Aunt Becky: ‘I *so* don’t get this song.’
The Daver: ‘Wait, isn’t this America?’
Aunt Becky: ‘Yeah…or maybe it’s ‘Chicago.’ The 70′s had a lot of bands named after cities. Either way, what the fuck do they mean- ’25-06-24′? That makes no sense.’
The Daver: ‘What are you *talking* about? It’s ’25 or 6 to 4′!’
Aunt Becky: ‘…’
The Daver: ‘You know, like 3:35 or 3:26 am.’
Aunt Becky: ‘…’
Aunt Becky: ‘It is not!! There is no way!’
The Daver: ‘What the hell did you think it meant?’
Aunt Becky: ‘I don’t know…maybe a combination to a lock or something? No, I refuse to believe this song is about a time of day.’
The Daver: ‘And a locker combination makes more sense to you?’
Aunt Becky: ‘No! That’s why I *said* that I don’t get this song, dumbass!’
The Daver: ‘It’s about smoking dope, Becky.’
Aunt Becky: ‘I refuse to believe that in all my years being a pothead that I never could figure out that this is a drug song. I have a sixth *sense* about this crap! I mean ‘Lake Shore Drive….get it ‘L.S.D’?’
The Daver: ‘Are you still bitter that you couldn’t do the ‘Dark Side of the Moon’/ ‘Wizard of Oz’ thing?
Aunt Becky: ‘I cannot discuss this with you. You wouldn’t understand. You were off being ‘good’ while I tried to determine the best liquid to put in my bong. Creme de Menthe was a hands down favorite.’
The Daver: ‘Fine.’
“…”
“…”
(three days later)
“…”
Me: ‘Is it really 25 or 6 to 4?’
————
What song lyrics have you completely screwed up, Internet? I know that I cannot be the only one who thought that Radar Love = Red-Eye Love.
I watched SherryBaby last night with The Daver and I hated it. Even the often-seen shots of Maggie What’s-Her-Last-Name-Was-In-Donny-Darko boobies (which were, I need to tell you, fantastic hooters) couldn’t save it for me. It was one of those dreadful character sketch type movies that always make me want to claw my eyes out. Like Napoleon Dynamite, which was only good because he did a wicked dance at the end.
I’m not a movie person, I’m not a theatre person, and I’m certainly not an shoot-yourself-in-the-face-boring art-house movie I’m sorry film aficionado. Given the choice between punching myself in the head and watching a movie, I’ll often choose punching myself.
Put down your pitchforks and your Blu-Ray copies of City of the Lost Children in it’s original French and hear me out.
I didn’t hate SherryBaby because nothing fucking happened besides seeing her boobs a lot, admiring the 80′s French Impressionistic crappy art they dug up for the set, and watching her have sex with everything that walked near her. No, I hated it because her attitude; her story; her ‘I’m obviously uncomfortable in her own skin’ behavior, they all hit too close to home for me.
They reminded me of the last couple of times I saw my friend Steph.
Steph died a year ago this past February. The official cause of death was “natural causes” and at age 27 they only put that stuff on there when you’ve abused your body so badly that it can no longer function. It gave out one night as she slept, a week or so out of rehab for the second or third time. She left behind two young sons.
The person that she died as was not the person that she was. Steph, MY friend Steph was one of the few people who stood up for me when I needed someone to. She was self-assured enough to chew a couple of people who had hurt me a brand new butt hole, something that not many people can do. Steph and I would play “Summer Car” and crank up the heat in my old del Sol in the dead of winter, strip down to our tank tops and pretend it was summer. She co-threw me my first baby shower.
She was one of those people who seemed to have a permanent light shining on them, maybe from within, and she was my hero for many years.When I think of Steph, I smile, because that’s what she would have wanted me to. Not a single day passes where I don’t think of her, my heart clenching up when I remember that she’s gone.
And she is gone. She’s dead.
