There are moments in life when you know you’re making a bad decision but
you do it anyway. Take the other night, for example. Completely aware of the
inevitable regret that would follow, I fucked a 6ft 3 guy in a bunk bed. Don’t
get me wrong; bunk beds are great for building forts and kicking your brother
between the slats while he’s trying to sleep, but when you’re 22, they’re
pretty much up there on the turnoffs list with AIDS and leprosy.
Just so you know, I’m not one of those weird adult babies you see on
the internet. When I arrived in Toronto, I took the first clean room I found
that was downtown and within budget. The room happened to come with bunk beds.
Not ideal, but whatever. I just swore to myself I’d never bring anyone back
home and nobody would ever know. This is all very well until the guy you want
to sex lives on the other side of town and it’s 3am and you’re both drunk and
horny. This is how it went down.
Upon the realization that we were nearing the end of a short and uneventful summer, my girlfriends and I decided a ladies’ trip to the Hamptons was in order. Luckily, my friend Roxy’s parents have a place there, so we made a last-minute decision to pile on the train and head east for the weekend.
A few years ago, after ending a really shitty relationship, I moved into a dank little studio apartment above a candy shop in an unknown suburb of Illinois. The landlord was a short Italian man who was about 1,000 years old. He ran an antique store, and the night I met with him there to sign the lease on my apartment, he told me that my only neighbor, a middle aged guy named Bill, was a big drunk. I asked if he was an angry drunk, and the landlord said no, so I didn't think any more of it.
A friend, my brother, and I had been in a a small African village for four days before heading to Arusha, the big city near Kilimanjaro, which we were going to climb the next day. We met our guide, one of those know-it-all pricks who grew up on its slopes, had been climbing it since he was a young man, was the president of the climbing guide association, brought lawsuits against negligent/shady climbing companies, fought for pay raises for the porters. And he was irritated that we didn’t prepare questions about the flora and fauna of the Mt. Kilimanjaro National Park. He was concerned that we didn’t bring sleeping bags and walking poles, even though our paperwork said those would be provided for us. He tried to insinuate, calmly, that we were stupid and that we would die up there.
Istanbul is a dynamic city. The interplay between European, Asian, and Muslim cultures left me awestruck and sweaty. I was most recently there to escape London snow and get some quality time with my friend John and someone literally named Michael Caine.
It’s a funny thing to tell people that I’ve been fired from my last four jobs, but it’s true. The only thing that makes me feel better about being fired so frequently is reading in some magazine that Miranda July used to get fired all of the time as well. Lately I have been going through a crisis where I’m trying to figure out what sort of person I am. What does it say about my character that I get canned left and right? I conclude that it has something to do with the fact that I don’t like to sit on my asshole doing stupid crap all day under fluorescent lighting. Am I right?
I have good sweet loving parents, I really do, but I spent Christmas with them in the suburbs and I haven’t been able to leave since. On the morning before flying back home to the city where I live many, many miles away from them, back to my friends and job and own apartment with books and beads and bright green lightbulbs, I go for a run. I slip on ice. I hear my right ankle crack—a tight fluid sound—and right away I know I’m really fucked. Now I'm stuck here, just waiting. Here is my long story about the painful ordeal.
Illustrator, tattoo artist, and noise nerdGary Stevens turned on the news Saturday evening to discover his ex-girlfriend, Christine Burrage (who he knew back in the day as a teen goth who called herself Corpus Christie) had allegedly shot and murdered her current boyfriend, Damon Smooth, in a parking lot. We talked to him about her and in the process found out he lives in a miasmic hellhole where the sanest people around are deranged noise musicians. The whole thing's really sad, so we're tempering the interview with a bit of Gary's relatively cheery art. He's kind of like the boy version of Lisa Frank, obsessed with cute li'l animals but mixing in boogers and creepy crawlers instead of hearts and rainbows.
The other night Cannabis Corpse needed someone volunteer their bag of bones and wear the giant weed bud costume and thrash around in the crowd. So I did. The costume smelled of many many many men, and beer, and scrotum, and more beer and MORE scrotes. I was so anxious to rocket myself into the evening, gender ambiguity aflame, freak flag flying free. But, I forgot one lesson I should have wisely recalled from an embarrassingly brutal moment for me at a Suffocation show last July. I will teach this lesson to my children.
I know this sounds impossible, but I swear on my bottle of Walgreens sleeping pills that a few years ago my friend’s apartment burned down around him while he was boozing, jerking it, and blowing copious lines of drugs off his laptop. I almost didn’t believe it myself—how the fuck can someone be so oblivious?—so I sat down with him over some Jamaican beef patties and we boiled it all down.
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