Precious Fathers

A rep for Hudson had no comment. A lawyer for Wilson tells Us in a statement, “[Anything] that suggests that the separation of Ms. Hudson was caused by Mr. Wilson…is absolutely false.” - US Weekly

Page Six reports that Owen Wilson - also known as the 'Butterscotch Stallion' - allegedly brought a woman back to his hotel room and licked her butt for over two hours. - The Superficial

I used to think Owen Wilson was really cool, until I met him at a wrap party for one of his movies that I was at with Frannie, and within minutes his dirty vibe exposed itself, wafting over the massive display of chilled dungeness crab that sat beneath a giant ice sculpture of a melting swan.

Fooling around is one thing, but carrying on with someone fresh out of a relationship is bottom feeding, and I can't help but think that guys that do it have some disfunction in their history that kept them from learning a little honor amongst men. I come from good stock, I don't do such things, although, I must say the temptation has presented itself on occasion. I made out with a girl once when her boyfriend was passed out in the other room, I felt like shit about it for weeks, and although it was years ago it still haunts me to this day, and I can only attribute this haunting of guilt to the men that influenced me during my formative years, my dad and his father.

I don't think my dad planned on working at a grocery store forever, but once my mom got pregnant there was little point in looking elsewhere for work since the money was good and he could work alongside his father who owned the place. They worked with each other during the week and would party together on the weekends, and since my dad's friends were the offspring of my grandfather's friends, all of them would spend time together, an entire generation of father and son, hanging out, drinking, smoking, hunting, and fishing. My grandfather's store did very well throughout my childhood and I was always in awe of all the toys my dad and grandfather had when I was growing up. They had boats for the summer, snowmobiles for the winter and always drove nice cars. My dad always had a convertible when he was younger, either a Corvair or an Impala, and my grandfather favored big Chryslers from the mid seventies, being sure to buy one every time a new model was released. For what seemed like forever, and what seems now like such a long time ago, they were there, at the back of the store, dressed in their blood stained aprons while standing on the sawdust covered floor of the small meat department that they ran together while my grandmother worked the till up front. Local radio would always be playing on a small transistor wrapped in a leather case that would sit on the ledge of an opening that allowed them to look out at the store from the back area where an oxtail stew or spicy chili would always be cooking on a hot plate they kept on a counter beside one of many ominous looking saws that would be used to cut through the side of a carcass at a blinding rate of speed.

My dad back then was very slight, he looked like Paul McCartney, and my grandfather was huge, more like Robert Duvall, except twice as thick. I always envied the pictures of them together, and I return to one in particular every so often as my favorite. My dad is sitting on a couch with his feet up on a coffee table, men of few words, they seem distant but incredibly close all at the same time. Dressed in the fashion of the day, which was mod skinny pants, beatle boots, and a short sleeved shirt with a collar, my dad has an eager smile that only youth can produce, while my grandfathers hulking body towers beside him in a white muscle shirt with a dead pan stare on his face and a whiskey in one hand with a cigar in the other. It took me years to figure out that my grandfather was actually very gentle, but because of his size and the way he looked I was terrified of him. An open family we are not, so stories about my grandfather being arrested in Paris for beating a man to within an inch of his life for eluding to some sort of homosexual activity in a pub, or downing 8 glasses of draft at the local legion while the delivery van full of groceries sat outside in the parking lot, I heard through friends at parties, because their dad's had told them the stories. It was a small community.

My dad is still alive, he and my mother are very much in love. They drink a lot, eat well, travel in the winter and spend the summer days beside their pool or working in their garden. I imagine he must have learned this model of living from my grandfather who loved his wife very much as well. Like most post war men, they were gentlemen, with a slight hint of mysoginist behavior. The kind that was born of necessity, innocence, and accepted roles. A model that was in its last days, and about to crack. My dad and grandfather were passionate about the things they believed in, they had flaws, they made mistakes, and they would fight anyone that threatened the things they loved. The people that wronged them were considered enemies, and were never mentioned again. I can remember being a kid and hearing hushed tones over the breakfast table about my dad shoving someone to the floor at a party the night before because he looked at my mother too long, and when I was wrongfully fired from my first job as a bus boy, my dad got into such a rage that he drove to the franchise steakhouse I worked at to threaten the manager with physical violence if he didn't give me my job back, which after an incident like that, I didn't want.

