4

Ah, Memorial Day. You just love these long holiday weekends. They're just hell for people who, like you, even on a normal day, do absolutely nothing. Not that there isn't always plenty to do.  It's just that you never get around to doing it. 

You do, however, spend a great deal of time on the couch watching movies, TV, and reading (in just that order of importance), and you caught Clint Eastwood's The Outlaw Josey Wales  on AMC last night.

Of course, you enjoy the movie. You enjoy almost everything Eastwood, from the Sergio Leone stuff to Million Dollar Baby (Changeling, you felt, was too plodding and obvious; Gran Torino? too pedantic and obvious--but hey, the guy's old. You gotta cut him some slack! 

After a while, though, you start focusing on a few things. Namely, the hair. A while back, you read that the Coen Brothers are remaking True Grit (after the novel by Charles Portis) in Grainger, Texas, with Jeff Bridges (nice site, by the way) as Rooster Cogburn (played by John Wayne in the original film--his only Oscar). Anyway, for whatever odd reason, you receive AFC (Austin Film Commision) postings, and you notice that, in the call for extras on the set for the Coen Bros. film, no one is allowed to have artificially colored or cut hair. You imagine that streaks n' wings aren't exactly period. 

You guess that Eastwood didn't really think about that one when directing The Outlaw Josey Wales or while portraying Rowdy Yates in Rawhide). While Eastwood covers his head much of the time with what may or may not be period headwear , you're pretty sure his trademark pompadour is a bit of a creative anachronism. By the way, you couldn't resist the urge to include this hilarious likening of Eastwood's Dry Look (very nice YouTube past-blast original ad) to Hugh Jackman's (you love how Jackman's site is not simply a site, but an experience) coif in Wolverine...

Maybe it isn't. You're no historian. But leading lady Sondra Locke's (and sure, you know you're alone in this, but isn't she odd looking?) 'do, you're pretty sure, can't be right. That flattened-out pre-Farrah look? No. You're pretty sure they weren't doing feathering in the salons back then. 

Otherwise? Besides the awful stereotypes of what Eastwood probably perceived at the time to be sensitive portrayals of Native Americans? All good. 

Just one other thing you notice. Well, not the first time. Eastwood's so nice looking. Why does he have such an unimpressive ass? And why is it so difficult to find a picture of Clint Eastwood from behind? This confirms your theory!

Well, lack of an appealing back side obviously hasn't hurt him any. Clint, no doubt, is clearly very cool. Maybe you shouldn't be so shallow. 

Then again, is there such a thing as being TOO shallow? You either are or you aren't. Degrees might not apply here... 

3

All your life you've dealt with the shame of being an early riser. The uncool one. The Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon's character from the Alexander Payne's brilliant film Election) in the crowd. As an artist and a writer, shouldn't you be out there late at night with the performing artists and musicians and writers of verse? With the poets who will all be wearing black turtlenecks and berets and be talkin' 'bout the squares?


Maybe so. But you can never swing it. Even with a nap, you can't hang with the night-owls. And you're not good with crowds, either. Just a few weeks ago, your buddy Mark Larue (he was your designated mailbox mate in the English department at the University of Houston from 1987-1989, and, quite possibly, one of the funniest men alive) made one of his regular treks from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to Houston to see one of his favorite bands, Camera Obscura.


Mark often travels quite far to see bands he likes. You remember him mentioning driving to Austin several times to attend concerts, and the whole concept mystifies you. For starters, you would never in a million years even drive from Houston to Austin--or San Antonio, or Galveston, or even downtown--to wait until at least 11 p.m. to stand around with a bunch of young women wearing smock-y type frocks with empire bodices that make all of them look pregnant (as quite a few seem to be chubby and proud of it) and waif-y young men wearing skinny jeans cropped and rolled slightly below the knee.


That's a big detractor for you, the standing-up-stuff. It might be a little better if you could sit down. But at the Camera Obscura show (you always consent to attending these shows with him, as he's traveled far to see them), you arrive too late to obtain a seat, so you find yourself practically curled in the fetal position in a corner behind the girl who's selling tote bags that look like they might be sold on Etsy.


And this is where you stay through the whole show. It's an okay show, you suppose. To you, the whole lot, after a while, strikes you as a tad repetitive, despite the fact that you really do like this band. Tracyanne Campbell has the voice of an angel, but the acoustics at the Meridian Studio really suck some major ass.


You suppose it's better than when he took you to the Pretenders show at the House of Blues and some insufferable ass in a white button down shirt screaming, "Play Back on the Chain Gang" doused you with his bourbon and soda. 


