balding angrily

I think I spoke too soon with yesterday’s post. The creative part of writing is the hardest; I’ve been staring at those few paragraphs for the day, trying to figure out where the story goes. Part of me just wants to end it there. Part of me wants to find out more about this character who has vivid and horrifying fantasies. And then I spent an hour this morning editing a few other pieces. I really love editing - taking an x-acto knife to a piece. The creative part hurts my head.

At Tuesday’s Writers’ Group, we’re sharing short-short humor stories. I re-wrote a post from this blog because nothing really funny is happening to me since Jen-An and Owen moved away. Oh! But good news, Jen-An is visiting Dallas, so we get to see her tonight. Hopefully she’ll do something wacky.

Crumpet is continuing a meme ‘cuz she’s cool like dat. Here’s my mosaic. The rules are simple; follow the link to do the thing yourself.

I noticed Crumpet picked pictures that somehow related to her answers. I didn’t; I picked the picture that I was most drawn to.*

The Questions:
1. What is your first name? alex
2. What is your favorite food? pizza
3. What high school did you go to? ocean view
4. What is your favorite color? red
5. Who is your celebrity crush? beckham
6. Favorite drink? mocha
7. Dream vacation? greece
8. Favorite dessert? tiramisu
9. What you want to be when you grow up? writer
10. What do you love most in life? jerry
11. One word to describe you. obnoxious
12. Your flickr name. baldingangrily

Here are the photo credits:

1. Esta foto se la tomé en las fuentes del Grao de Castellón a mi nieto Alex, lo pasó como un “gancho” corriendo de una a otra (A mi se me caía la baba, evidentemente), 2. Day 307, 3. not afraid, 4. Beautiful old lady from Darap(Sikkim) village, 5. Beckham Got Milk?, 6. “If you don’t feed me.. I’ll..” Mocha, 7. Up Or Down, 8. tira mi su**, 9. Day 106 - I am a librarian, 10. 846, 11. what we are wearing to town…..and my mom is crazy…, 12. Alex and The Internet

*Excepting the pic of Becks. In his case, I chose a pic that showcased his otherworldly humpability without Victoria aka “My cheekbones are instruments of death” getting all up in his bidness.

I checked out my keyword search terms for the first time in a long time. I was hoping to eke out another “i’m peeking at you” update. No doing. The same top search terms keep coming up.

Time and again, “balding suicide” comes up. The thought that a suicidal person comes to this site in a misguided search for solace frightens me. It’s alarming. I feel like I need to build a special page for these people with links to suicide hot lines or pages of hot baldies.

Then I thought, “I’m overdue to put up an FAQ page.” The balding suicide issue could be one of the FAQs.

So, I have to ask you, dear reader. What are your FAQs? Obviously I’ll make some up, but I’d like to get some suggestions. And please don’t get offended if I don’t use yours. It just means it wasn’t good enough, and by extension, you’re not good enough.

Oh. And thank you, Magnus. A million times, thank you. You are the wind beneath my wings force behind my flatulence. I get most of my traffic from your site. If you were here, I’d kiss you on a part of your body that would make both of us uncomfortable.

Let me tell you something about the past, about bringing high school into the present. The past doesn’t change, and when we look at it too hard, we revert back. We assume the roles we played in it.

I was in a group that rewarded cleverness. We tried to out-do each other with our vocabularies. We talked about our favorite words like others talked about TV. We stressed words like eschew as a way to both let the others know we knew the word and let each other know how silly (but not really) we were for using it in conversation. Back then it made us insufferable, but that bent or weakness for cleverness or self-conscious irony continues in my writing and conversation. I’ve given up trying to not be clever or ironic. I love clever.

I was also not as smart as the other people in our group. This didn’t matter to them, but it mattered to me. I’m sickly competitive that way. I always felt like I had to prove to my friends that I could be as literate as them. When passing notes between classes, I felt inferior to them - that I didn’t put my words together as well as them - that I hadn’t been simple enough.

More than that, I yearned for their approval and seethed when I felt I didn’t get it. That also continues. Hopefully, I successfully masquerade that as shtick.

Getting in contact with those people has brought all that back, and I’m once again paranoid that the English major, the author, the one of us who read 5 books a week is judging me. Yes, I know she isn’t. Yes, I know she’s way moved on, that she has a life divorced from the past.