This was a very different contrast from the father of a friend of mine in school who's wife left him for a man she fell in love with by writing to him in prison while he was fighting the murder and rape charge of a teenage coffee shop worker. It went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, and eventually the man in question got off and took my friends mom away to live in another province, leaving his father behind to look after the three boys they had together. While the peversity of all this was overwhelming for a boy in junior high who had been raised in a fairly sheltered domestic environment of lovers and fighters, the real shocker was the reaction from my friend's father who barely seemed to care, and not only didn't care, but would have the two adulterers over for dinner, and holiday with them and the kids in one big communal creep cult. The father of my friend was laid back to the point of comatose, and I suppose it took a certain amount of indifference to be able to befriend a man that was sleeping with his wife, but my parents would often ridicule his laid back drawling voice which asserted how they felt about the whole thing. It takes a certain amount of emotional vacancy to dine with the man that's fucking your wife, and I just don't have much interest, or respect for people that have complete control of their emotional well being, ultimately they are boring and predictable. I suppose my parents felt the same way.

So I learned. I learned from my dad, I learned from my grandfather, and his friends. I learned from my friend Cody when we were growing up, who used to assert throughout our time together in the hometown, "mowing someone else's lawn just isn't cool." There were movies too, I can remember John Wayne, the man's man, stating in The Shootist, "I won't be wronged, I won't be insulted, and I won't be laid a hand on. I don't do these things to other people and I expect the same from them." and we all know John Wayne was far from a model citizen, which is exactly my point.

I am angry, I am passionate, I make mistakes, but I know who I am and where I come from, and there are things that I would never do, but we're not all on the same page when it comes to cuttin grass, now are we.

Tap Tap - 100 000 Thoughts

Ten

Dudley Moore in 10

It was May 23rd, two years ago. I had just finished a two hundred dollar meal with Tony at a cramped tapas restaurant where the music bordered on deafening, and the waitresses were frustratingly lovely. I had fifteen thousand dollars in the bank, and an emptiness in my heart that not even the new 250$ shoes I was wearing could subside. But that was about to all change. Tony dropped me off at a party hosted by Dragica, who I had met just two weeks prior. It was her birthday, and our presence was required in costume because we were all planning on attending a late night Mad Hatter's tea party at a warehouse space on the east side.

When I woke up the next day in Nymphalidae's bed with her huge fourth floor windows just above my forehead, overlooking the church steeples and awnings of Chinatown with the snowcapped mountains overshadowing everything from the north, I was waking up in another world, and I haven't been home since.

The 23rd doesn't fall on a weekend anymore, it will take seven years for that to happen again, but a couple of months ago, it came around again, May 23rd 2006, and we had a party, A birthday party for Dragica, and we were again, of course, required in costume.

Phoenix - Long Distance Call

Home Six Part III

Barry Lyndon - A film by Stanley Kubrick

Low's Stories Big and Tall, continues its serialized account of our hero's return home on the hottest day of the summer with Part III of Home Six, below. Part I can be found here, while Part II can be found here. Happy Reading.

He had just finished performing a set of twelve songs to a disparate crowd huddled into a studio space for musicians and artists on the hottest day of the year. The walls were painted black, and thick carpets were hung from the sills to keep out the light, and keep in the sound. There was hardly any room and everyone had to stand so closely to Low and the rest of the band that any kind of movement was exaggerated to the point of overly dramatic. While he was singing though, he kept stealing glances at one guy through a small entranceway into the room adjacent to the band, his head was bobbing back and forth, and he was wearing the kind of cheap round Lennon type sunglasses that you can buy at a shop that sells Iron Maiden shirts, skull rings, and bongs. Obviously Low's fan just happened to be walking by when he came upon the small sign on the street below advertising that there would be free music to celebrate a small store opening within the studio, and in the quick flash of contemplation that presented itself between verse and chorus, Low realized that this was a real experience for his admirer, one unmediated by pretension, fashion, networking, or music sales, he was there for one reason only, and that was experience. Low realized what it must have looked like, to walk up a set of stairs only to be presented with a small group of people huddled into a dark room on a sunny day to see him screaming background vocals into the bell of a trumpet while it was pointed at a microphone, wearing his women's jeans. When it was all over Low couldn't tell if he had just made a complete ass out of himself or if he had actually pulled it off. Regardless of how his performance was perceived however, he would never forget it. Even though in a few days, or possibly even a few short hours, he would very much want to forget that it ever happened.

