Saw-una

There is nothing quite like working during a sale at IKEA. The different levels or "shades" if you will of the lowest common denominator is quite thrilling. Amazing and breathtaking like an aurora borealis, except try not to breath too deep, you might not like what you taste. I will admit, IKEA is not Target. It is not Walmart, it is not Sears, or Home depot. It is "Japanese right?" a customer asked, semi aggressively as they usually do. No, it is swedish, which would explain why I have been asked if carry wooden clogs. I am sure you would picture the swedish wandering through their tulip fields which miraculously grow near the arctic circle. A favorite food of the arctic fox I'm sure. As far as the majority of our customers are concerned, the swedish are basically a combination of every other culture that is strange, but white. Don't get me wrong, I don't expect people to know about the swedes, or IKEA, or the concept of near and far. I get that IKEA is confusing. I do not however think it is so ambiguous that I would be asked where the baby strollers and car seats are sold.

"I'm sorry, a baby stroller is not really considered a home furnishing. That and the swedes eat their children soon after birth with pickled haring in a festival known as FanterSKoppen. I know, I know... weird swedes".

I have been asked for luggage, portable fireplaces (this sounds not only real, but safe), diapers, tennis rackets, car parts, and industrial meat slicers.

However, the best question I have ever had, in 6 years, I was gifted from god this weekend.

As I stood at the computer trying to avoid all eye contact with anything with eyes. I was approached by a couple, no older than mid to late thirties. So very Idaho, they practically left a trail of potatoes and mormons (Yes, mormons. Utah isn't the only holy state). The scruffy baseball capped, dirty flannel clad husband asked me a low, manly tone (be sure to apply accent):

"Huay, Whur you guys got stuff fer my saw una?"

"What"

"Whurs the stuff fer saw unas?:

"Huh"

This is where the very long haired pregnant wife chimed in.

"You know....Sawunas?"

She had a bit more of a sophisticated way of speaking by not making sawuna, two words.

"Oh..... Saunas....no, we don't sell things for your sauna."

It's almost as if he has owned a sauna, but just before showing up at IKEA, read the name of this bubbly water box for the first time, because he was indeed in need...of things for it. Now I came for semi bumpkin beginnings.... but... saw una? Thats just precious.

Off the shoulder

There was a time in my life that could be described as pathetic, hilarious, deluded, and super gay. That time in my life was when I was an electro-club go-go dancer club bunny. at the beginning of 2004, I left Chico to move back to San Diego. A decision that I would like to poke fun at except that even at this point I find it to be one of the best decisions I made. I was living in Chico and working for Payless shoesource (pay less, die more). I spent my days at work reading books behind the register and dealing with people who wanted to buy their 1.00 pair of shoes and get another pair of 1.50 shoes at half off. You haven't lived until you have wedged a shoe on to the hoof of some fat crackhead on a rascal. My dark years included at lot of various clog rip offs. The rest of my time was spent getting high with my room-mate and either watching basic cable (WB) or going out to one of her hipster Chico friends houses and being awkward (the one time I showed up on a thrift store mustard schwin is the only time I got any attention whatsoever). I did have my fun, don't get me wrong. Kelsey and I made the best of Chico and we made some pretty awesome moments. But I decided I wanted to be a part of the gay culture (Chico frat dudes who want you to blow them when they are drunk does not a gay man make), and move to San Diego. So my friend Maurice said he would give me a place to live rent free until I got a job. So I gave notice, stole money from the till, and bid Payless a fond "I hope the children in your sweat shops rebel and rip each of you to shreds, and then construct a masterful rip off of a steve madden out of your skin and hair" farewell, and moved down south. Within 10 minutes of arriving after a 9 hour drive, Maurice, some homo he knew, and I went to an 80's night at shooters. I had arrived. Shortly before I arrived the up and coming electroclash club (four years after electroclash had really hit underground, but hey, we were on the cutting edge....we were party monsters) had shut down and re-opened as a hybrid in a shotty bar/club in city heights (shitty heights). This place was later to become a beauty bar. I spent the the following 6 months going to this bi-weekly (bi-whatever) club. As well as any other thing "electro-ey" that happened. Here are some of the things I wore.

