New Name Needed, Apply Within

I think it should be easier for regular people to purchase urinal cakes.

So I’ve been away for a bit, attending a conference held by nerds and the people who love nerds: other nerds. The conference was in Boston, which is still a really great city if you can ignore things like the really bad way the professional baseball team is playing, or all the Democrats in bad suits preparing for the most boring event in FleetCenter history since the last Air Supply tour. I had trouble with those things.
But I did discover something nice about travelling, which can be a good tip for all you kids about to go into college: no matter where you are in the world, booze still makes you tipsy.

Sometimes I really wish that cats could talk, because I’d love to know what they would say after using the litter box. I imagine they’d say “I just pooped in a box” a lot.

• When “Pac-Man Fever” comes on in your iTunes Party Shuffle, an angel gets its wings.
• Step on a crack, you’ll fall right in if you’re Mary-Kate Olsen.
• If the groom drops the wedding band during the ceremony, J-Lo won’t even notice, because she’ll already be hooking up with an usher.
• Red sky at night, sailor’s delight; Hagar in Van Halen, sailors jump from railing.

Whenever I’m feeling down and depressed, I like to imagine that I’m the king of a very powerful country, only the power comes from my citizenry’s advanced dancing abilities, and whenever I send them off to war it is really a dance war, and we are always better dancers and therefore the victors, and before I feed the losers to the alligators I tell them what a good job they did.

Today is like your mom making you a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with the kind of bread you like, soft and mushy and white, instead of the organic crap she’s been buying that’s dotted with seeds and small pebbles and barnacles, and the sun is shining and you’re allowed to watch TV for an extra hour because you’re dad’s out at the bar again because his college friend Popper is in town, and the name of the show on the television is The Dukes of Hazzard.

Today is like a rock concert where you’ve just had your first beer ever and there are girls from your high school in tube tops whom you’ve never seen before in tube tops and your parents have gone to Switzerland for two weeks for the Festival of Clocks and the name of the band playing is Hall and Oates.

Today’s entry is brought to you by the cover of this Dokken album that I willfully purchased within a year of its 1985 release, and listened to regularly on the regular fifty-minute bus trip from Schweinfurt to Würzburg. Indeed, there was a time in my life when I would staunchly defend the artistic merits of the waxy disk within. God, I feel hideous thinking about that. But isn’t it healthy to occasionally confront demons from one’s past, cleaning out the psychological basement of repressed memory for an embarrassment yard sale now that the weather’s getting nice?
Sad to say, this album’s musical quality ranks around the median of the record collection of my youth. Hindsight is 20/20, the adage goes, which gives me a crystal clear view of the river of sonic sewage I allowed to flow through my teenaged years. If the Environmental Protection Agency’s jurisdiction in the mid- to late-eighties included music, my room would easily have been declared a Superfund site.
And such a bizarre combination of noxious ingredients, too. Light inoffensive LPs from Huey Lewis and Men at Work leaning against the acronymous metallic piffle of Y&T and W.A.S.P. Nancy Wilson’s on-cover cleavage had me convinced that Heart’s eponymous album was worth heavy Walkman rotation; to this day, I can still sing “Nothin’ At All” from beginning to end, and I may be the only person on the planet who can (Wilson sisters included). Once I actually taped a Debbie Gibson album borrowed from some girl, and my credibilty wishes to God I did so with a sense of detached irony. Most horrifying: on my last visit to my parents’, I found irrefutable evidence that I once owned Toto IV, an album which is the musical equivalent of sarin gas.
What’s the point of telling you all this? Do I expect salvation by baring my early love of the cheesy? No, but I certainly expect all readers of this post to admit at least one of the musical accidents of their formative years in the Comments section.

Being a world-famous personality, I get a lot of email. Like you, a large percentage of it is of an unsolicited commercial nature. Most of it is casually tossed into the electronic landfill without a second thought. Today, though, I received the first spam message that gave me new information which I might never have known otherwise:

Subject: Hahahha, Little Pe-nis U Have satanism

Apparently my equipment has been shortened as a result of demonic possession. I never realized that was one of the side effects. But the mail doesn’t make clear: is there a pill I can take to fix both problems, or do I need to seek a urologist priest? Has someone blended Viagra into a stack of communion wafers?
And if the purging process is anything like what I saw in The Exorcist, someone better have a Costco-sized box of tissues handy.

“The season” hasn’t quite started, yet traffic is already jamming the streets of this little coastal town. It’s not tourists, though. The parking spots are full of trucks and vans, signs of the madcap rush to clean, repair, stock, and ready the stores and restaurants that have been scientifically designed to separate money from the flatlanders. It’s one of the things that Maine folks do best: catch lobsters, grow blueberries, take cash from out-of-staters. We’re the Kenyan long-distance runners of the Tourist Profit Olympics.
I spent today’s lunch hour finishing another stage of 120 Miles. Today’s weather was the best so far this year, 50 degrees and sky so blue it almost hurt to look at. I had a song stuck in my head the whole time, “Ain’t They Pretty” from the marvelous Fought Down album from Ken Layne and his merry band of Corvids. It’s a slow shuffler that evokes an image of fifty people in a dimly-lit bar, swaying and singing along with the chorus, louder than they really should, wrapped in the carefree shine of “just one more” cocktail:

you’re in for a good time
drop on by now
don’t be crying
the people are friendly
wait and see
all your drinks are free
you’re in for a good time

And God, does the song makes me want to drop by, and have a good time, and drink for free. I want to know where that place is and get there pronto. Who wouldn’t? We’ve all been in a place like that at least once. The day has drifted into a long warm night, empties are scattered all around, illuminated points from candles or strings of lights poke holes in the dark, it’s later than anybody thought, someone’s been slowly but steadily turning up the music for hours, but no one’s in a hurry to get going. I miss that place, folks. And some of you know where that place is.
And you’d better start telling.