Fucking high school. I loved it, and it did a number on me - in a good way.

I tried to track down an old high school friend last week, and last night she called me back. We chitty-chatted for 2 hours, laughing mostly. Her voice was good to hear. It hasn’t changed in the fifteen or so years since the last time I talked to her, and we cracked the same dumb jokes.

Unlike most of my other friends who went to mainstream schools after high school, she went to Humboldt State University, way the fuck in the northernmost part of California. It’s in Arcata, which is supposedly the pot capital of California. (I didn’t ask her if she was a pot-head, but I wanted to.) I visited her there a long time ago, and it’s beautiful country. And it suits her. She’s an outdoors-y type. She has a couple of horses, and she rides them on the beach. She’d been the one in our group to hate new technology, so it wasn’t a surprise when she told me she doesn’t have a computer.

As you know, I have a deep attachment to my past, especially my high school years, so it was great talking to her. Also, she told me about two other friends, siblings, with whom we went to high school. The one can be found here, and her brother can be found here. Give them some web-love by clicking. Thems is good people.

Gimme-gimme _more. Gimme _more. Gimme-gimme _MORE.

Say what you want about this week’s Britney/VMA/Chris Crocker hubub; her robots can create an insidious brain-worm. Given this particular one is tied to a moment of infamy, I say she’s already made her comeback.

Chicago is…

It’s New York City without the people spitting on you. It’s my new favorite city. We stayed near Rush and State, the center of the hip-and-cool-party-people night-life. The weather was beautiful. Birds were singing, police gave out candy instead of tickets, and pan-handlers smelled like flowers. When we got back, I was ready to pack everything and move up there.

We had a waiter that told racist jokes. We had a cabby that got all scrunchy when we wanted to pay with a credit card. We had a tour guide that took us aside and told us in a hushed voice all the latest hot gossip about Frank Lloyd Wright. Jen-An regaled us with poop stories. Owen didn’t know how to lay on the beach and waste away. He got flustered and had to “do something.” I met some fellow Filmspotters, and ate a Mediterranean mound of chicken wrapped in phyllo. We got in-room massages in which I learned that my hands and forearms are the most intimate places on my body a person can touch.

And we ate Riesens along with lots and lots of other good foods.

Jen-An, Owen, Jerry and I went to Chicago last week. The highlight of my time in Chicago was fulfilling a lifelong dream of mine. Family Guy stole my dream and made it a parody, so you may already know where this is going. I wanted to sit in front of Georges Seurat’s masterwork at The Art Institute and listen to The Dream Academy.

In Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, I identified with Cameron. I never wanted to be Ferris. I wanted to be - and be with - Cameron. He wasn’t my first movie crush, but he was important. The scene where the camera switches between Cameron’s eyes and those of the little girl in Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of La Grande Jatte was powerful for 14-year old me. I understood the longing in that exchange.

A little later, I started exploring Sondheim and rented the PBS performance of Mandy Patinkin in Sunday in the Park with George. I didn’t know it was about Georges Seurat’s famous painting until the end of Act I or that it was a multi-Tony-nominated musical; I thought I was making a discovery. The story is about the character of Seurat who isolates himself in pursuit of his art. That’s what I got out of it anyway.

Again, there’s that theme of loneliness with this painting. As a lonely little fella, I connected with this painting.

It’s breath-taking in person, and I nearly cried sitting there looking at it. I feel like Seurat painted it just for me, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels like that scene is Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was filmed just for me. Or that “Sunday,” the song from Sunday in the Park with George, was written just for me. Or that Seth MacFarlane and Co. wrote the parody in Family Guy just for me.

I’m sure that these things are loved by many, many, many people. How Eleanor Rigby of us.

I came home today to a delightful package from one of my far-away friends. You’ll remember my request. Winrit remembered anyway.

I’ll catch everyone up on our trip to Chicago, but let this tide you over.

God, I love my little Nun Monster.

The teaser: Have you heard about the fire? No, not that one.

Monday, Jerry and I left our apartment together on our way to the underground garage. There are a pair of doors on our end of the hall that stay open with magnetic hold open devices. These magnets disengage in case of fire, allowing the doors to automatically close. This isolates our part of the building giving us a smoke-free escape. The doors do not lock closed, so they do not cut off our or anyone else’s hypothetical escape.

