And You May Ask Yourself: How Did I Get Here?

Searches that resulted in a visit to Tornado Slide:

Ashley simpson peed in her pants (Yahoo)
Nifty nut house (MSN)
Nifty nut house (Yahoo)
Tittyfuckin (Google)
Bull tornado (Yahoo)
Practicing penmanship (AOL)
Clairebaby (AOL)
kelis deep throat milkshake (Google)
kim catrall's lesbian run on sex in the city (Yahoo)
superhunks (Google)
jeff johnson mcsweeney's (Yahoo)
skyway news (Technorati)
my charizard brings all the boys to the yard (Google)
tornado slide (Yahoo Canada)
little axe Oklahoma (Technorati)
Lieber and Stoeller Lyrics (Google)
videos do tornado no tsunami (Yahoo Portugal)
seasons in the sun nirvana (Yahoo)
bert and ernie eroticism (Google)
lindsayism (Technorati)

Just think how many more visitors Tornado Slide would have had if I could spell Ashlee Simpson's name right...

No Argument Here

"That's so gross! I'm such a queen about that sort of stuff."

--Willie, gay cast member of MTV's The Real World: Philadelphia, reacting to a roommate's scabies infection

"Like anal sex isn't gross..."

--Corinne, reacting to Willie's comment

Lawrence, Austin City Limits

Remember, Modest Mouse is coming to K.C. in February, and I've already got my tickets. For those of you that plan on attending but have little MM experience, you should have watched The O.C. last week, because they performed. Of course, Seth and the gang didn't pay much (any) attention to the band they were allegedly very exited to see... I hope they play Paper Thin Walls. Good stuff - listened to that track twice today.

So who'd have thought that a few short days before MM, the uber-great Secret Machines would come to town? Let me know if you wanna go - I'm ordering my tickets this weekend, as I love said Secret Machines.

And when I'm not out on the town(s) watching bands in person, I'll be at home watching the upcoming Austin City Limits performances. Flaming Lips and The Shins on the same show?! Modest Mouse, Elvis Costello, The Pixies, Damien Rice, and even The Polyphonic Spree will make appearances. Thank God I still don't have TiVo, lest Fatty has a new Spree concert to dance to in the wee hours.

Backstory - The Village

[In honor of M. Night Shamy's The Village being released on DVD next week, I present a deleted scene below. If you plan on seeing the movie, you should not read this scene, as it will spoil the movie's surprise(s). If you're sad now that you don't have anything to read, go to this site and watch the flash video. Then keep watching as the lady just keeps staring at you and blinking. And try not to think about where I found the link (actually, it was via lindsayism, which I read at Jeff Johnson's recommendation). If you've already seen the movie, read on...]

WALKER: My name is Edward Walker, and I have an idea.

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 1: What is it?

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 2: Is it something that will help us deal with the emotional pain stemming from the murder of our loved ones?

WALKER: Well, yes, I hope so.

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 2: I'm listening.

WALKER: Well, as you may have heard, I'm very rich.

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 3. You don't look so rich.

WALKER: I am. Really, really rich. My dad was a billionaire. Weren't you guys listening when I shared my pain with the group?

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 4. Sorry.

WALKER: So. My family is exorbitantly rich, and I was thinking I could use some of that money to buy an enormous tract of land - a nature preserve - and we could all live in there.

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 3. That's going to ease our emotional burden? Moving?

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 5. What the hell?

WALKER: Listen. Hear me out. We could all live in this protected area, away from all of the bad people in modern society -- away from the violence, away from the guns. We would be our own separate unit, see? And since we all know the pain that evil causes, we would only be good to one another.

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 6. Couldn't we all just move in to the same apartment complex and be good to each other?

WALKER: No, I think we have to totally separate ourselves from the modern world.

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 2. How could we totally separate ourselves, though? We can't make our own electricity or our own gasoline.

WALKER: Right, I know. That's why we would have to do without some things.

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 1. Do without electricity?

WALKER: Yes. And gasoline, and cars for that matter. Pretty much everything that makes modern life so convenient.

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 2. Let me get this straight - you want us to, like, go camping? Forever?

WALKER: Right. Like that. Except that we'll build houses for shelter instead of tents, and we'll have to eat only what we can grow -- I can buy some livestock with my fabulous wealth, and we can eat them, too.

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 4. So it's actually worse than camping - it would be like living in the Middle Ages.

WALKER: Close - I was actually thinking we would live like it was the turn of the century. And no one would be the wiser, because we will scare our children from ever leaving the village.

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 5. Our children?

WALKER: Sure! We'll live there for generations!

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 1. We're going to scare them from leaving?

WALKER: Yeah - I figure we can make up stuff about creatures in the woods. I mean, I've read about it before in my history texts. We'll say there's creatures out there that will kill you if you leave the village. And we'll say they are attracted to the color red. We'll call that "The Bad Color". And, I'm getting a little ahead of myself here, but yellow will be "The Safe Color". And sometimes we'll go around in creature costumes to give some weight to the myths we spread around. Those kids will shit!

