And one more, just for the heck of it.

James Carville:

The Cryptkeeper:

That's right boys and girls, it's time for Political Look-alike Theatre!

Cindy McCain:

Praying Mantis:

John McCain better watch out. He doesn't have Buffy and the Scoobies to save him if this thing decides to lay some eggs inside of him.

Look Inside My Junk Drawer

Every first Saturday of every month, my friend Chris Aubrey puts on a sort of open-mic night for DJs. I guess you'd call it "open-turntable." Anyway, it can be a lot of fun. The idea is that a bunch of record geeks bring in a ton of vinyl (vinyl only) and just take a stab at being a DJ for about twenty or so minutes. Each month there are usually one or two guys that could pass for professionals, if they aren't pros already, and it can get a little frustrating listening to them mash up various songs that, usually, don't even contain instruments. But those guys are talented and it can be fun just to watch them work, and typically, everybody has a great time.

Last night I was last to go on, which was kind of a bummer considering how long I had to wait. There weren't a whole lot of people left by the time I got to spin, but my friends stuck around and danced, so I did at least have a small audience. I wish more people had been there to see it though, considering it was the best set I've done so far. See, me and machines, we don't mix, so it's taken me a while to get used to using the mixer. Plus, I grew up pretty much with nothing but CDs, so messing with turntables was not a huge part of my childhood. Last night, all my effort paid off though, and I rocked the anemic crowd as hard as I could. After a couple of hours of hip hop and electronica, it was nice to hear a little Waylon and a little George Jones. It was the Waylon and the Possum though that caused what was almost another problem with my set.

Sometime after White Lightnin' and before the end of Washing Machine by Orion, this older guy who'd been hanging around the bar all night wandered up to the stage. I'd seen him around, noticed that he'd been drinking hand grenades (Mickey's malt liquor) all night, and I took a deep breath and vowed not to let this joker mess up my good thing. Here's how our conversation went;

OLD GUY:
Hey man, why don't you play unintelligible by Black Oak Arkansas.

ME:
Oh man, I'm sorry, but I don't have any of that with me tonight.

OLD GUY:
Hey, does that microphone work?

ME:
I don't think it does. It hasn't been working tonight. (It worked fine.)

OLD GUY:
How would you like to play unintelligible by Grand Funk Railroad and have the guy who wrote it up here singin'?!

ME:
Oh yeah man, that would be great. Maybe we could do that next month. I've already got all the stuff I'm going to play tonight laid out.

Then he hovered for a moment, staring at me as if I were going to relent and suddenly produce some Grand Funk Railroad from out of nowhere, then he walked off.

That's right people, DJ Red Beard, loved citywide by weird old rednecks who drink too much malt liquor!

Bicycle, Bicycle!

Want to know something about me that, well, most of you probably don't already know? Come on, sure you do. Everybody loves secrets, even if they're not that big or impressive. Actually, this one's just kind of, well, sad. At least I think it is. It makes me quite the self-conscious twenty-something.

Oh, take your minds out of the gutter. This is obviously about bicycles!

Okay, here goes.

I never learned to ride a bicycle.

You heard me...read me...correctly. Riding a bike, that rite of passage for so many kids, is something that I never managed to accomplish. Seems kind of strange, right? I mean, how many kids with complete use of all their limbs never learn to ride a bike? I'm sure it happens more often than any of us think, but still, it can't be that common. Perhaps there's a support group for it out there. There's a support group for just about everything these days, so I don't think it's out of the question that those of us burdened with the shame of being incomplete in this fundamentally adolescent way would have a group to help us deal with our problem.

Most of you are probably wondering how learning this important means of preteen transportation managed to escape me. I'll tell you, I don't mind. After all, that's the point of this whole thing. Full (sort of) disclosure.

My parents both worked when I was a kid. Each of them started their own business. Dad started a welding supply business with his brothers Jim and Gary, and a high school friend, John. Jim and Dad both worked for this business in my hometown as route salesmen, another welding supply company, called Harris Welding Supply. They had pool parties and I can remember never feeling comfortable at them as a kid. The kids of the people my dad and uncle worked for reeked of money, and I didn't like it. Apparently my pop didn't like it much either, because he and Jim decided that they could just start their own business and do the same thing they were doing, be their own bosses, and maybe give Harris some competition. They did more than that, they put them out of business, and their business, Midstate Welding Supply, went on to be folded into the company Air Products, which was folded into the company Air Gas. My dad and my uncle make a lot more money now than they ever did before, and Harris is an afterthought. We don't have a pool, but damnit we have our dignity.

