6000onions

Before I begin complaining – and baby, I got some ‘plainin to do – I want to briefly review the Die Antwoord concert I attended on Monday night.

IT FUCKING ROCKED AND WOULD TOTALLY BE THE BEST CONCERT I HAD EVER SEEN IN MY ENTIRE LIFE if I hadn’t gone to see the Pogues, the Violent Femmes & Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper on the pier in NYC in 1990. Z TO THE E TO THE MOTHERFUCKIN’ F!!!!!

That is all. Except pictures are here.

And now, on to the complaining! So I went out on Monday night and then again on Tuesday night because I am in my early twenties and what the hell, you know, I might as well burn the candle – yeah, okay, I was about dead on Wednesday – but all good, except I came home to discover that there was a nice puddle of water in front of the kitchen sink. My daughter, lying on the couch, said “Oh well I thought Miles spilled something.” Good try at the blame shifting! But you see, if I am in my early twenties than she is only like five, so what does one expect? I opened up the cabinet under the sink to discover that it was, basically, underwater and if the cabinet door had been made of glass it would have looked a lot like the Baltimore aquarium R’lyeh display. I keep cleaning stuff under there, of course, fortunately in a couple of dishpans. The dishpan under the left side of the sink was brim full with water and floating cleaning supplies which did not for the most part mix well with scummy water: goodbye, bartender’s friend, box of anti static duster thingies and some unidentifiable other objects. Yeah. So I cleaned that up, which is what I just love to do at 1:30 am and then on Wednesday I made a couple futile stabs at fixing it, by which I mean I watched some Youtube videos and became depressed and went back to bed.

Actually, it doesn’t look like too difficult a fix, particularly if you have the whole sink upside down on a nice clean work surface and the right tools, just like the calm and unshakable guys on Youtube. If, however, the sink is right side up and you are upside down under it with water and scum dripping on you trying to fix things with, uh, your hands and a small pair of needle nose pliers, it is surprisingly unsimple! I put a note in there that says DO NOT USE and that is where I have left it. I get paid next Thursday and maybe I can get somebody to fix it then. Or just never use it again, which is a big pain in the ass – I have already poured most of a large stockpot of water all over the floor this morning. And this would be a drag, yes, but surmountable if it didn’t follow suspiciously closely on two extremely recent stopped up toilet happenings and if I hadn’t seen the water from the right hand side of the sink this morning well right back up in the left hand side, which leads me to suspect that we might be facing something much worse, much much worse: a real drain issue. In which case I’m completely, but completely, fucked and that is all she wrote.

And as if that were not enough, the fucking iMac is dead and I am typing this on my beloved old Windows 98 desktop, the one an ex built for me in 2004 and another ex rebuilt in 2010, the unkillable machine, old reliable itself. I had been slowly teaching myself how to use the Mac since my brother gave it to me last December and I had put most of my pictures on it and felt like I was finally getting the hang of that whole bassackwards OS – not to mention playing a shit ton of Minecraft which it does do better than this computer – when blammo, it will not start up at all. There was some kind of almighty power surge last night apparently and while here I am, typing away on my antique windows machine, the supposedly reliable Mac won’t even get further than 1/3 of the way along its power starting up line before emphatically dying. And this is the second time it’s crashed horribly in the six months I have owned it. Fuck that and the horse it rode in on, frankly but oh I will miss that big monitor something fierce. And Minecraft.

So, two sucky things – and now I am waiting for the third shoe to drop. Great! There is nothing like a feeling of creeping dread and horrid anticipation to take you into the weekend – particularly one of my weekends which are heavy on the work continuously and light on the “weekend” part. And off we go.