I went to her funeral with all of my her our friends in tow, all of us red-eyed and sniffling and nervous, wishing we were anywhere else. I cried so loudly during her funeral that I was afraid people were going to stare. When her eldest son said “Look at my mom, she’s all dead and hard,” I nearly lost my cookies on the lilly-scented carpet. The only thing that saved me is that I was in front of her mother, talking to her mother. When her youngest cried after being taken away from viewing his mother’s body, screaming (just as mine does for me) “Go see MOMMY!” I felt like I’d been slapped.
But I didn’t connect it in my head. It was like my brain couldn’t accept the two events as related.
1) I had a friend Steph.
and
2) I went to a funeral.
Two mutually exclusive events.
The cold waxy person that was laid out in that coffin wasn’t the same person who taught me how to take a Camel Wide Light, empty the tobacco and pack it carefully with The Ganj. She wasn’t the person who smelled like a garden with me. She didn’t prefer “Waiting for my Ruca” over “Scarlet Begonias.”
But it was.
She was two different people, and in the end, it’s what killed her.
It’s taken nearly a year and a half, but I have accepted it. My friend, one of my oldest and best friends, she’s dead. She’s gone forever. There will always be a hole where she was, like a lost tooth. I don’t have to like it, but I do accept it.
Gone but never forgotten.
————-
Angels beating all their wings in time
With smiles on their faces
And a gleam right in their eyes
Thought I heard one sigh for you
Come on up, come on up, now
–Shine A Light, Rolling Stones
I wasn’t going to write this post. Really, I wasn’t. The Internet has been flooded from Twitter to Facebook to all the 300 blogs I read with posts about The Death Of Michael Jackson And What It Meant To Them, and I don’t really have much to contribute.
I was born in 1980 into a family of stinky hippies and I cut my teeth on Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Pop music was seen as some sort of abomination and I could still probably sing you a medley of anti-war songs that I grew up listening to. My brother, ten years my senior, was far more interested in making Freddy Kruegar gloves with real working razor blades than with jamming out to the top 40 station.
I did have a Michael Jackson album that I occasionally rocked out to on my tiny Fisher Price tape deck, but where it came from and where it disappeared to is anyone’s guess. I didn’t miss it.
Don’t get me wrong here, I’ll never ever deny that he was an amazing musician who changed music in ways we’ll never begin to understand; he was. No argument here. He just wasn’t someone I rocked out (with my cock out) to very often.
From a young child, his every move scrutinized by the media. We at home sat back and watched eagerly like a bunch of fucking vultures when the first hints of his unravelling occurred.
Ohmygod, We clamored, is he REALLY turning white? What is UP with his nose now, We scoffed? He’s turning into a wax man, We giggled!
The tabloids reported facts and falsehoods, indistinguishable to Us, We scandal-hungry jackals, licking Our gleaming white teeth, ready to rip him apart. Truth didn’t matter, no, so long as We had quotes from well known sources and had every fucking doctor who had never treated this patient speculate on what was really wrong with him. The juicer the better, We screamed, giddy with joy begging for more dirt on his penis, his monkey butler, his life. And the papers, always happy to sell more copy, happily obliged.
Once in awhile, We’d stop for a second and say, you know what? This is kind of fucked up, that We’re sitting here like a bunch of scavengers, hoping for scraps–tasty, delicious scraps–about this man’s life.
Oh well, We quickly reasoned, justifying Our voyeuristic look into the life of someone We’d never meet, he ASKED for it when he became a star. He should have said no, at the age of whatever-young-age he was when he was thrust into the limelight with his family, We reasoned, Our conscience making a dramatic flip-flop. Morally superior to someone We didn’t know once again.
It’s not OUR fault he’s such a freak.
And maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s not Us that made Britney go berserk last year, reliving those private teenage years that We all went through, maybe a little later than Us, but the same awkward mistakes We all made. Only We didn’t have to grow up to see Our face splashed about the papers when We broke curfew or had sex in a car in a parking lot.
