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Yesterday, I turned 38. (Am still somewhat in denial. For instance, I first typed that as “28.”) Among the festivities of the day was Lamb of God’s last show in Richmond, before they head out on their big tour with Metallica. It was a great show, about which more will have to be written at a later time. (I’ll also have to finish this later - hopefully tonight. Had no idea there’d be so many people to include. Damn, people can be nice.) For now, though, I must share this: when I came home from the festivities and looked in the mirror at the All-Access guest pass (thank you Randy!) attached to my dress.

Written on the pass was the date: “24-Nov.” But the reverse image, as reflected in the mirror, looked like it was spelling out the word, “Young.”

All-Access pass with date

All-Access pass with date - Image reversed

On Sunday, I returned from a five-day trip to Greensboro to see visit with he who is known to most of my peeps on Twitter as “the BFF.” Here’s us, goofing in an appropriately blurred manner at the local Krispy Kreme:

We go back as far as our time in the collective primordial soupcan, I’m pretty sure. He’s the Hansel to my Gretel in our respective (wildly) dysfunctional family narratives. (Or sometimes he’s Gretel and I’m Hansel. We’re versatile like that.) We went to high school together for a few years, before (in a story that would take far too long to explain here) I impersonated a social worker on his behalf, leading to my doing a fake interview of his family, in order to establish his fitness and stability to enter into a student exchange program - in freakin’ Egypt, because his main issue was getting as far as possible from his family no matter what that took. And it was hard - so hard - to see him go; to help him go, even - but I knew we’d continue to cross paths.

And so we have, ever since our time together in the mid-eighties on the North Shore of Kauai. He’d be living in Florida or Georgia or North Carolina or Alabama while I’d be living in Washington State or New York or Minnesota or Virginia and we would find each other again, and catch up on all the mad chaos of our times apart.

I love him to pieces. He’s both the brother and the sister I never had. And because, now that I’m back in Richmond, and already miss him something terrible, I thought I’d posta compendium of past BFF-related tweets, for those who appreciate that sort of thing (what? There are some).

The usual guiding premise of my trips to Greensboro is that we will write. And we do write! But sometimes we also act like silly kids:

• Extracting chapter titles for work in progress from past tweets. (To BFF: “See? I TOLD you there was a literary justification for Twitter.”) (link)
• BFF now actively sabotaging me. Sends email w/ (blessedly un-twitterable) graphic w/ slogan at bottom (as it were): “Ass: The Other Vagina.” (link)
• BFF thinks his Chewbaca impressions (& threatening to show me pictures of foreskin) is going to help me write. Seriously. GOING TO KILL HIM. (link)
• BFF has adopted my fave exhortation (via @jagosaurus), “Sweet Sparkly Jesus!” In return, he enriches my vocab w/ phrases like “donut puncher” (link)
• Trying to convince BFF that since, when we were teenagers, I credibly impersonated a social worker on his behalf, I can now act as his agent. (link)
• BFF, as Lionel Richie song plays on 80s channel: “To you this coffee’s weak, but after I drink it, my BALLS will be dancing on the ceiling!” (link)
• BFF (suspiciously): “Are you twittering?” Me (doe-eyed): “Of course not!” (pauses) “…But I am, you know, lying.” (link)
• BFF, indignant: “I have NOT had plastic surgery! I’ve had a minor amount of laser and chemical resurfacing.” Well okay then. (link)

Sometimes it’s a family affair:

• BFF’s sister, who is known for telling the story of how she photographed Oprah (twice!) - just mentioned having photographed Oprah. (Twice!) (link)
• OMG! My BFF, his husband and his bi sister are all forcing me to watch an Oprah special. ON CHER. I AM the butchest person in this room. (link)
• BFF’s husband: “Omigawd! She’s like, all Sade now.” Me: “I can’t believe that’s a metaphor for you.” (link)
• Oh fuck all. Now Cher is talking with Tina Turner and Oprah ABOUT TOM CRUISE. BFF & fam staring as if experiencing rapture. How I love them. (link)
• “Uh oh. She’s texting.” - BFF’s sister, earlier tonight. (link)
• For my benefit, BFF put on VH1’s “40 Best Metal Songs.” I name-drop, proving I am as tedious as his sister about her (twice!) meeting Oprah. (link)
• Explaining “The Great Sharon Osbourne Versus Iron Maiden War of ‘05″; BFF finds this approximately as fascinating as I found Cher last night (link)

Sometimes it’s just about us:

