It's Tricky

Man, this takes me back. Just re-watched the video for the first time in years and found myself grinning like a loon all the way through.

In 2006 The Knack filed a lawsuit for copyright infringement, claiming Run-DMC stole the riff from 'My Sharona.' Seriously. It took them that long to notice?

Eclipse

Christopher Hoffman put out a gospel album entitled 'The Road'. On it, he explores his faith and his relationship with Jesus Christ. There's just one problem, at least as where Evangelicals are concerned: He's gay as a picnic basket.

I love the idea of anybody who feels no need to thump their chest and proclaim how their brand of faith is The One True Message in order to make them feel superior in the here and now. Christopher simply details the road he's traveled, spiritually, and isn't out to convert anyone. But were his sexuality not enough to piss off the people who think they hold a copyright on the words of Jesus Christ, he also strongly identifies with the Wiccan faith. Myself, I'll quote from The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra: "I'm a scientist. I don't believe in anything." But Chris is a Christian Wiccan, or a Wiccan Christian, depending. I recently told him, "Hey, if you're going to be a person of faith, why settle for just one?"

After a years-long struggle, he and his partner, Jake, have finally adopted two kids (again, a major difference of opinion in that I think NOT breeding is the major perk of homosexuality) and are, finally a real family. He's ready to record again.

And he's asked me to produce. My first return to audio in years and I'm working on a fucking gospel album. Okay, granted, a queer, witchy gospel album from a guy with sleeve tats featuring tarot cards and Harry Potter characters, but still. What's next? I get a call from Alan Jackson?

If you click on Christopher's name at the beginning of this post you can hear samples from his last album. This is not at all the sort of thing I generally listen to, but because of our shared love of penises and Italian horror movies we ended up friends.

There's one song on the album, Eclipse, that has nothing to do with faith but rather his struggle with bi-polar disorder. It's sheer hell to suddenly find yourself miserable for no real reason. You know it's biochemical, but that does nothing to relieve the sheer physical and mental torture you're going through. Chris wrote a song comparing this to planetary motion and I thought the analogy was brilliant. Again, click on his name to hear a sample from it. Even though I'm not a fan of the arrangements on the album, there's no disputing the boy has pipes and can belt them out. Just for fun and just for him, I did a remix of this song:

Christopher Hoffman--Eclipse (Spookshow In Your Pants Prozac Remix)

So now he wants to do something true to his beliefs but sounding freaky and weird. The ancient Chinese had a curse: May you live in interesting times.

Second Guessing

This is how I learned about abortion:

I attended a private, Christian school and when I was in 7th grade our teacher passed out sealed manilia envelopes with the edict we were NOT to open them until further instructed. He carried on about how the less wholesome segment of society were planning to murder babies, detailing in very specific ways just how it was done, then let us open our packets containing color photos of teency dismembered arms and legs and crushed skulls swimming in a sea of gore. At that point we were dismissed for lunch.

Naturally, the cafeteria served spaghetti.

At thirteen I found this ludicrous, obvious propoganda. It didn't slow me down in the slightest when it came to my appetite; no more than when they served ravioli after making us watch 'Red Asphalt', the gory safe-driving movie. I like food. Just because I'd recently seen pictures of chopped up babies was not going to deter me from a zesty tomato sauce.

They had a point. The stuff in the photos were easily recognized body parts and putting the 'fetus' spin on things didn't detract from the fact that what was going on was no less brutal than putting a premie in a blender. It wasn't a zygote, or some other clinically detatched term for shoving the surgical equivalent of a weed-whacker up a woman's womb and chopping her kid into bits. Abortion is, absolutely, murder.

But so is sending teenage kids into another part of the wold to die in the name of patriotism. That is murder as well. And if you're going to see one as a-ok then you better see the other as kosher as well. Oh sure, trot out your blah-blah-blah "innocent" life schtick. Call me crazy, but a kid at nineteen is no more prepared to be dropped in another part of the world where people want to kill he or she than a crack-whore's baby being aborted instead of plopped out in a toilet bowl. You call war "neccessary" murder? That's what I call abortion in some cases. Okay, most cases, given that children in general are vile to be around.

At last, both sides of this highly volitale argument can come together in the shared hatred of a common enemy: me. 'Cause I think you're both nuts.

Gothpop

This is an old, throwaway Spookshow In Your Pants tune I did when I was living in a warehouse with bare insulation for walls and exposed electrical conduit hanging everywhere. The sound is much as the title implies. Click on it to have a listen.

Floating Fish

I had the weirdest kindergarten experience ever.

I started at age four, a year younger than most of my classmates. I guess it made sense; I could already read on my own at the time whereas the older students had yet to completely learn their ABCs. People saw this as a sign of genius. But people are idiots. I could do this one thing well and that was it. My oldest brother believes this happened because my mother started reading to me the day I came home from the hospital after being born and never let up. He might be right. I don't remember being taught anything; I just remember picking up books and somehow knowing what the arrangement of letters was supposed to mean. Mom read the same books over and over, I watched and followed along and through repetition got that certain funny shapes related to specific words and it all kind of sank in through osmosis. Somehow my four-year-old mind was able to break it down so that this combination of letters resulted in this sound, and that another, and somehow I learned to read. The more I read, the better spoken I became. In other words, as a toddler, I interviewed well. So I got to attend kindergarten a year early.

