3 concerts and 5 hours of waiting in line to get tickets to another one, i am tired.
i met the "the ingenue at the blue gator where i took pics of mike genovese and then red wanting blue before landing at courtside bar. when she and i arrived on the scene 5o Cent was blaring and even the most intamate of game-spitting was elevated to face to face shouts. there i immedealty spied the empty dickel bottle on the bar. beside it was my professor, sam and one of my students, clay. both looked like monkeys on a swing with a shit eating grin. "dunaway, " i say, give me 2 shots of whatever you think she needs", pointing to the naked back of the ingenue in her torn up I LOVE NY tshirt tied around her shoulders. duaway took a contemplative pause, nodded his head and poured 2 shots of
jack daniels.
after a conversaion with sam and clay about ralph stanley and women's underwear, i ended up at the frisky ingenue's place arguing with the about my PONCHO LIVES tshirt she made me. that discussion took us through the ryan adams heartbreaker CD 3 times, and 1/2 pound of grapes. i decided to get a cat nap from 6:00 am until 9:00 before i left for the phish show.
Mt. Adams, Cinncinnati: i roll into dougy p's pad. - after driving through the dismal weather and tuned into the classic country hits on 99.5 FM out of washington courthouse, singing along with patsy cline and following a woman with down syndrome driving a maroon S10 - and immedialty get handed a stack of polaroids. "dude" he says. i found these yesterday when i was cleaning. i think they are from the last guy who lived here.
i take off my coat that still smells like a cross between a charred pack of marlboros and perfume and sit down. the top photo was of a naked blond girl in the same room i was sitting in on all fours with silouette of another body meticoulsy cut out from behind her. the follwoing stack was various shots of her naked. i was impressed with cameras close up focus. i use a polaroid 600 and could never get a focus shot from 7" inches away from anything much less this woman's crotch.
30,000 people at the concert and as soon as i get through the turnstyles i see ONS. awesome....it is a good thing i took pictures of the phish show, so i know it was real. between sets bonwag and i discussed the resurfacing of political and cultural instabilty and predicted a second coming of the 60's. It had nothing to do with the top 200 feet of the US bank arena being shrouded in approx. 50,ooo cubic feet of pot smoke, or the fact the we were the only ones in the section wearing store bought clothes.
much later that evening we R-O-C-K-E-D OUT to GnR appetiete for destruction while bonwag drove his station wagon in reverse up an exit ramp onto I-75...
the trip ended with Beck's 'Sea Change' album and lunch the next day in one of those resturaunts that has styrofoam injected walls that always orbits the strip malls with the stores selling cutlery, pda's, and abercrombie sweaters. nonetheless it was a good time with several animated conversations, most of which ended with a bonwag-impersonation of great volume, and our nervous waiter with his well rehearsed waiter talk running around in his black velcro tennis shoes.
back to athens, saturday night where i found myself sitting with my sister watchng genovese play again, only this time there were no underage girls force fit into low cut jeans blocking my view. somehow that turned into 7:00 am this morning and i was in line and in the snow waiting on counting crows tickets by myself. when i finnaly got inside the coordinator for the events made an annoucnemtn to the 400 people in line: "whoever left their poor dog tied up out in the cold please leave and take it home or we will call the humane society" so i got up among boos from the crowd and took her to perez'z who was still passed out and ran back in time to get a handfull of tickets in the very back of the auditorium behind the sound board and a concrete pillar.
Through the course of my day, i usually don't take much time to look in the rear view window. but right now, at 6:24 pm EST i am stopping the car and getting out have a look the day i just carreened right through. the following is list of some of what i have done today. What do they have in common? nothing. except that they all happened in my life today.
chugged a quart of choclate milk in 45 sec flat while walking down the street into the computer lab
contemplated taking one of those new s&w 50 cal. revolvers to the computer monitor that told me (for the 33rd time in a row) the my lingo script had an invalid hanlder assigned to the event...
drank a beer. in the bar while driving a remote controlled vw bug around the floor.
had a friend tell me how he could make millions on making a protective CD case that you put into a CD player that then took the CD out of the case so you never had to touch the CD so it would never scratch
graded student projects and looked at photos of scottish sheep herders
researched xray machines at airports to see it they do infact ruin unexposed film.
looked up the official sunset in austin texas in mid march
stared at 80 some photos of young attractive women while editing photgraphs of tall skinny girls from a model shoot with the ingene.
read an email from a friend who was offered and accepted an offer to feel a large african american's breast on an elevator in detroit.
had a discussion witth the owner of courtside bar about which is the best tasting 40 ounces of malt liquor avaible on the market today.
burned a 99 cent frozen pizza and ate it anyways.
