Mishka's Awesome Rocking Weblog

She’s the yin to my mother’s fiery yang.

Feeling badly about not writing for a long time.  There hasn’t been much to report, and there has.  I’ve been foundering here with my family, just like old times.  We’ve all been barely restraining ourselves from killing each other, getting into petty arguments.  My mom pisses me off all the time because she’s continually upbeat, even polite to the continual barrage of telemarketers. She’s been working marketing for the vacation industry for so long that everything she encounters is filtered through her brain’s current obsession for marketing.  The apartment is full of no, not National Geographic and Outside magazine, which I actually dig reading (part of my visiting-home-regression-ritual), but National Geographic Traveler and Outside Vacation, which is each’s magazine’s respective attempt at cashing in by selling something that looks like a magazine but is really just full of ads and short article that read like ads.  This is the part of American commercial culture that deserves a violent, lingering, painful death.  And my mother is now an enthusiastic proponent of it.

My little sister is just as bad.  She’s 22, working at the Deli in a supermarket called ‘King Sooper’s,’ which has as a mascot, you guessed it, a little cartoon king.  She’s the yin to my mother’s fiery yang, unable to muster enthusiasm for anything.  She doesn’t have her driver’s license and has shown zero interest in learning how to drive.  A pal here gave me a bunch of pot, and she wasn’t even into getting fucked up. She’s moving to Dallas at the end of this month to move in with a dude she met over the internet.

Of course, I’m the fucking worst of the bunch.  Since I’ve been here, I’ve been reading Stephen King books (trust me, you remember The Talisman as much better than it actually is, I’m sad to say) and pulp real-life war thrillers, jerking myself to near unconsciousness, not showering, sulking around the house.  My mom has cooked every single meal I’ve eaten since I’ve been here (except for the times she’s taken me out to dinner) and I haven’t washed a single dish.  Not (nary?) a one.

It’s kind of funny, my mother bounces around like her life is one big adventure when she’s been through some really horrific shit, like a childhood of poverty-with-a-happy-face, The Divorce, the years of near poverty and loneliness that followed, rapidly approaching sixty, and my sister and I, whose lives still really are just big adventures, literally spend days on the couch, never getting dressed or leaving the house.  We’re like extras for ‘The Ice Storm’ who didn’t make it because we were too depressing. Man, I am just horrified at the banality of my family (I include myself in this group).  It’s totally bogus, but somehow you think that your love and esteem for these people will save them from internet dating and making lame jokes about "Puppetry of the Penis" in front of your girlfriend or the bizarre comedy of having to set your alarm to get up in the middle of the night and empty the salad bowl, the stock pot and the bucket that have filled with water from the threeleaks in the roof of the one bedroom apartment you’re illegally inhabiting before they overflow, but it can’t.  Nothing can save them.

The saving grace about my trip out here has been the great folks I’ve met.  Greg Ego, a dude who e-mailed me out of the blue because he liked my CD so much, has come to every show I played and even recorded a bunch of ‘em and is going to burn me CDs of the shows and a CD of pictures he’s taken.  I got to meet Shannon, the guy who rescued my CD from a stack the Lion’s Lair was going to throw away and is responsible for a lot of the fans I’ve made here.  The PW3 were super nice, buying a bunch of CDs and hooking me up with another show and even gave me the lion’s share of the eighteen bucks we made for the night.  Sharon, who I used to work at IHOP with, let me sleep at her crib a couple of nights.  Theron fed and watered me and hooked up two shows for me, let me borrow an amp, all kinds of shit.  Thank you thank you thank you, you’re the fucking best.

Posted by Mishka at November 11, 2003 12:29 AM