207

Details eventually…

Best,

E

Ain’t I a stinker…

I don’t know what exactly it says about our economy, but I’m pretty sure it says something that for the first time in my life i’m seeing commercials for strip clubs.  is it possible that we’re so poor that even naked girls are something we have to be convinced to spend our money on?

If this is the case then i demand that the government makes nudity tax deductible.  Or give each family a five thousand dollar tax credit for lap dances.  Now that’s a stimulus package.
See what i did there?

Package is a euphemism for penis.
Socialize boobies and you won’t get called a Communist, no, no.  You will be called a “hero.”

Or possibly a perv.

But back on point, what’s worse is that the tag for this one particular strip club is “the hottest girls and the coldest drinks.” Now, ‘hottest girls’ i’ll give them, that’s a selling point even if it’s a blatant lie judging by the advert, but ‘coldest drinks?’ At some point don’t they freeze at which time they are no longer drinks so much as liquersycles?  And at some point after that, as they approach absolute zero, aren’t they just effing dangerous to hold?  I like a drink to be cold, but ‘cold’ in and of itself is enough for me.  I do not require a beverage to break any kind of temperature records.

It was way, way clever the way they worked those floating opposites, though.  Hot and Cold in the same sentence!  We haven’t seen genius like that since joint cream!

This commercial, by the way, is so uncomfortable that it makes the place look A LOT less like a strip joint and more like a tweener church social with the guys and the girls awkwardly hugging separate walls and hoping no one asks them to dance.  And “dance” in this isntance means sway slightly from side to side.  The body language of each of these girls is clearly saying, to use a sports metaphor, “I don’t want the ball.”  Actually, maybe it is like a strip club.

See what I did there?

In other news I visited the set of a teen-soap tonight and have come away with a stark realization: I could step on every one of them.  These were tiny people shuffling about on tiny feet in tiny clothes.  I fear i may still have some Minkus on the bottom of my shoe.  And props, by the way, if you got that reference.  No matter what set I visit, though, or what redonkulousness encapsulates that specific experience, I always come away reminded that making moving pictures sure as hell beats working for a living.

The last thing I’ll mention tonight is this: Is it just me or are Wil Wheaton and Screech looking an awful lot alike these days?

Maybe it’s just me.

Get a beverage of your choice and please don’t look for me on broadcast television in a few weeks. Seriously.

E

you seem finally happy…

Until tonight I hadn’t done a crossword in more than a month.  I’m a little sad to report that in that time I have clearly gotten much dumber.  I did two tonight and it took me fully thirty minutes to do a Tuesday.  A fucking Tuesday!  I’m not a dude who tries to speed through the things, it’s meant to be relaxing and fun not P.E. class for my brain.  There are no small blocks to collect from one end of a line and return to another.  No fat people screaming at me or blowing whistles or looking at the high school girls in ways that make me uncomfortable, but when a Tuesday takes that long it’s a little like having difficulty eating.

And I don’t mean like a psychological disorder so all you anorexics and bulimics can stop composing the hate mail in your fucked up, disordered little heads…or maybe not at this point…

But what I mean is it’s like sitting down at the dinner table with a steak in front of you and you’ve got the knife and fork and you’re hungry but that’s about as far as you can sort shit out.  And an hour later you have steak all over you face and all over the dining room, the plates are broken the candles are melted to the ceiling, the cat has drowned in A1 sauce and you’ve lost an eye.

It’s a bit like that.

In other news, the weather has turned on me like a girl I’ve cheated on.  It’s gotten cold.  And it’s not like I didn’t see this coming, but it still kind of sucks.  See the way I weaved that shizz?

What doesn’t suck, though, is Buffy the friggin’ Vampire Slayer.  I lurved that show back in the day and I’ve fallen in lurve all over again.  After my beloved Tina Fey divorces me I’m totally marrying Buffy Summers.

Not Sarah Michelle Gellar, mind you, no no, I’m going to marry (and surely soon divorce) a fictional character.  I’m pretty sure I’ve got the game to make shit like that possible.  I’m pretty sure I’m just that good.

Anyway, if you confer with your friends I think you’ll find that 9 out of 10 of them agree that this has been a blog.

Get a beverage of your choice and bundle up,

E

 this is all making the kind of sense that’s not…

There were two 207 weddings last week.  Two opportunities to celebrate the awesomeness of my friends.  So I bombed down from the beach and set up in my old house in Asheville for a few days thanks to the kindness of my filthy assistant and her Haitian dude.