Mom's business didn't do as well unfortunately. She had a clothing store where she sold a few different brands. Every year, she and the lady who owned the jewelry boutique next to her shop, Angela, would go to Atlanta for the huge textile market they hold there every year. A few years she would take Dad and I with her, and I always enjoyed it. Going to Atlanta meant Braves games, and even though I never really liked the Braves that much (I'm a Red Sox fan, as most of you know), I did love going to baseball games. To this day, I'll watch anyone play baseball. I'd go down and watch the little leaguers if I didn't think a bearded stranger watching their kids would creep the parents out something fierce. Market also meant hanging out with both my parents (something I still enjoy doing a great deal), eating out every night, and staying in a nice hotel in a HUGE city. Just the highway alone in Atlanta baffled me. How could anything be so vast and so rapid? Why would people even need that much road? I still think about that sometimes and I marvel at how, now that I'm on the road every day, there never seems to be enough of it, and you never seem to get anywhere as fast as you need to.

So we'd go to Market with Mom and hang out, and I enjoyed it. Oh, I probably whined and complained about how boring it could be half the time, but I look back on it fondly. For example, I didn't give a damn that the year we actually went to the concert put on for the various market participants that I was seeing Smokey Robinson. I didn't even know who Smokey Robinson was. Hell, at that time I was probably still listening to the New Kids On the Block. But my mom impressed on me how cool it was to see someone like Smokey Robinson live, that he was a living legend, so I sat attentively and I soaked it in. And she was right. I look back now and I'm proud to say that I have a mother who knew how important it was for her son to see Smokey Robinson when he had the chance, even if he didn't appreciate it then. She could see the man I'd grow into.

So mom's business was a good idea, but our small town just wasn't geared toward it. After a clip, it went under, and she started into glorified secretarial work, which eventually led to her being an HR rep for her current company, a steel company that's a subsidiary of a Fortune 500 corporation. She's doing well too.

So yeah, my folks both worked. By the time I was ten, they trusted me enough to let me stay by myself in the afternoons, just till they got off. I was very advanced for my age, and they thought I'd be okay for just a few hours in the afternoons. They were right, but in those years before I was ten, I was subject to afternoon babysitters within the family. For the majority of that time, it was my Aunt Jenny Griffin, who had three daughters around my age; Mandy, Mary, and Melissa.

Mandy, the oldest, who is now a teacher, was most certainly the ringleader. Even at an early age, she had the clarity of vision and authoritarian manner that help her wrangle a large group of small children on a daily basis. After all, she practiced on me and her two younger sisters for years.

I loved my family growing up. I had no serious problems with any of the Griffin girls, but being subjected to the whim of three girls and their mother every day after school did start to take its toll. For instance, I wasn't allowed to watch G.I. Joe or Transformers. They were too violent, my aunt would say, and besides what would girls want with G.I. Joe or Transformers? So every day, complete with the knowledge that just a couple of stations over they were showing back to back episodes of G.I. Joe and Transformers, I had to sit quietly and watch Little House on the Prairie and then the Brady Bunch. To this day, the sight of Michael Landis sends me into a sort of Pavlovian rage. The Griffins were also the first people in our family to get a VCR, so If it wasn't the Ingalls-Wilders and the Bradys, it was Mary Poppins, the Shaggy Dog, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, or the Parent Trap, over, and over, and over again. Being let outside was a merciful reprieve.

Outside I could shoot basketball, or run around in the yard playing tag, or hide and seek, but even the outside could be a frighteningly feminine space. They would play jacks, or hopscotch, or even hula hoop, all of which I would try myself but would eventually give up for fear that I was compromising my masculinity before I'd even become a teenager. Mandy would say she didn't want to play with me anyway, and her two sisters would recoil, cowed by the older sister's playground marm presence.

I would get frustrated with their games, sometimes spouting off a Dang it! or a God darn it!. The three girls would gasp with fear and then explain to me that our grandfather, Dody, my mother's father, would never give me a quarter. When I asked about this, they informed me that Dody had been giving them each a quarter every time they didn't curse or take the Lord's holy name in vain. I was hurt by this, though I remained defiant. It appeared that this was an offer only extended to the Griffin family. Apparently my grandfather could sense that my father's family's influence on me had already shaped me into a lost cause, at least when it came to cursing. I never did get a quarter, god damnit!

This back and forth between Mandy and I was most evident when she attempted to teach me how to ride a bicycle. When I was younger, I'd had a He-Man bicycle with training wheels. I loved to tool around the driveway on it, but when it came time to take the training wheels off, I lost interest. I guess at the time I thought, This thing works just fine with four wheels. Why would you want to take two of them off? So I never learned to ride a bike the traditional way. Mandy, Mary, and Melissa, on the other hand, were all quite adept bike riders. They could ride circles around you on pavement or on grass, and they were all very proud of this skill. They had bikes cast in various pastel shades, all pistachio green and bubblegum pink, with streamers off the handlebars that would blow triumphantly in the wind, mocking you with a declaration of sheer velocity as the girls whipped by.

So finally, in the time that I was staying with them, Mandy decided she'd had enough of me not participating in the bike riding and she took it upon herself to teach me. I secretly wanted to be on a bike. To feel the wind whipping through my hair, to bring the tires to a screeching halt, to jump it off ramps and ride it recklessly down hills. So when she dreamed up this little scheme, I played along. So they put me on one of their bikes colored like grandma's rock candy and then told me to just take off down the giant hill in their backyard.

