Some Philly Trash

These were originally written for a seemingly ill-fated Philly Magazine aptly called Philly Trash (www.phillytrash.com). I was "hired" to write for them and submitted a bunch of crap, which I will put up in appropriate intervals in the coming days. It is fairly clear that either the incredible deftness of my writing, or its incredible daftness was a primary force in its miscarriage. Either way, they took one look at this stuff and their minds completely blanked on all that HTML training they thought they had.

They had a list of topics to choose from, including health, advice, hunting, fishing, dancing, trapsing, walkabout, and hedge-core. OK, I don't remember any of the choices except for health and advice, as they were the two I chose to start with. What follows is my first, and thus far only shot at an advice column. However, feel free to email any and all questions and concerns to Billyfrolic@yahoo.com and I will answer them in a more respectful form than one witnesses below:

Ask the Man From the Billy D

This column will consist of my answering questions presented by you the reader. Our first batch of questions have been compiled by myself, over the years, by reading the mail of people who no longer reside at the home(s) where I now(ed) live. Our first question comes from Paula in Trevlock Creek, Louisiana.

Dear Mitch,

Why ever did you leave me and the children? I know you left to follow your dream. But we want to be a part of that dream. On a lighter note, I have two dinner parties to attend this month, and I need some advice. The first party is a small smattering of old friends, getting together for a night of reminiscence and flavor. The next party, just the following night, is at the home of a man I met at work. Actually, he’s my new boss. But we really hit it off, and he told me I had trenchant eyes. My question is two-fold. First, what would be the proper wine to present to my hosts at each occasion? I would like to bring something light and fun to my get together with Cindy, Rachelle, and the crew. I’m thinking something classier for the next evening with Donald and his great aunt. For them, I want something deeper and more incisive. Something that says, “I’m not quite a connoisseur, but I know enough about wine to bring you something refined that will make you think about it as you drink it.” Secondly, how much do you think I can get away with drinking on Friday and still look good on Saturday night? The ladies and myself tend to get carried away the one night a month we allow ourselves to go out together. Cheryl is so busy with the kids, and the rest of us have jobs, jobs, jobs. Something. Something. Something. “At least it’s something.” And you know Loraine, her bowels are so irregular she may spend the whole damn time in the toilet anyway. So I’d like to get a good load on Friday with the girls. Some drinks, a couple of pills, just a bunch of loud obnoxious girls in the corner of the pub. But I don’t wanna look like I swallowed the dog the next night when Donald introduces me to “the woman to whom I owe everything.” I’m not exactly sure what he means by that, especially considering the detrimental affect she has seemed to have on his life. But anyway, your advice, as always, is appreciated. I hope to see you at the family get together next month. You know that your mother and I are more than willing to foot the bill for you to take a train from Clifton Heights down to Trevlock Creek for the party. We love you Mitch. Make us proud. Come back! Oh! Love forever and ever, Paula M. Trevlock Creek, LA

Hey lady,

For your little soirée with the gals, bring along a nice light Pinot Grigio. This is an especially good wine if you will be mainly having Hors DeVours, or just light appetizers with your drinks. Bring it chilled if you expect to have it opened in your presence. This is a good wine for a spring swing, or a late afternoon on a temperate day. For a playful burgundy, darker and richer for these winter months, try the Georges Duboeuf Beaujolais. It’s a red wine, but it is light and fruity and just fun. It’s a young wine, so pick up the 2005 or 2004, and they’ll all just love it.

For your night out at the new in-laws, you want a wine that that makes a statement about the kind of woman you are. Confidence and control?: Cabernet Sauvignon. Airy Princess?: Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Grigio, light Chardonnay. Wild enchantress?: Champagne! It’s your night, you decide!

When selecting a wine to bring as a gift to the hosts of the house to which you have been invited, be discerning. Pick one that’s a bit more than you were hoping to spend, but not enough to even come close to breaking the bank. Fifteen bucks, max. Most important in your search, you must, absolutely must, select a wine that has a pretty label. How else are your hosts going to see just how refined you are…

Dear Professor Lache,

How important do you feel the creation of our moon and its subsequent set of major influences on our planet was to the evolution of creatures from fish and simple sea creatures to the amazing array of land dwelling (and sea dwelling) beings we see today? Also, would you suggest wearing a tie on a first date.

