It's all coming back, in bits and pieces...

I feel like Nicole Kidman in "The Others"; I know something was trashy at the midget-wrestling, but the whole of it is too shocking, but memories keep surfacing spasmodically and uncontrollably...

Somehow, I forgot to mention that during the first bout of midget-wrestling, they had amped up the bar and played "Welcome to the Jungle" and then "Back in Black". For the second round, right when I was leaving, for some reason they were playing that one Journey song about that midnight train and believing.

During the night, they also played "Milkshake" and "My Humps", but not for wrestling, just for people's listening pleasure.

Also, there was this well-groomed early-30s guy in decent shape with an expensive haircut and nice shoes and pants but a tight-fitting gray t-shirt that just said, with a lower-case b and a sleek-looking graphic-designed font, the words "balls".

Compensation for my impatience: Trolley talk.

Yesterday night I had to wait twenty minutes for the subway to go two stops and then I waited twenty minutes for the bus, all when it was too late and I was tired and I had to get up at 7:30am this morning. Like two seconds before the bus came, though, this trolley of drunken frat-type and sorority-type late 20-/early 30-somethings came by and were going "whoooooooooo!!!!!!" and waving to people and taking pictures on their cell phone cameras, and as soon as the red light changed and the trolley left, this smiley early 20s black girl in a Bubba Gump Shrimp Company uniform was like, "I like white people." A biracial woman ahead of her in line for the bus that had just pulled up was like, "Hey, watch out, I'm German and Irish," but as soon as she was inside the bus, the shrimp-girl turned to her friend and was like, "She's denying sumpin', wit nappy hair like that," and then was like, "And I didn't say anything bad, I like white people, they friendly."

Kuwaiti TV and Falconry.

On Kuwaiti TV they have a falconry channel devoted to teaching you about how to train falcons and techniques for falcon hunting. It's kind of like the grampa channel, where old Kuwaiti men sit around and watch it and think about when they used to have falcons. Falcons are a status symbol among the Arab rednecks, I guess, and though you can still get them at markets, not as many people own them as they used to.

Addendum: Returning home.

When I got home after 2am and took off one of my shoes and tossed it in the closet, I saw something skitter from under another pair of shoes behind a box of laundry detergent, so I lifted that box and a two-inch silverfish beelined for the hallway, and I killed it with the last dress shoe I had on, leaving a four-inch smear on the sole. No silverfish were in the area where they usually were, though.

So I went to midget-wrestling last night...

So me and a few people went to midget-wrestling last night. I bought some hair gel and a comb and got my hair spikey, especially in front, and I went for a long-sleeve collared shirt that I could turn the collar up on, only I decided not to wear any of mine since they don't fit too well and they were kind of wrinkly, so I went instead for a short-sleeve polo-shirt kind of thing with brown and white stripes that I could turn the collar up on.

The bar was this upstairs room that was just a floor and a bar off to the side, and back in back another bar, and big unmanned metal tubs in a few places in the room, and banners talking about the different shit they were having going on and posters looking for bartenders/beer tub girls/shot girls/security/camera and name girl. In the bathroom above the urinals were photo collages of women, including mom-types, flashing their tits in the bar and standing up on the bar dancing and bending way over so you could just see the thong as this little teeny thread going in between their ass-cheeks. They had a few different tvs -- one was playing a baseball game, which delayed the midget-wrestling a while -- and one had footage from the bar of women bar-dancing (a big theme with them) and people doing shots and that beer funnel thing, and even one of a big-titted waitress kneeling on the bar while a midget poured a bottle of Jack Daniels into her mouth.

As it turns out, the advertised $6 pitchers of Long Island Iced Tea were for one, so everywhere you looked there were people standing around holding these gigantic pitchers of Long Island Iced Tea with straws sticking out of them. At first I was standing around and started drinking one of those, and a midget walked by, and by the time I got to the bottom of the pitcher, what I thought was a small child walked by, and I was like, "Who the fuck brought their kids in here?!?!", only I did a double-take and realized it was the same midget again.

Over in the corner there was an early-40s businessman hitting on a late-20s girl, all night.

One friend of one of my friends who came was told at the door to turn around his baseball cap so it was forward, because of gang shit and signs or whatever from people who drift through there, and later when he adjusted his cap and put it back without thinking, and a manager immediately came up and asked him to turn his hat-bill forwards again.

