Twist and Crawl

A lot is going on at the moment, but I had to take a moment to share this with you guys!

I found while going through my vinyl collection - a letter from a self-proclaimed skinhead living in San Antonio, Texas. I guess I never bothered to look inside the sleeve of my copy of "What Is" - a compilation of hits from The English Beat. Ol' Dave is pretty thorough, I think:

Skinhead Times,

Hello, I'm Dave A. and I 've been a skinhead for a few years now and in the time that I've been a skinhead, I've heard quite a bit about your magazine. I just recently got a hold of your address and I'm really interested in your magazine. It is really hard to get magazines and music from the United Kingdom here in the United States.

The Skinhead scene here has really grown in the past couple of years. I think it would be a lot better if we could get things like your magazine. I don't know much about your magazine (or how I could get it). If possible maybe you could write me or send me something I could subscribe from. It would be neat if I could get some order forms, so we could get your magazine going in our town.

I play in a local Oi Band and I'm working on a Ska band. We play at a lot of klubs and we all work on keeping the SKINHEAD scene going here. Ska is getting really big here so everything is getting a lot better. A lot of the racist skinheads are going 2 TONE. Me, well I'm just a traditional SKINHEAD, We all believe in Oi!!!

If you can please send me an order form and maybe a sample of your magazine (and an ok to make copies of your order form for promotion.) If you can it will be great. Hopefully with your permission I can get copies made of your order forms and put them in the music stores and clothing stores and give them out at shows, so please write me and I'll write back and send you money for a regularly subscription. Thank you for taking the time and reading my letter. Oi!!

Oregon - Thursday

I want to write all of this shit down before I forget and the memories get hazy or what not. . . this will be edited and made more smooth in the coming days, so just consider this a rough draft!

Ryo and I left Columbus in separate planes - her flight time was MUCH shorter than mine and I'll admit feeling a little twinge of jealousy at not getting to ride with her and get to PDX as soon as possible. We parted ways, and before long I was in Chicago for one of my first layovers. As I sat there in the terminal, in a sea of empty chairs I saw a man approach from the corner of my eye and sit down right next to me. This made me super nervous, as there were plenty of other seats to be had but here he is, practically sitting in my lap. I glance over, only to find that it's my friend Brandon who is making his way out to the Goonies Anniversary shindig as well! It was a great start to the trip and was really nice to see a friendly, familiar face.

The rest of the flight was pretty uneventful - I slept fitfully throughout and when I touched down in Portland, I was sore as hell and hungry to boot. It's pretty bad when someone as short as me has trouble with the leg-room situation on a plane. Yeeesh!

I was met at baggage claim by Mikey and Ryo and while we waited for my baggage to show up, we talked about delicious food - it wasn't helping my hunger in the least and I fear that Chris, a Mancunian Goonie who we were also traveling with, thought that I was some deranged food addict that would stop at nothing to om nom nom her way through the city. Well. . . that's pretty much true. I won't lie.

From there, Mikey took us to a lovely restaurant (insert name here) and I had a healthy serving of mini corndogs and the best ever veggie burger. Seriously - so fucking tasty. From there, talk turned to Voodoo Doughnuts and we were all shown a very flattering video of a gentleman by the name of Rheiner who was sucking raspberry blood from a voodoo doll doughnut.

Now, while the doughnuts were absolutely fresh and amazing and fantastic - the taste soured a little in my mouth when Mikey thought it was a good idea to show us all "Puppetry of the Penis". I don't really think that I need to elaborate on that. It was so gross but I couldn't stop watching!
Packed up the car, headed back to PDX to meet up with the English Contingency. It was SO good to see everyone - even Merk who I'd just seen a few months back! Anyway him, Giuseppe, Red, Shaz, Jut and Angie (who isn't English, but still pretty awesome) were all in one place and it was great to see everyone. The twilight drive out to Cannon Beach was beautiful. Looking into the enchanted forest as it speeds by always leaves me with such striking feelings - At once, I understand and am mystified by it.

Once in Cannon Beach, we met up with the rest of the people that were staying in our house. Again, really lovely to see old faces and meet the new ones. Here's the part where I would say I cooked all of the weary travelers a wonderful meal to fill their bellies. . . but that would be a complete lie. All that was open was a small convenience store. I made a mess of some ramen noodles and am so, so ashamed.

truth movement

I am in love.

More to follow - still a bit knackered from my recent trip to Oregon. . . honestly the best trip of my entire life. I'll be playing catch-up with that and doing some posts here in the near future on my experiences there. In the meantime, enjoy this

Handbook for the Recently Deceased

My dog's are absolutely barkin' after yesterday's Zombie Walk through downtown Columbus!

I decided to go against the grain a little bit and wear my Miss Argentina costume. It's really hard to believe that I made that thing back in 2007. It took me about an hour to get into, with ample help from Ryo. I will say that doing the makeup is still a pain in the ass. . . I really need to work on mastering that set of skills. We met up with Pat at work, where he'd spent a good part of the day working on the layers of his zombie makeup. He did a great rushed job on Ryo and Carlos.

The walk was a lot longer than I had anticipated, but a really fun experience. I was a little nervous about wearing a non-zombie costume, but it was really well received and made my day.

doodles and drawings

I draw just about every day - I find it very centering and a refreshing change from my normal creations. I'm not on any deadline, I'm not creating for someone else, I'm on my own and all of these very simple things make for a change that's quite energizing. It's ok if I mess up or they suck or are never completed - because they're not for anyone but me. They rarely see the light of day and I'm ok with that.

Group 7 Clearance

So. . . if you're a Tron fan, you should mosey on over to Flynnlives and get yourself one of these kick-ass badges.

There you can upload a photo, enter certain pertinent information and the fine folks over at Flynnlives will send you an awesome laminated Encom International i.d. badge to help you to infiltrate the greedy corporation's network.

The lanyard just makes it that more official-looking :)

Zip-zap

I feel like I'm on a roll here - using up all of this stuff that I've had laying around for ages feels great! I've had these old brass zippers that I purchased in September of 2001. Now, the only reason I can recall such an inane detail is because this was the very first thrift store I went to when I moved to Columbus. Ah. . . memories.

I chose 2 white, 2 gray, 2 blue and 2 navy zippers and proceeded to cut off the stops at the ends. I removed the pulls and cut the zippers into various lengths. From here, I simply rolled them up into different sized circles and stitched them together. The lazy person in me wanted to stop halfway through and make this into a bracelet, but I persevered and came up with this little necklace.