Rants & Ravings From an Aspiring Daydreamer

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A friend and I went to see G. Love & Special Sauce at the House of Blues this weekend. Tristan Prettyman opened for them. She is, by the way, very pretty, man. I know, I’m sorry. You saw that coming and I said it anyway. You should know me by now though. Anyway, we were packed in there like fresh little sardines (maybe that’s not the best analogy because they don’t smell very good – but wait, never mind, maybe that’s why I chose it), all bouncing together and all the normal audience reaction you get sucked into. G. Love totally owned the place. Well, after Bob Dylan got through with it. We had to wait outside for quite a long time because Bob ran over. He’s obviously forgiven for it, though I’ll probably have a word with him about not at least inviting my friend and me in to hang out.

Anyway, a good time was had by all. We stood in an inch of beer and sweat – quite literally. Girls’ purses were soaking wet. The cuffs of my jeans were soaked. Pretty nasty stuff. I’m of the opinion that places like that with standing room should have gratings on the floor. Or make the entire floor from a grate. That would be grate. Oh God, I’m sorry.

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The Dredge House Chronicles, Vol 6

Final Edition

Well I’m going to wrap up these here Chronicles, as I think I’ve told most of the good stories that happened in the Dredge House. So to recap, you know it was a party house. Someone was always drunk, having sex (even surprise sex), getting drunk, getting ready to have sex, getting into a fight, or playing nintendo. A lot of our Fry Street Friends would come by after long nights of drinking and having sex on Fry Street and hang out for a while to drink and possibly have sex at my house. Old Guy was somehow always cool with it. He never complained. And our dirt driveway always had plenty of room for more cars.

So one time I brought a girl home with me. She was a lovely little thing, cute and petite. She looked a little young, but that didn’t really catch my attention too much, because I had seen her buy cigarettes. She was at least eighteen. She came over and we turned off all the lights in the living room. I sent Wil to my room because some other couple was sleeping in there, and I was stuck on the couch. TJ’s room was occupied as well. Well this young lady I brought home wanted to hear the Lost Boys soundtrack while we discussed magic and drank popsicle juice. So I put it on. It got through Cry Little Sister and she told me to play it again. So I set the CD player on repeat track, and away we went. Well I won’t bore you with the details of our expedient congregation. But it lasted a while. Seriously. When we got done with all the uh – whatever I called it up above – the index on the CD player said 23. It had played Cry Little Sister, an almost seven-minute song, 23 times. I was pretty sick of it. But I hadn’t wanted to stop long enough to turn off the repeat mode.

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Cannell The Man

Shine and I ran up to the Barnes and Noble last night to meet Stephen Cannell. Again. Remember when I met him the first time? Yeah, he was just as cool. So I wanted to go in there and first of all get him to remember me. He has some family attachment to Spaceyville, where I live. He said last time I met him, “Oh yeah, I know Spaceyville! I’m up there all the time!” So on my post-it note I put ‘Brian from Spaceyville’ so maybe it would jog his memory. It did. He remembered me.

Then I wanted to pass him my book so that maybe he could read something good for a change. I kid, I kid. No, for real, last time we met he told me to mail him a copy. Well I never heard back from him. So I just took him a copy tonight, slid it across the table and said, “Yeah Steve, we actually have something in common. I design my own bookcovers as well.” He was like, “That’s great!” So he asked when I had finished it, and if I had anything else. I told him, “Yeah, I’ve finished my second novel, halfway through my third.” He complimented me and shook my hand. Then I got my picture taken with him. He grabbed both books and held them up for the photo. Pretty awesome picture, if I might say so myself.

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The Wasteful Years of Sleep

I was thinking earlier about how I needed to rotate my mattress. Because there are forming in it two large crevasses where my wife and I lie at night. They say you’re supposed to rotate them 90 degrees every once in a while. I guess so you end up making a pound-sign shape on the bed, rather than the symbol of equality. What’s that all about? A conspiracy?

Anyway, that led me to thinking about how much time we spend on the mattress, and why we should purchase a really good one when we do make that purchase. They say you spend a third of your life sleeping. Well, I retorted in my thoughts, I don’t need to spend a third of my salary on a freakin’ mattress! Ha! I showed them, eh? But then I slowed. And I considered. A third of my life. A third. Wow. So what it boils down to is I’ve spent eleven years sleeping, total. A ninety-year-old has spent thirty years of his life sawing logs.

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If I Had a Time Machine

Before we get into the details of how I would use my time machine, I feel the need to expose some technical details to you. There are certain issues one runs into when traveling through time, and these have to be addressed. There are some technical modifications that must be inherent to the machine itself in order to prevent certain things from happening. Some of these are just basic safety features.

For instance. Say if I wanted to travel back in time to 1989 so I could visit Tiananmen Square and watch the protests, I would set my time machine back to the day before it started. I would attach the wrist strap, select the exact time, then I’d click “Insert” on the icon running in the Human Icon application. Now, if my time machine didn’t have a Relative Space-Time Binding Computer built into the architecture, I would arrive at that exact minute I specified, and there’d be no planet beneath me. Forget that the Earth orbits the sun. Remember instead, that the whole of the Solar System (and the Milky Way, beyond that) is moving through space as well. I would appear somewhere in the blackness of space, nowhere near anything terrestrial. That RSTB computer mod basically binds the time to the space, makes calculations based on Earth’s insane kinetic posture, and moves me through space, as well as time. So when I appear on April 15, 1989 at Tiananmen Square, the Earth is actually there underneath me. Relativistic Global Positioning. It’s the new-age, people. I feel sorry for those people who experimented with time machines back in the early 90s, and had to find out the hard way that time and space move separately!

