Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Facebook is an odd phenomenon for a number of reasons. The one I’ll briefly explore is the fact that I never know if I’ve “told” someone a story. It works in two distinct ways. Either a) I’ll be telling a friend some tale of weekend heroics or absolute failure and they’ll have this bored look in their eyes suggesting they are all too familiar with the details or b) an absolute stranger walks up to me and tells me about some intimate detail of my life that I forgot I willingly tossed out into the universe for consumption. Since the advent of the Heavy Guilt I have been active on ye ole facebook, initially my actions were strictly for the band, then gradually, as I figured out how to navigate the post myspace waters, it morphed into a crack like addiction to harvest the fleeting minutia of stranger’s lives. I thought I was doing pretty well at facebook until I read a post this morning that said “if you are popular at facebook, you suck at life” (to the authors disadvantage it had about a million “likes”). That was the safety pin blow to my ego balloon, but alas, I digress. This first part was simply to apologize to any of you who may have heard the following tales of the Heavy Guilt New Year's Eve show and related shenanigans.



I’ve been playing gigs for a long enough time to healthily take on most of them as they come, I generally sleep well the night before and dream of rotisserie chicken just like I always do and I walk through the “day of” with the frail air of confidence that I have on any other day. But there are about two shows a year that utterly shake my anxiety to the core for whatever reason. New Year's Eve was one of those shows. We were playing at the same time as Transfer, one of ours and san diego’s favorite bands, it was sold out, we played at 10 and I had to work til 9. These factors were swirling around the centrifuge of my mind all through the excessively slow work shift. The minute hands of the work clock taunted me, they pointed and laughed, they moonwalked, clicking, ticking backwards and my shift moved at the pace of a slug crawling over a salt flat. Questions bloomed in mind, would I be able to find parking and get to the stage on time, would anyone see our set, and just how much red sauce will my burrito fire onto my white shirt (I was prepared for that, I’d drop an equal amount of green sauce and just call it a Christmas decoration). I literally paced around the store the last three hours of my shift with the swiftness that could have beaten a Kenyan in a marathon. Finally 9pm came and I was off to the Lafayette Hotel.



I made it to the gig on time, I parked across the street, thttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifhere were people there, all anxiety was squashed upon downbeat and we put a big fat ass exclamation point at the end of 2011. It was the hottest I’ve ever been during a gig and I wasn’t bright enough to bring a change of clothes, so all apologies to anyone I hugged when the clock struck midnight and I was soaked to the bone. I basically gave you a full body temporary frontal autograph, just marking my friends people. We closed out the year with a cover of Iggy & And the Stooges I Wanna Be Your Dog, on the video you can distinctly see Jason Littlefield laughing and singing his revised version in his head “now I wanna feed your dog”. This version is born out of our singer being a professional dog walker/sitter and a more apt and relevant lyric for him to sing when reflecting on his life from stage. However, I’m pretty sure if we ever uttered such softening changes to the song a shirtless sweaty leathery Iggy Pop would show up at the Guilt’s rehearsal space and severely kick our collective asses (and rightfully so) and eat Erik’s soul (Iggy can do that). The night progresses.



After our set I see an attractive lady who looks extremely familiar. Not in the way that you make up before sauntering over and delivering a worthless “do I know you”, but more of a legitimate I think I know this person. So I walk over to her and she seems to recognize me. Since there are basically three skinny tall black dudes in San Diego we get mistaken for each other from time to time, so initially she is under the impression that I’m a DJ that spun a moving set of electronica in some desert years ago. It is too loud to explain that the closest I’ve come to electronica was watching Run Lola Run, so I just thanked hhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifer for the compliment. At this moment she asks when I’m DJing next at which point I’m outed for the fraud that I am. “Oh, I’m not a DJ”. After a period of awkward silence and still trying to figure out how I know this person, I ask “have you ever heard of the Heavy Guilt”. The answer was “no”, next follow up question, “Back in the day I used to be some kinda rapper, my name is Alfred Howard.” Apparently that struck a cord cause I witnessed her face change from “happy to meet her favorite DJ” smiles to “I just bit into a lemon or a beehive” scowl. Her response “Alfred Mother F*&King Howard, I know who you are, 9 years ago you smashed my Birthday Cake”. At this point I should have skulked away into the shame of the night, but I had no recollection of smashing anyone’s birthday cake, I ate someone’s birthday cake once at 4a.m. but that was in Boston 1997 (sorry Jen) and I’ve already been punished for that maneuver. So I wanted to defend myself, I’ve been basically sober for 13 years (excluding 2 months in 2005) and all my cake smashing happened knee deep in a bottle of hard alcohol. So I asked her if she had witnessed me smash her cake or if it was rumored. At this point she goes into detail “not only did I see you smash my cake, but you explained why you did it, you said that I looked like the kind of cute girl who got everything I ever wanted in high school and I needed to get my cake smashed”. At this instant I remembered doing exactly that, a swift attack on her cake for all the nerds out there who never had a chance. I should have just pretended I was the DJ and called it a night.



At the end of the night it was time to go home. I was the designated driver and I figured I could put some extra bodies in my 15-passenger van. I had Erik and Jess and I offered two friends a ride home as well. We circled the van to the front of the hotel to pick up my friends, Erik and Jess already snug in the van. Though the van is spacious we had tons of equipment and extra stuff so there was room for two more people and no more than that. When I got to the front of the hotel the van door opened, a woman got in and Erik, not knowing my friends, assumed that she was one of them (why else would a lone woman get into a tinted van on El Cajon Blvd at 3 in the morning filled with dirty sweaty dudes and loose saw blades on the seats). I turned around to see the blonde confident stranger, I politely asked “who the F*&k are you?” She looked at me with eyes that seemed to ask the same question and were definitely incapable of answering it. Then she delivered the simple and to the point “Drive my ass home!!!”. Erik, ever the rational, explained to her how we weren’t a cab. She responded “I don’t give a f*&K what you are, just take me home”. I stepped in “I got two friends I need to give a ride home and there’s just no space for a third” at which point I received one of the most piercing “stink eyes” ever witnessed. Then my friends showed up and tried to get in the band and our trespassenger said “really, you’re gonna give these b**ches a ride and not me.” Sorry lady, but I know these b**tches. Jessica turned into an instant heroine, sprung into action and extracted our new “friend”. Hopefully she was able to find another tinted out white creeper van on the Boulevard to take her again. 2012 is gonna be adventurous.



The Heavy Guilt loves you.

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