I have succeeded, yet again, at addiction: I have gotten myself well and thoroughly hooked on Sim City: BuildIt, which is an evil little game you can play on your phone, although I think you would have to have better eyesight than me to do that, or you can, alas for me, play on a tablet like the iPad I share with young Miles. This Sim City is slightly different than the one I was addicted to back in the 90s when computer games were oh so new and all, but it’s similar enough that I fell instantly into building obsessively. It’s one helluva game: just like life: there is never enough money to do the stuff you want and when you inevitably fail, everyone hates you! No wonder it’s so addictive! It is, however, even more evil: it’s “free” to “purchase” but like those other masters of addiction Candy Crush or Bubble Witch, they want you to buy stuff in game. Like, I could spend real money to buy simulated money for my simulated town, thus getting my citizens to love me, or I could, you know, spend real money on my real house, thus getting, well, at least the dogs to love me. But fuck that! Fuck, also, spending money in game. I don’t mind paying for a game I want – that seems only fair – but I don’t like being hit up sneakily. So I refuse to do that and that is why my Sims are not all that happy and why, I suspect, I never got to level 400 in Candy Crush. Also, a school costs like 60,000 simoleons and so far I have never amassed more than 16,000 before I give in to their anguished cries and get them something like a police station. The Sims are strangely pro cop but meanwhile, see, in Minecraft I’m building a tower so I can find my way back to the donkeys after I go back to my other house in the village that I’m fixing up to get the saddle I left there. And I’m playing, as usual, pacifist vegan Minecraft, which makes it considerably more difficult because, damn, it sucks to follow cows around waiting for them to fall into lava so you can get some leather to bind a stupid damn book.

Today in a singular feat of procrastination I managed to spend several hours playing TWO video games at once: Minecraft, my old love, on the desktop and Sim City on the iPad. Both of them have day / night cycles so if you time it right, you can never look away from one screen or another. Meanwhile, my house crumbles about me and tumbleweeds of dog hair roll through the living room. Ah, how technology has improved our lives.

Tomorrow night I’m going to see Die Antwoord!!! I will have more beer spilled on me and become terrified by the magic bouncing Orange Peel floor! Big fun! I am totally psyched. It will be weird and weird is good.

I just watched Where the Boys Are with the Queen of Bohemia. She enjoyed it – at least I think so, anyway she giggled a lot – and I enjoyed it, despite the, uh, problematic subtext. But then I have always had a soft spot for that movie, based mainly on the clothes I think, or maybe on the fact that one of the characters thinks she is undateably tall, being exactly my height.

But! There is that problematic subtext and boy, is it ever problematic. This is old news, I know – everybody knows – that the point of Where the Boys Are is to let us all know that girls who drink and have sex will be raped and abandoned in squalid motels and then try to kill themselves inefficiently on busy highways. Then, I guess, they drop out of college – I just want to see my father, sobs the girl in question, my mother and father will tell me what to do! Yes, I just bet they will. After all, the problem couldn’t possibly be that people have been telling you what to do and you’ve been smilingly obedient, could it? Well, no matter. It’s all over for you anyway! Hopefully they’ll stone you right up and down Main Street, you little hussy. No more than you deserve! It’s really kind of an astounding movie.

The guys are all sort of universally horrible, too. There is the guy who gets drunk – the one with the tall girl, who won’t put out – and takes up with the mermaid from the fancy restaurant. Then he yells at the tall girl as she is sobbing on the beach. Well, naturally. I mean, she shouldn’t have sex, because it’s deadly for women, and just wrong, and she’s a Good Girl, but you can understand him getting angry and going for a sleazy ho. Of course she immediately loves him more when he shortly thereafter sees the error of his ways. Hooo boy, I bet that marriage worked out well. Serial infidelity, spiraling alcoholism, hovering on the brink of divorce by 1976 – I think they were friends of my parents! Or maybe they were my parents. Then there is the “boy” – he looks about 40 – who can’t see without his ridiculous glasses, so his new girlfriend (Connie Francis herself, always joking about how she’s not pretty, because having an amazing voice and looking damn good to my 2015 eyes clearly doesn’t make up for not being blonde) says she will keep him in the dark. Ha ha! He is so wrapped up in his music he doesn’t even know what she looks like! Ha ha! Another marriage that ended badly but at least she had a career to fall back on. And then there is the main character, who is Serious and has a High IQ – they actually ask each other about this, her and the Rich Boy. He is Understanding but he also Wants Sex. Does she give in? Not before the credits roll but as they are rolling they are declaring true love, so maybe. Probably not, though, and anyway I predict that their different social statuses will lead to trouble and he will never marry her, or his parents will steal the kid and have it annulled or something like that.