No one reported that We were yet again at McDonald’s, stuffing Our pimply faces with Big Macs and chocolate shakes. No reporter caught Us talking with a stupid accent or wearing those itty-bitty short-shorts that made Our ass look dimpled and gross. What We ordered at Starbucks wasn’t national news. When We screwed up–God knows We all did–it was between Us, Our family, and God.
Sure maybe We made Shit List at Our school of 2,000 people for blowing some chick’s boyfriend in the bathroom, or maybe We shit our pants in gym class and the whole school was gleeful and mocking for a couple of weeks. Maybe it lasted a year. Maybe that year was miserable and hard because people hated Us.
But eventually, people forgot.
We’d grow up, move out, and the hazy memories would turn sepia and move to the back of Our brains. Remember when (dot, dot, dot) would turn soft-filtered and someday We might not be able to recall the smaller details that were so important to Us at age 16. Or 17. Or 25.
There’s no magazine archive from ten years ago that chronicles all the fuck-ups, all the cooter shots, all the bad fashion choices I made. It’s not national news that I drink diet coke by the bucket-full or that I really do need to lose some major pounds. When I have a fight with Nat, there’s no one to capture the look on my face, the snarl on my lips when I tell him to fuck off, no one will interview my friends and family to find out if I’d had a drink before the fight.
My life, comparatively, is unexamined. Just like, I imagine, yours.
Sure, maybe some of us have blogs, some of us have well-read blogs with a wider audience, and those of us who have gotten a bigger crowd reading understand the scrutiny involved even here, on The Internet.
I, for as small of a blog as I have, know full well that whatever I put here is something that I need to own up to. I can’t bring you all of the drama that I’d like, the hidden feelings in my heart of hearts, not without remembering that every time I do, I stand to have someone come here and rip me down. And worse, get me wrong. Completely wrong.
And I own that. I’m okay with that. You want to rip me up one side of my ass and down the other? Go right ahead. I invited you in and I’m very happy that you’re here.
I choose to be here. I choose to put myself out here. Just like you do.
And, like you, I can stop at any time. I’m not supporting my family on my income here (go ahead, have a giggle). I don’t owe anyone here anything, and although my archives will remain somewhere here in the place where bad blogs go when they die even if I pull my blog down, that’s okay. I’m not ashamed.
But I can choose to stop whenever I want, just as you can. I can flit back to my life outside the computer and no one will be the worse for it. My kids might come to me and make fun of the crap I’ve spewed here if and when they find it and I will laugh with them. My disappearance here will make no ripples. Just another dead link.
Could Britney leave? Could Mr. Jackson? Could they really?
Of course not. Michael turned into a recluse in his later years, a creepy recluse who underwent mockery whenever he stepped out of his house to try and lead a normal life; take his kids to the zoo or the bookstore. We’d lap it up, laughing at what he’d become.
We laughed at Britney too. How could she possibly have held one of her kids hostage in her home when her ex-husband tried to pick him up? Ha-ha-ha-ha, that crazy bitch, we giggled sanctimoniously, knowing full well that we would never behave that way.
They were trapped. Super-stars trapped and cornered like caged wild animals.
Sure, maybe Britney would have become a bat-shit crazy hairdresser in Louisiana if she hadn’t become Britney Spears ™. Maybe Michael Jackson ™ would have worked at Sears and had a penchant for kiddie porn. No one would have known or cared what these two nobodies did, what they ate for breakfast, what brand of toilet paper they used to wipe their no-name assholes with.
Britney can never be anything other than Britney Spears ™ and Michael Jackson could never be anything but Michael Jackson ™ if you like or Wacko Jacko ™ if you don’t.
And for all the fancy cars, the notoriety, the fame, the fortune and the glamor, there’s a pretty big part of me that wonders if they could choose to do it all over again, would they?
As I sit here today, submerged in a never-ending sea of snippets about Michael Jackson, I can’t help but feel a little ashamed. We made him. We made him and we laughed when he fell apart. Dress it up, take it out to dinner, hell, take it home to meet Dear Old Dad, we can’t escape that cold hard fact.
We made them all.
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