On Meow Meow Meow Meow, Meow Meow Meow Meow, Meow Meow Meow Meow Meow Meow Meow Meow

or,

You can find me in da club, bottle full of bub, mamma I got whatcha need if ya need ta feel a buzz. Or so it would seem.

Shane Bartell sang the Meow Mix tune at 20X2 the first year, and it stuck in everyone's head for a little bit. Later I learned that the tune is a great tool for getting rid of other mental detritus. Got the new Madonna track in your melon and need it removed? Meow Mix. Really, it replaces whatever is in there, like a little mental chemical fire extinguisher. The program director at you personal mental radio station playing the local auto dealer's commercial jingle over and over? Meow Mix. It works, really. Take it from a guy who is subjected to piano bar covers of songs that you were sick of 17 years ago, it works.

On almost everything.

50 Cent is just too strong for The Meow Mix tune. He inta havin' sex, he ain't inta makin' love. A few months ago, I had never even heard of this guy. I like hip-hop just fine, but my tastes run to the experimantal and the old school. I like J-5, bought the new record. I was really upset when Jam Master J got murdered. I wore My addidas, both the shoes and the record, completely to shreds. Hommie, ain't nothin' changed, Ho's down, G's up. I'm a skinny white-boy, but I got a little street cred, at least on 6th street. N.W.A. 's Strait Outta Compton and Public Enemy's Nation of Millions are two of my all time favorite records, of any genre. 50 Cent is that cat by the bar toastin' to da Good Life. Kevin was talking about spending some time with a bunch of teenagers doing focus groups in Houston, and how they were all little 50 Cent disciples. So the other day, bored with my CD's, I foolishly switched to the radio and began surfing through the channels. The DJ announces that 50 Cent is next, and I think, Ok, I guess this is that guy the kids all like, one quick listen won't kill me. After all, in tha Hood and in L.A., they sayin', "50, you hot." I pretty much think that everybody deserves the fifteen minutes Mr. Warhol promised us, so what can it hurt? At worst, I'll hate it and change the channel. If they hate, then let 'em hate and watch tha money pile up. So the song comes on and, first impression, this guy has got to be on Aftermath Records, 'cause this has got to be a Dr. Dre produced beat. Good Base line, a nice little groove to it. Then he starts rapping. A pretty smooth lyrical style, reminds me a little of Tupac, who I like a lot. His flow, his show, brought him da dough, that bought him all his fancy things. His Crib, his cars, his clothes, his jewels, look homie, he done came up and he ain't changed. Before I know whats happening to me, I'm digging this song. Thing is, while Chuck D had things to say, this guy doesn't seem to be rapping about anything other than being a rap artist. He's obviously one of these lifestyle rap guys like Puffy that turned me off of rap a while ago. Yet, I'm sitting a little lower in my seat, and that hip-hop head nod has started, rhythmically up and down subtly with the beat. If you watch how I move, you mistake me fo a playa or pimp. Both me and 50 are fulla focsed, man, our money on our minds. Before you know it, the song is permanently stuck in my head. After it ends, I'm still humming it, feeling the beat, I even look for it on other radio staions. I realize now that it has happened, much like a thousand times at work. I've got that song stuck in my head, and I cain't ack like I don' know who he be, nietha. So I pull out my secret weapon.

Meow Meow Meow Meow, Meow Meow Meow Meow, Meow Meow Meow Meow Meow Meow Meow Meow.

Thing is, it doesn't work. When 50 rolls twenty deep, there's always drama in da club. My seemingly infallible escape tactic has failed me. 50 Cent is a more formidable foe than I had antcipated. He been hit wit a few shells, but he don' walk wit a limp. His plan is ta put tha rap game inna chokehold. He seems to have done it to my brain as well.

That was a week ago. It's still IN THERE! Nothing I do will get rid of it! I could understand it if it were a day or two. I mean, after all, he got a mil out tha deal, and he's still in da grind. He must have some talent or Dre, who I learned did in fact get a production credit on the record, as did Eminem, wouldn't have signed the guy. And shorty's say she feelin' his stash, she feelin' his flow. I downloaded a free mp3 of the tune hoping against hope to just play it to death. It's all I listen to while I'm at my computer now, over and over, hoping it will wear out. Like when you repaet the same word over and over until it loses all menaing for a little while. If it doesn't I don't know what the hell I'm gon do.

Oh well.
(the beat starts right now)
Go shorty, it's ya birthday!
We gon' party like it's birthday!
Sip Bacardi Likes its ya birthday..........

On something funny that Erica reminded me of
or,
I'm struggling with writing something serious, so here's something funny.

