The Friends I Used to Have

I spent this weekend in a state of artistic stupor. Too tired or apathetic to attempt finishing any of the works I've started, I eventually find myself doodling a naked anime woman on my computer, wishing I knew enough of anatomy to make her breasts look right. I like to fill my plate with as many unfinished projects as possible to help cement my status as a ne'r-do-well. Currently I'm in the process of designing a website for a friend's band, working on some graphics for an Xbox game that won't ever be finished, a half-attempted video game review for the semi-unpopular website I sometimes contribute to, and of course the empty pages of my novel continue to stare back at me, wondering why the fuck I'm so able to rank up my Mafia Wars character and yet can't pen coherant dialogue.

For the record this blog experiment of mine has been a great exercise in trying to get something done on a regular basis. It's odd how quickly the words flow in this stream of conciousness type mindset I can get into, whereas when I have to take the characters I've obsessed over for the last four years and force them to interact with each other, I can't help but get caught up in perfecting each individual adjective. I was also fairly distracted by the videos I found of this German woman in a latex cow outfit, her tits hooked up to an industrial milking machine, mooing as a monotone robotic voice enforced her slavery. The amateur pornography is always the best. Why would I want to watch a paid actress get fucked when I can watch normal everyday people show me how equally depraved they are? If I could form my own support group the members would include me and the five or six normal looking middle-aged women whose living-room sexual excapades have excited me for the last six or eight years. Petra, Alice, and most of all Angie - whose pictures I first discovered on a newsgroup back in 2001 when I was still in middle school, having spent the last eight years trying to put together a complete collection. I'm at something like 800 pics of hers now, though I know I'm probably missing plenty.

So, in-between bouts of visiting my support group, I found the time to stumble over to my buddy's apartment. Apparently my old friend was in town as well, so we all ended up stumbling over to the bar to see my buddy's roomate play a show. The show was beautiful for largely two reasons. One, the act that was playing as we arrived. The band featured an assortment of out-of-shape forty & fifty year olds desperately attempting to rock. As my old friend remarked, it really was something quite amazing. They must've known their chances at rock and roll stardom had died years ago, though still they clung to this beautiful adolescent dream, living it as hard as they could. At one point the lead guitarist, an overweight guy with a cherry-red guitar and hair much too long for his age-bracket, slides to his knees, wailing out as hard as he can. Playing guitar behind his back, with his teeth, eventually returning to the stage so he and his bandmate could sword fight with their instruments, first rubbing the tips together before individually stroking the lengths from the top quickly towards the base.

I hope that when I'm old and awful, that I still have a dream like that to blindly believe in. That I can still impress the crowd of other mid-life crisis sufferers, taking some fading broad home to my apartment so we can remark about what it could've been like if we were still young.

The second highlight of this beautiful night was my two friends deciding to mosh midway through the roomates show, all the snarling old broads who'd to that point been giggling like idiots and dancing like white people- moving off to the side to watch in horror as these two young adults violently slammed into each other. At one point my heavy friend, weighing something like 350 pounds, is sent reeling towards the door, where he punches the bouncer in the face and gets us all banned from the club forever. All of this happens on the night of the previously unmentioned third roomates' 21st birthday, girlfriend of the second roomate and a spectacular drunk. The next day I find out someone has vomited all over the bathroom. I am blamed for this as I am an easy scapegoat, and the accusations will continue for the next few days, as no one makes any attempt to clean the filth up.

Our lazy hangover of a Sunday is spent looking for something to watch, managing some half-starts on several on demand movies before settling on cult-classic hockey comedy Slap Shot - starring Paul Newman (after failing to make it through twenty minutes of the awful hockey comedy docudrama No Sleep Til Madison starring Jim Gaffagin and being unable to find legendary hockey comedy D2: The Mighty Ducks starring the legendary Emilio Estevez). I can't even sum up this movie in any way that makes sense. On one hand, its awful, the jokes which were likely cutting-edge stuff thirty odd years ago (Foreigners talking is funny, dirty sexual talk is funny) kind of fall flat in today's modern age. What really sticks with you though is the sense of plot, not needing any logical continuity or motivations for its characters, just two hours of hockey fights and childish name calling. The real achievement comes in the final act, where the team is really broken up about where its gone, that they've gotten so far away from the sport they love, embroiled in nothing but the fighting and useless showmanship. So for their final match they try to play a clean game, to bring some respect back to the sport even as they get their faces pounded in by the savage other team.

Then they find out the talent scouts are there.

Any chance at a moral is thrown at the window. Everyone starts kicking everyone's ass and the one pacifist on the team performs a strip-tease on the ice, something which through a bizarre deus-ex-machina gets the other team disqualified. Everyone is bleeding or naked as they take the championship cup back to the locker room, all of it culminating in a grand parade through the streets, marching band and all, children cheering for their new heroes.

I wonder if whoever wrote that movie realized he was a genius.