• BFF to pay for my next train ticket to Greensboro. Claims this isn’t charity but for his selfish benefit; he writes better w/ me there. Aww. (link)
• BFF & I go back light years; we are often each others’ single common thread, ribboned through our respective decades of open throttle chaos. (link)
• BFF has learned to send text messages, though they’re always quite brief. Latest: “Sphincter Spasm!” Not sure how he’d fare on Twitter. (link)
• BFF has texting now & is sending various alternate spellings/pronunciations for “vagina.” Latest: “Mugigera.” It’s going to be a long night. (link)
• Nap interrupted by panicked BFF’s “CALL ME” txt. Called. The emergency: his screenplay needs title! So, watch for future hit film, “Mmmmph.” (link)
• BFF is most vag-obsessed gay dude I know: “1st we’ll turn right on Aycock.” (Note: an actual street.) “Then we’ll turn left on… A Vagina!” (link)
• BFF: “Did I tell you that I am so extra-incredibly gay?” Me: “…?” BFF: “What I mean is, in two weeks I get to see Dolly Parton! Yay, me!” (link)
• “Can we stop for a minute & just count our blessings?” - BFF. “Can I blow my nose first?” - me. (after a long talk and a good cry) (link)

When we’re together, it’s awfully hard to keep track of all the words that pass between us, what with all the giggling like schoolgirls and watching after six dogs (whom I’ll be taking care of in December when he & his partner go to Vegas) while actually getting in some writing, too. But I try my best to record for posterity some of our better conversations. This one, following the above “counting our blessings” discussion, is a personal favorite (and was just brief enough to fit into one tweet):

BFF: “You have a GREAT husband. I mean, he’s funny…”
Me: “Very!”
BFF: “He’s a Democrat…”
Me: “Yep.”
BFF: “And he’s hairy!”
Me: “Sure. Wait, no! That’s NOT a plus.”

Finally reading Nancy Milford’s biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Savage Beauty (a gift sent by my friend Chris, to whom I owe a good three or four letters). Here, the biographer is speaking of her early, delicate negotiations with the late poet’s sister, owner of Edna’s estate:

There were only three things she said she’d destroyed. One was a letter returned to her by a no-longer-young man to whom Edna had written. Norma said it was indiscreet. Edna described his physical beauty in detail and made what she wanted clear. He was homosexual. Norma said, “Maybe she didn’t care. Anyway, he turned her down. We can’t have that.” There was an ivory dildo, which Norma admitted was difficult to burn, but she’d managed. And there was a set of pornographic photographs, taken, she thought, about the same time as the nude photographs from Santa Fe in 1926 or 1927, when Millay was writing her libretto, The King’s Henchman, for the Metropolitan Opera. These were of Eugen and Edna, she said. Some were taken down at the pool, perhaps shot by Eugen using a timing device on his camera. Norma guessed that Arthur Davison Ficke had a hand in shooting them. “Vincent was already a famous poet, how could she have let these photographs of her be taken? Well, she did. Naughty Vincent Millay! I found them, and I destroyed them. For her own good! You can put that down!”

- Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. New York: Random House, 2001, xv-xvi.

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This shot taken, as best I can remember, in one of the stalls at Alley Katz. (I know, I am a walking cliché.) The three different versions of same (rendered via Picasa because I still don’t know Photoshop or whatever it is the cool kids are using these daze) are intended to reflect the double- & triple-vision I would experience later that night, as well as to highlight what, once I was sober, I found most amusing about it: that I seemed to resemble the zombie on my shirt (band T for the much-beloved and missed Alabama Thunderpussy).

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Earlier tonight I was complaining that my husband was going out to a show tonight (Hatebreed /Halo of Locusts), but I wasn’t. Not his fault, since I’d known about it for awhile and could have arranged childcare in advance, but I spaced it.

Here, by the way, is the poster for the show I’m missing. (Like you care, right?)

(Also, if all this seems incredibly excessive, please understand that I am extremely sexually frustrated right now. Certainly, there are worse ways I could be coping with this problem than by blogging about some drunken evening last month, right?)

So to cope with my irritation, I finally went through the photos (from my crappy camera phone and Jeff’s slightly less crappy cameral phone) from the last night I did get to go out. Since I don’t do that terribly often, I tend to make up for lost time when I do; that is to say, I might get completely snookered.

That particular evening (August 16th/early AM of 17th), I had my phone handy and, with it, sent a variety of inebriated messages to Twitter (you can follow me here, but note warning about my posts being not always funny, and never for the faint of heart). So here’s the story, as best I can reconstruct it:

• Commence project “Banish Cramps By Any & All Means Necessary” so I can catch the RPG show @ Alley Katz tonight. Overnight childcare, people!
• Also: predominantly left-sided abdominal cramps (when I no longer have a left ovary or fallopian tube) kinda freaks me out. Related: Vicodin
• Tampon in at slightly wrong angle; also wearing high heels. Physical comedy FTW!
• Cute, portly drunk chick seated on pavement hugging cute, skinny drunk chick not *yet* seated on pavement. Pass the popcorn.
• Sign in bar says “No Fighting, No Tagging.” First thought: “Flickr.” Second thought: “I should tweet that.” Third thought: “OMFG I’m a nerd”
• Hopefully tomorrow I’ll be able to reconstruct how I ended up in a discussion of lingerie catalogs and website statistics with RPG’s drummer
• Holy… duck I’m frunk.
• Show’s over. If the room could stop spinning now that would be totally awesome.

This, by the way, was RPG’s set list from that night. That’s Mike Marunde’s foot in the picture.