I don’t know, this movie was made before I was born and it is foreign to my understanding. Therefore when I got home I tried to watch Where the Boys Are 1984, but it turned out to be so alarmingly awful I couldn’t even make it 15 minutes in. As I was watching it I was thinking about my generation too, and figuring that if there had been a remake it was probably a slasher pic, because if the cinema has taught me anything, it’s that Gen X girls who hop in cars with guys usually get decapitated. Alas, the remake is not a slasher pic, or even very interesting, and the one star review said that there were lots of really dreary sex scenes. Yes, my generation: by 1984, in that weird little space of time before AIDS and after the sexual revolution, women were supposed to have sex with every single guy they met to show how liberated they were. Then on to the decapitation! Or at least to Porkys. So had it improved? Not so much. Has it now? I don’t know, because nobody has had the balls to make Where The Boys Are 2014 or even 2004 and that is kind of too bad in a sick or at least a sociological way.

Well. Where the Boys Are is still a great great song and the clothes? The clothes are a-fucking-mazing. But don’t take my word for it. You can watch it right here, or at least the first half and there’s a link to the second half on that page. Enjoy!

Well I just made a comment on Metafilter about this but I will go ahead and leave this movie here in case I have never linked it on the blog – look for a much much younger me around the 19 minute mark, goofily hippie dressed with a gold dot on my forehead –  and thus say goodbye to the Queen of Bohemia’s good friend and Deia stalwart Daevid Allen, who died today. I will also by doing this say goodbye to another good friend, Del Negro, who died a few months back and whose son Aureliano I used to babysit for back in those dim and distant days. Watching a generation pass is a sad yet inevitable thing if you live long enough but it’s also the kind of thing you don’t ever think about until it happens. And then you don’t really notice until you’re in the middle of it and then it’s like, blam, one after another, all the people who were the grownups, the adults of your childhood, the ones who ran everything – are gone. Which means, I guess, that you are the grownup now. And that’s really scary. And it is also sad, because damn those were some amazing people and the world is less for their loss. And while I’m at it, add Terry Pratchett to that list. I am sorry to see him go as well. Turtles, I suppose, all the way down.

Well, blog a day, I missed yesterday but I did think of a topic – I just couldn’t manage to get out of bed to write about it. This is partly because I did make it to the eye doctor yesterday and they dilated my pupils, which took hours, literally hours, to wear off and what with the vicious hangover and all, discombobulated me. I did, however, get a new prescription! Which we will get to later but I also drove around Asheville in the rain a lot with my dilated pupils, wearing sunglasses, taking young Miles places and hitting the grocery store and so on. It was weird but the thing that was alas not weird at all was the fact that because Craven Street and that stretch of I think Haywood Street, whatever they call it after it veers west by the Civic Center and heads out past the sheriff’s office and the homeless shelter, are both closed. Craven Street has been completely closed for months now and Haywood Street has been intermittently closed, also for months. These are both roads that I used to take, oh, almost daily, so I have noticed their absence.

Well, why are they closed? They’re both public streets, paid for and maintained by the taxpayers of this fair city (yo! Tax payin’ citizen here, yo!) for the public good, so the only reason they would be closed must be for necessary and important infrastructure repairs! Right? Oh wait. Oh, not in our post modern plutocracy. They’re closed so private enterprises can make more money. Private enterprises which have already gotten sweet tax incentive deals: to wit, New Belgium, which is building a giant brewery and kind of beer drinking Disneyland brewing attraction on Craven and some hotel cartel which is building another high rise giant luxury hotel palace on Haywood, which by the way I imagine spells doom for the homeless shelter.

So, yeah. Let that sink in for a moment: tax money, from people like me, who live and work here and make considerably, oh considerably, less than 30K per annum, which is supposed to maintain those streets that I used and need and miss is instead being used to support wealthy corporations. Well. I do not like this much. I don’t have anything against New Belgium – I miss the picturesque and freaky ruin that was the old stockyard, yeah, but not enough to forgo the real living wage jobs they are promising. I doubt one will go to me, although if I am here I am sure as hell going to try hard, but still, in the meantime, I am pissed off about the loss of Craven Street. I am pissed off in both the particular and general sense because it is not just that I miss my easy route to and from Earthfare and Westwood that I took every damn day just about, but I feel the principle here, whereby everyone gets shafted by the almighty corporate dollar, is Wrong. And when the company in question is yet another hotel, which I fucking guarantee you will not be providing living wage jobs unless you think $8 an hour is living wage, I am even more pissed off.