*A long sleeve black shirt with the neck cut out so that I was an off the shoulder number. I wore that on top of a white t-shirt (to man it up a bit) with my black hair straightened like a bowl and 3 a-symmetrical beauty marks and black nail polish (and a bit of mascara, always a bit of mascara to bring out my ice blue eyes).

*A long sleeve black and blue striped shirt with the neck cut out, draped down my sternum with a black neck tie on, black paints...classy.

*A sleeve-less red t-shirt in which I took the sleeves that I cut off, cut them into strips and tied them on my arms and forehead and on the the knee of my WHITE JEANS!!!! I thought that I had to make something that wasn't happening happen... and I thought "White jeans!" I tried twice and realized that somethings can never ever happen, outside of welfare offices and Jersey.

*a black muscle shirt, a vintage star wars cap, one black glove, and my jeans tucked into wrestling shoes. Asics naturally.

*and once when I had a cold-sore, I painted on a mustache with eye liner, put on a straw hat (that Peaches had thrown at my roomate...CRED!) and a western shirt and went all ironical and shit. Funny that that was one of my best looks by the crowds re-action).

*One time I puked in the sink of the joint cause I chugged a whole bottle of rosse rose in the parking lot and ended up on a couch at Portia's house. just wanted to mention it.

Then there came a time where I climbed the ladder of the San Diego awesome-ness ladder and became a regular at the a new club that my friend May opened up. I was industry now because I never paid, passed up the line, and got drink tickets to boot. The thing blew up, and soon I was taking pictures for the flyer, and jet-setting to the nearest taco joint... but with a much deserved superiority complex. So I naturally began go-go dancing for May because thats the natural progression of fabulousness. Here are some of the things I wore.

*A button up red shirt, with a vintage gucci tie, and a white pullover on top of all that. As well as little boy swimming shorts... they were red. It was an underwear party theme, and I will say, i was the classy-ist...by far...by realllllllll far.

* A long sleeve wool maroon sweater number with stitched arms and large buttons. Lots of foundation. Red pancake makeup for rosey cheeks. And lines drawn on my mouth, neck, arms, and legs so that I looked like a marionette. A pouty marionette.

* Giant ripped jeans, a wife beater, fingerless gloves, and gold chains. The theme was over the top 80s so I went Jersey 80's. I also went with what was in the "I need to donate" drawer of my dresser/floor.

*For the 7 deadly sins theme I danced on the box as "Pride". I wrote "Rob is cool" on my cheek and wore a crown of pictures of myself. My friend jennifer was "gluttony". So she wore a trash bag that I wrote the word gluttony on in mustard.

There were many more artistic things I put on my body, face, and in my mouth. In the end, I had fun-ish, I got free booze, I helped May get onto Spins top funnest places (who reads Spin?), and I got my wish... I was around the gays. I got gayer. Gay.