This was hardly a state-supported entity, but rather a self defined institution some woman ran in a garage-like structure in back of her house. It was West Virginia in the sixties, so this sort of shit could fly.

The kindergarten teacher had no idea I could read. I would spring that one on her later. Her primary concern was the fact that when it came to Art time, all I would do was scribble. Other kids were doing stick figures and block houses but I only seemed interested in grabbing a handful of crayons and running them across the page. One of the few sense memories I retain of the time is that I liked the way it looked. I remember how much fun I thought it was to see six different-colored lines streaking across the page at the same time. But no, the teacher wanted to see me draw Mommy and Daddy and Me, so when I kept scribbling she sent home a strongly-worded note, in the language of the time, voicing her suspicion that I might be retarded.

Hell, in the art world everyone's a critic.

But my Mom went to bat for me and essentially said, "Oh yeah? Why don't you give him a candy bar wrapper and ask him to read the ingredients?"

The next day the kindergarten teacher thrust a wrapper in my hands and asked me what it said.

"Sugar, Corn Syrup, Milk Chocolate (Sugar, Cocoa Butter Chocolate, Milk, Dextrose, Emulsifiers (Lecithin), Butter Fat, Salt, with Vanillin and Ethyl Vanillin, Artificial Flavorings), Sweetened Condensed Skim Milk (Sugar, Skim Milk)
CONTAINS LESS THAN .05% OF THE FOLLOWING: Partially Hydrogenated Blend of Vegetable Oils, (CONTAINS ONE OR MORE OF THE FOLLWING: Cottonseed, Peanut, Soybean), Soy Protein, Artificial and Natural Flavors, Maple Syrup, Delactosed Whey, Invertase, Tapioca, Flour, Salt, Citric Acid, Artificial Color (Blue #1, Red #3)"

She nearly fainted before I reached Milk Chocolate. But she revived enough to realize that I could be her kindergarten star and recreate the turn of events so that it was SHE who taught me how to read ahead of my time. What fucking wonderful advertising! A four-year-old attends Miss Hick's backyard babysitting and comes away a prodigy! Good luck backing that one up when Ma and Pa Toothless finds their kid still can't count to three.

Thing was, before she hit on the fact that my advanced reading skills could mean advertising gold, something really creepy went down. By total accident I opened the bathroom door and walked in on a female kindergarten classmate, being assisted by the student intern who was probably all of 17 or 18. But the woman who ran the kindergarten got wind of this and decided to go for an eye for an eye approach to punishment.

Here is where things get sketchy, fragmented and perhaps hidden under a few layers of denial. But this definitely happened: I was made to stand on top of a table and pull my pants down in full view of my kindergarten class, so that they could all see me in a vulnerable state, to atone for the unconscionable sin of opening an unlocked restroom door.

Was it just pulling down my pants and seeing me in my underwear, or was my four-year-old peen exposed before everyone? I don't know. I remember the ordeal, just not the details. And really, if you're a supposed "teacher" making a kid do this does it make a fucking difference?

It has taken years to piece one part of the puzzle with another. I did something shortly later, that perhaps began a lifetime of passive-agression. Now, I'm grown up enough to prefer outright aggression, calling things the way you see them, to this, but still: I'm very proud of my four-year-old, kindergarten self for having the balls to react instead of just sucking it up.

My kindergarten teacher had a fish tank full of what she called her "prize" fish.

I dumped half a can of Ajax into it and killed them all.

Ten years ago I set this experience to music as a Spookshow In Your Pants song. Click on the title if you want to listen.

A Hold Of Me

I put this up on FB and realized for once how honest I was being so I figured I'd repeat it here. This is what I said there:

"So tonight has been Boomtown Rats night here at Der Spookhaus. And I found this video from the 6th annual Dia De Los Muretos Celebtration exhibition; a zillion ways to paint skulls, attached to my personal theme song from 1984. Weird thing, listening to the lyrics tonight, I think it's still my personal theme song from 2010. Yeah, parts of me have grown and become much more human than then...but still...the words pretty much reflect how much of me there is I want to hide."

Over The Rhine And Through The Woods To Grandgansta's House We Go

I lived in Cincinnati and needed to get a job, pronto, before my boyfriend bludgeoned me in the head to death with a plastic thing he'd bought initially to shove up
his ass. I found employment in a blood plasma center in the middle of Over-The-Rhine, Cincinatti's well-publicised answer to the ghetto. I was a small, skinny white boy, and signing up for this was tantamount to saying that active-duty in Afghanistan gives me tittie hard-ons.

Because blood-plasma centers are not known for drawing the future standouts of the local board of education.
Becuause blood-plasma centers are not generally a gathering place for lively discussions of post-modern approaches to music and literature.
Because blood-plasma centers have yet to be considered a haven for the concept of free thought.

And because I was tiny and white.

This was a slight few years before the Cincinnati riots of 2001 broke out, and although the reslults were less than honorable, not that they were without
good reason. Some fucking cop shot a kid just because he had 14 outstanding warrants, not getting that, duh, all of them were non-violent. But this was simply
the straw that broke the camel's black. This kind of shit had been happening for years and the people who lived in the neighborhood had gotten sicker and sicker
and sicker of this shit until one day it fucking broke and Helter Skelter came raining down. The mood was there, in '87, when I arrived, and years of white
cops getting away with killing black kids for no real reason was uppermost in the minds of the community. It hadn't reached the point of crazy looting and kicking
in windows and screaming "Fuck this!" But it was getting closer and closer. White motherfuckers were coming into a historically black neighborhood and killing people, including children. This is when I landed my job in the middle of Over-The Rhine as an intake clerk.

