diary

Did you have to?

The Space CrocsMy office is pretty basic. Your typical cube farm with a few offices around the edges. For my own personal office, they knocked down some walls and joined a few of the smaller ones together so I have about 5000 square feet of space. Pool table, arcades, wet bar – just the essentials, you know. I’m pretty important here though. Anyway, it’s not like a corporate environment. We’re all professionals, but none of us is corporate – if you know what I mean. Shorts, crocs, t-shirts, women leave their bras in the car, the usual. It’s a fun environment to work in.

Anyway, even though it’s relaxed and comfortable and pleasant, it’s not conducive to concentration in a lot of ways. And it’s also not very private. For instance, when you enter the bathroom, you get the feeling the people in the next room can hear everything that’s going on in here. And they can. I can hear everything that goes on in the women’s restroom. So yeah, when Penny Nichols, the Hottest Girl in the Office, walked by me on our way to the restrooms this morning, she waved and said, “Hi Dr. Space!” and I smiled and said, “Wuddup, Penny,” and I went in to the restroom thinking all was dandy. Until I heard her stall door close. I was like, “Oh no. No. Please no.” And then that bowl breaker she ripped just about broke my heart. The echo was loud and forceful. I mean, I guess I should have known that since she’s so hot she probably shits with some amount of authority. But wow. I could hear every sonic detail of her encounter with the porcelain. And boy let me tell you, she laid a slab cracker in there. Son of a bitch. :gonk:

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Copperwound Chronicles Vol. 3

Here in the last week, my band has spent fifteen hours in the studio, recording cuts from our second album. We’re really knocking them out, too. We’ve recorded three complete tracks for the album in that relatively short amount of time. We also recorded a fourth song, which won’t be on the album. It’s a promotional thing for an event planning company. So technically, we’ve recorded four complete songs in fifteen hours. But let me tell you a little bit about what goes on in the studio.

People all the time ask if they can come hang out with us while we’re recording. Somewhere remote in their minds, I think people associate music studios with cocaine and strippers. It’s a helluva good time, all of us hanging out, snorting off their bellies and popping champagne into the air, confetti everywhere, a big wild orgy. It’s off the hook! But yeah, no, yeah, it’s really not like that. (more…)

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I just joined the Darwin Awards.

We used to do crazy shit when we were adolescents. Seriously. My mother used to shout at me for jumping off the roof into the pool. Man, if she had seen some of the really crazy shit I was doing, she would have begged me to keep jumping. My girlfriend pulled up beside us on the highway one night, honking and flashing her lights. It was dark, there was no one else on the highway, but my pickup was very recognizable. The graffiti-style paint job was distinct. So she pulled up and rolled down her passenger window, waving at me and shouting something incoherent. Well, I’ll just get my buddy to take over driving!

So my buddy slides behind the wheel and I hop over to the passenger side, crawl out my window and into the bed of the truck (while we’re still moving). Then I did the whole acrobatic stretch between the two vehicles and slipped down through her window and into the seat. I guess I could have just waited, since we were going the same place, and both arrived some three minutes later. I missed her though, you know?

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Not That Kind of Pool

A buddy of mine and I were shooting pool last night. We were sharing a table with some lovely ladies we meet there quite often. I guess you could call them pool friends. Anyway, I was on my way to the restroom and walked by the foose ball table. There wasn’t anyone around it. But one of the handles was pushed all the way in on the far side, which made the long steel piece stick all the way out on the side I was walking by. I was about to run into it. So I reached out and slapped it in on my way by. So I wouldn’t impale myself on the foose ball table, you see.

And I hear this, “what the hell!” really loud. I looked over, still walking, of course, and see a guy standing there with his hands out. “Oh, sorry, chief. Didn’t know you guys were playing,” I said, and went into the lav. After I finished I returned to my pool table. And after about three minutes, I’m leaning over the table, about to make a four-rail bank shot on the nine. And dude walks up and makes a big show of scattering all the balls on the table, then stands there with his hands out again. Staring at me.

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The Dredge House Chronicles, Vol 6

Final Edition

Well I’m going to wrap up these here Chronicles, as I think I’ve told most of the good stories that happened in the Dredge House. So to recap, you know it was a party house. Someone was always drunk, having sex (even surprise sex), getting drunk, getting ready to have sex, getting into a fight, or playing nintendo. A lot of our Fry Street Friends would come by after long nights of drinking and having sex on Fry Street and hang out for a while to drink and possibly have sex at my house. Old Guy was somehow always cool with it. He never complained. And our dirt driveway always had plenty of room for more cars.

So one time I brought a girl home with me. She was a lovely little thing, cute and petite. She looked a little young, but that didn’t really catch my attention too much, because I had seen her buy cigarettes. She was at least eighteen. She came over and we turned off all the lights in the living room. I sent Wil to my room because some other couple was sleeping in there, and I was stuck on the couch. TJ’s room was occupied as well. Well this young lady I brought home wanted to hear the Lost Boys soundtrack while we discussed magic and drank popsicle juice. So I put it on. It got through Cry Little Sister and she told me to play it again. So I set the CD player on repeat track, and away we went. Well I won’t bore you with the details of our expedient congregation. But it lasted a while. Seriously. When we got done with all the uh – whatever I called it up above – the index on the CD player said 23. It had played Cry Little Sister, an almost seven-minute song, 23 times. I was pretty sick of it. But I hadn’t wanted to stop long enough to turn off the repeat mode.