What?

Just do it. It's how we learned!

Yeah, it's how we learned.

Yeah, it's how we learned.

Just ride down the hill? But I don't know how to ride. Shouldn't we start on the pavement?

No, because then you'll fall and hurt yourself.

Yeah, you'll fall and hurt yourself.

Yeah, you'll fall and hurt yourself.

So here I am, looking down the hill at these giant trees jutting up from the ground, and the row of hedge at the bottom of the hill that hides their house from the alley beyond, and I'm terrified. I'm thinking that I'll just take off down this thing, and if I'm lucky enough to keep my balance, I'll either die a bloody mess on the trunk of one of those trees or I'll be twisted and broken inside of that hedgerow with the girls alternating between gasps of horror and chittering laughter. I'll never live to know the touch of a woman if I take off down this crazy damn hill.

Come on Brett, this is how our dad taught us!

Yeah, this is how daddy taught us.

Yeah, this is how daddy taught us.

Okay, what do I do?

We'll push you to give you a headstart, then we'll let go and you just start peddling.

What if I fall over?

Then you get back on and try it again.

Her logic was infallible and I hated her for it.

Alright, alright. I'll do it.

This is going to be so much fun!

Yeah, so much fun!

Yeah, so much fun!

Uh huh, sure, fun.

They must have sent me down that hill ten times, and each time I was a gangly, awkward mess of legs and arms and gears. Each time, I failed. Eventually I was so sick of the humiliation I felt, so sick of the, Why can't you do it? and the We never had a problem. that I stopped trying altogether.

To this day, I still don't know how to ride a bike, but I do remember having the last word on the subject. Mandy's best argument, the thing she liked to hold over me when she realized how hopeless a case I was, was the college argument. The college argument went like this:

What are you going to do when you get to college and all the kids want to ride bikes and you can't because you don't know how?

I'll be in college, Mandy! I'll have a car!

Okay, so maybe that wasn't the last word. Maybe I did pay $46.50 for a full tank of gas yesterday and maybe my girlfriend would like to go bike riding with me. That doesn't mean anything, right?

At least I was right about the G.I. Joe.

The photographic equivalent of meat and potatoes

"The Wrath of God is the only way I can describe it."

When a politician in Tennessee describes something as "the wrath of God," you can usually lay the smart money down on that politician being Bill Frist. Indeed, it's not difficult to imagine an image of the good doctor (and I use the term lightly, the way that one might use it in reference to an eight year old playing Operation )sitting around his house thinking of all the various ways God inflicts his wrath on the sinful masses with a sort of perverse glee. But this particular quote, "The Wrath of God is the only way I can describe it," was uttered not by the brightest rhinestone on the buckle of the Bible belt, but by our intrepid Democratic governor, Phil Bredesen.

Now, let's get one thing out of the way. Democrats can say dumb shit. Democrats can in fact say dumb shit in regards to religion. I know that may come as a shock, considering the ruling party likes to give the public the impression that anyone not registered as a conservative might as well be an idolatrous, AIDS-ridden, homo-lovin' heathen, but Democrats can be just as reckless in their language as the Republicans at times. So it shouldn't surprise us that, in response to his survey of Tornado damage across this state, our Democratic governor Phil Bredesen uttered something so irresponsible as the phrase above, but it should anger us.

Now, I'm not a Christian. I was raised Catholic, which is a lot like travelling 100 mph down the highway toward atheism, stopping only once for gas at that nice little town called Agnostic. I like my religion to stay as far away from my politics as possible, so you can imagine what living in the American South must be like. When I read that Bredesen, a man that I don't necessarily trust but that I at least rank lower on the Political Dirtbag scale than say, John Ashcroft, described the damage done by the storm that ripped through the South earlier this month as the "wrath of God," I was a bit ruffled in the feathers.

What, exactly, Mister Governor, did the state of Tennessee do to deserve the wrath of the ineffable bearded dude in the clouds? What did your loyal constituents do, what great sin did these voters commit, that your God felt the need to reign down death and destruction upon them? Was it God who ripped their houses from the foundations or who threw their children into the fields?

Or was it, just maybe, the weather?

You know, that random, difficult to predict, eons old thing we call weather? Maybe the conditions were just right across the South that day for a string of bad weather, including tornadoes, to rip some shit up. Maybe it didn't have anything to do with "God" after all.

Maybe we're all just people, trying to survive in a world that can throw anything at us at any time. Maybe that something is tornadoes, and maybe we don't need our governor entertaining the notion that we're being punished by some angry, abusive father figure in the sky, even if he is just using the parlance of our times.

"You are the new prototypes!"

Alright, what have we learned from this commercial?

We've learned that unless you have Indiana Jones or Captain America on your speed dial, you should run the other direction when you see someone wearing Under Armour clothing.