"Hi," I said to the people gathered in the lobby, "I'm new here!" I waved cheerily like a faggy white boy. Not the best plan.

My co-workers were mostly black, educated and gave me the low-down. "You gotta prove yourself as something different than the cops. This neighborhood can
be cool with white people as long as they distance themselves from the people who are killing their kids."

Sadly, 'Fuck tha Police' wouldn't come out for another few years, so I had nothing to go on. I would have thought that as a freaky punkazoid, sporting
hair down to my shoulders on one side, buzzed off on the other and sporting eyeliner; while wearing a white lab coat to denote me as an employee of
the place that would give them cash money for the malt-liqour infused stuff from out of their veins, would have distanced me enough from the five-oh.

But no. You have to prove yourself in a place like this. Appearances count for nothing. Much as it should in the real world.

This was about the time I took up smoking. I did it so I could learn some really cool magic tricks involving cigarettes. Not that if anyone knew this it would boost my street cred. This was back in the day whereyou could smoke pretty much anywhere, and I thought perhaps my newfound fondness for coffin nails would make me seem just a little cooler and therefore less like an opressor. Unfortunately, my job consisted of having to stab anyone who came through the line in the finger with a pointy thing that drew enough blood to smear on a little card for processing. If someone does this to you, most likely you are not going to consider them on your side, even if you get a teeny-tiny check at the end of the maze.

But I lit up, just to show the inner toughness of the guy wearing Maybelline. But I'd just started and I was no good at it so right after I stabbed a
local gang leader in the finger I coughed loud, hacking sobs and blew most of the contents of my nose on his specifically-colored shirt.

You would think of course that I'd be instantly dead but instead the hoodlum showed a remarkable instinct for subtle sarcasm (my favorite kind) and said,
"Been smoking long?"

I thought this was hilarious, but the woman working alongside me wanted me to live to see another day. "He been smoking forever!" she shouted,
"Don't you know asthma when you see it?"


This is what saved my life. Not her version of cunning strategy but the fact that me and the guy who now had my phlegm across his shirt looked at one another and cracked up together. We both thought it was the stupidest thing to say ever, as if, "Oh yeah, that's gonna work" and shared a moment. And THAT is what turned the tables and made my being there no longer an onslaught of fear.

He spread the word that I was ok. If that woman hadn't said that completly dumb thing it could have been oh so horrible. But because we laughed together, my life in the plasma center got a whole lot better by the very next day. The cold crowd of stare-you-down thugs became warm, personable and funny. They would insult me and I would insult them back and we'd laugh together. I loved it. Me, the whitest man
in America, connecting with the most dangerous part of town. I don't know this for a fact, but I'd like to think that some of them saw the beauty in the very same thing.

Belief

The Odd Gathering is much as the name implies. It's a collection of really peculiar magicians who get together at a hotel in California and just get crazy. I was supposed to be there this year but I dicked myself out of vacation time so I'm stuck here in Cowtown. But I get to appear virtually, so here's my online turn for those nutjobs.

Amazing Jesus

I'm very ill. I've got stuff coming out of both ends (as opposed to the usual fantasy of stuff of going into both ends.) But honeypot Christian Cagigal clued me into this and it absolutely made my day.

Kicker

This has been transfered from hard drive to hard drive for decades. Click on the title to watch or download it. It doesn't take up much space and will provide years of entertainment. Go on, you know you want to.

Fall On Yer Knees

I froze all day today. It was unseasonably cold. So screw it, let's have Christmas in April.

This is the Spookshow In Your Pants Christmas album; composed, performed and recorded Christmas week of 2000 in a crazy flurry of creativity. Warm Feelings was also composed and performed that week but it didn't quite fit with the Christmas theme aside from the "Have you been a good little boy" sample so I left it out.

It was kind of a nice time. I had a boyfriend who was probably the most natural, normal relationship I've had. He was a Christmas nut, and I have always hated that time of year. No, more than hated; it sends me into the worst place I can imagine and I don't know exactly why. Somehow my worst memories come to the surface that time of year. But Mark was crazy about Santa and trees and lights and for that very reason we never should have got together. We met on Thanksgiving week. For whatever reason, my personality charmed him; usually it tends to go in the opposite direction. But this is the Puddlewinks formula: I go years without a date and when I land someone they are way beyond, physically, for which I should qualify. He looked like a model and I looked like a toad wearing spats. Frankly, I'd rather settle for more mediocre looks and a semblance of regularity, but apparently it's not in the cards.

But Mark's Christmas glee was, at first, tough to endure. I loved looking at him; I loved talking to him. But goddamn, his giddiness over the fact he had a tree in his house and stockings stuck all over the place was more than I could bear. Plus there was that whole actor thing.

I'd said, for years, that I would never, ever date anyone who was a Psychologist or an actor. Because one wants to change your personality and the other changes theirs for a living. And Mark absolutely did this: around his Theatre friends he was insufferable but when it was just he and I felt like I was falling in love. This dual-play personality would have been a turnoff were it not for the fact that, somehow, he got me to understand Christmas.

"Look," he said, "It doesn't have to be about religion or family or crass, crazy commercialism. Let's just drive around. Let's just drive around and look at the houses, decked out in pretty lights and decorations, and pretend Earth looked like that all of the time instead of just one month a year."