That was blog post number one! Now, here is blog post number two, in which I get my taxes done.

I went to On Track Financial Services and had my taxes done by a lovely volunteer today. It took like 20 minutes and was totally free and they are an incredible resource and if you do not know about their tax service, which is for those of us who make less than $55,000 a year, which is to say, everyone I know in Asheville, you should call them up right away for an appointment. They are good people doing good things. And I am getting money back, which I had not allowed myself to hope for, and it will be enough, I think, for me to get glasses with that new prescription I got yesterday AND I will even have enough left over to get two more new tires so Batly will be riding sweet and not sliding any more. So, yay!

However! There is always a however, isn’t there? They are running a raffle kind of thing for their clients which I strongly suspect – I do not know – is part of some kind of grant funded initiative. It is meant to make poor people save money and I don’t like it one little bit. I think it is condescending as hell to assume that poor people are going to just immediately blow their tax refund check on, what, hookers and blow? And then to try to get them to save the money with, basically, a lottery – if you open a savings account and put the money in there you could win $500 in six months – is kind of missing the point entirely.

We working poor have a savings account. It’s called Uncle Sam and he disburses our money once a year in the spring, thanks. We spend all year counting on that money for such luxuries as, oh, glasses. And tires. And maybe a vacation, yes, that’s what I used to spend mine on when the kids were younger: spring break visiting friends and family. Now you should look down your nose at me and say, oh, you should save that money yourself and not count on a tax refund. Well, yeah, but unfortunately what happens when you are actually poor is that there is always an emergency and there is always a need for more money, more money, more money and little bits never, somehow, add up to big bits in a savings account you can access: they go to food and sudden high electric bills and car repairs and the thousand and one things that keep the poor poor and getting poorer. This money is not a handout, for fucks sake, it’s my money that I earned. If I want to spend it on hookers and blow, you know, that would be my prerogative. I’m not – god my life is boring – but if I wanted to, well, I should be able to do just that. It is my money that the government has been holding. And now I will get it back and then, in like a month or so, I will be able to see clearly once again, whoo, go me, when I pick out new glasses frames and get it all done: I am ridiculously excited.

Whooo! Let us all pretend it is still Tuesday and be amazed by the fact that WE WON TRIVIA again tonight! Yes! And, what’s more, with two of our strongest team members missing, so it was a total and complete fluke. And also I won the sudden death tiebreaker question, as my friends pushed me up to the front when they called for the smartest team member – which right there is killingly embarrassing – and  I actually knew the answer, which was bursar AND wrote it down quick enough! I was on some kind of freaky roll all night tonight anyway and won an entire round by knowing every. single. answer. about Marvel comics. About which I know NOTHING except stuff I have weirdly osmosed from having friends who read them. Vastly more than I realized I had osmosed, actually, and that is kind of interesting right there.

And Audrey being back knowing all songs and musicians ever and Kyle knowing all space and movies stills and chemistry and computers ever and Jodi knowing all movie quotes and movie stars ever, well, we rocked and won not just a gift certificate but T-shirts! And pint glasses! And mysterious bicycle drinking accessories (it was sponsored by New Belgium) which is nice and all but I want Craven Street back, you need to give me more T-shirts, New Belgium, before I forgive you for the loss of what is / was an every single day street for me. However! Look upon our works of trivia you mighty and despair. We rule the universe of knowing strange and pointless facts. Hurrah!

This blog a day thing is tough. I have nothing whatsoever to write about: I’m tired as hell, I worked all day, I am right now having a glass of wine and playing minecraft and soon, oh blessedly soon, I’m going to feed the dogs and go to bed.

So I’m going to steal a story my son told me while I was driving him to work this evening. My son works in a gas station / convenience store in West Asheville. It is frankly kind of a skeezy one (as if there were unskeezy ones! Ha ha! It is to laugh! Well, actually there sorta are, but this is not one of those.) Besides the usual accoutrements of such establishments – brillo pads, baking soda, glass roses, cheap beer, long lighters, lottery tickets and everything else you might need for a weekend’s big ole crack binge – it has a couple of presumably basically illegal gambling machines which are, unsurprisingly, usually occupied by sad / skeezy people. As they were last night. It also has an alarm that sounds when the gas level in the tanks is getting low. Apparently it is a loud alarm. WAH! WAH! WAH!

