Mustache-Free Mondays (& other ill-conceived exercises in melancholy)
Issue #0: notes to make it look like I actually do shit, yes for my own sputtering, gasping sense of self-worth, but primarily for the benefit of this smoking french erectile-svengali two tables down. (for further reading see: "sputtering"; "gasping")
Had I really been listening to all these Japanese bands?
Why was The New Yorker blueballing Ryan Vanderboosh’s aspirations to urbane cartoonery on the topic of Roz Chast’s most grisly demise?
Did re-shirting my bod during drum practice to stanch the distracting power of my hooters in the mirror signal defeat? (not for the integrity of my pecs, but the sacrosanct shirtlessness of my drumming)
Was this some manner of a winter slump? And how could I truly tell given that, existentially speaking, I’ve been sleeping under a park bench since before Jake Oyer was just a Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders with a chain necklace?
Oh yeah, and where the fuckall was my mustache? Down the sink and prolly being used to build a nest by some gay, socialist alligators in Montreal’s sewers. A frosty Monday had seen my chances for Mexican political office go the way of Krispy’s gag-reflex, and nervous regret was setting in. Maybe I thought something would change. My face free of icicles, perhaps I’d have a new bounce in my 3pm step to the packy. Whaddaya say? Done. Having spent five months stroking the vague terms of my self-improvement regimen/disgraced exile, put to rest were such festering unknowns as does french-dubbed "Dallas" go for tha gusto and slap on a francophonic theme song too? (yes) and just what is the correct pronunciation of Saskatchewan’s capital Regina? (yes). But these free breadsticks meant dick to a young scamp hungering for Chicken con Broccoli at the Olive Garden of Life’s mysteries. A vingt-deux of pilsner sunshine in my blood, fresh batteries and Ghost’s Hypnotic Underworld in my walkman, and I could shake a leg on over to the ol' grain elevators by the canal to give come hither looks to a Canadian B&E rap, and ponder the meaning of my naked upper lip.
I headed south, and somewhere far down that line nights of antisocializing were starting with tha provocation of Ballantine fo’ties & the line "So, if former Soviet bloc countries were Harold Faltermeyer tunes, what would be their favorite basketball teams’ most emblematic Freeway/DC Berman lyric?" Thinking only a damn fool would voluntarily excuse himself from Socrates’ culero game, I briefly guesstimated the spiritual toll of AIDS-ravaged populations underided, Herb’s prostate-examining dexterity uncontemplated. At least I was drinking by myself. That works.
But no, says a voice. Without the conversational grotesqueries & ivy league schadenfreude served up by your faraway cult of jerkoffs, love for the sauce loses its charm. You’re an alcoholic! And with so much else on the level, where’s the fun in that? I mean c’mon, people. I cook vegetables, and sometimes tofu. I cop reasonably well adjusted, and avoid the word "nigger" in public. You're no better than Sylvia.
It got colder when I hit the St. Lawrence River, turned down the canal, and hopped the fence into the Old Port. About 1% of the way to O’Flanagans, and reason started to come back into focus. On special occasions, whether it be Yom Kippur or the one-day anniversary of yesterday, there’s that drinking stride where the pace of pouring shit down your gullet is no longer a negotiable figure. So after washing your organs in a Jameson high-tide for the duration of a few conversations linking US presidencies to excrementitious displays of romance, sobering up doesn’t mean slowing down, it means ordering a Guinness. Yummmm, logic. Consider the slick reasoning behind "this is my first drink since three drinks ago." Kudos, slugger, arithmetic ain’t got shit on you.
What if I boogied south for God’s chosen country? I hear Birdmondo’s got spring break a comin’. Somebody’s gotta bitch out C.Smac to holler at a spot in Slang & Jesta’s future den of misbegotten bulimia. The appreciation for rape, suicide, and terminal diseases as fertile ground for humor needs room to frolic. Aghast old ladies on the subway aren’t just going to horrifically offend themselves, folks. And o the drunken merriment.
Then again, pretty much all our communal activities involve reckless drinking. (…don’t have these ideas, AT…) The suggestion that your precious shenanigans can’t get off the ground without wings of Country Club is a dismay worse than hunting through a fridge and finding only O’Douls when what you could really go for is a cool, tasty bottle of pure Afghani heroin. Having clambered onto an old freight car, I survey this potentially disastrous train of thought. The notions that both my solo sipping game and our group renditions of an Irish wake might somehow be questionable left me solemn, uneasy, and needing to pee.
Public urination can feel like an epiphany. Wanna know what else can? An epiphany.