So we drove around and held hands and yeah, he was right. The world looked a lot more fun to be around. The ice block around my heart this time of year melted just a tiny bit. Not enough to make me seem entirely human to friends and family, but still, for what it was, it worked a little. And compared to my screaming-meemie approach to Christmas for many years beforehand, it was a gulf as wide as the Grand Canyon.

He forced me to watch the Bing Crosby/Rosemary Clooney movie 'White Christmas' with him; something I would have never done on my own with a gun to my head. But since it was him I initially endured it. And ended up loving it thanks to our shared commentary; simultaneously making fun of it and reveling in the camp factor. And realizing, to my shocked horror, that it was a pretty fun movie just on its own terms. What the hell was I becoming?

Mark left Ohio to visit relatives across the country Xmas week. I went crazy with holiday cheer and catapulted into one of my most creative bursts ever: I created an entire mini-album of Christmas-themed songs to give him upon his return. Not entirely because he had turned me into a manger-frenzied icon of holiday cheer but because he had managed to let just a tiny bit of light shine in when it came to feeling what normal people do. Plus I hoped it would make him happy. 'White Christmas' turned out to be a major influence, but thank God there was enough of me left to make it weird.

I think it did. Make him happy, I mean.

This was not the great love of my life; we broke up a few weeks after Valentine's Day. He was decent about it and brought along a pipe and a bag of pot.

"Oh, lovely parting gifts," I said.

But still, his teaching me how to reinvent horrible times of the year into your own, more positive, terms was one of the kindest things anyone has ever done for me. I just didn't know you could do it that way.

So you and I will reinvent Christmas as something that can happen on a cold day in April and listen to the Spookshow In Your Pants Christmas Album 'Fall On Your Knees'.

I will not go into details but it turned out to be a mighty prophetic title.

Click on the titles below to hear the songs in order:

1) Dick the Halls

2) Ave Bill Cosby

3) White (Trash) Christmas

4) Adeste Fidelis

5) Snow

6) The Best Things Happen While We're Dancing

Smells Like Teen Spirit

That's it. I've officially run out of ideas.

Mugged

My father saw the world as a scary place. No matter what activity in which I was about to engage, if it took place outside the safety of our home, he would warn me about mysterious strangers who would “knock me in the head” and take my wallet. That I was sixteen, worked in a Bonanza Sirloin Pit and that the contents of my wallet usually amounted to thirty-five bucks didn’t enter the equation. The head-knocking and wallet-stealing was a given; the sure result of one daring to tread the dangerous, gangsta-ridden streets of Huntington, West Virginia.

I grew up and moved to Columbus, Ohio—to his mind the equivalent of settling down in Chicago’s Cabrini Green. Decades have passed where I’ve had to reassure him that I’ve yet to be knocked in the head, although to him the fact I like Chinese food is proof positive I’ve gone all uppity with my high-falutin’ big city ways. But still he thinks I’m in constant danger.

So I never told him about the time I got mugged. Sort of.

“Hey man, you got any papers?”

This is code for a stranger that wants to sell you some pot. Thing is, no stranger will ever do you this favor; it is always, every time, a scam. It works because people wanting weed, despite having been burned a thousand times before, always think that this time will be the one where an entrepreneurial stranger wants to furnish the world with ganja out of the goodness of his heart.

I forgot everything I ever knew and followed the stranger behind a building to make the deal.

“I gots to see the money first.”

I fished a twenty out of my pocket, no doubt preparing to buy the smallest amount of da chronic available on the street possible.

“Now let’s see the weed, “ I said.

Instead of producing said product, the man lunged for the bill. I yanked it away and he was not happy about it.

“Motherfucker, give me that money!”

“For what? Your good looks? You gotta show me what you’re selling before you get the money.”

Not a wise choice of words, as my new friend was apparently not used to being called on his line of crap and found it profoundly distasteful that I would suggest such a thing. He grabbed at me, knocked me to the pavement and the two of us rolled, wrestling, back into public view on the corner of 5th and (appropriately enough,) High Street.

I did a magic trick where I pretended to place the bill in my left hand but actually made it disappear. I kept my hand closed, making my attacker think it was still in there so that he wrestled me for a bit, got the upper hand, then pried my fingers open one by one to find nothing there.

“Tah-Dahhh!” I shouted.

He was not impressed.

I managed to break free and took off running. But the tables were turned and it was suddenly he who had the upper hand.

Because he had a bicycle.

I ran down the street and suddenly he was upon me, pedaling furiously and ringing his bell. Ching ching! Ching ching! The sound of impending gangsta beat-down.

He overtook me. He leapt off his Crips-mobile and once again pulled me to the ground. I saw some nerdy yahoo talking on his cell phone.

“Call 911,” I begged. “A crazy man on a bicycle is trying to hurt me.”

“Ew. Er.Uh. I don't think I want to get involved,” the man said. Reason 774 why Al Queda will win.

I broke the crazy man’s grip and sprinted half a block to the Family Dollar store. But before making it inside, my mugger caught up with me and started applying strategically-applied blows to my face.

“Call 911!” I screamed to the man trying to leave the store.

“He’s got my weed! He’s got my weed!” my attacker screamed, a role-reversal tactic that worked like a charm.

“Uh, I don’t want to get into this,” said the man leaving the Family Dollar.
“Call 911!” I yelled to no avail.