Phil Operance

[I was in your class last semester]

Recent discoveries right here on earth imply that with the right set of sometimes unexpected circumstances, life can spring forth and flourish. Such research provides insight into the very nature of life, and its regenerative abilities. At the deepest depths of the ocean, in the coldest, darkest seas of the Antarctic, in the path of destruction, life exists. So even the asteroid collision that created our moon, which inevitably turned the entire planet into a giant fireball, complete with brimstone and utter destruction of all present life, was a good thing in the march of evolution. As the planet cooled and softened and such, and life began its slow ascent from the depths of the newly forming oceans, the baby moon began its tutelage in the job its still wakes up every night to see through. In circling the young Earth, its gravity pulled the immense oceans from side to side. The tidal difference was only a number of feet in most spots, but this swaying in and out of water most certainly encouraged some of the creatures in the water to get out and have a look around, considering the moon was nearly insisting on it. And no doubt these tidal influences, as well as some relative catastrophe, left us with our sea bearing mammalian friends. So shucks bless the moon! She deserves it. As for your date, NO! Do not wear a tie! First off, you don’t wanna seem like an uptight nut job. More importantly, in case you didn’t get the memo they emailed out, “emo” is no longer cool at all and those people should be shunned.

Abu Ghraib

Here are some pictures the US Government is trying to keep secret. They're doing a great job, over there.

That Philly Trash mag I'm supposed to be writing for looks like it should be up any day now. Here's hopin.

bd

Russian Giant...

rocky! rocky! rocky!

I think that is actually tony duncan in a "giant russian" suit, like the ones you can get at the mall, just more realistic.

A sweet cannabian tale....

So here I am. Three am. Drinking some water and watching TV. Playing guitar during the commercials. (I am pretty certain that this new number I'm workin on is 'the one,' as it began just as the commercials began during carson daly's late night jaunt, and came to a victorious end just as the show kicked back in with its host. [The only, and I mean, practically only, reason I was watching that program at all was because it said in the description that Cheryl Hines would be the first guest of the evening. She was enjoyable as one would expect.] ) Beautiful young Elizabeth asleep in our bed.

I am getting high! That's the plan, as one would expect it to be, having returned home at 1:15am from a long and yet suprisingly smooth evening of workings. So I am drinking my water and doing my business. Now I know, like some or most of you, I occasionally attend to more paranoidish ideas when I am under the influence of marijuana. I definitely wouldn't say I get actually paranoid, but would rather claim "entertain" as the operative word in the previous sentence. In retrospect, I chose instead to go with 'attend to,' and yet, in truth, 'entertain' is more apt. Anyway, I'm kickin out the guitar jams, kickin back to the TV screen, just cold chillin before I shortly make my way to bed.

The TV is on somewhat loudly, but I swear I am hearing something else. Almost like a walkie-talkie, or a loud, muffled voice, coming from somewhere. I start to think, maybe the noise is from a cop car out front. You know how sometimes they use them speakers that sound like weird junk. So I go to my window and look out onto a quiet street. No lights, no action. But the noise seems somewhat more clear to me now. Where the fuck is that coming from?

I go back to the remote control and lower the volume completely. Now I know I hear something. It's aforementioned walkie-talkie voice, along with honest to goodness conversation between two male voices. I look out my other window but I don't see anything. So I go to the door, and peak out the guitar chord plug peephole. I pull out the chord softly, to see...

TWO POLICE OFFICERS. AT MY DOOR. AT THREE IN THE MORNING. HAVING A DISCUSSION.

Shit! I put the plug back in the hole, and I swear neither of them even noticed at all. I went back to my living room, now conveniently located more closely to the front door, and put the bong and the North Carolinean tobacco back in their hiding spots.

The I go and open the door. I'm all like "what's up, how you doing?" Two cops, prolly not much older than me, if even, all like confused already, and now taken aback. I'm lucky I didn't get a gun pulled on me. That would have been fucking awesome. But as it stood, they asked, in a really circuitous and confusing way, if I was the owner of the dog/s upstairs. Now I'll be honest, at the time I was prolly more than fairly stoned. So it may have been that in my highness I failed to comprehend their quick to the point cop talk, and instead only heard the sound of two guys who were pretty sure before I opened the door that they were in the wrong place, and were now soft pedaling around the question 'how the hell do we get upstairs?'