You know you're a curmudgeon, but really, why all the standing up at these things? People are rarely dancing. When Mark took you to Radiohead, where you positively insisted on having a seat (not knowing that the tickets for the seated area would cost as much as feeding a Zambian family for a year), you sat there wondering why people didn't just sit the fuck down. Radiohead's hardly a toe-tappin', can't stand-still kinda band. Those dudes sure can play their instruments, and the acoustics at the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion in what should be termed Hell, Texas but is simply known as the Woodlands, are more than swell.


Why, you wonder, can't people just sit the fuck down and listen to the shit? My God, the couple in front of you that night, who were obviously deeply in love and couldn't bear the idea of not joining their massive girths together in a bold, Here we are, the manager of a Winn-Dixie and his loving head cashier havin' a night on the town gesture, simply afforded you the view of their Wall-Of-Winn-Dixie backsides, rather than that of the band.


And they just had to be smooching up a storm.


But anyway, you've never liked crowds. Once, when you were 17, your father took you and your sister to see the Rolling Stones Some Girls tour at Soldier Field in Chicago. Between the lines to get in and the wait for the Stones to come onstage, you and what seemed like a million other people waited for what must have seemed like ten hours. You and your sister and your dad actually passed a joint back and forth, although you've never figured out who it came from. After hour 8.5, a very large bearded man with a long gray ponytail  in dirty overalls seated somewhere up in the bleachers behind you obviously overindulged and wound up falling on top of you and vomiting on your leg.


This could very well be the origin of your crowd fear and hatred, but you're no psychiatrist. You can't be sure.


So anyway, no crowds, and no late nights for you. You've always felt kind of bad about it. But you hit the hay at your decent hour and wake feeling just fine, so that acute sense of being a total squid temporarily melts away. Lately, though, you've made friends with someone in an earlier time zone who also happens to be a late-nighter. You'd love to chat, but even if you stayed up late, it wouldn't be late enough to accommodate this other person's schedule. Once again, you feel ridiculous and uncool.


This feeling's acute. You consider, in all seriousness, gasp!, taking a nap so you can stay up a little later. You feel compromised. Dirty, even.


But justification and redemption often come along when you most need them and least expect them, and in the oddest forms. This, for you, came in the form of one of your most favorite public personalities, Christopher Walken.

You've always been a fan of Christopher Walken, but this morning, when you read a brief bit about him in a rumpled New Yorker, you are mesmerized. This is off-topic, but you think that you would do anything to just sit around and listen to this guy. Not meet him, necessarily. You wouldn't want to hang around like some star-struck fan. But you'd love to be a fly on the wall. Everything this guy says, even in print, seems like something out of Beckett: There I was, just a couple of months old. Lying on a table. The window was open. I looked to the side and saw a fried egg on a white plate. 


The man is a living work of art.

That, and an early riser. According to the article, he retires at 10 p.m. and rises at 6 a.m. Every morning. Man after your own heart. And he's cool. Christopher Walken's cool. Is anybody gonna argue that? You think not.


So, phooey to all you hipsters. You, you know, shall continue to rise with the sun, and feel no further remorse. You are a lark, after all, and not an owl.

2

                  What Would Glenn Date?

Disclaimer: The following post is a decidedly un-mellow brew of fact, fiction, hyperbole, sheer horror, and self-loathing. The events depicted in this blog, therefore, are fictitious. Any similarity to any person living or dead is merely coincidental. 

If you happen to recognize yourself in any part or passage, well, shame on you. 


 A few days ago you meet this dude on the internet. You notice that he's looked at your profile, so you, in turn, look at his profile and it's totally empty except for the picture. So you send him a message wondering what is up with him. You hate these guys with empty profiles! Seriously! If you're on there,  it's your implied duty to be brave and tell everybody how you're laid back and a good guy (hello! can't we come up with something original, fellas?) and that you like just about any music, except for rap . 

So anyway, his is empty, so you're like, "What's up?" and, to your surprise, the guy sends back this novel-length message telling you, exactly, what is up.  He's unemployed. He's living in a huge house in the suburbs, but, due to the fact that he's been unemployed for a long while, his electricity's been cut off and since he gave away all his furniture, he sleeps on a sleeping bag in the empty living room. He goes to fast-food joints to get his wifi. Why, you didn't even know that for the price of a Value Meal, you could surf to your heart's content! He's badly injured because he's been hit by a car on his $1500. mountain bike. His dad lives down the street but refuses to lend him a dime, for unspecified reasons. 


Ah. Well. That's all interesting. Still, though, you've been seeing a passel of down-and-out types lately. One's unemployed and living at home. One's making shit for pay as a temp for a major oil company and sees no end in sight. One finds joy in potted meat products. Oh, you could be all snobby on this subject, but chances are you won't want to have much to do with any of them after a week or so, and who cares if a dude has a job if you're just, hopefully, going to be addressing one thing? You have, after all, completely bailed on the idea of meeting someone you might actually like...