In between some innings -- the wrestling hadn't started yet -- a waitress climbed up on the bar and brought up a baseball fan and a wrestling fan and had a chug-a-pitcher context between them.

When the wrestling finally started, I was surprised at how theatrical it was. The advertised midget "Puppet the Psycho Dwarf" couldn't make it, so they worked it into the plot, where the visiting midget from Kansas City, a slightly taller midget with shaved head and a goatee and pierced ears, was trash-talking and saying how he pussed out, and then Tito the home-side midget, a clean-shaven slightly smaller midget with a lot of tats on his arms, started telling him to go fuck himself and everyone started chanting "Fuck him up", after Tito had gotten the crowd going by being like, "Are you ready, to see a midget, BLEEEEEEEEEED?", and held out the microphone for the response. Both he and the midget from Kansas City were standing on the bar for all of this pre-game shit.

After some more baseball, the one bartender cleared a circle in the middle of the floor and the midgets started trash-talking again, and then they started throwing WWF-type punches that didn't make contact if you looked closely (or actually not too closely), and throwing each other around by the hair, and dropping each other with elbow blows to the head. Tito even rushed the midget from Kansas City and pinned him against the bar and punched him in the stomach a lot, though eventually the midget from Kansas City got the best of him after trying to pin him a couple times, and the bartender left the plot open by being like, "And we'll have a rematch within the hour..."

After the first round and into my second pitcher, I was talking with another friend of a friend who came, a tall guy with a baseball cap and bad teeth and a tattoo under his left arm that was something like a tombstone that said 'RIP - MOMMA' with a date-range underneath it, and it turns out that he didn't find the midgets that odd at all, since he had opened a few bars in Cincinnati for an owner who was a midget. He started telling me that it's not about your height, but your height on the inside, and how a seven-foot tall person can be a midget on the inside and would be more crippled and treated worse than than the midgets he knew and the ones in the bar.

When it got time for the rematch, the bar was mega-crowded, and everyone pushed forward to see it and I couldn't get a place, and since it was already almost 1am, I left, with people crowding around the midgets. I guess I don't make it seem as trashy as it was, but I think overall there was something uncapturable about the atmosphere, taken as a whole, though I wasn't so much appalled as exhilirated, though this morning my mind is fucked.

Midget wrestling is on tonight.

Two friends are going and they invited their friends. I just ran into someone at the library who can't go, and she was like, "Are you still going to that dwarf fighting tonight?"

The whole area of town is trashy late 20s/early-to-mid-30s professionals. The dwarf bar has been annually voted the city's best pick-up bar for the past few years, and the men's dress code is collared shirts, jeans, and dress shoes. A free newspaper from like a week ago had a party organizer on the cover from that part of town in that very outfit, and he had worked-out arms but a double chin and an incipient pot-belly, and the article was all about him manning a clubline to make sure only women with proper loungerie were allowed into a midsummer's night dream party. A bar around the corner from the dwarf bar has this banner outside that says "1oos OF BEAUTIFUL WOMEN... AND 3 UGLY ONES!!!", and professionals flock to it too. I feel like this entire part of the city is just filled with people debasing themselves for the white male gaze.

N'DIGO: "The Designer Vagina".

From N'DIGO publisher Hermene Hartman:

Hollywood’s endless quest for perfection has given birth to a new world of plastic surgery: the Designer Vagina.

Designer Vaginas are new surgeries designed to enhance the appearance of your vagina and intensify your overall sexual experience...

The verdict from the gynecological community is still out, but I am writing this column to alert, educate and warn: Surely, these surgeries are the new frontier of plastic surgery for women, but make no mistake, these intimate, elective surgeries, can be dangerous. There are four surgeries for the vaginal area. can be dangerous to your overall health if not done properly...

Vaginal Rejuvenation. This surgery promises to decrease the diameter of the vagina and tighten the vaginal area, thus curing that ‘loose’ feeling associated with childbirth. (Other medical indicators are weak a bladder, an indication that the floor of the vagina is weakening; this is a problem that can start in the teen years and commonly occurs between the ages of 25 to 40.) This procedure is designed to repair the vaginal muscle for tightness, tone, strength and control, in order to enhance the sexual experience for women whose orgasms do not come readily because the top of the vaginal area does not receive enough stimulation. The risk: If done improperly, the physical consequences are scarring, painful intercourse and a dysfunctional urinary tract. This surgery also repairs the hernia and a botched procedure can result in an uncontrolled bowel and feces unexpectedly *exiting the vagina*...