"Well bleach my anus and call me Sue!"
I can prove that I don’t need a cushion of suds between me and that cocksucker Grimes with his fucking attitude. And don’t worry, it in no way whatsoever involves not drinking. Alls a scrappy little shit like me gotsta do is to keep drinking by myself. Don’t you see, babydoll? Alcohol’s doesn’t make my friends palatable. It makes life palatable. Don’t try to play me like Cru needs to GLUG GLUG GLUG to TA HA HA, asshole, cuz we’re already drunk anyways. So all who read this: find a quiet moment, have a little you time, and give a toast --not to the fact that your future self will someday find more joy from the PBR in an unguarded ashtray at the Port Authority bowling alley than most people do from love and family-- but to your current self, who can pretty well count the people able to bear your company on one hand, leaving the other hand free to hold the shot glass. Cheers to the difference between alcoholism and a drinking problem. Alcoholics? You bet, everyone of us, but what we have here is a drinking solution. (Except Grimes. Mike, you have a disease. Seriously.)
Huzzah! slurred the townsfolk. The self-indulgent rationalizing of a degenerate, faux-Canadian fuck-up proves as surefire as Ahab’s vengeance, or Falstaff’s conviction, or some other guy’s central characteristic in some other book I have not and never will read, but will blithely chime in on whenever I goddamn please because I over-paid for three-quarters of a half-baked education, and ended up with a resin-encrusted frontal lobe, a set of mugshots, and membership in a scrofulous cadre of loud-mouthed misanthropes named after a prima donna basketball player’s neck tat. Fuckin A! Go tell that fairy soft-shoeing on the craps tables at Foxwoods that he was dead on balls right: Life is good, life is sweet, my abortion poster sure sounds neat!
It was getting dark, so I hoofed it through the Latin Quarter towards the crib. I knew where my mustache was. It’s in Lesotho, where a muthafucka’s just glad it ain’t Botswana; it’s in tha ballpit of the Long Island City Chuck E. Cheese, where I promised to lick acid on MacBiatch’s birfday; it’s in Marisa’s diaphragm, where a microscopic hole has secretly been pricked; it’s in Hot Ann’s Alcatrazian grasp, where Sam’s penis has a monthly dj’ing gig. My mustache is in our next drink together, homeys, cuz Slang Bangers didn’t live all of twenty-five years just to not get his stomach pumped in the back of an ambulance and then write about it at work the next day. See you in tha city.
Had I really been listening to all these Japanese bands?
Why was The New Yorker blueballing Ryan Vanderboosh’s aspirations to urbane cartoonery on the topic of Roz Chast’s most grisly demise?
Did re-shirting my bod during drum practice to stanch the distracting power of my hooters in the mirror signal defeat? (not for the integrity of my pecs, but the sacrosanct shirtlessness of my drumming)
Was this some manner of a winter slump? And how could I truly tell given that, existentially speaking, I’ve been sleeping under a park bench since before Jake Oyer was just a Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders with a chain necklace?
Oh yeah, and where the fuckall was my mustache? Down the sink and prolly being used to build a nest by some gay, socialist alligators in Montreal’s sewers. A frosty Monday had seen my chances for Mexican political office go the way of Krispy’s gag-reflex, and nervous regret was setting in. Maybe I thought something would change. My face free of icicles, perhaps I’d have a new bounce in my 3pm step to the packy. Whaddaya say? Done. Having spent five months stroking the vague terms of my self-improvement regimen/disgraced exile, put to rest were such festering unknowns as does french-dubbed "Dallas" go for tha gusto and slap on a francophonic theme song too? (yes) and just what is the correct pronunciation of Saskatchewan’s capital Regina? (yes). But these free breadsticks meant dick to a young scamp hungering for Chicken con Broccoli at the Olive Garden of Life’s mysteries. A vingt-deux of pilsner sunshine in my blood, fresh batteries and Ghost’s Hypnotic Underworld in my walkman, and I could shake a leg on over to the ol' grain elevators by the canal to give come hither looks to a Canadian B&E rap, and ponder the meaning of my naked upper lip.
I headed south, and somewhere far down that line nights of antisocializing were starting with tha provocation of Ballantine fo’ties & the line "So, if former Soviet bloc countries were Harold Faltermeyer tunes, what would be their favorite basketball teams’ most emblematic Freeway/DC Berman lyric?" Thinking only a damn fool would voluntarily excuse himself from Socrates’ culero game, I briefly guesstimated the spiritual toll of AIDS-ravaged populations underided, Herb’s prostate-examining dexterity uncontemplated. At least I was drinking by myself. That works.