But therein lies the rub. No pun intended. Poverty and pinheadedness seem to go hand in hand these days. But hope springs eternal. You agree to go out with this guy. After all, he looks kind of cute in his profile photo in a big high school jock kind of way. And though he regales you with tales of woe, he does it in a remarkably amusing fashion! Why not go out with this dope? 

So you plan to meet at a Mexican restaurant. He shows up complaining that he couldn't find the place. It was far. He likes the suburbs. He's a suburb kind of guy! 


You are definitely not a suburb kind of guy.


And this guy--typical--doesn't look like his profile picture. Why are these lugheads always thinking that they can post photos where they had more hair and get away with it? You balk. Between the khaki shorts with pleats (NO FUCKING PLEATS, GENTLEMEN--EVER), Bruno Magli loafers with (thankfully, no socks, although the combo still strikes you as dreadful), and a tucked in tee shirt (do all the goddamned guys outside the loop get together and decide that tucking their tee shirts in is a good look?), all you can think is, "Wow. Congratulations. You just made 43 look like the new 54..."


Still, for God knows what reason, he seems kind of funny. He looks you up and down and says, "48, huh?"
You say, "Huh?" 
"You're 48." 
"Yeah," you say, "It's on my profile." 
"Man," he says, eyeing your legs. "You look good for 48." 
You laugh. You do not tell him that he looks like shit for 43. 
"Do I look like my photo?" he asks. "Am I what you expected?"
"No," you say. 
"I thought you'd look like you do," he says. "But you look better. Man. 48." 
"I'm pretty sure I told you how old I was." 
"Yeah, no, for sure. You did. It's just. Well. Damn. 48."
You've heard this before--the part about looking better than your profile. You're not very photogenic. 


At dinner, a cheap Mexican place, you're having a pretty good time. You both worked in the restaurant and bar business for a long time, so there's always that to laugh about. And although you don't find this guy attractive one little bit, you're still having fun. But then he starts talking about his old neighborhood in a Dallas suburb. About how it's gone to pot, due to a certain minority. 


You clear your throat. Oh, no! The "N" word is coming! You can feel it! You can handle almost anything but the "N" word! As you feel the pressure mounting, you throw your rather large cloth dinner napkin over your head and cover your face.


"What the hell are you doing?" he says.
"We can't talk about this," you say. "I won't take this off of my head until you agree not to pursue this topic." 


He agrees. The napkin comes off of your head. He then, for whatever reason, tells you that Glenn Beck is right. About everything. You do a giant spit-take with your jumbo limonada. 


Still, for some reason, you're still laughing. This is the funniest train wreck you've been involved in in some time. The next topic of conversation goes, roughly, as follows: 


"So," he says, "I'm 43 and I've never been married." 
"You mentioned that." You look around. Do people understand just how deeply you understand your folly this evening? "I don't know if I want to get married again." 
"You don't?" 
"I dunno. Not right now, for sure." 
"But you're 48!"
"I think we've established that."
"And you're good looking." 
"So you say."
"Well," he says, "You're not gonna want some old fat guy."
"You are correct, sir." 
"That's all you're gonna get, cuz guys look like that when they're 55."
"I don't know," you say. "My ex is 57, and he's quite handsome and in great shape. Surely he can't be the only one." 
"You're gonna want a younger guy." 
"Yeah?" 
"Well, you're 48."
"Yeah?" For some reason, this conversation is still amusing.
"Well, you'd better get on it, cuz a younger guy won't want you."
"Because I'm 48." 
"Yeah." 


He gets up and goes to the bathroom and you decide to check your phone messages, as your phone's been ringing. You call voicemail. The first message is from the bathtub refinisher wanting to set up a time to deliver. The second is your friend Roxanne, confirming lunch. The third is a long, garbled thing. You're about to hang up when you recognize the voice of your date. The conversation he's having with two men, presumably in a fast-food restaurant, is garbled, but you can pick out a few things: "internet dating, man!", "tap that ass", and "yeah, can you believe it? 48?"

By the time he returns from the men's room, you're practically purple with mirth. Have you laughed this much in the past six months? You're leaned over the side of your rustic painted wooden chair with the woven rope seat, trying not to vomit. 

"What's so funny?" he says, sitting down. 
Gasping, you hand him your Iphone. He presses it to his face to listen. 
"Man," he says, unfazed, "I gotta watch that butt-dialing from now on."
You're laughing too hard to say, "Indeed!"


At the end of the evening, you say goodbye. He puts his arm around you and tries to give you a kiss. 


"Oh, for God's sake," you say. "Really? Come on!" 


Still, as you're walking away, you can't stop laughing.
Was that fun? Or what? 
Or What?