Upscale, urbane women have a tendency to want designer everything, but this is taking a fashion statement a bit too far. Be very careful of undergoing any elective surgery for your sex organs, as disaster and dysfunction may occur.

Meanwhile be happy with yourself and what God gave you. Some things simply aren’t worth changing.

Dance Dance Dance.

Me and a masters student friend are doing Tuesday night dance lessons through a university club, though they have a professional instructor come in. This past Tuesday was the first night. The tango class was so much fun, we stayed for the samba; thankfully it was that order, because the tango was so encouraging, while the samba was frantic and I felt like you couldn't enjoy yourself everything moved so quickly.

An older Chinese couple was there, too, who had been drawn in because of "Dancing with the Stars" or whatever the fuck that show is called. I was really getting sweaty doing the samba, and the husband told me that you can see how someone from that show lost like ten pounds the first week from practicing the dance moves six hours a day.

One taller older lady from the community has a deeper voice and always zeroes in on me to dance. She has a deep voice and big wrists and always gives me advice on how to lead, so I think she might be a transsexual, though her ass is very round and seems naturally womanly.

One older stringy lady from the university press who comes also gives good advice. When I was saying how the samba was discouraging, she was like, "Yeah, the samba is tough, but" -- and here she paused and smiled -- "when it comes together, it's totally worth it."

A dream, silverfish -- though not a dream of silverfish.

No silverfish the past few days when I came into the Danish Haven and dashed across the tasteful natural-fiber IKEA rug to tap on the upright soft-lighting crepe-paper lamp, though when I got into the shower yesterday, a 2-inch silverfish skittered out from behind the curtain and across the bottom of the tub. I got my house sandal out and whacked it with my hands. Afterwards I again wiped it off from my sandal with toilet paper, which again sunk quickly to the bottom of the bowl. As a test, I put in a piece of toilet paper (it floated), and then a piece of toilet paper which I had wiped against the tile near to where I squashed the silverfish (it floated briefly, then slowly drifted to the bottom of the bowl).

At night I dreamed I was in the passenger's seat of a car from the 70s with a leather interior that smelled like cigarette smoke, and the Judy Collins song "Someday Soon" was just coming on the radio and I was telling the driver how great it was, but they clicked off the radio before the song reached the chorus.

And then I woke up.

Midget update.

It looks like midget wrestling might not happen on Thursday. I invited a second-career ph.d. student from my program and she was interested, but she says she's not going since it's a part of herself that she doesn't want to encourage. A masters student I know says she really enjoyed this one bar she went to on St. Patrick's Day where they had paid a midget to dress up as a leprechaun and dance on the counter, but she has too much work this week for Friday to go out.

Rock-and-roll panel: Comments.

This past Saturday I went to a panel on artists who've worked with rock album covers. All of them were thankful for the massive exposure landing a choice album can give someone's work, even if people don't know the artist behind it, though they lamented the fact that CD covers are smaller than record covers, and MP3s just don't allow for the circulation of cover art like it used to be.

In addition, one speaker trashed a lot of rock-and-roll artists for their lack of social concern, and how there's not been one good rock song about the Iraq war, and how rockstars "are shoppers, not rebels," and how the role of the rebel in popular consciousness has increasingly devolved away from rockstars.

Also also, they spontaneously trashed New York and how there's nothing happening there since no one can afford to live there. "But Brooklyn is better and a lot of artists live there," the moderator was like, and everyone in the panel kind of shook their head and was like, "No," as if the Brooklyn artists didn't matter. One (foreign-born) panelist said Berlin had a really productive art scene right now, where people were flocking there and it was cheap to live.

Also also also, they said the U.S. is so big that it's hard to have a "moment" here like you do in other countries like England, where everyone can get fired up about the same musical developments at the same time because it's densely populated and everyone's tied into London. They were saying that to have something get going to create a moment, it would have to happen in New York/Chicago/L.A. and elsewhere and get momentum really quickly, and that just doesn't happen.

Was discombobulated.

One more detail --

I was telling Diezel that my dad taught high school and his whole crack about keeping meals in his moustache was usually his response to his students who asked him about his moustache, so him saying what he did in response to that fact added a whole different layer to everything.