 

The first wedding was for our beloved Bru. 

 

 

She had a lovely ceremony with a mariachi band (with a likely drunk trumpet player) wandering around celebrating how very Mexican my favorite little Puerto Rican is. It was a very nice night filled with honouring a beautiful bride, hanging with some long lost members the scoobie-gang and lots of drinking which was only a little hampered by the fact that I snorted 1,000 miligrams of vitamin C just before the ceremony which hurt A LOT and resulted in sneezing little citrus clumps all night.

 

See, I felt a cold coming on so I wanted to take some Vitamin C but for whatever reason I ended up choking on it and shooting the pill up into my sinuses.  Like when you laugh until milk comes out of your nose?  Well, it was like that except instead of coming out the large pill just sat inside my sinuses making me feel like an opossum family had taken residence in my skull, slowly dissolving and being jettisoned in little packets of blood and clumps that looked a little too much like goat cheese.

 

Good times.

Despite all this, though, I really did enjoy her wedding and most importantly she seemed very happy and excited to start a new chapter in her tiny Cuban life.

 

So mazel tov, Bru.  I hope you find all kinds of happiness as a wife.

 

The second nuptial was just yesterday and it tethered my boy Xoph to his beautiful bride Casey for an eternity or until she gets sick of him, whichever happens first.

 

 

I was a groomsman in this wedding and being a groomsman is kind of weird because you don’t really do anything.  Before the wedding we’re meant to keep the groom calm I’m told, but Xoph is a zen motherfucker and head over heals and back again over his chick, so we weren’t really needed.  Basically what you end up doing is standing right next to the groom during the ceremony and looking hard.  I began to see my role as that of wedding secret service.  If any ex boyfriends or ex girlfriends or toddlers had tried to rush the gazebo I would have tackled the fuck right out of them.

 

I was also asked to give a toast at the wedding which I was happy to do.  I worked on the toast for many, many, many hours, trying to figure out what was best to say and how to most succinctly say it.  As I’m sure you all know, I’m not really into the whole brevity thing, but I didn’t want to go on and on.

 

I spent hours on this thing.

 

On the 45 minute drive to the ceremony I previewed my toast for my special lady friend and her reaction was so destructive to my fragile artists ego that I lost all confidence in the damn thing and ended up more or less winging it.

 

But it seemed to go all right.  Both sets of parents complimented me profusely, the wedding photographer said he’d done 52 weddings this year and mine was by far the best toast, the lady who hated the first one said it was great and most importantly Xoph and Casey seemed into it.  So I guess it all worked out in the end.

 

Hell, maybe the OG toast would have crashed and burned on the rest of them just like it did for the girl.

 

Whatever the case, I wrote it so I’m including it in this blog now.  This is taken mostly from the earliest, longest draft and I’ve also gone back and inserted one of the stories I told off the cuff for those who weren’t there.

 

It ain’t short and I don’t know how many of you will care, but I’m posting this mostly for Xoph whom I love very dearly and for whom I want nothing, nothing, nothing but the best in life.

 

Begin toast:

 

I met Christopher “Xoph-daddy” Arbor/Ansaldo in a poetry class in college and when first I saw him sitting in a desk along the east wall of a second story room in Karpen Hall, fondly, sweetly I remember thinking “That dude’s head is enormous.”  As I recall I spent about half of that first class wondering if Haberdasheries came in “big and tall” varieties and the other half laughing to myself about how haberdashery is a funny word as small candies and pieces of chalk would occasionally find their way into orbit around his skull.

 

I didn’t become friends with Christopher until about a year later, though, when we took an Advanced Fiction Writing Class together.  When we arrived for that first class Christopher was already about halfway through a pretty great novel that he had been working on for years and I was about halfway through a bottle of Johnny Walker Black that I had been working on for about an hour.

 

He and I first became friends due largely I think to the fact that I quite fancied his book and also to the fact that I hated everyone else in that class.  It’s rare that I’m comfortable using the phrase “any port in a storm” to describe a dude, but that’s just the kind of special my boy Xoph is.

 

It was in the few minutes after each class as I walked to my apartment and Xoph to his car that we really came to heart each other though, I think.  As we discussed the greatness of The Counting Crows, whether Kevin Smith was still a relevant voice in pop culture, how no matter how many times it happens it’s always awesome when Batman kicks the crap out of Superman and so on.  And it was also in these minutes walking home one night that a host of six headed pterodactyls swooped down from the sky and tried to carry me off so that I could be fed to their young.  But Xoph-daddy leaped in from I don’t know where, looked one of the creatures square in the eye and said, “You were put here to test my faith!” then fought them off with a loose leaf notebook and saved my life.

