Stupidity Should Hurt

Suggested soundtrack: “Bicycle Race” by Queen



Hey, all! It’s time for an update, and then a little story time.
Remember the beater bike from last post? Well, with a little help from Andrew I got her up and running.
A new chain:


Tires!


I just got all this work finished Friday, so I wanted to take it out for a ride. A situation presented itself in the form of “Taste Addison,” an outdoor festival in a suburb of Dallas. Addison is the place you go out drinking and see a lot of the pretentious douchebags that give Dallas a bad name.

My friend Daniel just got a cool bike, and he lives in Addison, so I convinced him that we should ride our bikes to the festival. He was reluctant but he agreed. The only problem is that Addison is really really bike unfriendly, as only a master-planned suburb comprised of housing developments and strip malls can be, which is to say no bike lanes and intermittent sidewalks. It was treacherous. But we made it and had fun on the way. After the ride, Daniel was fully converted to a bike lover.

This festival itself was a very good time. The Black Crowes, those hippy-rock throwbacks, were live on stage and jammed the fuck out. We were under the influence and the show was great. Afterward, we went to a local bar and got even more drunker.

Everything was perfect, then…

Let’s take a moment here to go over the reasons why you should always, always ride your bike in the street, namely a) the street is smooth, straight and usually well-lit, and b) the sidewalk, by comparison, is fraught with peril in the form of uneven concrete, large cracks, sharp turns, road signs, fire hydrants, low-hanging branches, and debris.

But at two in the morning, when the streets are full of drunks hauling ass to get home, and there are no bike lanes, what are two intoxicated guys to do? Take the sidewalk home, of course.

Which is why, today, I am hurting.

Observe the fruits of my stupidity:




That last picture bears a striking resemblance to an injury I sustained in England many years ago, while playing in the goat pen next to Stonehenge:


Last night, arriving injured at Daniel’s place, we found out that he had no bandages and hardly any paper towels. So, for my hand I put a paper towel on the wound and secured it with my belt:


And for my elbow, we used one of Daniel’s sister’s panty liners. Lint-free and sticky, it’s like a giant band-aid! I have no pictures of this, sadly, but the counter guy at Dunkin’ Donuts asked about it.

I got home after stocking up on bandages at the Walgreens (“Dude, what happened to your hand?” says the clerk), and with the supplies at hand…


…I patched myself up:



My bike, though, will require a little more help. I broke the brake:


...and in a related story, I got another bike.




I'll let you know when I eat shit on this one.
Until next time…

Bought Read Watched

Suggested Soundtrack: "Paint the Silence" by South




APRIL:

Books bought:

Noisy Outlaws, Unfriendly Blobs, and Some Other Things That Aren't as Scary, Maybe, Depending on How You Feel About Lost Lands, Stray Cellphones, Creatures from the Sky, Parents Who Disappear in Peru, a Man Named Lars
Farf, and One Other Story We Couldn't Quite Finish, So Maybe You Could Help Us Out by Various Authors

The Future Dictionary of America by Various Authors

The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip by George Saunders

The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby

Riding Toward Everywhere by William T Vollmann

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by
Anthony Bourdain

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks

Will and Abe's Guide to the Universe by Matt Groening


DVDs Bought:

Jim Henson's the Storyteller - The Definitive Collection

Hotel Rwanda

The Whale Rider

Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn

Almost Famous

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Hang ‘Em High


Books Read:

Then We Came to the End: A Novel by Joshua Ferris

The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip by George Saunders

The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby

Killing Pablo by Mark Bowden

Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk (unfinished, previously thought lost)

One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson (unfinished, previously thought lost)

Areas of my Expertise by John Hodgeman (unfinished)


Movies Watched:

Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn

Gargoyles

Jim Henson's the Storyteller - The Definitive Collection

Hang ‘Em High


This post is another (hopefully) recurring one. Reading a great book on the way to New Orleans led me to actually think about the obscene amount of books and DVDs I buy. The book, The Polyphonic Spree, is a collection of articles about books written by Nick Hornby (High Fidelity, About A Boy). He has the same problem I do. Well, since he’s quite a bit older than I am, I guess I have the same problem HE does, namely, buying more books in a month than can possibly be read in that time frame. So as a way of cataloging and keeping track, I’ll try to do a monthly breakdown of what I’ve bought, read, and watched.
I got the Hornby book as part of a bundle of literature from the Mcsweeneys.net website which, if you haven’t heard of it, is awesome. They publish a lot of books and magazines, and every once in awhile they’ll have some bargain blowout, so I’ll grab shit at random and usually do pretty well for myself. The first four books I got this month came in two different sets from McSweeneys. Anyway. Hornby reads a lot, and his opinions on books are frequently hilarious and/or insightful. I have a new list of like, six books I need to buy on his recommendation.

The other McSweeneys book I read was The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip by George Saunders. While it looks like a kid’s story, and you could easily give it to a ten-year-old and he/she would understand and enjoy it, there is a darker lesson in there for the adults, and I liked it a lot. I knocked the whole thing out in one sitting at lunch, and I even had time left over to go back and look at the pictures again. The art is fantastic.


