A couple bad pick-up lines to add to this list:
Do you come here often? Or do you wait until you go home?
Hey baby — wanna go halves on a bastard?
Personal
The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.
Rollins!
I’m a bit late posting this, as I’ve been battling with a flu/sore throat bug that’s kept me in bed and downing NyQil for most of the weekend, but Friday’s fun was seeing Henry Rollins spoken-word act at the Moore Theatre here in downtown Seattle. While I’ve never been a huge fan of Henry’s music (Black Flag, The Rollins Band, etc.), I became a big fan of his spoken-word performances a few years ago after one of the people hanging around the Pit brought over a videotape of Talking From the Box.
Rollins is an incredibly intelligent man, and does great spoken-word performances — cynical, insightful, hilarious, disturbing, and about ten or twenty other good adjectives. I’d been able to see him once before when he came to Anchorage a couple years back, and as soon as Candice let me know that he was going to be in Seattle, I knew I’d want to go again. As it turned out, Candice picked me up from work and we went, then met up with Chad, Rick, Casey, Liza (Rick’s roommate), Kim, and Kayo, and then we all went out to a bar after the show. The show was great, the after-show party was a lot of fun, and I had a blast, up until I finally had to head home and put my sick self to bed.
I’d had the Rollins spoken word album Think Tank for a while (autographed by The Man, even, after the show in Anchorage), and I highly recommend it. At the show Friday night, there were two new spoken word albums available — Talk is Cheap, Volumes one and two, both of them 2-disc sets, and both of them just ten dollars each! At the moment they’re only available at his shows, too — needless to say, I’ve got them both.
Snippets from a couple articles about Rollins from local papers plugging his show:
“In a way, I think it’s good that major labels have charged so much money for their wares,” he said. “Because it’s going to cave in and there will only be one record company. A new release will just say, ‘FM Music,’ and it will sound like Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake and Jennifer Lopez put in a Cuisinart with the Korn guitar player, who will be out of a job….”
— Seattle P-I: Henry Rollins likes to keep himself ‘off balance.’
“TO ME,” SAYS Henry Rollins, “the way to really get close to the material is to go at it from almost an insane or an absurdist angle. If you just go for the straight facts, you know, they kind of come up to meet you with a fist in the face. It’s like the idea of us getting into a war with North Korea. I can’t see it happening, but the way for me to internalize it is to envision these old guys running around the war room with hard-ons, looking for some payback for when they had to bail out of Pusan in the ’50s. Or Donald Rumsfeld’s thing: ‘Yeah, we can handle two wars! Absolutely two wars! How ’bout fuckin’ three? Come on, you motherfuckers, we’ll start two half-wars over at your house, and we’ll have another one on the White House lawn right now, bitch!'”
— Seattle Weekly: Henry Rollins Brings the Noise
Happy New Year!
Welcome to 2003, everyone! Here’s a toast I learned from Casey years ago…
Here’s to you,
here’s to me,
friends shall we ever be.
Should we ever disagree…
…fuck you, and here’s to me!
A little crass, sure, but amusing. Hope the new year goes well for all of you.
Exhausted
Ugh…this sucks. I was supposed to be at work early today, so I could leave early (all that New Years stuff), so I set my alarm for 8:30am and went to bed.
Then I didn’t fall asleep until sometime after 7:30am due to a really, really nasty bout of insomnia.
Now it’s 11:45am, and if I leave the house immediately, I’ll get off work all of a half hour early. Dammit.
Oh yeah
By the way, I’m back in Seattle
Just in case you hadn’t guessed yet. Hm. Yeah.
The Christmas vacation was really good. Relaxed at home a lot during the days, and hung out with as many friends as possible during the eveings. As always, things got a little crazy towards the tail end of the trip, so I missed out on seeing a few people (most notably Royce, which I’m terribly sorry about), but on the whole, I got ahold of most everyone I wanted to.
Got a good bit o’ loot, too, of course. :D A SPAM calendar and can of SPAM, Mississippi John Hurt’s ‘Live‘ album on CD, and a bunch of books: Robert J. Sawyer’s ‘Calculating God‘, Niccolo Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince‘ (2nd edition), Tanith Lee’s ‘The Secret Books of Paradys’ Books I-IV (in two volumes — Amazon only has them as four seperate volumes), and a 1911 copy of The Oxford Book of German Verse — auf Deutsch! Very cool.
Kevin and I weren’t able to do our usual Christmas Day tradition of going out to Son of River City Billards (and having Kevin completely whup my butt at pool), unfortunately, because thanks to the California-style smoking ban enacted in Anchorage at the beginning of 2001, SoRCB had lost all of their big-time customers, and have apparently recently closed down. So, rather than that, we went out to see Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers instead (my second time, his first). Not quite as interactive as a good few hours of clumsy pool, but still enjoyable.
I got to see and go out with quite a few friends while I was there, including Erica, Gracie, Darrell, Candice, Mary, and quite a few other people I know, both from the real world and the online world of the Yahoo chatrooms.
All in all, a very enjoyable trip.
Except for the 15 degree below zero weather. Ugh. I am so not moving back to Alaska. Ever.
But I’ll visit.
In the summer.
;)
Nightclubbing, we’re nightclubbing…
So this guy wants to go into a nightclub, but the bouncer says, “Sorry, bud, you need a tie for this place.”
