it. So she'll clearly have to learn of my plans through this blog.

July- Kick back in Wyoming with several thousand of my closest pals see how long we can survive both a) living on dried pulses, and b) the comingling of general Eau de 2 week Ripe Hippie with the natural conclusion of massive bean ingestion by thousands of humans.

Magically liquidize all my books and other bulky, pseudo-valuable crap in a single flash of brilliance, so that I don't manage to while away the money that I've saved/earned the previous few months by not paying and selling Handmade Fairtrade 100% Bolivian Sticky Dank Nothing on a Stick.

Renew my passport.
Move back to Moscow and teach Yoga and English.

Maybe I should leave a space for yoga lessons in there somwhere? Maybe I can move in with some nice asexual diggers who will tolerate my lack of money and the red x lit up on my vagina as long as I fed them well. I have found historically (from a youth spent as "her ugly friend")that that ability to hold your cool/liquor/ "non-liquor"/ tears, etc. while at once serving homemade lasagna from a casserole nestled between 15 y. o. hips and DD breads while exclaming that you're "so glad you finally got to make this- you've been on the rag all week and craving it" generally leaves them too dumbfounded to do anything but pass you the bong.

Then again, who knows- maybe I'll want to have sex with a 67 y.o. geezer perpetually adorned in a loincloth on the packed-earth floor of his gedesic home. Such things are prone to happen when I quit my frigidity happy/sleepy/crazy/nervy/spazzy pills.


Good god I've got so much beading and macrame and patchwork to be done.

News of the Stoopit

My lord, did I really play race the train tonight?

I wonder it it had anything to do with 54 hours without sleep. (The first 24 all natural.)

I brushed my hair today

The is an event, because it was the first time I had done so this year. Well, in this year of my life, anyway. November was a month of neglect: I've been reduced to reusing the same serrated knife (for slicing cheese and bread, but also for smearing them in mustard and margarine), plastic Taco Hell spork, and pyrex one-quart liquid measuring cup for all of my domestic needs (not to mention my designated "bathroom" cups) as I ignored the mountains (and probably-by now- unique biosphere) that filled my sink by the beginning of the month. I just didn't care. Now? I sort of care- I'm sick of my binges being limited to generic boxed stuffing, day-old baked goods & Lil' Debbie knockoffs, and gigantic bags of store-brand potato chips. But now it's grown to more of task than simply washing dishes and finding adequate space/facilities to dry them. Now I fear it would involve an obligatory relocation program for the community that have surely hosts a variety of (hopefully not sentient) life-forms.

At any rate, I started with something (minimally) less daunting: brushing my white-girl-dredlock-prone nap. My hair is getting long. It's also almost back to a natural color. And here's the clincher: while using the Jaws of Life to clean out my brush after this act of self-inflicted violence, I came across an entire hank of abnormally light hair. I couldn't tell in the darkness of my cave whether it was totally devoid of pigment, or just one of those random *really* light blond streaks that decide to grow randomly out of my head to help me retain my status of blondness as my natural hair color has metamorophosed (and nearly fallen off the Map of Blond) with age. I realized that what I was looking at could actually be grey hair, sprouting in streaks.

That's when I decided to revoke my moratorium on dying my hair unnatural colors. Sure, I may looks silly as I progress through my 30s with _Vampire Red_, _Azure_, and the inevitable _Ultraviolet_ sticking out from under my hood, but at least I won't have to subject myself to the horrors of _dying my hair its own color_ in order to remain in denial. Of course, with flourescent hair the denial may be a bit more outwardly obvious, but it's easy for me to believe I'm still punkrock.

(I was never punkrock. I was a gothic hippie.)

In other news, I believe I have officially blown my one remaining median cubital vein. This sucks, but on the other hand- it means no more trainee phlebotomists when I get bloodwork done. Ever.

A mixed cd

Heart Shaped World- Chris Isaak
Manic Monday- the Bangles
Life is a Highway- Tom Cochrane
Son of a Preacher Man- Dusty Springfield
Hot Child in the City- Nick Glider
Devil Went Down to Georgia- CD Band
Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald- Leo Kottke
Don't it Make My Brown Eyes Blue- Crystal Gayle
Killing me Softly with His Song- Lauren Hill
Sunrise- Donna Godcheaux

We Interrupt this Miserable Life To Bring You Barely 21

In the event that you had forgotten, this is what the weekend used be for.

Beer and bongs and board games near xmas break 96 from UF . I didn't really need to be on acid. But not everyone does coke, right? Only so many people can possibly work in the restaurant business. . .

Right, um. As you were.

Russian Music

Sorry folks. This one will require not only having your whole damn "character encoding" list ( in firefox->view->character encoding-> then digging around in the options until your find the one that makes this readable.) I've got reason to belief that it's "unicode UTF-8", a c.e. of which I know nothing. Presumably because it uses transliteration rather than the real cyrillic keyboard which just screws me up. Or- if you are on Firefox- and god only knows why anyone in the free world would be using anything less by now, go check out the wet dream list of language extension tools. Right now I'm doing fine with Anykey. I noticed much more recent loads of add-ons available, including quite a few that I could potentially *use* in entirety . . .just don't see myself buckling down with- well- *any* brand new language family right now, unless I finally opt to get my head out of the clouds of pharmaceutical shell/artificial sweetener/ high-fiber cement-like items I inevitably give in to eventually, even knowing that they are primarily doomed to end up in my lower intestine. So, yeah, perhaps it's time to find a more personalized add-on until such a time as it becomes plausible vital to get a high colonic, in order to facilitate extraction of head from ass. It appears most feasible to expect this possibility to present itself on a grand scale during

Anyhoo. In response to this poll regarding my favorite band's latest album cover, I replied to the guy who thinks a child's picture doesn't "go" with the title.

Никите- А по-моему во фотке сосредоточитя беспредельная, заязычная радость яркокраской, тянушим морем прелестьно-глупостью (огромных очков). В самом деле она точно подходит М.Кунстливому состоянию. (т.е. тому, кодга я его знала. Может он обезсветовалась, возможно теперь на каждом концерте представляется одна и та же самая списка лишенных экспромптом песень, а ни на коем случае больше не обращаются с фанками, тем более запрещены бсе "guest musicians.") По-моему такое отчуждение темперамента появляется крайне-редко, верно следствием шок-терапии.

В любом случае, обложка на албуме должна воображать музыкантов и их творчество целом. Название в конце концов мгновенный способ проверки. Нафиг обложке ему подходить? Прелестный представитель группы, которая вызывает во мне сольнечные тропические мысли и ребячливое желание смеяться и танцовать (несмотря на взгляды других). ' '

Go check out the band whose blog I linked to in my title. I discovered them quite serendipitously in March 1997, when the band on the roster at the tiny club Кризис жанра failed to show. That was the night I understood why Jerry Garcia had to die, and about the same time I realized I had to stay in Russia as long as possible.*