Like I say at the beginning of all my support meetings, I am a nerd. I have a favorite comic artist and writer, and can give you in-depth reasons why I've chosen them. I write poetry. I perform said poetry in public. I've even done a couple of low-level national tours with other poets. I spent several years working at a renaissance faire. I liked it. I am a nerd.

I am also incredibly attracted to nerds. Sure, the midwestern farm boy look is kind of hot. And who can resist a buff surfer boy. But give me mussy hair, glasses, and an IQ high enough to bake bread at, and I'm in love. And if they're multi-lingual...

Pardon me, I have to go change my pants.

Ahem, so...I was at a convention in Chicago. A friend of mine and I were staying at a hostel to cut down on the cost of the convention. It was the middle of August and the hostel had no air conditioning, and the free fans they supplied didn't work. We made plans to crash on the hotel room floors of other convention goers.

Why was I not whoring? Did I have a boyfriend? An STD? A sudden attack of morals? Hells, no. But in the five years I've been attending this convention I have never had the opportunity to stretch latex. Shit, I've never even been kissed by someone that I had a desire to be kissed by.

During the first day of the convention a good friend of mine reintroduced me to one of her gay friends. He was a hottie. Very punk nerd. Huge animé hair. I'd met him the year before and developed a mini-crush...until I caught him making out with my doppelganger (I have one...it's a story for another time). Note, I didn't stop crushing on him because he was making out with my doppelganger. The crush stopped when my doppelganger told me that Animé Hair was a terrible kisser.

At any rate, I spent some quality time hanging with Animé Hair and my friend (who might also have been referred to as Animé{e?} Hair), and decided he was a likable guy, but I refused to go all crush woozy. I was in fact chasing after a cute frustratingly straight attention whore who knew I had a crush on him.

At the end of the night, some friends and I ended up at the main hotel drinking and spitting words (see, it doesn't mean to speak poetry, it means you're drunk, and you're hurling slurred words at people)  in the hotel room that contained, among other people, Animé Hair. As far as I could tell, no sparks were flying. Attention Whore left the room, to watch a couple of bisexual girls make out in one of the other rooms.

Over the course of the night, I had tried to get blitzed. Alas, I have a high tolerance for alcohol, and no love of beer, so getting blitzed can be expensive, even when the fairly unkind bud began being passed around the hotel room. Eventually, though, jet-lag, lack of sleep, alcohol, marijuana, and my interaction with Attention Whore made me dizzy. So when Animé Hair took my hostel room key and slid it into his pocket I was confused. Fairly soon after he took my key, his roommates decided that 4:28 in the morning was a good time to get some shut-eye, so I asked Animé Hair if he was coming to the hostel with me. He looked confused as I was, and said "Sure."

We took an uneventful cab ride from hotel to hostel. We shot some shit and coy glances at each other. When we reached the hostel he said, "Well, I'd better get back to the hotel. I'll see you tomorrow."

"But" I stammered, as I fiddled with the door handle, "you have my room key."

"Huh?"

"My room key. You took my room key out of my hands back in your hotel room." I pulled the key out of his pocket. "See?"

"Oh. I'll come with you then." It made sense at the time. Really.

As I stepped from the cab I tripped a bit, and my canvas bag dropped to the pavement, spilling all my belongings. While I was collecting the books and papers, Animé Hair was snickering at me.

"What?"

"Progaine Shampoo?"

I turned crimson as my hair. "A pre-emptive strike against impending baldness."

He laughed some more. We went up to my room. I found out later that my roommate had crashed on Attention Whore's floor back at the hotel. We had the room to ourselves.

I'll spare you the coy boy flirtation ordeal and cut to the chase: he started talking about his boyfriend back home. Having a sense of morals that does not allow me to date people who are involved with other people, I terminated flirtation. Or so I thought.

Animé Hair was spread out on my roommate's bed (which my roommate never got around to sleeping on). After every other sentence or so, he'd give me this incredibly flirtatious smirk. Finally, I could bear it no longer.

"If you've got a boyfriend, why do you keep looking at me like that?"

"Cause, hon, your dick is hanging out of your boxers."

When I came home from a glorious night of work at Kookaburra Canyon, Wiz and  Peter were tanked. Hardcore hammered. The kind of drunk where you get to see a person's true feelings, no bullshit, no pretense of being a good person.

