Jar of Vaseline and a duck. Oh he was his man and he was doing him long.
It's been a hard week. Rough, work and child, homework and actual no foolin' IT person work. Getting little sleep. My mom yesterday told me there's a woman she works with, she's 32 at least, that she wants to set me up with. You see, her husband died of cancer a year ago, leaving her with a 11 year old son.....

Let's stop there with what's wrong with that. Ok, I can't. For one, it's been 10 months of Paxil for depression and anxiety that I'm coming off of and heading into the holidays, the thing that trigged those horrible panic attacks. Those were fun to try and describe to my dad.
"Panic attack, like what?"
I flail my arms around in the air as I speak, "Waking up, doing this and feeling like you've just run a marathon and pissed yourself at the same time, only you haven't." I Keep going with my arms. "You are doing this, in your sleep and now you are awake."
"Well, why were you doing that?"

You know, that's the logic that makes sense and sent me to therapy.

Ok, back to the reasons a blind date with two recently single parents right before the holidays which lead to the depressing winter. Then there's the fact that the Paxil, and the fact it made me so much more mellow, kept me from the gym for, oh, like most of the year. Turns out, when you stop drinking like that and go for a while not doing it after being a alcoholic for like twenty years it makes you obsessive in other areas, like doing two ninety minute workouts on weekend days and just like two hours a night three times during the week. Stop doing that while starting Paxil and your metabolism gives you the bird.

It is the word, after all.

I mean, I do want to start dating again, just nothing serious, you know. I'm looking more for a cute nerd with a rack and a clever smile that likes to pretend to be a super-villainess in her spare time, tight outfit and all. No shared property or commitments, just fun till it stops being fun then see if we can be friends.

But I digress by starting a whole different post that I wanted to do later. As it turns out, and this is kinda funny, talking to people and meditating and taking meds leads you to want to talk more for me, to myself and others. And as that turns out, talking can be just as good as blogging.

No offence, or should that be no offence???

It's been a banner year all around here for me, spiritually. Went to my high school's 20th reunion. I can't believe how we drank even back then and how some people don't change and others change horribly. There are couple that make me think but most are like fifty now, somehow, or are the exact same fucking person.

As we sat down to eat at the reunion I put my right hand on the hand of the person to my right and then my left on the person to my left, looked in the circle of eyes and said, "Now who's going to say grace to Baal?"

It didn't go over big. I think they actually saw it coming. My how it's been a year to see how I changed and still haven't....and I will never grow so old again.

So, why am I here. Well for one, over on my myspace I blogged how I had to explain that you don't vote against a person because they are black. Were I more sarcastic and V able to get a tasteless joke better the story would probably end, "Well, he's a nigger but he's a high falootin' nigger. So he's ok."

My ex boss, the ex CFO, and the whole CSR department I guess overheard me relating that story over the phone. That very line and people looked at me like I was serious about any topic where I used 'falootin' in a sentence. I looked at them like they were looking at me with a stink eye.

Anywho......

That's not even near what prompted me to get on my ass and post. It's been a long week, like I said. Listening to my MP3's while playing Xbox. I have more Glenn Campbell then I would have cared to guess, which is a good thing.

So, Rhinestone Cowboy comes on and for some reason my mind is having one of those flashbacks to a place and time that feels so real and now, even though it's decades away and probably more my memory then actual events but such is reality, I've come to learn in meditation.

It's senior year. All of us that were either in bands or were just real guitar players that jammed signed up for, get this, a new course offering called Intro To Folk Guitar. How could we pass it up? It was five of us male guitar guys and like three funny looking, hippy chicks. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not going to lean towards ugly because not only did they each seem to be really nice chicks they had great potential and probably turned out hot, as ugly ducklings always do. I probably should have been nicer though. When someone called my house after graduation and asked to speak with my mother, I figured it was a good chance it was one of those girls because I just wasn't nice in an effort to keep my distance.

The call went something like, "Is Mrs. Mastakowski there?"
"This is she."
"Your son is an asshole."
{click, dialtone}

However, let it be said in defense of those girls that it was a very looong list of girls that I had that would call and do that. I really did have it coming in just that sort of way and, no, I don't mean it in a romance, fuck em and leave em, sort of way. More in general I was a a-hole, j-off and d-bag all wrapped into one at times, as is part of my wily charms, so there might have been guys calling to do the same thing to my dad.

Back to folk guitar. It was a snooze-fest. The teacher made damn sure it wasn't going to turn into us playing whatever we wanted to play. It was going to be strictly folks songs of any type. You know, songs like Yesterday by The Beatles and Ring of Fire and Frankie And Johnny.

Yeah, I know. The schmuck didn't know a folk song if it sang up to him and bit him squaw on the asshole.