dug out my truck with my sister from under 12" of snow, then 4-wheeled out of the 1/8 mile drive
shovled my walk while my sister and talked about the downfalls of marrige.
called a couple who both have cancer to arrange an time to visit to make a video documentary.
packed to go to a phish show in cinncinnati tommorow.
from here on out today i will be: celebrating a 2 month lobbying campaign to get george dickel onto the shelves at courtside bar by trying to drink all the george dickel they have on the shelves at courtside bar, then head to blue gator to photograph my friends show. and then onto round 2 of the fashion shoot with the tall skinny girls.
a 45 minute monolouge with repeated disconnections of his cell phone [ lets call them commercial breaks] got me vicarioulsy up to speed with woody's vulgar pace of life. the characters in his plot spaned all of the contential time zones, touched on race, religion, sex and several inter-twined subplots which would hold up even in post production to fit the 30 minute primetime slot on any of the major networks. and that has only been in the last 2 weeks. if his life were a color, it would be day glo. then he just stopped talking all at once and said: "thelastjoemillionareisaboutover. igotto seewhatthisguydoes. later." click.
the irony of the situation was stunning.
i wonder how many romans went to the coliseum tonight to watch joe the lion try to slay his captive. meanwhile, i just got not 30 min, but 45 of real reality from a life that is exponentially more epic than anything the big boys at fox could conjure up on their white boards for next season. even if no one would appreciate woody's story, it is real. he is not stuck on some far off deserted island (with enough power for network production studio equipment and helicopters or the airial fly overs) he doesn't need to eat bugs or get locked in cages underwater or be forced to fornicate with a predetermined set of women. [he seems to be able to find his own. and in a much more creative manner].
i think he does it because he enjoys living his own life. not watching the illusion of someone else's. /okay, in his case i guess it is both. but i get all the entertainment and the comercial breaks were only as long as it took woody to hit the redial button on his battered cell phone. i guess there are some people who need a syndicated studio-lit-life to fill theirs with, and there are others who find excietment in living or being involved in their own very real and private pay per view world.
for the last 72 hours i have either been sleeping or in front a computer. at least the computers i am mostly on require a walk across campus. it seems that as far as the curiculum goes around here, creativity=computers. and there is no end in sight. and despite the steadfast regement i have held myself to this last week, it seems the analog world we call reality still creeps into my otherwise server-side life...
i was walking across the college green between computers in the snow thinking about FinalCut codecs and Director lingo when a spot in the snow started blinking green. "oh" i thought to myself, perfectly calmly. That looks like and odd alpha channel. then is started chirping. Is that 16-bit @ 44.1 khz audio i hear?
then i lost my train of thought and i seeped back into the world of love and pain. i bent down and picked it up out of the snow. it was a nokia cell phone ringing it's little heart out. "no one is home." i said out loud. although calling a misplaced cell phone is no different than getting your frame labels mixed up in Flash. or having a mismatched sampling rate in your audio data. anyways i tried to answer it, but my gloves were making me too clusmy. so i just put in my pocket. when i got home it rang again and this time i answered it. sure enough it was the rightful frame asking to be rejoined with his correct label. he was at lucky's and since prada needed a walk i told him i would walk down and return it. when i got to lucky's the guy was very thankful. he insisetd on buying me a beer. i told him it was no big deal, but he seemd elated to get his phone back. had i not had prada with me i would have taken him up on his offer. instead he handed me 5 bucks, to which i also denied, but he insisted. "go buy yourself a beer." on the way home i tied prada up on the fence outside courtside and went in to honor his request. i sat down beside perez and kerry, who last week i made cry by calling her average looking, and bought a beer. i couldn't help noticing the old man at the end of the bar. he was nodding off and wiping his face and wild white hair every few minuites. it was only 9:30 and the bar was still fairly empty. i got to talking to perez about the irish mafia when the old man stood up and then fell like the stockmarket face first onto the ground.
"damn" we both said at the same time. the guys at the door and behind the came over to help him. it was determined that it was correct to call the EMS. so perez called. the old man was talking, so leaned over to listen. we decided to keep him still until the ambulance came. "5 minutes" said the tyler. "ambulance will be here." despite our plan, i helped the old man roll over and sit up. but perez, having the bartender pull talked him into not moving anymore. "5 minutes." i said. no problem. i can keep this guy coherent and stationary for 5 minutes. "i am a vietnam vet..." he started into his story... " i just got out of the VA hostpital in chillecothe.... this medication is strong.