I lunged for the doorway but unfortunately my bicycle mugger had a firm grip on my favorite shirt. The beautiful, pale yellow paisley pattern ripped beneath his strong, ebony hands.

“Call 911!” I shouted as I burst into the store, my nipple peeking out from the sizeable rip in my shirt.

They did.

Although I had been mugged, albeit by a guy on a bicycle, the cops finally showed up. I told them the story I just told you, cleverly omitting the trying to buy some pot part. It probably didn’t help that I was together enough to shop for two cans of Family Dollar brand ravioli before they arrived.

"Yeah, we'll check it out," the police said, making it clear through body language that they damn sure wouldn't.

Someone I knew, Connie, showed up shortly after and saw me standing there in my ripped-to-shreds shirt, holding some ravioli.


“Uh, hi,” she said.

“I just got mugged,” I said, leaving out the part that it was a guy on a bicycle. Or the other stuff.

She took me home. Leave it to a lesbian to be my knight in shining armor.

Scioto Shoe Hut

Another commercial from the now-defunct-but-soon-to-be-resurrected Spookshow In Your Pants Radio Hour. Sam did the free-form ranting and Chris was kind enough to allow me to use the cheesy background music from his Pagan-Queer-Tattooed-Born-Again gospel album. (Yes, such things exist; just because your pastor has a doctorate from divinity school doesn't make him an expert on what it means to be a Christian. Unless of course it helps you feel better about yourself and morally superior to others.) Sam did a great job here, at least to me; I snicker every time I hear it.

Click on the title if you want to snicker, too.

Kendra Pays Her Respects

My friend Kendra just returned from a trip home to attend a funeral. While that was bad, the way things turned out was even worse.

I have my own story along those lines but for now I think I'll tell hers instead.

Her uncle died. She was close and it was a sad thing. She drove from Ohio to Tennessee, meeting up with her mother and sisters. All of them were running late, and the service was an hour away. They were cutting it close. Kendra's mom got behind the wheel.

And promptly ran over the family dog.

Kendra and her sisters realized what happened but the mother did not. "You just ran over the dog!" they screamed.

"No, I didn't."

"Yes! You did!"

The dog was shrieking and it's entire lower half was paralyzed. Eventually the mother realized what her daughters were telling her was entirely true. Decisions, decisions: deal with the dog or show up to her bother's funeral on time?

Cell phones were clicked and one of the sibling's boyfriend was dispatched to leave work and arrive to deal with the half-crushed pet.

Inside the car, Kendra, her mother and the sisters were freaking right out. "Didn't you just tell the dog, this morning," one of the daughters said, "that if it didn't stop barking you were going to kill its sorry ass?"

The mother convulsed in a new fit of sobbing; that was exactly what had went down.

Kendra was unable to deal, and the fact that everyone else in the car were fans of rap pushed her over the edge. "WILL YOU TURN THE RADIO DOWN?" she screamed, a half-dead dog and a fully-dead uncle and a career-dead Asher being too much for her to bear. One of her sisters leaned forward for the volume knob and, unfortunately, in the process, her big-boned buttocks knocked over a coffee cup, spilling it on another sister, who had to exit the car, step over the howling, half-crushed dog and return to the house so she could scrub her dress with Life Buoy and blow it clean with a hair dryer.

So Kendra's family had kind of a late start.

They arrived at the funeral home one minute before the service. They were all sobbing; the majority of the guests thinking, 'Oh they must have been so close to the dear departed' insead of "Whoopsie, we just ran over the dog." Kendra, her mother, and her sisters (particularly the one who was trying to hide the coffee blotch on her dress) settled in and tried their best to think about the uncle. But the sounds of a yelping mutt that's spine had been ground into powder took center stage.

The boyfriend called from the vet. Kendra's mother agreed, via cell phone, it would be best if the dog be put down.

"I know," the pastor said, "the death of your beloved family member upsets you..." while Kendra's mother spat out hacking sobs as she tucked her phone into her purse, knowing what she'd done.

Pat at work burst into a sob-fest on hearing this tale, convinced completely the story was all about her.

And I thought, of course, "Shit! Blog content!"

Iam Siam--Talk To Me

I dunno if these guys ever had a real album. I suppose I could do a google or Wikipedia search but I'm the laziest mofo to ever slither across the planet and its so much easier to post this and suggest you do the work yourself. I did have the vinyl LP single and had a lot of fun listening to it. It's sort of a tribal meets 80's synthpop thing and the video is fun to look at. So here ya go:

Corpse At The Mall

My friend Richard was into special effects-makeup (blood and gore, as opposed to making yourself pretty, like some of my other friends) and needed a guinea pig. I was all to happy to comply. He was a perfectionist, so it took hours. When finished, yep, I looked like a rotting corpse that had crawled out of the grave. Thing is, it wasn't Halloween. It was just the sort of thing he and I liked to do on a summer afternoon rather than, you know, passing ball.

It was such a terrific effect I thought it would be a shame to waste it on solely ourselves. I suggested we drive to the local mall and let me stumble around and see what people thought. Not the best of plans. We lived in West Virginia, not exactly a haven of zombie fans. Or people particularly interested in being confronted with something different.

We pulled up in the parking lot, near where the multiplex exited. A movie let out and people started streaming from the door. I got out of the car and shambled near them in my rotted corpse makeup. "Excuse me," I said, "Can you tell me how to get to Spring Hill Cemetary?"

