A Night to See the Stars Actually Wearing Clothes – New York Times: “Saturday night, though, was an unapologetic, hearty celebration, with a flashbulb-drenched red carpet entrance and awards presented in 104 categories, including best performances in a wide range of explicit acts and sexual positions. The more conventional were for best director, supporting actor and actress, screenplay and the most anticipated award of the evening: best feature.

That went to ‘Pirates,’ a relatively high-budget story of a group of ragtag sailors who go searching for a crew of evil pirates who have a plan for world domination. Also, many of the characters in the movie have sex with one another.”

“Aw, man… you’re not gonna check the trunk, are you?”

Cops hate it when you give them hints.

“Here comes the Calvary!”

How was I supposed to know, with her talking like that, that she was a former missionary?

Heh. Missionary.

No animals were harmed in the crafting of this tale. Except the ferret, and hell — ferrets aren’t really animals as much as stoles waiting to happen.

MercuryNews.com | 01/03/2006 | A mystery no longer?: “The Mystery Spot, for decades one of Santa Cruz’s most alluring tourist sites, bills itself as a place where the laws of physics and gravity cease to exist.

At least one scientist has attributed the weird goings-on at the site to carbon dioxide seeping up through fissures caused by a landslide or earthquake. Flying saucer aficionados postulate that aliens once left strange metal cones deep below the earth. Others theorize that the bizarre phenomena are caused by a magnetic field, a hole in the ozone layer or an ancient meteorite.”

Apparently I slept right through January, February, March. Cue Snoop, and Neely throwing open the townhouse window over a line of freshly sun-dried laundry…

The rule of three continues — Saturday night, another good friend of mine told me that her relationship has ended. Which, as with all others, is good if you see it in the right light… but regardless, it made for a strange (but worthwhile) Saturday night. Drank, got to see a few folk I haven’t in a while, got a wonderful ego boost from having four gorgeous younger women squeal (yep, squeal) my name as I walked into Bailey’s, got my tab covered for no sweat off my back, and got hit in the head with a cue ball.

Yeah, it was a good Saturday night. The kind that they should all be, I think, only with less sex and drugs than I might prefer…

It occured to me yesterday, drving past a dried-ivy covered phone pole near my parent’s house that my idea of perception (and a distinct non-existence of good and bad, beautiful and ugly, etc., except for inside the head of the viewer) is not impossible to analogize properly, as I had thought. All you have to do is think of photography (and I wish now that I had a camera, and had spent fifteen minutes taking pictures of that pole, to show that you can make any object beautiful or ugly with no special software). In any given moment, under any given conditions, any particular object can be photographed and captured as ugly or beautiful; the end result of the memory will all depend on what perspective the photographer takes.

And sometimes, making the moment beautiful (or ugly) requires a lot of work, a lot of moving around and keeping one’s eyes peeled for the unique point-of-view that will provide the right angle and combination of light and shadow and color and shape. But for any object, I guarantee: look long enough (which doesn’t require work, necessarily, as much as it requires willingness and an open mind’s eye) and you’ll find a way to see it as beautiful.

And what is life but a collection of moments, moments made up of objects?

Amazing to me that somehow, a full week into ’06, I’m still feeling healthier and more human than human than I can remember ever feeling. It’s not even euphoric anymore (although yesterday’s sundown hour, driving around in the ridiculously warm air with the windows down and a little Aurore Rien playing on the stereo was perfectly post-Apocryphal in it’s own moment). It’s simply a good, clean, dare I say normal feeling.

It’s almost like the minutes before hitting the crossroads, only calmer and with less anxiety.

I like it, myself.

Am I rubbing in the beauty of being me, or is it so far preferable to my usual (and hopefully past) Bringer of Doom and Nay that it doesn’t even matter?

Yep, I know him. Craig Smith, class of 1987, RLC. If it weren’t for this man, I’d not have discovered Metallica for another few years.

Etc. Some details are not necessary. For public consumption, at least…

And he did pretty well on Jeopardy, coming in second place to some Ken Jennings wannabe, a six-time (as of tonight) winner with over $100,000 in winnings. But man — did you really not win the question about the Cure? Or Rush? Damn, Craig…

Cameras and audio recorders. Video and still.