Honcut city limits

I recently traveled down to San Francisco, and in the interim stopped in my hometown Oroville. Being in that general area of great beauty that my friends ex boyfriend described as the background to a mario brothers game reminded me of one the other random places that my rag tag childhood traveled to. There was a time when I was a child that my mother and her drug dealer boyfriend must have gotten adventurous and spun a globe and put a finger down, laughing and talking of the wild experiences and foreign people they will encounter while doing so, and that finger landed on the humble town of Honcut. In reality instead of a globe it was a crack pipe and a chance to cook methamphetamine out of the reach of those vice like sleuths that are the cops of Oroville. I have no real idea how they/we ended up there in a rundown old two story house. I'm sure my mothers boyfriend agreed to kill someone to get it or something, being the cunning business man that he is. The Honcut house was held together by nothing more than popsicle sticks and shattered dreams. I traveled between this house and my grandmothers house, since Honcut was about 20 minutes outside of Oroville (who knew heaven was so close?), so I was given a room....upstairs. I write that with a foreboding hesitation because to travel upstairs was not unlike entering the temple of doom. Every step was a willingness to die in some horrible boobytrap. The stairs could not have been more than a bunch of pallets and old rotten firewood crafted together and covered with blue insulation (to match the walls, Martha would be proud). If you make it up the stairs you're not out of the woods. You then get to dodge the rusty nails holding the second floor together. The only thing that made all of this more fun was when the generator would run out of gas and all the lights would shut off, which happened often not unlike the chime of a grandfather clock. I guess when confronted with decision to buy gas to keep you out of the dark ages, and buying meth, the choice is an easy one, you don't need electricity to light up. When that bell tolled you prayed you were close enough to the bottom of the stairs to make it down in one piece (no banister), and not so far up that you had no option but to go up. For to go up in the dark meant one thing. The rats would come out. These are rats that would eat a baby before it could coo at them. The few times I remember sleeping up there it was a orchestra of scuttling and chewing. Coupled with the random porcelain dolls that my mother gingerly placed throughout the rooms, it was like Stanley Kubrick did the decorating. But it wasn't all rats, dolls, and rusty nails....there were bee's too. We came home one day to find that the house was full of bees. I suppose in your less quirky homes you might have covered the hole that used to house a wood stove pipe, but out in Honcut people aren't so bogged down by societal standards or safety. I mean, bee's need a place to build a hive too you know. Aside from the casa del grandeur there was the actual town of Honcut...which in my opinion rivals the greats like Venice, Paris, and Chernobyl. Population would be about 200 hundred I'd say. There was a church, a k-3rd school, and a general store. Well strike that, there is now a church and a k-3rd school. The general store met its untimely demise while I lived there. There was a night when Honcut was all a twitter. We walked down the street to see the general store burning down. It was awesome, like the 4th of july. Everyone felt bad, but really wanted to clap at the same time. It burned to the ground. About the a week later me and some of my local Honcut friends, A girl named billy, her sister Koochie, and my "girlfriend" Nikki, were all swimming at the local swimming hole and we were waiting for some local boys to show up on bikes. They never showed up, something was awry all "Stand by me" like. We all walked back and when we crossed the road there was shattered glass all over the road and a pool of bright red. Turns out, one of the boys had just looted the burnt down general store (as most Honcut natives were doing, come to think of it it was arson that burned that place down...hmmmm) and were riding over to us with a couple of six packs of hawaiian punch and crashed his bike on the road due to the weight. He sliced his chest open and went to the hospital. He was not far from the rail road tracks....and his friend did kinda look like a young River Phoenix....if you were a closet gay kid and he rarely wore his shirt. My then girlfriend eventually broke up with me cause she thought he liked her....Heartache in Honcut. Honcut was a terrible place, but I had some experiences there. We outlived a tornado there, I rode 4 wheelers and shot crows with a b-b gun. A coming of age really.

Project Fagtime

Things have changed I've been noticing. I'm thinking this as I fag out watching the new project runway with the enthusiasm of a white trash kid on lice check day. What happened? What happened to not only project runway, but to Lifetime as a whole. Lifetime used to be a channel that made no apologies for its vaseline lighting and crying in the shower. All things that women who spent the 80's drinking strawberry daiquiri wine coolers had grown to love and relate to. No other channel was giving you tips on figuring out if your husband was gay. No other channel offered gang rape and leukemia in one mascara streamed movie and/or mini series. No other channel kept a career alive for Judith Light, Jean Smart, Valerie Bertinelli, and the mom from family ties. As I watch the commercials for Lifetime now (which admittedly, I hadn't watched Lifetime since I was a faggy stoner of 20) it seems to have lost its path. It's now the gayest thing ever. Not even LOGO has such a limp wrist. There is some show where a pretty girls soul is in a fat girls body and in one episode, ONE, there is Liza Minelli, Rosie Oddonel, Delta Burke, and the maraschino cherry on that sundae is Paula Abdul. The only people watching this are super homo's. One probably named Rodger, who lives in the south and wears kimonos around the house while he eats cherry cordials. Just a hunch. They have traded vaseline for lube, Judith for Paula, and the golden girls for project runway. I obviously used to love project runway, seeing as how my friend was on it and won. I loved it before that though. I do not love this orphan amputee version of project runway. Its so lame. It's just a bunch of whiney, un-memorable wet towels bitching about the easiest challenges ever. EVER. Your challenge this week "designers" is to take any amount of money you want, and create any design you like, for any event you like. The twist is....you must use black thread, at some point, but if you don't.....thats o.k too. Innovation!