Nothing surprised me about either of them. Wiz was the way he always is when he's drunk, fucking hysterical. He digs on himself, the people in the room, and people who deserve a good ribbing. Nothing evil, nothing uncalled for, but dancing the border of good taste and bad. My kind of humor.

Peter does not get funny. He gets truthful. I've known many people who get introspectful and honest when they're drunk. Generally I find this much preferable to the "look at me, I'm drizzunk" drunk, or the "let's go smash the windows of parked cars" drunk, but with Peter, I'm not so sure.

First of all, he takes complete credit for fast talking slam style. He, in fact, invented it back when he was out of Chicago Green Mill (never on the team, just a regular slammer) back in the mid-nineties. Saul Williams, apparently, appropriated his mystical poetry from Peter. He was also responsible for Shakespeare's portrayals of love, and e.e. cummings's visual layout.

His ego didn't bother me as much as the following incident, though. While he was taking credit for creation of the universe, and inventing the written word, I was reading Savage Love., which contained a  letter involving a reader who collects pubic hair from urinals at her place of employment.  The whole concept was so ridiculous, I burst into laughter. Peter asked me what I was laughing about, so I read it to him.

Wiz's reaction was similar to mine: That's fucked up! I would be completely open to somoene arguing why it's not fucked up. I can always agree to disagree. What I didn't appreciate was Peter asking "Was it a guy or a girl? Cause if it's a girl, it's ok, man, whatever, but if it's a guy I'd beat the fuck out of him."



There is a moment of silence here.


Wiz points out the asinine nature of Peter's statement. It's either fucked up, or not fucked up. The gender of the person is completely irrelevant. I point out the whole "beat the fuck out of him" statement makes Peter a glaring homophobe. He explains he's not homophobic, he just wouldn't stand for a guy jerking off about him. While he's waaaaay too egotistical and stupid for my taste, I'm willing to bet a guy or two has called out hia name in the privacy of their bedroom before. He's an in-shape, fairly attractive narcissist. That makes him ideal for a number of my gay friends. In fact, had I not had my revelation surrounding Elvis, I may have been attracted to him. Actually, I know I would have been attracted to him about five years or so ago. Ugh.

I wish I could say I was surprised about his statement. I'm not. Just overly disappointed. Wiz says he feels karmically attached to Peter, but can't wait for him to leave. He's a very talented painter, but not a very good person to be around, and frankly a terrible poet. I don't say this because he can't write. He can. But he makes a concious effort to bury his poetry in an outdated slammy delivery, so that no one ever knows what his poetry is about. "My poetry is about being raw and inaccessible." he told me yesterday. What a great fucken goal.

So I spent several hours of the day, naked in a hot spring with Steggy, and our friend Danny...No, really, there's no punchline here.

I woke up early, and had a productive writing/e-mailing morning. Around noonish, just as I was getting into "Choking Tiger, Himelayan Dragon," Danny shows up to take us to the hot springs. On the way, we make a stop off at a natural food store where I stock up on Paul Newman's stale-ass organic pretzels, and fruit flavored water {since when is water a flavor of water? My water tasted exactly like water, not even a hint of anything else, and to top it all off the damn water had vitamins in it, I've never been so furious.}

Anyway, stop two was a cool little pub called Los Ojos. We munched on lime/salt covered nachos, while listening to the owner building a bomb shelter in the kitchen.

Stop three was the mountains. Beautiful beautiful beautiful. It was all very...mountainous. We walked for about fifteen minutes through muddy red clay and melting snow, and arrived at the hot springs, where many naked hippies were sitting around talking about where they were from, and how they found out about the springs. {Yawn}

To spice things up, we started asking people where they were from, and how they found out about the springs. Many of them found out from "The Internet." I don't what that is, but when I find out, I'll let y'all know.

Eventually the hippies were replaced by a few mid-twenties girls, a dentist from Illinois (you though I was kidding about asking everyone where they were from?), and the mother of the twenty-something girls, who dipped her toes in the hot grotto, and refused to look in the direction of the naked people. She is from South Dakota.

We passed around a bottle of wine, some people actually drinking from it, for about another hour or so, before Mama and her girls headed back to some place away from the scary naked poets.

This was when the naked musicians who wanted to hear poetry showed up. They had heard about our show, and had wanted to come, but they were performing at the same time, elsewhere. So Danny performed a couple poems for them, I hid behind a rock, and Morris got out of the hot springs and rolled around in the snow for a while.