We talked about the war, and then about his brother's used truck lot on rt. 50 towards parkersburg, and his job at bob evans farms. we just sat there. on the floor of the bar talking. people started coming in. they just walked around us. 10 minutes later the EMS arrived and i helped them walk him to a booth where they took all kinds of EMS things out of there EMS bags to check him. "thank you boys for being so kind" he said as i left him.
then i finished my beer and walked prada home. i started thinking again about lingo event handlers and non-linear DV editing and it dawned on me that there is beauty in not being able to handle events. and living linear. sometimes the linear actions of the analog world offer so much more unexpected expierences.
At 4:37 this afternoon there was a knock on my office door. She was 23 minutes early...
When i opend the door there stood the ingenue*. She is a budding young fashion disigner with a knack for sacasm who has employed me to help her make a website that showcases the clothing she makes. I am busy. However there are some obvious reasons i am willing to make some time for this project. 1: in order to properly show her clothes they need to be on women which i will need to photograph. "all my clothes only fit skinny tall girls" she says. skinny tall girls it is. 2: my payment- 2 custom made tshirts of her doing. one will say "PONCHO LIVES" the other- JOHNNY CASH IS A HERO [that one is black of course]
so next thursday i will be photographing skinny tall girls in as we hop from alley to bar to bathroom. it is candid low-fi sort of thing. in the end it will look like polaroids from an all night bender. only everyone will be tall and skinny and likely beautiful.
there are also some reasons i am doing this that i cant quite put my finger on: it is not just due the ingenue's quite comfortable looking skin she lives in. i think it might just boil down to the fact that everyone's sentence ends with a period. It's the verbs that make it remembered.
*this was dictionary.com's word of the day.
I suspect my only valentine's gift i will get this year was given to me by my mom. She gave me a red evelope with a walmart® gift card. I was hestitant to go there though,...
not because of the whole "the man" thing, but just because my friend tyler told me he got lost in it when it first opened and was stuck in it for 3 hours. Nonetheless i go. the parking lot was and no doubt still is packed. I think it is the new cruisng circle for athens youth. I get my groceries, [it is a super- walmart®] then cut to the lawn and garden/pet supply section via the women's denim aisle. hook up prada with 50 lbs of feed. then i realize i forgot laundery detergent. Then it dawned on me: where in sam's green earth is laundry detergent? I had found a loophole in the walmart® organizational martrix. It wasn't in the dish soap section. It wasn't in the personal hygiene annex either. Finnaly i freaked out in the aisle with die cast nascar replicas and cotton valences, whatever those are. i was pissed. i just pushed my cart and it's 50lbs of dog food and let it ghostride all the way throguh the main auxillary cross-ailses and into the ceiling fan section. then i looked for the nearest employee. the next aisle over was the beach towels and lipstick. there were 3 older women stocking the lipstick. [joke: how many walmart people® does it take to put lipstick on the shelf?] "excuse me laides" i interrupted, "can you point me to the laundry detergent?" they all pointed in a southwesterly direction. "ailse 12 in the grocery wing." i then located my cart which had coasted into the coffee pot/garden hose aisle and pushed back over to aisle 12. actually it turned out to be aisle 13. but there it was, like an oasis among everyday low prices® - and guess what. the ENTIRE aisle was laundry detergent. my point? there is nothing in common- or not in common with laundry detergent. it defies all generes of consumer goods, thus making it a completely unique loophole in walmart's point-of-puchase strategical tactics®.
I have found sam walton's bastard.
After cardio kickboxing class on tuedsay evenings, i go Seigfred to the photo studio and shoot my still life projects. Every so often I run into a girl who...
always seems to be doing peculiar work. Tonight when i cam out of the studio to wash a negative she was there, cutting out big 16' x '20 color prints. trying to talk about photography is sort of like trying to sing a song to a deaf person. They exist with different languages. At least for me. All i can say is that they were pretty fantastic color prints. I always seem to be able to talk to her. Probabally because there is always something in our hands to make mention of. Tonight it was her photographs. She said in her country, those photographs would evoke a sort of nostalgia. I asked her what country was she talking of. 'Japan', she said politley. I started to realize that i grew up in a cornfield. Then she retuned the volley. Where are you from? I told her Dayton. But that is like saying Michael Jordan palyed for a basketball team in Illinios. I told her i grew up on a farm. her eyes lit up. "so did I" she said. 'My parents own a horse farm'. I replied, "i didnt know Japan was big enough to have any farms on it." Then i remembered again how small my mind is. The conversation followed suit until i realized i forgot her name. When i asked her she laughed and said she had forgotten mine too. She said her name was 'makeeko' I asked her to write it down on the back of my polaroid. MAKIKO was spelled out in perfect handwriting. What is yours? she asked. I took the pen and wrote out my name beside hers. It looked really awkward. We both sort of smiled. About then i realized that i was totally flirting with a girl without ever noticing it. Either i am so conditioned to do so or i geniunly was interested in what she was saying.