While we’re on the subject of kid’s stuff that adults can enjoy, I picked up a relic from my childhood this month. Jim Henson's The Storyteller - The Definitive Collection is a DVD collection of the TV series made by the same folks who did Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal. These have the same look and feel, and the same ability to throw the stuff of nightmares into a story for kids. The one called “The Soldier and Death” has a muppet Grim Reaper that looks like a 3-foot-tall infant and that little bastard gives me the willies.

Put it in your netflix queue.

This was a bit of a horror month for the movies I watched. I also forced myself to sit through Gargoyles, a made for TV movie from the 70’s that a friend let me borrow.

It’s known for having really great monster suits. The gang of gargoyles must’ve been something back in the day, but at this point, a guy in a scaly green rubber suit wrestling with a state trooper wearing bellbottoms is just funny. All the gargoyles needed to seal the deal was sideburns and handlebar ‘staches.

The other old-school horror movie I (re)watched was Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn.

If you’ve never seen an Evil Dead movie, start with this one. It’s better than the first, and looking at it now I realize that it is a comedy first and a horror movie second. Bruce Campbell is so perfect as Ash, the chainsaw-handed hero, that I am positive the movie would suck the biggest boner ever if he were not the main guy. It’s wall-to-wall blood and guts and zombies and dismembered limbs and it’s a hell of a good time. “I’ll swallow your soul!!” Priceless. Get high and watch this movie. Wait – kids: don’t do drugs. The adults can, though.

Also exploring the horrors of the world, but in a non-fiction way, is Killing Pablo by Mark Bowden (Black Hawk Down). It covers the rise and fall of Pablo Escobar, and it does so in great detail without ever getting boring. The amount of pull Escobar had when he was at the top of his game was downright scary. Every person in Columbia was afraid of him. Can you imagine George W being afraid to say something bad about a drug dealer? This guy had so much pull that no one would criticize him publicly without expecting to die. In the end, though, he was just running for his life with US-trained soldiers on his tail, and the eventual takedown is as exciting as anything in any work of fiction. There was a time when I wouldn’t read a work of fiction without also reading some nonfiction with it. I would switch back and forth. Killing Pablo reminded me why I need to get back on this regimen. We’ll see if I can do so in the coming months. Actually, looking at the amount of memoirs sitting on my “Books I haven’t read” shelf, I don’t think this will be too difficult.

Mixing it up a bit, I picked up a couple of westerns this month. I got The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and Hang ‘Em High. These are classic Clint Eastwood. My dad loves westerns, and some of my childhood memories consist of a jumble of scenes from the various movies I watched with him over the years. No coherent plots, just a bizarre mix of handguns, horses, whores, hangings and the occasional guy getting shot and falling off of a roof. So when I saw a bunch these movies offered as two-for-one packs, I called Papa and got the thumbs up on the duo I picked. TGTBATU is regarded as one of the best westerns ever, but it’s two-plus hours long, and rated R, so I couldn’t watch it with the kids. I’m pretty sure I’ll find time for it in May. Hang ‘Em High is rated PG-13, but the first five minutes turned out to be one of the snippets I remembered from my childhood, and it used to scare the crap outta me. Good old Clint Eastwood is riding along with a herd of cattle when nine men ride up to him, accuse him of rustling and, despite the fact that some of the men believed he was innocent, they hang his ass. As a kid, the part when the camera zooms in on the creepy old leader guy and he says “Hang ‘im” used to make me so scared. Now the whole scene is actually quite funny, just because one of the bad guys is played by the Skipper from Gilligan’s Island. Young Andrew, the adopted boy, had never seen this movie, or Gilligan’s Island for that matter, so he was fascinated. As we watched Clint get saved from death by a passing cop, and then hunt down and kill those nine bastards one by one, I hoped that one day Andrew would have a mish-mash of random western slayings kicking around his mind. I’m doing my part, believe me.

Look for the Skipper about a minute in:


The last book I read this month was the workplace fiction story Then We Came to the End: A Novel by Joshua Ferris. The story is, for me, sadly relevant: a company with declining profits is forced to start laying people off. It’s amazingly funny, sad at times, but the real amazing thing is the point of view. The whole book is narrated by sort of a collective narrator (never “I,” always “we” and “us”), which is genius, since office gossip makes every event a shared experience. In this way, all sides are covered as things progress. The whole story feels like sitting around a table as twenty people tell the same story. If you have a shitty office job, or fear one, this book is a good read.


A quick note now on the three unfinished books on my list. Areas of my Expertise is a weird collection of facts which are all bullshit, and is quite funny. It was written by John Hodgeman, best known as the “PC Guy” from those Mac commercials. Because it offers no narrative whatsoever, and the sections can be read a little at a time, it is the perfect toilet reader. So I haven’t pooped enough yet to read the whole thing, but let me just recommend it, and we’ll assume that at some point in the future I will finish it. The other two books were started by me in March, then I sat them somewhere when I was drunk, they were missing in action for some time, and I only just recently found them. As I write this post, I am on a plane over the barren Midwest, headed back to Dallas, and I have only 60 or so pages left of Haunted, so expect a full breakdown next time. I’ll try and tie up that other loose end, One Good Turn, by the time May is done. So, until next time…