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 3. Why is red "The Bad Color"?

WALKER: Think about it, I mean, red just seems pretty evil, doesn't it?

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 5. Well, it does seem the most dangerous color, but doesn't that mean that we couldn't have any red clothes for ourselves?

WALKER: Right. No red clothes for anybody. No red anything. But remember - we'll be living very basic lives, so it's not like you'll have that many possessions; most of the material things you love won't be coming with you to the village. Not only will you not have your favorite red things, you won't have most of your favorite things, period.

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 2. Geez. I'm just trying to take all this in...

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 3. I hear that. Sounds like it would be really hard to live like that! I mean, we'd have to become farmers, basically. The only things I've ever grown -- I mean, besides flowers or grass -- was some vegetables in my garden. Tomatoes, mostly.

WALKER: Yeah, see! We've done this sort of thing! We've all grown tomatoes before, right?

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 5. But aren't tomatoes red?

WALKER: Ah. Good point. So we can't grow tomatoes. Unless we pick them before they're ripe.

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 1. Gross. That's gross.

WALKER: No tomatoes, no red onions, no red peppers, no radishes. Am I forgetting something?

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 3. Apples are red -- some of them, anyway.

WALKER: Right. So there can't be any red apples in our village. Good thinking.

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 4. You know what's NOT good thinking? This little village idea of yours. Do you really think it's a good idea to start an agrarian society without the color red? We're knocking out half of our food supply here!

WALKER: Not true. We've only mentioned 3 or 4 foods, I think.

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 1. Um, what about cherries?

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 2. Strawberries.

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 3. Red plums.

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 4. Cranberries.

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 5. Raspberries.

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 6. Red potatoes.

WALKER: Motherfucker! Potatoes! I was banking on lots and lots of potatoes!

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 2. Hey - didn't you say something about livestock? Because pigs are usually pink.

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 3. And chickens have red on their heads.

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 4. Same with turkeys.

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 5. Hey, yeah -- if a cardinal flys into the village, are we going to have to shoot that thing down and bleach it or what?

WALKER: Of course not! We won't have any guns in the village! Remember? A world without violence?

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 5. Oh, shit. Yeah.

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 2. So back to those animals -- if we're going to eat beef, that's red, too.

WALKER: Damn. And I love beef.

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 4. This is stupid. Let's just switch colors from red to something you find less frequently in nature. Purple comes to mind.

WALKER: Purple? Are you fucking kidding me? Who gets scared of purple?

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 1. Hey, man, YOU need to settle down. It's your dumbass idea we're trying to fix.

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 3. What do we do at sunrise and sunset? There's purple and red in the sky at those times.

WALKER: Fuck. This is hard. Let's just go, and we'll figure it out as we go.

FUTURE VILLAGE ELDER 6. Well, you're the rich guy, you know best.

ALL: Go, village!

We Had Joy, We Had Fun, We Had Nirvana

I spent the majority of Wednesday (my snow day) pouring over the contents of the Nirvana box set, With the Lights Out. I read the full color booklet, listened to some of disc 3 (In Utero demos with alternate lyrics!!) while cooking dinner, and watched the DVD. The DVD features a lot of rocking out in Krist's mom's house, some live performances, and a few early videos. The DVD is essentially the fourth and final disc of the box set, and ends with a Nirvana cover of Seasons in the Sun -- studio footage with Kurt on drums, Dave on the bass, and Krist on guitar.

The reason I started this post was to convey their recording of Seasons in the Sun, but after staring at the screen for a few minutes and browsing through the Nirvana Fan Club site for another 30, I still have no idea how to explain it. The three of them are just fucking around, Kurt casually singing, casually altering lyrics, behind the drumset, Krist and Dave looking back at him (when Krist isn't looking down at his axe, struggling to play the notes in order) -- just a perfect, throwaway, early-nineties moment in a tiny room, imperfectly playing a sweet, wistful, seventies hit.

Goodbye Papa please pray for me
I was the black sheep of the family

This post is not going well. How can it? I can't possibly explain it. I can't possibly explain exactly why I spent the majority of the day -- up to the moment I fell asleep -- thinking "I miss Nirvana". You can't know how much I liked Nirvana, and I can't know why I liked Nirvana so much.

A framed picture of a rubber duck hangs between the two surround sound speakers on my back wall. Prior to that, it was stuffed into my files. Prior to that, it was taped to the inside of my high school locker. Prior to that, it was artwork within the liner notes of Incesticide.

I have no idea what struck me before Nevermind, but after I dubbed by brother's copy, that was it. My tape was clear, with some yellow on it, Memorex, 90 minutes. It belonged to my walkmanesque Memorex personal cassette player. I listened to it every day on the bus, to and from school. I listened to it, particularly Drain You, over and over again on the ride home from a field trip - the first and only field trip we ever took out of the state, to a cave and a salt flat in Oklahoma; I was in the seventh grade, and I was wearing sunglasses. The tinted lenses allowed me to stare at the girl I had a crush on with zero repercussions -- she would look at me a few times, but I just kept looking straight ahead at her, confident that my hideous yet effective sunglasses would shield my obsession.