I returned the favor by replying in only the most circuitous and confuse-ed of ways. Not really, I just kinda did ramble for a minute. I felt bad selling out my neighbors like that. But really, you know I ain't the one that called and complained, even though I'm the one who gets the worst of it. If I knew who was complaining, I would be all like "you need to get the fuck over it and NOT get the authorities involved. It's not even that loud."

I shoulda said that to the cops. I shoulda been all like "I don't know who's complaining, but I live right underneath those two pit-bulls, and if they wanna fight at 3am, that is their business, and it is by no means my or anybody else's duty, responsibility, or privilege to put a stop to their natural urges. I mean, Christ, trust me, it is really not that loud. You should just let those people sleep, as they have finally gotten the dogs to lie down. Go in peace, officers. Go in peace."


But like I said, I was pretty effing stoned.


Post Script: In this new pre:We all knew it was coming, and post:yesteday world we apparently now live in, it really doesn't matter if I write about smoking. After all, everything you could possibly want to know about me (and all of us) is available through numerous channels. My cell phone histories, my emails, my credit information, the conversation I had with Bobby on the phone the other day, the conversation we had in 2000 on the Madison rooftop. Et. Al.

So if, and when, I run for president [2020bd] I apologize, like Al Gore, well in advance, for having ever smoked a whole bunch of marijuana. Unlike our current president, I can now boast that I have seen, actually seen, cocaine, for the first time. Just this week at my place of work, Ray found an empty baggie of cocaine on the bathroom floor. You could tell it was cocaine because it was a lil nickle bag, but instead of being filled or emptied with juicy chronic, it was all white and powdery and junk. I thought about trying it, since it was right there in front of me. I've never done coke on account of the fact that I am absolutely convinced it would give me a heart attack the first time I do it. But here it was, in as an innocous form as ever. Alone in my office, with a bag I would have to lick clean to be able to even possibly get anything out of. So the high wouldn't be too intense, and I would be significantly less likely to die of a heart attack upon using it.

Wait a minute. Did you say "would have to lick clean"? Did you also say before that "found on the bathroom floor."? Now I know this "bathroom area" I speak of. It is less a bathroom than an area where quiet recently a swell of nasty ass waters congregated, upon the clogging of the main drainage pipe with "tampons and grease." Were I a worker for the Roto Rooter, I would spice things up a bit, and tell the customer it was clogged "with tampons and bloody grease." But hey, ever guy's got his own art.

So I didn't lick the bag. Having spent a good deal of time in the midst of the sludge, wet vaccing like 50 gallons of it, I couldn't bring myself to lick up on something that may have been through the 'flood.' I threw it out, like a good boy. Who needs that crap anyway. George...? Officer...?

Endless Mike Jambox

Jambox Ringtones Have Arrived.
VICTORY!

We’re just fanatics
each of us on its course
wind no object.
Any objection at all muttled by the soft airstream
created by the fans and filtered air they breathe.

Simply fanatics,
each finds his niche and it just clicks.

We cannot jump high enough. What do we want?
If we knew, we could tell.

You. You who we breathe, who we scream
to as if there is anything more
than a simple human boy or girl standing between us.

Biology, children, is the first defender of denial.
And the cats are no more kittens than the kittens are. . .

The spinning wheel is a trove.

After three years with the appropriately effective "emailaccount.com" as my email address, they have disappeared! Try it! The web address simply does not exist anymore. Maybe, at some point, they will reappear. But for the time being, that being the last four or five days, the website has simply not existed.

It is as if the stocks have plummeted and the board has taken the money and run. It's as if a government has left its people dangerously ill prepared for catastrophe. It's as if the rich have sent the poor to die! It's as if a band member has quit! It's as if the tenents have just up and left, with three months rent due.

I wonder if the guys at emailccount new this was coming, and just didn't, couldn't tell everyone because the strain on the server would be just too great, when the six or so of us with an "emailaccount" address would stampede to the doors, years worth of back email in tow. And where would we go? These tired, huddled masses, crowding at the doors of varied domains, with nothing, absolutely nothing in tow?


"Now I've got new shoes..."

billyfrolic@yahoo.com I know, it sucks. I went with yahoo in the opaque hope that tomorrow, yes tomorrow, the lost island of "emailaccount.com" will appear across the distant horizon. On that tomorrow, I will be of the first of the sailors, the first of the map writers, to chart the mysterious beast. I will go to the ordained place and I will dig. I will dig until I find, upon typing my individual[(s)?] "screen name" the trove of messages, addresses, contacts, and records I now go without.

billyfrolic@yahoo.com