 

And that’s when I knew he and I would be BFF’s.

 

But I’m sure you’ve all heard that story a dozen times by now.

 

I’ll take another aside now to tell you all one of Christopher’s favorite stories about those days.  See, I’m not what you would call a people person.  And it happens that I often have difficulty hiding my displeasure.  There was a particular student in that class whose name I won’t reveal that I fairly routinely begged to stop writing forever because she was killing America and my will to live.  I would tell her that I’ve left more interesting stories in my toilet and insist that English could not possibly be her first or even second language and often inquire about the specific heights from which she was surely dropped as a child.  Christopher, however, as is so often the case, was much more even tempered with her and offered repeatedly to help her learn how to start a new paragraph when a new person speaks, or why it’s a bad idea to shift POV in the middle of a sentence and all the other things she should have learned in the fourth grade, while I’m in the background screaming “You’re killing America!”  So cut to a year or so later, Xoph and I are getting a pizza and in walks this particular student.  Screw it, her name is Molly.  Anyway, Molly walks in with her girlfriend and she sees us and her eyes light up and this Cheshire cat grin slides up her face and she turns to her girl and says, “This is the guy I was telling you about.” And Xoph gets this little twinkle in his eye because he knows I’m about to get the karmic bitch-slap I deserve and Molly points right at Xoph and says, “That’s the mean one!” Have you ever seen a water balloon popping in super slow motion?  That’s kind of what Xoph’s head did in that moment.

 

 

 

Pop.

 

But the fact of the matter is, I am the mean one, I’m a bastard and Xoph-Daddy is one of the finest people I’ve ever known.  I was born without an angel to sit on my shoulder and talk me down from the cacophonous lunacy of my instincts, so Xoph does it for me.  And through many years and a hundred score pieces of generously crafted awesome, no one has ever proven themselves to be a more stalwart, selfless or kind friend.  He is constantly pushing me to do more and to do better and I will be forever in his debt for his guidance and friendship.  And this is a sentiment I can only imagine rings true for nearly every person he comes into contact with.  If you find Christopher in your life for whatever reason and don’t come away with at least the desire to be a better person, you weren’t paying attention.

 

When I see Casey doing the same for him, when I see her pushing him to be just a little better, I’m once again struck by the remarkable substance of their romance.

 

It’s like someone making Michael Jordon’s jumpshot a little tighter.  Like making Jaws eat Quint a little harder.  Like making Larry King look just a little more like an owl corpse.

 

It doesn’t seem physically possible, but there it is.

 

I’m as close to Chrostopher as I am to anyone.  I refer to him more often as my brother than my friend.  I’d seen him happy before he met Cayce.  And I’d seen him content in relationships.  Or so I thought.  But seeing the way this groom looks at this bride I know I was wrong. 

 

Seeing the way he looks at her, it makes me wonder if I’ve ever looked at anyone like that.  And then it makes me wonder if anyone has ever looked at anyone like that before, and I think the answer to both questions is almost certainly, “no.”  Such is the unique and palpably holy nature of their bond.

 

To quote one of my favorite passages of literature and one of Christopher’s as well, “The future is an inherently good thing, and we move into it one winter at a time. Things get better one winter at a time.”  I know this to be true because last year I wasn’t standing here celebrating the marriage of two of the finest people I know.  And when I think about how great things will be for them one winter from now, ten winters from now, I get tingly in my headbones.

 

I have many headbones.

 

The mystic chords of memory, stretching from red states to blue, from faith, to faith, from young to old, from frightened to fearless and to every living heart and every trembling hand across this room and the rooms we will soon populate will yet swell the chorus of this Union, when every winter from now we are again touched, as surely we will be, by the better angels of Christopher and Cayce’s nature.

 

And Christopher’s head is still enormous.

 

Cheers, kids.

 

And beyond my toast it was a truly beautiful event on a beautiful day.  Everyone seemed thrilled to be there, my date was gorgeous and awesome and a hundred other things made up a spectacular beginning to what I’m sure will be an epically kickass life for these two.

 

It was a good day.

 

Get a beverage of your choice and toast to the matrimony of some truly wonderful cats,

 

E

 

 

All you want is a beauty queen, but not a superstar, but everybody’s dream machine.