One of my favorite, and ongoing, social experiments is to force people to come face to face with something outside their sheltered little world-view. What is fascinating, to me, is how often this sparks, of all things, sheer anger. I'm forced to confront things every day I simply cannot fathom, but the most heated response I usually offer is a smartass joke. But apparently I am not most people. A vast majority, I've found through perpetrating such stunts for most of my life, think that experiencing something they can't understand is immediate cause to feel threatened and offer bodily harm as a solution.

This is exactly what happened mere seconds after appearing in public in July made up as the living dead.

Some redneck and his girlfriend, no doubt watching Stroker Ace for the fifth or sixth time, caught sight of me. Mr. Man clearly had to protect his woman from watching a teenager bathed in latex and the fight-or-flight mechanism kicked in. He chose Fight.

"Buddy," he shouted at me like I was anything but, "You need to take off that creepy-looking suit and get your ass the hell out of this parking lot." He swiftly advanced his pace, heading straight for me.

"Richard? Richard!" I hissed through clenched teeth, "Unlock the car!"

He didn't hear. The angry man in the wife-beater ran after me.

"Richard!" I shrieked like a girl scout, "We've got trouble!"

Richard is not one for moving at a high rate of speed. He opened the driver's side door, then casually unlocked the passenger side. I jumped in an re-locked the door, smearing makeup on the window in the process.

Mr. Man and his 70's porn-star mustache hammered on the window.

"This is why we need to get out of here!"

"Oh," Richard said.

We took off, with seriously offended redneck man chasing the car like a mutt hunting dog.

And there ya go. Some twisted kid shows up in zombie paint and someone's brain misfires in a way that reads 'This does not compute' and a serious beat-down is the only possible way to handle the situation. What scares the living shit out of me is that this is how MOST people deal with such a scenario.

Some years later I bought a bunch of tubs of 'I Can't Believe It's Not Butter' and stood on a busy downtown corner with a shopping bag full of them. As each person passed, I said, "Would you like some margarine? You don't have to rub it on you right now..."

Not one person took one. And many people were hostile and threatened to punch me. (What made this experiment even more fascinating was that when I pointed to a non-existent, "hidden" camera people would smile and laugh and utterly change their personality in a heartbeat.) People clearly have to have a safety zone of the familiar. But potential stardom, no matter how half-baked, can cause them to throw that notion right out the window. Whatta world.

On the way home from my near-thrashing at the mall, Richard and I passed a car full of girls on the highway. They caught sight of me in my corpse makeup.

They mooned us.

Very Empty Spaces

Spookshow In Your Pants is not exactly known for keeping up with the times. The only cover songs so far has been Debbie Reynolds' Tammy, the James Bond Theme and In The Hall of the Mountain King. Now there's this, a funky slap-bass kind of noodling that unexpectedly morphs into Pink Floyd's (although, I suppose, legally, now Roger Waters') 'Empty Spaces' from The Wall. But since it came out in 1979 I guess we're getting closer to what's current. At this rate a Lady Gaga cover should appear in about thirty years or so.

As usual, click the title if you wanna listen.

Transcendental

I hate and fear the dentist. This, plus chain smoking as though nicotine were oxygen, has resulted in a smile that is sepia-toned like a turn-of-the-century tinotype. I think this mindset came about early on. I rode my bicycle to the friendly neighborhood dentist for a routine check-up.

Understand, this was in West Virginia so what constituted state-of-the-art in oral health was pretty much the nineteen-fiftes for everyone else. The dreaded drill was operated by a manual foot pump; the dentist's ability to stomp up and down
at a high rate of speed determining the level of pain the patient might endure. But Dr. Barber was elderly and his reflexes weren't quite as quick as one would have hoped.

He leaned in and I couldn't see his eyes, splotches covering his coke-bottle glasses; no doubt specks of pyorhhea from former patients that had spattered onto his eyewear during one of his foot-stomping frenzies.

"It's going to have to come out," he said, probing at a tooth from which I'd never felt any pain.

Whmmmpf? I asked, all his fingers inside of my mouth.

"Shhh!" he hissed. "Now rinse and spit."

He went to a corner and unwrapped a tray of sterilized instruments that looked like H.R. Geiger had run amok in a hardware store.

"Look, I don't think I..."

"Don't worry, this will make you feel better," he said brandishing a syringe with a needle gauge comparable to indoor plumbing. He stuck it into my gum and halfway up my skull. I did not feel better in the slightest, although ten minutes later my entire face was numb and I talked like a woman with Cerebral Palsy.

He stuck a crescent wrench into my mouth and, planting one foot firmly on my cheek, twisted and pulled until a tooth was plucked from my head. "There we go!" he said, spritzing my mouth with Lavoris cinnamon mouthwash to compensate for the loss of part of my anatomy. Wisely, he followed up with some heavy-duty pain relievers, then sent me on my way in such a condition to ride my bike back home.

"I got a tooth pulled," I informed my mother.

"Nonesense," she said, as facts rarely interfered with her world view.

"No, look," I said, pulling back a corner of my mouth to display a hollow space now packed with gauze.

She was on the phone in a heartbeat. "Can you tell me," she asked the dental receptionist, "why I wasn't called about this? You're going to remove one of my son's teeth and didn't think I might want to know ahead of time?"

"Well, it's policy..." the phone-answerer started, but Mom gave them an earful of shouting complete with bible verses that would argue her point.