Which NOW brings me to my reason for posting. Sheesh. The true meat of what I wanted to get out on digital paper. We're sitting there the one morning, it was a first period class. Teacher hands out sheet music, it's assumed we know how to read music though some of us do not so much that it leads to them transferring after a quarter. Some people just wanted to be Eddie Van Halen no matter how little fun it could be at times. These weren't complicated pieces of music. That is to say, I can read music up to a point. From like high up on the bars to about the low e and single notes only please.

As our foggy heads and squinting eyes are trying to make heads or tales of the piece on the first run through we're singing along. It's a monotonous monster of a song. Lots of the same note.
Duh duh duh duh duh duh da duh.....duh duh duh duh da da duh duh.......
It's named like Fluer deux Le or some French shit. What was it? Vache de Garcon de la pierre brillante, that's it.

So I get to the bridge and I just bust out singing, loudly, not even conscious that I'm doing it, "It's been a road of compromising......on the road to my horizon! But I'm gonna be where..."

"This is fucking Rhinestone Cowboy!?"
"Matthew! Language!"
"Sorry. Sorry but this is still Rhinestone Cowboy. Come on!"
It would be known that would be the day we all snapped, all of us male guitar players. The guy to the right of me actually had a prototype and sponsorship with Ibanez. If guitar playing didn't work out, which it had to because even though he really couldn't read music this guy had perfect pitch and could walk up and play any instrument, his dad owned this chain of business electronics supply stores. He was already working there as a manager.

Fuck, this guy was so good that he watched the teacher trying to play something on the piano once that I remember. I say try because the teacher was your typical music teacher in that he was either a woman, gay or had a gimp something. This guy had a gimp hand. Made it hard to play things like, oh say, the guitar. All my male music teachers I remember by their gimp parts: gimp eye, gimp hand, gimp leg (names of a grunge band, rap act, and porno, respectively).

He's trying to play some slow piece that isn't supposed to be slow and feels all proud, gets up and goes to head to his office. Rob, the perfect pitch guy, walks over, starts tapping his feet and breaks into that Darkside Of Town song from that one movie with the Beaver Brown Band.
"Dude", I say, "Isn't that the gay ass song from that movie?"
"Yeah, had it going through my head all day and had to get it out." He says in a way that makes you realize he meant he had to play it for the first time after going over it in his head to the point of exhaustion.

The teacher just lowered his head and looked like he wanted to cry, not much unlike Tom Dooley.
/
"Come on dude! This isn't even folk music!" we said back at our mutiny. The girls just got quiet and nervous, giggling a lot.
"You weren't even looking for folk music. You just are using French sheet!"
"Oh please, let us play some metal. There are some really nice, gothic sort of pieces Metallica do."
I chimed back in, "Or Great White."

This got stares from my companions.

I shake them off, "What makes you think this is folk music, anyways?"

"Look, I've got a masters......"
"in music or whatever, we know." We all three say at the same time. We did that a lot the guys of us that were left. Mostly because it was before 8:30 and we were stoned off our asses. I mean, really baked. It was the only way we could make it through class at the end. There was such temptation to drink but that would just be a harder crash or we wouldn't stop and go to school, which would have been real bad.

"You have a masters. Ha!" I had finally had enough and wanted to go for the throat.
"I do!"
"And I'm stealing cummerbunds out of the band supply room but that doesn't make me a member that's ready to march!"

This silenced everyone. Yes, it was true. I was the one stealing all the band apparel. I had so many clip ons and cummerbunds that my car was full of them. At one point a girl I was giving a ride to noticed how many were in my car and asked if I had some sort of thing for girls in band uniforms.

I just paused, not knowing what answer to give. It wasn't the reason I had them but I was suddenly turned on by the thought of undressing a band chick that I couldn't pass it up. I said, "Why, you into that? Cause that would be hot."

"Besides", I said inserting my foot deeper, "Some of those are men's garments back there."

Come to think of it, that chick was also on the list of girls that might have placed that later phone call to my mom.

It wouldn't be the first time I came on strong to the level of a pizza man in a porno. "Did you say pass the salami?" {zipppppppppp} I swear, I'm glad I don't drink just cause of that and the reunion. It was an open bar. I've grown up and become more immature at the same time. I weighed 150 lbs back then. I could reach into a milk bottle and pull out and egg, if you know what I mean. Add alcohol to that and I would have been telling women, "That's right! You don't remember me but you were a cheerleader. I used to bate to you all the time! You had the greatest legs!"

I would have thought confessing while questioning my teacher's educational record would have gotten me in trouble but, again, my verbal rebellion was so over the top that I think the teacher would have just rather we all forget the whole thing rather then have to repeat what I said over and over as if it were true.

Not to mention, at that point I would have been calling him a gimp right in front of the principal. God, I can be a real asshole sometimes.