And so it all went down, Low leaves the party, suitcase in hand, finally hails a cab after much thought and contemplation at the side of street, and listens to Hindu pop in the back seat of his mini-van cab all the way to the airport. He boards the plane just before they start to announce his name as a missing passenger, and eventually finds himself with row 10 entirely to himself, free to sip cans of Canadian at 41,000 feet and to comfortably watch the sun finally settle amongst the clouds, leaving the tail of the plane covered in an intense glare of hot orange and streaking yellow while the nose of the vessel was shrouded in starlit darkness, allowing the night to begin for our hero.

Low was travelling at 500mph, and moving at such great speed seemed to cause the transition between night and day to take unusually long, but eventually the captain informed everyone in his authoritative voice that the Boeing was on its approach to the runway, encouraging Low to fasten his seatbelt for the descent into his past. He could see out the window of the aircraft perfectly, It was clear outside, it was never cloudy there, leaving everything in a constant state of exposure, and as the plane hovered over the city, the lights of the neighborhoods that he frequented all those years could be looked at as a whole, allowing Low to sit and scrutinize that place from his little window as if an apparition was sitting beside him taking him through various scenes in his life as his eyes glanced from each and every recognizable location.

"This is where you lived Low," it would say in a withering wise old man's voice, Low imagined.. "You loved here, had sex in parking lots, stole from houses and cars, shops and parties. Lit forest fires, and vandalized schools. You watched your parents age, and witnessed the extinction of the generation known as your grandparents. You watched the houses your family lived in become the possessions of strangers, like sealed tombs they could only be experienced in imagination and memory now. There are the fields where you lay with your father in the grass of the prairies with a shotgun between you, ready to jump up at the first sound of approaching geese, and there is the first street you lived on where you rested your head in your mothers lap while she cleaned your ear with a Q-Tip and recited stories about her dad, and there is the backyard to the green house, where, like fools, you and your brother wasted an entire 6-pack of Coca-Cola, spitting it all over your face and hands, in an attempt to imitate blood so that the two of you could recreate the portrait of Gene Simmons on the cover of the classic Kiss album, Alive II."

"I never hesitated," Low spoke out loud, drunkenly entertaining this scene as if it were really happening, while the plane shook towards the ground, making everyone's head rock slowly back and forth hypnotically against the seat rests. "When situations presented themselves, I took the opportunity to experience them no matter the cost. I always thought that attitude would pay out in endless rewards, but I lost so much."

"And do you know why you failed?" the voice responded in Low's head.

He stared out the window at his hometown with the lights of the streets crisscrossing beneath him as he floated closer and closer towards the ground, "No," he mumbled, "I have no fucking idea."

One of the advantages that living in a small city has over living in a big one is how quickly one can perform the menial tasks involved with the day to day activities of public life, and this became apparent to Low as he only had to walk down one short hallway to reach the arms of Cody, which were waiting for him at the bottom of an escalator. In bigger airports you had to walk for upwards of 15 minutes just to reach the baggage carousel, but this was not necessary for a little airport like the one Low and Cody were standing in, greeting each other for the first time in ages while Low's green Fleetwing went around and round to the amusement of a small group people standing and waiting for their luggage. Cody seemed to be getting dirtier every year. His demeanor always got him into trouble, his nasally laugh always sounded condescending, and his hair constantly hung in his eyes, even amidst total chaos, at which point he would deliver his trademark, "don't worry about it, " with his measured drawl that sounded like a cross between Dennis the Menace, and John Wayne. He had features that could never fail the tribal nature of what attracts humans to each other, a good nose, chin, and broad shoulders. He was incredibly thin, but you would never know it because his clothes were always so baggy, and he looked much younger than he really was, even though he was unshaven, and wearing the same ratty shoes that Low had seen him in three years ago.

"I wasn't sure if I was gonna get a hug or not so I figured I'd wait to see what you were gonna do," Cody said, as he got back into his silver jeep after securing Low's luggage in the back.

"I've been drinking since noon, so I am feeling quite amorous, although I think I've sweated it all out," said Low as he thought about the small stage he was on, which was now on the other side of the continent.

Cody grabbed a cd case from the glove box and quickly laid out two enormous lines of cocaine with great precision and speed. "You watch," he said leaning down into the arm rest with a 20$ bill up his nose, and then, passing the bill to Low, continued on, "I figured we'd party tonight and then take it easy the rest of the week, I'm on holidays. Ok, where should we go tonight?"

