Wednesday, September 10, 2008

mt girl




end of summer makes me miss montana. it would be nice to sit at the top hat with some people i knew in second grade. to sip on moose drool and let the cigarette smoke marinate my clothing. to hear the twang of bluegrass reverberate across the wood-paneled walls. to feel it on the bottoms of my feet.

good morning

while driving to work this morning, 'never there' by cake came on the radio. i turned up the volume, slid on the aviators and rocked out. yeah, cake gets a bad rap, whatever. i'll love them forever because i picked up a copy of fashion nugget in 7th grade and was suddenly the coolest kid on the block. that says a lot considering this was at the apex of my awkward phase. anyway, 'never there' is awesome. horns layered over a staccato bassline and some strategic vibraslappin' action...and are those maracas i hear in the background? or a cabasa? then there's john mccrea who doesn't really sing the vocals, he's a little too good for singing. he's into a drier, cockier delivery. smug syncopation. you tell me that you love me so, you tell me that you care, but when i need you, baby... come on, it rocks. admit it, you like it too.

i arrived at work and promptly checked my gmail to find that i'd won disorientation tickets in some fnx email contest i'd forgotten i had entered. sweet. i have this unique talent for winning things off the radio. just within the last year i've won tickets for ryan adams, devo (yes, devo), and tegan and sara. hey, there are definitely worse things to be good at!

so this disorientation tour is okay. just okay. two of the five bands are actually pretty terrible. but the kooks will be there, and boy do i love me some kooks! rogue wave will be good too. i'll leave before flogging molly to prevent my ears from bleeding, but the first half of the show should be worth the cross-city journey.

Monday, September 8, 2008

fuck me up, steal my records.

i wish i could go back to last night. i could've listened to ryan for days. months. the air, the beer, the music, the friends, everything. it was one of those occasions when you're just existing and perceiving and suddenly you get this feeling that life is actually okay. more than okay, maybe.

today i'm dealing with a pheromone crash. i was oozing my musk all over the place last night, i think i'm a little dried out. that's just what he does to me. i wonder why i fall in love with rockstars. couldn't i prefer a less-complicated type? like athletes. or investment bankers. i'm generalizing, but you get the point. instead, it has to be the emotionally-driven musician who gets all mola ram on me, thrusting his hand into my chest to grasp my thumping heart and yank it from my thorax. it really isn't healthy to be so easily conquered. honestly, all you need to do is grab an acoustic and stop shaving for a few days and sing all achy. bam. i'm yours, take me. throw my name into a song or two. sing about your chameleon eyes and how i used to tell you their color every day because sometimes you just didn't know. someone had to tell you, and i was looking at them the most. sing about how you miss me. people will listen and get sad because it'll grub up their own pain, but you would know and i would know they could never quite understand.

ryan, though. what a sweet life he leads. he plays his music and writes, travels around and sings to make girls swoon. mmmm. that would be nice i think.

his blog makes me love him more. it's sexy in the way that cigarettes are sexy.

i secretly hope ryan is one of those people who never showers. just once a week, maybe, or once every two weeks. i hope he gets a really distinctive odor that no one would ever mind because it's just his essence and it smells sort of like his music. i hope his guitar smells like him, too. i hope i'd be able to catch a whiff from the front row.




Thursday, September 4, 2008

sunshininess

thanks to my masterful painting skillz, my kitchen is now the lovely shade of dandelion.





it really brings some vibrance to the room, don't you think?

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

guest blogger #1: sir william j. fleming

due to a recent lack of inspiration, i decided to let someone else pour their creative juices into my blog. i couldn't think of anyone in the world who has more of these juices than b.j., one of my dearest friends. so here ya go:

guest post #1:
Except that I do and I do




Shannon is a gem. Let's just get that right out there. She and I were at high school together and formed several organizations of note during our tenure including but not limited to H.U. Intl. and a non-union construction company focusing primarily on cotton-poly blend units. Tehe. I said "units."

Anyway, recently, I was all like "Yeah, motherf-er," when Shannon was all like "I want to start a blog." Then we started brainstorming blog names and I had some really great ones like RoboBlogfromtheFuture, and Shanimatron 10069. She, however, opted for idontlikeyoubutiloveyou.
