Balding Angrily: providing your fire and life safety lessons since 2006.

Our building is built in a very old part of town; some iteration of the building has been around since 1910. In the last 5 years they remodeled it for lofts. They did a spot-on job, but our electricity still has to travel through the ancient infrastructure that plagues this part of town. Consequently, we frequently have outages and surges and other creepy goings-on that cause our elevators to mysteriously stop working and our alarms to sound.

The first time we heard our fire alarm, we were sound asleep and we made our way sluggishly in the direction of the fire exit. After the fifth time, we just looked at the red box on the wall, asking each other, “Do you think we should do anything?” I held my shoes in my lazy-wristed hands and assumed a sneer until it went off.

I got way down the daisy-covered path on that one. Back to Monday. We came out of our apartment, and the double doors were closed. We hadn’t heard a fire alarm, so we assumed it was another one of those creepy instances of our building assuming a personality. As I reached to push open the door, Jerry jokingly said, “Wait! You’re supposed to feel the door first! Only after you know it’s safe are you supposed to open it!” I ignored him and went through; it was fine.

In the late afternoon, Owen called me at work and said, “Don’t worry. You’re place isn’t burnt down.” He tends to start off phone conversations with these kind of non-sequiters. If someone isn’t looking at me quizzically when the four of us are out, they’re looking at him quizzically; we share that tangerine-trees-and-marmalade-skies thought process of free association.

He explained that he was driving around our apartment and saw what the news termed a “column of smoke” near downtown. He checked to see it wasn’t our building and called me. Nice guy, right? Yeah, he is. Jen-An lucked out because she’s not half as nice.

After many hours I came home, and from our window you could see the warehouse that was on fire. It was still burning this morning, and I’m not convinced it’s out right now. In a sick way, I’m kind of sad that I can’t see the flames anymore. It was kind of fun to look out and shake my head at the thought of the smoke adding to Gore’s Gasses^TM.

Given that our electrical infrastructure is shoddy - given that Jerry and I are now immune to the alarm after so many false ones - given that the warehouses in our area are lighting up like Roman candles - given that our building is likely haunted - given that both Jerry and I have left the iron plugged in and on - given that we both get distracted by burly firemen - given all these things we are doomed to die of something fire related. And we don’t even have any kiddos to fight over our vast fortune when we do.

At Balding Angrily, we get lots of letters asking us to mention them on the show. Kids, the best way to get mentioned is to give me things or tell me you were thinking of me in some way.

So a month ago, Angela (winrit) gave me a mixtape. It’s Latin-infused. She’s a ballroom dancer, and apparently that’s given her a taste in Portuguese sambas. Or mambos. Or whatever they are.

Shortly after, Jon sent me Finding Nemo and the book to Company, a couple of things that were on my Amazon wishlist. I read through Company that very night, and I watched Finding Nemo on my iPod on a slow day at work. Shh. Don’t tell anyone.

I knew of a fella on the boards that had a handsome pup as his avatar, but I didn’t know Jon before I got the package. Thanks, Jon.

Jen-An and Owen gave me a photo of Cyndi Lauper with a trombone with my face taped over hers. That was, um, disturbing. Very, very disturbing. I acted strangely insulted, and then Jen-An said, “Oh please. We all know that you like when someone goes out of the their way to make something for you.” Yeah. I had to admit that it was very sweet. She also called me a puppy, a bulldog puppy. Then she did an imitation of a puppy with a grumpy face, stomping around with a harumph. I hate her.

Finally, Lynch just sent me a song I’ve never heard and called it the unofficial Balding Angrily theme song. He said that whenever this song is on the radio, he thinks of Balding Angrily. Please, people. Don’t think of Balding Angrily while you’re driving. It makes me think that you don’t have a life. If you’re driving around thinking of these degraded ramblings, you really, really need to seek help.

The song is Mika’s “Grace Kelly.” I can’t upload it because Wordpress is forbidding it. If I can I’ll write down the lyrics. The singer sounds like Freddy Mercury, and he’s singing about how he can be anything you want him to be if you just love him. I can see that as being perfect for Balding Angrily.

-Update-

Lynch posted the YouTube of the video for “Grace Kelly” on Watch This Vid.