I thought it was great. Until the pain pills wore off and I spent the day crying in agony like Chris Crocker in the face of people disrespecting Brittney. I wanted to slam my head against the floor until I became unconscious. This was my first brush with the dark side of dentistry and I knew right then I didn't want to experience any more.

But I was forced to go. When I was eighteen, my dentist informed me that I had wisdom teeth buried in my jaw that were about to pose a problem. I needed to have them cut out.

"You'll need an oral surgeon. I generally recommend two. One is sort of a dry fish, not much in the way of personality. The other is a joker, a funny guy. He's got personality in spades."

The subtext was made instantly clear. I had a chance at having my face split open by a comedy oral surgeon. It wouldn't play in Vegas but in Huntington, West Virginia a man had found his niche. "Sign me up," I said.

Confusing funny with what the situation actually calls for has been the hallmark of my life.

I forget his actual name, but for the sake of the story from here on out we're going to call him Dr. Gallagher. He was, pretty much, like what would happen if you made an appointment to go under anaesthesia and Hunter S. Thompson showed up. He came to the waiting room, called my name, then dragged me back to the room where the procedure would take place, talking a blue streak NO ONE wants to hear:

"Yeah, we're gonna get those goddamn wisdom teeth right the fuck outta there before they do some damage. Shit, just last week a woman tried to take me to court--claimed I molested her while she was under. Shit, fuck, I wouldn't have touched her with someone else's dick."

This was back in 1981 where, yeah, someone with a doctorate could talk like this and not get sued. Not that it was the slightest bit reassuring.

"Okay, my faggot of an anesthesiologist is going to shoot you up with some joy juice." Given that they'd already given me a Valium, I couldn't help but smile. If only, I thought. "Count out loud backwards from five to one. Five, four, three..."

Everything went black.

I woke up, dizzy, and had to be led with two people in scrubs supporting me back to the oral surgeon's equivalent of a recovery room: a couple of folding chairs. My mouth was stuffed with so much cotton I felt like a cat hacking hairballs.

My parents drove me home. When you have your wisdom teeth removed they slice open your gums, dig into your jaw, cut loose the renegade teeth and sew you back up again. Only this is not a cross stitch pattern where exacting detail of a red-breasted robin wearing a sombrero scores points for being photo-realistic as possible; at the oral surgeon's they just want to stich you up as quickly as they can. There are loose gaps and you bleed from them. The blood trickles down your throat and, unlike in the Twilight novels, your stomach is not wild about this addition to the party.

Mom, Dad and I were watching TV and the pain medication had worn off. I was hurting. In addition to the pain I'd swallowed so much blood my stomach could stand it no longer. BLAAARRRRGHHH! I screamed, puking dried blood clots all over the coffee table.

My dad took this as supreme insolence, directed specifically at him, as though I'd been planning this for days to ruin his would-be-memorable experience of watching Rhoda.

"What do you think you're doing?" he yelled, leaping from his easy chair and slapping me upside the head. "What is wrong with you? What are you, a queer?"

I thought, but did not say, that queers are generally noted for their lack of gag reflexes.

He hit me a few more times, then pulled off his shirt and threw it on the blood and vomit covered coffee table. "Clean it up!" he shouted, exposing his manly pecs.

Yeah, I don't much like dentists.

The act of vomiting caused a few of the stitches to rip loose, so that I swallowed even more blood. This caused my neck and face to turn a ghastly shade of green, which no doubt caused my father to think I was, through the act of sheer will, turning myself into The Spotmaker. I wised up and forced myself to vomit out the blood chunks in private; getting it out of my system before family TV time. But the damage had caused my face to bloat into one of those things you see on Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

I returned to Dr. Gallagher's office to get what remained of my stitches removed, not that I hadn't already swallowed and puked the bulk of them. He came into the waiting room, took a look at my green and swollen face and was off on another comedy bit:

"Somebody sure beat the shit out of you! What, you don't know how to fight? Come on back here, Greenie!"

I followed him back to where the procedure was supposed to go down, Dr. Gallagher ranting every bit of the way. "Yeah, that's just what the fuck happens when you get your wisdom teeth taken out. Some ugly broad tried to sue me, claiming once
she was under I blacked both her eyes and bashed in her cheeks. I wouldn't let her suck my dick if either one of us were roaring drunk. Hey, want some novacaine before I do this?

"No, I'm fine," I said.

Jump cut ten years later and I go to a dentist's office in Cincinnati. Apparently they were not happy with the way I was flossing, so insisted I watch a video about how to floss your teeth. But they trotted me back out into the lobby, stuck the VHS into the player located there, and an entire room full of strangers got to shame me, mentally, as the guy who doesn't know how to floss.

Those porcelain fuckers can rot, break, and drop one by one out of my head before I ever see a dentist again.

10 Jokes That Failed Miserably

I toss off zingers and one-liners as often as a guy with Tourette's will shout "Mohammed pees Brine Shrimp!" in line at the bank. Thing is, like anyone trying to be funny, some of them work and some of them don't. But some attempts at humor
transcend bombing and move straight into comedy hell. It's more than not getting a laugh; it's having everyone present hate you simultaneously while the unrelenting silence is like a potato peeler thrust through a kidney.

The following are true-life examples of smartassery gone horribly awry.

1)I'm in 10th grade, and the private, Christian school I'm attending is having some sort of outdoor activity. I just happen to find a perfect circle of barbed wire lying on the ground. "Hey coach!" I shout, "The new Christian Academy baseball caps
are in!" It did not get a single laugh. It did get me harsh, cold stares and a trip to the principal's office.

