Poking around the ‘analytics’ I discovered that while fighting pigdogs in Boston in October, I got plugged in…….wait for it……..
Hahahahahaha. Awesome. I’m wedgd in between a piece on BSG’s Razor (oh yeah), and a piece on Peter Jackson (less exciting). Kidding aside, thanks to Whitney Matheson who does UT’s ‘Pop Candy’ blog.
That’s 83!
This is the 82nd dirtbag comic, done in just about two years. I’d like to get up to 104 by early January, so I’ve got a lot to do. Hope they’re good.
Couple quick notes before I run out for errands.
I’m completely obsessed ‘Peacebone’ by Animal Collective. The video is amazing too.
I know I’ve plugged this in the past, but Daytrotter keeps putting up great sets by touring indie acts, including a new one by Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, and BTW thanks to Owen for plugging my interview with him in his blog.
Last randomness, I can’t describe how excited I am for this book to come out. Dean Wareham’s pretty great. Oh, and he did an interview too (with his partner Britta Phillips)!
The cover of the book has been released:
I’m sitting in my brother’s room in stately Cortlandt Manor, NY where I’ve spent pretty much the whole day doing next to nothing, which is nice.
I’ve been thinking about doing a string of pieces on best friends, sort of the way you see presidents laid out on a poster in grade school, you know:
George Washington
1789-97
John Adams
1797-1801
etc. etc.
So I wrote up a couple hundred words on one of them, from middle and high school. It’s not finished or anything. Maybe think of it as a study for a later work.
“Hey, Alan?”
“Yeah?”
“I have kind of a weird question. I get what you’re supposed to do and when, but, um, what do you DO with your legs, uh, during?”
“Well, if I’m on top, they help with balance. If she’s on top, then they just sort of lay there I guess.”
“Cool, thanks”
“Sure. But, I promise you won’t really be thinking about your legs when it happens.”
I was two months odler than John, almost to the day, and he perceived this accident of fertilization timing as brining about some type of wisdom in me, though it certainly did not.
It’s true that things seemed to happen to me first. My parents break up foreshadowing his, my dating (and subsequent discovery of sex) preceding his by a few months to me always seems accidental, yet allowed me to be a sort of guinea pig of adolescence for him.
We feigned a cynicism we hadn’t yearned, yet would some day both grow into like a hand me down winter coat. It takes great chutzpah to yearn for the past at fifteen. We had that chutzpah.
Walking down the mainstream of our 980 person hometown on Christmas day, we romanticized the past and spoke of the commercialization of Christmas. His family being more well off than mine, I silently questioned his commitment to anti-commercialization.
We were the stuff of sappy movies. My family was poor, but had lots of warmth and love. My mom was friends with all my friends, and we’d sit around the kitchen table eating her lasgna and talk politics. His was a family of means, and we’d go to his house after school to eat the microwave nachos forsaken by my family while playing his Nintendo in an empty house.
We modified the games to suit our mood. The best being our version of ‘Duck Hunt’ we affectionately dubbed, ‘Kennedy and Oswald”. One of us would have the gun attempting to shoot down the ducks. Only, in our version the gunman was Lee Harvey Oswald and the ducks were John F. Kennedy and Gov. Connelly. The other man was the secret serviceman whose job it was to keep the gunman from hitting the target.
It was combination video game and wrestling match, and in this way, we predated the Wii by decades. We could be very rich men if we had tried at all.
After awhile, he began dating a popular girl, and the sex question became more frequent. One day, driving back to his house after school, he shyly asked if I had a problem keeping condoms on.
I asked as gently as I could what he meant, not wishing to embarrass him.
“Well, every time I get in, they just sort of break off.”
At this point, I realized my best friend had a giant penis. We went to the drugstore a couple towns over to purchase the xtra large Trojans so that he could avoid becoming a high school dad. He was too embarrassed to go in for the transaction, and I gladly volunteered my services knowing it would likely be my first and last chance to legitimately buy the XL kind.
In what’s becoming a regular feature here on Dirt’s funnies, I have to share the myriad ways people get here this week.
My favorite, dedicated to the fine folks at Fuckyouistan:
“malkmus is a dick”
In the awkward, ‘how on earth did THIS phrase lead people here?’, category:
fucking picture
time to fuck
Then from the humorous files:
life as a phd student
dirt on bard college
Cheers.
A couple weeks ago, I wrote a love letter to my room and the items I keep with me. This is the flipside of that story. I collect people too, and some are outlined below. This is less a story, and more some late night ramblings, intended as a love letter to myself between the ages of 14 and 17, and the people who populated my life then. I want to take a quick moment here, and say a quick hello, thank you, and I’m sorry to the (at least) two people in the story who will read this. Hello. Thank You. I’m Sorry.
xoxo
It was a simple room, on the second floor of the student center. Outfitted with perhaps a dozen or more of the ‘comfy’ chairs you find in any doctor’s office waiting rooms, and another eight to ten couches of a similar variety. There were windows on two sides, and a couple of tables. In total, it was perhaps thirty five feet long and twenty five feet wide.
We would gather there once a week, or once every other week. Sometimes to talk, sometimes to play, and sometimes just to sit. Usually just five or seven of us, depending on whether we had access to Donovan’s parent’s van, or Adam’s dad’s Caddy, which we later destroyed, but that’s another story.