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And a Happy New Year…

Looks like we made it into another century. I don’t even know what that means. I heard a sports commentator the other night during the football game talking about Testeverde, and how if he played for one more year, he would have played in four centuries. Centuries? Really? Last I checked, that still meant one hundred years. Right? I guess he meant decades. But if Vinnie’s thrown a ball in the 70s, 80s, 90s and these here the oughts, he’s already made that mark. Either way, it cracked me up quite a bit.

We celebrated last night by going over to a buddy’s house and drinking, listening to music and throwing the Frisbee. In the garage. Seriously. While we stood out in the garage with beers and cigarettes in our hands, we started tossing around the Frisbee. It was actually quite entertaining. We made up rules as we went along. “Now you can only use your left hand.” “Now you can only throw over-hand.” Stuff like that. Then we got bored with the Frisbee and nailed up a piece of plywood and began throwing knives at it to see if we could get them to stick. Our parties.

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The Fall of a Masterful Empire

When I was young, I collected Hot Wheels cars. Matchbox too. I remember those John Cleese commercials where he’d slip one into his shirt pocket, and that always made me feel so good. I made my mother buy me a white dress shirt with two breast pockets just so I could stand in front of the mirror and slip into my pockets my two favorite Matchbox/Hot Wheels cars again and again.

I collected them. Like I do guitars, books, Elvis Costello albums, tattoos and Evan bottles, I collected every one of them I could find. They had realistic die-cast metal miniature automobiles with vibrant colors and awesome chrome wheels (and sometimes flake paint). It was magical when my mom would take me to the Wal-Mart and I had a five-dollar bill in my pocket. I could buy five new cars. They were 89 cents apiece. The only problems I ran into back then was which five or six to get. There were so many to choose from, and I knew that at any minute, Matel could go out of business and the Wal-Mart could burn down, and I’d be forever kept from completing my collection. So I had to select the best five.

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Where are the good cats?

This last Monday I took my folks to the airport for their trip to Hawaii. Yeah, I’ve heard it from just about everyone now: “Tell your parents they suck, dude.” Why, because they were smart enough to fly south for the winter? If only a week, at least… Anyway, I loaded them up with memory for their camera and Cheez-Its for their flight and sent them on their way.

That meant I was driving my mother’s Porsche for the last couple of days, because I was too lazy to make the trip back out to their house to pick up my trusty old Wrangler. It’s amazing how lazy one can get about things like that when he is driving a sports car. Either way, I took the wife and kid out to Red Lobster last night for a feast of seafood (OMG those lobster tails and crab legs holy god they were awesome…) and then made the trip out to Silent Hill to swap out the cars. I gassed up the Porsche (I tend to put my foot in it a little too often and turn what should be a one-gallon trip into a five-gallon adventure) and parked it neatly between the lines in the garage. After my wife hopped out and moved all the shit out of the way.

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The Dredge House Chronicles, Vol 5

Volume Five: Old Guy and The Onion Incident

The Dredge House wasn’t always fun. We did more than just party there. If you want specifics or anything, I’ll have to get back to you on that. But what I’m trying to say is that it wasn’t always fun and games. Sometimes we got serious. Sometimes people almost died.

At the time I was seeing a girl called April pretty regularly. Now I’ve told you what the word relationship meant to me back then. It meant that sure, I’ll call you my girlfriend and we won’t date other people. Just remember that the word ‘dating’ and the word ‘sex’ aren’t synonymous. So anyway, April was my girlfriend, and I loved her quite well. I don’t think I ever needed to see anyone else while I was with her. So it was all good. Regardless, that has nothing to do with the story, so I don’t know why I’m even telling you that except that maybe to establish that I wasn’t a complete asshole. But I was, so that point is moot anyway. So, moving on, I mentioned April because she had two friends with whom she lived a lot. These were Cammie and Cody. They had a pretty slick apartment in Dallas but were almost never there. They were pretty regularly not even in town. They stayed mostly in Houston, and just about every weekend, were loading up to go south. April didn’t though. She mostly stayed with me.

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The Coolest Places I’ve Worked

Being an unruly and independent sixteen-year-old means you don’t take shit from anyone. Or in the parlance of the age, you don’t take shit from no one. Ever. You do as you please. You wake when you want. You go to school if you feel like it. You listen to your parents if it suits you – because obviously you know better than they… How the hell should they know what it’s like to be alive in the 80s as a teenager? They were teens in like the 50s and shit. Trust me, Pop. You just don’t understand.

It also means you have to work in as many jobs as you can fit between your sixteenth and your nineteenth birthdays. Seriously. I didn’t quit because I got sick of places. Actually yes, I did. But I was going to say that I quit because I was ready for something new. I wanted to experience it all. And both are true. How long can you work at Skaggs bagging groceries before you begin to believe you could manage the store yourself? It can’t be rocket science, dude. That’s why you, Mister Store Manager, only make like thirty grand a year. When I grow up, I’ll make twice what you make in my spare time. I’m sixteen, all powerful, hear me roar.

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