I don't want to watch the old lifetime, I don't want to watch the new lifetime either. I just feel bad for those women who now have to turn to the Hallmark channel for their banal emotional movies. Except now they have to deal with christian undertones. Why don't you just slap the Little Debbie right out of their hands you monster.

Pinocle face

So I'm old now. I have come to terms with the fact that I can in no way relate to anything that is shown on MTV. If I had told my 15 year old self that I had no idea who Lil' Wayne was, my former self would have rolled his eyes, and turned up his latest Tori Amos c.d so as to not be tainted by my un-coolness. Still being me, I of course consider myself much more cool for not knowing. Who has time for that shit when there are jazz singers playing tin cans over a synth track made from cracking ice.  I don't know of anyone doing that, but I'm sure I'd dig it. I feel that if there were music made that could gentrify music... then myself, and most of my friends would be into it.  

So you can imagine my surprise when I slowly (very slowly, being old and un-cool) figured out that Lady Gaga is all the fucking rage.  I had known of Lady Gaga for some time (being cool and all). I knew of her as some underground gay electro diva. Some broad wearing club kid clothes and singing terribly in front of strobe lights. Most fags either have a friend doing this, or are doing this themselves. So I figured she would stay in her comfort zone of playing pride and big electro gigs. Then I saw her on American Idol on top of a glass (plastic) piano singing poker face. The only lyric I know in that song is "poker face", and does anyone over 25 know any more than that? She looked hot, because she is a provocateur. Her look is great, but I have had the (mis)fortune of being a club kid myself. In my days of go-go dancing in san diego I spent way too much time around a lot of Lady Gagas. Hell, when I didn't have a job, I was Lady Gaga. Don't get me wrong, this all may make me sound like I am a Gaga hater, I totally am not. I find her interesting. I find her songs to be endlessly terrible. As my boyfriend was showing me one of her videos I had an epiphany. She is the new Lady Miss Kier! Also know as cat-suit wearing, cocktail ring sporting, wigged out, psy-co-delic Deee-lite.  People may say that the Lady Miss Kier was nothing but a throwback, but she is just as much of one as Lady Gaga. Lady Gaga is a 90's club kid. You know she was one gay club venue away from helping some faggy club kid beat his drug dealer to death with a hammer and cut him up and put in a cardboard box. ok... two gay club venues, tops. 

I love this Gaga phenom. I find it so interesting  that a generation that I really cannot relate to at all, loves this broad. I wish her the best, and I look forward to seeing her play pride 2012, god willing. But lets not forget who paved her way. And lets hope that in 5 years she will be on some horrible reality tv show where she has to fight the Lady Miss Kier to death in a glitter and coke strewn stage-cage. cross your fingers poker face.  

A stairway to heaven

I just went camping for the first time in about 18 years. It was amazing! My only experience with camping previously was the annual camping trip I was forced to go on with my parents every summer. As I was driving to this campground a week ago, I had this feeling of "this isn't camping!" because it was only about a 45 minute drive to get to the campsite. Where's the long death defying stretch of highway 70? In order to fully build the right amount of enthusiasm and optimism for a camping trip you need to spend four hours in the middle part of a one seater Chevy Love pickup with a stick shift between your legs. Great way to make a gay kid feel more effeminate. The road to heaven (camping) needs to be paved with deadly winding mountain highways , stick shifts slamming into your groin, and Heart blaring in your ears. At some point stairway to heaven would be played to let you know that you were going to die. There is nothing more thrill seeking than barreling down tiny swerving roads with no guard rail, and, get this....a rickety wooden hand made trailer ( not unlike something the greeks would have built) attached to that janky, old, rickety tomb of a pickup truck. It really  hit home for me that this would someday be the road I died on, was when I was eight years old. I saw a train de-rail on the side of the mountain. I looked at these strewn rail cars thrown along the side of a canyon all the way down to the river (around 800 feet or more)and thought "If they can't maneuver this, then how the hell can my steroided out dad?". All this was to reach the oasis of Antelope lake. A strange,semi-pretty, but obscure bit of the deep Sierra Nevadas. far from where anyone would ever live. Someplace that the x-files would have shot some episode about killer mosquitos or a shack dwelling badger man. So I got to spend the days by myself, chasing ground squirrels and stomping on big black ant hills. Riveting really. Now that I look back, what the fuck where my parents doing most of the time? They had to be getting fucked up. I had to sleep in my own tent, not ok. 7 year old pre-homosexual boys love spending time in the middle of the woods in a little tent waiting to be eaten. I decided that I would rather be eaten by wolves rather than bears. It just seemed more original than most camper deaths. A bear mauling is a dime a dozen, but a good wolf attack is only for those special people like myself. I'd become a campground legend.