But no, says a voice. Without the conversational grotesqueries & ivy league schadenfreude served up by your faraway cult of jerkoffs, love for the sauce loses its charm. You’re an alcoholic! And with so much else on the level, where’s the fun in that? I mean c’mon, people. I cook vegetables, and sometimes tofu. I cop reasonably well adjusted, and avoid the word "nigger" in public. You're no better than Sylvia.
It got colder when I hit the St. Lawrence River, turned down the canal, and hopped the fence into the Old Port. About 1% of the way to O’Flanagans, and reason started to come back into focus. On special occasions, whether it be Yom Kippur or the one-day anniversary of yesterday, there’s that drinking stride where the pace of pouring shit down your gullet is no longer a negotiable figure. So after washing your organs in a Jameson high-tide for the duration of a few conversations linking US presidencies to excrementitious displays of romance, sobering up doesn’t mean slowing down, it means ordering a Guinness. Yummmm, logic. Consider the slick reasoning behind "this is my first drink since three drinks ago." Kudos, slugger, arithmetic ain’t got shit on you.
What if I boogied south for God’s chosen country? I hear Birdmondo’s got spring break a comin’. Somebody’s gotta bitch out C.Smac to holler at a spot in Slang & Jesta’s future den of misbegotten bulimia. The appreciation for rape, suicide, and terminal diseases as fertile ground for humor needs room to frolic. Aghast old ladies on the subway aren’t just going to horrifically offend themselves, folks. And o the drunken merriment.
Then again, pretty much all our communal activities involve reckless drinking. (…don’t have these ideas, AT…) The suggestion that your precious shenanigans can’t get off the ground without wings of Country Club is a dismay worse than hunting through a fridge and finding only O’Douls when what you could really go for is a cool, tasty bottle of pure Afghani heroin. Having clambered onto an old freight car, I survey this potentially disastrous train of thought. The notions that both my solo sipping game and our group renditions of an Irish wake might somehow be questionable left me solemn, uneasy, and needing to pee.
Public urination can feel like an epiphany. Wanna know what else can? An epiphany.
"Well bleach my anus and call me Sue!"
I can prove that I don’t need a cushion of suds between me and that cocksucker Grimes with his fucking attitude. And don’t worry, it in no way whatsoever involves not drinking. Alls a scrappy little shit like me gotsta do is to keep drinking by myself. Don’t you see, babydoll? Alcohol’s doesn’t make my friends palatable. It makes life palatable. Don’t try to play me like Cru needs to GLUG GLUG GLUG to TA HA HA, asshole, cuz we’re already drunk anyways. So all who read this: find a quiet moment, have a little you time, and give a toast --not to the fact that your future self will someday find more joy from the PBR in an unguarded ashtray at the Port Authority bowling alley than most people do from love and family-- but to your current self, who can pretty well count the people able to bear your company on one hand, leaving the other hand free to hold the shot glass. Cheers to the difference between alcoholism and a drinking problem. Alcoholics? You bet, everyone of us, but what we have here is a drinking solution. (Except Grimes. Mike, you have a disease. Seriously.)
Huzzah! slurred the townsfolk. The self-indulgent rationalizing of a degenerate, faux-Canadian fuck-up proves as surefire as Ahab’s vengeance, or Falstaff’s conviction, or some other guy’s central characteristic in some other book I have not and never will read, but will blithely chime in on whenever I goddamn please because I over-paid for three-quarters of a half-baked education, and ended up with a resin-encrusted frontal lobe, a set of mugshots, and membership in a scrofulous cadre of loud-mouthed misanthropes named after a prima donna basketball player’s neck tat. Fuckin A! Go tell that fairy soft-shoeing on the craps tables at Foxwoods that he was dead on balls right: Life is good, life is sweet, my abortion poster sure sounds neat!
It was getting dark, so I hoofed it through the Latin Quarter towards the crib. I knew where my mustache was. It’s in Lesotho, where a muthafucka’s just glad it ain’t Botswana; it’s in tha ballpit of the Long Island City Chuck E. Cheese, where I promised to lick acid on MacBiatch’s birfday; it’s in Marisa’s diaphragm, where a microscopic hole has secretly been pricked; it’s in Hot Ann’s Alcatrazian grasp, where Sam’s penis has a monthly dj’ing gig. My mustache is in our next drink together, homeys, cuz Slang Bangers didn’t live all of twenty-five years just to not get his stomach pumped in the back of an ambulance and then write about it at work the next day. See you in tha city.
posted by Anonymous at 6:46 PM
1 comments
