Tag: Karaoke

Purple toupee is here to stay, after the hair has gone away

The kids gone, I worked really late last night. It wsz so late that it seemed reasonable to go straight to the Karaoke place in my business suit, to grab a Miller HL & sing some 80s tunes.

It was the songstress princess’s night off (see 1st post to understand who she is, hereinafter SP for all intents and purposes) and she blew the doors off each number, getting the crowd into it, and was an all around rock star. Even better is that we got to hang out, joke around and stuff.

Insert wistful sigh here.

The deal with a lot of the attractive 20 somethings who hang out at this place (and even the not so attractive ones, but SP is both beautiful and wild) is that after a few minutes of conversation the severity of the generation gap and the extent to which the person to whom I am speaking is a vapid head case all becomes harshly clear. After over a year of going to this place, this is not the case with SP. She is sharp and witty. Her engaging sassy banter is one of the most enticing things about her.

I’m not a total fool, though. I can’t pretend like her life isn’t the typical Holly Golightly mess typical of the single, no college degree having, struggling 20 something. But unlike many of her contemporaries, adversity has made her reflective, and she is a whole lot more self-aware; and far cooler.

What really tips me off that I am hooked on her? It’s my combination of:

a) sticking my foot in my mouth
b) pratfall-like clumsiness
c) FB stalking her

and, Sadly

d) not trying to contact her when I’m not physically at the Karaoke place

What comes with reaching your 30s, having watched yourself and your friends go through their failed relationships, is the realization that mutual attraction is not enough, and a one-sided attraction is the musicial “The Fantastiks.”

I think this is what my dream about SP (See May 23rd post) was telling me: I have nothing good to offer this person.

This seems like a typically harsh self-assessment. Do I have nothing to say for myself? Surely, there are good things about me. I’m a professional, a good father, witty, caring… am I not? All of these things are bad things in the context of “things that would help SP.”

I’m chained to my job, in the service of my children’s future.

My kids will always come before any gf.

I use my wits to keep away people who might hurt me. And I am not sufficiently thick-skinned about having hurt feelings.

Moreover: I’m not handsome anymore. I’m not up on culture. And, importantly, I don’t feel young.

This is something of a litany re-hash (also known as a familiar refrain) but that’s how one establishes a theme.

I don’t feel young, though. Man, that’s hard to get used to. This must be what it’s like to go bald, to look at the place where there was once hair and realize that it’s not coming back because something died a little inside you.

Skipping church to get my kids early on Father’s day

I had a conversation with a friend last night, while I was waiting to sing at the Karaoke place. My friend was telling me about how he had started a non-denominational evangelical Christian youth group whose ministry featured a major component based on heavy metal music, because he felt moved by the spirit after he had performed Christian Heavy Metal with face-melting awesomeness in a music festival. I was proud of him, and said as much. Well, not in words, but this isn’t exactly the point of this blog entry.

God is still there, even when you don’t got to church. This is my point.

God is in your conversations at the karaoke place. God is within your most banal interactions, and can surprise you with joy.

My atheist friends (which would be most of my friends) are offended/freaked out by this idea. And I think some of my Christian friends aren’t always comfortable with the idea that God exists even when they are not in church or prayin’.

Here are a set of limericks that I learned as an undergraduate, to help understand the metaphysical and epistemological significance of an ever-present God, who sustains us even when we have to miss church. It also summarizes the philosophy of George Berkeley (pronounced Bark-a-lay):

A skeptical sophomore wrote God:
“I find it exceedingly odd
that there yonder tree
dost not ceaseth be
When no one’s about in the quad.”

“Dear Sir: Your bewilderment’s odd;
For I am about in the quad.
And thusly, yon tree
shall continue to be;
observed by… Yours faithfully, God.”

I had something else to say to my friend, but the KJ called me to sing. So, I got up and sang “The Rainbow Connection”. When the intro started, I gave him a shout-out, saying that this song was dedicated to him. When I finished my song, I realized it was after midnight and that it was now Father’s Day. I decided to pay my tab, and go home.

Today, a bunch of my Facebook friends are posting about their fathers here and passed. I don’t really need to try very hard to imagine what my Dad would say about my whole situation, were he still alive. I am fairly sure that I have access those thoughts, and I am certain that I do access those feelings.

That’s maybe the more interesting epistemological trick. My parents are gone, I know that. This knowledge lacks understanding. Metaphysically, I don’t know where they went to. I seem to think that they are gone but somehow still with me; and not in the sense “that God dwells in all of us.” I feel it as a corporeal reality. I am made up of their DNA. The repeated aphorisms of their nurturing years trained and shaped the chemistry and physiology of my brain. Echos of their utterances run through my thoughts and the language that I use; especially as I nurture my kids.

Neither is the relationship purely static. There is a lasting dynamism that survives in the relationship. As I move through the ages my life, and my experiences come into phase with their corresponding ages and experiences, I feel the strength of their vicarious impulses within me. Mother and Father duel within my psyche, urging me both to correct their mistakes, while also urging me to repeat their same choices. I wonder if my kids will have the same paradoxical feelings? That’s rhetorical. I know they will.

Ok. here are some TMBG lyrics:

You’ll always miss my big old body
In its prime and never shoddy,
While bloodhounds wait down in the lobby you’ll eulogize my big old body

You’ll miss me with effigies
Lighting up your house like Xmas trees
As tears roll down below your knees
You’ll miss me with effigies

Too late or still too soon to make lots of bad love and there’s no time for sorrow…

…run around, run around with a hole in your head ’till tomorrow.

I ran into a slacker at a different karaoke place the other day. Like me, he was flying solo.  For purposes of this blog post, I will call him “Slacker.” We compared notes.

When you run stag, you need a defensive mechanism to compensate for a lack of a wingman. Ideally, you pick a gimmicky defensive mechanism that also has the potential to attract wingmen (feasible), or possibly women (less so).

Slacker’s gimmick was that he solved the crossword puzzle from the local paper.

I had developed a gimmick over the winter.  I had been carrying around a notebook into which I would jot down ideas, as if I was going to do something with those ideas. As lame as that sounds, the notebook gimmick was possible because I had a woolen winter coat that was the perfect size for the notebook.

Now that summer is here, the intensely sad nature of being a guy walking around writing crazy things into a notebook was painfully clear. So I just stopped bringing it. But it meant that I would walk into a place, just me and no defensive mechanisms at all. When you have no defensive mechanisms and are all by yourself, you end up just eyeballing people in the crowd.

The term for guys who do this is “creeper.” Its a fair criticism. When you are on your own, stop being on your own. The key is to step up as soon as possible. Make a human connection or bail. This sometimes means jumping on the wing of another dude flying stag.

Hey, man. S’up? That word there? 36 down… “arsenal.” A-R-S-E-N-A-L

For real, bro? Whoah… yeah it is! That’s awe-some, bro. Awesome.

And just like that, my new name is “bro” and he and I are hangin’ out.

Anyhow, Slacker and I, compared notes about on-line dating. While we did that, I was his wingman. He tried to pick up the waitress for whom he had feelings. After a drink or two, it became clear that they had a history and that it wasn’t a good one. I kept my thoughts about this to myself, but started to think about leaving.

At least, we compared notes.

So what did I learn from these notes? Turns out, neither of us like online dating. This wasn’t exactly a profound revelation.