My son was standing over by the poker machines watching these two guys playing poker when the alarm went off last night.
“What’s that” said one of the guys.”I – I don’t know!” said Miles, “I’ve never heard it before!” And he ran a few steps towards the front of the store then shouted “OH FUCK! It’s – the pressure is up! OH SHIT IT’S GONNA BLOW!”

And the two poker players in their haste to get off their stools and get the hell out of there lost their shit completely and started screaming and knocked over a display rack and scrambled towards the door. Which said son somehow foolishly failed to get on video but he described it vividly enough to me that I laughed hysterically all the way up Haywood Road.

I hope he does it again.

One of my roles with the Queen of Bohemia is that of MST3K host: I am Joel in a bungalow spaceship and it’s my job to crack wise about whatever we are watching on TV at the moment. Luckily, I am actually pretty good at this – it is apparently my one true talent besides spelling, pity it’s not monetizable in any way that I can figure – and since I basically haven’t watched TV for decades, there is plenty that is new and fresh and horrifying for me to comment on.

A lot of the time we watch nature shows. Nature shows have changed since Jacques Cousteau and his kin – “et now, ze cousine Francois weell deeescend into zee depfs. Zere he weell find ze eluzive zhelllifeesh. Eeet is a leetle too dark for zhe cameras but you can zhust make out Francois zhere, and zee tiger shark over zhere. . ” – or Mutual of Omaha – “My assistant Jim will now wrestle the leopard to the ground and put it in the capture sack while I sit 200 yards back in the land rover. Ouch! That must have hurt! Jim is too high risk for insurance, but. . ” – and they’re not even like David Attenborough any more – “The magnificence of this simple creature is equalled only by its magnificent appetite of grandeur. We will now observe as the cameraman has a small orgasm over an incredibly lengthy, sustained shot of this grasshopper’s eye.”

Instead, they are sort of dimwitted game shows, tons of frenetically edited footage with zippy cheap graphics and inserts of, like, Guy with Hat and Blonde Woman (they seem to have no other qualifications) talking back and forth about points. “Hey that grizzly gets 12 points for voracious appetite! Go bear!” Fuck that. Either I want their jobs – I too can wear a hat and talk about bears, you would be amazed – or I want them to shut up and play calm, elegant footage of animals who are ideally not doing anything in which anyone gets hurt at all. I get angst ridden when the animals are getting hurt and the fact that there are entire shows essentially based on “Toughest Animal Combat” (is that a show? It probably is. I try to block out the titles as much as possible.) makes me more than a little ill.

Every so often you’ll see those cute blog posts or articles: 17 Things I Learned From Working In Bookstores and they’re always life affirming and heartwarming and shit, like
#12 Nicholas Sparks really understands people! And they love him too!
#7 Finding a copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar made that baby so happy, I cried!
They are never things like,
#5 Some people take such enormous shits, you can’t get them to go down the toilet and you know, being in there with a plunger, thinking about your college degree and extensive resume can really start you assessing the hanging yourself possibilities of the break room ceiling.
#15 You know what goes great with ramen? Fortified wine from the dollar store, that’s what.
#3 This person needs a social worker and a hefty prescription, not a bookstore clerk. Dear god I don’t believe in, please transport me to another planet, preferably one where there is help for mentally ill people, immediately.
#9 That dude with the fingernails is back with the used erotica and creepy horror novels again.

The post below this one is making me uncomfortable: it’s maudlin, emo, self pitying, overly revelatory and not even all that well written. So I thought about taking it down but I decided not to on the grounds that a blog, or at least my blog, is more of a notebook than a finished work and it’s dishonest to edit your notebooks. But there is nothing to stop me from burying it in a sea of new posts! So I’m going to try to do one of those Post A Day for 30 Days things that used to be so popular back in the dim and distant Golden Age of Blogs of Yore. This probably means that there will be stuff on here that really belongs on Twitter – it’s like video killed the radio star except with Twitter killing the bloggers, which is actually fine by me, because I love Twitter and music videos, even the one with Kate Bush interpretively dancing about Heathcliff, more than blogs and radio – but that is okay. It will hide my dumb depression post! Fuck depression! It’s just a self indulgent way of saying I am lazy. And also, just fuck it. Nobody got TIME for that.