Also, I felt like this was the first time I had ever been overwhelmed by an outlandishly obscene scenario someone sprung on me to the point where I couldn't respond. Usually, I'm the one doing the springing, like with "hairy ball sweat", and when that happens, I'm always amazed at the lack of reaction I get, but now I think I know what it's like to be a deer in the headlights. You really don't see it coming.

Got my haircut yesterday (part IV of V): Diezel's favorite story.

After all this shit, Diezel told me his favorite story. Like fifteen years ago, his gay coworker came in to the barbershop where he was working and was talking about how he had brought this guy home and was getting his clothes off, and was like, "I said, 'No, that ain't going in me! I'm gonna put that on my shoulder and burp it.'"

Got my hair cut yesterday (part IV of V): Ladies being nice.

Somehow, too, Diezel got to telling me about how he's dumb with women and he doesn't know when they're hitting on him. Just last week, he was telling me, this woman he knows in her 20s whose family he knows was alone with him somehow and told him, "You know, I've been hitting on you for a while," only he was like, "Who am I, to think she's hitting on me, am I something" -- and here he mugged -- "'Yeah, she's hitting on me, did you see that, did you see that,' no, I was just thinking she was being nice, I'm dumb like that, and I told her that, I told her, 'Your aunt, sure, maybe your grandmother, and definitely your mother, but darling, what do I need with a young girl like you.' No, I'm not getting into that, no I'm not."

I was confused a little by that story, and asked about his age -- it turns out that even though he looks mid-30s, Diezel is actually in his 50s.

Got my haircut today (part III of IV): More on moustaches.

Later me and Diezel started talking again about hair, and he was saying how he gets a really patchy beard so he can't wear a beard or a moustache, though back when he was young he grew a thin moustache and tried to make it look better with moustache wax, only he was dating a white girl at the time, so she kept getting this dark ring around her mouth from when they'd kiss and they couldn't figure out what it was, though he figures she thought black men were dirty, then he realized it was his moustache wax and he stopped wearing it but didn't tell her that that was what was leaving the rings around her mouth. He was like, "They should put a warning on that stuff, "Warning, do not date light-skinned people.'"

Diezel, who's really, really black, then told me about how he's always gone for women lighter than him, and was like, "It's bad enough when it's you and you turn off the light and she's like, 'Where'd he go?', but when it's both of you, oh boy, you need dogs, 'C'mon boy, find her, find her, c'mon!'", and he stretched out both his hands and walked around beside the barber chair like he was blind.

Later he was telling me about the Filipino woman he's dating and how last weekend her mother badgered him for a haircut and when he got to her place in Chinatown, it was a surprise birthday party for him.

Got a haircut today (part II of probably IV): Advice.

Diezel asked me why my dad just didn't shave his head entirely, and I said my mom said not to and just let it grow back a while, which turned out to be bad advice, though he was like, "No, that's good advice, he just didn't do it right, that's what you always say. Women and your mother can't give bad advice, you always messed it up or you weren't listening right or something, but they always know what's right." I tried asking him about times when his mother gave him bad advice about something, but he didn't really tell me of any times.

Last post for the day: books, Jewish sophomores, midgets.

I had to run back into school tonight, and so I took the last 7 hardcovers with me and put them on the free book cart in the foyer of the main library on campus; when I came back again just now, they were gone. I have now distributed to the wider university community 148 of 149 of the trashy books left in my care.

At the gym two Jewish sophomores with huge legs and gigantic bouncing tits were on ellipticals next to me. The one was saying how she came back to her apartment after the weekend and the only thing in her fridge was gefilte fish and ginger ale.

This afternoon I ran into a French graduate student from my program. I invited him to midget wrestling on Thursday, like I tend to do nowadays, only when I did that, he got this immediate, stricken look on his face, and cried out softly in spite of himself, "Oh no!" I felt like shit, so I was like, "Oh no, we're not going up there to watch, but to protest, wanna come?", but I don't think he believed me.

Got a haircut today (part I of like III or IV): A new hair-cutter person.

I got a haircut again today. I swung by the salon on my way to the grocery store yesterday and made an appointmet, dropping off a piece of banana bread and a piece of pumpkin bread and a piece of angel food cake in the process -- I had passed a youth group bakesale table a block up and thought I'd get some for the people at the salon -- but when I came in today, the Japanese owner was just leaving because she was feeling sick -- she put her hands together and bowed at me like a namaste when she ran into me on her way out -- and since Tennille only works on Tuesdays, instead my barber was this mid-30s-looking black guy named Diezel.