The idea of capturing that which we experience is fascinating to me. We don’t experience visuals in a frame by frame mode, but someone thought to capture a single moment in time (although, initially, that moment was actually a few minutes – no such thing as candids in the beginning). Along came the phonograph after that, and audio was captured. Quality improved over time, and then film cameras captured moving pictures, and then VHS, CD, DV…

But even the sci-fi worlds and their holograms are lacking in three of the five senses: there is no smell, no taste, no feel. And scientists have figured out how to break things that stimulate those senses into chemical components, and so you have air fresheners that smell like baked apples, candy that tastes like lemons, and materials that feel like whatever fruity thing you want to fill in here to finish the metaphor.

So much of what makes a memory is more than sight and sound, though. Photographs are great, and listening to tapes of myself and my kid sister when we were toddlers is fun, and watching the old videos of my first wedding and early gigs with bands is a great walk down memory lane. But not really; these things are reminders, but nothing more.

I stood outside the building today, taking a smoke break and watching the cars whip past on University. It’s very much a spring day — low 60s, an occasionally gusty dry breeze coming through city streets. The air is fairly clean, not heavy or unusally poisoned today. The sun was beginning to set — that hour before moment where you can almost look directly at the sun itself, shadows falling soft and hazy. And I pulled out my camera phone to capture it, and realized that it was pointless. Not that the sunset wasn’t beautiful, but rather that the sunset wasn’t what was worth capturing.

I can pull out pictures, and they bring back memories. Not just of people, but of specific times and places in my life. There is a series, for instance, of Maria and Cassidy; I was in the first week or two of my relationship with Maria, and Cassidy was brand new, to me and to the world. I can fill in the blanks in between those pictures, and on some levels I can recreate that hour or two, as we sat in my den in the apartment on 18th Avenue and enjoyed the summer day, Cassidy playing with the tiny Piglet doll that outsized him and crawling all through the holes in Maria’s jeans.

But as much as I can recreate about that moment — even as much emotion as I can recall, and almost feel again — it’s not the same. I do remember that, during that one hour, I had the same feeling (more than emotion, more than senses — a combination of the two, and then something more) that I had standing on the sidewalk earlier, the same as I had driving around Southside a few years ago on a perfect fall day, the same as many Mondays around the time I first met Melissa. It’s a perfect feeling — I’m not sure that I’m even capable of putting it into words. Not too much nor too little; not happy, but definitely content. It’s like a very mellow high, maybe. A feeling of promise and hope. Knowing that you’re headed in the right direction, or maybe just facing it.

These are the things that make the promise of a virtual reality so interesting to me. Sure, creating realistic environments from your deepest imaginations is intriguing, but not nearly so much as recreating those moments from your life that put you in that perfect, indefinable moment. And even if not recreating them exactly, playing with the variables until you can put together the exact combination of parts to make the puzzle fall into place at will.

Throw all the cameras and 24 tracks away. I’ll gladly give up making movies and multitracked music in return for a camera that captures every detail of a single moment in time, and allows me to revisit that moment on command.

I’ve spent the entire day reading other people’s various and sundry Top 10 lists: Top 10 CDs, Top 10 books, 10 Most Annoying People, 10 Things I Accidentally Ate… And I find myself swept up in the moment, caught up in the joy of preserving one’s memories forever by posting them for all the world to see.

Actually, I’m killing the last 30 minutes at work, and really needed something to jar me out of the non-writing funk I’ve been in lately. Whatever. Not like more than three people are reading this anyway, and two of those three are just here looking for my post on Gabby Gingras.

So at any rate, these are my 10 most memorable bits of 2005. Most memorable, because they’re what pop into my head at this moment, 3 days into 2006; in no particular order, because I hate playing favorites with my own neural connections…

10. Haver, Jen, and Christina. One was only a few days, thanks to the wonderful timing of the new year, one was a lot of fun while it lasted, and one was the source of one of the funniest things James Brown will ever say.

9. Insomiactive Productions. I’ve done freelance work for the past five years or so, but this is the first year that I’ve ever deposited more than four checks for over $2000. Good times.

Unless someone from the IRS is reading this. In which case, that was all a dream. A very, very nice dream.

8. Return of the Honda. Finally, I’m driving a car that I will enjoy again. I genuinely feel like I can contentedly drive a giant metal can with wheels, as long as it gets me from point A to point B (preferably with a decent stereo, but that’ll just get stolen within 6 months anyway). Now, though, I don’t have to, and admittedly, it’s kinda nice. It’s the first time in my 34 years that I’ve ever had to worry about a car payment, but it’s worth it, to have a car that I chose for myself.

7. Wedding Bells (Someone Else’s, Not Mine). Let’s see: groomsman for Andrew, and videographer for Dan. Oh, and I started 2005 in Cincinnati with Haver for a wedding of one of her friends. All of the weddings were actually kinda nice, especially since i never once was asked to say, “I do.” Andrew’s really stands out, because his family is wonderful peoples.