We would talk of shows we’d seen or wanted to see. We’d discuss and practice plays. We’d talk seventeen year old philosopher talk, the best I’ve even known, or hope to. We’d make forts of the cushions, and play freeze tag.
We were children. We were adults. We didn’t realize we were either. We just knew we loved each other. We knew we were different, and we reveled in it while we bemoaned it.
There was Adam. My best friend, two months my junior, tall and lanky. Adam took up smoking in the hopes that a reversible deer hunting cap would fall magically from the heavens upon his head. Adam and I wrote skits and drew comics. We hated the small town, and dreamt of the wry sophistication that always seemed just out of reach.
The last I heard from Adam, he was applying for jobs with the Department of Defense and the CIA. He has gone bald, and for a period wrote sarcastic columns for a small humor website in his free time.
There was Donovan. Two years older than us, with long stringy blonde hair and Quaker parents. Truly the only one of us who came from a traditional parents. When we observed his parents being sweet to each other the rest of us looked on with jealousy and bemusement.
Donovan now lives in the East Bay, and does some kind of computer consulting. I last saw him in 1998 or 1999, and he was appalled at how much money he was earning doing something he enjoyed.
Occasionally, his sister Sarah would tag along. She had beautiful eyes that seemed full of questions, and I once kissed her, sweetly and awkwardly, after a sleepover at her house. We both got nervous, so went into the kitchen and ate giant hunks of the mozzarella cheese delivered by the co-op her parents belonged to. Sarah is married now, and seems happy. She was smiling in the wedding pictures on FlickR.
There were the Darby sisters, Sarah and Beth. Sarah, soon to be the valedictorian, was the most interesting to have ‘intellectual’ conversations with. She would ask questions and poke holes in theories. Once, in the back of a pick up truck, I explained the plot of Slaughterhouse-5 to her.
When I lived in California, I looked her up at Stanford. She was getting a PhD in history, and had the shell-shocked look and demeanor of someone who had taken far too much LSD, except she never did drugs. Her heart had been broken, and she hadn’t recovered. We said we’d get together in the city, but never did, and I moved a year or two later.
Her sister Beth was another story. Full of life, Beth loved the stage, and acted every chance she got. Years later, she and I would get together for a bit, but I would fall for someone else, and break her heart as a result. I still feel badly about that. I cared for her deeply, just not enough. I believe she’s living in Baltimore.
And there was Julie. Julie who changed her name to Julia went she went to college, and has never been the same to me since. Julie with shoulder length dark brown hair and big glasses. Julie with delicious handwriting and great shoes. Julie, my first real love.
When everyone was in the room, we would sneak off. We’d go on tours of the rest of campus. We’d find open buildings and explore the hallways, making out on every floor. One night, very early on, before we were together, walking across campus after a film, she said her hands were cold. I suggested she could put them in my pockets to keep them warm. Her left hand glided into the right pocket of my overcoat where my warm hand was waiting, and our fingers entwined themselves.
Her fingers were so long and slender, and terribly cold. I lightly squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back. I swooned. She swooned.
Despite Julie being my first most everything, the pieces remembered today with the most sweet tenderness are the hand holding, and the hallway making outing.
I last saw Julie in Berkeley in 2003 or so. Her husband had written a book, and was on tour. She flew out from Brooklyn to see him on the coast and catch up with old friends, me being one of them. I went to the reading, which was good, and then we all went to Long Life Veggie House on University. I sat next to Julie, and failed to notice that everyone else called her Julia.
A dozen or more people sat at the table – but the entire night my attention could not be shaken from her. We laughed like in the old days. Big, hearty guffaws of true laughter and joy, and I had the feeling neither of us had laughed that well for a while, but I didn’t bring that up.
There were others who would come to the room with us. There was Dollie, who would get so serious, and so intense. We watched a thousand movies together and dissected each one, finishing each other sentences whether discussing David Lynch or Alfred Hitchcock. And she was always smarter than me.
Living in New York City now, she has taken on the role of wizened old friend, and I get excited every time I travel to that fair city, knowing I’ll get some Dollie time.
There was Emily, whose father had been our seventh grade social studies teacher. A few years younger than most of us, we were nonetheless good friends, Emily and I. Turning each other on to new music we’d discovered and making out between CD changes, she was someone who FELT music in the same way I had. She could describe the tingling of a bass line up her spine with a clarity that gave me shivers.
After a ten year absence, largely my fault, Emily is back. A teacher now, married and with child, her smile remains the same, at least in the pictures I’ve seen, as wide as the Mediterranean, and as lovely as ever.
We’d gather in the room above the student center, at Colgate University, to talk, to sit, and to play. We’d talk about music. We’d pour over linear notes and chord changes. We’d sing at the top of our lungs, and sit silently.
We’d talk about our divorcing parents, our dead parents, our fucked up siblings, and each other. We’d ask the big questions. Hours poured over what happens when you die, days on The Stranger by Camus.
We were an amorphous group. Sometimes two of us would go, and sometimes a dozen or more. There were never drugs or alcohol. We’d pick up a half gallon of strawberry milk, a half gallon of chocolate milk, and a box of cookies, and we’d sit together. And it was fucking beautiful, no matter who was there.
Ok, I’m really sorry about this cartoon, but I found this gun ad from back in the day and this cartoon sort of came out of it. For the record, I’m against guns, and the ad was way worse than any comic I could ever possibly make.
no work, no work please!
rather write and play music
oh well, phone bill due.
