014: I found some stuff...

Now that my brush with fame has come and gone (I bet I can count the number of regular readers on one finger) I can go back to treating this site like the personal journal that it really is...

In this spirit, I found a sheet of paper dated 4-6-98 with some stuff written on it that I'm going to transcribe here:

"That night I half slept half stared. I had been doing a lot of that lately. Too much sleeping seemed like such a waste of time. Dull. If it weren't for the stereo babbling away all night at the foot of the bed, I probably wouldn't bother at all.

Don't get me wrong. I was tired. Some nights completely exhausted, but I had begun to question sleep. It seemed so... ridiculous to just lay there..."

Most of that had been crossed out. I'm guessing that I was trying to write a story about a guy with insomnia, although this is almost exactly what going to bed is like for me still... I have never slept well. I was even a colicky baby, preferring to scream all night than just lay there with my eyes closed...

Here is another bit of writing from that same sheet of paper (remember from 4-6-98):

"Life is not the 'happily ever after' at the end of the book; or the 'this is how he ended up' that most people seem to regard it as. It's the accidental bump into a stranger and the toothpaste spilled on a shirt and the smoke in your eyes as it escapes from a cigarette. The ending is never interesting, it's just the end, and the beginning always starts from zero. It's the middle, the beautiful, random, chaotic middle where all the action happens that you've really got to pay attention to..."

Hmmmmmm... Not sure what to make of that one. I guess I was in a "Seize the Day!" mood...

Yeah...

In a post from a few days ago I mentioned that I had written some NEW stuff for the blog, but I was feeling too lazy to type it in. Here is the first part of that stuff:

"My first proper girlfriend was a feral creature who was eventually tamed, perhaps BLANDED DOWN would be a better way to put it, either by my own wild nature or by TIME itself, to such a point that we could no longer relate. At the moment of our final parting I predicted that we would never speak again and, to date, the power of my curse has held strong."

The important thing is that I stole a lot of music from that girl before we finally broke up...

Here is another bit that I wrote a few nights ago specifically for the blog. This is one of many blurbs I've written about the happenings at Café Forum, a coffee house and nightclub that a friend of mine opened here in town back in 1992. For many people in the Longview-Kelso alternative scene, the Café Forum was the one thing that all of us had in common. I intend on writing a book about my experiences during this time and this little bit is typical of the notes I've written on this magical time. For some reason, I changed the names of the people and the café this time:

"A time that many in Longview, myself included, have mythologized into a virtual GOLDEN AGE occured in the very early 90s. Our Mount Olympus, our Neverland, our Xanadu was a creation of my friend Mr. Lovejoy (and his family... and yes: all names have been changed to protect ME from lawsuits...) called The Metropolis...

Our Met, designed as a coffee shop and café, quickly solidified itself as the meeting ground and 'home' for every punk, skinhead, pothead, waver, raver, goth, and grunger within a 50 mile radius when, on our second official day of business, Green Day materialized for an impromptu performance and, with no advertising and only a few hours warning, our unsuspecting staff of about six people were instantly transformed from cashiers and servers into fetish workers, distributing fantasy, underground entertainment, drugs and alcohol. Technically we weren't licensed to sell any of these things, but for a brief moment in history a doorway to some subcultural utopia was opened right here in Longview and those of us that chose to pass through it were forever altered by the experience.

So much was happening all at once, so many streams crossed in that one building... It's difficult, and probably unnecessary, to sort them all."

Boy... what a pile of crap... If I had any self respect at all I'd just erase this whole post and forget about it... But, I don't...

The point of writing all that terrible prose about Café Forum is that it really was an important time in the formation of my identity. I, and several other people, practically lived there for several months. I met people there became life-long friends.

Now, I just need to discover a way of distilling the essence of that experience into a novel. There are some great raw materials there to choose from: Death, drugs, bizarre love triangles, crazy underground performers including: Beat Happening, Heavens to Betsy, Jack-knife, Small, All You Can Eat, Bung, (probably The Jimmies, although I don't remember them actually playing), Snowbud and the Flower People, Big Daddy Meat Straw, Just Plain Bill, and Green Day (when they were still an indy band on Lookout! Records...) There were a bunch more bands that played but I got fired just a few weeks after the cafe opened and I spent the rest of the summer drunk... (This was the only period in my life where I drank on a regular basis... I eventually got tired of it, but not EVERYONE has moved on...) Besides the bands that played we also had crazy drama: the owner's mom died, we would run out of groceries but not have any money in the till to buy new ones, no one ever paid to get into the shows, and someone even blew up the plumbing for the whole block after one particularly nasty party... I'm telling you, this DESERVES to be made into a book, or a screenplay or something... It MUST be told before everyone involved ends up dead and the whole experience disappears from the universe... Cuz that would be a damn shame...

I really should be doing homework now... (Maybe I'll come back and fix the spelling errors later... We'll see.)