n'est pas

Last Weekend, Part One:

"You should've asked him to play that Morrissey song where Morrissey goes 'aaaaaaaahaaaaaaaaaaaah.' You know, the one with homosexual undertones?"
"Yes, let's please analyze some Morrissey lyrics. He's such a great poet."
"This time: from a Hegelian standpoint."
"Lacanian."
"Hegelian."
"LACANIAN!"
"HEGELIAN!"
"What the fuck are you guys talking about?" Voice 3: backseat right.
"Somebody failed to read up on philosophical side-effects."
"Yeah, what's your problem?"
Right now I'm falling more in love with the Magnetic Fields, thinking about Napoleon in rags and the pointlessness of long walks. Something about summarizing a weekend makes me shift to storybook expatriates, makes me want to be Lady Brett Hangover in San Sebastian. Minus the part about being a giant whore.
It's really a perfect book, isn't it?
Sometimes I think with British accents (of the Anna Wintour variety). Were I to describe the past weekend in said accent:
"It was quite odd, don't you think?"
"Not that anything physically happening was odd, mind you, it was simply a feeling that perpetuated throughout the entirety of the weekend."
"Much like an oddly-shaped grey stormcloud."
"Indeed."

Hot tea is only good in my head.

Honestly, does anyone really like house music? I don't mean as in giving the ol' one-two lindy hop on the dance floor. I mean as in sober, middle-of-the-day fluorescent office lights like it so much they crank it on I-tunes.
If so, are these the same people who allow Ashton Kutcher to be in motion pictures?
It's me at eight listing my favorite genre as "when I play a canned beat on my 1985 Casio keyboard and then I hit one note. Yeah, what that does." And while that is not (yet) an actual genre at Tower, as a kid I used to just speed up the beats (primarily samba) until they were unintelligible. If I had known I was dabbling in rudimentary jungle I would have ceased immediately and returned to dabbling in rudimentary Radiohead lyrics.

Five Things On Which I Blame 40-Year Old Cokeheads
1. House music.
2. Comeback tours.
3. Business Casual
4. Grape Nuts (for tasting like evil)
5. The "crap" portion of your evening.
Formosa, being the very opposite of me, thrives on these Buckhead leftovers. The dregs of urban middle-class Atlanta filtering down and landing in a giant pile of 1992.
When house music is not altered for a visit by indie scenesters, the scenesters chat up two hours of:
"This sucks."
"Yeah, there's nothing good about this place."
"There's basically nothing that doesn’t suck about it."
"This music sucks."
"This music especially sucks."
"Who listens to this?"
"People who live in a giant void of sucking."
"I think Conor Oberst lives there."
"Totally, Conor Oberst sucks."
"Hey, can you watch my Jack and Crystal Pepsi? I'm going to see if any 40 year old cokeheads dropped anything in there."
There's nothing quite like a runway show in a location ill-suited for a runway show. If I ever have a fashion show (Camp Basement: the scarf.) here in Atlanta, it will actually be in East Berlin.
Upon initial arrival at Formosa the only other person I knew in any capacity was Brian Parris, and after discussing how much the music sucks and sleeping patterns, the conversation dissolved into vaguely amusing head-bobbing. I was going to make a comparison to the IT mind-control planet of "A Wrinkle In Time," but everyone knows that mixing metaphors with sarcasm causes kittens to explode.
Walking the fine line between decent conversation-
"Hey, before you wax yourself too far off track, why on earth are you using Brian Parris’s full name? I smell impending legal doom."
"It's in the contract."
"I don't remember that part."
"Yeah, it's between 'Paris, France' and 'Parrris, Saskatchewan.'"
"But why?"
"You're seriously asking 'why?' in the middle of one of my stories? I just do what the British voices tell me to."
"What happens if you don't use his full name?"
"I don't know. Let's find out, shall we?"
Walking the fine line between decent conversation and annoying babble is tricky, and I tend to talk in excess so rarely that when I do I assume it annoys everyone in the room I know well enough to annoy, and has the capacity to become annoyed, assuming their part of the conversation is not even more annoying, which also assumes they are dominating the conversation. Which is probable, but not an absolute. Assuming this corollary contains no more than two constraints, we have to assume that the correct answer is: B) Brian.
(ANVIL FROM SKY)
"I guess that's what happens."
"Let me try!"
"Whatever."
"Brian."
(NOTHING HAPPENS)
"Nothing happened."
"That's because I was referring to that other kid Brian."
"What other kid Brian?"
"You know. When someone asks where Brian is and you say 'Brian Parris?' and they say 'no, that other kid Brian.'"
"A different Brian? Are you trying to outwit my subconscious by not referring to the agreed-upon Brian?"
(PIANO FROM SKY)
"This is not sketch comedy, dammit!"
(ACCORDIAN BODY DISCHORD, LAUGH TRACK)
"I'm leaving for Lenny's now, and I'm taking my disjointed narrative, ill-advised metaphors, characters introduced out of nowhere, and self-deprecation with me. And you know what else I'm taking? The giant pop-literary cliche that was that last sentence."
(MEANWHILE, SOMEWHERE NEAR EAST ATLANTA, A BESPECKLED DRIVER FELL FOR THE OL' FAKE PAINTED TUNNEL GAG AND PLUMMETED INTO THE CANYON. ALL THAT WAS LEFT WAS A VOLVO-SHAPED HOLE IN THE GROUND. PLANS ARE UNDERWAY FOR AFTERPARTY IN VOLVO-SHAPED HOLE.)

Part two coming soon, starring Rippy as "Van Helsing!"
Seriously, he has Swiss Army Knives for hands.