I'm Not Afraid of the Black Man Running

I may have related this story before on my old (extinct :()) MySpace blog, but I want to say it again, because I find it funny, and I miss my Dad, even though he's still alive:

So, Dad was living in New York. He was probably engaged at that point to my Mom, or at least they were seriously dating, because he was living in New York, and they moved to Jacksonville after the wedding. (Yawn.) Anyway, Dad went to watch the second Cassius Clay-Sonny Liston fight with a co-worker, who was black, in Harlem. Very important to the story.

(They didn't watch it in person -- I believe it was in Lewiston, ME -- but it was also the 1960s, and they didn't have HBO or Twitter or anything, so they went to an auditorium to watch it on closed-circuit TV).

So, it's the mid-60s, Kennedy's dead, black militarism is on the rise, Clay/Ali is a visible proponent of the Nation of Islam, wokka wokka wokka. Great time to be white in Harlem. My father is particularly blessed, because he is the only non-black person in the auditorium.

Before the fight, they play the National Anthem. My dad's friend (he's black, remember) was also a veteran like my Dad, so he stands up in respect of the anthem. He's the only one. In the entire crowded auditorium-place they are in. Again: They're in Harlem, in the mid-1960s, and standing up for the National Anthem just wasn't something you did if that's where you lived back then. Dad didn't live there, but he's a pretty sharp fellow, so he realized he probably shouldn't stand up, either.

Dad's friend, however, gets mad. He begins to yell at the people around him (I picture him in my head as the best-possible street-corner crazy in the TL), "STAND UP! STAND UP!" and begins motioning with his arms for them to stand up. Dad becomes terrified for his life because he's white and sitting with a guy who's antagonizing a black crowd in the mid-1960s before a fight featuring a nascent, athletic-version of Malcolm X.

But the people around them are also terrified for their lives, because crazy black people scare everyone, I guess, so they stand up.

The fight was over halfway through the first round.

I Don't Think I'm Ever Going To Figure It Out

I can't tell a story. Here's an example of me making a very funny story not funny:

So, my friend's cat died a couple of days ago, and she was talking about her boyfriend handling the removal and disposal of the body. I guess she'd been telling that story at work earlier in the day, because one of her co-workers had the following story:

So, this woman was housesitting for a couple who went on vacation for a week. The couple had a dog the woman took care of. Well, one day the dog dies. She's unsure of what to do; apparently, she's unable to contact the couple to get instructions from them, and she doesn't want to leave a dead dog body lying around the house for a week or whatever. She decides to have it cremated and the ashes put in an urn, because that's what she thinks the couple would have wanted.

This is happening in Chicago, BTW, which is very important to the story. The woman doesn't have a car and gets around by the subway or whatever they have out there. She doesn't want to bring a dead dog stuffed in a garbage bag on the subway, and thank god for that. Instead, she puts the body in a roller suitcase and brings that to the subway instead. Guess it wasn't a very big dog.

One guy asks her if she needs help getting it downstairs, but she's very protective of it and says, "No! I'm fine!" But that doesn't help when another guy runs buy and steals the suitcase with the dead body inside.

So now she's got a new problem. She doesn't have to worry about getting rid of the dog anymore, but she also doesn't have any ashes to present to the family as evidence of their dead little doggie. So she goes to their BBQ grill and takes the ashes from there.

A thief stole a dead dog, and a couple in Chicago have spent charcoal that they think was their precious dog.

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What happened?

I don’t know. You know, ask anyone in Hollywood. Everybody has a Bill Murray story. He just punishes people, for reasons they can’t figure out. He was a student of Gurdjieff for a while, the Sufi mystic. Gurdjieff used to act really irrationally to his students, almost as if trying to teach them object lessons. There’s a great story along those lines that Jim Belushi tells about Del Close, the improv teacher: Jim went up to Del once, when he was a young actor, and he said, “Del, I want you to know that I really, really trust you.” And Del kneed him in the balls, really hard, and asked, “You still trust me?” Bill was always teaching people lessons like that. If he perceived someone as being too self-important or corrupt in some way that he couldn’t stomach, it was his job to straighten them out.

Harold Ramis has a really great interview in the new GQ, btw.

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Also: I just learned that Afroman's "Because I Got High" was a #1 single in, among other countries, Australia, the UK, and Norway (Scandinavians really loved it as a whole.)

I mean, it's OK and all, and it's about weed, which is cool, but really, Denmark? It's a simple novelty song. It's Dr. Demento-like. I like Dr. Demento-like songs and all, but I wouldn't want or expect any of them to be the #1 song in the fucking country. Especially if it's in a foreign language! Or how about you, France, don't try to act all, "It didn't reach #1 here," which doesn't hide that it reached #2 over there.

Fuck foreign snobbery.

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Gotta go to a birthday party. Not doing any things for Pride weekend since I have no gay pride, but that's only because I'm am completely absent of any gayness. I never caught it. I was innoculated young or something. Maybe it was watching Heavy Metal as a kid and seeing a hot naked animated lady with a faintly lavender bush. That may sound very gay, but even at age seven or whatever, I was like, "I'd be down for some of that."

So there you go: If you don't want your kids to be gay (not that there's anything, y'know), make them watch Heavy Metal when they're very young.



(Also: South Park had a Heavy Metal spoof? Why was I not informed?

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Gotta run. Here is adorableness.