dots

I changed to the dots background because I want to be like Seventh Ward, even though she won't ever comment on my blog.

visit from the south

My friend G interrupted his globe trotting and hip urban lifestyle to visit me here in this humble cow town this past weekend. (Look at the link, there's a cute photo of Mayor Dave.)

Friday night (or actually Sat. morning) he wakes me up at 3 a.m. to say he can't find his wallet. We find it approximately eight hours later on top of his suitcase.

Saturday. Here's what we did.
--- G spills coffee and/or Diet Pepsi on every surface and item in my apartment.
--- I note again that G has an aversion to wearing pants when not in public and he has very veiny legs.
--- We converse with my landlord, whom G has a crush on, through my bathroom window, while my landlord is standing on a ladder looking in my bathroom window. I'm not going into any more detail.
--- We finally venture into public, go to State Street, eat some tasty food in an Irish castle, and then inspect some of the
cows (G also attracts cow parades).
--- We enter quaint funky shops including The Pipefitter, that perennial mecca for rural Wisconsin teens, where one can look at bongs and assorted penis-shaped objects.
--- We inspect even more cows.
--- We encounter a new issue: how do you tell if guys are gay or just European???? We follow three young dudes who were wearing capri pants, one in a white pair, with funky hairstyles. We, obviously, think they are gay, but when we follow them into a store, we hear them speaking a Scandinavian language. What a conundrum!!!!
--- Back at my house, G takes a nap and I listen to a 22-year-old drama queen's two-hour blast about her breakup with Mark to the entire neighborhood.
--- We watch "The Wedding Banquet."
--- We decide we should not have children, as a service to mankind.
--- Later we go to "Strangers with Candy" --- insanely twisted and funny film in which we learn the phrases for not one but two deviant sexual acts.. I have since learned that Wikipedia lists every deviant sexual act known to man. It is not the Encyclopedia Britannia of my youth!!!

Sunday: First we sit on the dock, drink and spill coffee, talk about ducks and Otis Redding, and I try to teach G how to spell Monona and Mendota.

Later, the feeding. The only thing I learn on this day is that the only real advantage this restaurant provides is giving one the ability to pour melted cheese all over your hamburger.

A little later, I say a wistful farewell to G and wait for another action-packed visit ...

Manganese hair

It is 4 a.m. and I am worrying about my hair. In the last few months it has become brittle, frizzy straw and earlier today I learned my neighbor is having the exact same problem. Is it because of what's in our water, although everybody says it's safe??? Or is it because we are both brunettes?

I'm going back to bed to worry more about my hair.

Be my Yoko Ono

My friend Cesar once met Yoko Ono. She was fully clothed, but he was clad only in a towel. I can't give any more details here.


Myself, my brushes with fame have been less dramatic, but here they are:




--Political: When I worked for a certain Madison lefty, he introduced me to both Paul Wellstone and the Rev. Jesse Jackson.












--Movie star: I saw Mel Gibson shooting a movie in Chicago's Loop. This was before he revealed himself to be a really creepy anti-Semite.


--Rockers: 1. Huey Lewis of Huey Lewis and The News sang the refrain of "I Want a New Drug" to me in a skanky Wisconsin tavern, but did not cast me in the video, although he sweated all over me and then he gave me his towel.




2. In a drunken incident circa 1990, I was introduced to and insulted by the pocket-sized lead singer for Wisconsin-grown rockers the BoDeans.

Cows II

The evidence continues to pile up. I learned from
Jesse, who is one of the select few who have lived in both Mauston (which is gearing up for its first annual Pumpkin Bash) and the hip metropolis of Boston, that Boston is also having a CowParade this summer .... OK, so I visited Boston in late April and not six weeks later, a CowParade comes to town!!!

It's just uncanny .....

Other cities I have visited that are currently having CowParades are Edinburgh (OK, I was there in 1985, but it still counts) and Athens (check out the link to see cool Greek) -- OK, I actually haven't been to Athens, Greece, but I've been to the lovely city of Athens, Wisconsin, scene of the notorious Kunz murders, when an entire weird, creepy family was shot to death in their trailer (and there was no Truman Capote around, not even Philip Seymour Hoffman).

Back to the cows .. I almost forgot that some of the members of Madison's CowParade visited the humble town that was my birthplace ... and I was there only one day after the cows were there!!!