Hench!

Some Things I Hate

1. The word “toffee”
2. Being called by my last name
3. U2
4. When people spell “Brooklyn” without all the “roo” so it says “Bklyn”
5. The New York Post
6. Cleaning up crushed cockroaches
7. People who chew gum and look bored and selfish
8. Bad table manners
9. Television
10. Barnes and Noble
11. Crossword puzzles
12. Smarmy indie rockers
13. Che Guevara t-shirts
14. Fat men with short blond hair plastered down on their head wearing blue shirts and khaki pants.
15. Ayn Rand
16. When people drown puppies
17. Making decisions by consensus
18. Most natural disasters

I woke up this morning confused after a strange dream in which I was trying to kill this werewolf that lived in some midwestern family’s basement. I was worried that I wasn’t going to be able to kill it fast enough because I had homework to do for my classes at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Time passed in a really odd manner, and the next thing I knew I was in this basement with about half a dozen werewofl corpses and no time to do my work. When I got back home there was a message on the answering machine from one of my professors informing me that I’d gone to all of the wrong classes that semester and was going to be kicked out of the program. No mention was made of the fact that I’d singlehandedly solved Iowas werewofl infestation singlehandedly.

This weekend seemed really long. It included a visit from my dear old friend Dave, who is doing well in Seattle, a meeting with Garth about Vigilance and our subsequent meeting with the head of the New York Butoh festival where we will humbly ask for interviews and pointers. There was also a very close game of scrabble, a visit to the Basquiat exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum via bicycle, a cancelled meeting of the League of Heroic cyclists, being caught out in the pouring rain twice, and watching Little Otik, the latest Jan Svankmayer flick. I’m a little “eh” about Little Otik. As great as Svankmayer’s stuff can be, his scripts could really use some tightening. It can get really fucking boring sometimes. Interestingly, I like his Faust a whole lot, and everyone seems to think that’s the worst of the lot.

The other interesting thing that happened this weekend is that Sarah and I got our tickets to Serbia. How about that, pal? Going to Serbia, going to the see the golden brass summit, with stopovers in Munich, Budapest, and Prague. Possible jaunt to Romania, although we might save that for a visit to Russia next year. A few years ago I wouldn’t have thought that I’d be travelling all over the place but here I am, travellin’ around. It’s really a lot easier than you think, the tough part is getting the money together, sez I. On the other hand, Sarah is the one with the gift of a good directional sense and planning acumen. I mostly just hang onto the passport, yell at cab drivers when they try to stiff us, and figure out how the public transit works. All pretty minor, really. If Sarah wasn’t with me, they would have found my corpse being devoured by bees in the desert of Turkey, dingos fighting over my remains.

Bees, dingos. You know, the sort of thing that can happen to you if you’re not careful.

This weekend I was hanging out with Tom and Tavo, which was a lot of fun. Tavo brought over ear candles. I don’t really know why, maybe as party favors. For those of you who aren’t in the know, ear candles are these like wax tubes that you stick in your ear. You light the other end, and the heat is supposed to suck all this crap out of your ear so that you can hear better. I was disinclined to go first, so Tavo laid down on the floor, stuffed the candle in his ear, and lit the end.

I put on the CD that Tavo had brought over, namely, a performance of Oil Can Chuck. OCC was a band consisting of Tavo, Tom, and our motocycle enthusiast friend Greg [see previous post]. Greg wrote all these down and dirty biker anthems, like Quench Your Thirst, Low Hustle, Centerline, Axe to Grind, etc. Me, Tom and Tavo wrote songs for him for fun, like Gasoline Seed, Eve of My Seed, and Slippery Ring. Pretty fucking ridiculous, but really really catchy, or at least I always thought: three 19–20 year olds with really good chops and a desire to make retarded, priapatic hard rock. The CD was live and caught them in rare form: Tavo’s guitar solos were frequent and hilarious, and Greg sounded like he was trying to simultaneously take a dump and make love to a flying bear.

I turn off all the lights in my apartment so that the only light comes from the blazing candle that Tavo has stuck in his ear. He’s lying in the middle of the floor, trying to act natural. We talk for a while about the music, and then I notice that my apartment is filling up with smoke. The ear candle, remember, isn’t really a candle, it’s like a cloth tube covered with wax. And there’s a six inch flame rising from the end of it.

“Tavo, your fucking head is on fire!” I exclaim, running around in the dark and tripping over things in order to open the windows.

“What?” Tavo says, pulling the candle out of his ear. His entire ear canal has filled up with smoke, and it’s slowly wafting out, as if his skull was filled with dry ice. He notices the smoke, puts the candle back in his ear, and starts worming across the floor towards the window, trailing smoke and flames. I’m following behind him with a window fan, trying to blow the smoke towards the open window. Tom is playing scales on my guitar and trying to pretend like none of this is going on and is isn’t actually friends with retards like myself.

The candle is eventually extinguished, the lights put back on, and the smoke dispersed. We talk as if nothing had really happened. Tavo gives me a CD of some of his new recordings, and a couple of them are really great. One in particular, written to be the ballroom music from the Shining, is just completely awesome. I think it’s called “Theme for Delbert Grady” or something to that effect. Absolutely great. Someone should give this kid a record contract.