And, I guess that's good. I'm much better at ignoring emotion than Shannon, so it makes sense that her blog would be a little more serious and heart string-snipping than mine (which doesn't technically exist (my blog not my heart. I have a heart. Shh.))

Which is sort of why I like this blog, sort of why I like the title especially, and a little bit why I'm guest-writing on it.

I don't like you but I love you is something, thankfully, we've never said to each other (see title). But the tension in it rings roundly and loudly to me.

Shannon (and me, sometimes) are pretty good examples of one of my favorite concepts of all time which is the romance of self destruction. Obviously sometimes this is more true for each of us than others, and certainly we're not the most self destructive kids out there, but it's a huge part of our life like the time warp on third street before we ate a giant bag of chocolate chips.

We constantly surround ourselves with fun things that are god awful for us. On at least a few occasions, these things have included each other. On paper, her friends (myself included) are easy to hate. I certainly hate many of her friends.











So, why don't I punch her in the face? Mostly because she prefers to be bitten. And, concomitantly, I've had my fair share of scratches that've drawn blood from her. But why haven't we destroyed each other?

Well, we might. And that's fine. Being around Shannon is like being spirited away for a threesome in a minivan. It looks like such a dirty, reprehensible idea at first blush, and sometimes it is. But, more often than not, you can't wait to feel damaged again.


-Beej.

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

aurora

last night i realized my apartment feels like home. i haven't felt this way in years.

Friday, August 22, 2008

field trip

on tuesday, i paid my first visit to the ICA. it was very very cool.

this was my favorite piece:














bourgeois's arching woman depicts either sexual ecstasy or excruciating pain. or maybe both. oppositional and symmetrical human response. i love this.

Sunday, August 17, 2008

obama/phelps, 2008

come on, it's genius.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

fresh produce

i have a crush on a clerk at the co-op grocery store down the street. i make eyes at him while purchasing my tofu and instant oatmeal. he’s dimpled and has puppy eyes that are softly wreathed in curly blonde lashes. he wears red chuck taylors. i bet he has comic book collection and listens to sunny day real estate.

once, he was stocking zucchinis and i reached to grab a nearby bundle of basil. his hand innocently grazed the skin of my wrist. he mumbled a quick apology and nervously tugged the ties of his apron. i giggled shyly. his cheeks pinkened and he scurried away, still carrying the box of zucchinis in which my fragile heart had fallen.

okay, i totally made that up.

he is pretty cute though. sadly, i doubt he’s a day over 19.

Sunday, August 10, 2008

for the love of metric and margot

oh man, what a weekend.

on friday, the day of the metric concert, there was an accident. happily pedaling down centre st., i collided with a freshly opened car door. no time to think or stop, launched from my bike, airborne, over the door, skin and shoulder and helmet on the pavement. ambulance, emergency room, tetanus shot, x-rays, arrogant doctors, saline sloshed into my open wounds. in the end, nothing was broken (thank god). i walked away with my left arm in a sling and some gauze haphazardly taped to my thigh. limbs intact, nothing lost but a little pride.

here are some pictures!





despite their efforts, the gods failed to keep me from my love, emily. earlier in the week, after a heart attack inducing cancellation, the metric show was fatefully rescheduled for friday at midnight. even though i wasn’t released from the hospital until 6, i still had time to make the trip to new york and witness the brilliance that is metric. my friend tom (thank you, thankyouthankyouthankyou!) drove me down to the show. i was in pain and still a little shaken up, but it was ridiculously awesome. i danced and sang all the words and ogled emily in her skin-tight, metallic onesie.



and the fun didn’t stop there.

saturday morning, we drove back to boston so i could make it to the margot and the nuclear so and so’s show at the middle east. they were SO so so great, better than i remembered. i even hung out with the trumpet player for a little while. he said this tour is a lot better than the last because his girlfriend had been cheating on him all throughout the last one. then he asked me for some pot. i didn’t have any.




they played talking in code during the encore, sent shivers down my spine.

as masochistic as this may sound, the pain from the wreck made the music even better. it got all the way into my bones.

metric and margot, i love you, black-and-blue and aching. digging ditches out of boredom. voice cracks like a piano.
nothing can keep me away.