He goes back to his car and rummages around, but there’s no necktie to be found.
Finally, in desperation, he takes his jumper cables, wraps them around his neck, ties a nice knot, and lets the ends dangle free. He then returns to the nightclub.
The bouncer says “Well, OK, I guess you can come in. But don’t start anything.”
(Thanks to Etan)
The center of Anchorage
It’s good to know that even if it doesn’t have quite the status that it used to, in some ways, VINL is still definitely the center of Anchorage. I spent years hanging out at this diner in midtown Anchorage, and met quite a few friends there over the years. So, when tooling around Anchorage on a slow Sunday night, what to do but stop by?
It didn’t take me long to run into someone I knew there. In fact, I was still walking up to the door when I spotted Aaron coming in the other door — doubly amusing, since he and I have both been living in Seattle for quite a while now, but we ran into each other at VINL last Christmas season, too. We grabbed table 1, were joined in a bit by a friend of Aarons (who’s name I, unfortunately, can’t remember right now, but she knew me, and I’d met her from time to time over the years), and the three of us talked and caught up for a couple hours.
Later on, Erica showed up with her friend Eric, and when it got to be time to head off, I followed the two of them back to her apartment, and spent another few hours catching up with old friends. Was a lot of fun to see her and her son Deven again, as I’d not been able to catch up with her the last couple times I’d been through town.
Today, I think I’m about ready to head off and brave the Anchorage malls in some last-minute Christmas shopping. What better time to go shopping than Dec. 23rd, right?
Clubbing in Alaska
Why I’m glad I don’t have to rely on bars in Alaska to go clubbing: three words —
Belief, faith, and the church
Over the years, from time to time, I’ve surprised people when they find out that not only was I raised in a Christian family, but I still count many of my core beliefs as Christian. Apparently, I don’t “come across that way,” as one friend put it in high school. My primary color scheme is generally black. I listen to a lot of dark music. I’ve always run around with the alternative/gothic crowd. One of my favorite artists is H. R. Giger who’s work is extremely dark and disturbing. I have never had any problems with people believing in ghosts, magic (or majick), Gaea, or any form of “paganism” (popularly described as anything that’s not one of the major forms of religion).
On top of it all, I count my beliefs as mine, and other people’s beliefs as theirs. If they want to talk about it fine — but I’m not about to attempt to convince them that I’m “right” and they’re “wrong”, and I expect the same respect from them.
At the same time, while the base of my personal belief system is rooted in the Christian church (specifically, the Episcopal church), I certainly have my times when I struggle with it. The existance of any type of god is not always something that’s easy to hold on to, when faced with the things that go on in the world all the time. Some days I see sunbeams cutting through trees and making the golds and reds of the fallen leaves glow against the mossy ground, and it’s hard not to believe in God. I have a friend studying massage therapy and kinesthesiology, and for her, the more she learns about how the body works, how all the systems interact with each other to keep us moving, it convinces her more and more that there must be an intelligence behind it all, and helps to keep her faith in God intact. At other times, I see the atrocities committed by man upon other men, upon the world we live on, and find it very hard to believe that there can be anything “keeping an eye on us.”
It’s all part. It happens. It’s how you deal with it, and what decisions you come to, that help make up who you are — and I personally think that there aren’t necessarily any “right” or “wrong” answers to any of it.
Trains of thought like that are part of what makes finding a weblog like Real Live Preacher such a joy. Written by a Protestant minister in Texas, it’s not what most people would come to expect when reading something written from a religious point of view — funny, sometimes profane, full of both faith and doubt, very honest, and a joy to read.
I received an email from someone puzzled about the grief I experienced when I gave up on God. This person felt liberated when she left Christianity.
I understand how some would feel that way. Many of you only know Christianity from bad books, TV preachers, and the people who watch them. If that were all I knew of Christianity I would celebrate my liberation from it all the days of my life.
But I was exposed early to the real stuff — Top Shelf Christianity — Deep and Old Christianity. This kind is practiced by people who work until they stink and take life in great draughts. Their hands are as rough as their hides, and they DO their faith in secret, hiding their good works in obedience to Christ. They know how to love and be loved in return. Their laughter is loud and has its roots in joy.
These Christians don’t want your money and they don’t advertise. You will only find them if you MUST find them. These are the ones who took me to Mexico as a boy and showed me pain and joy. They hid nothing from me.
I was also blessed by being exposed to the right kind of Christian thinkers. C.S Lewis and his friend J.R.R. Tolkein. Frederick Buechner, Carlyle Marney, and Thomas Merton. Will Campbell who wrote “Brother to a Dragonfly” and Eberhard Arnold. Frederick Dale Bruner and Martin Luther King Jr.
You did understand there was more to this than religious TV and the drivel they sell in those awful Christian bookstores, right? After all, Christianity didn’t sustain itself for twenty centuries by shitting Hallmark cards before a live studio audience.
Many thanks to Boing Boing for the link.
Brrrrrr
Well, I made it up. Very thankfully, no repeat of the near-death experience I had last time I flew up. A bit of turbulence, but now that I’m in the habit of popping a couple Sominex before the flight takes off, I was tranquilized enough that I didn’t start to panic.
Officially, it’s 21 degrees here in Anchorage. Unfortunately, the side of town that my parents live on is always colder than the “official” record — and their thermometer in the front yard is reading 8 degrees below zero at the moment. Yikes.