You have really bad handwriting she said. In the same bad handwriting i wrote down the address to my web site. I told her i thought she had a great eye and would like to she what she thought of my work. Or maybe is said she had 'great eyes.' ...
I don't make a habit of watching much television. but now that i have a psuedo-empty nest syndrome with bonwag's absense, i turned on the picture box t0 cnn to see "just how much time was running out" for mr. hussein. sure enough: there is not much time left for him." anyways, there was a commercial for the navy. [ recruitment campaigns squezed in between 10 second sound bytes of bush's call to action. smooth.] anyways the commercial' asked: "if your life was book, would anyone read it?" i thought, "well maybe..." even if not, i would like to read it someday.. not for the dramatic things i saw the seamen doing but for the small reasons, such as this:
Last week i was at courtside and asked a girl. no wait. i asked perez to ask a girl [mature, i know] if i had a better chance of making out with her or winning powerball. [it was at 240m or something] so he asked her. she said."play powerball." fair enough. but she was laughing. anyways friday i ran into her at an afterhours party. you know the type were the keg sits proudly on a wet linolium floor and a guy named 'fuge' is firing off a 5' potato gun off the back porch whilst your friend, who doesn't know too many people, but still chants guys names until they do keg stands. [yes. i am in grad school.] anyways i have a converstaion with her. a good one. for it being 4 am. she leaves. i leave. but against better judgement perez calls her and says we are stopping by. with worse judgment i say"okay." it was awkward. mostly because drinking bouron at 5am is sort of uncomfortable. also because i had a nice ending to an evening with her and i should have known when to say when- and becasue she was in her navy and green plaid pajama pants already. i should have left it there. definiatly. but no. we make ourselves at home. she got out the guitar she won which had some bands autographs on it in sharpie marker. perez played it, how i dont know, but sometime duing his rendition if "rivers of babylon" i decided we needed to go. so with perez ahead of me we leave her apartment and i stop and turn around and and ask her:
"Should i walk forwards or backwards from here?"
Now, this is what i am talking about. How someone can use words to mean something and those words heard by someone else mean something entirely different. That is what i like about language. That is also what i hate. Picture me at 5:3o am in a hallway with a pretty girl standing in the threshold leaning her head out past the door [much like knights used shields for protection in battle] and i ask: "Should i walk forwards or backwards from here?" How brash she must have took me for. No doubt to her i was asking, hey can i come over and kiss you? or better yet can i come back into your aptartment and hook up? It didn't dawn on me until the walk home, the mis-communication that occured.
I have this problem of seeing what i mean but saying it with words that also mean something else. "Should i walk forwards or backwards from here?" If I had taken that through the 'Todd Roeth to smooth talk' translator, it would be spit out as such: So am i wasting my time trying be around you because i think you are a pretty girl whom i enjoy talking to and would like talk to you again sometime.
-Does anyone else have this problem?
But alas, i say what i mean, which also means something else. I might as well have said: hey baby, you can't ever get rid of me so let's just dry hump right here on the concrete, plaid pajama pants and all.
But the bottom line is this, had i the ability to say what i mean with the same words that meant the same thing to her, i imagine her reply would have the same:
"Walk backwards." she said. and closed her door.
Okay. i have sort of figured this out. It took an hour drive home from marietta alone in a dark snow to instigate this manuever. well that and some really sad songs on the radio. ultimatley i am doing this because quite frankly i am quite tired of listening to myself.
For instance, ...
i was really getting caught up in scene this evening. This time of year the sun always seems to hesitate before falling below the hills, giving the otherwise desaturated landscape a sort of bloody glow. An eerie light that seemes to be too deliberate. Like from a movie. And the music in my truck was a fitting soundtrack. So was the stale grey crust on the ohio river. per usual, i was imagining i was singing the song as if every word was true to me. But the truth is i couldnt think of someone who i truely loved and was missing, like the song said i should be. Well there is my grandfather. my aunt. yeah there are people who i wish were here today. but not any like i think the song meant. i mean, there really isnt anybody i love. like LOVE love. then i started remember reading about people who were in capable of certain emotions, or unable to see certian colors. and then there is the story my professor talked about where people who work in factories their whole life around certain machinery go deaf within that particular frequency range that the machinery makes. I'm not saying that growing up i had too much love (if there is such a thing) and now i have developed an immunity to it. but when i think about it, and sing a song about missing who i love, it is those people in my life that i have loved as family and friends, who are now gone.
I guess if this is a movie than at least it's not a bad romantic one.
here is my first blog. i am so nervous. what will i say?should i try to be funny? no i should be serious. and deep. no better yet i should just practice brevity.