(It should surprise no one that the song that was ringing most clearly in my head, both that night and all the next day, was Alcohol, which can be heard at the band’s myspace page here.)

Finally there were the reflective tweets of the following morning:

• When you find yourself justifying that you’re not *too* trashed since you can still control the direction of your vomit, you’re too trashed.
• “Rashad! I haven’t seen you in ages!” I said, throwing my arms around him. “I’m not Rashad, but thanks!” he replied, with a big smile. D’OH. [Note: See also "The expanded truth about this anecdote" on my Tumblelog.]
• It’d be just awesome if today’s accomplishments end up including things besides “napped,” “tweeted,” & “kept down Excedrin and ginger ale.”

As I continued to repair from my hangover, I noticed a post from Jay Hathaway, aka @strutting. He no longer follows me on Twitter, but had seen at least one of my tweets that evening, as it had appeared on Favrd.

His post? “I’m flotally tabbergasted that “duckin frunk” made it onto Favrd.”

Well, I dimly thought, excuuuuse me!

Sadly, I was indeed so drunk at the time that it never occurred to me that my spoonerism of “holy… duck I’m frunk” was anything but original. If I’d heard anyone use it before, it was buried deep in my the snookered recesses of memory. Oh, inebriated hubris!

So I replied thusly:

• @strutting: In my defense, 1) I really was that drunk, & 2) This hangover should be considered more than enough punishment.

Thumbnails from the photos appear below; the full photoset (such as it is) appears here.

Today I woke up with Ella Fitzgerald’s Hooray for Love in my head. Specifically, these lines:

It’s the wonder of the world, It’s a rocket to the moon
It gets you high, it gets you low, but once you get that glow…

So after my morning coffee, I went to iTunes and typed in “Hooray.” The song I wanted (from The Best of the Songbooks) came up, as did a 21-second Funkmaster Flex clip, Hip Hop Hooray (sampling Naughty by Nature¹) from The Mix Tape Volume II: 60 Minutes Of Funk.

Played back-to-back, I then wished I had the ability to mix them. I will provide both tracks here in hopes I might inspire some random individual to make this happen:

Ella Fitzgerald: Hooray for Love (mp3/album)

Funkmaster Flex: Hip Hop Hooray (album)

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¹The original Naughty by Nature song from which Funkmaster Flex’s track was itself derived is available here.

[L: Me with newly red-ified hair; R: shadow of husband taking picture. One of our stranger portraits together.]

Proof my husband hates me:

He recorded “Bait Shop,” starring Bill Engvall and Billy Ray Cyrus, on the DVR.

Proof my husband loves me:

Only five minutes into its playback, even he had to acknowledge it was so desperately, irredeemably bad that he deleted it.

This might also explain why, even when I am flipping him off, I am also smiling.

…while I am battling insomnia.

Folks, at the end of this month we will be, I’m afraid, moving.

Granted, it will only be next door, to a house owned by the same landlord (with marginally more room, so finally the girls will have separate rooms and, therefore, can hopefully avoid killing each other), so there will be no specific inconvenience or expense of a moving truck, for example.

However, we’ve been living here for a decade now, and the amount of life’s accumulated detritus is positively staggering. Efforts to pare down the loads of completely useless crap we own are… floundering.

But every now and then, going through boxes, I find some super awesome prizeworthy shit. Like this children’s book, an acquisition from Diversity Thrift (where the cool people in Richmond shop, thank you very much). (Coincidentally, I am of the thinking that the “cool” contingency of Richmond consists of broke ass people like us.)

(Click through to Flickr for larger images/detail)

Some teenagers would kill to go to a Lamb of God show - never mind the luxury of VIP access and such, since we’re friends of the band members, in particular, vocalist Randy Blythe (as discussed recently) and guitarist Mark Morton (whom my husband has known since the seventies, and I’ve known since 1990). Here’s my girl at her first (and thus far, only) such show:

Now, contrast that with the same teenager’s reaction to a Jonas Brothers’ show? No contest!

The funny thing? At the very event where the latter show occurred (Virginia’s State Fair, 2007) we also hung out for awhile with Randy, who gave our daughter some good-natured grief for her lack of enthusiasm for the metal genre.

Well, no one can say we’re not exposing the kids to a… variety of cultural experiences.

From my pal D. Randall Blythe:

I am sitting outside in Paris @ cafe Les Deux Magots (waaaaay Hemingway!) having an espresso and getting ready to walk over to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas’ house, then on to where Joyce wrote a good part of Ulysses. There’s your geek stuff for the day. XO, DRB

Can I just say? How rad is it that one of my dearest friends in the world not only throws down as lead screamer for Richmond’s own Grammy-nominated metal band, but also gets me as the literature dork I am. (And who was also my very first regular reader, in this blog’s first incarnation, in 2003 or so.)

Love you, Randy. Have fun out there and get your butt back home to RVA safe and sound. (And note that I waited a full twenty-four hours before posting this. Wouldn’t have wanted you to get stalked by Parisian metal fans or whatever.)