When he was cutting my hair and I was telling him what lengths of razor to use, I started telling him about how my dad cuts his own hair really short using some clipper he bought somewhere, but this summer four days before a friend of mine's wedding which he was going to, he started cutting his hair without putting the guard on and shaved down to the skin this huge swath of hair above his right ear, and so ended up wearing a baseball to the reception and tilting the bill down over his ear.

Diezel laughed, and then asked me how my dad wears his hair, so I told him how he has this big walrus moustache, and how when people ask him why he wears it that way, he says it's so if he has a nice meal, he can suck it the next day and remember it exactly. Diezel started laughing really hard at that, way too hard for how funny it is, so I asked him what was up, and he told me how just this past week a barber two doors down was telling him that he wears his moustache so that when he goes down on a lady, for the rest of the day he can scrunch up his lip (which Diezel demonstrated, smiling at the same time) and remember.

Diezel then told me that my dad probably means that, but softens the story up, which made me wonder whether he meant that my dad has been eating out my mom or has been getting some on the side. He then was saying how his friend the barber drinks liquor or chews some strong gum if he sees his woman later in the day, so she doesn't notice the smell; he said he doesn't wash with soap, because his woman would probably recognize the smell of a different soap, and you can't explain that away by saying you were playing ball with your friends or something like that, since even with that you'd be going home and taking a shower there and would smell like your own soap.

This was all going on, by the way, in the Japanese spa-styled salon, with the Japanese women in the background talking to each other and gently laughing from time to time with each other, as you often see Japanese women do.

Another 11 hardcovers...

...left out on the free book cart at the main campus library today! Nothing special among them, though.

Plans for Thursday.

A bar downtown is having midget wrestling, no cover and $1 Miller Lite drafts. On one hand, I think it's morally wrong, but on the other hand, I really, really want to see it, and it's cheap.

More on the lady barbers...

From Carl F.H. Henry's hagiography-like history "The Pacific Garden Mission", 8th ed., p. 115, in regards to how the famous Chicago (fundamentalist) mission changed locations in the early 20th century to the south edge of downtown:

The street outside seemed like a suburb of hell. It was the main artery of the lodging-house district, where 5,000 men slept nightly. Flophouses and taverns were everywhere. Burlesque shows of the vilest kind played to crowds nightly. The labyrinth of lady barbers, pawn brokers, gambling dens, indicated man's extremity and God's opportunity.

Also, on p. 145, again in reference to the new location:

Outside, the stench of perspiring hot dogs, the swing music of cabaret bands, the parade of unmasked hell itself merge into a caterwaul of depraved humanity. Here is where teh mission has deliberately chosen to prove its mettle. There is no running away from sin. Rather, sheathed in the full armor of God, its testimony plucks the fiery darts of Satan from many a pierced target. It is a struggle against mighty forces, as David Anderson, in the November 17, 1940 edition of the Chicago Tribune, writes:

"Competition is tough on South State street, but the old Pacific Garden Mission still does a thriving business in men's souls.

"Night and day thousands of homeless men -- bums, hoboes in from the wheat fields, ragged pan-handlers, crippled up, mumbling, shuffling men -- limp down South State street from Van Buren to 11th street and then plod back again. It's a parade of perpetual motion second only to West Madison street. Where they go, whence they come, is nobody's business and nobody cares much.

"Under the gaudy marquees of the burlesque shows they stop to look at the posters of hefty blondes. Or, they gather at the open doors of the tatoo parlors and watch the artist tatoo a spread eagle on the chest of a sailor. Sometimes as they move past the barber shops they wink at the lady barbers..."

Even though this is the recent past and I think I understand all the other cultural references, this "lady barbers"-reference thing makes me realize how past the past is, and how it's really not the present. This reference was floating in the air just sixty years ago and means nothing to us now.

Two things from yesterday: cell phone, coffee.

The black lady next to me on the commuter train, who put her two kids in the next seat up so she could keep an eye on them, had a martini graphic as the wallpaper on her cell phone.

I got a new coffee can of a brand I've never seen before -- "Brown Gold".

N.B. -- REVISED TWO POSTS AGO.

I realized after leaving for the weekend that I had left out from two posts ago what the GNC guy was whistling.

I could have totally just revised this without letting anyone know, but that would cause two problems:

1) I would be rewriting the historical record.

2) No one one read it.

So, I'm posting about this now.