No white rabbits

Now I am not one to really go full tilt boogie with "the drugs". Growing up around parents that did lines of coke off of a mirror/picture of a panther while listening to Boston through their record player that sat on our wooden plank/cinder block entertainment center, kinda soured me on whole thing. Perhaps that, and the fact that it made my dad crazy. So crazy that he put up tin foil on the windows to stop himself from invading the minds of the neighbors. A useful trade when there was a block party. You don't like the guacamole? Kill the people who made it with your mind. He was the professor X of Pamela Jane St. So I stayed pretty scared straight. But eventually you enter your twenties and are grossly behind everyone in your generation when it comes to being a fucked up mess. So I started spending more time with my resident fag hag, Natalie. They can always be trusted to show you the way around taking things that make you forget. If you wandered in around 7:30 p.m, Natalie and I would be passed out, with golden girls on loop, and surrounded by a shanty town of pizza hut boxes. Sometimes we made a fort. So I entered the valley of the dolls. Except our "dolls" were cheap mec. So it seemed the next natural step was to plan a trip to the coast with Natalie and my friend Maurice with the main objective being to eat shrooms on the beach. I should say that I was a tried and true stoner at that point and had dabbled in somethings a bit more "enlightening". Such as ecstasy. My account with ecstasy before that ended with me curled up in the fetal position swiping away the faces that were flying at me. So it seemed a good idea to go to a strange place and eat poison fungus.  We arrive at the beach at about 10:00 am. Its a bit overcast and looks to be a pleasant day to enter gates of hell. Balmy. We divide the shrooms between the 3 of us. Natalie and Maurice eat their portion quickly, like chicken tenders. I eye my share with a look of fear (not unlike I normally do with chicken fingers).

"I think I will eat half now and half later, just to maintain" I say

I have to state that both of them easily weighed twice as much as me or more. Not only did I need to look after my figure, I needed to not flip the fuck out and run screaming into the ocean.

"just eat it you pussy" they say

I am swayed by this argument, decide its for the best, and eat it all. 

We find a small cave like indent in the cliffside to settle ourselves for our trip.  We'll fast forward about an hour. Maurice is laying on his back looking at the walls of the "cave". He has made friends with the moss that is hanging on the wall and has given each of them names. Instead of responding to us when we say anything, he responds to the moss that bares our namesake. Natalie seems fairly normal. Then there's me. 

"Im losing myself, Im losing myself" I say over and over again.

Needless to say I am not stoked. Whenever I open my eyes and look out at the surrounding cliffs, I can see that they are breathing. Breathing and slowly crawling towards me. They will reach me if they can get across that beach made of graph paper. This seems unlikely though because those families of wandering space monsters will probably stop it.  I decide its best to leave nature to its mysteries and start convulsing. After Natalie is able to talk me down, let me know that she can get me to the hospital, and that, yes, time does in fact exist, we realize we had not brought food or water. The last time we did shrooms we were smart enough to have brought something to sustain life. Smart enough in fact to pack a lunch in a little cooler with frozen turkey sausage because we had no ice. We found ourselves clever for solving this logistical obstacle, not unlike Macgyver. Only stoners have tubes of frozen turkey sausage, but no ice. By the time we decided to eat we had a cooler full of turkey juice, so Maurice decided to eat wildflowers instead. This time we didn't even have rotting turkey meat. But after a vigorous search through my bag they did find something that was deemed edible, Lube. They ate every packet I had. From peach to pina colada. You can't top that (at least not as comfortably)  so it was time to go. I had come back from the brink and was ready to live, and Maurice had been arguing with the moss and was not putting up with their shit anymore. Needless to say there will be no "white rabbits" in my future. And if you ever think that I might consider chasing the dragon, then you better mean the ones in the chinese parades... because I would like to chase those... they're colorful!