After the naked musicians left, the real fun began. Chuck the compulsive liar, Jeeves the sincere British guy with the Native American tattoo, and another compulsive liar who claimed he was from Hungary (which he probably would not be able to point out on a map) all showed up around the same time. They quickly got naked, and hopped in the springs.

{now I interrupt the flow of the narrative by letting you all know that nudity is a violation of state penal code 3046C, and I am now a wanted man...clearly they didn't see me naked, or I wouldn't be as wanted}

Once in the water, Chuck, Jeeves and Goulash began to answer our exciting "Where are you from? How did you find out about this?" questions. Goulash didn't seem to remember the name of the town he was from, so I think he made one up that sounded remotely Hungarian. Transylvanian, perhaps. Definitely Eastern European.

He proceeded to tell a story about how he'd once been living on a couch in a tree (I'm not making this up...he did). One night he awoke to the sound of a rabid raccoon. Except it wasn't a raccoon, it was a panther. No wait, it was a mountain lion. Whatever it was, it had red eyes, and when he shined his flashlight on it, he ran 400,000 miles to the nearest coffee shop where he had a Chameleon tea (he didn't know what chamomile was, or how to pronounce it, but that's what he had).

Some of Goulash's other great misadventures included catching a black bear by making farting sounds. He said this in a very sincere way. Even showing us the head gestures the bear made in response to his farting call. {author's clarification: it has to be a sharp farting sound for black bears...SBDs attract grizzlies.}

And this one time, he was in a hot spring in Hungary {author's note:¿?¿?} when a bear climbed in with him, and made a comforting growling sound when it got in (think, the noise your Dad makes after a healthy, cleansing dump). The bear didn't bother him, because {the following is a must-have piece of information for warding off attacking bears} he was reading a newspaper. Surprisingly, the bear didn't ask him for a cigarette, or steal his picnic basket.

My theory is that this guy is being stalked by the guy who plays the bear in the Labatt's Blue commercials.

Eventually we left Goulash, Jeeves, and Chuck to their tall tales, and headed back to civilization (after donning our clothes).

Civilization was a wonderful way to cap off the night. We ate at Toucano's, a fantastic Brazilian restaurant, where a woman named Merle (who had seen us perform Sunday night) bought us all dinner. The food never stopped coming. Blood sausage, quail eggs, glazed pineapple, mango battered whitefish, sirloin, rosemary pork, if we hadn't run for our lives, we would still be being brought food at this very moment. I have never been so full.

All in all, it was a wonderful day of talking smack about slam (that's right jello shot, I'm talking about you), relaxing in hot water while the trees threw snowballs at us, and eating way too much food. I'm going to roll myself towards a bed now, and pass out.

I'm watching the 100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock on television, and coming to the realization that I crossed the line from MTV to VH1 about five years ago. I always thought I'd be ashamed of that.

Back in the early/mid nineties when MTV was playing Nirvana, and VH1 was playing Meatloaf and Hootie and The Blowfish, I would shudder at the thought of being one of the out of touch losers that thought VH1 played music. These days I watch VH1 because MTV doesn't play bad music videos, they don't play music videos period. Between The Real World, Undressed, and other meloddramatdocumentary programs, Carson Daly and Mandy Moore occasionally introduce videos by The Backstreet Boys, 'NSync...yadda yadda, you've heard these complaints by others before, I'm sure.

That said, I've just turned on MTV and am watching some poor frat boy let himself get pushed around by someone named Cora. She told him his hair was "ostrichey." So he went and got it cut. The theme seems to be self-consciousness. This Cora girl is talking about how people perceive her.

I suppose she watches MTV.

Anyway, she's in a club called Nell's in New York City. I performed their last year on the SlamAmerica Tour. Of all the venues I've performed at, Nell's is the most unfriendly to performers. They refused to let the poets in until the show started, which is a problem when you're trying to set up video equipment, and make a set list.

Now I'm getting IMed by a stranger (something that hasn't happened in well over a year) asking me about A/S/L. I don't think she means the language.

I'm becoming increasingly interested in Gestalt these days. The connection of seemingly unrelated things.

I think I'm going to use this page mostly to try out new ideas. I'm going to frame essays that may become slam poems, draft slam poems that never see life off this website.

Tonight's line that I hope some day makes it into a poem: I made a bargain with the devil. I sold my soul in exchange for directions to heaven.