The last credit I took in college was Bowling. I graduated from Texas Tech in August of 1996. I walked in May with everyone else, largely because my mother wanted to see it. I would gladly have ditched the whole cap and gown thing and just accepted my diploma in the mail, but she and Ron paid for four years of school, and if they wanted a show, I figured they deserved to get it. I hope they didn't see me nodding off during the three hour ceremony, but oh well.

Anyway, I had three classes left to take in summer school that year, and I was staying in the dorms for the summer again which was loads of fun. The dorms during the year were kind of a drag, lots of people eating crummy food, never much privacy, guys stealing my beer out of my little mini-fridge. Plus, the dorm I lived in sophmore-junior years was haunted. But whatever. Summer dorm was cool, mostly because there was only one on campus that was open. It was like going to one of those really small local colleges you see on WB television shows, where you know everyone and friends drop by all the time just to say hi. First summer session I took Spanish, a class I was being forced to repeat ( I still can't hardly speak Spanish. It is a detestable, ugly language in my ears, not poetic to me at all, and I just can't get my head around it. This is in no way intended to insult Spanish speaking peoples or Latinos. just a matter of personal taste. Everyone knows how much I despise racism in any form. I wish I liked Spanish, but it's nails on the chalkboard to me. Sorry.) I think I also took a lab over again, geology. I aced the class but was forced to drop lab or fail it, largely because I skipped it almost every week. The reason for ditching lab during that specific hour of my week can not be disclosed, as she had a serious boyfriend at the time. Oops! Pretty sure he never found out. Ahh, college. Anyway......

Second summer session, I took Bowling.

That was it. Just Bowling. Two hours a day, four days a week. The class was taught by a Teacher's Assistant, a girl working on her M.S. in Sports Sciences, essentially a Masters in Coaching. Melissa was her name. She was only a year older than I was. I made it a habit to tell her, regularly, that if she failed me in Bowling, I wouldn't graduate. Tech required PE credits then, I think they have since abandoned it. Every day, it was the first thing I said every time I saw her, in this depserate frantic voice and with fear all over my face. I would corner Melissa, grab her by both elbows and beg, "Melissa, please, if you fail me in this class, I WON'T GRADUATE!"

She thought it was funny. At first.

Melissa began readily assuring me that no one, and I mean no one, failed bowling. Secure in the knowledge that my diploma was safe and my parents would not have to bask in the shame of a child that took more than 4 years to finish college (the horror!), we went to the bowling alley bar and ordered a beer. By the end of the summer session, we were good buddies, Melissa and I. She even dated a friend of mine. The two of us, and the other two guys on my "bowling team" within the class, which was divided into 12 teams of three, were the only people in the class old enough to drink. We drank beer in the bowling alley every day, noon to two. Everyone else in the class hated us. The final test was the tenth frame of our last game. If you bowled a strike with the first ball, you got 100 on the final. A spare got you a 95, nine pins a 90, eight pins and 80, and so on.

I bowled three straight stikes on my final. Who wants another beer?

On Please Please Please DON'T Send in the Clowns
or
How Friday the 13th, the full moon, and Clowns Local 442 ruined my weekend.

The initial conversation was taken lightly. "I have a large group of ..... performers..... all of us a part of a local orginization that are going on a pub crawl next week, and we'd like to come by your place for about a half hour or so." He wished to pay cover for the entire group in advance. He wanted to limit any hassle that his large group would create for me and my staff. He wanted to be a courteous customer. Then he dropped the other hideously large red shoe on me.

"We're an orginization of Clowns."

He was serious.

Two weeks later (clowns have calendar problems, apparently) they Showed Up. 47 clowns in full makeup and gear. No kidding. Literally. None of them were "being" clowns. No flowers squirting. No happy banter. No prat falls. They were REALLY falling down, drunk as skunks most of them. Bad dancing. I asked three of them at the bar, with a big shit eating grin on my face, "So you guys are what? Bankers?" I got back three blank stares. This is what happens when clowns drink. I asked one guy later, "So, ya'll all came in the same volskwagon?" He stared blankly back and said, slightly confused, "Um, no, we came in a bus." This is what happens when clowns drink. One of them handed me a twisted mulitcolored construction of balloons that only bore a resemblance to an animal if it were part of said animals DNA chain. I asked him, "Is it abstract?" This is what happens when clowns drink. Later I had to eject one of them because he was geting undressed. In the CLUB! He had his shirt off and was going for his pants when I asked him why, and he responded that, "she wanted me to." There wasn't a woman within 20 feet of him.

I kept thinking, "Who are these clowns?"