In a passionate kiss
From my mouth to yours
Sloppy lips to lips
You're my vitamins
I'm like you

(Except that, in my youth, my dubbed tape with no liner notes -- not that it really matters, even the liner notes didn't have all the lyrics -- I thought the last part was "I like you".)

I listened to it on the tractor -- I was on the 80 acres surrounding my home, and I remember Mrs. Mies waving as the bus drove by, so it must have been one of the days I was kept home from school so I could help plant wheat, which makes sense because then I would have been on the smaller tractor, the one that makes less noise because it's not as big as the 1066. The larger tractor was so loud that it was pointless to wear headphones; even at the highest volume you could barely hear what song was playing, and I suspected that listening to headphones at their highest volume was likely bad for my hearing (although that didn't seem to stop my father from ordering me to work on the loudest tractor in the world). So, I must of been on the 686, and I know I was listening to Bleach, because I the memory is connected to Love Buzz. I learned from my new box set that Love Buzz was actually a cover song -- Shocking Blue, a band from the Netherlands of all places, wrote it -- and part of my youth was a white lie.

In Utero was released when I was a freshman in high school; coincidentally, I bought it on the same day that I borrowed a Blind Melon album from Danelle. In those days I rode shotgun in my brother's '79 Cutlass -- those familiar with the Oldsmobile line will recall that particular model did not feature a CD player, so we had to wait to get home until we listened to it. I put in the Blind Melon album when my brother wasn't looking and pressed play. "It sounds like Blind Melon," he said. Then we switched to the real deal; after hearing Rape Me, he brought the other stereo upstairs so he could play Smells Like Teen Spirit at the same time as Rape Me, to prove to me and to himself that it was the same riff at different speeds.

A bootlegged live album was taken when my house was robbed. I called the store I bought CDs from to ask if it had been sold to them that day. It had not. She explained that they would need a case number from the police -- that's how this sort of thing usually works. I looked around to see what else had been stolen.

Kurt died at some point due to a shotgun blast. (I have always opted against renting the movies and reading the books that debate murder versus suicide. In the end, it matters, but it doesn't matter.) Where was I? I don't remember. For me, his death was cemented the next morning at Shawn's locker; Simmons was there, too. Shawn and I had once made a little dance routine to Son of a Gun.

The sun shines in the bedroom
When we play
The raining always starts
When you go away

Joe was on my baseball team around that time, so I guess he died in Spring (a Google search confirms it was April). (I believe this must also have been the season that Joe hit three dingers in one game, and accepted an intentional walk later in the season when we face that team again. The three home run game by Joe remains the most inexplicable display of power I have ever seen, and will hold that slot until I witness one of those grandmother-overcome-with-adrenaline-lifts-car-to-save-the-baby-underneath events, and that intentional walk had to be the greatest and strangest feeling Joe G. had ever felt and has felt since.) I told him a kid at my school had killed himself, and he asked if it was because Kurt did. He said there were kids across the country committing suicide just because Cobain died. He thought it was unbelievable. I did not.

My heart-shaped box set adventure was Wednesday - on Thursday, the memories of junior high were put on hold, back to work. I picked up the two women in my carpool and drove us to our cubicles. But it was okay, because In Utero was playing on my car stereo, 30% louder than I had any right to subject my passengers to.

Ecto-plasma, Ecto-skeletal
Obituary every birthday
Your scent is still here in my place of recovery!

Vacation Summation Addendum

Two "Forgot to mentions" and one correction:

1. On the flight home I was reading Hornby and a thought popped into my head -- if a lot (I mean a whole lot) of Americans died for some reason, the surviving Americans would be wealthier, due to inheritances and things. As you know, this is not a common thing to consider. I reread the last few Hornby paragraphs to see what could have prompted such an idea; there was nothing in the text remotely related to it. Maybe I've been paying more attention to the tsunami than I thought.

2. The weak New Year's snog brought the total number of ladies I kissed in the past year up to four. Two of those women were severely drunk. One was coming down from a buzz. The fourth had several drinks beforehand. Let's hear it for alcohol's contribution to my 2004 love life! Woot woot! There's a lesson here, kids -- if anyone ever tells you that you don't need alcohol as a social lubricant, they:

haven't made out with me, and
throw shitty parties

3. According to Steph, who should know, I misspelled the name of the epic burger - it should be spelled Jucy Lucy. "Any other spelling is an imposter," she writes. Indeed.

Stellar!

From the Stella / MTV's The State / Wet Hot American Summer listserv:

STELLA, the TV series, has been picked up for ten episodes on Comedy
Central. Michael Ian Black, Michael Showalter & David Wain will write,
star and exec produce the scripted half-hour comedy. Slated for a
summer premiere!