SO! We move on to our main chapter, in which Felicity attends the Gogol Bordello concert. Last week I was on my staycation, which had gotten itself truncated a bit from its original planned week, first by work shenanigans and then by a PTO (that’s paid time off; I am lucky to have it, I say as a loyal American while the socialist Eurotrash girl inside me screams furiously about worker’s rights) eating combo of bad cold and snow days. I was over the cold in a week but it left some kind of stomach thing behind it so when Monday rolled around and I was supposed to go see Gogol Bordello for the first time with my dear friend Jay whose favorite band they are, I wasn’t actually really feeling up to it. But I was not going to tell him that since he had kindly gotten me the ticket and besides, what was I going to do, stay home in my pajamas, eat saltines and ginger ale and play Minecraft instead of going to a show? I am old but I am not that goddamn old. Self, I said, get up out of that chair and get dressed. You aren’t actually barfing. Yet.

Getting dressed is just one of those fraught endeavours nowadays. Partly because I am old and partly because I am fat and partly because I am vain and partly because, jesus, I never go anywhere except work and the computer room and occasionally the DeSoto, so going elsewhere seems to require a costume change and that throws me off. I had never seen Gogol Bordello before and I wasn’t sure what it would be like although I figured raucous and energetic, since yes, I have in fact been to concerts before and even shows at the Orange Peel and even shows with that word punk in them, good heavens. But it had been a LONG time (about three or four years? cannot remember) and I was nervous for some reason so I ended up in a velvet skirt and boots and tights and a small hot pink faux cashmere cardigan that was my mother’s. And I pulled a black checked bag I had forgotten about out of the closet and grabbed my coat because it was cold outside and off I went feeling rather elegant, actually.

Which was dumb as fuck because I had forgotten that the first rule of Orange Peel is THROW BEER AT PEOPLE. It was completely packed, wall to wall, and they have moved the coat check downstairs at some point in the last few years I haven’t been there and I thought, well, I’ll just hold it. So I got a beer and wiggled my way to about the middle of the crowd and promptly poured my beer down my fetching and rather low cut for me shirt as somebody slammed into me from one side. Mmmm! Beer in the cleavage! Another person helpfully brought their own beer to pour on me a minute or two later instead of using mine and by the time the third person had poured about half a cup on my coat I was somewhat resigned. Also then the band started.

It was a great show. I am not actually a huge fan of the Orange Peel for a variety of reasons but mostly because a) I don’t really like crowds of people and b) I think the sound is often muddy – for all that it’s loud as fuck, it’s hard to hear. This was the case at the show on Monday but nobody cared: they just jumped up and down and yelled and that was excellent because the band IS excellent, muddy sound or no muddy sound. I would have jumped up and down too except I was holding my coat and my purse – clutching them, actually, and if I had had pearls I would have clutched them too, because as everybody danced and jumped and howled, the floor bounced up and down like a fucking trampoline. Which reminded me of the other reason I don’t like the Orange Peel, that bouncing, moving floor scares the HELL out of me. It pulled me right out of the music and got me immediately trying to figure out stress points and where the safest place to stand might be in the event of a catastrophic floor failure. Also I started wondering if my beer soaked coat might work as a magic parachute or perhaps an airbag. But! I eventually got over myself and into the spirit of the thing and even danced awkwardly and had a fantastic, if damp, time. Here is a terrible video I shot at the Gogol Bordello show! The sound was not actually THIS bad, that is the sound of my phone explaining that it is too old for video. But it will give you an idea of the bouncing.

It was, however, by far the most sober night I have ever spent smelling like that and I don’t know if my coat will ever recover. That’s okay: it was worth it. It was a good night for more than one reason, too: in a couple of weeks I’m going back to the Orange Peel to see Die Antwoord. YES! I love them! And I am taking my adults because they love them too! OK perhaps this is a little outre for family bonding but we are all excited! And clearly I needed the practice. Now I know to not bring a coat or a purse, not to wear anything that doesn’t react well to a beer bath and I have time to figure out where to stand when the floor starts bouncing as it no doubt will, oh god. And to renew my tranquilizer prescription.