2) Most of my family is extremely religious. One year I go home for Christmas and find my mother has baked a birthday cake for Jesus, candles and all.

"I messed it up, though," she said. "It was supposed to say 'Happy Birthday, Jesus" but I made a mistake and wrote 'Merry Christmas, Jesus'"

"Oh well," I said, "at least you didn't write 'Happy Easter, Jesus'"


3) A woman I worked with was pregnant. I came in one day and was told by another co-worker, solemnly, that she'd lost the baby.

"Did they look underneath the couch cushions?" I asked.


4) A woman brought into the workplace some kind of country-down-home-charm craft piece of shit that looked like a small child standing in the corner. Because nothing screams family values like a child being punished. From the front it was nothing, but wedged into a corner for a second you might mistake it for a real child. She was trying to sell them. I took one of the things, wrapped an orange industrial extension cord around it's neck and hung it from the drop ceiling in her office with a sign around its neck reading 'Depression Kills.' To me, merry office hijinx. To the powers that be: Grounds for formal disciplinary action.

The write-up I had to sign read like this: "Mr. Puddelwinks did knowingly and without remorse placed an effigy of a small child in a noose in a co-worker's office, with a sign around it's neck alledging that depression brought it to this untimely end. The lifeless body of the child, swaying in the workplace, is highly inappropriate."

"Who wrote this?" I asked upon reading it, "Stephen King?"

"Well I couldn't just say it was a doll," said the Program Director, who I won't name outright but his initials are Paul Spencer, "otherwise people might think it was, you know, a Barbie or something."

"You mean a doll?" I asked.

"Exactly."

"Like what you might call what it was I actually hung as opposed to a real person?"

"Look. What if Marilyn had seen that? Three of her kids have been killed."

"Yes. Owing to sickle-cell anemia and gang warfare. I doubt they were dressed in overalls, a straw hat and polyester blends depicting sheep jumping over a fence."

"The point is that the doll looked like a child."

"Only from behind," I said. "Unless you're concerned Father Emke might have seen it."

"Are you going to sign this are are we going to fire you?"

I signed it.

5) I had moved from a secluded life in a small town to the sprawling, overwhelming metropolis that is Columbus, Ohio. On a friend's advice I started hanging out in the OSU Gay Alliance office (some years before the allegedly downtrodden masses realized renaming such organizations 'Gay-Straight' Alliances could multiply their numbers tenfold.) I watched a militant lesbian painting a sign and it was the first time I'd ever seen the particular spelling, 'Womyn'.

"Why are you spelling it that way?" I asked, honestly puzzled.

"Because this shows that we are seperate from men; completely different in every respect."

"Then why do you get so pissy when we call you cunts?"

6) My mother, after a few years of acting erratic, had finally been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. My extended family and I were gathered together and I thought I'd lighten the mood with a little joke. My friend Paul tells me that every story I've ever told him starting with this concept has ended in disaster.

"So this guy goes to the doctor," I said. "And the doctor says, I have bad news for you. You have both cancer and Alzheimer's..."

At this point my mother cracked up like it was the funniest thing in the world and that in itself was the punch line. I don't think it was the disease. Since childhood, she never understood actual riddles and would supply her own answer instead of waiting for the zinger. She knew she was always right about everything, so a need for further information never entered the picture. "Why did the chicken cross the road?" the six-year-old me would ask. "It wanted some cracked corn" she would reply, then leave the room, having satisfied herself with the answer.

So, to me, her cackling at the set-up was no big surprise. At the same time, handing her a fork and some food could be parlayed into an evening's entertainment. But it was a good joke and I was determined to finish.

"You have both cancer and Alzheimer's, the doctor says," I repeated, trying to maintain the pace.

"And the guy says, well, at least I don't have cancer!"

Not even a smile. From anyone. Except of course, from Mother.

7) My friend Glen had been so ravaged by HIV that he had to use a cane. Even so, he wanted things to be like they used to be and go out and about like we used to. A trip to a favorite restaurant found him wheezing and hobbling like an old man of ninety. I held the door open for him.

"AIDS before beauty," I said.

His boyfriend shot me a look making it clear he'd like to punch his fist through my windpipe.

8) When I was eight or nine, I took swimming lessons at the YMCA. After class I would explore the building and found the very spooky basement where the furnace engines blazed, giving off an eerie light and making dancing shadows. It was so
creepy, I had to get one of my swimming lesson classmates to come down there with me and see it. I snuck up behind him and suddely jabbed him in the sides. He let out a yelp and jumped sideways, crashing through a stack of plate glass leaned against the wall and slashing him to ribbons. They carted him away in an ambulance before my parents came to pick me up.

9) I told my mother I was gay. She told me she would have rather I'd been born dead. I checked up on this a few years later, just to see if it was something she said in anger. Nope, the verdict still held. Then she said, " I KNEW you've been stealing my panty hose!" a nutjob accusation coming way out of left field.

"That's transvestism, not homosexuality," I said. "Get your perversions straight." I thought it was a funny line but she stopped eating, most likely trying to guilt me into being someone else, and lost so much weight she became borderline anorexic.

10) I put a razor blade against my wrist and said, "Well, at least I didn't die in vein!" Then I realized there was no one around to hear it since I've alienated everyone I've ever cared about. I dropped the blade in the sink and went on in to
work.

"I never had the nerve to make the final cut"--Roger Waters