Low rose from the center console of the silver jeep, "wherever, let's just get a beer, and see what happens. Do you have a cigarette?" And the two schoolmates went off into the night somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

To be continued....

are Eh

and he remembered walking in with her back to him
the black cuff of her sweater wrapped around her wrist
mouthing the words
singing that song that she was listening to

Home Six Part II

Rent A Wreck - Suburban Kids With Biblicial Names

Home Six continues with Part II below, Part I can be found here.

"Haven't you got anything slimmer? Jesus fuck, everything is so bloody dumpy," Low ranted to the clerk from the other side of the change room door. She put him at ease, allowing him to speak with his usual excited rhetoric that he saved for girls that he thought were cute. Low had spent plenty of time with her before they hit the fitting area, having led her to every display of jeans in the store, perusing leg widths like some kind of manic in search of a religious experience. Her name was Tina, she thought Low was annoying, but didn't mind spending the extra time with him since he was more interesting than her average customer who had just finished gorging themselves on all you can eat shrimp at the restaurant next door, and were now in search of cargo pants or khakis to wear on some harbor cruise wedding reception. She was losing her patience though, and just wanted to get back to the till so that she could use the phone to check her voice mail and see if her boyfriend would be picking her up when she was off in a half hour, so she grabbed the tightest pair of pants in the store which happened to be a women's jean and slung them over the door for Low to try on.

"Wait, try these. All the guys I live with wear them. They have a real tapered leg, I can't fit into them but you're a pretty tall drink of water, so I bet they'll look hot," Tina said.

Low's outstretched arm grabbed them like he was accepting a weapon that would be used in some sort of ceremony that would place him and the young clerk in the upper echelon of men's fashion. There were others like him, he thought. A secret society of skinny pant wearers refusing the men's typical boot cut, or slim fit, all of which inevitably bagged around the ankles and looked terrible.

"Now this, is what I am talking about," Low said, impressed with his ability to wear women's jeans. It was a victorious moment in fashion, and Low at that moment officially banned himself from men's jeans forever, at least men's Gap jeans, because he knew that the right jeans were always available if money was not a concern.

Waiting at the side of the road for a cab was different than standing in a fitting room at The Gap though. It seemed like Low had been standing there forever, making himself available as fodder for the drivers in their cars who never had to worry much about being eyed up on the street like that. Normally it wouldn't be much of a concern, but Low was drunk, and the pants felt tight, really tight, and he was beginning to question his quest for the skinniest pants in the city as just that, an attempt at satisfying some obsession that he had dreamed up over his morning coffee rather than something that actually looked good. He thought of himself as an abnormality standing there, clearly over dressed for his surroundings, but as uncomfortable as that made him feel it was a rush to think that he looked different than everyone else, that people were shocked at the site of him even though the reality of the situation was nothing of the sort. His sense of priority was completely fucked. His life was a mess, an absolute drunken mess, yet he had put so much energy and thought into what he would wear that day that he only managed to magnify the real issues that were waiting for him to ponder when he would eventually stand still. He was waiting for a plane because he was going home, to the city that he spent most of his youth in. For a person that was dogged by the past and consumed by history the way he was, it was a dangerous place to be.

Continue to Part III

Home Six Part I

Veer - Family

Saturday was about to give way to the evening, but the afternoon heat was not about to release its hold over the city so easily, and as Low stood on the street with various other derelict characters milling about the boulevard in aimless distress he stared down the avenue and into the sea of traffic to look for a cab that would take him to the airport. Actually there is one thing that sets our hero apart from the other characters in this tawdry scene, and that is the state of his dress. Low had spent the better part of his morning thinking about the moment when he would have to leave the city, and of course, he was dressed exactly how he had imagined it. He was wearing his pink shirt, pointy shoes, and burgundy skinny tie with a green, vintage Fleetwing suitcase sitting beside him. The jeans that he was wearing had been purchased at the Gap only a few days earlier. Hours were spent parading up and down the strip of shops packed with out of towners and the down and outers. He eventually wound up in the change room with a stack of jeans that were not one bit near what he was looking for; which was an impossibly tight trouser that would be slung deep in the hip with denim that would cling tightly to his leg all the way to his ankles. Each rejected pair of jeans would be thrown over the top of the small cubicle at the back of the store in frustration at the franchises attempt at fulfilling his needs.

Continue to Part II