beatnikside

I love Shiner Bock. It's my new go-to beer. I've had exactly two other go-to beers in my lifetime: Sam Adams and Schlitz. I ascribe this meager selection of fall-backs to my religious upbringing, and also because I never really had the college experience. I had a favorite gin before I had a favorite beer. Still, there's nothing like a beer to chase a burger, and the People's Pub -- my go-to bar -- has Shiner Bock on tap.

I love Seattle and the people who live in it, despite the fact that in the last bar I visited before this one, these assholes were cheering the Yankees.

On a related note, I love a bar that's perverse enough to blast ABBA records during the World fucking Series.

I love writing, though I've been kind of sucking at it lately.

I love Las Vegas, the city that gave me the roots I'd always wished for.

And I love quitting while I'm ahead.

Crossposted from beatnikside.com.

Happy Hallowe'en, fools. Before I get into ... whatever the hell it is I'm going to get into, I feel compelled to send you to my Monkey Goggles article on Halloween songs. And Gregory Crosby's wonderful Monkey Goggles piece on Halloween costumes. And this gallery of photos from a zombie dance party I attended last night. I don't know who the guy in the lucha mask is, but he's one handsome rudo.

Google-hacking aside, I don't have much to report. Publically. One of my freelance projects is pushing ever closer to a launch; another is growing in popularity by the day; yet another one is about to receive a top-to-bottom redesign. I wish I could tell you which is which, but I don't want to jinx any of them. I'm at that sensitive stage of freelance empire-building -- the stage at which just one person could lose faith or change their mind and knock one of the legs off the table. I aim to have some good news to tell you, and soon -- but I've got to keep it close to the mask right now. Er, vest.

By the way: Many thanks to Mark and Susan Shaffer for donating that wrestling mask to my wardrobe. It's become one of my most prized pieces, next to my tearaway pants. And belated thanks to Geoff Carter circa 1990, who didn't throw away that bola tie upon realizing he hadn't worn it in more than a year. That venerable accessory, older than anyone in the cast of "Twilight," really brought the whole ensemble together. Totally made up for not being able to breathe, to hear, to see or to think. Who needs to do all that dumb shit when you look this good?

Unmotivated to write today -- or more accurately, to write well. You're getting the autowriting I dish up whenever I feel like I should be writing something but lack the desire, and lucky bloody you.

I guess I could think about Halloween today, and I'm once again unprepared for it. I don't have a costume, or the vaguest notion of what kind of costume I'd like to wear to the Halloween party that I, in a moment of foolhardy optimism, recently committed to attend.

This happens every year. I always say "Ooh, next Halloween I'm gonna do this and that and the other," but I've yet to do this or that or anything at all. I could continue to lay down the usual excuses -- my face hates makeup; I was raised a Jehovah's Witness and never got used to celebrating Halloween; I simply don't like dressing up -- but this year, I'll come clean with you: My imagination doesn't work that way. I can write a sentence or take a picture that represents something beyond what is immediately visible, but I don't know how to make myself into something else and look like I believe it. Can't pretend, even for a moment, that I'm anyone or anything other than a friendly, olive-skinned meat sack.

I wouldn't really care about this but for the fact that two people near and dear to me -- my girl Lorien and my old friend Gregory -- can whip out Halloween costumes for themselves as if they were nothing. Gregory has shown up to Halloween parties dressed as a Ouija board or the entire Velvet Underground; Lorien has been Houdini, a zombie truck stop waitress and a picnic table. Both have offered many times to help me to come up with an All Hallows' Eve getup, but I've always refused. It has to come from me, and it has to be something so damned clever that I won't feel self-conscious about wearing it. Hasn't happened yet, and it's looking like it's not going to happen this year, either.

Maybe I'll go as autowriting.
 

I am a recovering addict. For several years, I carried a camera with me every single place I went, and shot photos of every person or thing that occupied dimensional space. I was ever concerned that something might happen out in the world, and I wouldn't be able to remember it without photos. In recent years I've scaled back; I now carry a point-and-shoot in my laptop bag instead of my full D80 rig, and on some choice occasions I've ventured forth without any camera on me at all. (The shitty camera phone doesn't count; I almost never use it.)

It works and it doesn't. I'm shifting the lens of my cognitive abilities back towards the retention of people, places and events through writing, which is what I'm supposed to be doing in the first place. (I only got into photography to give me something to do when my writing gets stuck.) Friends who never knew I that I made my living as a writer have begun to read the stuff I do for money, and the stream of requests to photograph weddings and the like is thinning out (though I still consider every request). I'm beginning to trust myself to remember things without photographing them from every angle.

And yet, if I hadn't had a camera with me on an August, 2001 trip to a Henderson, Nevada TGI Fridays franchise -- the last time I visited a TGI Fridays, I think -- I wouldn't have caught the pictured mini-monsoon at its peak. It lasted scarcely a minute, barely a drop of time in an ocean of memories. But I did bring the camera, and I can look at this photo and remember the sudden, violent fury of Las Vegas rainstorms -- the house-shaking explosions of thunder, the fingers of lightning digging into the earth, the streets and parking lots flooding within seconds. Seattle doesn't get rainstorms like that, and I do miss the destructive beauty of desert rains. They can even make the patio of a TGI Fridays look somehow romantic.

You get bonus points if you get the double-reference of the title.

I took this photo from the O Deck of the Space Needle about three weeks ago. It was fairly cold up there -- the top of the Needle being in Space and all -- but the skyward trip was worth it. That $25 annual pass to the O Deck has proven a shrewd investment, after all; cliched though it may sound, I benefit from the perspective that comes from leaving street level. I'm able to look down at the Seattle Times' 1000 Denny building, a tiny square on the map (not pictured in this photo), and to imagine myself into the even smaller space I occupied inside of it. That was my entire world for six years; for all that time I literally did all my creative thinking inside that box.

Today, almost a year after I was laid off in the Great (and continuing) Media Apocalpyse, the entire world is my entire world. I may be dirt-broke and scrambling, but I'm using my skills to pay the requisite bills. It's tough to get that into my head sometimes without the occasional trip into the Touristsphere.

Cross-posted from beatnikside.com. Yeah, I've become one of those cross-posting guys.
 

• Nearly two years of eating salad and hitting the gym has caused my Bono-like bubble butt to winnow away to roughly half its former size. I've still got a dynamite ass, mind you, but you have to look for it.
• The next three weeks will be packed solid with constant, exacting and even liberating work.
• Thoughts on "The Wrestler": Its estranged-daughter subplot was cliched dogshit, the sloppiest writing since "Monster's Ball." Yes, Mickey Rourke can act -- but we knew that well before he ran off to have his face rearranged by cubists. I was much more interested in Marisa Tomei's disillusioned stripper, and I found myself wishing that Randy The Ram would have his second coronary so she could finish the movie out. Maybe she could even beat the tar outta that goon with the staple gun. Wow. That was one fucked-up scene -- and the only scene in "The Wrestler" that felt like it was directed by the Darren Aronofsky who made all those Darren Aronofsky movies.
• Today I had an incredible pulled-pork sammich from a lunch truck with a snout.
• I wish I'd had the good sense to discover the Durutti Column 25 years ago.
• Have painted my fingernails gunmetal, but only on my left hand. I lack the coordination to do the other. Guess you know which hand I Wii with.