Tuesday's Gone

"Tuesday's Gone" is easily my favorite Skynyrd song, and has been ever since I watched the movie Dazed & Confused. I was actually fairly shocked to find that it was also included on Metallica's Garage Inc. album of covers, this being a recording from a live-radio session with a other musical stars, including Skynyrd guitarist Gary Rossington, Faith No More's old guitarist Jim Martin, Jerry Maguire's "Jesus of the Copymat" Jerry Cantrell, John Popper on harmonica, and Les Claypool on banjo.

I went to my first class at Second City last night, and it went quite well, despite parking all the way over at Armitage and Larrabee in the bitter fucking cold. Before I got out of my car, I considered just springing the thirteen bucks at the Piper's Alley parking garage, and then I thought that New Yorkers walk everywhere, so can I. And, on my way back, the temperature having dropped twenty degrees in five hours, I began cursing at New Yorkers for giving me that stupid idea.

The class seems to be split between introverts who aren't especially funny, and those of us who either know or at least think we're funny, which then intimidates the introverts into not reading their work to the class. For example, one guy across the room -this guy is a fucking dead ringer for Pollux Troy from Face/Off- would just turn his page over when another classmate would read her stuff; and if her work even remotely decent, he wouldn't say anything, and would probably eat his own paper if pressured to read what he'd written. Quite frankly, I thought I was a good writer, but some of these people intimidate even me. Of course, a lot of stupid things intimidate me, like the guys who model summer-wear for the Tarzhay ad-sheets every week.

It's a class of seventeen people, of which fifteen showed up, and we're all crammed into a room about the size of my Tarzhay photo lab, which -for the sake of clarity- is about nine feet by fifteen feet. Looking around at my own bedroom, which is smaller than those measurements, I'm pretty sure that it's smaller than this. Call it eight feet by thirteen or so. Outside the room, the improv class occasionally performs tremendously annoying exercises in making animal sounds or orgasmic moans, and occasionally melding the two, I think; because when an improv group runs out of material, the show will always devolve into schtick about sex, and this group clearly knows that bestiality is a fucking humor gold mine.

My class discussed for a moment the notion of the writer as a classically tortured artist who tends to either kill himself or drink himself into an early grave. After discussing Virginia Woolf and her swim, Hemingway's last shotgun safari, Faulkner's drinking, Tennessee Williams' drinking, and the truly gonzo manner in which Hunter S. Thompson went out, we turned to music and people like Kurt Cobain, Jim Ellison, and Elliott Smith who warrants special mention for stabbing himself to death. In the heart. Twice. And through all of this, I couldn't help but think of the tragedy that was Mama Cass and her ham sandwich.

And I met a girl. I'm completely and utterly smitten, to the point that I actually asked her if I could buy her a drink after class, which I would never do in a normal situation. Of course, I'd also been awake for thirty hours and change at that point, and probably thought it was a perfectly rational act to ask a girl whom I'd known for about three and a half hours if she'd like to have a drink with me. I mean, she seems nice enough, having spent entirely too many underproductive years in college, she's nice to look at, loathes mediocrity, and -if that wasn't enough- she understood the Bozo Bucket reference, which is just unassailably cool. I mean, she got it on the first try, without having to stop and think about it or anything. I damn near blurted out, "I love you," at that point.

Of course, she had Bailey's and coffee waiting for her back at her dorm room, so I was off to my car, all the way back at Armitage and Larrabee, thank you draconian Chicago parking restrictions. When I got home, I had to ask myself the age-old philosophical question of where the line gets drawn between curiosity and creepiness; case in point: Is it wrong to run a Google search for a girl you're interested in? For women, I think this is a lot easier, because there's always the chance that the guy could be a sex-offender or something, whereas us guys are kind of hoping that the girl is a sex-offender, at least in the kind of way that could somehow be construed as cool. However, for a guy, you end up hoping that somewhere down the line, the cookie from this search doesn't end up as State's Evidence #1 for your stalking charge.

Anyway. I have to be out the door in seven hours, so I'm just going to cut this post off here before I incriminate myself any further. Maybe next week she'll take me up on my offer to get a drink after class, but the Magic 8-Ball's saying probably not. Now, I can only hope that she's not way better at Googling information than I am, because in the event that she finds this site, given all of this rambling, I'm sure that charges will probably be filed by the morning.

AIM: therbmcc71