6. The Exhibit(s). Back in the studio for the first time in years (since Daniel and I stopped speaking). On stage more than a bunch (and still not enough). Chance and Eric and Carlos are the best batch of guys I could ever hope to play with; we do almost nothing of mine, and I don’t even mind, because we’re playing music for the sake of playing, instead of thinking that a bunch of 30-somethings in Birmingham might have a hope fo getting signed.

Yeah, that’s a stab at someone.

5. Acceptance. This is an end of year thing — much like the car — but maybe the one thing that will stick with me for a long time. There’s a joy to self-awareness, but sometimes even that isn’t enough. You have to be willing to not only realize things about yourself, but to accept that those things, and other situations in your life that aren’t in your power to control or change, are what they are. There was a lot of that toward the end of 2005, about Neely and Melissa and Ann, about myself and romantic entanglements, about my outlook on life (and life philosophies in general). And I suddenly felt a lot better about a lot of things.

Still not real happy about missing JESUS IS MAGIC, though.

4. Music, Books, and More. Damn, it really was good year for a lot of entertainment. Nothing life-changing in movies, but a lot of great reading (ANANSI BOYS, SOCK – though technically 2004, I read it in January — the end of the DARK TOWER series, HAUNTED) and music (ALIEN, DARK SUNS, OCTAVARIUM, REAL ILLUSIONS) kept me going all year long.

3. Vai. I think I almost managed to forget this one, somehow. I’ve gotten a chance to interview a lot of people while working for Birmingham Weekly, including Norah Jones, Tenacious D, and a billion others. In March, though, I spent an hour on the phone with Steve Vai, talking about all sorts of things (including a lot of stuff that never made it into the eventual article). And then there was the show in Birmingham in March, at the Boutwell ballroom, in front of what had to be less than 250 people. Amazing, intense; easily the best show I’ve ever seen.

2. Spreading the Disease. It was a good year for progress for me. I was published in a national magazine for the first time, saw my website business grow a lot, made three films, was accepted into Sidewalk for the fourth year in a row (six if you count scripts). I met a lot of folks, saw a million faces, and I rocked them all. In spite of all the times I felt like I was moving backwards (or staying in place, at best), I was moving forward the whole time.

1. Muckfuppet. Yeah, no one saw this coming.

The best part is that it should make my 2006 list, also. Assuming I get anything done on it this year, that is…

Without giving in to that trite and timeless concept that the first night of any given year is indicative of how the rest of the year will turn out (does a year suck if your New Year’s Eve went poorly? Not in my memory), I will say that, at the very lest, 2006 has started well. Surprisingly so. In fact, a stark turnaround from the beginning of any year previous, and a blinding contrast to anything I expected.

So, yeah, there’s that…

Have I really planned a day full of football tomorrow? Jeezus….

• There’s a huge end-of-year music review in this week’s Birmingham Weekly — some predictable, some not so much so, and some that I wrote, too.
• Looking back, I’m not sure how I feel overall about the past year. Things changed, and at the time, I thought that they were changing for the better, but now I think that they were changing to remain the same. Which is to say, all the progress I made towards the person I want to be by and large fell by the wayside this year. Familiar and comfortable patterns re-emerged, and I didn’t recognize many of them until too late.

  And so perhaps, this year, armed with awareness, I can focus on reversing the reversal of that trend. I can step away, hopefully, from the comfortable — and in this case, comfortable is not good, in the sense of what I want, at least in the long term — and back into the unknown.

  I’m not one for New Year’s resolutions, but I’m a little caught up in it this year. And so I have one — one only, and that’s all you get:

  In 2006, I’ll do it better.

• Manicures are something I could easily get behind… It’s like fucking Pringles. Or crack cocaine.
• Today, next to last day of the year, finally felt like a vacation. And a spring one, at that — driving through Homewood to Neely’s house, I was so strongly reminded of another place — Chicago, to be specific, but it could have been any other place, a better place, somewhere that I belonged.

  I feel more like myself today than I have in a very, very long time. And I think that maybe that translates into knowing that things are turning around, that good things are on the way.

• Out of all the things in the world that I could choose to have go right, the car was definitely the fortunate thing to fall into place. I still have plenty of places in my life that can use better things, but none of them are holding me down or back. And the car — well, it’s nice to know (perhaps even tempting) that I can hit the road at any time, and head to wherever it is that I’m headed.

  Happy New Year to everyone. Be safe headed into 06.