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The Fall of a Masterful Empire

When I was young, I collected Hot Wheels cars. Matchbox too. I remember those John Cleese commercials where he’d slip one into his shirt pocket, and that always made me feel so good. I made my mother buy me a white dress shirt with two breast pockets just so I could stand in front of the mirror and slip into my pockets my two favorite Matchbox/Hot Wheels cars again and again.

I collected them. Like I do guitars, books, Elvis Costello albums, tattoos and Evan bottles, I collected every one of them I could find. They had realistic die-cast metal miniature automobiles with vibrant colors and awesome chrome wheels (and sometimes flake paint). It was magical when my mom would take me to the Wal-Mart and I had a five-dollar bill in my pocket. I could buy five new cars. They were 89 cents apiece. The only problems I ran into back then was which five or six to get. There were so many to choose from, and I knew that at any minute, Matel could go out of business and the Wal-Mart could burn down, and I’d be forever kept from completing my collection. So I had to select the best five.

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Where are the good cats?

This last Monday I took my folks to the airport for their trip to Hawaii. Yeah, I’ve heard it from just about everyone now: “Tell your parents they suck, dude.” Why, because they were smart enough to fly south for the winter? If only a week, at least… Anyway, I loaded them up with memory for their camera and Cheez-Its for their flight and sent them on their way.

That meant I was driving my mother’s Porsche for the last couple of days, because I was too lazy to make the trip back out to their house to pick up my trusty old Wrangler. It’s amazing how lazy one can get about things like that when he is driving a sports car. Either way, I took the wife and kid out to Red Lobster last night for a feast of seafood (OMG those lobster tails and crab legs holy god they were awesome…) and then made the trip out to Silent Hill to swap out the cars. I gassed up the Porsche (I tend to put my foot in it a little too often and turn what should be a one-gallon trip into a five-gallon adventure) and parked it neatly between the lines in the garage. After my wife hopped out and moved all the shit out of the way.

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The Dredge House Chronicles, Vol 5

Volume Five: Old Guy and The Onion Incident

The Dredge House wasn’t always fun. We did more than just party there. If you want specifics or anything, I’ll have to get back to you on that. But what I’m trying to say is that it wasn’t always fun and games. Sometimes we got serious. Sometimes people almost died.

At the time I was seeing a girl called April pretty regularly. Now I’ve told you what the word relationship meant to me back then. It meant that sure, I’ll call you my girlfriend and we won’t date other people. Just remember that the word ‘dating’ and the word ‘sex’ aren’t synonymous. So anyway, April was my girlfriend, and I loved her quite well. I don’t think I ever needed to see anyone else while I was with her. So it was all good. Regardless, that has nothing to do with the story, so I don’t know why I’m even telling you that except that maybe to establish that I wasn’t a complete asshole. But I was, so that point is moot anyway. So, moving on, I mentioned April because she had two friends with whom she lived a lot. These were Cammie and Cody. They had a pretty slick apartment in Dallas but were almost never there. They were pretty regularly not even in town. They stayed mostly in Houston, and just about every weekend, were loading up to go south. April didn’t though. She mostly stayed with me.

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The Coolest Places I’ve Worked

Being an unruly and independent sixteen-year-old means you don’t take shit from anyone. Or in the parlance of the age, you don’t take shit from no one. Ever. You do as you please. You wake when you want. You go to school if you feel like it. You listen to your parents if it suits you – because obviously you know better than they… How the hell should they know what it’s like to be alive in the 80s as a teenager? They were teens in like the 50s and shit. Trust me, Pop. You just don’t understand.

It also means you have to work in as many jobs as you can fit between your sixteenth and your nineteenth birthdays. Seriously. I didn’t quit because I got sick of places. Actually yes, I did. But I was going to say that I quit because I was ready for something new. I wanted to experience it all. And both are true. How long can you work at Skaggs bagging groceries before you begin to believe you could manage the store yourself? It can’t be rocket science, dude. That’s why you, Mister Store Manager, only make like thirty grand a year. When I grow up, I’ll make twice what you make in my spare time. I’m sixteen, all powerful, hear me roar.

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The Dredge House Chronicles, Vol 4

Beth, My Sister, and the Open-Door Policy That Failed Me

While I’m on the subject of my sister, I’ll go ahead and tell you about another incident that occurred involving her. This is a fun one! I had a girlfriend named Beth. She was German. She didn’t speak German, she just was one. In fact, she could have been full-blooded American and I wouldn’t have known because she didn’t have an accent or anything. She just told me she was German and I had no reason to doubt her. So for the purposes of this story, I’ll just ask you to believe she was German, and that’s that.

Beth and I got pretty close pretty quickly, and found our way into some rather embarrassing scenarios more often than I’d probably care to admit. Just by virtue of our being young and wild, I suppose. But she had a lackluster trust for me to begin with, and I can’t tell you why. I think she thought I was still seeing some other girl and couldn’t give her (Beth) my full heart. Uh, yeah. I was too young to be giving anyone my heart. I did, however, give them a different part of me, if you know what I mean. Wink, wink. Anyway, of course I was seeing other girls! That was none of her business though. I treated her like a queen, and gave her roses and all those things women love. She had no reason to doubt that I was for real. I just like to keep a spare account open on the side in case my primary account runs dry all of a sudden. Know what I mean? Anyway enough about her.

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